History is littered with creators who believe that they have a game-changing vision, but fail to create a game-changing effect. While the romantic notion persists of the ‘misunderstood’ and ‘aloof’ genius, a mature understanding of someone’s ability to identify and create trends should also take into account their ability to facilitate the adoption of these trends. Creators who correctly identify trends and apply entrepreneurial savvy are the ones who change the world in their lifetimes.
Meet Andrew Masanto, a 40-year-old serial entrepreneur and modern-day polymath, who has, despite being low-key on social media and in the press, managed to launch several billion dollar companies by commercializing powerful yet relatively unknown technologies. What is both remarkable and different about Masanto is how his success is spread across various industries. While he has founded several Web3 tech unicorns, he had a previous life as one of the top internet marketers, started America’s fastest growing animal health company (Pet Lab Co) with his brother, worked as a lawyer with the magic circle UK law firm Linklaters, created a global art movement called ANONA, taught finance at the University of Sydney, and started one of New York’s largest biohacking groups.
Mix of experiences
How does this unusually diverse experience marry Masanto’s ability to spot and capitalize on game-changing technology trends? Masanto credits his ability to handle new industries and face new challenges to his diverse life experiences, “Since I was young, I found myself deeply curious about topics and technologies which were either just emerging, fringe or not fully understood yet. Applying rigorous thought and action to these ideas resulted in exposure to unique situations. That experience seems to have put me in an ideal mental space for assessing and eventually commercializing promising technologies.”
While an early curiosity in Web3 allowed Masanto to develop a unique understanding of the crypto industry, Masanto credits his ability to capitalize on his vision to his previous business experiences. Masanto states, “When it comes to founding Web3 companies, I had to draw on my previous diverse experience in law, marketing, finance and entrepreneurship. This wasn’t by design; it occurred mostly by following my own curiosity over the course of my life to become proficient at multiple disciplines.” This mix of experiences was fruitful for Masanto; he went on to start and commercialize two of the top 100 Web3 protocols/technologies, Hedera Hashgraph and Reserve, before embarking upon co-founding two further Web3 companies, which he is currently building, NFT.com and Nillion.
How to Build a Crypto Unicorn
Masanto’s first foray into creating a cryptocurrency was starting Hedera Hashgraph. Hedera Hashgraph is the only public distributed ledger based on the Hashgraph algorithm. Despite being an alternative to blockchain, the Hashgraph algorithm was invented in 2013 and had little interest from the general public until Masanto commercialized and popularized it by starting the protocol Hedera Hashgraph in 2017. Within a year of Masanto starting Hedera, the hype around the project was palpable; the community exploded to tens of thousands of people and the company raised $100MM at a $6B valuation.
It has since become the most energy-efficient distributed ledger technology. Masanto largely credits the success of Hedera to the founding team he managed to recruit to work on Hedera, including Alex Godwin, Jordan Fried, Paul Bugeja, Kyle Armour, Tom Trowbridge and Alec Otto. In recognition of his achievement with Hedera, Masanto was invited to lecture on How to Build a Crypto Unicorn at Columbia University, to discuss how he has taken unknown, tractionless, technologies and morphed them into tech unicorns. In the case of Hedera, Masanto’s involvement eventually led to the creation of one of the world’s top 30 cryptocurrencies.
After Hedera, Masanto started Reserve, which aims to utilize Web3 technology to tackle hyperinflation. Masanto was Reserve’s Founding CMO, and worked alongside Nevin Freeman, Reserve’s CEO, to launch the protocol. Speaking further to Masanto's ability to recognize high-potential trends and technologies, Reserve has now emerged as one of the most popular fintech apps in Argentina and Venezuela with transactions totaling $3.7B, or $976MM and $300MM a month in 2022. Thanks in part to Masanto’s marketing, team and community-building efforts, the project gained enough traction to earn investment from top VCs such as Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Coinbase. Masanto remains active in the space and co-authored an industry-leading stablecoin report in 2019, entitled “The State of Stablecoins”.
Inspire people to rally behind new technologies and ideas
Critics could ask a legitimate question: how does Masanto pioneer so many projects that push new trends forward and inspire the public to take interest in new technologies? Simply put, Masanto is unusually curious, has very little tolerance for BS, and is laser-focused on his mission to push new technologies that have the potential to impact humanity forward. He approaches interests sequentially, not in parallel (i.e. he indulges in total immersion and almost never focuses on more than one thing at once, preferring instead to have supreme focus on one project at a time).
Moreover, a throughline that is consistent in all of his innovative ventures is Masanto's ability to not only find trends and create valuable businesses around them, but to evangelize passionate people around these projects, whether that be in the form of an incredible team or passionate community. “He has a great ability to inspire people to rally behind new technologies and ideas”, states friend and colleague, Slava Rubin, the Founder of Indiegogo, and current General Partner of Humbition VC Fund.
As new trends emerge, Masanto hopes to continue to build, invest and support the forefront of emerging technology. He believes that his next billion-dollar initiatives will come from frontier industries such as AI, climate technology, augmented reality or in his words, “hopefully, from technologies or ideas that people haven’t even thought about yet, but which I become immediately curious about upon hearing about them. That is where the future is.”
