Industry Veterans Lars Hinrichs and Geoffrey Prentice Join OST Inc. Advisory Board
I am very pleased to announce that technology-industry visionaries Lars Hinrichs and Geoffrey Prentice have joined the OST.com Inc. Advisory Board as active advisors to the company as we prepare to go to market in 2019.
I have worked with both of these innovative, successful business leaders, and I can testify to the the quality of insight and advice they will bring to their new roles.
Lars Hinrichs is founder and CEO of Cinco Capital, a private-equity fund that invests in European and American tech companies, Lars came to the tech world’s attention with politik-digital.de, an award-winning platform for politics and new media that he launched at the age of 22. Later he launched XING, which grew to be one of the world’s largest online business networking platforms. Under Lars’ leadership, XING became the world’s first Web 2.0 company to go public. I worked closely with Lars when XING acquired my company, Socialmedian, a couple years later. Lars went on to found HackFwd, an innovative pre-seed investment company. When he’s not working to promote European tech innovation, Lars is an active member of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum and the Young Presidents’ Organization. He is also serving on several Boards including Deutsche Telekom AG. Lars’ latest project is the Apartimentum, a smart house in Hamburg Rotherbaum with 45 flats.
Geoffrey Prentice co-founded Skype and served as chief strategy officer as it grew to become the world’s largest telecommunications-platform. Geoff has nearly 20 years of experience founding, scaling, and investing in technology companies across international markets. Currently, Geoff is co-founder of Oriente, a technology company looking to build a new financial services infrastructure that unlocks financial access, freedom and opportunity to underserved communities throughout Asia’s emerging markets. Oriente raised$105 million USD in its initial funding round in November 2018. At Oriente, Prentice is responsible for business strategy, strategic partnerships, brand development, and investments. I first worked closely with Geoff in his role as a founding partner of Atomico, an international VC firm with more than $2 billion in assets under management. Geoff led Atomico’s investment in my startup, Fab.
Geoff and Lars are the latest additions to an advisory board of business veterans whose experience spans the blockchain, technology, finance, and corporate worlds.
David Bohnett is a philanthropist, a technology entrepreneur, and the founder of early-stage private-equity firm Baroda Ventures. Bohnett began investing in digital currencies and crypto companies in 2014. An internet pioneer, in 1994, Bohnett 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!
Mark Bonchek is the founder and CEO of Shift Thinking and a faculty member of Singularity University. He has published more than 50 articles in Harvard Business Review, including the first on branded currency in 2013. In 1997, Bonchek received Harvard University’s first doctorate degree on the topic of social media. Ever since, he has been helping organizations rethink how to engage customers, accelerate growth and transform markets.
Jehan Chu 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 cryptocurrencies, Chu founded Ethereum Meetup Hong Kong and grew it from five persons to more than 1,100 and hosted more than 60 blockchain events. including seven presentations by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
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. Chwierut is a Fellow at the Singapore Institute of Management. He holds degrees from University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.
Tony Evans is a specialist in fiat and cryptocurrency based in Tokyo, Japan, with over 12 years of experience in Asia. Evans has more than 14 years of experience in Europe and Asia in the finance industry from client-facing, portfolio management, to managing teams.
Chris Dark is chief operating officer of OST.com. He previously served as president-international at C2FO. Based in C2FO’s Hong Kong office, Dark was responsible for C2FO business in EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and LATAM. Prior to C2FO, Dark held key leadership positions at Atomico, AOL (advertising.com), and Bain & Co. Dark is a former entrepreneur and the founder of GameReplays.org, an early esports community founded in 2002.
Adam Jackson is a technology entrepreneur and investor obsessed with creating beautiful and intuitive software. He is currently an active investor and advisor to early blockchain projects. Previously, Jackson was CEO and co-founder of Doctor On Demand and the founder of DriverSide and MarketSquare. His angel investments include Bolt, Placer, Aktana, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman, and Zenefits.
Brian Lio is the founder and CEO of Smith + Crown. He serves as chief research advisor 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. Lio has held positions at Microsoft and DDB.
Trent McConaghy likes to build things that matter for humanity in the long term. He’s working on democratizing data via Ocean decentralized data exchange protocol & network, BigchainDB & IPDB blockchain database protocol and network, and COALA IP protocol. He is also advising the Estonian E-residency program. His long-term goal is to help ensure that humanity has a role in an increasingly autonomous world.
Allen Morgan 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 of the New Ventures Group at Idealab, where he is on the board of directors. Previously, he served as managing director at Mayfield Fund and as a partner at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Gary Nuttall is well-known 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 he is a member of the TechUK DLT Working Group. Nuttall writes articles for magazines and thought leadership blogs with a particular emphasis on blockchain.
Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and super angel. He was an angel in Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, and EOS, and was an angel investor in what was arguably the first cryptocurrency startup, Paypal, in 1999. Penchina is a co-founder and advisor to Pryze.com and a partner at Ridge Ventures. Previously he was the founder of Flight.vc, co-founder of Fastly, CEO of Wikia, and a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay. Before eBay, Penchina worked at General Electric and Bain & Co. He has a bachelor’s in engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.
Thomas Power is a cutting-edge board member to numerous companies involved with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. Power is deeply connected in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Australia, and New Zealand. Power has raised and sold over £1 billion since 1980. He focuses on AI, big data, Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, fintech, ICOs, SaaS, and social media tokenomics.
Sebastian Quinn-Watson is a partner at Blockchain Global where he leads 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.
Daniel Weinberg has more than 20 years of experience in financial trading and technology. He was a senior partner at Optiver APAC and a founding member of the Optiver Global Foundation board. He is a member of the Derivatives advisory committee for the Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korean Exchanges and an advisor to a number of businesses spanning multiple industries and jurisdictions.
About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST Partners reach more than 350 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, 500 Startups.
