Publishing blockchain startup, Po.et hires VP of engineering

Po.et a startup that wants to put put publishing permissions on the blockchain and build a marketplace on top of it, announced today that it was bringing on Eric Elliott as the VP of engineering.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels that the company had hired Jarrod Dicker as CEO in February. Dicker was previously vice president of innovation and commercial strategy at The Washington Post.

Elliott, who has written a book on Javascript, has a range of experience working for the likes of Adobe, Wall Street Journal and BBC. He also helped code BandPage, a startup that was sold to YouTube in 2016. He sees this company as a way to move publishing away from a traditional gatekeeper-driven system to one based on purely on value on the blockchain.

“Po.et represents the chance to liberate creatives from traditional gatekeepers: to more directly connect with revenue sources to enable them to earn money doing what they love to do. It also represents a chance to make it easier for companies to find the resources they’re looking for, and obtain legal license to use the content with the click of a button,” Elliott wrote in a blog post announcing his new position.

Dicker says Elliott’s credentials speak for themselves. “Eric has scaled multiple engineering teams to tens of millions of users and helped build Adobe Creative Cloud, enabling the successful transition from boxed software to the SaaS model,” he told TechCrunch.

“The big thing [about this announcement] is that we’re growing our engineering core. A lot of blockchain companies are not shipping and delivering in the space yet and not only are we doing so, we’re bringing in a seasoned engineer who has a history of releasing products to help scale the team,” he added.

Po.et has a broad vision to transform publishing to a place where publications, authors and creatives can set permissions for their content and monetize it as they see fit in a kind of electronic marketplace of ideas. All of this is to be built on top of the blockchain. the electronic ledger best known as the record keeping system for bitcoin.

The ledger technology, which allows you to track bitcoin transactions in an immutable, irrefutable record that can also be applied to a number of scenarios for tracking virtually anything of value including content.

Today’s announcement is a sign that the startup is starting to mature, and building an executive team to carry the company’s vision to the next phase. To date, Po.et has raised a mix of traditional venture capital and token sales.They started with a million dollar seed round last June, then raised another $10 M through an ICO in August, according to the roadmap on the company’s website.