Women in Crypto

She-Fi is a crypto educational initiative that focuses on education, experimentation, and community.?

Maggie Love is a Founder of SheFi , where she reimagines and builds new business and societal models with blockchain for inclusiveness, interconnectedness and resilience. She’s passionate about doing meaningful work, positively impacting and empowering others, constantly learning, and connecting people, ideas and technology together for a common good. She is also Co-Founder and Director at W3BCLOUD .?

We dive into her journey into crypto, how to get other women involved, and what she thinks the future looks like.

Eve #WealthWednesday Highlight #26: Maggie Love, Founder - SheFi

What was your first investment?

For my first, I put money in Compound . I did a bunch of trades on Uniswap . I opened the vault on Maker. Right. I like to include all the steps, like step one, step two. SheFi also was a way for me to have confidence and do the things I'm telling women to take a chance on. So, yeah, Compound was my first. So that was like my first buy, and I was like, oh, that was actually pretty easy. And it gets automatic. Show me right away. The number goes up. I mean, it might be small, but it still goes off.

How/why did you get into your space?

I have been in the crypto scene since 2016, but at that time I was at IBM, doing lots in financial services stuff. I was in a meeting and this one guy kept talking about blockchain and I was like, “Wow, he won't stop talking about it. Like maybe I should go learn more about this thing. He seems super excited.” And I had, truly, no idea. You know, at large corporations, they just talk about blockchain. So I went and picked up the book called The Blockchain Revolution at Barnes and Noble with another coworker, which is by OG crypto people. I was like, “Wow, there's this whole new technology we can have global remittances and fixed supply chain and inefficiencies and financial markets,” which was an area I was super interested in. What I knew, then it struck a chord with me. Because I was focused on building products for banking thinking processes. So a suite of products that help banks do better data analysis. And it just wasn't really motivating me. I was just trying to do blockchain at IBM, and there was too much red tape, which ended up being a good thing. As I was Googling crypto, crypto, how do you blockchain, all this stuff, I found someone on LinkedIn who had went to university with a bunch of my friends, asked my friend to introduce me to him. We got a coffee outside of the Consensys office in Spring 2017. And then, I went into this Consensys office and it was a flattened Bushwick and everybody was friendly and it was the opposite of corporate America. And I was like, oh my gosh, I have to work here. Just on the way it looks alone. It felt like a much needed change. And I could just tell something was happening there. So. Joined Consensys in 2017. And I've done a couple of different things in that ecosystem. I'd worked on a couple other fun things like Solarius, which was a collaborative science fiction storytelling universe, because I still really do believe storytelling is a big part of onboarding the global human population to Web3. I'm still a big believer in that, but didn't quite make it through $80 ETH. And then kind of around 2019 was when DeFi really started popping up. I just kept hearing people playing with it. I was looking around the Consensys office and I just noticed a lot of guys were sitting there and that Consensys was a very male dominated company. And these men were putting in money into a compound and like getting 11% return. That wasn't really my focus, but I was like, wait, this should be my focus because one of the reasons, I guess I should touch back on why, like really got into crypto.?

I realized, because I hadn't gone into finance, I felt like I was a gatekept out of a lot of conversations that my male peers were having. And they were talking about money all the time. And I was like, I can't believe I'm excluded from that opportunity because I decided to not take that path after college. You start and you make that initial bond with your incoming banking class. Then you go onto the hedge fund or you go to this firm and you still all talk. And so all of a sudden, for the rest of your life, you're talking about money and talking about making money. And I felt that I myself and a lot of women weren't having those conversations at all. Crypto is exciting because it was this idea that, especially with Ethereum, anybody could invest in it and we are going to decentralize finance and decentralize access to it and knowledge about it. I felt so empowered by joining Consensys and purchasing this asset. And no one having any red tape around it. I could immediately see the value and use case of owning an asset that you want to keep building on. So that was really why I was excited about it. And I was really excited about my own financial literacy and my own risk-taking literacy. What I saw as possible with crypto didn't come to fruition until 2019 and DeFi started becoming a thing. When DeFi was coming out, I was like, oh, this is why I got into this space anyway, like this whole financial empowerment piece. Beyond just buying tokens. And so I was wanting to get myself into it.?

What role do you play in the wealth space and why is it important?

