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Here’s what we know:

Ted mentioned that they’ve begun working with a new board member. Ted mentioned that the board member is an “independent.” (Not an employee of Kik.) Ted (et al.) have used gender neutral language when referring to this individual. The developer contest was decided upon with the help of an un-announced Kin executive. We believe it’s likely this is the same person. If Kin is hiding their identity it’s likely they are influential. If they are also working as an executive and a board member, it’s most likely someone who isn’t working at another company currently.

#1 – Jan Koum

Who

Why it might be them:

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#2 – Eric Ries

Who:

Why it might be them:

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#3 – Marissa Mayer

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#4 – Gagan Biyani

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#5 – Alexis Ohanian

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#6 – Ev Williams:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#7 – Naval Ravikant:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#8 – Matt Mullenweg:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#9 – Thomas Hartwig:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#10 – Marco Arment:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#11 – Brian Wong:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

#12 – Led Rivingston:

Who:

Why it might be them

Why it would be great if it IS them:

Why it probably isn’t them:

Who do we actually think it is?

Who didn’t make it on to this list but was on our radar?

Tobias Lute (Shopify)

Tom Anderson (Myspace)

Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow, Discourse)

Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow, Glassdoor – now Benchmark Ventures, on the board of Netflix)

Matt Barrie (

Freelancer.com

)

Nathan Blecharczyk (AirBnB)

Sergey Brin

David Byttow (Secret)

Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon, Uber – Canadian)

Charlie Cheever (Quora)

Dennis Crowley (Foursquare and Dodgeball)

Roger Dicky (Gigster and key engineer at Zynga)

Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter, Speaker at Consensus in 2018)

Scott Farquhar (Atlasssian)

David Filo (Yahoo)

Janus Friis (Skype, KaZaA, Radio)

Logan Green (Lyft)

Garrett Gruener (

Ask.com

)

Reed Hastings (Netflix)

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)

Ryan Holmes (Hootsuite)

Dave Hyatt (Safari, WebKit, Firefox)

Brendan Eich (Firefox, Javascript, Brave BAT)

Michael Jones (Myspace, Science Inc, Science blockchain)

Justin Kan (

Justin.tv

Twitch.tv

, Y Combinator)

Max Levchin (Paypal – awards a prize in cryptography)

Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook, Asana)

Aswhin Navin (BitTorrent)

Pierre Omidyar (Ebay and First Look Media)

Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook, Spotify)

James Altucher (Reset Inc, Hedgefund Manager, StockPickr, Bitcoin investor, recently aiming to found a bitcoin exchange)

Mark Pincus (Zynga)

Sebastian Thrun (Udacity)

Justin Waldron (Zynga, Investor in Kik)

Tom Preston-Werner (Gravatar, Github) – Resigned from Github

Noah Kagan (

Sumo.com

, AppSumo)

Kevin Lin – Cofounder COO Twitch

Andrew D’Souza (Founder of Clearbanc, moved from TO to SF, advisor to Kik, previously at Top Hat)

David King (Green Patch, Blibby)

Mich Kaufman (Fixer)

Raj Kapoor (Lyft exec)

Lynda Ting (Venture/M&A exec, broad experience, connected in crypto)

Neil Shah (Exec at Twitter/Slack)

Thomas Hatwrig (

King.com

)

Daren Tsui (Imvu)

Brian Armstrong (Coinbase)

Fred Wilson (USV)

Moe Adam (Bitaccess)

Michael Kitchen (Wealthsimple)

Michele Romano (Clearbanc, Buytopia, Snap Saves)

Sam Teller (SpaceX, Tesla, and like tons of other stuff)

Glad Gil (growth exec and investor)

Adam Ludwig (

chain.com

)

Brian Acton (WhatsApp and Signal)

Evan Spiegel (Snapchat)

