Team Bios

Xavier Hawk, Founder and CEO

Entrepreneur, block chain expert, permaculture design expert, currency design consultant, speaker, artist, and humanitarian.

Selected Experience

William Knox, Co-Founder and Vice Chairman

Educationalist, entrepreneur, and humanist, William worked alongside Xavier during the formation of Permacredits and Hermes Global Partners sharing Xavier’s passion and helping to shape the vision of the Phireon Corporation.

Selected Experience

After reading an English MA at the University of Aberdeen, William has had an extensive career in Education and Educational Management in the UK and abroad that includes national oil companies, banks and various governmental and non-governmental organisations.  His interest in education and the future applications of technology prompted him into founding one of the earliest virtual language schools in 2011. His expertise progressed into international educational projects with NGOs through his involvement with Carfax Education, which led to an interest in human systems and the role future technology will play in defining the human story. William supports several charitable organisations, most notably The Friends of Hilary Storm, a sustainability cooperative in Uganda.

Erik Wesley, Chief Operating Officer

Erik is an entrepreneur, strategic management consultant, logistics consultant and investment adviser representative.

Selected Experience

After finishing his degree in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany, Erik operated within the consultancy sector in Shanghai prompting him to found the strategic management and sourcing firm as well as Cast Steel Solutions in 2012, before moving into investment consultancy and portfolio management in 2016.

Nate Wolfe, Head of Design

Nate Wolfe is a seasoned design professional with a robust background in visual media and company branding. His vision and eye for detail has been in constant demand for nearly a decade by top name clients, and his expertise in designing the Phireon website is demonstrative of the quality of his work.  Nate oversees and creates the Phireon branding, and will head up the company’s creative department after launch.

Anfisa Bashkirova, Head of Business Development

Anfisa has built extensive project management career in Oil & Gas, IT, Finance and Educational projects internationally. Her wealth of operations and finance experience, combined with proficient project management techniques are offered to ensure Phireon’s ICO is well executed. Looking forward, Anfisa will oversee Phireon’s portfolio of investment projects along with  other members of the Board. Currently Anfisa is also a candidate in the MSc Major Programme Management programme at the University of Oxford Said Business School.

Gelyana Garyaeva, Governance & Compliance Officer

Experienced corporate para-legal and compliance specialist, Gelyana is leading Phireon’s efforts in risk management, compliance and governance. In the future she will continue overseeing the  legal formation, contracts and legal risks mitigation.  Gelyana has an LLP Bachelor of Law with Honours, Oxford Brookes University.

Bernard Lietaer, Chief Advisor

Civil engineer, economist, author and professor, Bernard studies and has written the definitive book on monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Bernard Lietaer, the author of The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity and New Money for a New World, has been active in the realm of money systems for close to 40 years in a wide variety of functions. With the publication of his post-graduate thesis at MIT in 1971[1] (which included a description of “floating exchanges”) and the Nixon Shock of that same year which eradicated the Bretton Woods system by unhinging the US dollar value from its gold standard and inaugurated the new era of universal floating exchanges (previous to that time the only “floating exchanges” involved some exotic currencies in Latin America), the fledgling management consultant suddenly found himself to be at the center of the financial world’s attention.[citation needed] The techniques that he had developed for those marginal Latin American currencies were overnight the only systematic research which could be used to deal with all of the major currencies of the world. A major US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach which required that he begin another career.[2] While at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium) he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries. Source:  Wikipedia October 2017.

Bernard plays a key role assisting Phireon with the white paper, the architecture of the currency, the governance, and commons structure of Phireon.

Alex Lightman, Investment Portfolio Advisor

Alex Lightman is an entrepreneur, speaker, and futurist with over two million words in print about the future. He is chief strategist for Passport Cities $300 M+ ICO and an advisor to several current and near future ICOs; including, Guardian Circle’s Guardium $30 M+ ICO, Phireon Global Partners $60 M+ ICO, and to the $100 M+ Science Incubator ICO.

Lightman is the recipient of four global technology awards, including the first Economist magazine Reader’s Award, and has written national innovation plans and technology transition plans for the US and Mexican governments and NATO. He has been one of the most highly rated mentors for Founder Institute in the world (“Global 100”) and qualified as a director, after six 16 week startup creation programs, each of which launched over a dozen companies.

