GRTiQ Podcast: 117 Lauren Feld

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Lauren Feld (00:00:18):

So in that way, I see The Graph as being a very critical piece of infrastructure for really just understanding what’s happening on all of these platforms across the space, without which I feel like we would be collectively, I think, a lot less informed about really what’s happening day to day and tactically with these protocols.

Nick (00:00:33):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Lauren Feld. Many of you may already know Lauren or have heard of her. She’s been an active contributor within the industry for many years and has a ton of momentum behind her most recent project, Collective Works. During this interview, Lauren talks about her time working as a blockchain strategist at Deloitte in international consulting firm, and then moving to Consensus as a venture strategist. We also talk about several incredible stops along the way before Lauren launched Collective Works, Lauren’s venture that oversees the Women’s Collective and Indigo Collective. As you’ll hear, Lauren has many unique insights about the industry, which is informed by her impressive experience and expertise as a go-to market strategist. We start the discussion talking about Lauren’s educational background.

Lauren Feld (00:01:53):

Yeah, sure. Well, I won’t go all the way back to the beginning, but I grew up in Manhattan, went to high school there and then ended up going to Chicago in the Midwest to Northwestern University for undergrad. I studied psychology mostly because I did not know what I wanted to study, and I thought all of the classes that I took in psychology were just absolutely fascinating to me and justified it by saying that, understanding people and how we interact with each other and in the world is going to be helpful and make me successful no matter what I end up doing. And I think for the most part that ended up being pretty true.

Nick (00:02:26):

Well, I haven’t had a lot of guests on the podcast that have studied psychology, so this is a lot of fun to speak with somebody who has. Take us through that degree a little bit. Did it really deliver on those skills that you use presently on a day-to-day basis of being able to understand and communicate better with people?

Lauren Feld (00:02:42):

Yeah, I think a 100%. Exceptionally, a lot of the work that I’m doing right now is around branding and positioning and helping these very technical products and founding teams speak to their customers and figure out how do we message or communicate what we’re building in a way that will really resonate with them. And a lot of that is psychology. Understanding how you tap into other people’s emotions, how you motivate them, how you create a value proposition that resonates with them. So very much so, I think helping with both interpersonal dynamics and teams, I think it’s been very helpful in terms of management style. I think a lot of managers tend to lead from, “Here’s what I need from you and my organization.” But the best managers understand that this person you’re working with, they have their own ambitions and their own goals. And the more that you can try to understand that and cull it from them, the more successful they’ll be and you will be working together.

(00:03:33):

So in a lot of different ways, I think it’s been really helpful. And also just interesting to learn about the mind. There were a couple neuroscience classes in there. I don’t know that that’s been too applicable in my day-to-day job, but just interesting to understand. We know so little about the mind and consciousness, but it’s something that we all have and interact with every single day. And so, understanding some of the feedback systems that we have in our brain and how it impacts how we show up in the world is, I think helpful

Nick (00:04:00):

When I have the opportunity to speak with guests that have studied something like psychology and I’ve had guests that have studied behavioral economics or just economics in general, I always ask them, is there a book in that field that you would recommend everybody should read if they want to, in your case, better understand psychology and the mind?

Lauren Feld (00:04:16):

Yeah, I think so. I’m trying to decide between all the ones that I’ve read, because I have read a few. I think maybe one that I’d recommend is the How of Happiness, which just talks a little bit about your mental frame of reference and how happy people see the world and cultivate circumstances to enjoy and maximize their quality of life. And so, I think that’s helpful for anyone to read because it’s hard out here. And so, the more that you can try to figure out how to make the best of situations and things that happen to you and experience, I think better.

Nick (00:04:51):

And I want to also ask this question, and it’s a hard one. But it’s this question about the psychology of web3 and Crypto. And I know we’re getting super meta here and drawing on all your college education, but when you think about the ethos of web3 and the type of people that are attracted to the industry and who are building and contributing, do you get a sense that there’s a certain psychology that at least in the early part of this emerging industry is attractive to certain types of people?

