Blockchain has captured the imagination of (dreamers & builders), (engineers & businessmen), and (entrepreneurs & investors). Yet much of the discussion around Blockchain's potential remains abstract. Too much of focus is on the speculation of token sales and crypto-exchanges. For clarity - we will NOT be discussing those topics.

Our goal is to move beyond the theoretical to the practical. We want to discuss real-world applications for real problems for real people.

Like millions of technologists and entrepreneurs, it is critically important to embrace Blockchain technology not just about disintermediating the middlemen (displacing jobs) or automating manual processes. While true, Blockchain will disrupt outdated industries, it has so much more to offer. Blockchain can help reduce cost, remove the mundane and repetitive tasks, eliminating duplicate effort. I think it is more exciting to create new economic opportunity, improve supply & demand efficiency, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

The promise of blockchain is that by eliminating intermediaries and enabling global commerce, individuals in every country are financially empowered.

Zi, Yvonne, Michael, Aaron & Hoi are serial entrepreneurs from Google, Stanford, & Carnegie Mellon working on blockchain & AI companies in Silicon Valley.

Their companies will empower people to own homes, become fund managers & find great blockchain projects.

Zi co-founded Third Planet, a blockchaincompany that focus on the future of residentialhomes. Our business is to create & protectvalues for the global real estate ecosystem:developers, investors and owners. We are on amission to create new sales channels fordevelopers, increase investor liquidity, and mostimportantly, we want to help millions of residentsto have a better home and a better way of living.

Since 2006, Zi worked at Google as an engineer,PMM & PM. He was the first global creativedirector for the Android and co-founded GoogleACME Lab. In 2015, Zi led a ventured backedstartup to work with Corning, Google, and Toyotato develop next-generation AI products. 

Aaron is the founder of Qokka.ai. He was an engineer in machine learning at the Google Research (on core ML systems), NICTA (Australia's national lab, now part of CSIRO), and a lead engineer in the founding team at Scaled Inference, an AI startup backed by Vinod Khosla, David Wallerstein, and Michael Jordan.

He won multiple awards, including the prestigious ACM SIGKDD 2014 Best Research Paper Award on language topic modeling while completing his M.S. in Language Technologies (Computer Science) at the Carnegie Mellon University, an area he has been working on since before he finished his B.S. at Australian National University with quadruple majors in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. A Beijing native and New Zealand citizen, Aaron was granted "Einstein green card (EB-1A)" in the US to create fundamental, disruptive technologies for humans. He started mining Bitcoin since 2011.

Yvonne will be the Host at our event. She is the founding engineer at CoinAlpha. She is a full-stack engineer who develops decentralized applications on Ethereum blockchain. Her work combines technology and creativity – she loves creating applications that tell coherent, compelling stories. With a problem-solving mindset, she wants to use technology to showcase the immense possibilities and diverse experiences of our world, and bring people closer with empathy and understanding.