F*ck The Matrix Rebuild the Matriarchy with Cynthia Huang, Sydney Lai, Keisha Mitchell, Valerie Song

in Social good stage uh my name is Keisha Mitchell and I will be sharing with you all a little bit about F3 which is funding female Founders the lovely organization bringing this to you today um and we are just first of all I have to say so honored and excited to be here uh amongst all this inspiration imagination and Innovation um and I have a little bit about us via our mission that I would like to share with you in the form of reading our Manifesto so I will get started and here we go it is entitled rebirth in the matriarchy and it was written by me shall I start by telling you the story of a past a past where mother was synonymous with God and to be female was to be an intrinsic part of the Divine of a time when women spoke in Nash Nation sat down to listen and when giving birth held the same esteem in the same sacrifices dying in battle when women were seen not sorry when women were seen not as separate from a society's success but the encouragement inclusion a foundational feature of it thank you or yeah I got you or maybe I should begin instead by sharing with you a vision of the future where to be woman is to be whole spiritually emotionally physically financially and professionally where to be woman is to be liberated from structures that suffocate and instead is to be empowered to become the leader of the creation of systems that serve her and in Turn the World Around her and we're to be woman is ultimately to be safe and empowered to be whoever in whatever you want to be but perhaps it's always better however to begin with the now because this is where the F3 organization was born now is a time in a space where the Paradox of having female identity feels to be at a Breaking Point a time and space where women are passively acknowledged in the halls of Institutions and isms that keep us at an arms length away from real sustainable change and refuse to actively engage Us in conversations at their tables in a capitalist world the truth of that world will be found most crystallized in the economic standing of the different demographics that call that world home and in the Western World the truth is that out of all venture capital funding distributed annually only three percent ever reaches women LED or founded startup Enterprises or small businesses this is the problem that F3 Ventures was born to solve with an original Mission of funding female founders the F3 organization pushed through the ether as a defiant [ __ ] you to people who stand and continue to stand in the way of economic empowerment and social equity for female Founders the problem of Social and financial inequity exists in the now and we the women of F3 were unwilling to wait any longer and be denied what we can certainly take for ourselves today [Music] this Revelation quickly created an awareness that the need and path to Social and financial equity for women was much wider than just the lane of venture capital and goes on to include the incubation and support of developers Engineers investors and people who are aligned with our vision of a future ah this realization gave birth to the F3 Foundation the community outreach the nonprofit arm of the organization and first sister to F3 Ventures however to become a venture capital firm and Community incubator isn't enough we realize that the blessing of blockchain technology is the palpable and tangible potentiality it provides the way it lends itself to dreaming and thinking bigger and bigger for us is not just playing by the stale rules of the dusty board game that is capitalism but using tokenomics and blockchain Technology to create our own financial instruments and ultimately our own utilities of Liberation and this was the spawning of F3 Labs our female-led and staff firm that is working to actualize a new way to engage with currency in developing innovative ways that the world of blockchain can truly become a safe haven for all we operate and govern ourselves on a simple set of core values Equity empowerment care trust inclusion growth and responsibility and this is because as Millennials gen zirs children of immigrants women of color many of us have only known a world that is operating with a scarcity of these things many of us have been personally affected and on the front lines of the multi-generational economic social and cultural Awards started by on our communities by men that did not look like us however gifted us the chaos and strife of their wildest dreams as inherited nightmares for our communities nonetheless F3 is our reconstruction it is our reconciliation it is our Rehabilitation it is our incremental and strategic attack on patriarchy and Supremacy it is our declaration of war against the Matrix of social injustice it is a safe place it's our Haven it's our home and it is our rebirth as individuals as sisters and as community it is our Reclamation regeneration cultural restart and the way that we choose to rebuild the matriarchy thank you thank you and on that note I would love to keep this conversation and introduce you all and bring up a few women that have been very very real examples and proponents of this change that I spoke about ladies would y'all like to come and join me on stage please [Applause] foreign well thank you so much for reading that beautiful Manifesto my name is Valerie song and I'll be a loose moderator for this panel here I'm so excited to present and have everybody