Meet Our Mentors

Albert Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of the Bitcoin Startup Lab, a no-nonsense startup bootcamp that enables entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into investment-ready startups. The BTC Startup Lab works hand in hand with Stacks Accelerator and Stacks Foundation to build the Web3 user-owned Internet on Bitcoin.

Albert is also the co-founder of iGenesiis Group, a pre-accelerator that enables founders to learn the science of turning ideas into meaningful and sustainable businesses. Albert, as CEO, led iGenesiis Group to become the longest-running pre-accelerator in Shanghai and China. Over the years, Albert has trained hundreds of entrepreneurs to launch their startups.

Trevor is an entrepreneur, author, and investor in early stage startups. He's currently Managing Partner at Bitcoin Frontier Fund, where he invests in outstanding teams building Web3 startups on Bitcoin with the Stacks blockchain. Bitcoin Frontier Fund has a portfolio of nearly 50 startups spanning DeFi, NFTs, and Web3.

Previously, helped foster the growth of the Lean Startup movement by creating and running one of the world's largest, grassroots organized training programs for entrepreneurs called Lean Startup Machine. A three-day bootcamp, Lean Startup Machine workshops have been taught in over 150 cities and impacted more than 200,000 entrepreneurs.

Trevor is also author of the bestselling book on applying Lean Startup methods in large organizations, The Lean Enterprise: How Corporations Can Innovate Like Startups.

Dr. Muneeb Ali is the co-founder of Stacks, a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts. He serves as the CEO of Trust Machines, a company building the largest ecosystem of Bitcoin apps. He has raised more than 200 million USD in funding from investors like Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Breyer Capital, and others. Muneeb received his Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science from Princeton University, where his Ph.D. thesis was nominated for the ACM SIGCOMM dissertation award. Muneeb gives guest lectures on Bitcoin & crypto at Princeton and his research publications have over 1,900 citations. He is one of the main characters in the book Life After Google and was a technical advisor to the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Dan Von Kohorn is Managing Partner and CIO of Broom Ventures. He has worked on management of more than $4.3 billion over a career in investment management and venture capital. He is also a software engineer and founded multiple software companies with multiple exits. He has worked in crypto since 2016, built a blockchain oracle company in partnership with ConsenSys, founded the Oracle Working Group at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and contributed to the Specification for Off-Chain Trusted Compute.

Connect with Dan on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tycho is the General Manager at Trust Machines and Co-founder of Zest Protocol, an institutional Bitcoin lending protocol. Zest Protocol aims to expand the Bitcoin economy by creating highly liquid Bitcoin capital markets. Previously, Tycho founded a SaaS company, was listed on Forbes 30 under 30, and graduated from the University of Oxford. He likes to help teams build DeFi on Bitcoin.

Jonathan Sadlowe is General Partner at Gossamer Capital. In the emerging Web3 landscape, Jonathan's investment success stems from a combination of growth and product expertise, consumer insight, and technical proficiency gained as a PM at Google, and CMO of the venture-backed startup Spacious, which was acquired by WeWork in 2019. In addition to his role at Gossamer, Jonathan actively consults with Fortune 500 marketing and executive teams to leverage Web3. He holds a BA in Marketing, MS in MolBio and MBA.

Been a part of the startup community for nearly 3 decades. Was the first executive at streaming media startup Broadcast.com in 1995 and helped build that business up which was sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 Billion USD. Over the years have been involved in several startups related to the online gambling industry. Most recently created Spreads.ca, an online casino and sportsbook in the Canadian market which is poised to explode in growth over the next few years as regulations take hold. Have been an advisor to a few blockchain gaming startups most notably Virtue Poker when they were only a concept. Currently working on a stealth web3 gaming project.

Xan is a Web3 growth leader, founder, and investor who first started in crypto as one of the first 10 core team members of Stacks in 2017. At Stacks, Xan focused on growing developer communities and evaluating early strategic investments, which included Opensea, Cointracker, and Casa.

Xan is currently the Founder of Daemon Technologies, an entity in the Stacks ecosystem focused on community growth in Asia, and the Co-Founder of Conductive.ai, an Animoca backed start up enabling businesses to leverage Web3 for user acquisition and marketing intelligence. He is also the Venture Partner at Rubik Ventures, a Web3 fund focused on investing in infrastructure enabling interoperability.

Abdel Harraz is a three times founder. He previously bootstrapped two WEB2 businesses to profit spanning different industries (telecom, banking/insurance). He has a statistical engineering degree.

