Max Skibinsky
Max Skibinsky is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup mentor. Most recently, Max was an investment partner with Andreessen Horowitz, where he focused on enterprise security and bitcoin and deals with Tanium, TradeBlock, and Digital Ocean. In addition to co-founding Vault12, Max leads the R&D team. Before that Max was the founder and CEO of Hive7, a social entertainment company that became part of The Walt Disney Company. In 2003, Max joined the newly formed Voltage Security, an encryption startup incubated at Stanford University, where he architected and designed an Identity-Based Encryption messaging system that was showcased at DEMO '04. Voltage was acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2015. Max has also advised and invested in many startups graduating from Y Combinator including Eligible, Transcriptic, and ZenPayroll. Max graduated with a masters' degree in theoretical and mathematical physics from Moscow State University.
Blake Commagere
Blake is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and advisor to several companies in the SF Bay Area. He has started seven companies and sold five of them. He regularly gives talks on subjects including Growth Hacking, Fundraising, and Psychology Management.
He created the social gaming category by building some of the biggest apps ever (over 50 Million players) on Facebook, including the iconic games Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves. Blake also wrote and designed the first version of Causes on Facebook, which has over 120 Million users and has raised over $100 million for various charities. Blake graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rice University.
Wasim Ahmad
Wasim Ahmad has spent decades at the exact point where deep, difficult technology meets everyday people.
It started early. As a schoolboy in Britain in the 1970s, he was among the first children to learn Prolog, the artificial intelligence language. He went on to the University of Sussex to study Mathematical Physics, then switched to Physics and French so he could spend a year in Paris — an early sign of a career that would keep crossing between the technical and the human. After university, he was an astronaut candidate with the Juno Project, but was too young to be allowed into space.
In the 1990s he joined Synon, the British startup whose software-based code generation won the Queen’s Award for Technology, moving with the company to Marin County, California.
As a founding member of Voltage Security, a Stanford University spinout, he launched the first commercial email encryption built on Identity-Based Encryption — the first genuine breakthrough in public-key cryptography in thirty years — working alongside some of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, including Stanford’s Dan Boneh. When catastrophic breaches hit the payments industry, he helped launch end-to-end protection for the world’s payment systems using format-preserving encryption.
His crypto journey began with AlphaPoint, working with the founding team that launched some of the world’s first cryptocurrency trading exchanges. He then joined Vault12, the pioneer of crypto inheritance, where the mathematics of Adi Shamir’s Secret Sharing — became a product that lets people pass their digital assets safely to the ones they love.
Most recently, he has been lobbying hard in both the United States and the United Kingdom — engaging with the SEC, CFTC and the FCA — to evolve the laws and regulations governing crypto, so that everyday people can access these technologies safely and confidently.
He is now the author of a book on everyday cryptography: "Who holds the key?", an everyday guide to cryptography, passwords, crypto wallets, and navigating the technology that protects your privacy in the modern world.
The pattern across all of it is the same one that drives his book: taking complex technology and formidable algorithms, and shaping them into solutions that ordinary people can trust, understand, and use.
Wasim served on the board of non-profit, StartOut, and is a Seedcamp and WeWork Labs global mentor.
Wasim graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and French from the University of Sussex.
Vault12
Vault12 is the pioneer in crypto inheritance and backup. The company was founded in 2015 to provide a way to enable everyday crypto customers to add a legacy contact to their cry[to wallets. The Vault12 Guard solution is blockchain-independent, runs on any mobile device with biometric security, and is available in Apple and Google app stores.
Vault12 is NOT a financial institution, cryptocurrency exchange, or custodian. We do NOT hold, transfer, manage, or have access to any user funds, tokens, cryptocurrencies, or digital assets. Vault12 is exclusively a non-custodial information security and backup tool that helps users securely store their own wallet seed phrases and private keys for the purpose of inheritance. We provide no legal or financial services, asset management, transaction capabilities, or investment advice. Users maintain complete control of their assets at all times.
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