Meet the Fetch Team: Jack
By: Hansmeet Sethi
Tags: Blockchain, Fetch Team, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Welcome to a series of posts to meet the team behind Fetch.

Who are you and what do you do at Fetch?

Hi, I’m Jack! I’m a Fetch co-founder and software engineer working hard to make the application run smooth as butter.

What are 3 things about your background that people should know?

I speak Portuguese pretty well — I used to work with a cadre of Brazilian developers. It was always fun learning new Portuguese swear words when they were debugging a program.

I’m working on learning the guitar.

I grew up in London, but now live in San Francisco.

What got you excited about Fetch?

A chance to own a part of the crypto space that no one else seems interested in gravitating to and the skill set to do it. The company I previously worked at made municipal bonds accessible and easily purchasable. Since municipal bonds have largely fallen out of sight of the retail investor over the last 40 years, a huge part of the challenge was reducing the complexity involved in purchasing and holding a muni, as well as extensive user education at each step of the process. Crypto and munis are wildly different assets, but I think the aim of getting user experience and tooling right in the crypto space is a huge opportunity.

Do you remember making your first token trade and how you learned to do it?

Barely! I bought some CVC a while back, but the experience was a blur of reading Ethereum documentation, speed-reading Medium articles, and trying to find a gas limit that would allow my transaction to be processed.

What is something that people are dealing with today that you’re most excited about fixing in crypto?

The barrier to entry is overwhelming and a complete non-starter for newcomers to the space. Since so many current crypto holders and traders have a background in computers it’s easy to forget that executing transactions from a terminal or combing a project’s GitHub repository to try and ascertain if it’s a good idea to entrust them with your key pair is a good idea. Just understanding the concept of a key pair is a terrible user experience for people who don’t come from technical backgrounds. Making blockchain interactions zero knowledge and putting the user back in control will open crypto up to the world at large.

How did you get into crypto originally?

I bought my first Bitcoin for about $80 in 2013 — it was such a strange experience. I had no idea what I was doing and at that time there were zero resources to guide you through the process. I gave a dude I met online $80 bucks to transfer it to my wallet…looking back I should have been using my laptop to mine it 24/7 when that was still possible. Oh, hindsight…

What are your top 3 podcasts/blogs/resources to learn about the world of crypto?

CCN to keep super up-to-date on crypto announcements and happenings

Unchained for thoughtful takes on the space

Financial Times/WSJ/traditional news for outsider perceptions of crypto. They’re usually quite bearish, but an out-of-the-bubble perspective can be invaluable.

Where can people find you when you’re not building Fetch?

Perfecting my lemon bar recipe.