Unlock Inc

Unlock is building the web's new business model by enabling new ways for creators to monetize their content through their decentralized, access control protocol.

We are a team of 5 full-time engineers, we received early-stage funding from top tier VC (General Catalyst, Cherry Venture) and we are building our company in the open to help fix the web's unhealthy business model while empowering creators.

Founder, CEO

The Graph

The Graph Council governs technical upgrades and the community treasury to support The Graph protocol development and ecosystem growth.

Council Member

As a Staff Software Engineer, I was working on both the front-end and back-end stacks of multiple web applications. 

- Refactored authentication flows across several applications.
- Added support for Google Auth
- Added support for 2-factor Authentication to mitigate credential leakage threats

Starting in February 2021, I was the tech lead for Ro's world-first in-home vaccination effort. As part of this role, I Iead the tech team, as well as data-science engineers, to design and implement a process that enabled licensed nurses to perform in-home COVID vaccination for people at risk.

- architected the system based on user stories and business and regulatory constraints 
- lead the development of backend and front-end components
- designed the processes to identify the shortest path between patients
- analyzed data after each daily vaccination campaign

https://ro.co/press/ro-covid-19-in-home-vaccination/

Staff Software Engineer II

Gimlet Media

Gimlet Gimlet Media is the award-winning narrative podcasting company that aims to help listeners better understand the world and each other. Gimlet was founded in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Gimlet podcasts are downloaded millions of times per month by listeners all over the world.

Gimlet Media was acquired by Spotify.

Advisor

Medium.com

I joined Medium after the sale of Superfeedr. I joined the NYC office at Medium's Lead Engineer.
There I worked on several critical projects: 
- Syndication: adoption of Facebook's Instant Articles, and Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages, as well as extensive support for RSS feeds.
- SEO: Benchmarked Medium's search performance, implemented good practices (sitemaps, deep linking, semantic markup...). In 6 months, traffic went from about 5% to 40%. In 2017, SEO was the single largest contributor to Medium's growth of traffic and engagement.
- Cryptocurrencies: researched and designed economic models to incentivize and reward positive usage of the platform.

Lead Engineer

Co-Authored the WebSub specification, as part of the Social Web Working Group.

WebSub provides a common mechanism for communication between publishers of any kind of Web content and their subscribers, based on HTTP web hooks. Subscription requests are relayed through hubs, which validate and verify the request. Hubs then distribute new and updated content to subscribers when it becomes available.

Invited Expert

Notifixious Inc. (Superfeedr)

Superfeedr is the leading RSS feed API for both Subscribers and Publishers. Customers include IFTTT, about.me, Etsy, Medium and more.

I designed and implemented a complex distributed architecture, able to parse thousands of feeds per second as well as cache their content in real-time.

In June 2016, Superfeedr was acquired by Medium.

CEO and Founder

Real Time Conf Europe

Organized, curated and presented the first Realtime Conference in Europe.
The Realtime Conference is a conference dedicated to realtime web technologies, including HTTP streaming, XMPP, WebSub, WebRTC, WebSockets, Event Streams...
The conference gathered 150 participants in Lyon France from all over the world, with sponsorships from Azure, Google, Mandrill (Mailchimp), Mozilla and more.

Organiser and MC

Jobetudiant

I created Jobetudiant, the leading job board for students in France when I was still in school. It started as a "side project" but within 6 months, thanks to great SEO, we started to receive job offers from very large multinationals.

This "sealed" my love of the open web: a platform where a student could create a business with no prior-experience or backing, without requiring anyone's permission.

Jobetudiant (fully bootstrapped) is currently reaching the 20 year mark, has more than 1M students registered and hosts job offers from SMEs and vary large international corporations (McDonalds, H&M, Yum, Ikea...)

Founder, President

BNP Paribas

I worked in the leverage buyout team in San Francisco. We syndicated debt (new investments and restructuring )  for buyouts of companies in various sectors, with EBITDA ranging from $20 million to $80 million.

Junior Associate Leverage Finance

Unlock is my most ambitious professional endeavor. We are building a better business model for the web, based on memberships, rather than attention.

I am an entrepreneur (built 2 profitable start-ups, sold of them to https://medium.com), an unconditional web advocate, and a hacker. 
French living in New York. Husband and father of 3.

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Julien Genestoux

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