WiB Spotlight: Evin

Saniya More
Women in Blockchain
9 min readApr 29, 2024

WiB Spotlight is a Q&A series by Women in Blockchain where we highlight women and non-binary leaders building in the crypto space.

Introducing Evin from Disco.xyz! As we spend more and more time online, it has become harder to manage our data across the different platforms we use today. Disco.xyz has built a groundbreaking solution by introducing the concept of the “data backpack” — a virtual repository where users can consolidate their online presence seamlessly. In this month’s WiB Spotlight, we talk to Evin about her crypto journey, effective management styles, and the importance of human coordination in our industry.

WiB: So wonderful to meet you! What have you been up to this week?

Evin: Over at Disco this week, we’ve been hard at work making identity data friendlier for growth leads and ecosystem leaders to interact with. We realized very quickly that the infrastructure, foundational infrastructure, to build identity data on top of addresses is great, wonderful, something no one had ever seen before, but it was only useful in service of their business goals, of course.

And so recently we’ve been building out dashboards that make it easy to understand your ecosystem’s identity, everything from where they are, what time of day they’re awake, their network, where they hang out when it’s not with you, who knows each other.

WiB: Very interesting. I definitely want to learn more about how you started Disco, but before we do that, tell me more about yourself. How did you get into the industry?

Evin: It’s sort of a funny story. I grew up in Ohio in the middle of nowhere. My parents are attorneys, and so they were pretty strict. So my first introduction to rules was with intellectual property. When I was a kid, Napster and Limewire were becoming popular, and so I got into this argument with my parents about why I couldn’t listen to music in the same way that other people could? And that’s when I realized, okay, wait, there are rights and responsibilities around data. Certain things you’re allowed to do, certain things that you can’t.

When I got to university, I had an incredible professor who inspired us to become excited about the net neutrality movement at the time and to take more seriously what it means to be able to control and move data. It was through that coursework and that amazing professor that I discovered Bitcoin. And so initially, I thought, you know, oh, this is a really interesting method of censorship resistant data distribution. That money thing isn’t going to catch on, though. I felt like it was kind of a distraction from the real serious work, which is the data. And so, of course, you know, to this day, we remain distracted by the unserious money part of crypto. But all jokes aside, I did, of course, eventually develop a deep appreciation for DeFi.

WiB: Tell me more about your career before you became a founder.

Throughout my early career, I worked in a variety of human centered design practices, from technical content, helping to launch things like IBM Watson, working with CERN in the Large Hadron Collider, and then worked on connected hardware. Then, in 2017 when I was working in Omaha, Nebraska for Berkshire Hathaway, I discovered that you could now have a job in crypto full time.

After a 20-minute phone call with Joe Lubin in the departures lounge of the Omaha airport, I hung up my suit and joined Consensys. I started working above a pizza shop in Bushwick. My parents thought I was crazy.

But it ended up being a wonderful four years.I built out enterprise, worked on the identity side as well, had a lot of opportunity to understand what it meant to explain a blockchain to the government of Saudi Arabia or to the NBA, and then to, explore what it meant to build something with them afterwards.

But as wonderful a learning environment as it was, I thought maybe I could do my best work solving a problem that’s been eating at me for the better part of a decade.

That’s when I started Disco.

WiB: What was it like to kind of go through the process of actually starting your own thing? What were some of the biggest challenges? Some things that you weren’t expecting?

Everything is what you’re not expecting because there’s no set of experiences that I think are sufficiently commensurate with that set of responsibilities. It’s a tough challenge to prepare for, but certainly one for which I was very grateful to have had so many years working in the industry. I was able to, as I ran into challenges or new experiences, call on others for help. That was probably the most unexpected, wonderful part of starting a company, realizing just how many of my colleagues and peers were willing to give their time and treasure to help us battle test this idea.

WiB: So what does your day to day look like generally?

Evin: I would say that half of my time is spent on deep interior work into the product, doing bug reviews or copy changes, that sort of thing. And then the other half of my time is spent engaging with my team and representing our team’s work. I really try to sort of honor that 50 percent. At the end of the day, I like to reflect on how I spent those hours. I keep a little CEO journal, a couple bullet points every single day. Like, what’d you do? Was there anything you felt like you spent too much time doing? What would you wish you had spent more time doing? And then that can help me be more judicious in the days coming.

WiB: That’s really interesting. A CEO journal. I’ve never heard that one before.

Evin: We had just went through a technical audit from working with these guys who used to be at Microsoft, and one of them just shared that when he was previously in executive leadership, this was just a pattern or practice that he had that helped him kind of gut check how he was dividing his time and maintain a view on what that ratio looked like week over week. I thought, wow, that is pretty perceptive. And I haven’t thought of describing my past actions in that particular manner, but it’s actually pretty funny. It’s literally a hot pink gratitude journal that I have.

