John Wolpert
John Wolpert is contributing Writer for Forbes, focused on applications of Zero Knowledge Cryptography.
Previously, he was the co-founder of IBM’s blockchain initiative and Hyperledger, John now focuses on Ethereum at ConsenSys. Follow him especially for his great technical insights into both enterprise and public blockchains.
He is Member Of The Board Of Advisors at Neocova, Product Executive at ConsenSys Web3 Studio, have joined Consensys, blockchain venture development lab, to help start the next wave of companies on Ethereum and the emerging decentralized Web - Web3.
Habituated to digging into problems worth solving, seeing opportunities to apply creative business models and technology to solve them, and building first-class teams that can approach problems from different viewpoints.
Co-founded IBM Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric. Now working with Joe Lubin and ConsenSys to make Web3 a practical reality, where protocols and platforms like Fabric, Corda, Tendermint, Truebit and others work together and avoid 'blockchain balkanization' by coordinating state through the Ethereum mainnet. #stateful-Internet
Spun the first ride sharing company, Flywheel out of Best Buy, led it through two pivots and two rounds of funding. Company was acquired.
Helped build 5 commercial ecosystems: Hyperledger Fabric, alphaWorks (online), IXC (R&D), Flywheel (mobile), IBM Watson.
Created and ran a consortium of companies in IT, life sciences and healthcare in the US, Australia and the UK. Spent four years overseas leading these and other “open innovation” initiatives.
2 Specialties:
- Building multi-sided markets from scratch.
- Finding and building new businesses in and around large, complicated organizations.
Practical Know-How:
- Can design and build products and services users love and build a mature product organization that can handle change under pressure and maintain speed, quality and market leadership;
- Can efficiently build a large, evangelical developer and user community;
- Can forge collaborative business development opportunities at both research and product stages;
- Can run a startup or a company's new line of business, get it funded, find the repeatable, scalable business model, and build a team with an amazing culture;
- Can sometimes spot where rifts between groups of people will form and avoid them before they happen.
