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BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen Has Left the Company (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bram Cohen, a co-founder of BitTorrent, the company which oversees the development of eponymous P2P protocol, has left its board, he told TorrentFreak. The revelation comes weeks after the file-sharing service provider said it had been acquired by blockchain startup Tron. It remains unclear exactly when Cohen, who also served as a lead engineer at the firm for years, made the decision to part ways with the company. He hinted to TechCrunch last year that, as of August, he was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. The departure of Cohen underscores BitTorrent's long battle to find a lucrative business model. The company, the services of which are used by more than 100 million customers, has long struggled to find new applications of its platform and avenues to bring home some cash. In 2016, the company announced a mobile music and video streaming service [called] BitTorrent Now, which it abruptly shut down months later while also firing its co-CEOs. Last year, the company shut down its much hyped live streaming service BitTorrent Live, which Variety described as a brainchild of Cohen.
'Quasi-influential' might be overstating it.
BitTorrent (the company) was not responsible for BitTorrent (the protocol). It was founded two years after the protocol was solid and most (if not all) further development of the protocol came from the community and third-party BT clients.
The company was founded by Cohen and some guy with an Indian name, presumably to monetise the BitTorrent name. Apparently they succeeded, since they amassed enough money to buy uTorrent and launch a good handful of services. But they don't hold (and never have held) any influence in the BitTorrent community.
(Bram Cohen wrote the original BitTorrent client in Python.)