Findora Foundation
Findora’s Heritage of Innovation
Remembering John Powers
In July of 2020, after many months of battling multiple myeloma, John Powers passed away. He was 67 years young.
John served as CEO of the Stanford endowment fund from 2006 to 2015. In addition to chairing Stanford’s endowment, John also had an extensive background on Wall Street that gave him the perspective as a principal, advisor, and agent. John co-headed a private equity business at Credit Suisse and ran research at the renowned technology investment bank, Robertson Stephens. This gave him invaluable experience and put him face to face with many of the problems faced in finance today.
John leaves behind a legacy that touched people around the world and a family that he loved dearly. His friends will forever remember him as JP; Findora will remember him as one of our founders. In the present day, the Findora team around the world is committed to building in the spirit of John, in order to make his vision a reality.
Our Contributors
Lily Chao
Founder
Lily Chao
Founder
Lily has an entrepreneurial spirit and successful track record of investing in early stage businesses both in the US and in China. Prior to Findora, Lily and John co-founded Powerscale Capital, which has $5 billion AUM. She is part of the tech-savvy generation of new leaders who seek to disrupt and improve legacy businesses, as opposed to following their lead. With one foot in Silicon Valley and another in the broader Asia-Pacific rim, Lily has seen the ways technology can create real world solutions across all corners of the globe.
Benedikt Bünz
Co-founder, Head of Research
Benedikt Bünz
Co-founder, Head of Research
Benedikt Bünz is a PhD in the Stanford Applied Cryptography Group, known for inventing Bulletproofs, a revolutionary zero-knowledge proof technique. Bulletproofs are core to the Findora technology stack. He has done research on accumulators, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable delay functions, super light clients, and proofs of solvency. Alongside the Findora engineering team, Benedikt translates cutting-edge cryptography into industry-grade financial systems.
Ben Fisch
Co-founder, Head of Technology
Ben Fisch
Co-founder, Head of Technology
Ben Fisch is overseeing the technology development of Findora and completing his PhD in the Stanford Applied Cryptography Group., known for inventing the Supersonic zk-SNARK, a breakthrough technique in zero knowledge proofs and verifiable computation. Supersonic is what enables Findora to offer the first trustless fully-confidential blockchain. Ben is also known for inventing Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) as well as his research on proofs of replication (PoReps) and accumulators, which contributed to the core protocols of Filecoin, Chia, and Ethereum.
Charles Lu
Business Development
Charles Lu
Business Development
Charles is a blockchain veteran who holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Charles founded the Stanford Blockchain Club in 2014 and previously worked at Binance, Citadel, Facebook, and Amazon. He is currently on leave from his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, where he focused on cryptography, blockchains, and smart contract security under Professor Dan Boneh.
Young Yu
Business Development
Young Yu
Business Development
Prior to joining Findora Foundation, Young is Managing Director of Corporate Development at CAIS, a leading asset management and wealth product distribution platform. Young has a long career in investment banking and business strategy, having previously worked at UBS, Deutsche Bank, RidgeWorth Investments, and most recently, Fosun Group. Young received his bachelor’s degree in Economics from Brown University.
Noah Golub
Engineering
Noah Golub
Engineering
Noah is part of the Platform team at Findora. He studied computer science at Stanford, concentrating in theory. Noah is excited about Findora’s mission to bring cryptographic transparency to financial services
Fernando Krell
Cryptography
Fernando Krell
Cryptography
Fernando is part of the Cryptography team at Findora. He got his PhD in Computer Science/Cryptography from Columbia University in 2015. Prior to Findora, Fernando was a R&D Engineer at Dreamlab Technologies. Fernando joined our team on January 2019.
Binyi Chen
Cryptography
Binyi Chen
Cryptography
Binyi Chen is part of the Zei Crypto team at Findora. He received his PhD from UCSB in 2019 where his advisors were Prof. Stefano Tessaro and Prof. Huijia Lin. Prior to joining Findora, he worked as a security engineer at Google. Before that, he had research experiences at University of Washington, VISA Research, Institut Henri Poincare, and Microsoft Research Asia. He has also won the Best Paper Award at EUROCRYPT 2017.
John D. Corbett
Engineering
John D. Corbett
Engineering
John D. Corbett leads the Engineering team at Findora. A seasoned inventor with patents in cryptography, tamper detection, functional safety, space applications, and user interface design, John loves solving problems and making new things. These days, John is dedicated to clearing the way for the engineers under his care to collaborate on great products and to have fun doing it.
Philippe Camacho
Engineering
Philippe Camacho
Engineering
Philippe is part of the Cryptography Engineering team at Findora. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Chile and got involved in the blockchain space since 2013. At this time, he co-founded a startup called comprabitcoin.com. He then worked on several ambitious projects, including a non-custodial cryptocurrencies exchange called L2X.
Nathan Yospe
Engineering
Nathan Yospe
Engineering
Nathan heads up the engineering team at Findora. He studied physics before transitioning into defense (Textron, Rocketdyne, Raytheon), then enterprise software, building high performance databases. He served as the platform architect for SAP’s Netweaver MDM suite. While he has spent time at bigger companies, most notably SAP and Google, he prefers working for a small, nimble company with exceptional engineers.