introduce themselves and share their story about what rebirthing the matriarchy means to you Cynthia why don't you get started sure thanks everyone for being here I love seeing all the support for rebuilding the matriarchy my name is Cynthia I'm the CEO of D travel which is a web 3 power travel ecosystem I've been in web 3 since 2017 and I'm so so thrilled to see so many women enter into web3 I know like some of my homies are here so just like really thrilled to see everybody hey everyone my name is Sydney Lai I'm a developer Advocate at Magic um I'm really happy to be here and I'd like to thank everyone men women and others thank you so much for joining yeah hey you guys met me my name is Keisha it's a pleasure to be here with you all as well yes awesome so the first question is how would you define what rebirthing the matriarchy is maybe from your own individual Journeys on how you got to D travel uh how you got to Magic how you got to F3 Foundation to me rebuilding the matriarchy is not really just about women it's about creating a world with more equality web3 really is a promise for diversity for inclusion for accessibility and I think this kind of Utopia that we all see is what we're all trying to work towards and rebuilding the matriarchy is about having a place for everybody not just for women not just for men but how do we rebuild it from the ground up so that we are leading with empathy and love and treating every human being with kindness and respect and then showing up in the world the way that we want and I think that there's so much toxicity toxicity in the world today there's so much division especially in some countries and we need more and more people to show up and like be kind be loving and I think that's what we're trying to build in web 3 is how do we create this world that doesn't exist today to bring more equality and justice and really bring everybody in the world up not just people in like First World countries because it it's like the saying a revising tide lifts all boats and the more that we as people can connect together and help each other and love each other instead of feeling like we're so different then I think we are going to be living this beautiful world that doesn't exist today and that's really My Hope for rebuilding the matriarchy so for me I am I'm a woman I am Asian and I'm queer and I never understood why diversity mattered um I didn't get it I didn't think it really mattered um until I organized a hackathon i organized a hackathon for the Latino community in the Bay Area and when they started pitching when they started demoing at the end of the hackathon um about 50 of the founders were women I've never seen that before um I've been volunteering for seven years I've hosted 13 hackathons I've never seen a hackathon with the 50 women and the ideas that they come up with um I've never seen before I didn't know there was a market that existed for that and at that moment I realized why diversity mattered because you can have ideas and perspectives and contributions um from a place that you yourself wouldn't even experience no matter how diverse you are so so why does rebuilding the matriarchy or why does diversity matter um in the development of technology is because it really showed to me how you can create different products and opportunities in the world and uh just a fun fact uh my family is Taiwanese uh Taiwan is a matriarchy also we also have a female president that has never been married before and I know hot right uh and as Taiwanese women we keep our last names yes uh and I think that for me like rebirth in the matriarchy is just really comes down to the simple principle that once things are safe and cognizant of women they're safe and cognizant of pretty much everybody else you know uh and realistically there is a need for balance right um but we don't seek to like paint the patriarchy in pink right like rebirth in the matriarchy is not re-imagining you know patriarchal systems or systems that have not served us in a more feminine way it's really going back to ancestral roots of what women have always been for their communities no matter where those communities may have been and thinking about how to integrate that into a modern context again just to make the world a better place you know so I think that that's for me what that means I love that thank you so much everybody for sharing and um I know each and every one of you has such a unique and personal story to how you got to this realization how you got to your work so I'm wondering if you can share with the audience a little bit about your background and what led you to where you are today yeah sure so uh it's really I just tell people now like I just took a 13 year long walk essentially uh my background is in journalism and Publishing I own my own publishing company I'm a journalist by crafting by trade um and through that I kind of like started doing graphic design and like all these layouts and taking on clients and I became really interested in what made these CMS as possible like what was behind the Wix or what's creating the tools that I'm utilizing to be able to help others and that was kind of like my foray into web 2 um and then through that I after graduating boot camp um during covet and quarantine uh I was able to get onto Twitter and use it as a real resource to kind of like help people find you know where my Niche was at and through that um I started working at Ledger as their corporate journalist but because