WiB: That’s really cool. Maybe I should start doing that. But I’m also wary of doing so because I’m sure I’ll look at it at the end of the day and be like, there’s only three bullet points here so maybe I just didn’t accomplish that much.

Evin: No! I know it sounds a little silly, but really, like, especially a month from now, when you look at it, when you see those three bullet points, they’ll be meaningful because you remember what they were, even if you don’t remember anything else you did that day. I’ve found that if I can go two or three weeks and say, okay, for the last two or three weeks, I’ve been 70% internal. I need to spend a little bit more time focused externally and be really intentional about that in just giving myself that little piece of feedback.

WiB: One thing I’m really curious about is management style. In crypto, a lot of teams are like, we have a super flat structure. But it’s really hard to not have some sort of management. I’m curious to know more about the structure at Disco and your personal style of management.

Evin: I love this question. This is so thoughtful. And really, I wish more people talked about this. In my own experience, I’ve been on the receiving end of many different management styles. Especially in my experiences where I felt like I was not always receiving effective or impactful feedback. One of the things that I tried to do most, that I try to do a lot with my teammates now, is to define a shared language around what it is that we’re discussing, whether it’s goals, whether it’s areas of improvement, but just trying to get on the same page in terms of, hey, here are the goals that we’re working toward together, and do we have a shared vocabulary and how we’re describing progress towards those goals?

It took me a long time to figure this out, but when I didn’t have that shared vocabulary, that’s when I got really frustrated and felt like I was not able to manage up or communicate with other teammates. It was because they weren’t on the same page as me and were not observing my behavior or my actions toward this goal because they didn’t see or understand that goal or have the ability to describe it.

When people ask what I do at Disco, I say I have the privilege of working for very smart people. My job as the founder is to serve the people who work at Disco. I work for them. And so it is my job to remove roadblocks from their way. It is my job to facilitate a healthy, respectful and communicative environment for them. It’s my job to meet with them regularly to understand their experience and how we can improve it. And so I have one on ones with every single teammate, every single week, even if it’s just to ask how their dog is or what they’re doing this weekend, because I care about them as people.

It’s important to be able to spend time in an environment where we can just learn from and level with one another as opposed to talking about the specifics of a given task. I think that invites everyone to just open up, feel a little more heard on our team as well. There are different types of personalities. Some folks are more extroverted. Some are more introverted. Some I’ve worked with for seven years. Some I’ve only worked with a few months. And so I also find that sprint planning and checking in is super important.

You not feeling awesome? Let’s dig into that. Why are you not feeling awesome? What part of that could our team help with? What part can I help with? What part can you help with? I don’t know if you ever saw The Magic School Bus when you were little.

WiB: Oh, my God. Yes!

Evin: I know it’s so silly, but my mental model for myself is, like, I am Miss Frizzle. My job is to drive the bus safely to get everyone to the galaxy to make sure we have cool activities while we’re on. While we’re in the spaceship on the way there, everyone’s getting along with each other, and then we all agree about the direction we’re going in the spaceship.

WiB: That’s a really interesting analogy. I haven’t thought of The Magic School Bus in so long. I used to love that show.

Evin: Put a girl with good hair in charge and give her a bunch of science — you will have the best day ever.

WiB: Well, you sound like a really fun person to work with.

Evin: You know, this is gonna be such an obnoxious thing to say, and I hate that I’m gonna literally quote Oprah to you, but, sometimes you gotta teach people how to treat you. And so one thing I would also suggest for just thinking about management is sometimes people will be down to meet you for your structured meetings and you basically gotta boss them around. Okay, cool. I’m so glad you sat down for a one on one. Here’s my agenda for this week. Here are my goals. Last week, I met all of these goals. Here’s my progress against these goals. Do you have any others? No. Okay, cool. I’m going to say that’s completely great. So we both agree I’ve completed 100% of my goals from last week.

Obviously I’m exaggerating it, but I think the role of the manager is to help you do awesome. And so if you need to be your own manager and sit them across the table like a puppet while you have a conversation with yourself and show them the paper, so be it.

WiB: Is there anything else you want to add or you think people should know? Any advice, any parting words?

Evin: Overall, I would say, fundamentally, blockchains are multiplayer games, right? Otherwise they’re just databases. It’s ironic, but in order to make the most out of trust-minimized technology, we have to add more trust. We’re playing a human coordination game. That means we need to talk to the other humans that are playing the game with us. And if those folks are not in a position to honor the part of the human coordination game and to show up to try to solve these really challenging problems together, then we’ll find a different configuration. But blockchains are best enjoyed with friends and colleagues.

And so whether you’re exploring as an independent individual, bringing one buddy or looking for a team to build with, I think that the human part of human coordination tools is the most pivotal strength that we as an ecosystem have to put toward these problems. Compared to human coordination, the math part should feel easy.

Follow Evin on Twitter.

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