Clubs & Associations

Sam Borghese has designed and taught eight courses inside the Master of Quantitative Economics program at UCLA. Over the last two years, Borghese has developed and taught graduate courses in the fields of machine learning in finance and cloud computing, and he taught the first blockchain course in the economics department. 

After starting a mock fund with the former chief economist of Soros Fund. Borghese founded his own crypto hedge fund in 2022. In the first six months, he yielded +40% net of fees for his investors. The hedge fund employs machine learning–driven trading developed by Borghese himself. 

While simultaneously running the fund and being a full-time lecturer and director at UCLA, Borghese also advises several blockchain companies. One of these companies is Raze Fintech, which offers an SEC-compliant way to tokenize equity and gross revenue share of private companies. Others include a physical Web3 gaming console, VC funds and discretionary trading funds.

Alex Nascimento (’08) is a serial entrepreneur and founding partner of 7CC Blockchain Investments and 7Visions LATAM Digital. Nascimento is also a faculty member and co-founder of Blockchain at UCLA, where he lectures on blockchain business applications and security tokens. Additionally, he is the bestselling author of The STO Financial Revolution, a textbook uncovering regulated and compliant fundraising via blockchain. He received his MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and has developed training, marketing and blockchain strategies for companies in the United States, EU, Latin America and Asia. Nascimento speaks at major global blockchain conferences and corporate events to demystify securities issuance, business applications and investments in blockchain technology for corporate leaders, students and entrepreneurs.

Alex Simons is the head of consumer marketing at OpenSea, where he leads the team that looks after brand campaigns, social media, partner marketing and web editorial. Prior to OpenSea, Simons led social and editorial for Calm. Before joining the world of startups, he spent five years at Netflix, where he helped launch titles like “The Defenders,” “Narcos: Mexico” and “The Umbrella Academy,” and initiatives including Netflix Is a Joke and Netflix Geeked. In 2019, he was transferred to Netflix's Tokyo office, where he spent 18 months building and developing the region's social and editorial team.

Simons lives in Los Angeles with his partner, Andy, and their two cats, Appa and Calbee. You can find him pretty much everywhere @alexjsimons.

Benjamin Tsai, the president and managing partner at Wave Financial, is a trilingual financial executive with 15 years of proven success in developing global investment solutions for institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds and high-net-worth clients. Tsai has managed profitable teams in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei, and served as CEO of Merrill Lynch Singapore Commodities. Subsequently, at AllianceBernstein, he served as senior portfolio manager for the alternative investments business across Asia. In addition to his work at Wave Financial, he invests in and mentors early-stage startups in Southern California. He holds a B.S. in engineering from UC Berkeley and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he is currently teaching crypto finance.

Clark Read is building crypto products and services for institutions as VP of the Prime business at Gemini. Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies. Before joining Gemini in early 2021, Read was head of trading and portfolio Risk at ShapeShift, a cryptocurrency market-making firm and holistic digital asset platform. Previously, he traded currencies and other macro products at various Wall Street firms in New York and Singapore.

Fabrice Cheng is the co-founder, CEO and CTO at Quadrata. Cheng was previously the head of blockchain technology at Spring Labs. He is an experienced technologist and has been building on top of the Ethereum ecosystem since 2016. He received his MS and B.S. in computer science from EPITA: Ecole d’Ingénieurs en Informatique (France).

Artis “Jarrod” Jenkins is a senior policy leader who advises tech platforms on how to protect against bad actors. He began his career as a federal law clerk and litigator, but since 2015, he has been on the policy teams at Airbnb, Facebook, Clubhouse and now OpenSea, where he serves as the director of content and moderation policy. As a sneakerhead, he stumbled into Web3 after learning about Nike’s acquisition of RTFKT in December 2021.

When he’s not writing the rules about what behaviors should or should not be allowed, Jenkins enters sneaker raffles; plays chess; listens to indie R&B, jazz and funk; and spends time with his wife and daughter. He is a native of Atlanta, but after spending six years in the Bay Area, he now calls Los Angeles home.

Jason Huan is a graduate of the UCLA Engineering School's Computer Science department, having co-founded the club Blockchain at UCLA during his time as an undergrad. While in school, he co-founded Frax Finance, currently the 5th-largest stablecoin in circulation with a market capitalization of $1.0 billion dollars. His background is in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance.

Jonas Simanavicius is a highly accomplished technology leader and an expert in various fields, including blockchain technologies, finance, DeFi, entrepreneurship and internet technologies. Simanavicius received his degree, with honors, in computer science with management from Edinburgh University and began his career in investment banking at the Royal Bank of Scotland and JP Morgan, where he worked on exotic derivative products and in trading technology teams focusing on securitized products.

Simanavicius is a co-founder and the CTO of Syntropy, a blockchain and internet technology company. Over the past five-plus years, he raised over $10 million in funding, grew a team of more than 30 people and supporting community of over 20,000 people and secured large enterprise customers and partnerships. Syntropy's decentralized technologies aim to bring the power and control of internet routing to the people and the next generation of app developers. The protocol has a utility token that reached a market capitalization of over $800 million in 2021.

Simanavicius has led teams to launch several blockchains and blockchain-based solutions and a publicly tradeable utility token, holds patents for his work on a distributed autonomous internet routing protocol and is a pioneer in decentralization and the global internet infrastructure. He is well versed in the subjects of Web3 and tokenomics, has appeared on numerous Web3 podcasts and has been featured in Forbes, on Yahoo and on other media outlets.

Layne Nadeau is a technology thought leader who has delivered large-scale technology initiatives for over 20 years. Nadeau uses his hands-on experience in blockchain, digital assets and institutional finance to create and lead teams executing ambitious technology and business projects in the space.                                                       

Nadeau has led multimillion-dollar initiatives in retail banking, investment banking, blockchain and digital asset industries, as well as U.S. state governments, the British Columbia public sector, commercial and retail automotive services providers, public utilities, transportation operators, professional associations and universities. Recently, he was part of the leadership team that successfully executed a $76 million project to replace the book of record system for an investment bank with over $300 billion in assets under management, with investments spanning all major asset classes.                       

Nadeau has a bachelor’s degree in math and computer science and is genuinely excited about digital asset markets, ecosystems and technologies, and he is continuously researching new ways to apply them.

Nadeau is a father to three girls, a husband, an avid cyclist, a sailor, a brewer, a world traveler and an NFT/DeFi degen. 

Lisa Yu is a venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur, startup coach, podcast host, speaker, musician and DJ. Yu is actively advising and investing in blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, dApps, the metaverse and all things Web3. She is an expert go-to-market strategist for Web3 startups, NFT launches and token sales.

Yu is the founding general partner at Oria Capital, a female-led VC fund investing in early-stage Web3 startups. She also hosts “The DAO Factor,” a podcast about leaders of decentralized autonomous organizations, and is the creator of Queens of Crypto (QXO), teaching women all about crypto and NFTs. She is also a community builder and hosts regular Web3 events, pitch competitions, live concerts, tech conferences and networking events.

Yu has been featured in LA Weekly, Forbes, Yahoo Finance and Crypto Today, and shipped award-winning tech featured in The Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She has spoken at SXSW, StartupGrind, CoinAgenda, Web3 Expo, NFT San Francisco, NFTCON, Miami NFT Week, NFT-VIP, Chainlink's Women Disrupting Web3 Panel, FEMTech, International Women's Day, Unit Venture's Global Unconference, Draper University, IVY: The Social University, Digital Lifestyle Conference, HERStories, a conversation with Women in Tech & Entertainment and many more. She is an advocate for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.