Juan Otero is a serial tech entrepreneur & innovation advocate with over 15 years experience in building, scaling and leading disruptive technology companies.
After beginning his career at Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle for $7.4B), Juan joined the Project Management Team at Booking.com, the world’s largest and fastest growing online hotel booking service.
Juan’s experience in tech start-ups has led to his involvement as a Consultant and Advisor in several leading start-ups, blockchain projects, government organizations and start-up accelerators like Silicon Valley’s Founder Institute, Wayra Start-up Accelerator, the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) and the European Commission in Brussels.
Currently CEO at Ultimo, leading events company. Previously, Juan was the Founder & CEO of Restalo, Southern Europe’s leading online restaurant reservation service — named by Wired Magazine as one of Europe’s fastest growing digital companies. Juan completed the transition of the start-up from idea stage to a company with over 100 employees and yearly revenues in excess of €20M — successfully sold to The Michelin Group
Have you ever suffered from scams in your life?
Yes, unfortunately in several occasions — like many of us — and more recently during the Experty ICO where all my personal details were compromised by a phishing scam. Luckily, I didn’t lose any funds but the scammers stole over $150,000 in Ethereum from several people that participated in the ICO.
What inspired you to team up with CryptoPolice?
There are 3 main reasons to explain my attraction to CryptoPolice.
Product/market fit
Security is arguably one of the biggest issues online and particularly in the crypto space nowadays, with an alarming number of scams and frauds being detected every single day so there is no question regarding CryptoPolice’s product/market fit. The demand is there!
Also, I’m particularly attracted by their AntiVirus-like WatchDog notification product. When you can see yourself and everyone else you know using a particular product — that tells you something!
Team
I’m a firm believer of “investing in people, not companies” and, as soon as I read their White Paper and I had the first meeting with the team, I knew that their skills, their passion for the project and their vision to make the crypto world a safer place for everyone was unique!
Tech/innovation
I’ve seen many other projects trying to apply blockchain technology to their operations but not many can do it in such an innovative way as CryptoPolice with their pioneering community-based cryptocurrency police platform on blockchain technology.
What is the role of community in the fight against scams and fraud?
There is no doubt that the power of CryptoPolice lies in the community, which is given the opportunity to participate in the global fight against scams and be rewarded for it. The Community will always be a decentralized force that will make objective and independent decisions. CryptoPolice is combining breakthrough technologies with the “wisdom of the crowd” to guarantee transparency, efficiency and consistency — and that’s something that no other centralized platform could ever offer.
To make their data even more reliable CryptoPolice has developed a multi-level decentralised algorithm of data verification. This is in my opinion one of the key technology applications in the CryptoPolice project by offering unparalleled accuracy in their investigations and verdicts, which obviously drastically minimizes the risk of wrong decisions.
What are your thoughts on the future of online security and evolution of scams?
No doubt that the IoT has been reshaping the future of online security. With more and more people online every day the vulnerabilities/scams will keep increasing at an even faster pace. In my opinion, the fact that every interaction we do online relies on some “trusted” centralized party, and we are putting our trust in someone else to be reliable and trustworthy is just not feasible long-term! This is one of the areas where blockchain technology presents numerous possibilities in relation to the future of online security. Blockchain offers a key opportunity to establish a trustless system with secured distributed data sharing and a way to coordinate the power of the people/community. Blockchain will pay a major role in the future of online security and the global fight against scams.
How visionary is CryptoPolice project in your opinion?
I’ve been involved in the tech start-up ecosystem for over 15 years now. During this time, I’ve seen many innovative projects with amazing teams, clear strategies and great execution plans. However, the vision of the CryptoPolice project to create a truly global leader in the online security space by providing state-of-the-art solutions to fight against online fraud and scams is unprecedented in my opinion.