Dan Elitzer is co-founder at Nascent. Previously, Dan co-founded IDEO CoLab Ventures, a crypto-focused venture firm associated with the renowned design agency, IDEO. During that time, he also helped launch YAM Finance. Dan began his career in social enterprise and microfinance, working with both domestic social impact organizations and international development agencies. Dan earned an MBA from MIT Sloan, where he co-founded the MIT Bitcoin Club and MIT FinTech Club, and a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Pomona College.

Josh Felker is co-founder at Nascent. Previously, Josh was founder of Montreal-based proprietary trading firm Vigilant Global, a leader in latency-sensitive and technology-driven trading which was acquired by DRW Trading in 2012. Josh served as a partner at DRW for 5 years where he helped to oversee a highly diversified global trading firm spanning liquidity provision operations, risking-taking/directional trading, venture investing, and cryptocurrency trading. Josh has a bachelor’s degree in genetics from Western University and is a father of four.

Theresa Regenstreif leads Finance, Operations, and People at Nascent. Previously, Theresa was Head of Finance at an early stage Fintech company that was acquired, with a VC who built and invested in early stage consumer facing Fintech companies, and worked with an impact investor seeding early stage agribusinesses in sub-Saharan Africa. Theresa holds a graduate degree in Accountancy from John Molson School of Business, Concordia University.

Brock Elmore is Lead Architect at Nascent, designing technology and advising portfolio companies. Previously, Brock helped launch YAM Finance, consulted on smart contract engineering, and built Ethereum-focused trading and liquidation systems. Brock has a background in machine learning, smart contract engineering, and finance. Brock attended UPenn’s Wharton Undergrad before dropping out to go full time to start a small crypto-focused fund.

Matt Klein is a Portfolio Strategist at Nascent focused on optimizing the liquid portfolio, trading, and early-stage venture. Previously, Matt was a trader at Citi on the FX Options and Equity Derivatives desk, providing liquidity to institutional customers in the full spectrum of vanilla and exotic products. His interest in crypto began as a DeFI user who was mesmerized by the possibilities for a programmable and open-source financial system. Matt graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.

Chris Novick is a Principal Engineer at Nascent, working to design and implement our technology. Chris's professional background spans a wide range of experience from working to help solve long-term spaceflight challenges at NASA Glenn Research Center, to helping Disney create a new generation of media software running on millions of embedded devices around the world. Chris's journey in crypto started in the early days of Bitcoin as a hobby interest, then more seriously with smart contracts after recognizing the magnitude of the disruption on the financial industry and others. Since then, Chris has spent untold hours reading, building, and investing in all things DeFi. Chris graduated from the University of Toledo with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Hedeer El Showk is Data Engineering Lead at Nascent, designing and building our data and systems architecture. He has over a decade of experience as a risk manager and quantitative developer with large alternative asset managers. Hedeer co-founded Lore Ai, an NLP startup serving enterprise scale asset managers and other institutional clients. Most recently, as a director of AI engineering, he led a team at IQVIA building a platform for large-scale healthcare data analytics. Hedeer has an MSc in Mathematics in Finance from NYU and a BSc in Computer Science from George Mason University.

Peter Shoemaker is a Venture Analyst at Nascent focused on growing and supporting our early-stage venture portfolio. Previously, Peter was a Researcher at Polychain Capital, a blockchain-focused investment fund, and started his career as a biotech-focused Research Associate at RS Investments, a long-only, public equities fund. He started to tumble down the crypto rabbithole when he realized Uniswap enabled anyone with an internet connection to have 24/7 access to institutional grade financial infrastructure, all governed by code. Peter graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics.

Elle is closely involved in sourcing promising early crypto projects in DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, and social tokens, identifying farming opportunities, as well as supporting portfolio companies with advice and analysis. Previously, she worked as a Venture Associate at Greenfield One. In her free time, she likes sifting through indie games on Steam (and then ends up playing Stardew Valley or Slay the Spire again).

Austin Williams is a Security Advisor at Nascent. Previously, Austin was a senior security researcher at OpenZeppelin. Austin has also worked on protocol design for OpenBazaar, game theoretical analysis and mechanism design for Augur, and has worked on MEV extraction and mitigation strategies.

Jamaal is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Nascent. Previously he worked at global innovation and design firm, IDEO, where he worked on a variety of consumer and healthcare and crypto products. Jamaal graduated from Stanford with a Masters in Product Design Engineering.

Jessy is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Nascent. Jessy runs pop-up hacker houses to host hackers and work with partners on generating high-leverage product ideas. Previously, Jessy was researching the topics of collective intelligence and graph networks with Roam Research and Open.ly, which led the exploration into crypto given its capabilities in designing new coordination structures and social graphs that are built on the financial ledger. She is also the Venture Partner at Smrti Lab where she led the deals for Celestia, Clique.social, and Curio.gg