Max Sills IP Counsel at Square and GM of COPA and Jed Grant Co-Founder of Open Crypto Alliance

Written by Alexandra Moxin

This episode features Max Sills IP Counsel at Square and General Manager of the Crypto Open Patent Alliance and Jed Grant Co-Founder and Advisory Board Member of the Open Crypto Alliance (OCA) and CEO of KYC3. We cover each guest’s background, how they’re involved in the space and what COPA and OCA are doing to protect developers and help advance innovation in the space.

You can reach this episode’s guests on Twitter @opencryptoorg and @OpenCryptoX and click to find out more about the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) and the Open Crypto Alliance (OCA).

This episode was recorded using Jitsi.org - a privacy focused, open source video conferencing platform. Please consider using and supporting FOSS/OSS.

Show Links

• Square
• Square Crypto
• Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA)
• Open Crypto Alliance (OCA)
• LOT Network
• Open Invention Network (OIN)
• KYC3

Show Transcript

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Alexandra933 00:00 Alright, let’s get started. Welcome to the Advance Tech Podcast. Joining me today are two very special guests Max Sills who is IP Counsel at Square and also General Manager at Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA). We also have Jed Grant, CEO and founder of KYC3 and Co-Founder of the Open Crypto Alliance (OCA), where I’m also a board member. Welcome.

Max Sills 00:54 Hi.

Jed Grant 00:54 Thanks for having us.

Alexandra933 00:56 So, Max, how did you get into this space? Could you tell our listeners and viewers a little bit about your background?

Max Sills 01:01 Sure. So I’ve always been interested in crypto. My interest started in law school. I was interning at the Securities Exchange Commission in the risk finance division then, and I was just getting so excited about new financial products. I really believed in the SEC mission, we worked on the crowdfunding regulations there, we really wanted to democratize finance while also protecting people from crazy investments. So before my current role, I was working at Google, when I started at Google, I had a very legalistic, very transactional mindset about business about everything. I started working in the open source group on open source licensing and open source legal policy and over the six or seven years, I was there, my entire world changed. My whole worldview changed. My philosophy changed. I think I went from being very, there’s a legal mindset you know for a baby lawyer, very adversarial to realizing how important sharing was. And it was just amazing to me learning more about the open source community and open source developers. First how much people pour their heart and souls into public projects with little or no expectation of payment, but also how much money and how much progress can be made through open sharing. So it just changed my whole philosophy. I was running our open source licensing and policy for a while and the square opportunity was really interesting, because it helped me get back to my roots in finance but where open source was really interesting because it was about collaborative development on software. Crypto is even