Anna Carroll talks Dharma’s journey from protocol to product, being a trendsetter in the space, and co-founding the Stanford Blockchain Collective

Anna dreams of an inclusive, globally accessible financial system capable of empowering marginalized communities around the world; she is dedicated to leveraging blockchain technology to achieve that vision. Anna earned a degree in Computer Science at Stanford University where she co-led the Blockchain Collective, a student group aimed at fostering the blockchain community on campus. Upon graduating, she was selected as one of six participants of the Kleiner Perkins Product Fellowship, where she sharpened her entrepreneurial skills as a Product Manager at Doordash. Today, Anna works as a Product Engineer at Dharma, where she spends her days building product that enables users to easily borrow and lend cryptocurrencies.

What first got you into the blockchain space? What keeps you here?

I’ve always been really focused on social impact. In high school I started a non-profit called the Corina Field Carroll Fund focused on protecting children

in my home state of Tennessee. From that point onwards, I was interested in how I could use my energy towards things that would make a difference in a positive way. I had been into tech for social impact for a couple of years when I first heard about blockchain. There were these promises in the blockchain space that we could make a difference for people who have traditionally been left out of the financial system. These promises are what first drove me to learn about blockchain and crypto. What keeps me here is striving towards being able to make a difference and deliver on some of the promises that brought me into the space in the first place.

You were one of the co-founders of the Stanford Blockchain Collective? What prompted its founding?

The Stanford Blockchain Collective was around for a couple months before I joined. It was around January of 2018 that a core group of six folks (the co-founding team) came together and decided to get the collective off the ground. We were trying to create more of a community around blockchain and crypto on Stanford campus. Our co-founding team saw the potential of blockchain technology and we wanted to make sure that our student community joined us for the ride. A core motivation was keeping Stanford’s place as on the cutting edge of emerging technology.

How did the co-founding team meet?

I had just started getting into crypto and I decided to dive in by applying for a scholarship to attend Token Summit in San Francisco. It was a great experience because it buoyed my initial excitement about crypto and allowed me to make my first couple of contacts in the space. While I was there I met Alex Pruden, who was an MBA candidate at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He told me that he and a couple of GSB students were thinking about this initiative, so we exchanged numbers. When I started, the Collective consisted of Alex, a couple of other GSB students, and myself and Richard Chen who were undergraduates studying Computer Science. Richard Chen is now a partner at 1confirmation (founded by Nick Tomaino of Coinbase) and Alex Pruden just graduated from the GSB and is joining a16z crypto. So I’m definitely proud of this group of people.

What kinds of initiatives did the collective lead?

We lead a broad range of activities. We’ve had panels of people from the industry share their work with our campus. We’ve done hackathons, where we’ve taught students to code smart contracts. We’ve done pitch days for people to pitch their crypto project ideas. We’ve done “un-conferences” where we bring people together to talk about crypto and just meet people. It’s all towards the goal of getting people involved, educating people, and supporting the folks that are getting their hands dirty.

What is Dharma?

A product that allows people to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies with ease.

Why are rainbow colors so prominent on Dharma’s website?

The rainbow colors are definitely are due to our lead product designer Matthew Vernon. He is an awesome designer who the team was able to contract for the first several months and then convince him to come on permanently. Matthew has a Vaporwave inspired aesthetic with lots of colors. His aesthetic communicates the playful aspects of what we’re doing in this ecosystem.

What is your role at Dharma?

My title is Product engineer, which is in-between the role of a product manager and a full stack engineer. My background is in product management, so the team wanted to incorporate my product background into my role. However, my efforts thus far have been focused on full stack engineering. When I joined, we were racing towards our public launch, so the team and I agreed that I would have more impact in engineering. As the company evolves, we’ll see how product comes in to my role.

What’s it like to work on such a small team?

We all work in the office. Our culture is very playful. We have a saying, “if you’re not having fun, you’re dying”, so we’re constantly joking around and having a good time. The space is so fun and there’s so much going on. It’s the first time that I’ve been immersed in a group of people that spends all their time thinking about the things that I think about and care about. My passion for the blockchain space doesn’t have to be compartmentalised into a hobby anymore; it’s my day to day experience. We eat lunch together every single day. I walk into the office and it’s the same group of people. I’m lucky to have an exceptional group of teammates that I like, trust, and care about.

