Melissa Zhang talks building foundations of the Duke Blockchain Lab, gaining the courage to try for her dream job, and making financial inclusion a global reality
Melissa is a recent graduate working as a software engineer at Coinbase in San Francisco. At Duke, she studied computer science and economics. She founded the Duke Blockchain Lab in her senior year of college to give students at Duke the resources to have an impact on their respective industries and eventually start their own ventures built on blockchain technology.
What first got you interested in blockchain? What interesting problems keep you active in the space today?
At Duke, one of my friends was taking a class taught by Cam Harvey called Innovation and Cryptoventures, and I decided to join them. That class basically changed my entire career trajectory. It was one of those moments where the light bulb goes off, and I was thinking “wow this technology is so cool, this is the thing I want to be doing”. Really, the specific thing that got me really interested was the financial inclusion piece of crypto. Blockchain technology and crypto gives people access to financial infrastructures that they might not have. We take it for granted that in the US a bank is going to have our money and we’re going to be able to withdraw it tomorrow. We trust that a credit card swipe will go through and complete a transaction seamlessly. This type of trust in financial systems doesn’t exist everywhere. It’s harder for people in countries with less developed financial systems to get loans, build businesses, and enjoy the financial security that we have in the US. It was really eye-opening to see that using crypto we can create a global economy where everyone is included. I feel that cryptocurrency can give control back to the individual and to me that’s really powerful.
You founded the Duke Blockchain Lab while you were in college. What was the impetus for founding it?
I founded the Duke Blockchain Lab my senior spring. It was something that was really important to me. I felt like I didn’t have a choice in founding the lab– it was completely necessary due to the lack of resources in Durham for students to really understand this new exciting technology or be competitive in the space.
What did the process of founding the lab look like?
I had a few great mentors at Duke (mostly teachers and advisors), so it was easy to establish a group of people to support the founding of the lab. The hardest part of starting this initiative was developing the team because I knew that I had to have a team that would take it over after I left Duke, I didn’t want the organization to just dissolve. I wanted to find a strong leadership team that would take my vision for the lab forward and keep the group active. I spent a lot of time talking to people whose vision aligned with mine, and from there it grew organically because people were really interested. There were no other classes at Duke or any other group that provided the same type of education.
What was the initial vision for the lab?
The initial vision was for the lab was to be an incubator for people who are developing ideas around blockchain and cryptocurrency. I quickly realized that it was a little bit early for that, so we shifted to being more education focused. We hosted workshops, brought in speakers, and educated students about the power of crypto and blockchain. Now the lab is more research focused. It’s cool that the initial foundational education work has paid off and people are now starting dive into blockchain research.
What kinds of educational initiatives did the lab run?
The first thing we did was an Ethereum workshop. It was a full day workshop where we brought in speakers to talk about how to build your own smart contract. We initially had an engineering focus, but we ended up recruiting business/econ students as well, so it was hard to speak to both groups. That was the first iteration and although we saw some success, we realized that one day is not enough, so we started working on a house course. A Duke house course is a semester long student taught course. The house course ended up being completely full– it was a 50-person class.
When you were just a sophomore in college, you reached out to Fred Ehrsam, co founder of Coinbase, and managed to meet up with him on campus. What was casually reaching out to him like? What was that meeting like? How did it influence your interest in the blockchain space?
I reached out to him after he spoke in our Cryptoventures class. It was lucky because I reached out to him and he just happened to be on campus that day for an alumni event. We met very briefly and he told me to come to the Coinbase office over the summer because I was interning in the city. That’s how it all started. Every time I visited San Francisco I made sure to always visit the San Francisco office. There wasn’t a lot of talk about blockchain in Durham, so for me visiting the Coinbase office and learning more about the space was really exciting.
You had a lot of career options coming out of college– you even state your interest in product management. Can you take us through the process of choosing Coinbase and narrowing down options?
Coinbase was my dream company, so it came down to getting the courage to admit that. I didn’t want to at first, because then the possibility of failure becomes real, and the idea of being rejected by them was very scary. Once I committed to it I decided to give it all I had and if it didn’t work out then it wasn’t meant to be. I had the great option of going back to Microsoft in a product management role, which is the field I was most interested in before I realized that I wanted to do software engineering. I didn’t feel very confident about applying to a software engineering role, because I had very little previous industry experience.
You mention a lack of confidence and courage. How did you end up just going for it?
It was a lot of self-reflection. I realized that this was something I really wanted, and I knew that I was hesitant just because I was scared. From there, I realized that I would regret it if I didn’t try for this opportunity. Regret wasn’t the only motivator– it was recognizing in myself I was scared of the possibility of failure that prompted me to think, “this is silly, let’s just go for it”. I was confident that this was the right decision for me because of the all of the summers I had spent at the Coinbase office. I was also lucky that I had a good support system of people who told me to follow my passion.
What does your day to day look like at Coinbase?
My role is as a software engineer for our frontend products, so anything that has to do with Coinbase.com. My day to day is variable. I have stand ups with my team and project meetings where we do project updates. The way that our teams work at Coinbase is that we have product teams and platform teams. On the frontend platform team I lead our weekly meetings. A lot of what I think about is the developer experience and protection against bugs. On my product team, I work on international expansion. Much of that involves localization and figuring out requirements for adding new countries. I work closely with product managers to make sure that the product requirements are realistic with the technical requirements and to establish a timeline. Because I work on frontend, I get a really clear view of what the customer experience is like and I can have a direct impact.
What interesting problems are you working on solving at Coinbase?
The reason I’m really excited about my team and particularly about international expansion is that we are directly working on our mission of building an open financial system. The best part is that my team is perfectly aligned with where I think crypto should go in the future.
You talk a lot about the importance of “paying it forward” at all ages and stages in this blog post. What are some valuable ways that women can pay it forward for other women in the blockchain space?
I think that making the space feel less intimidating and inviting more women in are two important ways to pay it forward. Blockchain is a combination of the two most intimidating subjects– technology and finance– and for that reason I feel like a lot of people may not be interested in getting involved. However blockchain and crypto is where the next generation of wealth creation is happening, so we need women to help widen perspectives and move the space in the direction where everyone benefits from the technology, not just traditionally dominant groups.
Connect with Melissa on her Twitter and LinkedIn!
Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu. The she256: Fireside Chats are sponsored by Upscribe.
