Gil Penchina and Mark Bonchek join the Simple Token advisory board

I’m pleased to announce that Gil Penchina and Mark Bonchek, two technology industry veterans and visionaries, have joined the Simple Token advisory board as active advisors to the project.

Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and super angel. He was an angel in Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, EOS and was an angel investor in the first “crypto currency” startup, Paypal in 1999. He’s a frequent media contributor on Blockchain at TechCrunch and here on Medium @ Gil Penchina. He is a co-founder and advisor to Pryze.com and Partner at Ridge Ventures. Previously he was the founder of Flight.vc which manages over 25 investment syndicates with over 5,000 angel investors, a co-founder of Fastly, CEO of Wikia, now a top 50 website and was a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. In addition, Gil has been an active angel investor in over 200 companies including firms such as Dollar Shave Club, Cruise Automotive, Linkedin, Paypal, AngelList, AltSchool, eShares, Wealthfront, Indiegogo, and many others. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.

Mark Bonchek is the founder and CEO of Shift Thinking and a faculty member of Singularity University. He has published over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review, including the first on branded currency in 2013. In 1997, Mark received Harvard University’s first PhD on the topic of social media. Ever since, he has been helping organizations rethink how to engage customers, accelerate growth and transform markets. Mark’s here on Medium @ Mark Bonchek.

Gil & Mark join our tremendous lineup of advisors (announced last week) spanning the blockchain, technology, finance, and corporate worlds:

Trent McConaghy. Trent likes to build things that matter for humanity in the long term. He’s working on democratizing data. This is via Ocean decentralized data exchange protocol & network, BigchainDB & IPDB blockchain database protocol & network, COALA IP protocol, and advising the Estonian E-residency program. His long-term goal is to help ensure that humanity has a role in an increasingly autonomous world.

Brian Lio. Brian is the founder and CEO of Smith + Crown. He is the Chief Research Adviser to the Digital Chamber of Commerce’s Token Alliance and a Fellow at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Previously, he founded the Bright Iron Group, a design, strategy and user experience consultancy based in NYC and has held positions at Microsoft and DDB.

Allen Morgan. Allen has been deeply-involved with technology startups for more than 35 years. He is an early-stage investor and startup advisor. He also serves as Managing Director, New Ventures Group, at Idealab, where he is on the Board of Directors. Previously, he was Managing Director at Mayfield Fund. Prior he was a partner at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

Jehan Chu. Jehan is co-founder and Managing Partner of Kenetic Capital (formerly Jen Advisors), one of the first Blockchain Venture Capital and Cryptocurrency Funds as well as Token Sale Consulting in Asia. An early investor in crypto-currencies, Jehan Chu founded Ethereum Meetup Hong Kong and grew it from 5 persons to over 1,100 and hosted >60 Blockchain events including Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin 7 times.

David Bohnett. David is a philanthropist, technology entrepreneur, and the founder of early stage private equity firm, Baroda Ventures.​ David began investing in digital currencies and crypto companies in 2014. An internet pioneer, in 1994, David founded GeoCities.com, once ranked one of the four most trafficked websites in the world. GeoCities became publicly traded on NASDAQ and was acquired by Yahoo!

Sebastian Quinn-Watson. Sebastian is a partner at Blockchain Global leading the Blockchain marketing and advisory business. He has advised on a number of successful and market leading projects such as Viberate (sold out in 45 seconds), Bankera (largest presale in history), Powerledger, Etherparty, Playkey.io, Airswap and others.

Gary Nuttall. Gary is well recognised in the Blockchain / Distributed Ledger Technology arena, with particular expertise in the commercial insurance and legal sectors. He is a founding partner of Team Blockchain, a global virtual consultancy practice and sits on the TechUK DLT Working Group. He writes articles for magazines and thought leadership blogs with a particular emphasis on blockchain.

Chris Dark. Chris is President International at C2FO. Based in the C2FO Hong Kong office, Chris is responsible for C2FO business in EMEA, Asia-Pacific and LATAM. Prior to C2FO, Chris held key leadership positions at Atomico, AOL (advertising.com) and Bain & Co. Chris is a former entrepreneur and the Founder of GameReplays.org, an early eSports community founded in 2002.

Daniel Weinberg. Daniel has over 20 years’ experience in financial trading & technology. He was a Senior Partner of Optiver APAC and founding member of the Optiver Global Foundation board. He is also a member of the Derivatives advisory committee for the Hong Kong, Singapore and Korean Exchanges and an adviser to a number of businesses spanning multiple industries and jurisdictions.

Thomas Power. Thomas is a cutting edge Board Member to numerous companies involved with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, deeply connected in Silicon Valley, NYC, London, Australia, New Zealand with over 200,000 Twitter followers since March 2007. Raised and sold over £1bn since 1980. Focused on AI Big Data Bitcoin Blockchain Crypto Ethereum FinTech ICO SaaS Social Media Tokenomics …very Geeky, Social and Likeable.

Adam Jackson. Adam is a technology entrepreneur and investor obsessed with creating beautiful and intuitive software. Currently an active investor & advisor to early blockchain projects. Prior he was CEO and co-founder of Doctor On Demand. Previously founded DriverSide and MarketSquare. Angel investments include: Bolt, Placer, Aktana, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman and Zenefits.

Matt Chwierut. Matt Chwierut is the Research Director at Smith + Crown. He guides a research team in evaluating new cryptocurrency protocols, authoring briefing memos on key emerging topics, and reviewing countless white papers and is a Fellow at the Singapore Institute of Management. He holds degrees from University of California Berkeley and Stanford University.

Tony Evans. Tony is a specialist in fiat and crypto currency based in Tokyo, Japan, with over 12 years experience in Asia. Tony has over 14 years’ experience in Europe and Asia in the finance industry from client facing, portfolio management, to managing teams.