#IntroduceYourself Part 2 Brandon Venetta <> MissionSuccess

To give you more context, I was living for the past 4 months renting a room from a colleague in Ingleside TX, had an air mattress that popped and I was to cheap to buy a new one so I was sleeping on the floor for the past month. The only items I had fit in my sedan, I was living out of my car at the time. I was researching the path as i have never driven to FL and I was going through the panhandle of Florida where Tallahassee is and I recalled one of my best friends growing up attending that school, he was PhD in financial mathematics at FSU. I hit him up to see if he could grab lunch and it worked out that we could, we ended up catching up for a couple hours and came up with a plan to stay in touch consistently. He was passing off information about what he was learning and I would dive into about the financial markets, especially about the '08 crisis and the current set up of the system etc. As things were becoming clear on the flaws, he came across bitcoin and called me immediately and said "start digging."

So I did, I started researching and it didn’t make any sense at all. I spent many hours trying to figure out what I could do with BTC if I had any, why it existed etc. The light bulbed turned on one night when my wife, gf at the time was working late, one of her cousins had a baby and we wanted to send a congratulations gift. We wanted to send money cause thats what they needed most but we couldn’t cause we could only afford $20-50 and the fees to send that amount didn’t make sense and then we didn’t know if the funds would actually be received with the corrupt banking etc. Then I was like ooooooo but if we had bitcoin we could send value right to them, so I was like ok I get this and got really intrigued by the tech.

After it started making more sense I started to go to a bitcoin meet up here, this is where I met some like minded folk and actually met Doug our CTO at one of the meetings. I went to a few when I realized I was looking at this technology way differently then the people that were attracted to it, I remember one meet up where I was totally not into it and had to leave cause I was getting frustrated in the conversation. All it was about was what the conversion of bitcoin would be to the $ and if bitcoin took up x % of this market it would equate to x, etc and I could care less. So at that point I got turned off from bitcoin its self but started digging into other value preposition blockchains. At the same time my friend was learning the academia financial mathematic system and knew his trajectory was leading to Wall Street but this technology stirred in him, he started applying to blockchain start ups, he first tried Coinbase but wasn’t accepted, then applied to Ripple Labs and soon became employee 20 something and ended his PhD at FSU to take a career in blockchain.

As for me, I got fascinated by ripples underlying technology and understood there value preposition to the market place the other blockchain project I was super excited about what SolarCoin. The founder of that project Nick Gogerty is extremely smart and the logic on why value derived by solar energy is extremely credible. I researched the team and instead of reaching out to the founders another name stuck out to me, his name was Eric Stetson. I did alittle research on him and found his morals and values were extremely in line with mine.

So i ended up emailing Eric, we started dialogue on how ripple and SolarCoin could collaborate, he ended up traveling to a Bitcoin conference here in Orlando called Coins in the Kingdom (Disney, get it :)? ) We didn’t really attend any of the conference, we just talked about our ideas on what was missing in the space, our passions on what we thought this technology could do to help the world, etc. He headed back home after the conference and a couple days later shared with me Grantcoins first revision of the white paper which we now know the rest is just history and now is manna :).

Maybe I’ll go into the journey as well from when Grantcoin started to where it is today, thats a wild journey as well, a much larger force is at work bringing this project to life for all of humanity!

The point I'm trying to make if anyone actually read all of this is that we're all part of the story, every life has an incredible story behind it and we all play a pivotal role to help humanity and to leave the world a better place for the generations to come.