Our team
Here are key stakeholders focused on building our community
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As the first Technical Accounts Manager and International Beta Coordinator hired by AOL outside the US, Paul was part of the team that helped to launch technologies such as AIM, X2 56K modem protocol, Internet Radio and Online Games during the 90's. He was one of the two people who co-instigated the creation of the Standard for URI Categorization at the W3C, the industry standards body for the World Wide Web, and holds a full patent for URI security inside an app WebView. He is one of the seven original founders of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and was amongst the first invited experts to the Semantic web Education & Outreach Program. Paul is a named contributor to 8 W3C Technical Specifications.
In 2003 Paul founded mobile testing and web accessibility compliance company Segala. Segala was the first test house to become an Associate Member of the GSMA, generating $2.2 million in revenue in year one. While living in the UK he was Chair of the British Interactive Media Association between 2006-2009.
He co-founded Shanti Life with Sheetal Walsh (MetaCert Board member), the first international Microfinance charity to gain charity status in India - it also has charity status in the US, Canada and UK.
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As one of the first 50 coin carrying community contributors for Mozilla, Ian sponsored engineering build and maintenance of SpreadFirefox.com (2005-2009). As Mozilla's lead community admin of that site he helped shepherd and grow Firefox's grassroots marketing community.
In 2009 Ian co-founded AppCoast where he and his team built the official browser add-ons for digg, Delicious, Microsoft, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, and Google. They also contributed to bug fixing for Firefox. Ian and his team built the first security add-on for Segala in 2005, which was formally endorsed by the W3C as one of the best implementations of the Semantic Web. He and Paul have been working together on many joint projects since then, before joining MetaCert in 2017.
As the only certified COBOL programmer in entire APEC region, Kamrul started out his career at Bank of Philippines Island (BPI) in 2000. He worked across some of Asia's largest fintech companies as a lead engineer and chief architect. He joined Segala in 2004 as a senior engineer where he was instrumental in helping some of the UK's biggest telco providers and digital agencies to build accessible websites and ads built in flash. He was also part of the compliance certification team that awarded compliant websites with the Segala Trustmark.
After leaving Segala in 2011, he worked as startup CTO of Pandabed (Asian spin-off of Airbnb). He also worked as technical consultant for Ayala Health arm during it's foundation. Kamrul was the first Chief Architect for Compare Global Group, and creator of a financial comparison engine that powers more than a dozen financial comparison websites across the world today.
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Starting his career as a Linux Systems Administrator and Network Management analyst gaining CCNA Cisco and CEH qualifications, Alfonso became a Security Specialist at Dextra Technologies working on projects for blue chip companies including Texas Instruments Later becoming a Senior Linux Engineer for Telecommunications company Sprint Nextel, Alfonso spent 3 years optimizing infrastructure and services with: NGINX, Varnish, Memcached, APC, Apache and MySQL tuning, Akamai CDN, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront along with organising system hardening and performing vulnerability assessments.
For the past 6 years as CTO and Founder of his own specialist infrastructure company he gained valuable experience in the field of scalable architectures, distributed systems, and building cloud-native applications for clients while learning first hand of the value of entrepreneurial commitment.
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Mario has been building industrial strength browser add-ons for blue chip companies for over 6 years. He built the popular Cryptonite extension for MetaCert which is a must have tool for anyone visiting cryptocurrency related sites to prevent phishing and check validation. He also built the popular news reputation add-on called Check This powered by MetaCert. In addition to being expert on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge browser platforms, Mario contributes his considerable engineering talents to the bot team and billing engines.
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Patrick is the founder of Intellectual Property Society San Francisco. He has a special commitment to encourage civic engagement with the evolution of intellectual property law, personal data rights and Internet identity. He is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Russian Language Studies, and has earned a BS in Sociology from the State University of New York, a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toledo and a JD from Concord Law School. Patrick is a member of the U.S. Patent Bar and the California State Bar.
Jeremy Nation is a writer living in Los Angeles. In 2017 he became a reporter at ETHNews and went on to produce over 460 articles. Working with a skilled team, his efforts helped ETHNews to gain recognition as a digital publication accredited for redistribution by Google News. Jeremy's reporting focused on both the Ethereum blockchain and the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole.
