In this post I'm going to take a brief look at some of the team members behind Algorand plus their history! I though I'd do this since Governance is starting and hope to bring some recognition to their amazing team.
I'm sure nearly everyone who is invested or knows a little bit about Algorand has heard of Silvio Micali jesus? and there will be a section on him but there are so many other hard workers working on this project!
Team members
Silvio Micali - Founder
The big cheese, The one above all, Eru Ilúvatar, he's had many names assigned by this subreddit and as the founder of Algorand he is the face & often used as the reason to invest and believe in Algorand. But what's his history?
He graduated and earned his Laurea (Like a bachelors degree in Italy) from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and moved to the US to pursue his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkley in 1982 under the supervision of another famous cryptographer Manuel Blum (won the Turing award for "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking"). Shortly after this he became a professor at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department in 1983 and has been a part of the faculty ever since.
He's best for known for his work on: public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs. "Silvio is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography". I'm not going to pretend I know what they mean or that I could possibly begin to explain them because that would be lying, but I think it's pretty obvious he is a BIG figure in the cryptography and computer science world as evidenced by his accolades and awards.
His first "big" award is the inaugural Gödel Prize (awarded annually in the area of theoretical computer science) in 1993 with a few others for their work on interactive proof systems. He also was the recipient of the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (annual award for cryptography that one person wins )in 2004. He has won multiple other awards and recognitions but the biggest one (and the one that gets spread around reddit a lot) is when he won the Turing Award along with Shaffi Goldwasser (won Gödel Prize with Silvio & has previously won the RSA Award for Excellence as well).
The Turing award is considering the Nobel Prize of computing and is named for Alan Turing, they won this award: For transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.
And of course, his most important role (in our eyes!) is the founding of Algorand in 2017!
Steve Kokinos - CEO
Responsible for the overall business vision and strategy, Steve has been quite busy and is quite the entrepreneur! He's founded and help grow multiple businesses and now is hoping to do the same at the Algorand Foundation presumably. Let's take a look at his background!
He attended McGill University and graduated with a bachelors in economics in 1998, He was also the founder & President of Web Yes Inc. Thich was an ASP (Active Server Pages) market leader that offered services and infrastructure to Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and Lycos among others and upon being taken over by Breakaway systems, Steve Kokinos' leadership allowed the company to pull in $120m in revenue and was ranked 2nd in the Worldwide ASP rankings in just 18 months.
Later he would go on to co-found BladeLogic which was a data centre automation vendor serving GE, Time Warner, Microsoft, Walmart, Sprint etc. It would later be purchased by BMC (Software as a sales company - Salesforce would be another example) for a whopping $800m in 2008. Steve was at BladeLogic for around 4 years.
As well as being CEO of Algorand, he currently is co-founder & Chief Executive of Fuze) which is a cloud communications company focusing primarily on businesses, they currently employ over 700 employees and service and service around 1500 enterprise customers. They were previously known as Thinking Phones Network.
W. Sean Ford - COO
Sean's job description on the Algorand website is:
Responsible for go-to-market execution and operations including product management, engineering, marketing and global community development
He's definitely got quite a bit of experience to bring that to this team I would say! I'm not going to go into every job he's had which is quite a few based on his LinkedIn profile, but here are some of the highlights:
He earned his Bachelor's degree in English from Williams College, then went on to graduate with Masters in Business Administration from Harvard University Graduate School of Business.
Shortly after this he spent 7 years as a senior strategy consultant at Monitor Group (later acquired by Deloitte after they filed bankruptcy in 2012) and he left in 1999 to co-found Upromise where he was the Vice President of product marketing and product management. Upromise is a company with a loyalty program that lets you earn credits on purchases at grocery stores, travelling, eating out etc that can be used to pay down student debt. They were acquired by Sallie Mae in 2006 (on a personal note: fuck Sallie Mae).
