Leadership
Josef Marc leads the Publica team. Although he didn’t originate the Publica idea in its earliest form, he volunteered to write the white paper that thought it through to its logical ends, and decided to help bring it to fruition.
His experience leading teams in the launch of DirecTV, 500 channels of fully-automated digital satellite television, and the launch of Verizon FIOS TV, national cable television on a telephone system backbone, prepared him for Publica because we too are launching something that hasn’t been done before. Also part technology, part operations, marshalling hundreds of people in multimillion-dollar budgets, in the public eye.
He’s helped startup companies to reach healthy success before. He co-founded Archimedia Technology, acquired by GrayMeta. At Front Porch Digital, acquired by Oracle, he designed systems and operations that preserved and made digitally accessible the ten-year videotaped history of the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. At SAMMA Systems he worked closely with the United States Library of Congress NAVCC technical and operations teams. His first technology job was in a startup that was acquired by Sony to form its broadcast systems integration company in what the media calls an aquihire today.
At Sony he managed teams building two Olympics broadcast centers for CBS, several Jumbotron control rooms including New York Times Square, and innovative entertainment and interactive television systems for Celebrity Cruises “cyberships.” We can take systems like those for granted today but somebody had to do them the first time.
He’s comfortable with technology on the leading edge, learning it and explaining it so others can understand it from their own perspectives. As a longtime member of the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) he authored four technical papers, presented them to critical audiences at SMPTE’s annual conventions, and contributed steadily to standards committees.
Josef’s first career was in music and that’s when he first learned how publishing and self-publishing work. He and a partner wrote, recorded, printed, sold and shipped their own music on vinyl records until the manager of The Police, a superstar group, signed them to a publishing deal for his company. He’s a constant reader, always interested in the economics of publishing. He studied in the pre-law curriculum at the University of San Diego.
A pioneer in Bitcoin trading technology and systems, Yuri Pimenov knows the blockchain revolution extremely well. His experience as the head of research & development for Latvia’s top brand and most popular website besides Google led him through the technical challenges in machine learning, robotics, and high-load Internet technologies. Yuri is one of the few industry professionals who can be counted on to connect a grand vision with a real-life technical solution.
Yuri is a longtime contributor to the blockchain community with his blog and his Russian translation of the seminal book "Mastering Blockchain" by Andreas Antonopoulos. Before Publica, he was the CTO of a leading Bitcoin exchange. Other work experience includes peer-to-peer lending platform development, a national email server, automated magazine publishing, and Internet radio.
Yuri earned his Master’s Degree at Riga Technical University.
The blockchain revolution and its demand for experienced high-quality services is sure to grow exponentially and that’s where Antons Sapriko comes in. Antons grew a company of two people to a hundred times that size and an industry leader serving the very top retail companies. He brings highly adaptive and growth-oriented business management strategies into Publica’s fold.
Antons is responsible for operational management in Publica. His experience leading Scandiweb from a local agency to becoming the largest ecommerce services provider on the Magento platform will help Publica take care of business. He will bootstrap Publica’s roles for marketing, HR, development, quality assurance, creative infrastructure, and technology services for all Internet-connected platforms.
Publica benefits from Antons’ experience in setting up workflows for enterprise-grade delivery to Walmart, Jaguar, Land Rover, The New York Times, Peugeot and many other brands and startups since 2003.
Antons started his contribution to the blockchain revolution in 2014 leading a series of workshops explaining to the Scandiweb team how the Bitcoin blockchain works. Blockchain-related workshops and practice sessions led to go-live projects and they continue to this day. As of this writing, in July 2017 he and his teams built and launched successful smart contracts and blockchain apps for the launch of large-scale Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) for $25 and $30 millions led by USA-based Element Group.
Antons comes from a technology background. His father made the first-ever dial-up connection in his country in 1986. Antons learned to code at 14 and won top places in Math Olympiads on the national level. He earned a Bachelor degree in Business Administration at Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, a top-20 business school and started Master of Science at the IT University of Copenhagen.
PBL Smart Contract
