The Journey to Web3 Meet The Scholars Tracey Bowen mod; Melissa Henderson mod; Ana Belen Gonzalez Ba

because we we ran a uh a travel scholarship program harmony very very kindly funded us to bring 150 women to east denver which is i believe one of the biggest efforts at inclusion and diversity if denver has had so amen and so i was super happy to be involved super happy to facilitate that and um i'm just gonna go across the board and have you ladies introduce yourselves give a little bit of background and maybe say what this is meant that you know you got a travel scholarship to come and what this has meant for you yeah okay hi my name is melissa henderson i am a head of community app ape work so it's a developer framework um coming from the web 2 space as a journalist a writer i met tracy in lisbon and it's just been amazing just connecting with her dow because um we have a community now like we're not just in you know like a corner of the bathroom talking about web 3 or crypto or what d5 shady d5 token we've been investing in um so that's what it's meant for me and then also just hurt harmony as a blockchain i just love their vibe and just the support that we've gotten over like maybe two three months has been pivotal so yeah thank you hello well my name is anna and evelyn i'm from mexico and well i have a marketing agency focused in webtree and i'm very into the house i'm in bangladesh engineering commons hairdo and well here thou gave me a very big opportunity because this is my first web 3 conference so for me it's amazing it's uh very very very thankful with her thou and harmony that they gave us the opportunity to come and meet a lot of people here getting to know so many cool projects so i'm pretty excited thank you hey all thank you so much for coming this evening so my name is owen adebayo full name on consular bio um i'm so privileged to be here as well as part of the herdal team received a scholarship from the uk um i run um two companies um one of them is all about getting black women in the uk and in nigeria into tech so in the uk less than one percent of the tech industry is made up of black women so i wanted to do something about it so we run boot camps specifically for black women and we were on various ones so we've been able to upskill 300 women to be able to get into tech and connect them with um different employers and but i'm excited about this um the youth denver summit because i'm actually currently building a hair beauty and fashion nft platform um that really gives real utility um to creators and also consumers so think pinterest mixed with wearable hello everyone and good evening my name is gyan and i've traveled from bangalore india i've been in the web3 space for over five to six years now i started out as a developer and now i'm um an educator researcher as a full-time job i work with quest book i work as a protocol researcher and content lead and apart from that i also work with different protocols creating content for them uh trying to educate the community on the various protocols that are out there for both developers and non-developers and of course i'm also passionate about uh women in tech women in web 3. i run a small guild called the phoenix skill where i'm encouraging more women to apply for bounties grants etc so yeah that's me and i'm really uh thankful to tracy and of course the whole harmony initiative to have more diversity and inclusion in the web3 space because it's definitely the need of the hour with the kind of products the kind of solutions that we are building and the people that we're building for so yeah very excited to be here great so you're all pretty successful women in web 3 and you're all building companies and you're all building really great products so like i think it would be interesting for people to kind of know your your journey to web three because everyone's got a slightly different story haven't they and like things have happened by accident and then all of a sudden you find yourself in a crypto festival and you know so can you just tell us your your little journey to web3 you can start again okay yeah so my journey to web3 uh wasn't through crypto actually surprising when i started out five six years ago it was when i attended a conference on blockchain uh by a professor and i was very intrigued by the technical terminologies around blockchain and the fact that this ecosystem is completely new at that point in time i was at a dead job where the circumstances around my existing web 2 job were like really not great and i was looking to expand into a space which is new which is exciting and which also challenges me that's how i got into blockchain and then i got a lot of opportunities somehow coincidentally to educate and mentor different folks in this space when i myself was new so it was more like a rapid learning curve where i had six months to one year to ramp up on four to five different protocols which were completely new and create a lot of content educational material etc so um i think it was more about the technology that attracted me but what has led me to come full time and be in this space is just the vibe like the openness of the space the kind of innovation that we can do the kind of people that we meet the solutions that we can build it's like massive so yeah that's been me um my journey into tech full stop it's just been super unconventional i'm actually an economist by trade and it was actually research that actually got me into tech and actually research that got me here into web 3. um i've been trying to build um this kind of beauty solution on the web 2 space for quite a while and really well connected in the in the harem beauty space in the uk and in nigeria we've got a lot of influence influencers and i realized that the web 2 solution that i was trying to build wasn't going to economically empower those creators um and so really being here allows me to be able to economically empower um those creators um you know there's this kind of battle for likes on instagram or battle for likes on youtube um and it's all been kind of fighted by algorithms um but i want to be able to create something that actually allows creators to feel economically empowered and be economically empowered um so yeah that's my unconventional journey um passionate was passionate about economic empowerment passionate about breaking vicious cycle of poverty did a lot of research into and i realized that whoa tech is the way and where web three is the way so yeah that brings me well i'd say my journey to f3 i'd say it starts when i was very young i i really liked about technology i i called my puppy wi-fi and then and then another thing that was very excited to me it was different cultures and languages so that's why i studied international business and commerce and then one day i read that the most important um [Music] the most important um [Music] the shipping companies most important shipping companies of the world they were starting to introduce blockchain so i was like oh i want to start studying those and then one day one friend post something about crypto i went to study to germany and then there um everyone was investing in crypto so i started reading about it etc and one day one friend post something about crypto and i talked to him and he was very into crypto he has a podcast and then we he's my boyfriend now he's here and yeah we were very into crypto now and i get into bank lesson i start there and there i like i was very excited about the people there how open is is everyone and that i was in i was able to start in every guild i want like for example i started in marketing i discovered that i was very good for marketing for designing things i'm into the sponsorships team in international media knows and translating so yeah i'm very excited and now i'm in here now and talking engineering commons and keep building and i'm very excited about wave 3 amazing i guess my journey into red 3 i always wanted to be a writer growing up and everyone tell me like you'd never make money like go and you know do something in uh science or whatever and so i wanted to be a writer so i just could pursue that journey as a blogger and web one and in web two but there was this always this barrier of like ownership and