Lauren Feld (00:05:21):

Yeah. This is actually such an interesting question. I really should dive into this more, because I think there’s a lot of parallels. There’s definitely an ethos about the web3 community. If you’ve been to any Crypto conference or event, you see it. And it’s a lot of people, they tend to lean more left, they tend to be more liberal. Maybe a little bit anarchist or little bit like antique government and governmental oversight. But I think there’s definitely these tenants that we all draw to around collective living and community building. And so, there’s definitely some kind of collective consciousness that we’re all gathering around. I think in the early days, there’s definitely a lot of the people that have been in the space are obviously super technical. And so, I think a lot of those that psyche, and again, “I don’t have not a PhD, I don’t have any doctorate to diagnose or analyze people, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

(00:06:10):

I think that there’s something that drew those kind of technical minds to this space of trying to, one, create something that doesn’t exist yet in the world. So people that want to innovate, that want to bring about change. And I think people that also want to solve really hard problems. Looking at the world as it is today and seeing some very critical systems are very broken. We don’t like how they’re set up today. Changing them requires radical new systems and new structures. And so, I don’t know the exact term for that, but I do think that there’s some people that are drawn to this space because of the potential. And I think the fact that it’s all virtual and all of this technology is somewhat intangible in a way. We don’t have physical money. It’s virtual money. And so I think that gives this idea of the possibility of what we can do with this tech that attracts a lot of people that I think are very big thinkers, because it feels so global and expansive because it is.

Nick (00:07:02):

Okay. So after college, you entered into the professional world. What did you do right after college?

Lauren Feld (00:07:08):

Yeah, so my first job was working at Deloitte. First I was actually working in the insurance space with large health plans. So that was interesting. I actually got the opportunity to take six months off first though to travel, which I highly recommend if there’s any new grads listening, take as much time as you can before you enter the real world. But while I was at Deloitte and working with one of those clients, learned about Crypto, ended up joining the blockchain lab internally there. So we were doing more strategic projects, building proof of concepts for Deloitte’s enterprise clients, a lot of big Fortune 100 brands. Everything from pharmaceuticals, supply chain, payments, really broad set of use cases and got to work with a bunch of teams. I led a multi-day workshop for the CTO of PayPal when I was six months into my professional career and had no idea what I was doing. So, lots of cool opportunities to be in this space early in this kind of niche center of excellence there, and it was really fun experience.

Nick (00:08:08):

Well, I want to ask you some questions about Deloitte. So for listeners that don’t know that name, Deloitte is a internationally known consulting firm that can do a whole bunch of things for organizations including strategic consulting, operational consulting, and so on down the line. So my first question would be, how does a firm like Deloitte who’s got a long legacy and you could make a strong argument, is very conventional in the way it approaches and consults on business. How are they thinking about blockchain and the disruptive nature of it?

Lauren Feld (00:08:38):

Yeah. Well, I will give Deloitte credit. I think that they are very much a digital first brand. They’ve always leaned into the narrative around digital transformation and trying to be a shepherd for their clients to bring that into fruition. But I think, props to Deloitte for early on, creating this blockchain lab and center of excellence and making it a focus area and dedicating resources to it. I think the way that their clients saw Deloitte as we had this dedicated group of people who understood the technology early on in time were a lot of people were not familiar. Crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum were not the household names that they are today. And a lot of these teams just didn’t… Even if they’re big global corporations, some of them didn’t have many people internally that understood it and they weren’t really sure how to start playing with it or experimenting internally.

(00:09:28):

And so we were helping them to find an easy way to say, “Hey, you’re not going to transform or disrupt your entire industry tomorrow, but let’s give you a way to start to see the possibility of this technology and do what we call the art of the possible.” Looking at different use cases and trying maybe a very scoped experiment to start to see the potential for what this might look like in five, 10, 15 years.

Nick (00:09:49):

And are you talking about the interplay between public and private blockchain or in these contexts, is it mostly private blockchain?

Lauren Feld (00:09:58):

At Deloitte, most of the projects that we are working on were with permissioned chains. And for permissioned use cases. Obviously a lot of these big brands have sensitive customer data, their own intellectual property. I think now there’s some more cutting edge forward thinking brands that are experimenting with public chain, but it’s not right for every kind of use case. A lot of public chains by nature, the data that you put onto it is public and available, even if you encrypt it, then companies, especially big corporations, especially if they’re in the health field for example, have legal and fiduciary responsibility to safeguard customer data. So it’s really just not an option for a lot of them. But there’s, I think also just a fear of it’s such a radical shift in the way that companies have been built for so many decades, where your entire remote was around having all these closed loop systems and data and to all of a sudden put that in a very public fashion to be openly collaborating with potential competitors. It’s just such a 180 in terms of day-to-day operations and strategic thinking.

