CoinTelegraph once called me the “Leading Female in Crypto”
Here is the (very unbelievable) story of how that happened.
It was 2014 when I caught the Silicon Valley bug. I was working at Revlon in PR. My best friend was Tesla Canada’s number two employee, and she had to be at HQ for some meetings, so I bummed a stay in the Tesla sponsored Air BnB. (It was lovely, thank you Elon). We’d connected with some fellow Canucks who were working and living in San Francisco and and wound up at an impromptu meditation session with some very magical figures, start up bros, and a soon-to-be-famous race car driver. (More on that later).
We were totally mesmerized by the California Dreamers — they were doers, hustlers who’d stop at nothing to get their startups off the ground. Some of them did, some of them didn’t — but all have some pretty epic stories to share, and they all started in that 5 bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
That same weekend, I connected with another Canadian who was new to the San Francisco area. He had just accepted a job as Sephora’s North American CEO, you may know him today as the CEO of Lululemon. Calvin MacDonald was kind enough to connect with me over a drink and discuss the future of beauty (at the time, I was obsessed with all things “bloggers” — and digital beauty trends. It was all happening online, and he agreed). We figured there must be something special going on in the Silicon Valley tech scene, and both vowed to keep a close pulse on beauty and fashion’s relationship to tech. (Spoiler alert: Calvin was responsible for Lululemon’s acquisition of Tech company Mirror just last year).
But the most exciting person I met in San Francisco that week wasn’t the CEO of Sephora, the magical white witch who predicted my future, the Emmy-winning reporter, or the girl power fuelled race car driver — it was the one and only Bill Tai. You may know him as @KiteVC, or that kite surfing VC who wrote the first cheque for Zoom (ya, THEEEE Zoom), Canva, or even Bitcoin mining company BitFury. But I just know him as Bill Tye-Dye shoes. (That’s how I remembered his last name at first.) He was a new friend who had really great vibes and obviously a very big heart. He was really passionate about community and excited to connect me to fellow Canadians that shared the same positivity and zest for life. Bill seemed to have some fun stuff going on, and he needed help. I needed a way to nudge my way into the Silicon Valley scene, and so I was game to use my skills for Bill’s new passionate project — the Extreme Tech Challenge.
It was that summer (August 2014) that my “company was born” — named by epic race car driver Colette Davis at her kitchen table in SF over a bowl of scallops and pasta. She was my biggest supporter in the entry in the community — and we made a great team. I helped her with an ACTAI gathering she was putting on for Bill in Vegas, while also helping Bill and his team get the marketing for the Extreme Challenge off the ground. Even though there were big names involved, it was still bootstrapped — so I was doing everything from website updates, to blog posts on IBM Watson, to ghostwriting for XTC co-founder Sir Richard Branson. It was my first intro to the powerful tech community — and even more powerful ACTAI community.
That day is August, Bill “Tye-Dye shoes” Tai was eager to show me a Bitcoin mining company he had just invested in — and photos from his most recent trip to Iceland the world’s leader in geothermal energy (and now a well known hotspot for Bitcoin mines).
“Bitcoin” I said. “Hmm. Interesting. Like digital money.”
And Bill said:
“I believe, that the world’s next billion dollar idea will be built on the blockchain, Bitcoin’s underlying technology. And that’s what we’re trying to find at the Extreme Tech Challenge.”
I let it seep into my brain and I sat on that statement for a number of years. My work with XTC didn’t stem too far past the launch of the competition as I battled an illness for a few months that pulled me off of everything I was working on, full time and side hustles, all on standstill. But I watched, I supported, and I always kept in touch with Bill.
Fast forward to summer of 2017 I have one of those random epiphanies from the universe. I was still following Bill, keeping in touch on social. He was always somewhere gorgeous kitesurfing — often posting 360 degree selfies well fellow activists and innovators who always look like they’re having the time of their lives. The conversation around bitcoin was picking up steam, but more importantly — Bill was bullish on Ethereum. Hmm… smart contracts, this I can get behind.
A solid 26 hours of YouTube wormholes slithered through… my then BF (now Husband) and I were determined we were already late, but had to buy in. All in. And when I say buy in you guys — I don’t mean with money. Well, of course I mean with some money. But when you’re the kind of intense entrepreneurs and opportunists that we are — you BUY IN WITH YOUR TIME. It’s your most precious and impactful resource (don’t let anyone ever tell you differently).
So we were like okay. We need to go into education mode, learn everything we can — and then figure out where the pain points are. If you ever want to sell anything to anybody, figure out their pain points. Where are they struggling the most? What is keeping them up at night? It was very obvious to us in this new emerging world of cryptocurrencies, ALT coins and ICOs, marketing was a deep pain point. Community building was a real challenge with so many undercover figures and un-doxxed founders and mods. Boom. Opportunity. Be the best marketers in the space.
Here’s where the universe steps in. Very random. We are moving — and some nerd comes to look at our office space. It just so happened that Ange my partner had just gotten his Bitcoin from Quadriga (ya, THAT Quadriga) — and he was yelling about it. (It was notably exciting). Bitcoin was $2k at the time. We chose Bitcoin over a house downpayment. (Still don’t regret it).
