Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Sarojini McKenna of Alien Worlds On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Very Successful Tech Company

An Interview With Penny Bauder

Being able to adapt. You’re just generally very aware of the context of the decisions that you’re making in relation to your plan and can communicate that at any given time that just allows you to build the project in a more future proofed way, but also allows other people to have confidence that you have the ability to foresee what the future might hold, even though of course, it always ends up going off plan, that’s completely fine.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarojini McKenna. Sarojini McKenna is a co-founder of the breakthrough NFT Metaverse, Alien Worlds, one of the world’s most popular blockchain games and one of the biggest dapps overall, according to DappRadar.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I have formerly worked in corporate finance but I became interested in crypto as a side activity. I also had friends who were working in different crypto projects and through that I began to understand a bit more about the industry. A turning point was when I was invited by a friend to work in EOS DAC, at the time one of the major protocol projects. We created the Dacoco out of our experience at EOS DAC. At that stage, Dacoco was intended to be a service provider for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations DAO or DACs. And over time, we began to see that putting DAOs within a game would be a really great way to get quicker adoption of the technology. And that’s how Alien Worlds was born.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

My interesting story would be that I and the other founding members of Dacoco were working on different DAO projects.

And then one day, one of my co-founders and I were meeting in a cafe and I just said, “I think we should do this within a game”

He replied that our other business partner was working on a game and just at that moment he walked into the cafe.

So we just wanted to know about the game. He had it all laid out, even down to the name — Alien Worlds. He had ideas for different series of NFTs and he knew there would be a mining feature.

Within a couple of days, we brainstormed a lot of the ideas. Then we had a brain wave to add DAOs. But it was funny — asking about the ideas and our co-founder walking into the same cafe — serendipity.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We did over 60 AMAs (ask me anything) within a two month period, it was really crazy. We all attended and we were rigorous in our replies. It was very strenuous and nerve wracking. These were mostly text based and we typed like crazy. One of our early AMAs was with Satoshi Club which was amazing — great host and participants.

Then we twigged that many of these AMAs required the same questions to be answered. We got smart and prepared written answers which we could just cut and paste into the channel. We’d maybe edit the beginning but it meant we could provide really clear answers and eliminate typing errors so we looked much more professional.

However, it was a really good exercise as it honed our replies and also introduced us to many different crypto communities which we loved.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

At the beginning of the project. We got a lot of rejection. In those early days when you’re just trying to get something off the ground, everything feels so significant. I would send a deck to someone, and I’d be waiting to find out if they wanted a meeting, and I’d be checking all the time, and then I’d feel really bad if it didn’t happen. It all felt really important. One of the things that actually did go really well, was the Binance listing, and then that ushered in a new part of our scale.

I remember going on a run one time early on and just being like, this is never gonna work, what are you even doing, you’re just putting together some random project. Before something is real, it feels very insubstantial, and really not worth your time or effort.

So it was very hard to justify putting in all of that effort, and I remember being on this run and just thinking of the person that was in our team that was waiting for the thing that I needed to give them, they were expecting this thing from me and I thought, he’s waiting for it. So I’ve got to do it. And so that was kind of a good thing realizing that I wasn’t alone there. There was a group of us trying to get this thing off the ground and I guess that team spirit was what got through the early periods.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I think it’s got to be to thine own self be true. I kind of don’t even know whether that’s from the Bible or from Shakespeare. I think I did discover in my life I had to just go with my own intuition and my own sense of what was right for me to do, as opposed to looking at other people for an example of what I should be doing.

Gradually, I learned that some of those things made me happy, but some of them didn’t. And so I was able to learn over time what would really make me happy. It’s still better to be doing something that you fundamentally believe in and enjoy. For me, crypto really was that, at the end, I really did eventually realize that this whole movement of trying to give power to more people is just really fun. And building something brand new with technology is just brilliant. So once I knew that, I think it was easier to take more risk and to say I’m just going to keep going until something works.

Because I had conviction that was the right place for me to be, I knew I was in the right place. And eventually something would end up being successful. So, to thine own self be true would probably be my quote.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

We’re helping people to have fun and to bring value into their lives in the form of NFT and cryptocurrency. And we’re helping them to work with each other and collaborate and strategize and compete within a game. And I think whilst they’re doing that, we’re also helping them to learn about blockchain technology, and to discover ways that they can use that develop it, build it, add to it, by creating their own code, or their own content or their own art. So it’s helping people to really shape their destiny and their own lives using this brand new technology that we’re building.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We’ve grown very quickly, that’s something that other CEOs that I speak with have mentioned, they’ve never seen a company grow this quickly. So in a single year, we went from having four employees to having about 80. And our revenues, of course, just went through the roof. Our player numbers went from 10,000 at the beginning of 2021, to millions and millions at the end of that same year. We were the first blockchain application in history ever to exceed 100,000 users, 500,000 users, a million users, and so on.

