Michael Terpin
Founder & CEO
Michael Terpin is founder and CEO of Transform Group, whose divisions include Transform PR, a global public relations firm that has served more than 200 clients in the blockchain field and helped launch more than 100 ICO’s, including Aion, Aeternity, Augur, Bancor, Dent, Ethereum, Factom, Golem, Gnosis, Lisk, MaidSafe, Neo, Qtum, SALT Lending, VideoCoin, and WAX Token; CoinAgenda , an event series for cryptocurrency investors, and Transform Strategies, the company’s advisory division. Transform Group International, LLC, is headquartered in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with offices in Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, New York, Toronto, and Denver. The Firm is also a partner in TokenMatch, the leading investor matching event series, presented across Asia, Europe and North America, 12-18 times a year.
Terpin also co-founded BitAngels, the world’s first angel network for digital currency startups, in May 2013, and he is co-founder of Aspire, a new asset creation blockchain platform scheduled to do its token generation event in 2018. Previously, Terpin founded Marketwire, one of the world’s largest company newswires, which was acquired in 2006 and later sold to NASDAQ for $200 million. He also co-founded Direct IPO, one of the earliest equity crowdfunding companies, and founded his first PR firm, The Terpin Group, which represented many of the early Internet leaders, including America Online, Earthlink, Match.com and the Motley Fool, as well as serving as AOR for divisions of Alpine, Fujitsu, JBL, Kawai, Konami, Playboy and TEAC. The Terpin Group was sold in 2000 to Financial Dynamics, now part of FTI Consulting (NYSE: FCN), the same year he received venture funding from Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad for Marketwired’s predecessor, InternetWire.
Terpin holds an MFA from SUNY at Buffalo and dual BA in journalism and English from Syracuse University, where he serves on the board of advisors at the top-ranked Newhouse School of Public Communications. Terpin is also an investor and advisor to many blockchain, media and technology companies, including Aion, Alpha Networks, Polymath, Purse.io, ShapeShift, VideoCoin and WAX. He is a general partner and heads up the ICO investment committee in Alphabit Fund (www.alphabit.fund), a Cayman Island registered digital currency fund with $400 million assets under management and a first-year return on investment of more than 750 percent. He is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but spends much of the year traveling to the Firm’s other offices, as well as conferences and speaking appearances worldwide.