Jonathan Bertoni
Cryptography
Jonathan Bertoni
Cryptography
Jonathan is an experienced systems developer who works on Findora’s core platform. Before Findora, Jonathan was a senior systems engineer at Google, where he worked on DDoS prevention. He also holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where he conducted research on the performance analysis of I/O subsystems for multiprocessors.
Min-Si Wang
Product
Min-Si Wang
Product
Min-Si is a part of the product team at Findora. She has a mix of blockchain and financial services experiences as a director at AZA Finance (formerly known as BitPesa), as a management consultant with PwC’s M&A practice, and worked in financial product development with Temasek (Sovereign Wealth Fund of Singapore). Min-Si is a graduate of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and The Fletcher School, Tufts University.
Qi Li
Product
Qi Li
Product
Qi is part of the product team at Findora. He previously worked at Nebulas, a major blockchain company in China, and won a major Binance hackathon. He is a savvy DeFi and DAO product designer.
Zihan Liu
Business Development
Zihan Liu
Business Development
Zihan helps with expanding Findora’s ecosystem, ensuring Findora enterprise solution’s expansion goes smoothly in both the US and China region. Before Findora, Zihan worked at Citi Bank in Shanghai, China.
Lucca Spaapen
Marketing
Lucca Spaapen
Marketing
Lucca is part of the marketing team at Findora. Lucca studied history at the University of Amsterdam. He has been involved in numerous open-source privacy and cryptocurrency projects, most recently PIVX and Veil. He also worked as a project manager at Saulx, a software consultancy company based in the Netherlands. Lucca loves distilling highly technical information into easily digestible formats, and interacting with the community.
Cameron Dennis
Marketing
Cameron Dennis
Marketing
Cameron is part of the Community team at Findora. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, he worked as a blockchain analyst for a small venture capital firm before starting the Blockchain Acceleration Foundation (BAF). BAF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that accelerates the development and adoption of a user-owned internet by starting university-accredited blockchain courses and providing its members employment and research opportunities.
Mathew Richmond
Engineering
Mathew Richmond
Engineering
Mat is a part of the Engineering team at Findora. He studied Computer Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Before Findora, Mat worked various startups in New Mexico, including work in digital commodities, security infrastructure, and point-of-sale development.
Brian Rogoff
Engineering
Brian Rogoff
Engineering
Brian is a part of the Engineering team at Findora. He holds a BS in Mathematics from MIT and an MS in Scientific Computing at Stanford. He has worked in a wide range of fields, from VLSI physical design automation, backend software, distributed systems, and data science, at companies like Cadence, ARM, Facebook, Pure STorage, and a number of startups.
Joe Doyle
Engineering
Joe Doyle
Engineering
Joe is part of the Platform team at Findora. He studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and has worked on a wide range of software engineering topics, including formal verification, embedded systems benchmarking, high-performance computing, and machine learning. His second-favorite imperative programming language is Haskell.
Nathan McCarty
Engineering
Nathan McCarty
Engineering
Nathan is a part of the Platform team at Findora. He studied Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. Before Findora, Nathan developed his skills working for UK’s Research Computing lab, Kentucky’s Commonwealth Office of Technology, and VetData. Nathan is heavily involved in the Rust open-source community, and spends his free time working on Asuran, an experimental privacy focused, de-duplicating archiver.
Meng Liu
Design
Meng Liu
Design
Meng is a part of the design team at Findora. He studied Information Interaction Design at Nanjing University Of the Arts and received his bachelor’s degree in 2016. Since then, he worked as a designer in the famous Chinese Internet company NetEase, and later as the head designer of the Chinese blockchain company Nebulas. He specializes in brand experience design and user experience design.
Advisors
Dan Boneh
Dan Boneh
Stanford Applied Cryptography Group
Dan Boneh is a professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University. He leads Applied Cryptography Group at Stanford, and is the author of multiple breakthrough cryptography publications including BLS signatures.
Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji Srinivasan
Coinbase, Andreesen Horowitz
Balaji S. Srinivasan is currently angel investing and taking some time off. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he was also the cofounder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. He also received Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and was named to the MIT TR35.
Rosario Gennaro
Rosario Gennaro
zk-SNARKs, IBM, MIT
Dr. Gennaro received my Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, and was a researcher at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center before joining City College in the Summer of 2012. His research focuses on cryptography and network security and more in general on theoretical computer science. His most recent works address the security of the cloud computing infrastructure, the issues of privacy and anonymity in electronic communication, and proactive security to minimize the effects of system break-ins.
Will Cong
Will Cong
Tokenomics, FinTech@Cornell
Will Cong is the Rudd Family Professor of Management and Associate Professor of Finance at Cornell University. A founding scholar for the field of tokenomics and world renowned authority in FinTech and Business Data Science research, Cong leads the FinTech Initiative of the SC Johnson College of Business, serves as associate editor for Management Science and the Journal of Banking and Finance, and advises organizations such as the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance. He has also been invited to speak at leading conferences and international organizations such as the IMF, and was consulted during the incubation of Dfinity and for regulators’ lawsuits againt some of the largest ICO cases.
Jack Lee
Jack Lee
HCM Capital
Mr. Lee is the founding managing partner of HCM Capital. He received his education from UCLA Anderson School of Management and National Taiwan University. He is currently the board member of Cambridge Blockchain, Abra, Galaxy Digital, FnConn, and Chained Finance.
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