I'm Joining UTU Full Time!

I've been consulting for UTU for about seven months now, but I am excited to announce that I'll be joining the team full-time as Chief Commercial Officer!

UTU’s mission is to become the trust infrastructure of the entire internet, replacing anonymous star ratings, reviews, and scores as the de facto trust mechanisms of our digital lives. We're pioneering new models of online trust to make the internet a safer, more trustworthy place to work and transact.

I've been a startup founder and independent consultant for nearly a decade, and this will be my first full-time job since 2012. While it'll be an interesting transition to full-time employee, I couldn't be more excited.

Here's why.

UTU's vision is massive

If you think about it, trust is involved in nearly every decision that we make. Trust impacts our choices of what products to buy, which handyman to help fix our home, which babysitter to watch our kids, and so much more.

The way we typically make these decisions in the real world is that we ask our family, friends, and neighbors - people we trust - which service providers or products they would recommend.

Now think about how we make these choices online. We are forced to trust based on ratings and reviews, many of which can be fake. And the concept of recommendations from people and connections we trust doesn't really exist at all online.

At UTU, we are building systems that leverage this real-world trust system to increase trust across the entire internet, for every industry where risk is prevalent and trust is paramount. This can include but is not limited to finance, peer-to-peer services, eCommerce, and so many more.

We're doing so in a really unique way - leveraging artificial intelligence and blockchain to incentivize trustworthy behavior and punish untrustworthy acts.

We are solving a massive problem that cuts across almost every industry.

If that's not a huge vision, I don't know what is.

The challenge is also huge, and I'm ready for it

With a massive vision comes a big challenge. And I'm always up for a challenge.

First of all, trust is a bit of a nebulous concept. Sure, we all know that we trust certain people, companies, or apps, but we can't always clearly define why we trust who we trust. There's no standard way to define this, but we believe we've cracked the code of bringing real-world, relationship-based trust online.

Another challenge the fact that we have many different audiences to address.

We have products like our Trust Engine that businesses can incorporate into their applications to provide their users with personalized, contextual recommendations for products and services. We are also building many products, like our Fintech API that provides better analysis of creditworthiness, the DeFi Portal, MPESA parser, and many more, all of which have different value propositions.

Being a crypto company, we also need to cater to our investors, whether institutional or retail, who have purchased our token or provided equity investment into our company. We need to continuously communicate our progress, ensure our token is accessible and liquid enough, and work to increase its value.

Finally, we have the end users of the UTU protocol who are providing accurate ratings and reviews. We need to be able to communicate how our protocol works, why it's worth using, and what they get out of it.

And all of these businesses, users, investors and other community members are spread across the world, speaking many different languages and coming from very different cultures.

Lots to say to lots of different people, and increasing trust across the entire internet is going to be a long journey.

Regardless, I'm ready for and excited about these challenges.

Perfect fit for my skill set

As Chief Commercial Officer, I'm responsible for Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and crypto growth initiatives, with input on Product, Operations, and many other aspects of the business.

This is a really broad role that will be challenging but fits my skill set perfectly.

There will be times where I'll be selling our products to business customers, communicating with our B2C end users and investors, digging through website analytics, helping to design marketing collateral, or working on improving our products - and all of this can happen on any given day. I love doing a mix of engaging, selling, analyzing, designing, and more.

It's very similar to my past roles as startup founder, where you're involved in pretty much every aspect of the business.

And even though I'm not an UTU Co-Founder, I am going to dedicate myself as if I was.

The team is amazing

It's been great to work with the UTU team over the last seven months.

Co-Founders CEO Jason and CTO Bastian have great approaches to building the company and technology, and we work really well together.

And we've recently hired more rockstars in key roles, and whom I already jive with off the bat.

Another great aspect is how supportive and dedicated our board members and advisors have been.

These are titans of industry - successful investors with billions of assets under management; founders who have started, grown, and sold companies; and others who have achieved great wealth and influence - and they'll immediately make themselves available when we need them. Pretty amazing.

Conclusion

It's going to be invigorating, challenging, stressful rewarding, you name it. I'm really excited for my role in helping increase trust across the entire internet, and can't wait to achieve this lofty mission!

P.S. I've been also working with Meter, another company in the crypto space, as their CMO. I'm stepping back there but will stay on as a Marketing Advisor. Check them out, they are doing big things as well!