Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), and we’re expecting this year to involve a lot of brightly-colored social media posts, #InternationalWomensDay sales, and invitations for women to apply for leadership roles. It brings a fantastic energy to our social feeds that we want to encourage year-round.
International Women’s Day is a celebration, but it is also a call to action for the areas where we can further champion women in the workforce. This year we’re using IWD as an opportunity to highlight five amazing women that have built a stronger, better, and more inclusive web3 world.
Sheila Warren, Crypto Council for Innovation
Sheila Warren is the inaugural CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, an alliance working closely with governments and institutions to support crypto adoption. Next to her work at the CCI, Sheila hosts the popular “Money Reimagined,” podcast from CoinDesk and is an advisor to the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and the NEAR Foundation. She is also part of the Steering Committee of the DeFi Education Fund and is an early-stage investor in diverse Web3 technology.
Tune into Sheila on Speak Bold for more on crypto regulation and policy.
Elizabeth Stark, Lightning Labs
Elizabeth is the Co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, a tech company building a layer 2 bitcoin to make cheap, fast, and private transactions available to anyone around the world. Elizabeth was previously a professor at Stanford and Yale Universities, teaching topics like peer-to-peer transaction technology, privacy, and open-source software. She advises startups across the decentralized and emerging technology spaces and is a fellow at Coin Center.
Read more about Elizabeth and her work at Lightning Labs here.
Laura Shin, Unchained Podcast
Laura Shin is the host of top crypto podcast Unchained. She also authored “The Cryptopians,” a book outlining the history of top crypto and some of the top figures in the industry. Before hosting and authoring, Laura was Senior Editor at Forbes, where she was one of the first journalists to cover the growing industry full-time. Laura covers diverse topics, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, DAOS, NFTs and more.
Hear more from Laura about her career in crypto on Speak Bold.
Neha Narula, MIT Digital Currency Initiative
Neha Narula is the Director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), which is part of the MIT Media Lab focusing on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. She entered the digital currency space after completing a PhD in distributed systems in 2015. Neha is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Blockchain and was previously a Senior Software Engineer at Google.
Read more about Neha’s work at DCI in this article from MIT Technology Review.
Edith Yeung, Race Capital
Edith Yeung is a Partner at Race Capital, which invests in early-stage startups across web3, enterprise, developer tools, APIs, data privacy, collaboration, security, fintech, and infrastructure. Edith also authors the China Internet Report, a yearly overview of technology trends in China. Edith has personally invested in more than 50 startups and previously worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies.
Listen to Edith discuss building successful startups and being a woman in tech on Speak Bold here.
The Women of Stronghold
Of course, we would be remiss not to shout out several key women supporting Stronghold’s mission of more accessible payments for all. A big round of applause to Crystal Whitford, Ina Maria Bagne, and Lena Tichy for their meaningful contributions in marketing and operations.
We’ll close with a quote from the woman behind Stronghold, our own Co-founder and CEO, Tammy Camp. “I believe that women using blockchain technology will drive the widespread adoption of digital payments. I want to find the women with new ideas at the start of the innovation curve and connect them to resources. At Stronghold, we are dedicated to finding and developing the emerging technologists who will help us overcome the challenges in expanding access to modern financial services.”
It isn’t always easy to be a woman in the tech world, but we are grateful for the trailblazers, like the ones mentioned above, for building a strong foundation for our success. Happy International Women’s Day. Let’s make this holiday the kickoff point for uplifting more fantastic women in web3.
Speak Bold
We’re looking for more women to feature on Speak Bold in 2023 when we officially launch as a podcast. If you or someone you know might be interested, fill out this form, and we’ll get in touch. We’re so excited to hear from more visionaries like you shaping the industry and breaking glass ceilings in the process.
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