He is an MIT graduate and attended graduate school at Harvard’s School of Government, and is the author of the first book on 4G and co-author of 2016 Amazon best-seller in seven categories, Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane.

Alex also plays a key role assisting Phireon with the white paper, the architecture of the currency, the governance, and commons structure of Phireon.

David Orban, Product Advisor

Founder & Managing Partner at Network Society Ventures, Advisor to the Board. David is an experiences investor into disruptive technology companies, driven by the 8 Pillars of Change: Energy, Manufacturing, Food, Health, Learning, Finance, Security, Policymaking. His expertise lies in the mechanics of marketing, sales development, localization and globalization.  the global technology landscape, applying cycles of accelerating technological change to the needs of high-growth organizations. David was also one of the key players in the Blockchain space’s 1^st ICOs. Considered by many to be the godfather of ICOs and blockchain token architecture, David is one of the key figures in the Token Sale world with the experience and business relationships to facilitate Token Sale Events of the highest calibre. He also has a deep understanding of the needs and mechanics of both product marketing, sales development, localization, and globalization. Leading teams excel under the pressures of competitive business conditions.

David is a key advisor on the Phireon board helping to define the structure and strategy in taking Phireon to its token share.

Robert Dermody, Software Advisor

Robert has 18+ years of professional experience with software design/development, systems administration, sales, operations, professional services and entrepreneurship and was the co-founder of Counterparty, the world’s first decentralized, peer-to-peer financial platform. Robert was also the architect and principal technical resource behind Cisco’s Remote Silent Monitoring product, which is shipped with every copy of Cisco’s flagship Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE), product suite sold, and in use by a number of Fortune 100 companies.

Robert also founded a call monitoring and recording product in use by clients such as Nestle Waters, as well as PoundZero, a contact center-mobile integration product in use by companies such as Samsung. As a contact center specialist, developed speech and support applications in use at Echostar, SEIU, Bed Bath and Beyond, Earthlink, Volvo, Sungard, several banks & the FAA.

Possessing software development experience in varied fields such as contact center, crypto currencies, DSP, game development, big data, and business computing. Specialties include Cisco Contact Center (13+ years), Cryptocurrencies, Web technologies, Linux devops, administration and security (16+ years), distributed systems, TCP/IP networking, voice technologies (SIP, PCM, G.&xx, TTS/ASR, etc), SQL and NoSQL, Robert is an invaluable asset to the advisement team at Phireon Global Partners.

Karen Korponai, Delegate and Representative Advisor

Karen is a business development and marketing professional who works with companies interested in making a difference via international development or socially responsible projects. Her motto is “Promote the paradigm– People, Planet and Profits.” With a business career spanning 17+ years, she has held marketing and management positions with Fortune 500 companies, medium size companies and family owned businesses including management positions in global businesses for celebrity brands such as George Foreman, the family of Bob Marley and Akon. She is an MBA graduate of the Thunderbird American Graduate School of International Business and is bilingual English and Spanish.

Most recently, Karen has played a strategic role in the business planning and marketing of the Akon Lighting Africa initiative bringing solar energy solutions to over 1 million rural households in 17 countries. Strategic partnerships fostered by Karen led to the first “made in Africa” solar street light assembly plant in Mali and to donating solar street lights to the Red Crescent and UAE Royal family initiative to support Syrian refugees in the Mrajeeb Al Fhood Camp in Jordan.

Karen’s professional skills derive from developing business plans and executing marketing strategies to grow businesses, and identifying strategic partners. Career highlights include:  planning and executing the communications strategies for the Guinean Presidency at events such as the World Economic Forum  in Davos, Mining Indaba Africa and researched country branding. Karen was a founding member of House of Marley leadership team and launched the brand in 33 countries in 3 years. Responsibilities included developing and executing a marketing plan/budget, overseeing external agency relationships as well as managing over 10 yearly conferences with the goal, to create a better world and spread Bob Marley’s vision through earth-friendly products. She was also a founding member of the 1Love.org charity and in collaboration with Little Kids Rock raised over $800k for music programmes for children. Karen played a strategic role in growing an Oster brand category division sales by 50%placing the U.S. brand as #1 in that category. Other highlights include publishing an export document through the Stanford Research Institute presented to government officials in Egypt, and a black belt Six-Sigma certification leading to over US$500k company savings and patenting two product designs.