Jeremy has interviewed key industry figures and followed up on a wide range of subjects relating to cybersecurity, legislation, regulation, technological innovations, use-cases, possible scaling protocols, consensus mechanisms, international commerce, second layer solutions, and more. Jeremy's personal interests include writing, reading, charity work, gaming, a love of cuisine, and spending time with his family.
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As the first Technical Accounts Manager and International Beta Coordinator hired by AOL outside the US, Paul was part of the team that helped to launch technologies such as AIM, X2 56K modem protocol, Internet Radio and Online Games during the 90's. He was one of the two people who co-instigated the creation of the Standard for URI Categorization at the W3C, the industry standards body for the World Wide Web, and holds a full patent for URI security inside an app WebView. He is one of the seven original founders of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and was amongst the first invited experts to the Semantic web Education & Outreach Program. Paul is a named contributor to 8 W3C Technical Specifications.
In 2003 Paul founded mobile testing and web accessibility compliance company Segala. Segala was the first test house to become an Associate Member of the GSMA, generating $2.2 million in revenue in year one. While living in the UK he was Chair of the British Interactive Media Association between 2006-2009.
He co-founded Shanti Life with Sheetal Walsh (MetaCert Board member), the first international Microfinance charity to gain charity status in India - it also has charity status in the US, Canada and UK.
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Kieran is the Chief Marketing Officer for Belkin International, encompassing all three of its brands: Belkin, Linksys and WeMo, where he manages every aspect of the marketing organization and eCommerce globally. Fast Company named Belkin one of the World's Most Innovative Companies in the Internet of Things (IoT). Prior to joining Belkin, Kieran spent the past two decades building the best consumer experiences in the mobile, digital and retail sectors spanning everything from large companies to startups. Kieran served as vice president of marketing for RadioShack Corporation where he developed the company's first integrated marketing campaign resulting in a National Retail Federation Gold award.
Eyal is the owner and controlling shareholder of the successful online gambling corporation 888 Holdings Ltd and Founding CEO of Shaked Ventures.
Eyal holds a BA in both Business Management and Information technologies from Israel's IDC University. He has vast experience in the online gambling field as a result of his career at 888 Holdings, which included a period of four years in which he managed 888's operation center in Gibraltar. Eyal is a "Super Angel" investor from early stage to A round startups with a focus on technological startups disrupting the industries of online gaming and gambling, BI, payments monetization, and marketing.
Eyal takes active part by being a leading board member and a consultant for over ten different organizations that promote online security, startup nation ventures and more. MetaCert was Shaked Ventures first investment in the Bay Area.
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Sheetal acts as Advisor to London School of Economics Careers team focussing on entrepreneurship. From 2000- 2005 Sheetal was the first Director of VC Relations at Microsoft where she worked with the Venture Capital community in EMEA and Silicon Valley to help their portfolio companies leverage the .NET initiative, access smart funding and go to market. Previously she worked with the Edmonton Police force working with children and women to alleviate domestic violence and assist victims with drug abuse.
In 2009, Sheetal decided to apply her skills to help entrepreneurs in Indian slums and villages to build sustainable businesses by providing mentoring, training, microfinance and promotion of health and well-being. She is a spokesperson on the topic, having presented at Cambridge, LSE, Doha Forum, Big Society, House of Lords, TEDx and other prestigious forums.
Sheetal has received several awards: Asian Women of Achievement: Social and Humanitarian (Prince Charles and Cherie Blair) for her efforts on taking technology to developing communities in India and Africa (2005); Management Today Magazine 35 Under 35; Success Magazine No 5 of top most powerful Asian women in the UK (2006), Award for Entrepreneur of the Year by Asian Woman Magazine and No 3 Ones To Watch' section of the Asian Power 100 list the most influential and highest achieving Asian women in Britain (2007).
Asian Woman Magazine covered a story of Sheetal's business in the Sept 2007 issue. Sheetal has been invited to Buckingham Palace for Women in Business reception hosted by Her Majesty, The Queen in November 2007. She's received the Alumni Award of Excellence from the University of Alberta and was most recently nominated for the Microsoft Alumni Integral Awards 2012. Sheetal has a Masters in International Relations (Economics) at the London School of Economics and a BA (Honors) in International Politics at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is a yoga teacher and plays drums including the dhol.