Nerd enters office, hears Bitcoin discussion “You into crypto?” My man puffs out his chest and goes “Oh ya, big into crypto. Just loaded up my bags with BTC.” Nerd says “ever heard of an ICO? We’re looking for some marketers”.
It took my husband longer than me to say hell yes. Funny enough, I don’t think the guys even wanted me on the project in the beginning — but there were rumblings of the #MeToo movement coming down the pipeline and so there was some more pressure to have women at the table. I will forever be grateful they included me.
We were a group of misfits. Nothing about us fit. It felt like a random group project in first year business school where you wind up on a team with the football player, World of Warcraft wizard, and the local boy genius and you’re trying to make sense fo it all. Except this time, it was a nerdy mechanical engineer, an even nerdier software engineer, a brilliant salesman with a horseshoe up his ass (we called him the $10M man because he had so much Ripple and it went CRAZY). Then there was my husband — the rock n’ roll data geek, expert attention getter, chief marketer and official spokesperson. And me. They call me the little fairy. No one can ever really explain my magic. I’m still trying to understand it myself.
I believe my super powers are connecting deeply, quickly — with everybody. Life of the party, and always there when the lights come on to help clean up the bottles — I’m the one who dreams big and takes even bigger risks. I never take no for an answer, refuse to give up, and make that energy the only energy in any space I contribute to. A relentless optimist, I love to make people’s dreams come true and I’m a sucker for anything that can make an impact. I wound up accidentally fighting a bigger battle than I signed up for. (I knew it would be tough in a man’s world, but I never guessed it would be so brutal).
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Driving the AdTech Development with Blockchain: Why AdTech Needs A Blockchain Solution? <br><br>▪️Fighting Ad Fraud<br>▪️Transparency<br>▪️Targeting<br>▪️Goodbye, Middleman 👋 <br><br>Learn from our experts<a href=”https://twitter.com/TheRealSJR?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheRealSJR</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/kyleellicott?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kyleellicott</a><a href=”https://twitter.com/AngeloDodaro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AngeloDodaro</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/TheCreativChris?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheCreativChris</a><a href=”https://twitter.com/Yusingco?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Yusingco</a><br><br>▶️ <a href=”https://t.co/HOOndeg6XF">https://t.co/HOOndeg6XF</a> <a href=”https://t.co/0UfpbmlMed">pic.twitter.com/0UfpbmlMed</a></p>— BlockShow (@BlockShowcom) <a href=”https://twitter.com/BlockShowcom/status/1169252437359845376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 4, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset=”utf-8"></script>
I got this shit beat out of my soul. Our project took off, of course, we had a great team, a stellar plan and more tricks up our sleeves than the average yogi bear. I used my lioness level hunter prowess to track down a savant from late night TV. The epic Emmy-losing Zack Bornstein (SNL, Jimmy Kimmel) became an amazing partner and friend through the process of creating an explainer video that became the ad campaign for our project. That campaign went on to raise the company $15M USD (which is a lot of Canadian dollars, yo). In just 6 weeks. As of today, that community is 150,000 person strong.
Angelo got really famous for all of the fancy marketing… particularly in Russia. It is indeed one of my favourite party tricks to tell people that my husband is Big in Russia like Bryan Adams is Big in Japan. It never gets old for me. He was all over these screens at an event and was mobbed by adoring fans. I’ll never stop laughing about it.
Anyways, things got crazy for us really fast. It was EXTREMELY hard on our relationship. We almost broke up many times, although he’ll never admit that to you :P. Making money changes you, losing money changes you even faster. The markets surged, and then the markets dumped — that’s tough on anyone. Try being in a relationship with your co-founder. Ha! I will tell you from experience, these stressful -serious-money-life-changing-things are much easier to go through as a married couple than as boyfriend / girlfriend.
The unspoken competition between us to become known in the space became very personal to me as women in crypto and tech continued to struggle to be recognized and were constantly overlooked as innovators, co-founders and change makers. My big break really came from an old friend in the beauty biz who forwarded along an event invite to the United Nations. She couldn’t attend, and nominated me in her place. It was there, on International Women’s Day, at the UN — I finally felt like I belonged in this world.
It circled back to that feeling that I had when I met Bill Tye-Dye-Shoes Tai, there were people there who cared deeply about the world, it’s problems and how to solve them. A crew of people who felt so much like the ones that Bill curates who I’d come to admire over the years. I leveraged my knowledge and experience in the space to do what I’ve seen Bill doing all of these years — I started to give.
I gave my time, my advice, my expertise — I gave my energy to the community, my passion to the causes I championed, and all of myself. Mind, body, spirit. And it made an impact. Ange and I met the most incredible people in this space that had inspired us for so long, and we were — for the fist time in our lives, able to make an impact in a meaningful way.
YondoMondo, My latest effort in the space aims to do the same thing with a tangible project road map to support the UN SDGs. More on that later this week.
I have many stories for many days… but each and every one of these moments where we gave for the sake of giving, with the intent to make a positive impact — has lead to working with rockstars, childhood heroes, producers, filmmakers, billionaires, philanthropists, world leaders, A-list celebrities, world class VCs and constantly putting us in situations we never thought we’d ever be in.
People keep telling me to write a book. I don’t know. I still think,
If I Told You, You Wouldn’t Believe Me.
