Given that the background wall was nondescript and the Wi-Fi was strong, Jonathan Frazier could have been anywhere.
A lack of palm trees or turquoise-blue waters scrambled his location, but the Louisville native was taking part in a video interview from Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands — located off the coast of West Africa near the border of Morocco and Western Sahara.
Known locally as being a technical co-founder of Louisville-based Forecastr, Frazier and his latest blockchain security-focused startup, Trustware.io, has been selected to take place in the Techstars Web3 Accelerator.
The event, which began in Dublin in April, meets in-person every three weeks in different locations across the world — the next was set to take place in London (on Tuesday), followed by New York City and Toronto. Frazier’s startup was one of 12 chosen out of approximately 750 applicants from across the globe.
“Since we were coming over to Europe, we just figured instead of flying back and forth the whole time, we would just pick somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic to camp and work on the company,” said Frazier, who added that there the location popped on their radar screen when he has his co-founder, Jesse Phillips, discovered that a blockchain conference was taking place on the island the day after he spoke with me.
The final demo day will take place on June 29. That’s when Frazier hopes to be able to have a workable product for an initial testing stage. The company is currently in what he called pre-beta testing.
Such a relatively tight turnaround leaves little time to bask in the tropical sun.
“I mean it’s a work trip [with] slightly better scenery in the background,” said Frazier, who is a Louisville native and still calls the city home.
Up until joining Techstars and accepting $120,000 in dilutive funding, Trustware.io had been entirely bootstrapped. Frazier said his company is not currently seeking out investors, but that will change once Techstars concludes and it can share a prototype of its main product, which is basically a secure digital wallet that works in the expanding world of web3. Fraizer described it in layman’s terms as a “tamper-proof database.”
‘A fast move since then’
Frazier and Phillips initially met each other attending a reunion event in June 2022 for Draper University, which Frazier called an “entrepreneurship and leadership bootcamp” in San Mateo, California, in the Bay Area.
“It’s been kind of a fast move since then,” Frazier said.
Phillips had been involved in the blockchain industry since 2017, whereas Frazier had served as the chief technology officer of a blockchain-based startup, Society.io, right after attending Draper.
Shortly after meeting, the two began talking about the main pain points that came standard in the world of blockchain — about the how technology, though brimming with possibility, was hard for a regular person to get into given the overall lack of knowledge of cryptography and how those who did dip their toe in the water were often being taken advantage of through the platform.
There are approximately 84 million people in the world who use a crypto wallet, according to data that Frazier and Phillips have collected.
“We think a lot of these experience problems that people have are what’s stopping that number from becoming larger,” Frazier said.
Frazier and Phillips landed on two main problems. The first was the “single private key problem,” given that when you create an account on blockchain, that becomes the key and the vault itself at the same time.
“It’s like you're creating an account where the key is stuck in the vault,” Frazier said. “And that’s why it's so easy to attack.”
The second issue centered around the fact that users seldom use two-factor authentication (2FA) in the blockchain space, in spite of its success as a security measure in the “normal web” — due to there not being a way to 2FA natively, Frazier said.
Rooted in Derby City
Frazier is a native of West Louisville, who graduated from Doss High School in 2004 before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), not to study computer science, but political science and government.
Computers, though, were a family passion — one encouraged by his father.
“I [didn’t] know anybody else in my neighborhood in West Louisville who had computers in the '80s, so I count myself as kind of lucky in that way,” Frazier said.
He would later attend the Draper University “bootcamp” in 2017, after having served as chief technical officers for Society.io and one other startup — Mailhaven.co, where he had a successful “small exit” — before helping build what would become Forecaster in December 2019.
Frazier said more than the actual conceptualization of the platform that he helped build from the ground floor with the other co-founders of Forecastr, he was “just proud of the team, in general, that we built.” Forecast, named one of our Startups to Watch in 2023, provides financial modeling courses to many of the Techstars accelerators, Frazier said.
“The reason why I wanted to participate in the project and Forecastr in the first place [was] for one, I love startups. I love Louisville. I want to see Louisville startups succeed [and] I knew it was a product that I could build.”
Then it was time for a new challenge, which is why he went to the Draper reunion.
“I really like building cool stuff … [Forecastr] wasn’t a project that I could see keeping me there for decades, but this one kind of is,” he said. “I’m really excited about where we’re headed.”
Now, Frazier is in the process of trying to convince Phillips to move from Boston to Louisville. Technically at the moment, the company is a C-Corp that on paperwork is based out of Delaware.
“I call it the best city nobody knows about. I love being home in Louisville,” he said.
He also hopes to educate Louisvillians about web3 and blockchain — and the good side of new technology — through this startup.
“A lot of people are worried about AI … and about losing jobs because of automation, but one of the things about technology is that it creates as much as it destroys,” Frazier said. “There are so many opportunities in web3 and blockchain. There are new economies being built right now, and I want people in my hometown to know that.”
