Assembling the Avengers of Web3: How Andrew Masanto Brought Tech's Hottest Founding Team Together

Web 3 is likely to produce the most important innovations of our time. Already, it has revolutionized how we can interface with money/value exchange, art, data, virtual reality, digital real estate and more. In fact, despite the current bear market, data shows that companies and consumers are on board with the technological revolution, with 46 percent of finance apps currently already taking advantage of web3 technology. If you step back and zoom out on the industry, it’s easy to see web3 is significantly larger than what it was only a few years ago and the upward trajectory of the space (even in spite of the current downturn) continues, as reflected by both adoption and even the price trend of Bitcoin since 2010.

The young industry is replete with colorful personalities, projects and stories. From the long-form blog ramblings and market predictions of Arthur Hayes, to the colorful Tweets of Cozomo de Medici, to the PR provocations of Justin Sun. While controversial, what is clear is that this young, quirky, fast-moving and rapidly-evolving ecosystem has attracted some of the brightest and most talented individuals of our generation away from traditional industries, particularly financial services.

As a pioneer and leader in the web3 industry, Andrew Masanto (and his new project, Nillion), embodies this sentiment. The Web2 entrepreneur and artist turned serial Web3 builder has brought together what could be called the ‘Web3 Avengers’ team to build a blockchain-free, decentralized internet infrastructure protocol, based on a new mathematical algorithm called Nillion. The all-star founding team includes the likes of the Founder of Indiegogo, the Founding Engineer of Uber, the Associate General Counsel of Coinbase and an elite squad of other web2 veterans and individuals with experience in reputable companies like Goldman Sachs, Nike and Google, who are joining forces in an attempt to build what they hope will be revolutionary internet infrastructure.

Masanto is no stranger to the industry. His track-record in commercializing previously unknown technologies and bringing them to the mainstream is impressive; he is a two-time web3 unicorn founder, having started and popularized two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (Hedera and Reserve). Masanto is a sought-after thought leader, and has guest lectured at institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and most recently

Columbia University and is widely considered a thought leader on marketing, entrepreneurship and web3.

His latest venture, Nillion, was inspired when Masanto met Dr. Miguel de Vega in 2018. Over the next few years, Dr. de Vega shared his thoughts and inventions with Masanto. Their discussions culminated in the development of Nil Message Compute (NMC), the technology behind Nillion. Masanto didn't take de Vega up on commercializing his earlier inventions, because Masanto states, “I was only interested in projects with industry-disrupting, world-changing potential and while his previous innovations would have been profitable to commercialize, they wouldn’t have had the impact I would have deemed worthy of my time." It was only when Dr. de Vega presented Masanto with Nil Message Compute technology, that Masanto felt compelled to Co-Found the protocol Nillion.

Nil Message Compute is a mathematical algorithm that uses multi-party computation (MPC), rather than blockchain, to create decentralized infrastructure. Rather than facilitating financial transactions (like blockchain), the technology has the potential to facilitate fast, private and information-theoretic (unconditional) secure storage and processing of information within a decentralized environment. Nillion’s “Information Theoretic Security” is the gold standard of security that is mathematically proven to maintain secrets even in the face of unlimited computing resources, a particularly compelling proposition with the advent of AI and quantum computing.

What sets Nillion apart from other Web3 companies is that it does not rely on blockchain technology. Instead, by leveraging Nil Message Compute, nodes in the Nillion network are able to do things that blockchains were not designed to do. Potential use cases include decentralized secure storage, credit scoring, authentication and artificial intelligence / machine learning.

Nil Message Compute is not intended to replace or compete with blockchains. Instead, it’s objective is to enhance existing blockchains by providing an alternative method of private storage, access control and computation.  Nillion’s CEO, Alex Page, states “Nillion will have a big impact on non-blockchain, real-life, problems, such as enabling health records to be shared and used confidentially to advance research and treatment without ever compromising the integrity, validity or privacy of the data”.

Having previously started several successful companies and protocols, Masanto understood the necessity of finding the right team to execute Nillion's vision. “Team is everything, especially in the early stages”, Masanto states. This is precisely why, after identifying the potential of the technology, Masanto identified and recruited what could be Web3’s most impressive founding team.

He began by inviting his long-time friend and ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Alex Page, to join. Soon after, he convinced the former founding engineer of Uber, Conrad Whelan (the pair met at Burning Man, reminiscent of the infamous meeting between the Google founders and Eric Schmidt, who went on to be the legendary CEO of Google), out of retirement to join as Chief Technology Officer. With the momentum of these first key joiners, Masanto found it easier to attract top talent such as Lindsay Danas Cohen (the Associate General Counsel of Coinbase) who became Nillion’s General Counsel; Slava Rubin, the Founder of Indiegogo, who joined as Chief Business Officer; and Mark McDermott, who led Partnership Innovations at Nike, to join as Head of Ecosystem.

“I’ve known Andrew for many years and his track record at identifying disruptive technologies is remarkable. When he approached me about Nillion I had an incredible role heading up Innovation Partnerships at Nike, but after looking into the team, tech and purpose I knew I had to join”, said Mark.

According to Masanto, assembling the right team was just one challenge of the beginning of Nillion. Other challenges included writing the initial whitepaper and developing the early go-to-market, marketing, and fundraising strategy. In spite of the current bear market, on December 12, 2022, Nillion announced they had successfully raised $20m+ in their Seed Round via TechCrunch.

With $20m+ funding and an ‘Avengers-level’ team, Masanto is excited about Nillion’s potential to move the frontier of web3 technology forward. “We had incredible amounts of interest in the team and tech, which manifested in a vastly oversubscribed fundraise. If this team can accomplish even 1/10th of what the potential of the technology is, I think this project will be really special,” he says. “For now, we’re going to be heads down focusing on building a great product, and everyone is loving the experience of working with some of the smartest people in the world on bringing cutting-edge technology to life.”

by Darby Jones