KeyoCoin: The Team Behind The Token
For the past year and a half, my vision for KeyoCoin has been brought to life piece by piece by the team laboring behind the logo. As we head toward the next big milestone for the company, I wanted to take a moment to showcase the talented bunch involved in getting us off the ground.
First things first, our engineering team, led by co-founder and four-time CTO, Matías Menafra. When Matias and I landed on the concept for KeyoCoin back in February 2017, I knew immediately that we were onto something, and it didn’t take long for us to start building an international team of tech titans to make the dream a reality.
Matias has spent the past fifteen years in management and entrepreneurship, with a strong focus on front and back end software engineering and architecture. He’s a rare breed, in being able to simultaneously manage the overall direction and the day-to-day of our development team, while also remaining hands on with both the concept and the coding of our platform.
Joining Matias, in the app development team, we have Lead iOS Engineer Luis Mejías, and Lead Android Engineer Moisés Portillo Calles, whose work on getting the KeyoPass mobile app and marketplace off the ground has been incredible. It’s always amazed me how many ICO projects launch straight into fundraising with little more that a concept and a whitepaper to their name. We’ve been determined to have our app up and running before we took that step. But though we’ve taken our time over building the hospitality and tour marketplace, blockchain has been baked into our DNA from day one, and Moisés in particular needs no persuasion to roll-up his sleeves and join Matias in programming with Solidity.
Looking to the front end of the development team, we have Head of Design, Ignacio Sans, who is a master of fusing sleek and distinctive touches with an authentic look and feel; both of which make KeyoCoin’s design concepts represent exactly what we are striving to achieve. Both designer and developer, Ignacio is armed with over a decade of experience in the field, with a passion for decentralization that has drawn him to this exciting space.
Ignacio works side by side (in spirit if not geographically) with Paulina Szydlo, the most recent addition to the team from Buenos Aires. Paulina has been design freelancing since before she went to college, participating in the National Student Advertising Competition and even making waves on the Polish national swim team. Since then, she’s racked up over 6 years of design experience, to which she brings a rare talent in creating unputdownable consumer journeys.
Rounding off the development team, we have Jorge Terán, who slots into the KeyoCoin team as our Front-end Engineer, deeply enmeshed in the design of KeyoCoin’s launch platform and website, and always tackling design dilemmas with flair.
Building a global travel, hospitality, and local experience marketplace is a mammoth undertaking, especially when it comes to crossing geographical, legal and cultural and borders. Such a journey would be impossible without the operational know-how that our COO Sveta Kabonova possesses. Sveta’s knowledge and insight, accumulated from many years of project and operations management in global investment banking, six years of which with banking giant Goldman Sachs, has been as critical for helping us build a marketplace of 12,000+ products across seven countries, as it has for building the team that is now creating our universal travel reward platform.
Also fueling that expansion, is our Head of Hospitality and Tourism Sarah Dandashy and Head of Local Experiences Tyler Linn. In the half decade I’ve spent in the hospitality and tourism space, I’ve met nobody that knows it, and lives it, quite like Sarah. Winner of Les Clefs d’Or Best Young Concierge in the World in 2015, and founder of Ask A Concierge, she brings unbeatable insights and connections that ensure what we design with KeyoCoin is practical and usable in the real world, and always exceeds user expectations.
Tyler is equally involved in curating the travel experiences that are the beating heart of KeyoCoins’ value proposition, drawing on six years of management consultancy experience, in part managing a multi-million dollar program portfolio for the US Navy, to oversee our bookings activity with military precision. His creativity has also been instrumental in setting the scene for the roll out of 100 challenges in 100 cities from our travel merchants, which I can’t wait to see jumpstart the travel reward ecosystem we are building.
Joining Sarah and Tyler to assist and refine our hospitality strategy is Darryl Adams, the former VP of NXTV, who launched one of the first digital interactive in-room hotel movie entertainment solutions in the world. Darryl brings over 20 years of measurable success, cultivating innovation and executing on game changing strategy in leading organizations.
In marketing, I’m lucky to be joined by three absolutely stellar talents from the agency world, that help to channel my vision, product, and marketing messages. Our Head of PR and Communications Nick Albrow came to us as an award-winning Account Director and campaign creator for fintech startups and global blue-chips alike, and has been invaluable in helping to shape our humble beginnings into a vision which chimes with the future we want to see. His guidance in helping to manage our reputation is all the more important as we approach future fundraising milestones.
Meanwhile our Head of Marketing Melissa Gow has been instrumental in bringing our platform to life in the eyes of our growing community. Her passion for giving KeyoCoin wings is propped up by over six years of expertise in the advertising industry, including with M&C Saatchi and BWM Dentsu, most recently forming an in-house agency for Allianz.
And then we have Jeff Wilson, our Creative Director who has played a central role in leading the eye catching direction of our brand, and brings decades of experience helping large brands like Wells Fargo and Frito Lay cultivate their communities. Mel, Nick, and Jeff are supported by Ellie Cook, our resident writer (and translator) extraordinaire.
Over in research and data analytics, we have Benjamin Ramirez, who fuses together his fascination with finance and economics with his passion for smart contract applications and blockchain. Ben definitely has his finger on the technological pulse.
Square in the middle of our rockstar cast is Michael Zatulov, our CFO, who is an experienced financial strategy and operations executive with over 10 years of senior leadership in private equity and venture funded digital media, consumer technology, SaaS software, marketing technology, and logistics startups. Mike brings financial experience that arms us to navigate the sometimes tricky waters of fundraising.
And last but certainly not least, is our Director of Global Relations Adelle Demko. Adelle has a staggering track record as a former partner of Wedbush Capital Partners, a finance and strategy executive at Xerox, and a corporate attorney in New York City. She led the public offering of the well-known surfing brand Quicksilver, served on the Board of Directors of the Balance Bar Company (NASDAQ) where she facilitated the public offering, was Chairperson of the Audit Committee, and a member of the Corporate Development Committee leading to the company’s sale to Kraft. She also sat on the Board of Directors of Maps.com, and a number of other Boards of Advisors including UC Wireless. Supporting Adelle in global investor relations, is Sacha Brown, who is riding the rising tide of blockchain technology to introduce key stakeholders to our ecosystem.
And bringing up the rear there’s me, Matt Baer, Founder and CEO. I lead this talented team with an insatiable curiosity for cryptocurrency, blockchain, and a passion for bringing both to the masses! I set the vision, and ensure everyone is pulling together toward our north star: creating the world’s first universal travel rewards token used by millions of people around the world. Our team is on a mission to shift the power from a few large players in travel, back to the independent travel providers struggling to stay afloat with the burden of large third party commissions. We hope to give consumers a better travel experience, for a lower cost, and imbue smaller travel providers with the ability to level the playing field. How? Well we are gamifying the entire travel experience through our universal travel rewards cryptocurrency - KeyoCoin, and incentivising people to #experiencelife through our fun travel challenges along their journeys or even cruising around their own city.
Somewhere between building a product people are going to be excited to use, and raising the capital to achieve that goal, I make sure we have delicious team lunches from independent local providers, and that we have a lot of fun along the way. So far, so good.
Join our Telegram channel at: https://t.me/KeyoCoin to follow our progress, and stay tuned for our Meet the Advisors series to find out more about the advisory team behind the token.