One thing that we try to avoid at NuFi is wild and unfounded speculation. Instead, our wild speculation is mildly founded with rough interweb sleuthing. While most of the community has been on a fervorous hunt for bread-crumbs that they believe are evidence that Evan Spiegel (CEO of Snapchat) is the new board member, we here at NuFi decided to do some digging and come up with some other potential (long-shots) of who we’d really like it to be.Here are some ideal candidates we picked out that we like, but, it’s probably not them:: Jan Koum is one of the co-founders of the popular chat app “WhatsApp” which sold to Facebook for $19B.Jan is notably anti-Facebook and has apparently left Facebook in a “rest and vest” style. Leaving him open to other projects.Jan knows how to grow a kick-ass chat app.He’s got a fair bit of money, and is likely still on non-competes from Facebook. It’s unclear what value Kin would offer him, and if he wants to deal with the chat space again.Eric Ries is the founder of IMVU, The Long-Term Stock Exchange and the author of “The Lean Startup.”IMVU is a Kin partner putting it on Eric’s radar and with projects like the LTSE, Eric has shown his commitment to disrupting economic oligarchies.Eric is a master of the concepts of lean and MVP. Having been a student in Steve Blanks’ entrepreneurship class he knows how to lead tight and effective product teams.He’s already got two projects under his belt including the LTSE which he seems to be focused on full time.Marissa Mayer is the former CEO of Yahoo, and former COO of Google.: Marissa Mayer left Yahoo during its sale last year to star a project called “Lumi Labs” focused on consumer facing products and working with startups. Lumi is Finnish for snow. In 2015, Ted Livingston registered a trademark for Snowball Labs, based out of the Kik building. The trademark was later abandoned in 2017. Coincidence? Yes, entirely!Marissa Mayer is a master of running a tight ship. Her operational knack helped Google grow to be the empire it is today, and helped turn around Yahoo. She has an eye for excellence and takes no prisoners on the journey there.In her time at Yahoo, her salary was roughly $900,000/week, and her exit package from the Yahoo sale was another $260 million. Marissa can work on any project that takes her fancy, and to her a project like Kik is probably fairly small potatoes.Gagan Biyani is the founder of Sprig, Co-Founder of Udemy, Former Head of Marketing for Lyft, and founder of the Growth Hackers Conference.: Gagan currently isn’t leading any projects, and seems to be focused on investing. He’s linked indirectly to Ted/Kik via a mutual investor (Justin Waldron of Zynga fame).Gagan would bring with him great connections to multiple startups, as well as some strong marketing and growth prowess which would help Kin grow to the next level.When Gagan shut down Sprig in July of 2017, he updated his LinkedIn profile to note that he is taking time off to travel and learn. It’s unclear if he is ready to dive back into the professional world yet.Alexis Ohanian is the founder of Reddit and author of “Without Their Permission.”: Alexis was pro-cryptocurrency early on, and even explored a Reddit based cryptocurrency called “RedditNotes.” Recently, Reddit noted they are retiring the Gold program and replacing it with Reddit Coins.Reddit….Reddit…. – it’s a bit of a handful to run. He likely doesn’t have the time to think about other projects.Co-Founder of Twitter and Founder of Medium.: No longer active at Medium and exploring other projects.Ev brings strong experience in managing peer-to-peer social communities.Ev as a knack for starting his own thing. He may not be interested in joining other people’s existing projects.Co-Founder of AngelList, Co-Founder of CoinList, Prolific investor.: He seems to have taken a step back from the day-to-day at AngelList and CoinList, and is probably the only person in the world that might be as deeply involved in crypto as Fred Wilson.He knows (and has invested in) most major startups in the last decade, Naval is the best way to open any door in the valley.We believe the new board member is also a full-time exec at Kik. That doesn’t seem likely to be Naval as he tends to move quick and be involved in lots of projects at the same time.Founder of Automattic (WordPress): Matt’s long been interested in cryptocurrency and added crypto address listings to Gravatar early on. They’ve also been extensively interested in new ways to monetize hosted WordPress.com blogs as the team has had trouble launching a successful WordAds network.WordPress powers more than 30% of the internet, and is at the core of great content creation.WordPress powers more than 30% of the internet, and it’s just one of the many products at Automattic, it’s a handful and it’s not clear that it’s something Matt is ready to step away from.Founder of King.com: King.com is the undisputed leader in cross-platform games. But, the game monetization industry is getting hard and harder due to the walled-gardens of Apple, Facebook and Google. Kin is the perfect fit in solving this.Thomas Hartwig is lord of cross-platform games, with hundreds of millions of users world-wide using King.com built games, there may not be a greater adoption play.Even though game monetization is a tough business, King.com is historically quite good at it and may not be yet feeling the pressure to change their tactics.Co-Founder of Tumblr, Instapaper and Overcast. Influential app developer and podcaster.: Marco hasn’t been active in a major project recently, but, he has a deep interest in content creation, mobile applications, monetization and content discovery. A number of his posts on marco.org seem to echo sentiments of Kin’s philosophy.Marco is influential in the developer space and could really help drive adoption among app developers. But, perhaps more importantly, Marco has deep relationships with a number of major content discovery platforms and understands the nuances of the publishing space.Marco is quite self-sufficient living off of marco.org and his Overcast app. It seems he has really found his passion and is living the good live. Pretty hard to give that up. [adace-ad id=”2530″]Brian Wong is the Founder of Kiip, a rewards platform that works with major brands.: Canadian entrepreneur in the rewards space.Brian Wong is not only an incredible entrepreneur who knows how to move quickly, but, he also has deep connections to top marketing executives at major brands and millions of users to bring to the table. The fit would be mutually beneficial both for Kin and Kiip.Unlike a number of other companies, Kiip isn’t hurting. In fact it’s thriving. It doesn’t really have any need to do anything different. While it may make a calculated risk to grow to the next level, it’s a bit of a harder sell.Led Rivingston is the secret clone of Kik CEO Ted Livingston.: 2% secret sauce much?A powerful army of Ted Livingstons can descend on the blockchain world, being in all places at once and securing every partnership.I can’t think of any good reason!While we don’t think it will be an entrepreneur who is quite at this level we think it’s important for us to not get too stuck on any single individual. The goal of this article was to show there are hundreds, if not thousands, of great candidates who even if they aren’t the most well known mega-successful entrepreneurs, they still have unique skill sets to bring to the table that can help take Kin to the next level.