A friend at Consensys mentioned a bunch of the men did the NCAA bracket, which is the basketball game where they all put money in a pot and they choose a team to win and whoever’s team wins gets the money. All the men had put all the holdings into a compound until the bracket was over because they realized they were going to lose that money anyway, likely. So if compounds had had a bug it's no big deal - only one person was getting the money anyway. This didn't come up in the context of SheFi but I was like, that's a genius idea. Like find a way to get people comfortable playing with money, or taking a risk with money that they're not going to get back. So I just left that conversation, which had nothing to do with SheFi necessarily, cause SheFi wasn’t an idea yet. Like the summer, late summer of 2019, I was like, what could I do anyways from that conversation? I'm a big runner. I like getting outside and just listening to music and I thought of the name SheFi. And I was like, oh shoot, I really have to do this now. Just put together, like my initial pitch on it and what I want to do, which was to get women experimenting with money and being okay losing a bit of money. It's evolved a lot. So even that initial model is not great, but it was just like maybe at the end of the cohort, we all donate money to like an organization that also empowers women. Because you weren't going to get the money back anyway. So maybe now you'll put it in a DeFi protocol.?

I just started creating content. And then I launched it in April 2020, which was right after lockdown had happened. And we realized that this is a global pandemic and I felt a lot of ways about it. Like, is this the right time? Like money is such a difficult topic for many of the people, but also why I got into crypto was this financial alternative to wealth building into financial empowerment. I just wanted to make sure that people knew there were options and especially for women, that there's more options. And I have this great insight and knowledge of this whole network, and I always want to give whatever I have access to. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to announce that I'm doing this thing. I announced that there's other ways that I can be investing assets or learning about how to navigate this new crypto world. Did a bit of a pilot program with just some women in crypto already to see like, am I good at this? I know how to curate information and give you something to take away within an hour versus you keep putting that article on your to-do list. I think it just sort of grew organically from there.

Onboarded my first public cohort in October, November of 2020, and then another one in Spring of 2021 and then one this last fall. And so it just keeps growing and changing, but we keep that focus on onboarding, being able to ask questions. Like almost like being in the crypto trenches with you, because I also didn't really have that. When I first joined Consensys there wasn't really a strong goal, like while I could easily access Ethereum, I was still afraid to ask about Metamask. Like, am I allowed to ask about that? And so I think a lot of people feel that way. And so I just wanted to be that person that you could ask any question to. I'm a big believer in carving out time to do something like via a meeting or something. I really liked meeting highlights, having deadlines. I like having in person stuff. And like, I just used that to shape SheFi. So that's like my journey and why I got into it. And then like why I felt very moved to do something like SheFi, I think it's phenomenal that we have a whole new industry cropped up around democratizing finance in a new way. You could be anybody from anywhere. So it made a lot of sense to me to make sure that more people that aren't the first people to find tech had an opportunity to grow their wealth as well.??

What do you believe is the most exciting thing you’ve learned and want others to know?

For me, it always comes back to the idea that we can always keep learning.

\We get into a specific job role or we go into a work vertical. And we think "That's all I can do", even though we read new books all the time. We read the news. We take in new information. We learn new things all the time. I just think for some reason when it comes to finance, there's this feeling that it's not accessible. And for many ways, I think traditional finance is not accessible on purpose, but the biggest thing I've learned is, I can learn DeFi and I can learn what smart contracts are and how interest rates are calculated and what to think about when you're taking out a loan. You learn so much every day. When I first started my career, I didn't think that’d happened. You plateau, you become an expert and it becomes standard. Whereas in crypto I get to stay on top of everything all the time. And I can stay on top of it. I can learn technical aspects and financial aspects. And so that's really what I want women to know there's no age at which you stopped being able to learn about money. You just need time to keep reading things and to keep taking information. And to ask questions and to keep surrounding yourself with it, I guess. You get to keep learning new things, your entire life, which I think is pretty exciting.?

Who is a person or company that inspires you in the space and why?

There’s a lot, but I think what's cool right now is coming from Consensys, which is kind of like the OG Ethereum company. And now, we live in this ecosystem where all my friends are at different protocols or different projects. And so it's really cool to see how much the innovation has decentralized itself. So that's just like one thing. Another one is Komorebi , the investment fund. They're solving a huge problem, which is like the financial part of it. And there's like many things we need to solve in order to empower women and non-binary folks and people that don't have as advantageous situations. And so education is definitely one part of it. Making sure they have capitals is another part of it. You know, access to information is another, all these things, right? So. They all really inspire me. And they're also just like really. Like outstanding human beings. And so I very much look up to them.

Other organizations? I really liked the Crypto Coven NFT project. And they're doing a lot with fanfiction and storytelling and that's kind of something I mentioned a little earlier. I think the world will be onboarded through stories and narratives and I'm a big SciFi and a bit of a witchy type of nerd person. So I'm just really excited to see what they do there.