We made blockchain history by becoming the most used dapp (decentralized application) when no other DAPPs had ever reached those numbers before. So that’s kind of an unusual thing that has happened. And I suppose the story within that is just trying to evolve as quickly as you can with that, we had so many great team members along the way. People, especially community members who just began to start working with us, and then we might hire them. And people took a huge amount of responsibility. And they were working so hard in that period when we were growing so quickly. And they think they really just did that out of the excitement and kind of how incredible it was to be part of this thing that was growing so quickly. I think just like experiencing all of that energy and that activity, and then trying to figure out how we could get what we needed to get done through that, like the building of systems and processes.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Our roadmap contains lots of new developments. For example, we’re the only project in history that puts DAOs into competition with each other as game objects as teams. And so the release of that is going to help people to have a huge amount of fun as a team and to earn rewards and to drive innovation as a team. We’re also working on ways to keep using the NFTs that we’ve created in the game. And one of the things that’s really exciting is that our community is doing that as well. They’re coming up with ways to use the NFTs that are part of the metaverse, they use them as part of competitions and as part of giveaways and just as ways to create community, they kind of all hold the same NFT and so on. Those are all really fun things that we’re working on.

And we’re really executing our roadmap. We don’t really have that many things on the agenda that are outside of what we’ve already set out. But that roadmap is big and it’s really rich to try and build that out.

Let’s zoom out a bit and talk in more broad terms. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

I think that what’s important is that every individual person has the freedom to make the choices that they want to make and then can experience all of the highs and lows that result from those choices that they make. I think a lot of women are choosing to be part of this industry. And women are also choosing to be part of other industries or not to work and to be at home with children or for other reasons. And I think all of those are really great and valid choices for a person to make. And I really trust that individual people know their lives best and are probably making the very best choices for them.

So I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the industry or the state of the industry for women. Other than that, for me, it’s been brilliant and transformative. And for the other women that I know, it seems to be the same.

The stories that I hear are all extremely positive. And we’re all very, very happy in this space building this amazing technology and changing the status quo just by working here. So my opinion is that I’m really delighted that each person follows their own path, whether that’s to work in crypto to work outside of crypto or to do anything else, and women and men are all free to make their own choices.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

I think it’s impossible for me to generalize just from my own experience as one woman working in tech to what is true for most women or all women in tech. It’s impossible for me to extrapolate into how that would be different from men’s experience, all I really have to go on is my own experience.

And I think it’s quite dangerous when we try to assume because of our experience we know something objective about the world. The challenges that I’ve experienced as a person working in tech, I don’t really know if that’s because I’m a woman, or just the challenges that I’ve experienced, are confidence. Because most of us are doing something relatively new, there aren’t a lot of previous projects, for example, that you can look at examples of how to do something, most of us are, to some extent, inventing this as we go along.

But that’s what’s great about it, that’s not a bad thing. It also means that you have to have a bit of confidence, there isn’t some expert just around the corner who knows how to do this better than you, you might be the expert, even though you probably know very little and just go for it.

And a really nice thing is that, I find that the marketplace itself will give you the feedback that you need. So if you put an idea out into the marketplace and try and get people to buy it, for example, you will get feedback about whether what you’re doing is any good, whether people like it, whether the price is too high, too low. So I think the best way of gaining confidence is actually to try it and then you learn what’s working, what’s not where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are and through that actually the confidence builds.

So that’s been one challenge for me is just having confidence but the solution has always been just to take action and to try something, almost try anything. And then that’s the starting point to find the path to it to have a better product or proposition each each time you go through that process.

Other challenges have been doing a lot of public speaking and the first time I ever did one of these panels I was so nervous. I thought I can’t speak about this topic, what do I know about blockchain gaming, and I got so ready and prepared And I had practiced it so many times. And now I do one of these every week and I feel a lot more comfortable with it, but public speaking and just the amount of that I have to do has been challenging, but also a great opportunity to grow and learn, and I feel so much more relaxed about it now.

What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

I think that the issue there is that they’ve already acquired the customers that it’s easy to acquire. And so the remaining customers are more costly or difficult to acquire. And so the growth slows. There’s lots of potential solutions one is also to question whether you really do need to keep growing, that might be a good moment to merge with another company or project or even to be acquired, because then you can start benefiting from benefit from economies of scale, rather than just relying on growth as the way that you become more profitable.

So sometimes, when growth levels off, that’s actually a good moment to consolidate different projects together in terms of trying to reignite growth or appealing to new bases of customers. If your existing customer base is maxed out within the particular market, trying to repurpose what you’ve built to be able to speak to a similar but different audience and then get another burst of growth can sometimes work,as can entering new geographies.

