Head of Product · Founder · Blockchain & Cryptography · Machine Learning & AI

Doug von Kohorn

Product leader, founder, and engineer with 10+ years shipping products at the intersection of blockchain, DeFi, machine learning, and quantitative investing. Four company exits. Yale-trained computer scientist. Comfortable from whitepaper to acquisition.

Current Focus

Doug is currently building and learning across LLM tooling, agents, evaluation, fine-tuning, and local inference. Since December 2025 he has been shipping PodwiseGPT, a conversational RAG layer for podcasts with transcription, per-episode embeddings, and multilingual chat with timestamped quotes.

Most recently he advised Hashgraph / Hedera on product strategy across the protocol surface area, including HTS, smart contracts, EVM compatibility, consensus, SDKs, mirror nodes, and asset tokenization, translating ecosystem and institutional needs into roadmap priorities.

Selected Work

Thesis · Head of Product, Project Lead

2021–2023 · Remote

Doug led product for Threshold Network and tBTC, a fully decentralized BTC bridge to Ethereum and broader DeFi now securing 6,000+ BTC. He helped ship the first on-chain merger of two live protocols, built and managed a cross-functional team across five time zones, raised more than $8M in grants and ecosystem funding, and contributed to six live years with zero security incidents.

Rhombus · Co-Founder & CEO

2017–2021 · New York / Remote

At Rhombus, Doug built a high-throughput oracle engine that tethered real-world data to smart contracts, scaled the business to multi-year SaaS contracts with ConsenSys and MakerDAO, and negotiated the company's acquisition by Chainlink Labs, where Rhombus IP informed Proof-of-Reserve work.

ConsenSys · VP of Product

2016–2019 · Brooklyn / Remote

Doug incubated Rhombus inside ConsenSys and owned product across institutional Ethereum tools including Infura and Alethio analytics, helping grow adoption from zero to more than 65,000 weekly active developers while authoring the modular-oracle whitepaper that became a broader Web3 data blueprint.

Earlier Exits

2012–2016 · New York, Boston, and Remote

Earlier, Doug co-founded v2 Ratings, an ML-driven quantitative investment data platform acquired by Xynon; founded Occom, later acquired by Originate; and helped build JobCompass, which was later sold. He also served as Director of Engineering at Collective Decision Engines, building a quadratic-voting market research product alongside Glen Weyl, Eric Posner, and Kevin Slavin.

Capabilities

Product & leadership: product strategy, roadmapping, OKRs, hiring, cross-functional team building, fundraising, go-to-market, and public speaking.

Blockchain & crypto: Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hedera / HTS, threshold and MPC cryptography, oracle networks, token economics, DAO governance, and tokenization / RWAs.

AI & engineering: LLMs and RAG, Python, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Rust, Go, Solidity, TypeScript, AWS, and GCP.

Education & Speaking

Doug holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. His published work includes the co-authored paper Quadratic Voting in the Wild: Real People, Real Votes, and he spoke at ETHDenver 2022 about lessons from the Threshold DAO merge.