Andrew Masanto

Andrew Jonathan Masanto (born May 17, 1982) is an American entrepreneur, business magnate, former lawyer and collaborative artist. Regarded as one of the most prolific founders in the Web3 industry, he started two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (Reserve (2019) and Hedera Hashgraph (2017)) and in 2021 founded Nillion. Outside of web3, Masanto started Higher Click advertising agency (exited in 2012), Petlab Co (the fastest growing pet company in the USA), and was recognized as one of the top marketers in the world, having guest lectured at Columbia, Harvard, MIT and Oxford Universities. The cryptocurrencies and companies Masanto started had a combined fully diluted market cap of as high as $35 billion in 2021. As both an artist and art collector, he and his brother, Christopher Masanto, together own some of the most significant NFT pieces in existence, including an Ether Rock, one of 10 rarest Bored Apes and Right Click Save As by XCOPY (bought in partnership with Snoop Dog / Cozomo de Medici for $7m in 2021). Masanto creates art as founder of the ANONA art collaborative, which has released several award-winning works of art, videos and songs that trended across several countries.

Before his emergence as an entrepreneur, Masanto studied two of Australia’s premiere degrees - a Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws - from The University of Sydney. After graduating with First Class Honors and Dean’s List in both degrees, Masanto moved to London where he worked as a lawyer for Linklaters (a “Magic Circle” British law firm). There, he performed legal work for entrepreneurial clients who inspired him to start the Higher Click Marketing Agency. Higher Click was eventually sold to Growth Pulse for an undisclosed amount. Soon after, Masanto was recognized as one of the top digital marketers in the world by several major affiliate networks.

In 2014, at the age of 31, Masanto retired from business to attend ICON Collective music school in Burbank, California, where he graduated as one of the top three students. During the final semester of music school in 2015, Masanto and two fellow collaborators won the ICON Collective award for best collaboration project for their work, Renegades. The experience inspired Masanto to write a thesis on collaborative music which eventually formed the basis behind the ANONA Manifesto. The manifesto kickstarted an international art collaboration during the coronavirus pandemic as artists were unable to work together in-person, so instead collaborated online, and became the theological underpinning of the ANONA movement. The art of the ANONA movement has received widespread critical acclaim. Masanto participates in unusual pastimes, such as training as a Monk with Ananda Marga in Africa, Wim Hof training in Finland, unorthodox biohacking retreats in the USA, camping in the Sahara Desert and Burning Man. He is also renown for hosting exclusive parties and dinners in New York and London, which are attended by well-known tastemakers, founders and celebrity guests. Masanto maintains that his greatest professional achievement has been the success of his employees, mentees, friends and investors, many of whom became first-time multi-millionaires after joining his enterprises.

Early Life and Education

Masanto was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and moved to Australia at two years old. He attended high school at Christian Brothers Lewisham, but due to issues with racism, bullying and physical abuse from teachers, subsequently moved to St Patrick’s College, Strathfield.

In his senior year at St Patrick’s College, Masanto was a finalist in the NSW Catholic Schools Chess Competition, won the state championship (1st place) at the NSW Catholic Schools Public Speaking Competition and was voted in as Vice Captain of the school.

After achieving a near perfect score on Australia’s Higher School Certificate university entrance exams, Masanto attended the University of Sydney to complete a five-year program, with dual/combined degrees in Business and Law.

While at University, Masanto’s talent was recognized by several faculty members and he was offered teaching positions whilst still an undergraduate, a highly unusual situation. He became one of the youngest tutors ever at the University of Sydney and continues the tradition of teaching at the University of Sydney via guest lectures. During his time at college, Masanto was also awarded several scholarships, including the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program / Scholarship, the MITSUI Scholarship and the HSBC Singapore scholarship and founded the Students In Free Enterprise society. He graduated from Commerce in 2003 and Law in 2005, achieving First-Class Honors and Dean’s List in both degrees.

After graduating from University (and before moving to London), Masanto traveled to Africa to apprentice as a trainee monk under the tutelage of Dada Shivesh, an Ananda Marga monk, while participating in humanitarian work at Namaskar School in rural Ghana, Ejura. Shortly after he was inducted as a monk by Dada Shivesh, Masanto contracted Malaria, and was forced to travel to London to recover.

Career

2006 - 2008: Legal Career

Immediately upon graduating from university, Masanto briefly worked at Rothschild as an investment banking analyst in Sydney. Masanto quit Rothschild soon thereafter due to a distaste for patriarchal investment banking culture, work and lifestyle and, after several months studying under a monk in Africa, accepted a job as a lawyer in the UK with Linklaters in London.

2008 - 2014: Digital Marketing, Altitude Shoes and Higher Click

While working at Linklaters, Masanto became disillusioned with the corporate world, which he dubbed ‘the matrix’. He consequently attempted a series of side hustles (including a night club promotions company and selling online versions of Frogger) to explore alternative ways to make money.  

