Tech Culture in the Age of Blockchain | Tezos & Tykn founders discuss

Innovation doesn’t just have a speed – it also has a direction. So given that technologists have outsized influence in setting that direction, how do we foster a startup culture where social impact is at the core rather than the fringes? In this fireside chat, blockchain entrepreneurs Kathleen and Tey discuss how to weigh positive potential against negative unintended consequences, and the lessons they’ve learned from bringing a revolutionary – and risky – technology to market.

Speakers: Kathleen Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, and Tey El-Rjula, co-founder of Tykn. Moderator: David Goldberg, founder of Founders Pledge.

About Kathleen:

Kathleen Breitman is a co-founder of Tezos. Tezos is a blockchain-based smart contract platform with an on-chain governance mechanism. At its heart, Tezos tackles the question of governance and development in the context of a decentralized network. Tezos has famously raised one of the largest Initial Coin Offerings ever. Prior to Tezos, Kathleen was a senior strategy associate for R3, a blockchain consortium of more than 70 financial firms. She is the subject of Wired’s 2018 cover story: ‘Blockchain: A love story’.

About Tey:

Tey El-Rjula is co-founder of Tykn.tech, an organization that employs blockchain technology to store and certify birth and death certificates and academic degrees. Born in Kuwait during the gulf war, when the birth registries were destroyed en masse, Tey knows the difficulties of being an ‘invisible person’. In 2014 he started his asylum application in a refugee camp in the Netherlands, and for two years he felt the pain of thousands of Syrian refugees unable to verify the authenticity of their documents. This gave him the motivation to found Tykn, together with social entrepreneur Khalid Maliki, in order to work on providing self-sovereign identity to all.

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Filmed at Founders Pledge Forum in London, July 2018.

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Kane Dane