Announcing Leadership Changes at the Helium Foundation

We welcome a new Board Director along with our first General Counsel hire.

Feb 28, 2023

I’m thrilled to announce Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi as the newest member of the Helium Foundation Board of Directors. Arman has been one of the most active community members since the 2019 Helium Mainnet launch in a governing capacity as well as an educational resource. He launched The Hotspot, a Helium-focused podcast, in the summer of 2020 as its sole producer and host. Arman also created Fairspot, a revenue sharing host-network with over 1000 hosts across the US. As a two-time entrepreneur himself and a prolific app developer, Arman will be actively thinking about optimizing user-experience, reducing LoRaWAN fragmentation, as well as Network economics. He joins Jamie Wilkinson who, to date, has focused on scaling Network governance, facilitating public data resources, and has been an active Board Director since the inception of the Foundation. Jamie, the Helium Foundation team, and I are excited to work with Arman to drive more usage to the Helium network and value to our builders. The Foundation is still expanding the Board and our advisors to bring on more technical mentorship and commercial and rulemaking experience in telecommunications.

In addition to board-level changes, Joshua Kershner joined the Helium Foundation team as of January as our first full-time General Counsel. Josh comes to us after serving as the General Counsel for Pylons, an NFT platform within the Cosmos ecosystem. In addition to his experience and aptitude across many facets of crypto-related law, Josh has spent nearly a decade as Counsel for the Social Security Administration, is a Charter Member of TechGC, and has served for over 4 years as an elected County Committee Member in local New York government. Josh is a unique breed of lawyer with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and brings an incredibly attuned legal perspective to our technical and product roadmap.

The addition of new Board Directors and our first General Counsel marks a significant foundation milestone and an important changing of the guard. When I assumed the role of CEO and Chairman, Tushar Jain stepped down from the Board and passed the torch to me (effective December 31, 2022). We all owe him and Multicoin Capital an enormous debt of gratitude for supporting the network from its humble beginnings. Rest assured, they are not going anywhere and continue to be ardent supporters of the Helium Network, our dedicated community, and the value it brings to the entire wireless industry.

In the next couple of months, the Foundation team will be sharing more details about how to become a Member. As a US-based 501(c)6, our membership program provides a potential revenue stream for the organization and members will have the power to elect future Board Directors.

I’m excited about this next era of leadership and look forward to opening it up to larger community participation this year.

LFG! 🚀

Abhay Kumar
CEO and Board Chair
Helium Foundation