(00:11:00):

So, I think it was a hard leap for brands to make, and I don’t even think it is the right one necessarily for a lot of companies. So yes, there we were doing a lot of work on Corta and Hyperledger Fabric and a lot of those enterprise platforms.

Nick (00:11:14):

How do you envision that interplay into the future? So, so much about web3 and the adoption of blockchain and crypto is reliant on institutional adoption, I would imagine. And if there is a large move by existing or incumbent institutions to adopt only permissioned or private blockchain, that might stymie the growth of the industry, you could argue. So how do you envision that future?

Lauren Feld (00:11:40):

Like I always say, I’m not an Oracle and so I’m always wary to predict the future. But my opinion of where things are going is that, I don’t really see them as in conflict. I think that they serve very different use cases. So for example, if we think about logistics companies, UPS, FedEx, USPS, right now, they all do the same thing, but they operate very independently. Maybe there’s some synergy and strategic reason where they actually want to combine forces and see the different route optimizations that they have across different drivers and pathways. There’s a very interesting strategic reason why they might want to use permission blockchain application. There’s the ability for them to have this more open data set. They can all plug into the shared system and it can potentially lead to a lot of great synergies. That information doesn’t necessarily need to be publicly available.

(00:12:26):

You and I are probably not going to get up and start doing peer-to-peer delivery, although maybe that’s an interesting future potential business, difficult to scale. So, a lot of the interesting public chain infrastructure is about opening up these peer-to-peer economies that didn’t exist before. For example, a lot of the different DeFi applications or peer-to-peer lending, this really wasn’t possible with the technology that we had before. And having it be in this public fully global chain is one of the core value propositions of those use cases. So, I think that they’re both interesting. They both serve a purpose and have relevant use cases. I don’t see them as being in conflict with one or the other. I think every business that you build, I think the tech that you choose and that you build with should come secondary to the problem and you should use the best tech that solves that need. And I think in some cases for big corporations, enterprise platforms and permissioned ecosystems are actually more effective.

Nick (00:13:19):

Well, that perspective that you gained at Deloitte from this observation of Fortune 100 companies and their appetite to adopt this type of technology, you probably developed a sense for what that appetite is. So, how would you say that? Do you think there is interest in Fortune 100, maybe Fortune 500 companies to adopt blockchain? They see the value?

Lauren Feld (00:13:43):

Yeah, I think there is kind of a spectrum. I definitely think there’s a lot of companies right now, especially around the NFT hype that are just getting into it because, it’s kind of cool and fun and I think it’s interesting and maybe some of them really do see the potential for disruption and innovation, but a lot of them, like Adidas just came out with this NFT membership and maybe you get some early access to some merch drops or discount, and that’s cool. Is that fundamentally revolutionizing their business? I don’t know. So I think some of those really disruptive use cases, I haven’t seen as much of that coming to fruition, but definitely not true across the board. I’m trying to think of some good use cases.

(00:14:21):

I know when I was at R3, for example, and we were building with Corta, so this is I guess more permissioned use case, but SIX for example, which is the Swiss digital exchange, they basically are the Swiss stock market and they’ve done a use case and I believe they’re live now fully and production where they moved all of their trades to work on blockchain rails on the backend. So there are some really cool use cases that are really leaning into the fundamental unlocks of the technology, but I think a lot of brands still today are more just seeing it as something fun and interesting that they want a toy around with, rather than leaning into the full potential.

Nick (00:15:00):

So after your time at Deloitte, you make a move really into the industry by joining Consensus. Before we talk about that move and why you did that, what epiphanies did you have or what observations did you make during Deloitte that signal to you, “There’s something revolutionary going on here and I want to be more a part of this.”

