The track record
- 2006: founded YourSports and built it to 4 million connected sports, interest, and place networks.
- 2013: bought his first Bitcoin.
- 2014: an early buyer in the Ethereum pre-sale. Founded Data4America. Business Insider named him one of "The 55 Unknown Rock Stars in Tech, According to Marc Andreessen."
- 2015: founded Footprint, his venture lab, where a chat system for franchises and chains became work on zero-fee settlement and led to STORE.
- 2016: ran his first vote built to hold even if some voters cheat.
- 2017: founded STORE Research Inc.
- 2020: STORE began governing real decisions. Today 126 governors in 30+ countries have governed it over 2,200+ days, with zero breaks of the one-third rule.
- 2024 and 2025: he built the Hilander Hall of Fame in Kelso, Washington, to keep a promise to his great-uncle Kirby McCoy: "do something great for the kids of Kelso." Running it fairly took the same rules, so it also became a test network for them with people. Its elected trustee board adopted them with 97.22% approval, and the community has voted under them since: 60 voters, then 187.
Why governance matters to capital
The most important question in computing right now is not what AI can do. It is who holds the switch.
Most networks concentrate as they grow: the more users they add, the more value flows to whoever runs the center. STORE was designed so that growth runs the other way. With a one-third ceiling and two-thirds for the biggest decisions, with at least a third of governors taking part, the network gets harder to capture as it grows. STORE grew 21 times, and the largest share any governor holds fell from 16.7% to 0.8%.
Some of this is still open research:
- Can human governors govern the computing underneath AI?
- Can the one-third rule hold as the network grows, at a million governors the way it holds at 126?
- Can people stay in charge of decisions made at machine speed?
STORE Research is working on all three, with a live record to test against.
Two US patents granted (US 11,080,691 B2 and US 12,165,142 B2), with 36 granted claims. 160+ invention disclosures in development.
The investment thesis
Real estate taught him to look for every asset's highest and best use.
In 2019 and 2020, he negotiated for a 227-acre parcel at the I-5 and Highway 432 interchange in Kelso, Washington, the largest undeveloped site between Portland and Seattle.
- The seller: the Segale family. Mario Segale, the family patriarch, is the man Nintendo named Mario after.
- The bid: his $7 million bid was accepted. The week before signing, he was outbid at $14 million.
- What happened next: Trammell Crow Company built a 1,185,327-square-foot warehouse on 82 acres of the site, finished in December 2024. It sat empty for more than a year. In February 2026, Amazon announced it would lease it.
His framework for places like Kelso is simple: hire here, pay less; leave, pay more.
Enrico Fermi did not try to stop the chain reaction. He designed the control rods that let it be sustained, directed, and made useful. AI is already a fast-growing chain reaction. STORE Research is building the rods. McCoy Ventures invests in the inputs that reaction needs, and in companies that keep it directed, not just fast.
Trusted America is his research proposal to apply the same math to national economic policy. It is a sibling of STORE, built on the same math (named, not identical), not a STORE product.
Background
McCoy grew up in Kelso, Washington, and was elected Washington DECA State Parliamentarian, then State President, then, at 18, National DECA President (2001-2002). He put his spot on the University of Washington baseball team on hold to serve, then pitched for the Huskies. He graduated from the University of Washington, where he studied technology entrepreneurship and commercial real estate development. He is a second cousin three times removed of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962).