CLOUT’s Seasoned Management Team Includes Original Ripple Founder

Picking an initial coin offering (ICO) to invest in can be tough. There are so many startups looking for seed capital that identifying the most promising is a daunting task. Couple this with the fact that the ICO space is littered with scams and pitfalls and the task becomes seemingly insurmountable.

There is a surefire way to get ahead of the crowd and maximize the chances of backing a winner, however, and that’s by looking for a strong team being in place to drive whatever product or service is being created.

To put this another way, no ICO is going to be risk-free but a great team has a much higher chance of making a mediocre product or service a success than a weak team has of doing the same with even the best product. You can minimize risk, therefore, by backing the team as opposed to the product.

Take this one step further, and you can stack the deck further in your favor by picking a great team with a great product.

We’ve been on the lookout for exactly this combination and one company has caught our attention – Clout.

Clout is a decentralized media platform designed to allow content creators to produce and distribute news and information surrounding the cryptocurrency and blockchain spaces and, in parallel, get rewarded for the content they create. It’s a sort of social media, content aggregator hybrid and, with Clout, the team behind the platform is trying to provide a single, reliable and consistently high-quality destination for both content creators and content consumers in this space – something that, right now, doesn’t exist.

Clout is about to conduct an ICO at which investors can buy Clout tokens and, concurrently, will be awarded CLC tokens on a one-for-one basis. The CLC tokens are the currency that will drive user interaction with the platform, with CLC holders being able to reward content creators in CLC based on the quality of the content in question.

It is a neat model and the white paper is available here for anybody wanting to dig into the platform in a little more detail but, as we’ve said, our focus right now is squarely on the team that is pushing to bring this platform to fruition.

The team in question includes members representing 13 different countries globally, each of which is highly accomplished and has extensive experience with blockchain technology and high growth startups.

Clout’s CEO is David Cohen. Cohen is known in the space for being a member of the IOTA Foundation during the IOTA Token Cryptocurrency launch. Many reading might already be familiar with this launch but, for those that aren’t, it broke all previous records by reaching a $1.7 billion market capitalization on its first day of trading. Cohen is also a well-established and respected speaker at numerous big-name events and venues, including MIT, TEDx, Consensus and Blockchain 100X.

If you want to bring a product like Clout to market quickly and effectively you need a strong CEO and Cohen looks to fill that role perfectly. This is something that many of the currently ongoing ICOs fall short on and, in turn, is something that sets Clout apart from some of its peers in the space right now.

Clout’s Chief Advisor is another familiar name – Ryan Fugger.

Fugger founded the Ripple project back in 2004 that subsequently merged with OpenCoin in 2012 to form Ripple Inc. (XRP). Bill Gates of Microsoft just announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is set to use Ripple Inter Ledger technology in a mobile payment system that is designed to make financial transactions within easier for the poor and unbanked.

Fugger’s value here is primarily rooted in the network of contacts that he brings to Clout going forward. This space, as it stands, is all about reputation and Fugger is one of the most well-known and most respected people in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space as a whole, both from an operational execution standpoint and from one of technological implementation.

The four co-founders are Sean Kirtz, Frank Lucido, Dean James and Simon Josef. Each of these brings with him a wealth of experience in blockchain technology, marketing in the sector and entrepreneurial execution.

The company intends to raise $32 million by way of its ICO, which is set to kick off on October 27, 2017. The platform should be in Beta by March 20, 2018, which is an aggressive but, looking at the caliber of the team behind the product, a very much achievable, goal.

The bottom line here is that as an ICO participant you are always going to need to take on a degree of risk but one of the best ways to limit this risk is to look for individuals that can make key contributions to startup development.

With the guy behind the IOTA launch and the guy behind Ripple onboard, it’s tough to see Clout going too far wrong.