Lauren Feld (00:15:19):

For sure. I think honestly that workshop I mentioned with the CTO of PayPal, and it was about 50 of his direct reports, was really interesting because this was 2017 and they were really exploring the tech. They were going pretty deep. And obviously since PayPal has done a bunch of stuff in the digital asset space, I think seeing a company like that, this Silicon Valley, Tech first, very innovative startup, really starting to lean into this technology was a signal for me of, “Wow, a lot of companies are starting to take this seriously and they’re looking at”, and also just the breadth of clients that we are working with. Super broad. I mentioned the different kinds of verticals and industries that we were touching. I think that was really impressive on me, just to see again, the wide range of use cases. And I think for me, part of why, maybe jumping to your next question, why I wanted to make that transition was, just being this advisor and doing these start and stops of, “Here’s what it could look like and here’s this proof of concept.”

(00:16:20):

And I really wanted to get closer to the action because at that point I think I saw there’s real potential here. And I think I also was personally drawn, like I said in the beginning, to doing something that was different. I knew that I didn’t just want to work in a big company at a desk and do the same thing that six people before me had done. We kind of feel like we have one life. I want to try to do something interesting. And to me, interesting is all about change and impact. And so, it felt like this technology has real potential. Maybe it won’t go anywhere, but I’d rather spend my time trying to do that than just repeating the wheel on things that have already been done and proven and we know work and just making slight optimizations along the way. So, at that point I was ready. And obviously 2017, 2018 Consensus was really the epicenter I feel like of the crypto space and everything happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, it just was the right opportunity.

Nick (00:17:09):

Did it feel like a big risk moving from an established conventional industry and to something so new and novel like blockchain and crypto?

Lauren Feld (00:17:18):

To be honest, not really. I think for two reasons. One, I just remember being at Deloitte and seeing the partners. And obviously Deloitte is an amazing organization. I had such a great time working there and met some people that I’m still friends with today and really smart people and they’re doing really interesting work. I just remember seeing the partners and realizing, “That’s not for me.” I didn’t want to progress and in 10 years be a partner there. And so I knew if this isn’t a long-term path, why stay? Why continue working towards this thing that going down a road I don’t want to end up on? So that’s one. And then two, I think that honestly my father had a big impact on me. He is a technologist by trade. He’s been doing it for 50 years and he’s a programmer who now leads teams of programmers.

(00:18:00):

And he used to always try to get me into technology and teach me about new things that were coming out and coming home with new products every few weeks. And so, I think that had an impact on me for sure of just seeing the power of technology. And this seemed like something really new that at the time he didn’t even really know about or understand. Now we’re both pretty deep and bought into it, but I think just growing up in that kind of environment also prepped me to wanting to follow technology and the momentum there.

Nick (00:18:27):

So what can you tell us about your time at Consensus and what you did there?

Lauren Feld (00:18:31):

Yeah. So I joined Consensus on the Labs team. And so we were essentially the Venture studio that was incubating the 70 or so portfolio companies there at the time. So MetaMask, Infura, Truffle, some of the really big names in the Ethereum ecosystem were incubated within Consensus and I’ve spun out since. So at first when I came in, it was, you’re also doing new ventures. So finding new companies to invest in and bring into the incubator. And then the end of 2018 happened and then Big Crash obviously in the market. And so, then our attention really just turned to supporting our portfolio companies and helping them weather this bear market a lot around go-to-market support for these different companies and figuring out what does this program look like? So basically setting up the entire infrastructure for this Venture studio. How can people within Consensus propose a new idea to incubate? How do we allocate funding? How do we think about capital structures and equity splits and all that fun stuff.

(00:19:27):

So, really interesting and got to work with a bunch of really smart founders, some of which probably talk about later, but I ended up working with again later in my career, which was obviously very fun.

Nick (00:20:08):

Lauren, I don’t have perfect historical understanding of the bears and bull market cycles of this industry. But, around that time the market was probably doing okay when you joined Consensus. And then we entered into a bear, I’d be curious what that experience was like for you joining when things were going fine and all suddenly going into one of these bear markets.?

Lauren Feld (00:21:00):

Yeah, it’s funny because now we’re full circle and obviously in another bear market. But I think that there definitely, I would be lying if I said that it didn’t phase me at all. I think it definitely made me question, and that was part of why I ended up going to Techstars and I ended up joining the Barclays Accelerator program. So it was FinTech more generally, so there was some crypto, but it wasn’t just that and I wanted to open my eyes a little bit more. So I think there was a feeling of, it was this just a lot of hype and excitement and will come back or will it ever be that full promise of what I’ve been hearing and learning about for the last, at that point, I guess I’d been in the space two, three years. So yeah, I think I would love to sit here and be like, “I was never phased.”