I had this background in both communication and Linguistics but also this engineering understanding they thought that it would be really great to like kind of help me Galvanize the you know more of the American market and so really through working for Ledger I was was able to really start to go from really Canada and Mexico which is how I met my F3 family and friends um Mexico yeah all the way down though yeah the continent and just talk to people about web3 you know help getting you know disenfranchise communities or maybe communities that were being looked over which of course for my identity meant like black women and women in general um and black people uh and from that like we've just really been able to take it so far in terms of like the F3 Foundation as an American Events endowment that kind of like helps women through crowdsourcing that happens at events get into Tech fund other you know like initiatives and so really it's just kind of been like an exponential growth right like once you kind of put your head first into the water you just really become a part of the pool honestly sure I would also love to um dovetail your point of entering web 3 coming from different markets um one of the ways I got into web3 was I used to work in private wealth and I like to also relate this back to the matriarchy um so when I was working on private wealth um as you can imagine when you're investing in institutional assets it's a pretty male dominated space and one of the things that I learned when I was working for a Swiss bank was um in our Asia and APAC regions specifically Banks coming from China a lot of the investment managers uh were again half and half uh women and I've never seen that before and I asked you know why why at this Bank um the ratio is so skewed and why are these Banks um you know why is it 50 women so there's two actually two reasons one in a 30-year study done is that women actually outperform and investing in institutional funds listen we gotta manage the money right and then number two again politicals aside politics aside um uh there was communism in China right and one factor was you have to have equal participation participation um on both both sides and so they did that in the workforce as well and so that tradition still holds to this day especially in the institutionalized investment funds so just something something to share yes that's awesome I love that I think for me one of the things that has always stood out is this concept of mentorship versus sponsorship and to me actions speaks so much louder than words we can say whatever we want but at the end of the day if you don't show up then you're not showing your support and as women we don't get enough sponsorship we get mentorship sure everybody talks about how we need to support women but when someone says hey who can you recommend for this project can I'm looking for an amazing project to back I need to promote somebody Are you standing up and saying hey I know this amazing woman and I think that you should absolutely do that and it's not just men like we as women we're so afraid to recommend someone else because we don't want to help be held liable and that's why I love organizations and communities like F3 because they're actually showing up and saying we're here to support you we're going to give you money we're going to give you funding we're going to give you support and personally for me like I think anybody knows that I love love to show up for other people by connecting people together and I'm always thinking like if you're looking for something how can I help you I don't want anything out of it I just want to be able to support you however I can so if you're looking for a job or if I know that someone is saying hey I'm looking for somebody who has a speaking opportunity I'm going to be like I'm going to recommend this person you should go talk to them and I think we all need to do that whether we're male female binary doesn't matter we need to show up for each other as people but also especially as women because like in web 3 we don't have enough representation and it's so so so important for somebody to be visible so that when we all look at someone else we can say I see myself there and we don't see enough of that because like it's all men on crypto Twitter right it's like old white men can I share something yeah okay so I used to work at consensus do you guys remember consensus I mean I know right metamask all that so in 2018 um I was a part of a team there was about 32 33 employees I brought seven of the employees on board to the Token sale Ico team of the seven people that we hired that we brought that I brought on six of them are women and they they thank you but they asked they asked why how did you recruit any woman and I was just like I don't know I'm friends with girls like just men make friends with girls they're not we don't have cooties like they're fine even if you have like a partner it's fine they're called platonic girlfriends like have them and so there wasn't there wasn't a recruiting trick it wasn't like I was just like oh I know that girl she's a solidity developer who has a major in mathematics like she's still audits she's one of the best little developers to this day right so like just have friends who are female and hire them that's it all right everyone so we're gonna do something kind of fun we have about six minutes left and uh what we do here at F3 is we fund female Founders are there any female Founders I