How I Became Chief Discovery Officer of a Blockchain Company by age 25
one of my earliest memories where I am alone, I am writing in a little notebook. at the time I carried around with me inventor notebooks that contained different types of inventions. I had one for safety inventions, one for toys I invented, and my favorite one, the one with the most designs and specs was my flying car notebook. It was filled with every way I could think of that could make a “car” fly. At the time I was ~7 and only drove one of these:
When I got older I started to throw out ideas to solve social problems, they ranged from //saving dogs from kill shelters and giving them to families with mental health problems like my own// to //creating spaces for community members to come together and cook//. Unfortunately at the time I was relatively shy and had a hard time telling anyone my ideas beyond my Mother and Father.
My house sat just across the river from the Colville Reservation in Omak, Washington. I had lived on the reservation side for a while when I was younger but as non-tribal members my parents couldn't by property on tribal lands.
Omak is 2 hours from a mall and 4 hours from a commercial airport. The biggest event of the year there is the Suicide Race, the steepest horse race in the world.
During my senior year my science teacher, Nancy Ridenour, asked my class to do a report on a STEM job. I chose civil/environmental engineering nearly at random out of a list. After presenting the report, I thought, “I guess this is my destiny.” I had done ballet for 16 years, competed in California and had won 1st place in a National Point Solo competition last year, but had broken my foot this year and realized how uncertain a career in the arts could be for me. Mrs. Ridenour was an inspiration to me as a young woman who had talents in math and science and so it felt simply <right>
I was extremely supported in Omak. I was a cheerleader, a dancer, a church goer, close to my family, had lots of friends, was prom princess, and valedictorian. My first step out of that fishbowl was college.
~engineering school~is harrrddd. I wasn’t a studier. I had trouble concentrating in long classes. I realized that school was competitive and people weren’t always nice. I tore my ACL after my first month of school and felt utterly alone. My biggest bright spot was my roommate Pooja.
We had met at orientation and our mothers liked each other immediately & they set us up as roommates. She was a brilliant young woman with high ambitions and endless empathy. She was studying Biomedical Engineering with a Father in Computer Science and through her I learned a lot more about the other options in engineering. Because I couldn’t dance at my previous level anymore I started to paint as well. This combination pushed me toward the intersection of software and art.
Taking a class in transportation engineering was my final straw. I thought this might draw me closer to my *flying~car~dreams* but I ended up on a street corner counting cars for homework. I was done. I decided to switch my major to Systems Engineering. It had much more to do with math and programming.
After school and a job as a developer in DC at a startup called Routeam I moved to NYC to accept a job at Thicket Labs. Since then I have learned and done a lot of things.
During a period of depression being separated again from friends and family I asked myself what will make me get up each morning? What can I promise myself that will motivate me? What do I think is worth living for?
Machine Learning was my answer the podcast Linear Digressions probably kept me alive. I spent most of my free time learning about ML algorithms and trying them out on my computer. I avoided any classes because they would take all the fun out of it for me. My boss Deepthi Welaratna suggested I apply for NASA datanauts. This was one of the best decisions for my career and social life.
I was invited to present at NASA Headquarters in DC, that year I spoke at SXSW on behalf of Thicket Labs about self organizing maps (a kind of neural net), spoke to young data scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and taught a class at CoLab-Factory on Machine Learning for Business Application.
Coming up on this last winter of 2017 I took time off work to explore how I could really support this new habit through my work in the most impactful way.
~Enter Byzantine~
Sam Hutch had been my roommate when I first moved to NYC and we worked together at Thicket Labs for a while before she left. There she has always astonished me with the quality and quantity of her work. She was amazing at design, UX, UI, and understanding complexity but most of all was a person I believed to be good at heart & quite cunning.
She had reached out to me about a new company she was forming with another one of our former coworkers and introduced me to the new-new world of blockchain!
back in college I had dabbled in crypto investing a small amount into Bitcoin (HODL) and had read early white papers at that time, but hadn’t been an avid follower of the industry for the last two years. They contacted me about their vision and hinted that they were interested in working with me.
Immediately I learned everything about the industry I could. I fell in love once again with a tech revolution that gave me life. I have deep respect for Sam and luckily for me they saw that spark of an inventor, tinkerer, polymath and experimentalist in me and asked me to become Chief Discovery Officer. I SAID YES!
At Byzantine we aren’t just stopping with tech innovation, we are blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds. Byzantine has a space in Brooklyn over 92,000 sq. ft and our footprint will be expanding fast. We are managing a community called Liminal (our cute name that means “the place in between” in this case — digital and physical worlds) in our spaces that provides digital creators, technologists, and artists a place to co-create with access to resources like — Motion capture suits from Rokoko, Sound production booths, Live streaming studios, Maker Equipment, Mixed Reality Cubes, High speed computing, even higher speed internet (necessary for blockchain & game development), gallery space and much more. You may say ~WHOA there, that sounds EXpExnSive! Well it is! But thats why Byzantine has a two pronged approach — providing resources and building resources. We are in development of a Mobile IOS game with live player interactions built on the blockchain. The idea for the game came from Sam who brilliantly came up with a deeply engaging strategy game thats a mix between Farmville/Animal Crossing and Burning Man culture called *PLAYA*. The in game currencies are NFTs or unique encrypted tokens built on the blockchain. If you don’t know how transformative that is, I don’t blame you. This industry is moving fast. but it basically turns the gaming industry on its head because now game players can actually extract monetary IRL/Fiat/USD (etc.) value out of their in-game assets.
Playa will push the boundaries between digital and physical environments even more by interacting through beacons with the physical spaces Byzantine and partners own, and unlocking events, rooms, and more though in-game achievements.
Our first step toward releasing this game is #Space Quest# it is the first round of tokens for sale for use in the game! This is a product sale for in-game and IRL perks but happily can also be traded/sold on the market once they are all bought. After the last Space Quest Tile is sold there will be a “Flip Event” where the tiles will expose their metadata and the unique art that has meaning in Playa lore will be revealed.
“Imagine if every dollar was a unique piece of art”
The tiles are valued in Ethereum (ETH) which at the time of publishing was worth $ USD and climbing. The tiles are sold at increasing rates according to a step function (SALE is over since time of publishing)
I hope that the Liminal spaces and similar innovative spaces we are building today will be the “Open Source Bell Labs” that will finally make my 10 types of flying cars a reality. My inner child is most excited about supporting all types of artists, technologists, philosophers, and makers to move past incremental innovations into a new age of radical innovation through cross-pollination of industries and radical inclusion.
