Bill Barhydt is the Co-Founder & CEO of Boom Financial—offering mobile banking for the unbanked replacing cash services such as money transfer, check cashing, bill payment and payday loans with a federally insured, smartphone based, bank account. Boom provides honest, socially responsible financial services to those who need it.
Bill has worked in information technology for over 20 years and is a recognized thought leader in the field. Bill's passion is information technology and how it can be used to improve people's lives. Whether it's for mobile money, consumer banking, web browsers, education, cryptography, smart devices, robotics, or games Bill is a passionate believe in the power of information technology and the people behind it to make a big difference.
Bill is very active in the bitcoin community acting as an advisor to half a dozen companies in the space and has done extensive work in the areas of smart contracts, PKI/certificate authority design as well as key escrow, digital money and trading system design. He has also consulted to federal and international regulators on the impact of digital currencies and decentralized transaction systems.
In addition to a bunch of start–ups including m–Via, Sennari, Plaxo and KnowNow, Bill was an early employee of Netscape where he designed hosted systems for telecom companies and retail banks, worked for Goldman Sachs designing trading systems and was a research engineer for both NASA and the CIA.
You may not know:
- In Feb 2012, Bill gave the first ever TED talk on bitcoin. Bitcoin was trading at $4 and 90% of the audience didn't know what bitcoin was.
- In 2011, Bill helped form the International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IDEA) with the U.S. State Department and USAID to facilitate better relations within migrant communities across the US and their families "back home."
- Starting in 2003, Bill spent a year collaborating with some of the original cypherpunks on smart contracts technology. Some of this work was used at Sennari in designing their mobile wallet and digital currency system. Check out the "Colored Coin" project via google.
- In 2000, Bill received the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum for his work in online collaboration at WebSentric.
- In 1998, Bill started WebSentric which was the first online meeting service that required no software install beyond a basic web browser.
- In 1996, Bill helped design the first ever large scale web hosting business in Europe for their customers at Netscape. It was used by millions of people.
