Unchained Capital Welcomes Will Cole to the Team

Unchained Capital, Inc. is excited to announce it has hired Will Cole as its new Chief Product Officer. Will is a long-time bitcoiner and self-proclaimed “Hodler of Last Resort.” Will has over 14 years of experience in product development, including at Thomson Reuters and Stack Overflow.

Will joins the Unchained team from Stack Overflow, where he was VP of Product, leading the Product Management and Design departments and overseeing the Public Q&A, Stack Overflow Talent, and Stack Overflow Teams as well as internal product development. During his time with Stack Overflow, Will helped grow the company to over 300 employees, contributed to the company’s successful Series C and D capital raises, and helped the company reach profitability in 2018. Will built a world-class product organization, managed partnerships with Google, Indeed, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Pluralsight, and helped build products that help every programmer in the world.

In addition to his broad product experience, Will was appointed by Governor Mark Gordon to the Wyoming Blockchain Taskforce earlier this year, in recognition of his deep knowledge of bitcoin. Through his work on the taskforce, Will has helped Wyoming become the most promising jurisdiction for individuals and businesses to transact, build, and operate with bitcoin and other crypto products. 

Will joins Unchained Capital to oversee the development of Unchained’s financial services platform, which is built upon the foundational principle of collaborative custody: that the highest level of bitcoin security is delivered when clients control private keys. As a long-time bitcoiner and product veteran, Will is uniquely positioned to advance the product development of Unchained’s existing vault and lending services and to lead efforts to launch additional financial services to enhance the value of Unchained’s platform.

“We could not be more excited to add Will as a key stakeholder on the Unchained Capital team. Our core mission is to empower people with the unprecedented freedom and control that bitcoin provides. We execute on this mission through our collaborative custody model and by offering financial services built on this secure foundation,” said Joe Kelly, Unchained’s Co-founder and CEO. “Under Will’s stewardship, our products and services will only continue to improve and enable us to deliver even greater value to our clients.”   

The team asked Will a few questions about why he decided to join Unchained Capital. 

Will, why did you choose Unchained? 

“I’ve known the Unchained team for a couple of years and have been a customer since the launch of vaults.  I love the vision that Joe and Dhruv have set out for the company and see the culture and products that Unchained has built to date as exactly the type of infrastructure needed to help bitcoin succeed. 

The engineering history was also exceptional. The vault product was only possible because of the way Unchained custodied its loan collateral. There were no shortcuts.  Security best practices are core to how Unchained operates.  

Getting to know the team at Unchained, they have always worked to bolster bitcoin, not change bitcoin. It was important to me to see a company building the best products and services it could around what bitcoin is, not try to bend bitcoin to their own goals and ambitions.

Lastly, Parker Lewis joining Unchained and his vision for financial services in the space opened my eyes to how I could better contribute to the bitcoin ecosystem.”

What’s most exciting to you about bitcoin from a product standpoint? 

“If bitcoin is money, then some of the key products needed are in the financial services space. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer that bitcoin makes banks obsolete. Bitcoin makes a bank obsolete, and it certainly negates several banking business models. But as long as there is money, there will be loans, custody, and other financial services that support that money. I firmly believe that bitcoin is an extraordinary leap in creating sound, hard money, and I want to be a part of building products that support its growth worldwide.”

To learn more about Unchained Capital, email us at hello@unchained.com.