Caisson
verifiable self-managed identities
Caisson is a developing a system that allows for individuals to take ownership of facts about their identity established by a third party, and share these facts in a verifiable way with interested parties. We're aiming to make identity attributes reusable without the need to go through the arduous process of being re-verified every time they are accessed. Instead, the individual themselves can be the porter of the key facts about themselves they need to transact, and the previously established integrity of these facts can be reverified and relied upon repeatedly.
The concept of a self-managed, proven identity is not new. However, the advent of distributed public ledgers (blockchains), and the accompanying storage and computing power possible on top of them, means that we now have a new and novel approach to the thorniest problems that have plagued past solutions - publication and discovery. Our use of the Ethereum blockchain will afford users an easy-to-access, tamper-proof, bias-free place to publish and retrieve the crucial components necessary for securely sharing information about themselves. With it, we're building an open and distributed infrastructure that will form the basis of verifiable self-managed identities.
Obsessed with computing since before the age of the internet, Derek has lived through every step of the digital revolution. After graduating from Boston University, Derek jumped straight into startups, helping to build a successful small B2B company creating an online reservation system. From there he helped establish the digital presence of many seminal organizations, including the EPA and Conde Nast. At Nytimes.com, Derek helped bring the Paper of Record to the forefront of New York's digital community. He then moved on to become the SVP of Product and Engineering at Tumblr, and was integral to Tumblr's purchase by Yahoo! for $1.1B. Aside from building Caisson, Derek also advises a variety of early and midstage startups across NYC.
Ken finished his master's in mathematics at UGA in 2004, and immediately moved to New York to join the burgeoning startup tech community. He's held positions of leadership at Nytimes.com, Etsy, and Tumblr, and most recently was CTO of Handy. He has repeatedly grown engineering teams from infancy to maturity, creating scalable organizations well into the hundreds of engineers. Along the way, he has also architected and implemented reliable systems of scale that were foundational to the successful growth of a variety of digital products including e-commerce marketplaces, media platforms, and social networks.
