MGD Fellowship Interview: Kseniya Lifanova
by DAO Member, Mariana Coral
Meta Gamma Delta is a DAO that invests in and supports women-led Web3 projects. The DAO hosts a weekly speaker session featuring women leading their specialty in the crypto industry. Recently Kseniya Lifanova, a founding member of MGD spoke with us about her experience changing careers and entering the Web3 space.
Who is SHE?
Kseniya Lifanova is a developer currently working as a VP of Decentralized Strategy and Engineering at Foundry (a DCG company). She is also co-founder and partner of a five-year tech consultancy that builds custom web applications and decentralized applications on Ethereum. She is currently working on a DeFi project called SaveDAI. She also has taught Solidity classes and an early supporter of women’s education and leadership projects like Rabbit Hole and MGD. (Learn more about Kseniya here: LinkedIn.)
The Early Years:
At 26 Kseniya was working as a financial analyst for an architect firm in New York. She was successful in her career but felt unfulfilled. She wanted to create and be inspired.
She started reading about how smart people change careers. She began teaching herself how to code. Eventually Kseniya found herself enrolled in a coding bootcamp in the afternoons while she worked full-time.
When she honed her skills enough to become a developer, she quit her job and started working as a freelancer and getting involved in the tech community via meetups and events. In fact, she met her two future business partners at an event. The trio would go on the create Upstate Interactive, a tech consultancy. At one point, I Googled: what career should I switch into, and ended up finding my way to Code Academy, which is where I started to learn basic HTML and CSS. Quickly, I realized that it was something that I just loved. I thought that this was a technical and analytical thing that I could do, where I am also building, I am also creating. Just a few years later, at the age of 28 or 29 was the first time I wrote any HTML, where I wrote my first line of code.
Later, Kseniya would move to Los Angeles and begin her journey in crypto.
Wild Crypto Journey
In Los Angeles Kseniya got interested in blockchain and crypto when she met some Ethereum miners. She started her journey down the crypto rabbit hole reading “The Internet of Things” and understanding the why of these emerging technologies. Becoming enthusiastic about the idea, she started investing in cryptocurrency through exchanges, so she was intrinsically motivated to understand it even more.
The next few years for her were all about crypto. She started learning Solidity, one of the languages used to code in Web3 and attended as many meetups as possible. Kseniya met and remain friends with women who are key members of MGD, a group of women coming together and supporting other women in the space.
Kseniya gives two lessons of life advice that she has learned through her journey:
Life Lesson #1: take risks and make those bold moves, because they can pay off. If someone had told me that I would be starting my own company, just a few years later, I would have told them that they are out of their mind. But it happened, and it was really hard in the beginning, I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was one of the best decisions I made.
Life Lesson #2 Go to meetups, it is a great way to meet people. It is a wonderful way to learn about the space, you do not even have to go to tech ones. There are all different kinds, but the tech ones are great, and started the crypto ones.
Building Women Inclusion in Web3
Kseniya found her passion around increasing diversity in the tech space, so she has been part of various organizations that educate and empower other men. Once she was a master in Solidity, she started teaching classes on this programming language with her group DappLadies, she also has cohosted events with female speakers with the Rabbit Hole Network and raised money to fund women’s projects run by women in Blockchain with Meta Gamma Delta.
At that time, I had DappLadies was kind of it was a lot of work because it was mostly me putting together these workshops and teaching. And when I found MGD, it was again, a group of women coming together, supporting each other, and supporting other women in the space. The mission of Meta Gamma Delta was to raise funds and give those funds out to women building in the space.
Whether you are thinking about changing your career or starting your own project in Web3, you should check out, and be part of MGD. You will find everything that you need to begin this unknown but incredible journey into blockchain technologies!
MGD website: https://metagammadelta.com/
