Women in Blockchain Panel

Event Recap

On Monday, October 25th, the NEU Blockchain Organization hosted Maryanne Morrow, Caroline Dennis, Lynne Marlor, and Kristin Michaud. We discussed topics specific to the blockchain industry, women-specific, and of course advice for students. Scroll down for Recap

PLEASE REACH OUT TO SPEAKERS ABOUT JOB AND INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITIES

Resources mentioned:

1. Blockchain and Crypto Resources (make sure to thank Caroline!)
2. Surprising effects of gender bias and its impact on venture financing
3. Boston Blockchain Association Events

Recording:

JOIN US NEXT TIME

For more resources about future events join our community: https://linktr.ee/NEUBlockchain

Contact us: neublockchaingroup@gmail.com

Speakers & Intros:

Caroline Dennis

• Create and design careers that don’t suck
• Started in higher education and museum fundraising
• Built 2 companies in IT & Services
• Discovered crypto through volunteering at DefCon
• Impressed by the idea of the technology — the idea of transparency and fairness
• Help students and professionals visualize what blockchain and crypto careers look like and leverage connections and contacts
• Strategic Connections

Maryanne Marrow

• 29 years of experience in capital markets and traditional finance
• Capital markets operate in a very primitive way — systems are manual and surprising lack of technology advanced and antiquated methods
• Can fundamentally change the way that finance works with blockchain technology and solve a lot of these problems
• Focusing on FX, many of the systems are still working off things created in the 70s

Lynne Marlor

• Started her career in banking school and went into a consulting group at the bank
• Ran the asset management group at the BNY Mellon
• 2016 BNY Mellon was very involved in BK Coin

Kristen Michaud

• Biology degree
• Worked at IBM and GE Capital
• Run the InBlocks program

What made you make the switch?

• Thrived in the environment of hands-on working at a project
• Really about at a career inflection of doing something different
• The smaller company provides the opportunity to actually run a business
• Encourage you to think about what excites you

What areas in blockchain are you most excited about?

• Very excited about crypto and interested in an ETF
• Crypto is a very much a belief system, but when you come from traditional finance there are so many problems and it’s exciting to see crypto becoming an institutional play
• On the verge of this enormous adoption that is going to be a tidal wave
• Only thing that’s disappointing is that it was designed at first that everyone is going to get a piece of action and now it’s being captured by existing elites
• Would like to see more crypto on company balance sheets
• Medicine and research and creating a situation where individuals have self-sovereignty
• Existing system is set up where patients have very little control of their information
• NFTs and Digital Scarcity and what kind of ways people can apply these characteristics
• Interplay between these industries, such as the XR space and crypto, music + NFTs, and incentivization of talent communities
• Blockchain and DLT is a protocol for trust
• If the problem can be solved with blockchain — then great, but don’t apply crypto/blockchain for everything
• Off-ramp and on-ramps still have a tremendous amount of work to be done
• Boss beauties NFT on twitter
• Being able to eliminate the clean-up efforts on the cost of sending a transaction
• Taking something that takes 48 hours and condensing it down to 55 seconds (9th gear) — eliminates a ton of the back office clean-up
• Transparency and linkage of the asset

Building Strong Communities:

So many incredible communities that are filled with allies and women

• The bigger pie
• Global women blockchain

Smoke & Mirrors

• Everyone is learning
• Doesn’t matter when you started, but everyone is still learning
• Find people who are willing to teach and mentor

All about the people

• Ask for what you need and make what you need to be known
• Women raise 1.7% the amount that men raise
• We’re here to help the next generation of folks
• Future is women running these companies and more collaboration
• Remember to help and give back!

Advice For Students:

Go outward in communities and do not treat this as a cookie-cutter process

• Participating in meetups
• Volunteering on projects
• Getting engaged in communities

Companies today are incredible learning resources

• Many of these platforms have free resources and sessions, tap into that
• Being Hungry
• Constantly believe in yourself
• Wake up early, get and do something
• Take risks
• Follow people
• Do the work
• Network!

What risk do you see for the asset class?

• Risk is given to the shareholders, but lower the overall risk and capital requirements because of the efficiency and quickness (9th gear)

Biggest bottleneck:

• Women are uncomfortable in finance
• Fear factor or maybe it’s out of their comfort zone

How to encourage/support women:

• Ask what do others think
• Bring friends and talented people into the field
• Have them reach out to others — set up mentors

Next Steps:

• Accelerated learning
• Bootcamps
• Be nuanced in your learning
• Learn python and solidity — take a basic class

Written by Bennett Thompson and David Hsu