Just Go Grind #187: Jack O'Holleran, Co-Founder & CEO of SKALE Labs, a Blockchain Scalability Platform, on Building a Talented Team, Managing Growth, Fundraising, and Creating a User-Owned Economy
Jack O'Holleran, Co-Founder and CEO of SKALE Labs, is a technology entrepreneur focused on blockchain and decentralized systems.
SKALE is solving the blockchain scalability problem by facilitating processing between blockchains and decentralized applications, helping the ecosystem run hundreds of millions of smart contracts and transactions per second.
Jack also maintains a strategic advisor role at Aktana which he co-founded in 2008. Aktana is the leading SaaS sales and marketing analytics platform for global life science companies.
About Our Partners
This episode is brought to you by Hawke Media. Hawke Media is a full-service Outsourced CMO based in Santa Monica, CA, providing guidance, planning, and execution to grow brands of all sizes, industries, and business models.
Hawke Media was recognized by Inc. as the country's fastest-growing marketing consultancy and is proudly one of Glassdoor's "Best Places to Work", 2019 #893 on the Forbes 5000 list, UpCity Top Los Angeles Digital Marketing Agency. Hawke’s collaborative process, à la carte offering, and month-to-month fee structure give clients the flexibility they need to boost digital revenues and marketing ROI.
Hawke Media The company has serviced over 1500 brands of all sizes, ranging from startups like Tamara Mellon, SiO Beauty and Bottlekeeper to household names like Red Bull, Verizon Wireless and Alibaba.
Listen to our interview with Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO of Hawke Media, in episode 23 of the Just Go Grind Podcast.
This episode is also brought to you by Toptal. Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. Top companies hire Toptal freelancers for their most important projects.
Connect with Jack O'Holleran
Some of the Topics Covered by Jack O'Holleran in this Episode
- What Skale Labs is and how Jack decided to start it
- The idea of a user-owned economy
- What drew Jack into the world of cryptocurrency
- How Jack grew his team and brought his CTO on board
- Raising a $10M financing round and how Jack learned not to grow too fast
- The business model behind SKALE as a user-owned network
- What the SKALE token is and how it works
- The challenges in making the vision for SKALE Labs a reality
- Bringing on a number of math-focused engineers from Ukrain
- The differences in growth from Aktana and what Jack is doing at SKALE Labs
- Jack's advice for other entrepreneurs on fundraising
- Using investors as a barometer for your company
- Equity splits and how Jack thinks about them
- How Jack manages the short term and long term within SKALE Labs
- What led Jack to leave his company, Aktana, and start something new
- The difficulty in leaving a company you originally started
- Jack's book suggestions
Links from the Episode