Hello Community!

Today, we want to introduce you to our advisor, Jonathan Gillon. Jon was the founder and CEO of Roost, which was the largest peer-to-peer storage company ever built. Roost was acquired in 2017 by a traditional storage company. Jon now spends his time with Indisputable labs where he and his team build projects and protocols with blockchain technology. He is the perfect advisor to us with his knowledge of platforms and blockchain. You can learn more at Indisputable.io or check out their first protocol, a safety protocol to reduce blockchain based fraud called the Coral Protocol.

What was your first experience with entrepreneurship?

My first experience starts when I was in elementary school. I had a lot of friends that started shoveling snow and raking leaves to earn a few dollars a week. I wasn’t so interested in the manual labor side, so I started doing the business development side of the business and taking a portion of the proceeds. I would go around asking neighbors if they needed work done, then I would schedule my friends to do the labor. My first real business was started in my dorm room at Lehigh University. It was called, Tripsolutions, and the idea was that you would be able to book plane tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, and all transportation needs from one site, so that when you were traveling your transportation was taken care of. It was a disaster. My friend at the time was getting a degree in computer science and I was too young to know what a good CTO looked like. Turns out he couldn’t code and without the product we couldn’t sign up customers. We ended up wasting about $25,000 in the end. It was a great learning experience and taught me many valuable lessons.

What was it like building and selling Roost?

It was difficult to build and difficult to sell in different ways. Starting Roost, we faced a lot of rejection. We made many tech and other mistakes along the way but we were able to continue growing. It took us three years to finally build a great product. In year one, no one could book a space or list a space without having some type of difficulty. We had to change all of our processes and how we thought about the company along the way. We stuck with the process, always constantly learning, and we were able to grow into 5 cities with thousands of rentals. It was surprising to us that we were acquired and it was a difficult choice to sell. We had built this company and it was our baby, but we realized that it was the right decision in the end. It was a great pat on the back and confirmation that we had built something great.

When did you start learning and getting involved with cryptocurrency?

In 2014, I started mining Litecoin with my roommate in San Francisco. We were just starting Roost at the time and had no money to pay bills. We applied to get on a welfare program with our electricity provider. We were paying about one-tenth the standard rates and we were using a lot of power to mine Litecoin. It was 120 degrees in our apartment some days and we just sweated and sweated. Later on the milkcrates that all of our equipment was stored in finally melted and while we cleaned it, we ended up losing the flash drive with all of the Litecoins on it. Luckily, I found the flash drive earlier this year, so it worked out well. Since then I have kept a passion for blockchain and cryptocurrency. I’ve been pretty involved in the scene since early 2014.

What attracted you to STOW IT?

I fundamentally believe that the peer-to-peer model will revolutionize the storage industry. It is a huge market that has a lot of opportunity. Roost only scratched the surface. The way that STOW IT is tying incentives to the platform in the form of cryptocurrency is what initially caught my attention. It is hard to build a new business and gain mass adoption, so using these incentives will absolutely help. This $37 billion-dollar industry will undergo a mass change and I believe that STOW IT is uniquely positioned and is innovating to lead the change that self-storage desperately needs.

What is Indisputable Labs and the Coral Protocol?

Indisputable labs is a Blockchain RD lab that builds projects and protocol on the blockchain that solves big problems. The Coral protocol is our first product. Trading cryptocurrency is scary. Over $7 million dollars is stolen every day from phishing attacks. Coral is a safety protocol designed to reduce blockchain-based fraud by assigning blockchain trust scores to cryptocurrency addresses. Coral’s API can integrate seamlessly into any blockchain platform, reducing risk for businesses and bringing peace of mind to users. We believe that it will bring more trust and transparency to all of cryptocurrency.

What does the economy look like in 5 years?

Mass Adoption. I believe we will see mass adoption. Right now, it is hard to use blockchain technology, but as we start to see seamless integrations into everyday life, blockchain will be something we interact with often. Interacting on the blockchain will be a frictionless experience. Once we see some of the first great utilizations of the technology, we will start to see more and more adoption. Only when we get to mass adoption will we see real change and progress.

We want to thank Jon for his time and his valuable insights. It is truly amazing to have someone on our team with so much experience in peer-to-peer platforms and with blockchain technology.

Remember to join us on Telegram to stay up to date with all of our progress before the STOW IT Token Crowdsale on May 1st.