MS Computer Science with publications in cryptography, adventurer mathematician, experienced dreamer & founder, husband & father, skipper & black belt in martial arts. 2 exits (Co-founder & CEO) - Game development studio & Entertainment online portal. Created an online social game with over 10 million players from all over the world.

Right now - Co-founder & CEO @Stacks Force - Web3 gaming platform for Web2 games.

MS Computer Science. Studied distributed storages/FS. Tai-chi practitioner. Black belt in martial arts. Worked for two large high-tech US companies. Left to participate in building a game studio and later on decided to pursue a hard path of entrepreneurship.

My achievements as an App Architect: built an in-house game engine, made a VR sim for high-tech training, multiple big mobile/web/server projects.

Current area of interest - Web3 GameDev in web and mobile.

Robin Obermaier started his first business of selling digital designs to YouTubers in 2016 at the age of 14. He always had a passion for technology, high-quality products and learning how to run a business as efficiently and effectively as possible. During school, he worked as a freelancer creating and selling websites to businesses on Fiverr. After he finished school he worked at Apple before quitting to work in the blockchain space full-time.

The Creation of a social NFT Collection led to the desire of building more blockchain infrastructure which in 2022 became Liquidium - An NFT lending protocol on Stacks.

Co-Founder at BitFlow Finance, a decentralized stablecoin exchange designed to reward Bitcoin holders. Founder at CityPacks, an NFT collection on Stacks, for funding and building educational resources to empower public school students in Miami-Dade Country. Founding Partner at Bussola Marketing Group, with over a decade of experience in marketing strategy, branding and go-to-market for SMB and startups.

Sungmin Aum is an Adjunct Professor at Konkuk University Graduate School, who has authored 20 granted patents in blockchain, decentralized exchanges (DEX), artificial intelligence, and data security. He is a firm believer of technoutopianism.

Drew has been working in tech and product for over 20 years, and building on the blockchain for over 5 years. He has helped define products for numerous startups and Fortune 500 companies including HP and Adobe. Drew started and great a strategy consulting practice for a large independent Digital Transformation consulting company. He was a resident in the Stacks Foundation in 2021 and part of the Stacks Ventures Accelerator with frens in the summer of 2022. He has courses on LinkedIn Learning on becoming a CTO and building dApps on Ethereum and can support through his product strategy and development experience, lean startup expertise, creating corporate culture, Web3 strategy and more.

James Chiang was previously at a private real estate investment firm.

Not content with working in a slow pace environment in a very mature sector, he worked with various startups in Shanghai, China before joining Stackswap.

Currently he is pursuing his passion in working with early-stage projects and creating a platform with which they can be empowered and funded.

Mitchell is the Head of Growth for the Stacks Foundation, joining after 3 years at Blockstack PBC/Hiro and a career in the world of startups including being an early employee at Startup Weekend as well as Product and Marketing roles at Techstars.

Orlando Cosme is the co-founder & CEO of StackerDAO Labs, which is making it easy to create and manage web3 native organizations, like DAOs, powered by Bitcoin. He is a lawyer by background and most recently was a startup and venture capital attorney where he represented startups as their corporate counsel and VC firms in their startup investments. He was also a litigator where he represented Fortune 50 companies and Big 4 accounting firms in securities litigation and government enforcement actions. Prior to law school, Orlando worked in expansion, sales, and community at WeWork and was an interest-rates trader at Citigroup on Wall St. He earned his BA in Economics and Spanish from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

Dr, Chiente Hsu is CEO and co-founder of ALEX, a Bitcoin DeFi platform and currently the biggest project on Stack. ALEX is disrupting the financial industry by efficiently connecting participants at both the institutional and individual levels.

Dr. Hsu joins ALEX from Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, where she was a Managing Director and Global Head of Quant Research. She is also the author of ‘Rule Based Investing”, published by FT Press.

Dr. Hsu spent her early career in academia. She was a tenure-track professor at the University of Vienna, Austria, and a visiting professor at Duke University, where she taught and conducted research in Financial Econometrics.

Matty has a decade of experience designing economic models for hedge funds and VC funded startups. He has been in crypto since 2015 and Stacks since 2017. In the Stacks ecosystem, he has worked with Trust Machines, Stacks Foundation, NeoSwap, Alex, Zest, and others on their tokenomics and the consensus mechanism for Stacks itself. He authored the first community governance proposal for Arkadiko, publishes the quarterly 'STX Mining Report', and is an occasional angel investor.

Chris Castig is co-founder of Console.xyz: Secure Chat for Web3. He's also an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School. Previously, Chris co-founded OneMonth, a 20 person edTech startup and Y Combinator company, launched three multi-million-dollar courses while at General Assembly, and developed digital products for both seed-stage startups and top brands. Chris is passionate about using technology to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.

