Legendary Angel investor has eye on the Pryze

Pryze an automated sweepstakes protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain, is the latest venture that serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor Gil Penchina has his eye on. Gil is the brains behind the the decentralized VC model Flight Ventures on Angelist. His latest mission co-founded with Peter Franklin is to decentralize and reduce the cost of running traditional sweepstakes and XPrize-style competitions. The goal of the Pryze protocol is to allow sweepstakes to be created and operated via a decentralized and secure system while automating most of the costs of sweepstakes operation and compliance via the protocol. For Any type of competition or election the protocol could allow decentralized and transparent voting. Pryze website describes them as simple, bold, fun and transparent. Pryze is using Blockchain technology to solve the problems of the sweepstakes industry.Contest such as the xprize can be community funded - the crowd can define and solve real world problems with Crypto prizes. The biggest pain points for this industry that Pryze will try and solve are the following: 1. A global business hampered by the costs and complexities of operation. 2. The required intermediaries, auditors, prize administrators, and legal counsel to meet regulations. 3. Difficulty for contest creators to establish trust. So how will Pryze solve these problems? The blockchain will allow them to be a better, faster and cheaper solution! So why is pryze qualified to handle this daunting task? The simple answer the team! Peter Franklin, CEO & Founder Peter attended Duke in 2010 where he obtained a masters in computational economics for his studies in mechanism design. After years spent developing underlying technology as a lead engineer at Microsoft and Zynga for projects ranging from Azure and Clusters to Farmville, he went on to founding 3 highly successful companies with world-class teams. A chance meeting with top angel Gil Penchina at a non-profit event lead the two to found Pryze. Peter Franklin is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for game theory. Gil Penchina, Co-Founder & Advisor Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor. He is a Managing Director at Ridge.vc, co-founder of Fastly, former CEO of Wikia, and was a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay. He is an active angel investor in 100+ companies over the last 18 years, including: PayPal, Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, Dollar Shave Club, LinkedIn, Indiegogo, Wealthfront, AngelList, and more. Gil has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg. Jason McGuirk, CTO Jason has shipped dozens of successful games, including managing the launch of Zynga’s largest titles. Jason rapidly rose to the role of distinguished engineer at Zynga and formerly started his own gaming company called JuiceBox Games.   Sherilynn Macale, Head of Marketing & PR Sherilynn “Cheri” Macale is a multiple award-winning full-stack digital marketer whose work leading teams both in-house and in-agency resulted in record breaking launches of companies such as SKULLY, ONAGOfly, Kanoa, JIBO, and more. Cheri is an entrepreneur who actively blends her passion for all things creative with her love for digital business strategy, resulting in emotionally moving multimedia campaigns that often go viral online or receive critical acclaim. Kelly Battista, Sr. Designer Kelly is a Senior Product Designer with 8 years of experience ranging from designing and shipping products for several personal startups to leading product design for the last two years with Infuse, a development firm. Kelly has worked on a variety of consumer and b2b products, including founding Zenboxx. Juan Muñoz, Sr. Engineer A former Cisco veteran working on IEEE 802.1X features, Juan is an experienced Software Engineer with a tremendous amount of network and web apps experience. Disclaimer this article does not constitute as investment advice or recommend any participating in any crowd sales or Initial coin offerings and is for informational purposes only. Disclosures The author may have a relationship with some of the people mentioned in this article