A year and a half after moving out to Los Angeles, Dave Liebowitz went from recent college grad to an integral part of an ambitious startup that recently made national headlines for raising $30 million. Liebowitz is an Executive Editor and Founding Team Member of Everipedia, a two-and-a-half-year-old website that aims to disrupt Wikipedia, not only with cutting through Wikipedia’s notorious bureaucratic red-tape, but by moving the encyclopedia to the blockchain. Alongside his work at Everipedia, Liebowitz also runs the website Bitcoin for Plebs where he writes pieces demystifying cryptocurrencies to the masses, in addition to publishing interviews with prominent people in blockchain.
But before his cross-country move to Los Angeles and recent good fortune, Dave was a kid from North Jersey. Commenting on his early life, “I grew up in a Jewish household. I wouldn’t say we were that religious but my parents instilled in my sister and I good values such as humility and respecting others. I attended Hebrew school, had a Bar Mitzvah, went to sleepaway camp for a bit, and celebrated the high holidays with my family.”
In high school, Liebowitz was a successful athlete, being captain of his football team and winning the state championship in shot put. But there was more to him than just his athletic feats: “I’ve always been an extremely curious person and in my high school years, I found myself going down rabbit holes on the internet. I’ve always been particularly interested in the news, music, and politics, and would consume information about anything ranging from the life story of my favorite artist to the latest updates in a Presidential election year.”
While attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Liebowitz decided to study what he was passionate about, majoring in political science and minoring in history and philosophy. It was during this time that Liebowitz transformed from a consumer of information to a producer of it.
“I really honed my writing skills down in college. By the time it was late in my junior year, I had enough inspiration and confidence in myself to start my blog, Frequency of the Unknown.” The website, or “FOTU” as he called it, became Dave’s public journal for his thoughts about politics, philosophy, and his own personal experiences. He grew a small but dedicated following of readers. Commenting about his blog, “I wrote pretty consistently until the end of college. For me, the best part about writing was how people would come up to me saying that my writing inspired them to take action in their lives. I couldn’t believe it.”
It was right after graduating college that Dave discovered Mahbod Moghadam’s status about looking for interns for Everipedia. He took advantage of the opportunity and eventually earned the graces of the Everipedia team members to be invited to work full-time.
“For me during that summer, I had the mindset: Everipedia or bust. I did everything I could to get myself out there.” Liebowitz has been living and working at the Everipedia HQ since September 2016 and assumes a number of responsibilities ranging from trying to find breaking news stories to researching “evergreen” content (Everipedia pages that have repeat visitors over a long period of time). In addition, he is the mastermind behind the Everipedia+ service where people hire him to make pages about themselves and their business. “Not everyone has time to make their own pages and I have the experience to conform to the standards of Everipedia. The people I work with are always very pleased with the final result.”
If one thing is clear, it’s that Everipedia is a culmination of what Dave has been doing throughout his life; he applied the values his parents taught him, followed the “rabbit holes” he went through in high school, and continued to perfect his writing ability as he did in college to be a part of one of the most exciting projects in the blockchain space.
“The future is definitely bright for Everipedia” he says, and continues by stating that “information is always evolving, there are always new things being revealed about people and subjects. To that respect, Everipedia will become the most efficient arbitrators of consensus of that information when it moves to the blockchain. In a world of fake news, now more than ever we need an immutable source of content that people can trust and Everipedia is leading the way to do just that.”