(00:21:40):

But I think there’s always that natural feeling when you see, of course markets come down so significantly in prices and a lot of the investor reactions and even just people that I knew more anecdotally or just in my social circle who work site and Intuit and then calling it a scam and some of the legal repercussions for some of the ICO projects. So, I think that happened. But I think that there is also this feeling, I think being within consensus, you just saw so much activity. You saw the momentum behind MetaMask and still those numbers starting to grow and what was happening within just that community of so many smart technical leaders and their unbounded enthusiasm still for the space. So I think it was a good place for me to be, because I think their enthusiasm kept me going.

Nick (00:22:27):

Well, since that time, you’ve ridden many cycles, many bulls and bears, and that’s just the nature of the industry. But, how does someone like you deal with that? And I’ve had the opportunity to ask other guests this questions that have been in the space for a while, but I think it’s always nice for listeners who are new to the space or are a little worried to hear from somebody that’s been through many of these.

Lauren Feld (00:22:46):

I think a few things. One, I don’t check Coinbase or crypto prices that often, because I think that it just gets in your head. I think tracking the value of this technology purely by crypto price fluctuations is a bad signal or it’s a bad indicator for you. Because they’re not the same, they’re correlated, but the underlying technology and what it can do is not necessarily reflected in the value of crypto. The value of crypto is actually much more correlated with equities markets than some other things. And so, I think that’s my one very practical tip is, try to block out the noise, especially in the bear market. And then I think the other thing is my personal… It’s more just a personal philosophy, but I’d rather 10 out of 10, spend my time working on something that I think has great potential and real unlock.

(00:23:38):

And knowing that even if it doesn’t get there, even if it fails, if it doesn’t manifest into this vision that we think it’s going to be, I tried and I was at hunkering down and at the center of it and working with people to try to bring it to fruition. And if not, knowing that everything I’ve worked on is still worth it. I still learned so much in so many ways. Not just in crypto, but in terms of the functional areas that I’ve worked in, the people that I’ve met. And I think that’s the other thing that probably keeps me and I would say is just, there’s the smartest people I know work in this space and are excited about this space.

(00:24:09):

And so, for me, I’d always rather, I want to work on things that are impactful and that have big potential and I want to work with really smart people that I’m going to learn from and bull or bear, you’re always going to get that here. So I think those are the things that keep me going. And I guess if you share that philosophy, then it’s probably a good space for you to be in.

Nick (00:24:26):

So what did you do after your time at Consensus?

Lauren Feld (00:24:29):

So after Consensus, like I mentioned, I went on to Techstars, join the Barclays program. They actually have this really interesting setup that I think is good for listeners to know about if you want to break into tech, if you want to break into crypto, the way that they run their accelerator, every program is run in these three month cohorts and they have the managing director and a program manager that supports the managing director, and then they hire a team of associates, typically like six or so, design operations and business development associates. So that’s what I was, and you basically join for three months with the goal of joining one of the early stage teams. So you get paired with usually two or so teams that you work with very closely. And then if you both like each other, you’ll go on and join them.

(00:25:11):

Maybe you’ll meet one of the other mentors and end up joining another team that comes through. But it’s a great opportunity if you ever want to transition into new space, highly recommend people look at it. And just Techstars is another really, really great entrepreneurial community. So while I was at Techstar as part of the Barclays New York program, one of the mentors that we had there was working at R3, which is the team behind Corta that I’d mentioned before. And that’s an enterprise DLT platform actually. And I ended up going to join them and helping to build this venture development program in the Americas. And so, the goal there with Corta, it’s basically a freemium model. So they have this open source platform that anyone can build on, and then above a certain threshold they have an enterprise license. And so the goal was for us to really seed more activity with early stage startups and encourage adoption of Corta among early stage startups in the space.

(00:26:05):

And so we built this program to two, 300 startups over a course of the year that I was there. Built an entire program for them. So it was great coming off the back of Techstars, because learned a lot there that we took. We built out similar to Techstars, an entire perks program. So went to all the HubSpots and Salesforce of the world and negotiate all these discounts. We created an entire mentor ecosystem for them, had all of these events and workshops and special kind of support and advisory offering. So really fun again to build that from the ground up, work with early stage founders. So yeah, I guess that’s the one thread is a lot of time working with [inaudible 00:26:43] to series A startup has definitely been one of the sweet spot of my career, is just helping people go zero to one.

