It’s been an amazing journey getting to this moment. Before I take you for a ride in the wayback machine and share all that has gone into getting to this point I want to let you know that we appreciate you coming and learning more about BDB. Thank you for taking the time to learn about what we are doing. The blockchain community is very important to us. Don’t hesitate to challenge us or ask questions or send us praise. We accept it all!
The best place to start is around six years ago when myself, Brett Singer, and Simeon Schnapper were playing around with another business idea and building a site for it. At the time Bitcoin was not well known and trading in the $6 range. We were looking at how people could pay on our site using Bitcoin, but ultimately decided to scrap the idea and to sell our Bitcoin when it reached $9. I mean that’s a 50% profit, right? That business idea never took off but it was a fun adventure working on it and I know I certainly learned a lot. Yes, we do occasionally discuss what could have been with all that BTC but the past is just that, so why spend time worrying about what could have been?
Fast forward to early 2016. I had been following BTC a bit but not heavy into the blockchain space and then I started reading about Ethereum and I was hooked. You can add business logic into the blockchain with a smart contract! You can create your own token on the Ethereum network! The more I read, the more I loved the concepts and believed in the overall vision. I started to buy Ethereum. At that time the price moved up and down a bit but stayed in a pretty tight range. I told other people to buy ETH but most looked at me like I was nuts. I was really on my own learning and investing in crypto. Branching out to other coins and making all the typical mistakes an early crypto investor makes. You look around today and there are so many groups and chats and telegram and all that but very little was around back then. I learned more and more about the space and how this technology would truly transform the world. I also grew to understand that I needed to be more than just an investor. I needed to be a part of the revolution.
To best understand how the idea for BDB was born I need to share a bit about myself. You can see my career detail on LinkedIn but I will give you a bit of it here. I have been into technology ever since I was child. I actually went to computer camp as a kid so yeah I am a geek. I say that with great pride. I love being involved with technology. It’s always interesting and never stagnant plus I get to interact with smart people all the time. My career has been varied working in both small and large companies, startups to larger financial organizations. I have built a bunch of software and managed teams of over 100 people. My preference has always been to use open source software. I have also been dealing with large scale data problems for years. The data technology landscape has continued to evolve with technologies like MapReduce and the creation of Hadoop. Data is arguably the greatest asset out there right now and everyone is trying to understand how to process and use it to gain insights. This interest in big data and blockchain is how BDB was born.
In the summer of 2017 I started to think about what I could build on the blockchain. I wanted to build something that provided real business value in an area I was passionate about. That’s when it hit me. Why not create an intersection between big data and the blockchain? The big data space is amazing but it’s also not accessible to everyone. The barrier to entry is somewhat high as you need real technology experience to build solutions like this. The cloud has certainly made things easier but even then you need internal or consulting expertise to get those environments built and to maintain them. You then need expertise to operate Hadoop or other like-system to manage the end to end data processing. If you don’t have the money to hire consultants or internal staff you aren’t doing any of this. The vision was to change this paradigm using the blockchain. What if I could build a system that was distributed and run by people all over the world and the fee for using the system was per use only? This would change the entire big data landscape. No longer would there be any large upfront cost. Anyone could use the system no matter what size dataset they had. We could keep cost for consumers very low while providing the data processors a nice fee for running the system.
I started to share this idea with a very close inner circle and at the end of September 2017 I found myself in the right position to strike out on my own to make BDB a reality. This was a big step. I have a family and bills to pay but I knew this was right for me, and so the beginnings of BDB started to really take shape. I started to recruit others to the company from my inner circle and that’s how the rest of the founders joined. The core team we have is amazing and extremely dedicated to making this a giant success.
I want to thank everyone who comes here and spends time learning about us. I hope you communicate with us via telegram or FB or email. We are here to answer any questions you may have.
There are a number of challenges we will have to deal with in getting all this built. I am very confident we have the core team to do it. As a final thought I will leave you with this. What if we really do build the largest open big data platform the world has ever seen that’s essentially infinitely scalable? This has the potential to be revolutionary on a scale few systems have ever seen.
Jason Cohen
CEO