Masanto’s first successful endeavor was “Altitude Shoes”, a direct-to-consumer website which sold elevator shoes. While building Altitude Shoes, ex-colleagues and students from his law school ridiculed Masanto’s efforts and he came close to bankruptcy several times.

Due to the success of Altitude Shoes online, friends and associates began to seek Masanto’s help on digital marketing. In response, in late 2008, Masanto formed an SEO and PPC advertising agency called Higher Click, which over time attracted significant clients such as Atari, Athlon Sports and Macy’s. In late 2011, Masanto sold his shares in Higher Click to his partners and sold Altitude Shoes to uCommerz, both for undisclosed amounts. He then pivoted to running a small affiliate marketing team and between 2011 and 2014, became regarded as one of the world's top digital marketers.

In 2014/2015, Masanto retired from digital marketing and assisted his brother in co-founding several direct to consumer brands in the UK . In 2018, they launched America’s fastest growing pet company - PetLab Co.

2014 - 2017: Artistic Career and ANONA

Following success in digital marketing, Masanto retired from business to non-commercial pursuits. Having played piano and guitar while growing up, Masanto enrolled as a full-time student at ICON Collective music school in Burbank, California in 2015. During this time, he also performed as a DJ at various clubs in Los Angeles.Masanto graduated second in his class at ICON Collective and won the award for best collaborative music project with two of his classmates for their work, Renegades. The success of the collaboration led Masanto to write his thesis on the optimization of art via collaboration, which formed the basis of the ANONA (ANONA stands for “Art-Non-Artist”) Manifesto. The artistic works created by ANONA typically attempt to provoke critical discussion on social norms. ANONA’s music video, Not Enough, starring Lee Rodriguez and Pokey Spears, provided commentary on social standards of physical attractiveness, by painting a world where natural beauty is ‘Not Enough’, but ugliness is. Similarly, ANONA’s artwork entitled Melt, featuring Aliya Protto from the US gymnastics team, was an award winning abstract dance which highlighted the experience of losing oneself in an abusive relationship. As the global lockdown period came to an end, ANONA collaborators released an anarchic collaboration piece designed to challenge COVID 19-lockdowns, depicted by it’s defiant party theme and lyrics “fuck your rules” (in direct commentary/relation to lockdown rules), featuring Amber Frank and Joy Corrigan.

2017 - Present: Tech, Web3 and Latest Endeavors

Hedera Hashgraph (2017)

In 2016, Masanto moved to New York City. Having invested in Bitcoin in 2011, Masanto had an early interest in blockchain technology and became excited about the idea of decentralized protocols controlled by everyday people, as opposed to traditional companies.

In 2017, Masanto connected with Mance Harmon and Leemon Baird from Swirlds and together, they started Hedera Hashgraph.

Leemon Baird, Co-Founder of Swirlds, had developed the Hashgraph algorithm in 2013. However, the technology had limited traction / interest from the wider market until Masanto became involved in 2017, being utilized only as a pilot/test in a private implementation for credit unions up to that point.

Masanto discovered Swirlds whilst browsing AngelList. He initiated an outreach through a mutual business contact to Hashgraph inventor, Dr Leemon Baird, and Swirlds CEO Mance Harmon. After a few months of discussions, they agreed to start a public ledger together. Several months later, Hedera Hashgraph LLC was incorporated.

Masanto evangelized and recruited most of the Founding Team of Hedera - Alex Godwin, Daniel Francis, Kyle Armor, Jordan Fried, Tom Trowbridge and Kelvin Soh, who coined the name “Hedera”. Masanto also notably developed and orchestrated the “Blockchain is Dead” narrative which became a key theme of a marque talk by Hashgraph founders at the Assemblage and then in Squawker Magazine. While this approach caused considerable controversy, the Squawker Magazine article was shared over 20,000 times and the narrative jettisoned the technology into the limelight. Within a year of Masanto’s involvement, Masanto and the Founding Team of Hedera Hashgraph was invited to present at Techcrunch and Hedera raised $100m at a $6b valuation.

Hedera eventually became the most energy efficient distributed ledger technology and a top 30 global crypto currency. Masanto was subsequently recognized for his achievement in popularizing Hashgraph by Columbia University, who invited him as a guest lecturer on the topic of “How to Build a Crypto Unicorn”.

