Stephen Tse has been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years, and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen was a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer for search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search Spotsetter with institutional venture capital; Apple later acquired the startup.

Rongjian Lan was a search infrastructure engineer for Play Store at Google. He published over 10 academic papers on spatio-temporal querying and map-based visualization. Rongjian started researching decentralized protocols in early 2017.

Rongjian is the co-chair of ABC Blockchain Foundation, with more than 100 engineers from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn as members. He was a doctoral candidate of computer science at the University of Maryland College Park and obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

Nick White holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he focused on signal processing, optimization and control. As a graduate teaching assistant at Stanford, he researched artificial intelligence and applied mathematics with Prof. Bernard Widrow.

Nick has served as the AI specialist for Hong Kong-based AI incubator Zeroth.AI, and coached over 20 teams from 5 continents across industries ranging from finance to agriculture to blockchain. He is a certified yoga instructor and an avid surfer.

Sahil Dewan is a graduate of Harvard Business School, where he served as president of the blockchain and cryptocurrency club. He has worked at Draper Dragon Fund and advised several blockchain projects.

Sahil founded FuturEd, an ed-tech startup that pioneered a mobile platform for alumni engagement and fundraising for over 100 educational institutions in India. He was also elected country president for AIESEC India, a youth leadership organization present in more than 125 countries.

Leo Chen led a team of 8 engineers at Amazon Web Services. There he built high-throughput storage virtualizations for more than 200k EC2 instances. At Amazon Lab126 , Leo built the first generation of Kindle Fire and architected FireOS for all Amazon devices. At Ericsson and Broadcom he worked on their Linux kernel, embedded systems and large-scale distributed systems.

Leo holds a master’s degree in computer science from Simon Fraser University and a bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University. Leo has completed 8 full marathons and hiked the Grand Canyon R3, John Muir Trail, and soon the entire Pacific Crest Trail.

Li Jiang has founded a logistic startup during college with the highest revenue. During his six years at GSV Capital, Li organized Pioneer Summit and Global Education Summit with 1,500 attendees including Bill Campbell and Barack Obama.

Li holds an economics degree from Northwestern University. He is an adjunct professor​ at Northwestern's Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Li trains on ultimate frisbee daily and owns an amateur team that won nationally in 2017.

Gizem Cakil executes product strategy at Harmony. She is also the Mother of Pangaea. Gizem advised executives in healthcare systems, retail banking and telecommunications at McKinsey & Company. Gizem is on break from Harvard Business School to scale global nodes.

Gizem holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Koc University in Turkey; during her studies she worked as a teaching assistant of Game Theory courses and machine learning.

Robin Schmidt is an award-winning filmmaker. He is Harmony’s Creative Director, currently finding new ways of bringing Harmony’s story to the global audience. As a child he sang, played piano and violin. The passion for the audience morphed into a career as a filmmaker. First chasing the world’s elite extreme sports athletes and then into television, commercials and feature films.

As an independent artist the problem is always money. When he discovered blockchain and cryptocurrencies, he suddenly saw a way to solve it. He once played a crypto hacker for a leading global bank. Now he’s hacking crypto’s creative cortex. One block at a time.

Nikos Kostopoulos grows community and international partnerships at Harmony. Nikos built the largest entrepreneurial youth organization in the Balkans and grew the youth liberal movement in Europe. His academic thesis was among the first papers to argue the need and the method for regulating cryptocurrencies in the European Union.

He is an accredited trainer for EU projects, securing more than EUR$1M for 40 EU-funded projects since 2012. He graduated with degrees in law, civilization, and finance. Nikos enjoys exploring different parts of the world and has been to Singapore, Berlin, Cluj Napoca, Nicosia, Istanbul, and Austria.

Ganesha Upadhyaya builds scalable tools for mobile, IOT/cloud, and distributed systems. At Huawei, he developed a language, codegen compiler, and runtime for IoT end-to-end applications, winning a company-wide award. He published over a dozen papers at top-tier conferences and journals, such as International Conference on Software Engineering, and Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications.

Ganesha holds a Master’s and PhD from Iowa State University and is a recipient of John Vincent Atanasoff award for outstanding research contribution. He enjoys playing professional cricket and cooking delicious vegetarian meals.

Dennis Won is a core protocol developer at Harmony. Previously, he led light-field 3d graphics and computer vision tech at Leia and developed VR video streaming at Facebook BR. Dennis authored Facebook’s open source project 360 Capture SDK.

Dennis earned a CS degree from Stanford, where he pursued artificial intelligence under Professor Andrew Ng. Dennis is one of the top 6 winners of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and a former US Math Olympiads Finalist.