How does Dharma decide which crypto assets to support on the platform?

It’s a function of talking with our users and figuring out what is the most useful to them at a given moment combined with strategic business input. We also take into account constraints on the engineering, product, and design teams. Ultimately it’s a decision that the growth team makes based on input from customers and the extenuating impact to the rest of our business.

Dharma was originally very much a protocol focused company, when and why did Dharma pivot to product facing?

I’ll take you through the history of Dharma to answer this question. Dharma was started in early 2017 by Nadav Hollander, a solo founder. He was a part of Y Combinator and at the time the narrative in the crypto space was that value was accrued at the protocol layer. Most people in the space were working on protocols, and the idea was that the business model would be that other people would build consumer facing products on top of the protocols. Some protocols had associated tokens, so that the team could get a value capture based on creating public infrastructure. Dharma’s team didn’t see the need for a token in our protocol. Our team decided not to do an ICO, which has been an incredibly important decision for the company, because it didn’t lock Dharma into any messed up dynamics that we regretted later.

What happened after the protocol was built?

Our team was constantly trying to get other teams and developers to build products on top of our protocol, but didn’t have any control over the product experience that they were serving users. Essentially the way that Dharma acquired a customer was getting them to build an entire product and business on our infrastructure, which was incredibly difficult. In the fall of 2018 Dharma was struggling. Our team had an offsite and decided to take the destiny of the protocol into our own hands. We would own the product experience and build a product that lived up to the quality of the protocol layer. This moment changed everything.

What changed when Dharma pivoted to building a product on top of the protocol?

We actually started gaining traction. We got users and capital was flowing through the system. In the month of February we were handling more volume than we had done in the entire year of 2018. In March, we were handling five times that, and in April we were handling five times that much again. Dharma was able to turn things around because our team is agile and flexible. We saw the market opportunity to own the product experience for Dharma. Everyone on the team feels that this was absolutely the right decision. We’re really excited to see what comes next.

How did Dharma go about changing its vision?

Our team’s first step was launching a splash page to gauge interest in the product. People read our very basic value proposition and if they were interested, signed up. Users were asked for a rough estimate of how much they would want to borrow or lend. There was a lot of engagement, and respondents had tentatively verbally committed a large amount of capital. Our team itself mostly stayed the same. Our founder Nadav was able to coalesce amazing talent, so our existing team already had the skill to pivot. Our team showed up, made a new codebase quickly, and we launched a product.

Is launching a product on top of your own protocol becoming an industry trend, or is it something unique to Dharma?

There are some teams that have come to similar conclusions, such as dYdX. However, it’s not ubiquitous; companies like 0x have some high-quality people building on top of their protocol, and they have relayers, but this means that they don’t own their product experience. We’re starting to see more and more teams coalesce around this narrative for how to build a business in the crypto space.

Dharma is a trendsetter. It was one of the first companies to transition from protocol to product, and didn’t buy into creating a token during the ICO craze.

Yeah. This is a team value. We think from first principles, we call it like we see it, and we’re brave about acting without waiting on the rest of the ecosystem to catch up. We’re willing to go out in front of the rest of the pack and make the decisions that we think are correct.

Who is Dharma’s target customer?

If you’re borrowing assets you want to do something with that money. The borrow side of our product tends towards institutional and speculative investment. For example, margin traders, hedge funds, market-makers, and day traders use our product to accomplish their goals.

The lend side of our market looks quite different. Lenders are people who want to earn interest on their assets. That can be pretty much everyone. Lending experiences look a lot like saving experiences; you deposit your assets, they get lent out, and then you earn interest. With lenders we are much more retail focused. We’re hoping that we can build product experiences that are market expansionary. We want new users to be able to access these experiences.

How does the team ensure that Dharma is built for lenders of all backgrounds?

We focus on the design process. Our team iterates very quickly. We have a lot of really exciting iterations on the product experience side that are coming out. We’re focused on capturing the retail users on the lend side. We try to make the product as accessible to everyone and as simple as a centralized experience, such as Coinbase.

Connect with Anna on her Twitter or LinkedIn!

Anna was also on the Decentralized Finance Panel at Recolor 2019, our annual conference that took place this past April. To see Anna speak live about Dharma and DeFi technology, click here.

Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu with any questions or comments. Subscribe to our newsletter below!