know I see one and the audience who would like to come up and share uh their business what they're working on a project and uh hey we have this event coming up it's ten to thirty thousand dollars per female founder uh sorry up to 30 000 for three female Founders and this is coming up Fest in Atlanta in the end of this month so come on up big round of them [Applause] if you could please share your name and your anything with the audience that'll be great thank you um I'm losing my voice so I hope you can hear me clearly uh my name is melop and I am a web 3 educator content creator and copywriter I am also the founder of maternal instinct nft which is an nft that is focused on raising maternal health awareness and creating a support system for mothers and their support systems to be able to carry them through the Journey from reproduction to empty nest syndrome and I am working on building a Dao so I launched my project at the beginning of last year in January it was a success to me it was a I was shocked by what happened in the reception that was there however halfway through the year my project got hit with a wallet drainer and all the funds that we had made essentially we didn't have them anymore and to be honest I kind of felt into it fell into a little pit of shame because I felt like you know I had failed my holders but then I remembered like I'm here to do something for mothers like me who have struggled through things like postpartum depression and living through traumas while trying to raise children and trying to keep them from having those traumas and a lot of the times they don't have the right support and so if they can be given emotional spiritual physical financial and mental well-being then they can be the mothers raising the next generation of tech baddies that are going to change the world and so that's what I'm working on [Applause] wow thank you so much and uh go ahead yeah and I just wanted to call out that at F3 we have this kind of investment thesis that women really care about regeneration diversity inclusion as well as education so clearly we have women in the audience who are contributing to these things would anyone else like to come up and share we might be able to accommodate one or two yeah come on up no go ahead okay uh we gotta like call out this amazing outfit here that's how we just met we became friends right that's how we become friends with women we say hello um and I just want to say like shout out to everyone up here I literally could cry um because the things that you're saying are so touching and so true to my heart and my priorities and why I'm here it's important to show up right and like um East Denver was the first crypto conference I ever came to last year dive down the rabbit hole and was so inspired by a ton of great things but also taking a picture where it was 42 men and one woman in the room last year which it's a lot different now I'm happy for that but um yes I am a founder of a web 3 conference and Festival that was inspired by my trip here last year um we're in New Orleans we're called freshmen Fest and it's in October and we focus on music gaming art and impact so when I talk about impact for one second super important that the communities that are here look like the world that I live in every day right so in New Orleans we have a super diverse Community um and I want to talk and like I'm building a platform to make sure that everything that web3 enables it should be enabling better solutions for our world right and our community should have access to those resources also super important is that sorry I'm like nervous don't know why but um also it's important and I come from an architecture background um and sustainable design and building a female architect told me one time have you ever noticed that there's a long line to the women's bathrooms and I said yeah and she said why and I'm like this is a test and she said because uh women weren't at the table when these buildings were being designed and so if we are going to be designing the next world it is incredibly important that all voices are present at the table during the design phase because that greatly greatly like influences the output more so than retroactively trying to figure out why it doesn't serve the people it's supposed to be solving for so um so anyway uh yeah I'm gonna go now thank you but I'm so happy to be here and I'm so happy we connected you guys and um yeah I hope to see y'all in New Orleans and y'all better be going to ATL I know y'all are in Canada as well right I just looked up tickets I gotta come say hello you better shamelessly plug us yes that's what I love to see see yeah yes thank you so so much and clearly there's so much amazing talent in the audience if you have been thinking about getting funding for your business please please please check out our website apply to pitch we will give travel credit uh an accommodation for people who are coming uh so please check it out and apply yes and just before we go don't forget March 31st to April 2nd for anybody that will be in Atlanta like to come to Atlanta or just check us out virtually we will be hosting the women in web 3 conference um we have a lot of the sponsors and guys you see here uh consensus optimism shapeshift so on and so forth we have a lot of resources a job fair we're really about what we say we're about so please come and you know benefit from that please thank you everybody 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