Vaibhav is a partner at VC firm Moneta Ventures. Prior to joining Moneta, Vaibhav was President of the SAP Business Unit at KPIT, managing a global portfolio of over $100 million in revenue and a team of over 1,800 employees. He was co-founder and partner at Sparta Consulting, where he served as Executive Vice President and played a key role in growing the company to +$100 million in five years.
He was Vice President of Corporate Development and Global Delivery at Fujitsu Consulting, a Fortune Global 500 company, leading a team of over 1,700 consultants globally. Vaibhav started his career 21 years ago at Siemens. He holds a Bachelor's of Science degree in Electronics and a Master's Degree in Computer Management, both from the University of Pune.
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Geir is the Founding CEO of Famous Four Media (FFM), the #1 market leader in ICANN's new generic Top Level Domains (TLD). The 16 gTLD applications, that are currently under FFM management, include some of the most interesting and valuable domain suffixes, such as .accountant, .bid, .cricket, .date, .download, .faith, .loan, .men, .party, .racing, .review, .science, .trade, .webcam and .win
Previously Geir was a founder and CEO of the Global Name Registry Ltd (GNR), the operator of the .name top-level domain (gTLD) that was acquired by VeriSign. GNR focused on digital identity services, utilizing the .name gTLD as a core part of providing individuals worldwide with personal and memorable digital identities.
Geir was the CTO of the company during its initial phase, and was responsible for building its own Registry system, global DNS resolution infrastructure, as well as a 24/7/365 network operations function. Prior to GNR, Geir was a founder of the personal email provider Nameplanet.com. Nameplanet.com provided email accounts using personal domain names to over 1.5 million users. The company had a portfolio of over 100,000 personal domain names on a number of TLDs, providing consumers with a highly personal domain name using their name as an email address. Nameplanet.com was acquired by Netidentity.com in 2002, and is now part of Tucows following an acquisition in 2006.
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Daniel is Director of web Advocacy & Open Source at Samsung Research where he leads the web Developer Advocacy team behind Samsung's mobile and VR web browser. He has also been co-chair the W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) since 2013 with Tim Berners-Lee. The TAG is a special working group within the W3C, chartered with stewardship of the web architecture.
He has been working on the web for over 2 decades, first helping to create startups in the web publishing sphere and then (after moving to London from New York in 1999) working on the convergence between web and mobile through many projects and initiatives. He has also led open standards strategy for the UK Government and remains a member of the UK Government Open Standards Board.
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Francey served as the first-ever National Coordinator for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction from January 2010 to March 2012. The United States Attorney General appointed her to the post, which was created by the U.S. Congress in the Protect Our Children Act of 2008, and which was housed in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, DC. As the first coordinator, Francey was responsible for creating the inaugural U.S. strategy addressing child sexual exploitation entitled, The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, which was submitted to the U.S. Congress in August 2010. Francey oversaw all child exploitation efforts at the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, the Nation's 93 U.S. Attorneys' Offices, and the Office of Justice Programs, which houses the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces and other law enforcement grant and victim-centric programs.
Francey served as the liaison from the Department of Justice to industry, non-profit, federal, state, and local agencies, as well as to law enforcement agencies and governments worldwide. Francey testified before the U.S. Congress and the United States Sentencing Commission, and briefed senior officials at the White House on child exploitation issues.
Francey was a prosecutor for more than 15 years, serving first as an Assistant District Attorney specializing in crimes against children, then as an Assistant U.S. Attorney specializing in technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation. Francey has held a top-secret security clearance as part of her work on national security investigations while serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. She has been lead counsel on dozens of trials relating to child homicide and other crimes against children. She received her bachelor's degree in Political Science, with a Global Policy Studies Certificate, from the University of Georgia. Francey also holds a Juris Doctor from Ohio Northern University. Francey is now CEO of her own consulting firm, providing advice and counsel to law enforcement, governments, Industry, and others on the protection of children.
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Ariel Jalali is the Founder of Sensay, makers of the SENSE token to convert human knowledge into AI training data on the blockchain.
Ariel has 17 years experience as a startup founder, CEO and CTO. He specializes in building and growing big data and high value information businesses such as AdGreetz, EducationRefi, Infotrieve, LA411.
As a technologist, Ariel has lead mobile, social, SaaS and enterprise projects for Disney, Intel, Edison and several startups.