I'm also a very big fan of Poolsuite . Poolsuite is centered around music. It's kind of like a social collective. I actually followed their platform for a long time because I'm a big music person and have been talking a lot about crypto. I also DJ. I think it's about curating vibes for an experience where someone could feel the way I do when I listen to a really great song. Dance culture already has a very strong way of stitching together communities, bringing people together for IRL events. People will buy things to have certain access to creators. So I think it's just such a very fascinating use case to start there. NFTs excite me more when there's a cultural narrative or a storytelling part and both of those. Organizations kept these things relatively accessible. I'm not a big NFT collector. I really only have NFTs that I think are aligned with my values and things that I find interesting because I think it should be the point. I don't know how you could, you know, there's obviously NFT collectors out there, but if I'm going to invest my time in another community, I just want to make sure that I actually can be aligned with it. And yeah, I think all these DAOs we're seeing now like Web3 Baddies , there's myBFF , there's Eve , there's Investera . There's SheFi . We were not having conversations about women and non-binary folks focused organizations like two years ago. And I think it's just really important to keep growing that pie and keep growing these spaces and letting people join all of them or some of them, like, whatever it is that makes the most sense for people, but we definitely need as many hands on deck as possible.

Because we are bringing in more women and people. It’s really positive because it just wasn't the case. I actually find crypto to be a pretty decently nice industry. Like men are honestly super nice. I just think it's like, if it's not around, it's just harder to have conversations about. And now it's kind of this narrative that is really here to stay and it makes me excited to have more allies pushing that forward. I'm just, it's just much more fun now to be tagged along with a bunch of organizations and see many people working towards the same thing. Those are some organizations that I think are doing great things and inspire me. And honestly, there's so many. I could just like start listing off like a bunch of people who inspire me. It's very easy to be inspired in this industry. People are building cool things all the time and even in a bear market, people are still building. So I think that that's really cool. Julia Rosenberg , who's the founder of Orca , which is DAO infrastructure, is really incredible. She’s a powerhouse and gets things done. She’s not only a builder but is also really good at gathering community. She did so much in Brooklyn this summer. Ria , who's an investor at Castle Island . Aditi , who's doing product at Celestia . Near Protocol . It's like the whole Camaraderie crew. The whole She256 group. Rahilla Zafar . Rahila is executive producing an incredible NFT documentary, which is called Minted. Also inspired by male counterparts too, but I guess there's Eva Beylin at the Graph protocol. Yeah, I think in general, there's like a lot of people. Building and whether it's development or marketing or business, or setting up organizations and running them. And just also, I mean, Meltem at CoinShares is an amazing inspiration. Everything she does. I could just go on.

What advice would you give to someone getting started?

?If you can, and it makes sense, go to some type of Ethereum or crypto meetup in your city. I also love all of the events attached to the hackathons because you get to spend a lot of time with builders and community organizers and people speaking. I just think the ones attached to hackathons tend to just feel very community oriented. So it's not like a big conference. They have great programming, but everyone feels a bit more accessible. So if that's an option for you and you want to explore that world, I think that you should definitely try to get to an event. And it's like an event is not feasible financially, I think trying to find your local meetup, a lot of these organizations have meetups all the time. Right. So I think that's one way. I think another really good way to think about getting started is following some of the news outlets, like the Defiant . Or Bankless . A16Z is kind of a good place to start learning about some of these topics. And follow SheFi on Instagram!

But also when it comes to working in crypto, I think it's all of this like energy and these other groups popping up around diversity equity and inclusion efforts, but founders are messaging me all the time. Like, will you post, I'm looking to hire more women.

You can go to a crypto company and you can do marketing. You do business, you can do finance, you can do growth. If you want to get that skill or you have that skill, you can contribute it to a crypto company hiring or a DAO and if it doesn't work out, the general career acceptance of crypto means that it's not going to look bad on your resume. You're getting the skillset at a reputable company. It's no longer this weird niche of the internet, even though we're still small. And I think by joining the She256 Discord, Eve Wealth discord helps you kind of start to see where those things are. FineMatics is a good DeFi learning portal. So, yeah, that's where I would start. They do good explainer videos as well. I think a lot of people now are also very open to the idea that you don't necessarily have to be a crypto expert in order to start contributing your skills and learn it. As always women, you don't have to be 110% of the criteria of a job posting to apply. And so I think those are good ways to get started. You know, apply for SheFi if you want to learn, but if that doesn't happen immediately, don't let that stop you from looking for a role. Only very few people have like five to six years of crypto experience. We all wish we had found that point in 2011, but that's a very small fraction of the population. So it's okay if you found crypto yesterday.??

#fintech #womenswealth #futureoffinance #investing #investment

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