producing my own content um so i started violet summer zine just because i wanted to document my own stories and get paid for them and um in tandem i was all i was working with um web two companies like huffington post and l as a writer and i was like i still was like uh i don't want to write about you know what the magazine wants for me to write about i want to write about text so in 2016 i started writing about digital rights wrote a story about revenge porn and just like telling my story through personal essays and other stories through violet summer and in 2017 i discovered blockchain from um a boss that was investing actively investing in blockchain but it really didn't click until i guess the pandemic and i guess artists came together on clubhouse and that's when i put like all of my i guess my my key findings as a creator from a blogger to try to figure out what subscription-based model is going to work for me and then when i sold my first nfts in 2020 it just was like okay this is this is gonna be something and then i stumbled across um ape works and all these other companies just because of my curiosity so it's been just like to the moon from there and yeah and i met all these amazing women yeah thank you so hurdau's ethos and kind of mantra is if we want the future to look like us then we have to build it right so you know gone are the days where we just sit back and write a little shopping list and go we want this and this and this and expect other people to kind of like deliver it for us so that's kind of like an empowering thing like i want your kind of views of like what else we can do or how you see diversity and women empowerment in web three how do you see that advancing or what would you like to see um okay so i i a lot of people are like oh i never see anyone that looks like me well if you didn't see anyone that looks like you like give them an opportunity whether it's telling them about a grant telling them about um you know different things that are going on to this in the space like when i started navigating this space i always made sure to take two friends with me i wasn't going alone so that's that's one of the ways that you can you know bring up a girl diversity is like mentioning their names in rooms and it might seem really like uh like just like oh that's something that people do a lot of people don't do it and that's how me and tracy like connected because we were like okay well let's actually do something and in web 3 it's like it's about that volunteership but mostly um creating connection through like dedicating your time and your resources yeah well i'd say inviting more people and sharing your knowledge like in mexico with my friends we are having a community for women uh so we are starting like in the since the beginning like telling telling them what is bitcoin what is ethereum what is blockchain so that's how we can we can keep building and to [Music] invite more women into the ecosystem and yeah and also showing them what they can do with crypto like you can create nfts or buy an nft then collaborate into ada and there's many many projects and that and they are hiding that hello i i see that all the breaks here are hiding so you have to keep showing people that awesome so so many great answers i think one of the things that i have to say as well um that the space also needs to be very welcoming in language we need to be welcoming in um in also kind of different abilities because the web 3 space is still very intimidating to the average woman um so how do we simplify our language because even we're talking about nfds we're talking about daos we're talking like these all these acronyms are still very much alien to the average woman and so it's kind of our job to educate and also to look at language that's a lot more accessible you know um to the everyday person um also i think i'm creating simple solutions um because you know for example you know if you want to kind of engage in the space you have to think about like oh how do i actually connect my wallet to my phone or how do i collect my wallets my laptop how do i even understand that whole process can we create simpler processes that the average person can actually know how to use and that can be mobile friendly as well so yeah that's um just simplifying this space would be really helpful yeah i think most of the things that the panelists have already covered but just two things that i strongly believe in and i've been trying to do this as much as possible for the past couple of years one is mentorship and another is education right mentorship is something that is in general missing in the technology space especially for women you don't see like so many women role models even in web 3 in fact it's even more difficult but the fact is it's very easy for somebody to become a role model like you just need to you know share your knowledge talk about what you're doing and encourage other women to get into the space and mentorship could be some small things right like you could just put out a social media tweet that this is what i learned today and then people will approach you right because they think that you have navigated through something difficult so i can probably approach you and i can navigate through this too so i think this is one thing that i see women doing less and less and this could also kind of be a segue into a personal branding right eventually for you you can be a mentor for other women who are navigating navigating the space it could be non-dev right non-deaf folks are looking for design opportunities who are looking to build products right you can tell them what was your hardship when you try to uh build something or when you try to apply for a bounty or if you're technical you can give them the resources that would be required to do things so i would definitely like to see more women coming up into this space saying that hey you know what i attended eats denver this is what i did these are my learnings and this is what i learned maybe you could learn from me too right and even women who are building products right these are the things that i navigated it was this was a difficult conversation with the vc when they asked me how much i want to race i wasn't sure right things like this this could be small trivial things to us but it could make a huge impact in the community so definitely mentorship and of course education right if you know you can definitely teach others i always try to pull people and like encourage them to you know get into the space just explore and you don't even have to do it full time right just explore the space and kind of try out new things and uh if you get stuck reach out to women you know on twitter discord or you know heard out or other female supporting dows thank you i mean we were talking earlier about maybe a buddy system for like you know new people coming into east denver into this like you know mecca of crypto is quite overwhelming um so we were doing that earlier on and i really like the fact that we had a hacker house as well i don't know if some of you came maybe not i don't know but it was great and we turned it into a holistic hacker house because it's like we're trying to get rid of this old kind of web 2 culture of work yourself into the ground even though i'm not very good example because i am basically working myself into the growth but you know we had like yoga or meditation in the morning we had massage we had one-on-one coaching as well as hacking and talks and workshops and we're really trying to like change that concept to make it a a more welcoming space but um i think we have about maybe like six or seven minutes left so i really like to hear from some of the women and other people in the in the audience any questions come on ladies hi i'm curious um when it comes to dows what do you think are some of the biggest barriers that we need to solve for in order to keep women endows because some people get introduced but then engaging them and giving them an outlet seems to be an issue of them advancing into more leadership positions within daos yeah the on boarding part is very very important that's something that every dao needs to have process for it like and every dog needs to have for example every areas if depending of