Biography

Jonathan Manzi Biography, Age, Wiki, Business Success

Jonathan Manzi (born 23 January 1991, Beverly, Massachusetts) is an American tech entrepreneur. He is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Beyond Protocol, a distributed ledger technology company based in Silicon Valley. Manzi is also co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Ink Labs, Inc, provider of on-demand printing kiosks.

Manzi, a global expert in frontier technology, describes himself as “an agnostic, skeptic turned Christian based on evidence.”

Jonathan Manzi founds Vintage Network, making history as it grows into a multi-million-dollar company

Manzi started what would become his first multi-million-dollar company, Vintage Network, an internet advertising company, at age 15. By age 16, Manzi had attained a net worth in excess of $1 million. This made him the youngest person in history to hit this milestone as an entrepreneur.

In 2006, Vintage Network became the parent company of V-Bux, an incentive marketing and lead generation company built on a referral model. V-Bux users are rewarded with free, popular consumer electronics in exchange for trying out the products and services of third-party advertisers. In return, the brands, which include Netflix and Visa, gained quality leads, exposure, and the opportunity to reach a young generation of possibly future loyal customers.

In 2008, V-Bux announced it was shipping $1 million worth of rewards to its college student user base. In that same year, V-Bux had in excess of $3.2 million in revenue.

After V-Bux, Manzi also started Vintacore, a cost-per advertising company, as a part of the Vintage Network family. Vintage Network grew to 18 employees, 7 of them full-time. It also had 2 offices in Massachusetts, close to Boston.

Jonathan Manzi attended Stanford University

Manzi attended Stanford University where he studied Management Science & Engineering and Philosophy. During his time as an undergraduate at Stanford, he served as Chair of Entrepreneurship University and co-founded a non-profit for youth entrepreneurship.

His mentor and advisor while at Stanford was David Hornik, lecturer and general partner at August Capital. Hornik has placed Manzi among the set of Stanford students whom he describes as entrepreneurial athletes with an addiction to company building.

Manzi co-founded Ink and dropped out of Stanford University

In 2014, while he was still attending Stanford University, Manzi co-founded Ink Labs, Inc with fellow entrepreneur and technology expert Dennis Benic. The company is the provider of ink SmartStations and inkTouch – kiosks that make use of empathetic technology for on-demand digital printing.

ink SmartStations work solely with HP devices, thanks to a partnership between ink and that information technology giant. inkTouch, on the other hand, connects with any other brand of device. According to Manzi, the vision for ink was to use modern technology “to create an evolved version of FedEx Kinko’s.”

By 2017, ink had raised a total of $15 million from investors and advisors. The growing company, now with 25 employees, moved from California to Nebraska in 2017. Manzi opted to drop out of Stanford and work full time on ink Labs. The company formed partnerships with several universities and used the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus for pilot-testing of its product.

Beyond Protocol, “a new internet of devices,” is co-founded by Manzi

Manzi co-founded Beyond Protocol in 2018, along with its current Chief Technology Officer, Dennis Benic, and technologist and business executive Gurvinder Ahluwalia.

The Beyond Protocol platform is described by Manzi as “a new internet of devices.” It aims to make inter-device communication and collaboration safer by making devices unhackable with its IoT-Blockchain technology. The interconnectivity that Beyond Protocol provides has been likened by Manzi to “an octopus” and “a router.”

Manzi revealed in 2021, that Beyond Protocol had a private sale pricing that placed its market capitalization at $100 million. While plans are in place for a public listing of Beyond Protocol, the company has and will continue to offer its native token up for sale as a way to fund the project and seed its cryptocurrency before listing.

Three of Beyond Protocol’s several advisors are:

Brian Forde (Sr. White House Advisor to President Obama; Co-Founder of Digital Media Initiative, MIT Media Lab)
Brian Weinstein (President/COO, Bad Robot)
Anoop Nannra (Global Blockchain Practice Leader at Amazon; Formerly Global Head of Blockchain, Cisco)

Jonathan Manzi has been described as preparing to change “every major industry” with Beyond Protocol. The company has chosen several avenues to showcase the capabilities of its platform at secure cross-industry linking of devices and information. Among them is a partnership with NFL player Rob Gronkowski, tight end for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

In a 4 September 2021 livestream event, Beyond Protocol showed how it securely stores biometric information it has gathered about Gronkowski to come up with his requirements for optimal nutrition and supplements, delivered by third-party actor DoorDash. The event served as a use case example combining the health, sport, and technology sectors.