Reserve (2018)

Following the rapid success of Hashgraph after Masanto’s involvement, Masanto was introduced to Nevin Freeman, CEO of Reserve, by Alex Klokus (Founder and GP of SALT Fund and Futurism). Masanto and Freeman had independently considered the potential to build an algorithmic stablecoin that could become a decentralized stable source of value that protected against inflation. Masanto was excited by the Zero To One nature of the concept and agreed to launch the protocol with Nevin, as Founding Chief Marketing Officer. Masanto also co-authored an industry leading report called “State of Stablecoins” in 2019. He and Nevin Freeman are considered leading authorities on the topic of stablecoins, with both having previously questioned the legitimacy of algorithmic stablecoin approaches and predicted the Terra Luna crash of 2022. PetLab Co (2018) In 2019, Masanto and his brother, Christopher Masanto, launched PetLab Co. The inspiration behind PetLab Co was ‘Crystal’ - Masanto and his brothers childhood Labrador who lived to 18 years old. Both Christopher and Andrew Masanto drew inspiration from their time with Crystal and expertise from their previous business experience, to rapidly transform PetLab Co. into the fastest growing pet health company in the world, as reported by Entrepreneur Magazine. The success and rapid growth of PetLab Co. has been documented in several leading business publications.

Nillion (2021)

In 2018, Masanto was introduced to Dr Miguel de Vega, the now Chief Scientist and Inventor of Nillion by Venture Capitalists Lucy Wang from Divergent Capital and Johnny Steindorff from Distributed Global.

Between 2018 and 2021, De Vega presented Masanto with several computing innovations in Zero Knowledge Proof, but Masanto declined the invitation to become directly involved. Masanto states that while he acknowledged De Vega’s genius as an inventor, his earlier inventions did not have the groundbreaking implications that Masanto looked for in projects. “I was only interested in projects with industry-disrupting, world changing potential” Masanto stated. However, in early 2021, De Vega developed, and approached Masanto with, a new mathematical innovation called Nil Message Compute. Similar to the role Masanto played for Reserve and Hedera Hashgraph, Masanto began to develop and execute the Nillion go-to-market, fundraising and hiring strategy. He notably brought together founding team members including:

• CEO (Alex Page, ex-Goldman Sachs)
• CTO (Conrad Whelan, the ex-Founding Engineer of Uber)
• Founding Chief Business Officer (Slava Rubin, the ex-Founder of Indiegogo)
• General Counsel (Lindsay Cohen, ex Coinbase)
• Founding Chief Marketing Officer (Andrew Yeoh, ex UBS)
• Founding Head of Ecosystem (Mark McDermott, ex-Head of Partnership Innovations at Nike)
• Founding Head of Crypto (Tristan Litre, ex-CTO of Aqru)

All of the above key team members, and many more, were brought into Nillion by Masanto. He is thus largely credited with bringing on the initial Nillion team, similar to what he did for Hedera Hashgraph.

Masanto also drove the initial fundraising, marketing, PR, business development and community building and was deeply involved with protocol design. The momentum gained from this initial push created significant interest in Nillion. The company was invited to present at Soho House (in London and New York), Oxford University, Cambridge University, Columbia University and many other institutions. It achieved third place in the Coinagenda new project award, was one of the top 5 projects selected out of hundreds to join the coveted Coinlist Seed program and has been featured in many leading publications including CoinList, Business Insider and Cointelegraph.

Biohacking and Longevity Leadership

Masanto started and runs biohackinggroup.com, a group of over 10,000 members interested in biohacking, longevity and non-traditional medicine. He has written marquee articles on concussion, COVID19, sleep and other topics which have largely driven the growth of the community. Masanto has hosted health, longevity and biohacking themed dinners attended by the likes of Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Durek Verett / Shaman Durek, Oz Garcia,, Conor Russomanna and many others in the longevity space. He was a guest on the Ben Greenfield podcast, was written about in the best selling Dave Asprey’s book “Game Changers” and is an advisor to Hudson Wellness in New York City. He is reputed to privately run one of the world’s most elite longevity chat groups, which includes some of the world's top scientists, researchers and practitioners in the longevity space.

Personal Life and Philosophy

Masanto currently lives between London and New York. ​In his best selling book, “Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators, and Mavericks Do to Win at Life”, Dave Asprey states “Andrew invited me to a dinner party hosted at his hip $20 million SoHo penthouse... I had no idea that the "dinner with a few friends" would turn out to be a gathering of incredibly powerful, successful, and influential people from across New York's industries…” Masanto’s dinners and parties have been attended by the Founders of web2 and web3 companies such as Opensea, Axie Infinity, Sushiswap, Yield Guild Games, PleasrDAO, CoinList, Cosmos, The Block, Artsy, Watermelon Water, Casper and many others. Influencers who attended included Gmoney, Coin-Artist, Sisyphus, Christine Lee, Jim Kwik, Dave Asprey, Joy Corrigan, Larry Dvoskin, Tom Bilyeu, Jordan Belfort and many others.

External Links

Andrew Masanto on Instagram

Andrew Masanto on CrunchBase

Andrew Masanto on LinkedIn

Andrew Masanto on Twitter

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