she256: Year Two In Review
Last month, she256 celebrated our 2nd birthday. This is an incredibly exciting milestone for us and we want to thank everyone who has supported our mission to increase diversity and break down barriers to entry in the blockchain space.
Why is this a problem worth solving?
We are at a unique inflection point in history; people all around the world are losing trust in their current governments, people are frustrated with their existing financial systems and are struggling to be included in their economies, and finally, people are more digitally connected than ever before. The world as we know it has fundamentally changed. And in our eyes, crypto will be able to adapt to the changing needs of this new world.
It’s our job, as an industry, to make sure that the people building this groundbreaking ecosystem and laying down the foundation of future financial and governance structures are representative of the world’s global, diverse population.
At she256’s annual All Hands last month, we spent time not only sharing our vision for this upcoming year, but also laying down our longer-term vision for the space over the next decade. In the next 10 years, we want crypto to have diversity and inclusion ingrained in its DNA. Crypto should have the most diverse set of builders who are shaping the future of finance, governance, etc. Other industries should be looking to this space as a model for best practices in making D&I an intentional facet of the ethos of the industry. Working together as a community, we can make this vision a reality.
To accomplish this larger future vision, this year we aim to focus on identifying current barriers to the space using a data-driven approach, and then use that to effectively craft initiatives to address these barriers. Help us scope out what diversity in the space looks like now and quantify the current gap by taking our Future of Blockchain Survey.
Our past year
During our inaugural year, 2018, we focused on solidifying our mission, our brand, and creating initiatives. In 2019, we focused on expanding our initiatives, growing our internal team, and laying down our foundation as a non-profit. Here are some of our external accomplishments from the past year:
- Legal. We obtained 501c3 status (which means your donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law).
- Funding. We received grants from the Interchain Foundation, SamsungNext, and BerkeleyHaas which have been invaluable for us to run our initiatives.
- Press. We were nominated for Newsweek’s Blockchain Impact award, and were written about here.
- Designathon. We held a UI/UX Designathon for middle and high schoolers to engage students at a young age to solve real problems in the blockchain space.
- BlockChange. We created content for and piloted this series of blockchain fundamentals and developer workshops held after school for high-schoolers.
- Fireside Chats. This is a series where we interview influential women who are driving the space. We took some time to completely revamp Fireside Chats by iterating off of our readers’ feedback and relaunched.
- Mentorship. We launched our second year of this program, and grew our mentor and mentee community to 900+ people over 35+ countries.
- Recolor. We threw our second annual conference, which brought together the most kickass women who are all expanding the boundaries of this space.
- Webinars. We piloted two remote-first events: A bitcoin-focused webinar covering scripting and adversarial thinking in the peer to peer network, and a privacy-focused virtual workshop that used design-thinking principles to discuss topics such as data collection and privacy.
- Community Platform. We launched a slack to connect our community together; join it here!
- Various Initiatives. Along with all the above, we also released an introductory guide to crypto in Spanish, and held numerous other events that you can find out about here.
- Website. We completely overhauled our website and updated content and branding. Check it out here.
As we’ve grown from our initial conference to an official 501c3, we’ve also put a lot of thought into our internal processes, structures, and scaling our culture. Here are just a few of the ways we’ve grown in the past year:
- Team. We grew our team by 7 incredible rockstars: Xochitl Cazador (Business Development and Partnerships), Alicia Sidik (Fireside Chats), Kristie Huang (Operations), Sonal Kapoor (Design), Roshni Rawal (Fireside Chats), Ruhi Pudipeddi (Design), and Alexis Schottenstein (Finance).
- Culture. We defined our culture, and prioritized remote-first communication as well as emphasized personal development and ownership for each of our team members. This included introducing a cadence of 1:1s, lots of reflections and check-ins, introducing Agile concepts such as the weekly sprint, and establishing strong remote-first practices around meetings, socials, and online communication.
- OKRs. We implemented a system of internal OKRs to solidify our 2–3 main priorities for each year, and made sure that each new initiative we take on bubbles up to one of them.
- Brand. We expanded our brand through new styles and new colors, but solidified our original, timeless branding through the creation of a brandbook.
- Stretch Summer. We spent the summer of 2019 heads down, really focusing on developing strong accountability metrics, setting goals, and laying down our foundation. We had weekly deep dives on every aspect, initiative, and department of the nonprofit and fleshed out specific roadmaps for each one. We also used this time to work on individual she256-related projects that we had put on the back burner while the nonprofit was growing.
And we’re not done here.
Below is a sneak peak of some of our future initiatives:
- The launch of the Future of Blockchain Study, which aims to highlight the diversity gap that exists today, showcase the work of women pioneers in the space, and outline how we can engage more women and underrepresented minorities. Take this survey, share it, and encourage your company or organization to join our Coalition for Diversity!
- A job-board pilot, to assess whether there is a need for a platform to connect our community members to opportunities in the space, and to research what features both recruiters and potential employees need in that platform.
- ..and many more exciting initiatives to come!
We’d like to give a huge thanks to our community, sponsors, partners, and friends for a spectacular two years, and we are excited to see what lies ahead! Together, we can build diversity and inclusion into crypto from the very beginning, and enact change for decades to come.
Let’s disrupt the blockchain space with diversity.
— The she256 Team
