Ted Livingston

Livingston's billion-dollar chat app, Kik, first became popular with teens who liked not having to tie usernames to phone numbers. Last year Livingston, a longtime Bitcoin-phile, jumped on the “initial coin offering” bandwagon and held a token sale that raised about $100 million. Now he intends to form an alliance with other similarly positioned startups around his self-minted crypto tokens, dubbed Kin. His gambit aims to land on a non-advertising based business model that can compete against—or at least co-exist with—that 800-pound gorilla named Facebook.