Francesco DeParis is a seasoned Silicon Valley executive. He started his career at Microsoft, and left to build his own startup, a boutique investment bank. Together with his co-founder, Kyle Redinger, they executed several M&A transactions and brought digital publishers into the Web 2.0 arena.

Taking those lessons learned as a lean startup, Francesco then went on to manage M&A at gategroup, the largest airline services provider in the world. Working closely with the CEO and mentor, Andrew Gibson, he successfully ran $100+ million in M&A projects across the globe.

In 2014 Francesco became fascinated with blockchain technology and Bitcoin and joined Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges. As one of its first executives, he drove critical business development and technology partnerships that enabled Kraken to grow its consumer crypto trading business into new markets that ultimately led to its unicorn status.

Building on his blockchain knowledge, Francesco then joined Mirror, a smart-contract trading platform. As COO, he built key components of the company and ran product development, working closely with crypto luminaries such as Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja of the Lightning Network, Dominic Williams and Enzo Haussecker of Dfinity, and Jonathan Levi of HACERA. Later, Francesco operated Couchsurfing, the world’s first sharing economy application.

Today, Francesco is the COO of Upstak, a datacenter value added reseller. He is working with bleeding edge technology companies as they build out their next generation AI and high performance computing infrastructure.

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Francesco attended Babson College, focusing on Finance and Entrepreneurship. He is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Mandarin Chinese. He has completed courses in Disruptive Strategy at Harvard Business School and the Chief Technology Officer program at the Wharton School of Business.