We are proud to announce that Dave Morin is joining Blockstack PBC as an advisor. Dave is the former Co-Founder & CEO of Path and founder of Slow Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm that champions long term thinking and innovation. Dave was involved with the early days of Facebook where he co-created the Facebook Platform, which gave developers the power to create social apps inside of Facebook, as well as Facebook Connect, which gave all developers the power to build social apps anywhere on the internet. He has long been a creator and supporter of tools that empower developers to innovate at scale. As technology has evolved, so too has the idea that only centralized companies can create technologies for billions of users.

Better Digital Experiences

Dave is passionate about creating better digital experiences for the internet community. When Dave left Facebook and launched Path in 2010, social networks were moving away from privacy under the veil of connecting the world. Dave’s Path went against that trend, focusing on creating a platform that allowed people to share more private information, but only to a select group of close family and friends. Co-founded with Dustin Mierau and Shawn Fanning of Napster, Path was the first “personal” social network, and went on to raise $77 million in funding from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Shasta Ventures, and Greylock Partners before being acquired by Kakao in 2015.

Where Facebook was always meant to be a town hall, Path was meant to be your “home”, and it’s still one of the most missed social apps of all time with a die-hard fan base that would love to see it birthed again, especially in the form of a decentralized app.

Dave believes that technology can play a meaningful role in mental health and our interactions with digital apps need to be designed to avoid addiction and reduce mental suffering. He is the Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Sunrise whose mission is to cure depression and understand the brain. Dave goes beyond creating better digital experiences himself and has been supporting other entrepreneurs through investments and advice for over a decade; he is an investor in companies like Slack, Pinterest, Robinhood, Allbirds, Airtable, Evernote, NextDoor, Blue Bottle, Brightside, uBiome, and others.

Paving the Way for a Personal Internet

“It just can’t happen that we have another wave of technical innovation happen, and that all of society is not participating. This technology is so profound, on so many levels, that it feels really important to educate everyone about it.” – Dave Morin at the “Decrypting Crypto” Summit

Dave and I went deep into Blockstack’s architecture last year when discussing what a future computing model for apps looks like. Interestingly, Dave and his team at Path explored building Path in a more decentralized way in the early days but the technology wasn’t mature enough back then. Our 4+ years of R&D at Blockstack into decentralized computing fits nicely into early ideas Dave had about empowering users at scale.

One of the main reasons that Dave is coming on as an advisor is because Blockstack’s entire architecture is built from the ground up to be focused on the user and gives the power back to the user. On Blockstack, users own their data and connections and have the freedom to exit an app at any time. Decentralized apps at massive scale are not a pipe-dream anymore; they’re already here with 70+ apps built on Blockstack. Our focus on privacy, security, and freedom is not a far cry from what Dave set out to do almost 10 years ago.

The Next Step in Digital Rights

Blockstack builds protocols and developer tools designed to enable a truly personal, democratized, and open Internet. Dave’s work as both an entrepreneur and investor will provide the Blockstack community with invaluable support as we work toward a more open and personal internet. I’m grateful for the support and dedication Dave has already provided to the project. His belief in the power of a decentralized future and our mission makes us stronger as an open-source community; together we’ll continue to create a better internet future for us all.