Aaron McDonald

Aaron McDonald is a 20+ year technology industry veteran and serial entrepreneur with experience managing portfolios with over $1B in revenue. Aaron has long been an innovator with his eye on the future – from leading the market in telecommunications to now leading innovation in Web3. Aaron is the founder of multiple metaverse companies developed independently, but now rolled up under one umbrella entity, an open metaverse powerhouse, Futureverse.

As Co-Founder of Futureverse, Co-Founder Centrality, General Partner at NetX ventures and D64 Ventures, Co-Founder of Non-Fungible Labs and Co-Founder of Altered State Machine, McDonald is responsible for some of today’s largest NFT collections and most innovative blockchain and Web3 technology. In 2019, Aaron was named Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year and recognized by IDG as one of the Top 50 Technology Leaders.

Aaron’s quest for knowledge and democratization of the web acted as his north star as he led teams to install broadband throughout his home country, New Zealand in the early 2010s. After reaching the role of Senior Network Architect, Aaron’s thirst for holistically understanding the technology space led him to roles in Continuous Improvement, Product Development and Product Marketing, where he continued to better the customer experience, leading him to a position in Portfolio Management where he eventually ended up running a $1 billion dollar telecommunications and IT infrastructure portfolio. A skilled problem solver, Aaron began to focus his energy on start-up companies, and eventually went on to start his own venture studio Centrality in 2016.

Aaron’s interest in Blockchain technology began in 2015, (‘just as a nerd’) – but he soon doubled down on Web3 - where he found the next big problem to solve: “How do we get this technology in the hands of everyday users? How do we make the process of using this technology invisible to users so that we can get to mass adoption?”

He focused largely at first on different applications as the funnel for users, until in 2020 when it became clear that content was going to be the user funnel – when the Web3 community grew significantly and became alive through NFTs. Aaron quickly founded Non-Fungible Labs and Altered State Machine to focus on building content funnels that would bring users into the infrastructure that he had already built.

Aaron had a vision many years ago that has come to life: a group of start-up companies working together and cross-pollinating, making each other more resilient and working toward a larger goal. That’s what’s happening now, and that is how Futureverse was born.