Blockchain company Blockstream has announced that Samson Mow is joining its executive team as Chief Strategy Officer. With the addition of this strategic hire, Blockstream is continuing in its goal to bring more cryptographic innovations to the market and to expand its global footprint. Having reached approximately $80 million USD after its Series A funding, Blockstream is seeing continued investor interest, especially from strategic partners who want to accelerate blockchain technology in Asia, where the company believes the path to its technologies in production will be the shortest.
CEO of Blockstream, Dr. Adam Back said: “Samson’s skills and experience are exceptionally complementary to Blockstream, leveraging both his deep Bitcoin and startup expertise. As we accelerate and shift to the launch and marketing of our enterprise and consumer products, Samson will be undertaking a number of immediate strategic initiatives, including the establishment of Blockstream offices in China and Canada.”
Prior to joining Blockstream, Mow was the COO of BTCC, one of the largest digital currency exchanges and mining pools. At BTCC, Mow led the company through a period of rapid growth and was responsible for the mining and exchange business units, along with operations, product development, and marketing.
Mow remarked: “It’s an honour to join Blockstream and I’m very excited to be working alongside such an incredibly talented team. There are many exciting projects underway at Blockstream, which each have the potential to revolutionize and disrupt multiple industries. We have an incredible opportunity to productize these innovations and collaborate with strategic partners to bring them to market.”
Mow is a well-known contributor in the Bitcoin community, advocating for the importance of decentralization and the need to prioritize security in protocol development. Working with others in the community, he is involved with the organization of the Scaling Bitcoin workshops and lends support to Bitcoin community events and initiatives.
In addition to his work in the Bitcoin sector, Mow is a game industry veteran and entrepreneur, with experience in both scaling up start-ups and managing large development teams. Mow was a director of production at Ubisoft where he spearheaded their expansion into Asian markets for web, social, and mobile games. Before Ubisoft, Mow was in charge of business development and operations at Sitemasher, a Vancouver based start-up developing a SaaS platform for building websites and apps. Sitemasher was the winner of the Blue Sky Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft and was later acquired by Salesforce.com.
Samson Mow holds a degree in business administration from Simon Fraser University and regularly features as a speaker and panelist in industry conferences.
