Thursday, December 28, 2017
Reflections on 2017: Michael Terpin, Transform Group International
During the holiday season, our tradition over the last few years has been to post reflections on the past year and some predictions from Southern California's "movers and shakers" in the technology industry. This morning, we have a contribution from Michael Terpin, the CEO of Transform Group International and Chairman of BitAngels. Michael is a bit of an honorary Southern California, spending a large chunk of his time in Los Angeles (where he's built many of his companies) although he's now officially living in Puerto Rico. Michael is a huge early adopter and proponent of Bitcoin.
What was the big news for you or your company this year?
Our big news as a company was deciding to "transform" Transform Group itself - moving from the top PR firm in the blockchain world to a blockchain company that has a division that now has represented 31 percent of the entire market cap of the nearly $600 billion crypto landscape (excluding bitcoin). With this in mind, we expanded our CoinAgenda blockchain investor conferences (including our first full CoinAgenda during CES week, including an ICO mastermind at the former Mike Tyson mansion from the Hangover movie and a 1000-person conference at Caesars), and we began an advisory and management consulting group, headed up by our latest hire, former managing director of strategy for NASDAQ, Enzo Villani.
What was the biggest personal lesson you learned from 2017?
Biggest personal lesson was to stay steadfast in your beliefs, even when the world thinks you're crazy. I've been telling people to buy bitcoin when it was $200, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 (and continuing to take it for our services) and it's kept growing in value.
What are you looking forward to most in 2018?
Aside from $50,000 bitcoin? I'm looking forward to opening up new markets, including the expansion of family offices and other traditional investors to the amazing asset class that cryptocurrency has become. I'm also looking forward to traveling the world speaking at other conferences and to the publishing of my weekly podcast, Crypto Leaders, and video series by Agora Financial, the largest financial newsletter publisher in the nation.
Are there any technology innovations, gadgets, devices, software, that particularly caught your eye in 2017?
CryptoKitties! And you can now buy them with WAX tokens, where I'm an advisor and they raised $80 million (also based in Santa Monica).
Finally, what is your prediction for what will have the biggest impact on the technology industry in 2018?
I presume there will be continued growth in the blockchain and the first handful of "must have" reasons to own crypto (other than fabulous returns as an investor). Just as email kicked off the reasons to online, followed by websites and instant messenger, adoption went global with Google, Amazon and Facebook. 2018 will find its first "killer apps" - probably involving travel, loyalty, energy, corporate payments, jobs, search or some other application used by nearly everyone and made far more efficient by an easy to use blockchain.
Michael Terpin is founder and CEO of Transform Group International (www.transform.pr), whose divisions include Transform PR, a global public relations firm that has served more than 200 clients in the blockchain field and helped launch 65 ICO’s, including Augur, Ethereum, Gnosis, Qtum and WAX; CoinAgenda, an event series for cryptocurrency investors, and Transform Strategies, the company's advisory division. Transform Group is headquartered in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with offices in Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Denver, Toronto, Paris, and Cape Town.
Terpin also co-founded BitAngels (www.bitangels.co), the world’s first angel network for digital currency startups, in May, 2013, and he is co-founder of Aspire, a new asset creation blockchain platform scheduled to do its token generation event in 2018. Previously, Terpin founded Marketwired, one of the world's largest company newswires, which was acquired in 2006 and later sold to NASDAQ for $200 million. He also co-founded Direct IPO, one of the earliest equity crowdfunding companies, and founded and sold his first PR firm, The Terpin Group.
Terpin holds an MFA from SUNY at Buffalo and dual BA in journalism and English from Syracuse University, where he serves on the board of advisors at the top-ranked Newhouse School. Terpin is also an investor and advisor to many blockchain, media and technology companies, including CommPro, GoCoin, Polymath, Purse.io, ShapeShift, Videocoin and WAX.