Sean worked at Avid Technology where he led worldwide marketing strategy and operations as a member of the company’s Executive Leadership Team. Sean has also held several executive leadership roles including CMO and COO of Zmags, CMO of Syncsort, and as vice-president of Global Business Unit (GBU) marketing at Oracle reporting to the CMO where he was responsible for Oracle’s vertical industry applications worldwide. (From Algorand.com)
His last job prior to joining Algorand was working at LogMeIn as the Chief Marketing Officer responsible for the global marketing strategy at the company as well as communications & brand leadership as well numerous other responsibilities. LogMeIn is another example of a SaaS company and is one of the biggest in the world.
No lack of experience I would say!
Keli Callaghan - Head of Marketing
Keli studied at Fairfield university and received her Bachelors degree in Marketing Communications and Business Ethics and went on to study and receive hers Masters degree in Business Administration from Boston College.
She worked quite a few different jobs related to marketing and sales such as at Sprint Nextel, Zmags, & Travizon. After this she was at the Avid Corporation for 5 years working 2 different roles during this time period: Director of Customer Associations and Experience and Senior Director of Customer Engagement and Field Marketing, Americas. During this time she was responsible for ensuring the needs of customers were met including fostering the relationship with their key customer, Microsoft.
Now this is pure speculation on my behalf BUT W. Sean Ford joined from Avid in March 2018 to join Algorand & Keli joined in October 2018, so I'm guessing that Sean already knew about Keli & her potential to some degree.
I actually see Keli on twitter and she usually posts some interesting stuff to read about, so I would definitely recommend following or checking her account out if you haven't already
Chris Peikert - Head of Cryptography
This guy is one smart cookie and there's a reason he is the Head of Cryptography under someone like Silvio Micali, It's actually quite hard to find information about his history outside of the official website, but I did my best!
I can't find what his Bachelors degree is in but he did receive his Ph.D. from MIT in computer science under the supervision of... you guessed it - Silvio Micali. He would then spend 3 years as a researcher at SRI International before becoming an associate professor and later professor at Georgia Tech.
As well as having numerous papers (see link below), he has also been awarded and received numerous academic awards: His recognitions include a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation Bergmann Memorial Award, Best/Distinguished Paper Awards at STOC, Crypto, and Eurocrypt (among others), and the Test of Time Award from the Theory of Cryptography Conference. His research has heavily influenced several proposals that have advanced through several rounds of NIST’s ongoing post-quantum cryptography standardization process.
According to this article he is an expert in post quantum (quantum computers, which reddit gets very scared about) cryptography and lattice based cryptography. One of his primary goals & projects is to help ALGO become "quantum proof".
Website with some of his papers & more info
Jing Chen - Head of Theory Research and Chief Scientist
While Jing Chen doesn't have quite as much experience as some of the others in this list so far, she is extremely intelligent and obviously has the trust of the Algorand team.
She studied both her Bachelors and Masters Degree at Tsinghua University, and her PhD in Computer Science from MIT (doesn't say whether Silvio was her supervisor this time, but I'm assuming he knew of her from her time here). She would then go on to to do a one year post-doc at Princeton and her primary interests are distributed ledgers, game theory, and algorithms.
After studying she would stay in academia and become an assistant professor at Stony Brook in the Economics Department and is a role she continues to hold to this day in conjunction with her role at Algorand.
Jing received the NSF CAREER Award (an award given to people early in their academic career who show and have shown great potential to be role models & future innovators and teachers) in 2016.
I believe she is someone who is going to have a very bright future regardless of whether she stays with Algorand or not.
Yossi Gilad - Head of Systems Research & Chief Technology Officer
Yossi is studied his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. at the Bar-Ilan University in Computer Science (at least his Ph.D. is!) and before working at Algorand he was a Postdoctoral research both at Boston University and MIT & Hebrew University in Isreal as well as being an research member at IBM. He has had positions with Google, Marvell's Switching division.
His work is focused on the design, construction, and analysis of secure and scalable networked systems.
He also has received the following awards:
- Alon fellowship for outstanding young researchers (2019-2022).
- Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Prize (2017).
- RIPE Academic Cooperation Initiative (2017).
- IBM Research Inventor Recognition Award (2015).
- The Check Point Institute Information Security Prize (2013-2014).
- Israel Ministry of Science cybersecurity research scholarship (2012-2014).
