People of OST: Jean Wang, Business Development Director APAC

Jean Wang is OST’s Business Development Director, Asia Pacific. As an ex-engineer and ex-investment banker, Jean is passionate about the latest trends in Fintech. He joined OST with over 14 years of professional experience and is leading partnership efforts in Asia, helping companies unlock their growth potential. Jean holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, and a MBA from the University of Chicago.

Tell us about yourself!

I am originally from China, but I actually grew up in the U.S. and France because my family moved around a lot when I was younger. Within the U.S. I have lived in both L.A. and Orange County as well as New York and New Jersey.

Professionally, I started off as an engineer and worked in telecom for a couple of years. I had strong interest in business so I went back to school and got an MBA. Upon graduation, I spent some time working as an investment banker. For the past 9 years I have been working at various Fintech companies, mainly selling Data and Analytics to banks, private equity and hedge funds. Overall I have worked in both large corporations like AT&T and Bloomberg as well as small startup businesses like Uzabase and Capital IQ, both of which have become big operations in Asia.

What led your interest for blockchain technology?

I have always been interested in new technologies, especially the ones that have a direct impact on people’s lives and the way we do things on a daily basis. I first heard about blockchain from my wife who works in corporate banking. I began to research and read a lot about distributed ledger technology.

In terms of blockchain tokens, the typical examples that people think of are customer loyalty programs to tokenize a business, but I realized there is just so much more you can do. This includes things like reputation, payments, gaming, and Non-Fungible Tokens. Even for applications that are not related to gaming, there are many aspects that one could gamify. This is what excited me about this new technology and working at OST.

What does your role as Business Development Director APAC at OST entail?

OST is building tools and infrastructure to help mainstream companies adopt blockchain. My role in Asia is to introduce OST blockchain technology to established businesses and showcase the benefits of a tokenized business. I look for early adopters, what we call “Giraffes”, companies that are willing to stick their neck out and find out new things and adopt new technologies.

What do you look for when on-boarding new OST partners?

The main type of partners that we have been working with are established companies with millions of online users, companies that are forward-looking and risk-taking, and want to take things one step further in terms of technology development. These are companies that are very interested in blockchain, but don’t have deep blockchain expertise, so they are happy to work with OST to jointly develop blockchain-related projects and products.

Separately, we have been speaking with companies that are working on DApps (distributed apps). These are companies that are already building on Blockchain, but often have limited resources, so they would need many of the tools that we have built at OST.

Lastly, there are companies that are in-between being a mainstream business and a DApp, these are also companies that we are interested in working with.

What is your favorite hobby?

I played a lot of tennis when I was younger, especially during high school and college. Unfortunately, tennis is not a big sport in Asia and Hong Kong. Nowadays, I play a little bit, but I mostly watch big matches on YouTube or other channels.

THANK YOU, JEAN!

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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.