Rachel Yu is the Co Founder of ALEX, an open source DeFi company built on Stacks blockchain and modelled on the world's financial markets. Accelerated by Stacks and built on its platform, ALEX is disrupting the crypto industry by efficiently connecting participants at both the institutional and individual levels.

Rachel started her investment banking career at Goldman Sachs Asia, where she held a variety of roles from 2008 to 2016. Her last position was Executive Director and China Sales for Fixed Income, Commodity and Currencies (FICC). Her accomplishments including: substantial revenue contribution via a diversified client and product portfolio (alternative products, one delta funds, fund derivatives etc), covering major clients including SAFE, CIC, ICBC, BOC, CCB, ABC, EXIM, CDB, shareholding banks, as well as Life Insurance companies.

Mark is a product leader who lives in Barcelona, Spain having previously grown up in Menlo Park, California and started his technology career in San Francisco. He has extensive experience leading product strategy, management, design, development and marketing efforts at early-stage software startups such as Hiro, TechCrunch, Plancast, Lift, and KITE. He currently serves as Product Lead for the Hiro Wallet, leading the #1 cryptocurrency wallet for the Stacks blockchain.

Aakanksha is currently working as a Full Stack Developer at Whitelabel Collaborative. She has comprehensive software industry experience in design and implementation of web-based applications across diversified technology stacks. Having developed interest in blockchain technology since 2021, she is presently engaged in Web3 development projects. Her residency with Stacks Foundation as Clarity Educator involves educating and continually equipping Clarity devs to join the community and help with growth of Stacks ecosystem.

Tom Giles is the co-founder of Awesimo (https://awesimo.io) and ticketing startup, Project Admission (https://projectadmission.com). Having been in Bitcoin since late 2010, Tom has helped build multiple startups in the space, including Swan Bitcoin. Tom previously founded StageBloc, a direct to fan platform used by such entertainers as Metallica, Justin Timberlake, Linkin Park, and Eric Church, which was acquired by Fullscreen (2015) and AT&T (2017). Specializing in product design and strategy, Tom helps build product focused startups through Megatron Ventures (https://megatron.ventures).

https://twitter.com/tomgiles

https://gamma.io/megatron.btc

Louise was the Growth Lead at the Stacks Foundation, leading community and token growth. Here, they manage more than 100M STX in treasury to work towards ecosystem growth, governance, education, and funding.

He has a double master’s Degree in Green IT from the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Louise got his start as a passionate Stacks Community Member before becoming a team member to Hiro PBC, formally known as Blockstack PBC, mostly known for the first-ever SEC-qualified US Reg A offering and concurrent Reg S offering in 2019, which raised a total of $70M+. Currently, STX is the number 1 web3 project on Bitcoin.

Under Louise's leadership, Stacks grew to more than 100,000 dedicated community members, spanning 30+ countries while increasing STX access through various growth efforts, partnerships, and integrations. Passionate about the user-owned internet, Louise co-founded Ryder with the aim of bridging the digital and physical world together. He envisions a user-owned internet, where we capture 100% of the value we create today.

Adam is an early-stage startup operator and community builder with an extensive background managing internal teams, projects, products, and programs. He's previously helped and mentored founders through a variety of organizations, including Startup Weekend, startups.com, Techstars, FoundersBoost, WeWork Labs, and others. Currently, Adam is the community growth and programs lead at the Stacks Foundation.

Daniel is the founder of HireVibes.com, a Web3 recruiting platform built on Stacks that powers regenerative finance (ReFi) impact projects. Daniel is also the co-founder of Starfort Technologies, a carbon negative Bitcoin mining company that converts waste (MSW, sewerage, agri waste etc) into clean renewable energy to power modular Bitcoin mining data centers. He previously led recruiting teams at Avalanche and Amazon, is passionate about innovating on Bitcoin layers, and has a BA from the University of Galway, Ireland.

Head of Product at remodelmate (backed by Revolution Ventures, RareBreed Ventures, Dorm Room Fund and TEDCO), Analyst at Stacks Ventures & Angel Investor. Ex-Venture Fellow at Insignia Ventures Academy, ex-Co-founder of SmartRetail and Findwork, and ex-General Manager of Breeze, Hailo and myTaxi.

Philip De Smedt is a tech entrepreneur focused on web3. In the past, he was co-founder and CTO of Intuo, an HR-tech SaaS startup that was sold to Unit4 in 2019. Currently, he is a core contributor at Arkadiko, the first crypto-collateralised stablecoin on Stacks. He has been HODLing bitcoin since 2013... and trying to make it more useful since 2020.