- Check Point Institute for Information Security fellowship (2012 - 2013).
Again, it was quite hard to find a lot of information about Yossi outside of the main website & his academic based web pages.
Seems to be highly regarded though and has held a number of important research positions!
Gary Malouf - Head of Engineering
Gary has a lot of experience as a software engineer so I'm not surprised he is working for Algorand. He's built and improved upon engineering teams and software in a wide range of companies, the biggest of which being Wayfair.
Gary started at Marist College and studied Applied Mathematics before graduating with his Bachelors degree in 2007, he then went on to study and graduate with his Masters Degree in Operations Research from Northeastern University in 2009 whilst he was working as a Senior Software Engineer at DataXu (now owned by Roku).
He also held positions at Boston Technologies and Mediacrossing (Director of Realtime Engineering & Architect respectively), he has more info on this on his LinkedIn page but I'm not smart enough to understand fully what it was he did at these companies. At Offerlogic (now owned by Rokt) he held a leadership role as VP of Technology (My primary responsibilities included leading the technology team, working with the rest of our executive team to plan out the roadmap and building highly available systems for delivering value to our customers - From his Linkedin).
The final company he worked at before joining Algorand was Wayfair where: he led the teams responsible for their customer information platform (DMP), bootstrapped their ML platform org, and scaled the onsite Media / sponsored products platform; the latter growing 3x into a $100 million recurring revenue business over an 18 month span.
A very accomplished individual and someone that I'm sure Algorand are very excited to have as part of their team, he joined in August 2021 so he is quite a new addition!
Anne T. Warner - General Counsel
When I was doing research on this topic I had to admit that the legal advice team was the last place I was expecting to be surprised. This lady is simply put, incredible. I'll go into some of her achievements later but first lets look at her professional & academic history.
She graduated from Yale University with a Bachelors in Russian studies with Cum Laude (Latin for "with praise" or "with honor") before going to Harvard and receiving her JD (Juris Doctorate) from Harvard Law School with a Focus on International Negotiation Strategy. Already an impressive start right?
Here is a little bit more info about her time during school from Wikipedia: Warner is a graduate of Yale University in Russian studies, conducted the Yale Slavic Chorus and the Cambridge Slavic Chorus, and went to Bulgaria for a year to collect folk music from the mountain villages on a fellowship from Yale. While at Yale, she and Chris Ernst led the protest of the women's crew for equal facilities under Title IX.
She has a 20+ year career at numerous counsel positions including negotiating 25 deals in 13 countries for Inverness Medical, 5 years at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Pegasystems, and the General Counsel reporting directly to the CEO of Velcro. She has practiced in more than 30 countries and is considered an expert in international law.
At the start of her career she was a lawyer for law firms of Cooley, Godward and Hill & Barlow. She also took some time off to raise her 2 children.
Oh and don't let me forget she is an Olympic Bronze Medalist in the eight oared shell for the United States in 1976, she also coached the 1986 lightweight double team which won gold at the world championships.
Very impressive resume I must say!
THERE ARE TONS MORE MEMBERS I MISSED, THESE ARE JUST SOME OF THEM I PICKED TO HIGHLIGHT!
I'm glad I did this research. I knew that they had an amazing team but beyond Silvio, Keli & Steve I didn't really know a lot about them and I hope you take the time to read about each one. I wish I could post about every single Algo member as they all deserve it!
Lots of information found in this post came from here: https://www.algorand.com/about/our-team
TL;DR: Algo has an amazing team with some really intelligent, experienced & diverse team members and I highly recommend you read about each one!
[link] [comments]
You can get bonuses upto $100 FREE BONUS when you:
💰 Install these recommended apps:
💲 SocialGood - 100% Crypto Back on Everyday Shopping
💲 xPortal - The DeFi For The Next Billion
💲 CryptoTab Browser - Lightweight, fast, and ready to mine!
💰 Register on these recommended exchanges:
🟡 Binance🟡 Bitfinex🟡 Bitmart🟡 Bittrex🟡 Bitget
🟡 CoinEx🟡 Crypto.com🟡 Gate.io🟡 Huobi🟡 Kucoin.
Comments