Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S4 E19: Daniel Gallancy, Atakama

May 11, 2021

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Daniel Gallancy is a husband and father to an 18 month old son. He studied electrical engineering and physics in school, but ended up working in finance, doing diligence on tech companies for an investment fund. In 2011, he discovered bitcoin and became enamored with the concept. At that time, he bought 1 whole bitcoin for $4 dollars. Looking back, he obviously wishes he would have bought more. We got into an interesting conversation about ICO's - initial coin offerings - and tokens in general, around how companies drive up the value of said tokens through usage, rather than business profit. In his words, he saw the ICO world as a regulatory arbitrage, which didn't make for a good investment, but did make an interesting story.

In 2013, he decided to leave the hedge fund world - IE his nice cushy job - and pursue something in the crypto world. Ultimately, he realized that some of the more interesting concepts being used in crypto - specifically, distributed key management - could be used in solutions outside of the block chain world. In a discussion with his co-founder, they figured out that solutions like this didn't exist, and that they wanted to build it.

This is the creation story of Atakama.