Julien Genestoux

CTO

New York, New York, United States24 yrs 4 mos experience
Highly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Built two profitable start-ups, sold one to Medium.
  • Led the first in-home COVID vaccination effort.
  • Pioneered a decentralized business model for content creators.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and Fintech expert with a strong focus on decentralized technologies.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Decentralized Autonomous OrganizationsEthereum

Other Skills

Business StrategyEntrepreneurshipStart-upsWeb DevelopmentInvestmentsVenture CapitalE-commerceSocial NetworkingCloud ComputingWeb ApplicationsSoftware DevelopmentStart-upSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)EngineeringComputer Science

About

Unlock is my most ambitious professional endeavor. We are building a better business model for the web, based on memberships, rather than attention. I am an entrepreneur (built 2 profitable start-ups, sold of them to https://medium.com), an unconditional web advocate, and a hacker. French living in New York. Husband and father of 3.

Experience

24 yrs 4 mos
Total Experience
3 yrs 5 mos
Average Tenure
1 yr 1 mo
Current Experience

Relay

2 roles

Head of Engineering

Promoted

Dec 2025Present · 5 mos · New York, United States

  • Leading the engineering team at Relay.

VP of Protocol Engineering

Apr 2025Dec 2025 · 8 mos · New York, United States

  • Lead the protocol team who is building the decentralized infrastructure powering Relay.

The graph

Council Member

Apr 2023Present · 3 yrs 1 mo

  • The Graph Council governs technical upgrades and the community treasury to support The Graph protocol development and ecosystem growth.
Decentralized Autonomous OrganizationsEthereumBusiness Strategy

Ro

Staff Software Engineer II

Jul 2020May 2021 · 10 mos · New York, New York, United States · Hybrid

  • As a Staff Software Engineer, I was working on both the front-end and back-end stacks of multiple web applications.
  • Refactored authentication flows across several applications.
  • Added support for Google Auth
  • Added support for 2-factor Authentication to mitigate credential leakage threats
  • Starting in February 2021, I was the tech lead for Ro's world-first in-home vaccination effort. As part of this role, I Iead the tech team, as well as data-science engineers, to design and implement a process that enabled licensed nurses to perform in-home COVID vaccination for people at risk.
  • architected the system based on user stories and business and regulatory constraints
  • lead the development of backend and front-end components
  • designed the processes to identify the shortest path between patients
  • analyzed data after each daily vaccination campaign
  • https://ro.co/press/ro-covid-19-in-home-vaccination/

Unlock inc

Founder, CEO

Feb 2018Apr 2025 · 7 yrs 2 mos · Greater New York City Area

  • Unlock is building the web's new business model by enabling new ways for creators to monetize their content through their decentralized, access control protocol.
  • We are a team of 5 full-time engineers, we received early-stage funding from top tier VC (General Catalyst, Cherry Venture) and we are building our company in the open to help fix the web's unhealthy business model while empowering creators.

Gimlet media

Advisor

Sep 2017Feb 2019 · 1 yr 5 mos · Greater New York City Area

  • Gimlet Gimlet Media is the award-winning narrative podcasting company that aims to help listeners better understand the world and each other. Gimlet was founded in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Gimlet podcasts are downloaded millions of times per month by listeners all over the world.
  • Gimlet Media was acquired by Spotify.

Medium.com

Lead Engineer

Feb 2016Feb 2018 · 2 yrs · Greater New York City Area

  • I joined Medium after the sale of Superfeedr. I joined the NYC office at Medium's Lead Engineer.
  • There I worked on several critical projects:
  • Syndication: adoption of Facebook's Instant Articles, and Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages, as well as extensive support for RSS feeds.
  • SEO: Benchmarked Medium's search performance, implemented good practices (sitemaps, deep linking, semantic markup...). In 6 months, traffic went from about 5% to 40%. In 2017, SEO was the single largest contributor to Medium's growth of traffic and engagement.
  • Cryptocurrencies: researched and designed economic models to incentivize and reward positive usage of the platform.

W3c

Invited Expert

Jan 2016Jan 2018 · 2 yrs

  • Co-Authored the WebSub specification, as part of the Social Web Working Group.
  • WebSub provides a common mechanism for communication between publishers of any kind of Web content and their subscribers, based on HTTP web hooks. Subscription requests are relayed through hubs, which validate and verify the request. Hubs then distribute new and updated content to subscribers when it becomes available.

Real time conf europe

Organiser and MC

Nov 2012Apr 2013 · 5 mos · Lyon, France

  • Organized, curated and presented the first Realtime Conference in Europe.
  • The Realtime Conference is a conference dedicated to realtime web technologies, including HTTP streaming, XMPP, WebSub, WebRTC, WebSockets, Event Streams...
  • The conference gathered 150 participants in Lyon France from all over the world, with sponsorships from Azure, Google, Mandrill (Mailchimp), Mozilla and more.

Notifixious inc. (superfeedr)

CEO and Founder

Nov 2009Feb 2016 · 6 yrs 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • Superfeedr is the leading RSS feed API for both Subscribers and Publishers. Customers include IFTTT, about.me, Etsy, Medium and more.
  • I designed and implemented a complex distributed architecture, able to parse thousands of feeds per second as well as cache their content in real-time.
  • In June 2016, Superfeedr was acquired by Medium.

Bnp paribas

Junior Associate Leverage Finance

Jan 2007May 2008 · 1 yr 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

  • I worked in the leverage buyout team in San Francisco. We syndicated debt (new investments and restructuring ) for buyouts of companies in various sectors, with EBITDA ranging from $20 million to $80 million.

Sgam private equity (société générale)

Analyst

Mar 2006Nov 2006 · 8 mos · Paris Area, France

  • I joined the Venture Capital team. That team receives a deal flow of 600 companies per year. I studied their business plans as well as performed market studies, due diligence and wrote investment memos.
  • Actively participated in a Series A round (€3m) in a leading French e-commerce platform.

Jobetudiant

Founder, President

Jan 2002Jan 2010 · 8 yrs · Lyon Area, France

  • I created Jobetudiant, the leading job board for students in France when I was still in school. It started as a "side project" but within 6 months, thanks to great SEO, we started to receive job offers from very large multinationals.
  • This "sealed" my love of the open web: a platform where a student could create a business with no prior-experience or backing, without requiring anyone's permission.
  • Jobetudiant (fully bootstrapped) is currently reaching the 20 year mark, has more than 1M students registered and hosts job offers from SMEs and vary large international corporations (McDonalds, H&M, Yum, Ikea...)

Education

INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon

Diplôme d'ingénieur — Computer Science

Jan 2002Jan 2005

ESSEC Business School

Mastère Spécialisé

Jan 2005Jan 2006

Illinois Institute of Technology

Master Of Science — Computer Science

Jan 2004Jan 2005

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