Daniel Van Der Maden designed transmission logic and built an embedded radio navigation system for a DARPA project. He created chatbots to simulate human responses and is passionate about writing approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems.

Daniel graduated from the University of Berkeley with a degree in computer science and was also an electrical engineering TA. He was on the core teaching staff of Professor John Denaro’s 2,000 student computer science class. Daniel grew up in Congo and Chad and speaks Vietnamese and French. He has also built several cars, including a BMW E46 M3.

Yuriy Menkov has been a senior frontend team leader since 2017 for three blockchain startups including Waves Protocol. He was previously a senior frontend developer on web apps and developed in C/C++ for six years. 
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Yuriy graduated with a degree in computer systems automation and networks from National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). He enjoys fitness challenges and cooking Borscht soup dishes at home.

Maggie Wang graduated with a master's in Financial Mathematics from Boston College and earned her bachelor in finance from University of International Business and Economics. She built financial, DCF and M&A models at Bank of China and Deloitte and is a CFA level III candidate.

Maggie comes from a Buddhist family which has influenced her philosophy: she has been a vegetarian for two years in support of animal ethics; she has also completed two vipassana meditations. Maggie started a magazine on campus fashion and was a model for its swag shop.

Janet Liang graduated with a computer science degree with a focus on visualization and artificial intelligence from the Georgia Institute of Technology. As an engineer at Samsung, she developed automated testing scripts and performance monitoring graphs for the Austin Semiconductor division.

She also researched game AI, building an Unity tower defense game with animated 3D Mixamo models. Janet enjoys baking key lime pies and is currently learning photography on a Sony A5.

Xiaopeng Li helped to ship the Fractal mainnet, working on P2P networking, consensus, and Ethereum virtual machine modules. He implemented their delegate proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus based on verifiable random function (VRF). 
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Xiaopeng graduated from North China Institute of Technology (NCIST), majoring in electronic information engineering. He is an active butterfly and freestyle swimmer and goes mountain climbing when he’s not under water.

Jacky Wang developed DxChain Network’s public blockchain focusing on storage service. He built mainnet deployment, light client implementation, watchdog monitoring, DPOS consensus, and storage contract. Jacky holds a Physics bachelor’s from Fudan University and an Electrical and Computer Engineering master’s from University of Arizona.

Jacky enjoys writing beautiful and clean code. In leisure time, he spends time singing Chinese pop karaoke, hiking Lake Chabot twice a week, and watching drama movies like “Three Billboards”.

Niteesh Settypalli helped an ag-tech startup develop the world’s largest agriculture lab. He worked to restructure their business model, create expansion plans for Ukraine, manage relationships with 50 of the most influential farmers in the US. He’s passionate about improving the economic liberty for everyone globally.

Niteesh is an economics graduate from UC San Diego and learned from foremost thought leaders such as Dr. Karthik Muralidharan and Dr. Kate Antonovics. Niteesh loves playing basketball as a former guard and watching the Lakers.

Nick Vasilich served in the military for 17 years prior to his current career as a digital marketer focused on blockchain. Previously he also managed marketing for a software company specialized in GPU virtualization. He earned specialist degrees in electronics engineering and law from Sumy State University, a top 5 Ukrainian university.
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Nick is a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker and helps bridge startups with the 170 million Russian-speaking community. He adores spending time with family and you can find him fishing and cooking.

Sebastian Johnsson previously co-founded and was the CTO of a grocery delivery startup similar to Amazon Fresh. He created e-commerce solutions for some of Scandinavia's leading brands and has spent the last few years leading his own projects while traveling the world as a digital nomad.

Sebastian is a self-taught engineer and thoroughly enjoys learning new programming languages and tech stacks. In his spare time he enjoys playing the guitar, barbecuing and going to the gym.

Peter Abilla has been a marketing and growth leader for several leading blockchain projects including Oasis, ThunderCore and Mainframe. Previously he held leadership roles in operations at eBay and Amazon. He has been quoted by Clayton Christensen on innovation and O’Reilly Media on consumer experience. 

Peter holds a Master’s in operations research from The University of Chicago and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Mathematics from Brigham Young University. He enjoys cooking barbecues and supporting his children’s competitive football team.

Alex Yates was a program coordinator at Draper University where he helped train over 250 founders from around the world. He also started a digital marketing agency that advised companies on web development, paid search and search engine optimization. 

Alex studied Economics and Finance at University of Illinois at Chicago. He completed Draper University’s program, Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurship Essentials program, and Y Combinator’s Startup School. Alex loves extreme wilderness adventures.