My Story.
I grew up in Miami Beach and have spent most of my life there (I am a rare breed, a third-generation Miamian). I'm the middle child and one of three brothers. In high school, I played a lot of basketball and was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper.
By the end of high school, I was left feeling uninspired. I hoped college would be something new and exciting, but quickly realized it was mostly more of the same. I almost dropped out, but decided to focus on what did inspire me.
After my freshman year of college, I remembered buying my first bitcoin in 2018 and realized I had mostly forgotten about it. I started learning more about crypto and decentralization and realized this was where I wanted to focus my time and energy.
Meanwhile, I was working full time at a startup through most of college, where I first learned to sell. I was excited about our growth, but not what we were building, so I left after my junior year.
Against everyone's advice, I was hellbent on working in crypto full time. The market was bad and I had no real experience (or a degree yet). I think I applied to over 300 jobs. After about 7 months, I almost gave up.
The last job I applied for was at a startup called Galxe, working on decentralized identity and onchain credentials. I was hooked and joined with a few months left before graduation. Ten days after I joined, the FTX collapse was announced, and the skepticism I faced from family and friends was massive (lol).
Luckily, we persevered and went on to grow massively. Over the course of ~3 years, I became Head of Growth, leading the team I once joined.
Towards the end of my time there, we struggled with bots and keeping participation on the platform authentic. We tried everything: building our own suite of identity tools (zk protocol, zk KYC, humanity score) and trying third-party solutions. Nothing quite worked the way we wanted it to, and I realized this was a growing issue. Not for Galxe, not for crypto or tech, but for the world.
It became pretty obvious that without a scalable way to verify human participation online, we were heading down a bleak path. Just before my three-year anniversary, I left in search of a new way to solve this problem.
A few months later, Very was born.