People of OST: Francesco Pacella, VP of Product
Francesco is Vice President of Product at OST. He is a Product and Marketing Manager who has developed and scaled a number of projects and companies on the tech scene across Europe and Asia focusing on customer validation and development, growth, engagement, monetization, and analytics.
Tell us about yourself!
I was born in Italy. I studied finance, economics and social sciences in Milan. During this time, I had the chance to travel for international studies. After I finished my studies, I moved to Asia and worked in Thailand at the UN. I found that I like to work with real time management as I was working on disaster risk reduction. Disaster management can relate to startup life sometimes. Then I went to India for the first time to work in consultancy. I then moved to Berlin and started my startup career. I met Jason Goldberg in 2013 when I started working at Fab.com. I worked as a BI specialist and entered the product role as time went on. I worked with Jason at Fab.com and Hem.com. In 2016, Jason started to work on Pepo, the social media app. I wanted to use a part of the technology that we built at Hem.com to build an email marketing platform. Jason and I spent a lot of time working together at our office in Pune, India. In 2017, we started to think about tokenization for the Pepo app and this is how our blockchain adventure started.
What led your interest for blockchain technology?
Since the beginning I’ve been close to the concept of tokenization. When we were thinking about tokenizing Pepo, I was working with a team in the U.S. on a paper about incentives and how tokenization would work within the Pepo app. Steem was a very important use case at that time. Taking inspiration from the incentive that Steem had in their economy, we were trying to outline what it would look like for Pepo. I like to work in this space because it’s early stage and the projects are complex. Working in a space that is not yet fully developed gives me the opportunity to work together with the community to set best practices and lead a path to a better future.
What does your role as VP of Product at OST entail?
We are in a state of the company where product is involved in almost every project. It is a very busy role, but also very exciting because it’s the first time I’m working in a company that covers the full stack from technology, to business, to end customer. My role is about the digestion and circulation of knowledge. We’re building technology and working with partner companies which have a specific product. We have different lanes of products to take care in addition to end users, such as the development of wallets. My main work on a daily basis revolves around meeting the product requirements involved with end users, partners, and OST.
What projects are you currently working on at OST?
We have been working on building wallet SDK’s, moving towards completing the OST universal wallet. This is very exciting because it allows us to reach the end user for the first time. Another exciting project that we are working on is related to token rules. Token rules are not simple actions like the ones we have now in OST KIT, rather they’re an advanced evolution of that. The token rules are very important because they provide our partner companies with additional features for their token economies.
What is your favorite hobby?
I usually do not consider work and my private life as two different things. Working is a hobby for me because I get great fun out of it as well. Other than that, I live in Berlin, so I enjoy going out clubbing and I like to spend my time thinking about managing reality.
THANK YOU, FRANCESCO!
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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 300 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.
