Titan Industries and its flagship mining optimization software only recently came out of stealth mode, but its history has deeper roots – going back years. Titan’s CEO Ryan Condron and CTO Kyle Howlett met at California Baptist University (CBU), where Titan’s story really begins.

From 2012 to 2014, Ryan and Kyle worked together in the Information Technology Services (ITS) Department of CBU. They quickly became friends, sharing many interests as technophiles and enterprising minds.

Taking walks behind the department stores close to campus during their breaks (Target and Kohls were favorites), Ryan and Kyle discussed the latest tech and how to best engage in these new ecosystems and opportunities.

The two learned about cryptocurrency mining and the emerging technology, Bitcoin. While Ryan was initially skeptical (he even thought that it could be a Chinese government scheme to break the SHA256 hashing algorithm), Kyle was immediately intrigued.

Eventually, their conversations gravitated to this new world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology almost exclusively – especially mining. Less hesitant now, Ryan wanted to be a part of this new ecosystem. Both Kyle and Ryan were soon mining cryptocurrencies.

The two learned that mining (and choosing what to mine) was no easy task. Profit and mining power maximization required deep consideration and significant research. Squeezing the most out of their rigs quickly became the main topic of discussion during their walks.

As a result, they built programs and aggregated data for themselves to decide what to mine, where, and how – to great success. Realizing that this information was valuable, they built the CoinWarz and the now-shuttered PoolWarz sites as a way to share and pool knowledge on mining profitability by coin and device. These highly trafficked sites demonstrated a demand for crypto-mining knowledge and, more importantly, mining software optimization.

Ryan pitched Titan to Bloq co-founders Matthew Roszak and Jeff Garzik as a potential BloqLabs portfolio project. Since then, the Titan team has grown and has been developing in stealth mode with a target Q3 public beta.

We have a long way to go, but we’re very excited about where we are with Titan. See you at Consensus.

Phil Gomes is chief communications officer of Bloq and an advisor to Titan. He is not above exploiting the latter capacity if it means escaping the Chicago winters for Titan’s Inland Empire, California, HQ.