Ariel's technical training began at Arthur Andersen and he is a UCLA alum. Ariel mentors startup founders via AmplifyLA and is committed to empowering youth via volunteering at Minds Matter and serving as a technical advisor to several foster youth initiatives, including the first White House hackathon.
Vinny Lingham, who is also the star of Shark Tank in South Africa, is a well- recognized South African Internet entrepreneur who immigrated to California a decade ago and is currently the co-founder and CEO of Civic, a startup that is leading a global digital identity revolution. Civic is spearheading the development of an ecosystem that is designed to facilitate on-demand, secure, and low-cost access to identity verification services via the blockchain. Prior to Civic, he was the co-founder and CEO of Gyft a mobile gift card company founded in 2012 and backed by Google Ventures. Within 2 years, Gyft quickly become the leading player in the space and was acquired by global payments giant, First Data Corporation in 2014, for over $50m.
Vinny is an active technology investor primarily in Silicon Valley, focusing on Bitcoin & Blockchain projects in particular. He also partnered with one of his previous co-founders to establish an investment fund in South Africa, called Newtown Partners, where he has led early stage investments into successful an notable startups such as Sweep South and Augmentors. Currently, Vinny is a Shark on Shark Tank South Africa, has also appeared as a Dragon on the South African edition of Dragon’s Den, the longest running UK investment reality show, along with being an "Angel" in the non-profit spinoff of Undercover Boss- National Geographic's Undercover Angel. He is a co-author of “I’m In: Essential Advice for Entrepreneurs.” Vinny now lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and two sons.
Ohayon is French/Israeli, a former executive at ICQ/AOL, founder of TechCrunch France. Appsfire (sold to Mobile Network Group), Isai.fr (French VC) and was Manager of the internet Lab of Gemini and Lightpeed Ventures.
He's currently the CEO of CodenameDjango, a startup focusing on crypto custody based in Tel Aviv.
Kurt Kumar is a Token Sales Orchestrator, Business Architect and Process transformation specialist.
He has led small guerilla teams to rapidly create conceptual designs, prototypes and enterprise systems while applying best-of-breed solutions to meet business objectives.
Kurt has worked with clients like Capital Group, Universal Music Group, Allianz, Sensay, Everipedia, Sony, DirecTV, NewsCorp, Warner, ESRI and Sage.
He runs the Los Angeles Blockchain community group, BLOCK-CON and BLOCK-2-The-Future conferences. Kurt is a strong believer that future is Decentralized.
Daniel has a background as CTO of multiple e-commerce companies and is currently leading technology for the Element Group. He focuses on empathy based solutions that enable technology to just work to the end user. Since moving into blockchain, Daniel has built blockchain solutions have have processed $300 million in transactions and deployed contracts now worth over $1 billion in market cap.
Daniel is excited about projects that integrate the power of the blockchain into the web. Metacert's ability to use token economics to build a trusted list of wallets and sites is that kind of project.
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Named one of the Wired 100 in 2010, serial entrepreneur and executive Richard D. Titus has a passion for technology & innovation. Companies Richard has founded include Razorfish, Schematic and Videoplaza. His most recent startup, Prompt.ly, was co-founded in 2013 and sold in 2016 to Breezeworks, his fifth exit in a row.
Richard is an experienced Blockchain investor and is an active strategic ICO Advisor recently completed ICOs including AdEx, PILLAR, HIVE PROJECT, PO.ET. Current ICOs include CROWDWIZ, SCIENCE, OMEGA ONE, SNIP and GUARDIUM. Until February 2017, Richard led customer experience for Samsung Electronics (CE / Visual Display division). While there he was the group leader for the global user experience & design teams in addition to US-based product planning & new product development functions for all Consumer Electronics.
Richard previously held senior leadership roles at the British Broadcasting Corporation (Future Media Controller) where he launched iPlayer and the BBC mobile service and subsequently served as CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital the digital holding company of DMGT (the Daily Mail).
MetaCert is funded by a VC firm, three Angel Networks, and over a dozen angel investors. We have a very diverse group of investors who come from the US, Canada, UK, Israel, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Russia, and Ireland. We are proud to be Shaked Ventures' first investment in the Bay Area – the family investment fund that founded 888 Holdings Ltd.
Some of our angels include the founding team of Qik (acquired by Skype), the Founder of Travelocity and Kayak, and the Founder of 888.com
