When evaluating any ICO project, there are a number of elements to understand in order to make a wise investment. In short, there are four basic parts to any protocol which include the concept, the team, the competition, and the publicity. In my last article I touched on the concept of FreeMartketToken, Ecryptostore, and the competition the project faces.
In this article, I’ll be taking a look at the founders of FMT. The process will be fairly straightforward; I’m going through the website and the whitepaper, finding out who’s responsible for what, then looking for previous accomplishments by team members to get a sense of their ability to execute a business plan successfully. Once the team has been studied, I’ll provide my opinion on what it all means and if the project’s success is more or less likely based on what I find today. Whether you come to a similar conclusion or find yourself in opposition, feel free to comment below and we can hash it out.
Co-Founders
We can see on the FMT website there are three co-founders: Nathan Burns, Austin Lewinsmith, and Rafael Bergola. The first thing I noticed when beginning my research is that not only does FMT provide a small description of each co-founder’s previous projects, they also provide a link to their LinkedIn profiles.
Working left to right, I can see Nathan Burns has listed his experience back into 2005, and that a bulk of this time was spent working as a Team Coordinator at ACN Telecommunications. ACN operates in 24 different countries selling residential and business telecommunications services. Nathan spent almost 12 years at ACN, showing dedication to growing and developing his team and company at large. It wasn’t until early 2017 that Nathan branched out to start his own projects, starting with School of Blockchain and Ecryptostore early in the year, then extending his efforts to include FreeMartketToken in September of 2017.
Moving onto Austin Lewinsmith and we can see that both Nathan and Austin have been teammates for quite some time, suggesting they work well together. Austin worked as a Regional Vice President for ACN for more than 14 years, and is currently “developing accredited blockchain courses” for School of Blockchain. Austin has spent the past decade and a half developing his leadership skills and mentoring others toward achieving financial independence. This includes presenting to over 100,000 people, developing businesses, and raising capital for projects in the blockchain space.
Rafael Bergola is the co-founde responsible for software development of FreeMartketToken. Looking into his previous experience,I’m immediately greeted with a software development and digital services company called Fligno, which has been in business for four years now, has offices in 6 locations and 60 full-time staff members. Rafael is the founder and CEO of Fligno. His LinkedIn profile shows more than a decade of experience in accounting and finance prior to starting his own company. Fligno offers a team dedicated to software quality testing and implementing AWS and Oracle databases. Rafael is also developing the School of Blockchain infrastructure and coursework with Nathan and Austin.
From my perspective, it looks like the co-founders took their time to develop business acumen in their respective fields for more than a decade before constructing their own businesses. In a short amount of time the team has created the working product that is Ecryptostore, which is somewhat uncommon in the budding cryptocurrency space.
The three co-founders have proven to work well together, each with similar skills and an emphasis in different fields. All three have experience in international business and blockchain technologies, with Nathan running the community, Austin specializing in leadership and presentations, and Rafael specializing in the technicalities of software development.
After taking time to assess the co-founders individually, I went digging through the official FMT telegram group and found a video of an interview that all three co-founders participated in, which can be found below. This helps connect names to faces while showing the demeanor of each individual and how they work together as a unit.
In the next article, I’ll explore the legal and development teams of FreeMartketToken and Ecryptostore to round out the team’s assessment. So far the founding members of FMT seem to have what it takes to create and implement a successful business in the blockchain space. In future articles, we’ll look at the project’s roadmap, how FMT will power Ecryptostore, and more! If anything you’ve read so far seems unclear, or you think I could’ve done a better job of explaining, feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll do my best to respond and provide more clarity.
Disclaimer: I earn FMT tokens to discuss with and educate others about FMT and Ecryptostore, and you can too! Anyone can join from now until August 15th. Let’s get the conversation started about buying and selling goods with crypto! Click here to join. Any quotations above cite the FMT website directly. This is not financial advice, and you should do your own research before participating in any sort of investment.
Links:
Bounty Thread
FMT Website
FMT Whitepaper
Ecryptostore
Author Account