It can also mean that your competition has started doing something better and might be taking existing users from you. And so you can get into optimizing your technology and continuing to try and be the best to have the best technical proposition that you can, in fact, you could potentially reverse that and start taking customers from the competition. We’re basically always in a sort of cat and mouse situation in technology, we might be the dominant technology, but then another technology comes along, that’s better in some way. So either being ahead of that lifecycle, or at least being on that lifecycle, and evolving your own tech to be superior to the competition’s, or potentially that’s another moment when consolidation can also make a lot of sense because you can bring your existing user base and one of your competitors might have better technology and that combination could actually be could make a lot of sense at that moment.

Based on your experience, can you share 3 or 4 strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

We build our technology on an emerging technology which is blockchain. And it’s a little bit of an unstable technical environment in the first place. Because while you’re building a chain, the chain needs to reach consensus, there’s some limitations with the resources and so on. So what’s great about blockchain technology is that it’s open, interoperable, other people can call smart contract actions, and the assets are provably owned by users. But what’s challenging about it is that sometimes the user experience is not yet where the technology is for other types of applications. We’re on a constant technical path to improving what we can improve, but we can’t improve all of the variables.

The community is a major source of user support. And in fact, actually gamifying some of the challenges can bring people together. One of the reasons why people end up coming into our social channels is because they have a technical question. Actually it can be a way of bringing people together, and then somebody else answers that question. And all of a sudden, two people are in an exchange, and other people might be joining in. So it’s not always a bad thing for someone to have a less than smooth user journey, as long as they are encouraged to come into a channel and interact to find the answer. It’s actually part of how crypto communities get built, people are learning the technology at the same time as they’re using the technology and they’re learning it together. So those are the strategies I think to solve and to help with people’s user issues.

Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company? Please share a story or an example for each.

I think the first one is having a network or already being part of a community or part of an ecosystem, having reputation having some experience in the space, so that there are people who know you and who you know, who you can rely on and bring into your venture for expertise, or to connect you with external parties. That is crucial.

In our case we were already pretty well known within the WAX ecosystem of block producers and had previously been block producers on a related chain. So we had a fairly good network. And those people were our early adopters, and our early evangelists. And they really helped to spread the story out in a far more powerful way when we are alone couldn’t have done.

So the first thing is the power of already having a network.

The second is having a plan that you can articulate at any given moment. So people really want to understand what you’re building and understand your vision. The spoiler alert here is the plan can and will change. The point is that you have a thought out plan at any given time. Which means you’re thinking through some of the potential future variables, you’re understanding what the cost of doing certain things might be either financially or technically, you’re foreshadowing some of the strategic implications of making decisions at any given moment how you might be baking yourself into a particular path.

Being able to adapt. You’re just generally very aware of the context of the decisions that you’re making in relation to your plan and can communicate that at any given time that just allows you to build the project in a more future proofed way, but also allows other people to have confidence that you have the ability to foresee what the future might hold, even though of course, it always ends up going off plan, that’s completely fine.

It’s just having some kind of a plan and being able to articulate it. Our technical code blueprint is a good example of a plan. But it says at the very top this document describes a project in development and has been constantly updated. Adaptability I think is really important.

Know when to kill your darlings. It’s really baked into the whole thing of being an entrepreneur, and especially being a tech entrepreneur is that you will end up abandoning, like probably the majority of the things that you try, and that’s actually just part of the process. So being kind of comfortable with that and not feeling like it’s a failure, but just that it’s part of the process is really great.

I think the process of us getting to the concept of Alien Worlds was that we tried other things. First, we tried to sell the idea of DAOs as a real business proposition for a number of years. And it didn’t really gain scale, because not enough real world projects wanted to turn themselves into a DAO. So then we pivoted and we stopped doing that, and we started doing Alien Worlds. So that was a really great move. So the willingness to stop sometimes is also important.

The last thing that I would say is like being really connected to your customers and being really close to them. In our case, Telegram and Discord and all of our community channels are ways that we remain constantly connected to the people that are using our product and the other people that are building the product alongside us in the metaverse, these decentralized members are really important, understand what they need, what documentation they might need in order to be able to build better in the metaverse or what resources they might need, what they want to see. And then we can constantly have that in the back of our mind so that as we continue to deliver, we’re actually meeting needs that exist rather than needs that we think exist. So those would be my five things.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Elon Musk, I think that he’s been such a visionary technologist, such a clear thinker and willing to be contrarian, which takes a lot of courage. So I think his contribution to the environment through vehicles that don’t emit carbon has been really great. I think his commitment to free speech has been really inspiring. And I’m not sure he would be the easiest person to be friends with. Apparently he’s very driven, but I just really admire his work. And I’d love to sit down and find out also his commitment to space, innovation and responsible AI. He’s raising some important topics around the future of AI and humanity. So yeah, I think he’s a really great thinker of our time.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!