While covering CoinCongress a couple weeks ago I got in contact with Brandon Goldman, the CEO of Bitcoin startup FreshPay. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to sit down in San Francisco with Brandon before we wrapped up our coverage of the event. However, after some deft schedule-juggling by Brandon, I had the opportunity to speak with the busy entrepreneur late last week about his background, the future of Bitcoin, his thoughts on altcoins, and how the community can drive cryptocurrency adoption.

HR: So who are you?

BG: “I’m Brandon Goldman, co-founder and CEO of FreshPay. I’m 28 years years old. I have a wife, I have a dog, we don’t have kids yet.”

HR: Not yet?

BG: “We want to have kids in the near future, but my wife just got a job at Google, and we thought it would be best to wait a couple years until she’s established at her job.”

HR: So tell me about the dog…

BG: “He was our first employee. We jokingly call him the “Director of Happiness,” so he’s pretty far up the corporate ladder (laughs).”

HR: I see you’ve been involved in a number of startups, can you give me an overview of your career?

BG: “Yeah, I first worked in an IPTV startup after I dropped out of college. I also worked in a startup that optimized shipping and insurance for jewelry and watches. Then I moved out to Silicon Valley to work at Box - I was one of the first dozen employees there. It was a great experience.

“I moved back down to LA when I got engaged to my wife - she was in grad-school at the time and couldn’t move, so I moved - and did freelance work for awhile. I didn’t want to jump in with just any company, I wanted to find something where I could create value and do something meaningful to me. After meeting them at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, I got a job as Vice President of Engineering at Miso Media, a music education technology startup. Our flagship product was an iPad app that taught people to play guitar, ukulele, etc. I was at that company from when they were just 4 people until they were almost 20 people.

“After Miso Media I did some freelance work again, tried a couple startups that didn’t take off, and then I got into Bitcoin. So that’s my career in a nutshell.”

HR: When did you get into Bitcoin?

BG: “Early 2013… I first heard about it in 2011, but I didn’t get into it because the guy who told me about it was selling things on the Silk Road - it was really shady and I didn’t want to get involved. At the time [Bitcoin] wasn’t really being used for legitimate purposes yet.

“But, when I started seeing it in the news in early 2013, I saw that there was more to the currency, more to the technology, and that it could work better than fiat currencies. So, I spent about two weeks immersing myself in Bitcoin; learning about it, talking to people about it, reading stuff online.

“Then I found out my brother - I have a twin brother - was getting really interested in Bitcoin too, at the same time. Since we were both in-between jobs at the time, and we both had found that we really liked Bitcoin, we decided to build a Bitcoin arbitrage trading bot.

“It worked really, really well, but then Mt.Gox stopped business with US customers. At the time they were 80% of the liquidity - without Mt.Gox the bot stopped being profitable. So we stopped working on the bot and after that [my brother] went on to do a different startup, and I went on to start FreshPay.”

HR: How many people are working with you at FreshPay?

BG: “We have five people in our office full-time, and we’re also working with a few contractors.”

HR: What are you working on?

BG: “I can’t tell you that yet, but we’ve been working on it for over a year. We hope to announce soon, and when we do, it’ll be very exciting.”

HR: Do you have Bitcoin yourself?

BG: “Yeah.”

HR: Are you holding it or spending it?

BG: “I’m holding and not spending it yet. There aren’t enough ways to spend it.”