Nick (00:26:49):

During your time at Corta, what did you learn about that stage of the business? Those early entrepreneurial ventures and what they needed in order to be successful?

Lauren Feld (00:27:01):

It’s hard to pinpoint a specific piece of advice that’s generalizable, but the things that come to mind for me are, I think in this space specifically, and I’ve talked about this a bit already. But the reason I think I like working in Crypto and web3 is because there are so many very technical founders and not as many folks that are coming in from my side of the business now, much more so. We have much more business operators and as projects have matured, a lot of people have come in from the web2 space, but especially in the beginning, but still even to the extent now, a lot of the founders that I work with are very technical. They’re really just thinking about, “I want to build this thing, I see this kind of technical opportunity”, and then they put it out in the market and they wonder why no one’s using it.

(00:27:41):

And so, I enjoy being the person to help them work backwards to say, “Hey. What was the problem that you were originally trying to solve?” I think too many founders build a thing. They go heads down for a year, two years, put something out to market and then wonder why they’re not getting traction. And so, some of the things that I encourage founders to do are, one, just really stop building, especially early on. Don’t focus on trying to ship and develop a real product that people are going to use and engage with. Just start prototyping. Obviously that doesn’t work for every project. If you’re building some kind of ZK-rollup technology that’s hard to prototype. But there’s some other like consumer and B2B applications where it’s really easy to just create a super LoFi mockup, whether it’s in Figma or Google Slides or something else and just go out and start talking to customers.

(00:28:26):

I think too many teams are, you have a lot of in the building thinking and they really don’t go and interface with customers enough and deeply understand the problem. Because for any problem, there’s n number of ways that you can solve it. There’s so many different kinds of solutions and the companies that win, figure out exactly how to build the right thing for it to match a very specific problem like two puzzle pieces. And so, I think those are some tangible suggestions and things that I always think about is, one, how can you start prototyping early? How can you talk to your customers early and often? And then I guess the last thing I’ll say is, just on the messaging and framing. As you go out and talk to these customers early, I always encourage people to think about this framework, the job to be done.

(00:29:07):

And this is from Clayton Christensen who is very well known in the business space and has written some really great books around this, but really is just thinking about, so many people talk about their product and their service in terms of features and the what and the tech behind it. And customers don’t really care about that. They care about the value prop of how are you making my life better and easier? And the job to be done, idea is really this framework for thinking about every customer when they make a purchase, when they engage with you, they have a certain job to be done. So this framework comes from an experiment where a marketing agency was working with this fast food company and they were trying to sell more milkshakes. And they were going and asking all their customers questions about the flavors and the consistency, and there were no really good insights and they couldn’t really figure out, “How come we’re not selling more of these things?”

(00:29:55):

And they actually noticed that a lot of customers were buying milkshakes on their way to work. And so it actually really wasn’t a preference for necessarily the flavor, the consistency, but they really just wanted a quick and easy breakfast that they could drink on the go. And so with that unlocked, they understood, “Hey, our job to be done is that we’re an efficient way to fill your belly on the way to work and get you going and give you something interesting to do while you’re driving.” And when they did that, they were able to change their whole marketing approach and saw this increase in sales. And it’s a silly example, but it really resonates if you have to understand the problem you’re solving for your customer and the language you use to talk and communicate with them will make you more successful if you can really resonate with that job to be done. So, I love using that framework to help brands think about how do you talk about what you’re building and how you’re helping your customers.

Nick (00:30:43):

Do you think Lauren, for this industry, an emergent industry, something where people are still unsure about the future of crypto or blockchain? Do you think it’s more difficult to determine the market? It’s really hard to identify personas in this space. How have you approached some of that dynamic?

Lauren Feld (00:30:59):

It’s interesting. I think there is two different things. One is that, there is this dynamic of, when you have really innovative emerging tech, you are in some ways category creating. So there’s not always a paradigm or an immediate match the specific problem you’re trying to solve, because you’re really just trying to do something so different. But ultimately it does go back to some kind of fundamental. I’m trying to think of an example, maybe ChatGPT. That’s the most obvious one. We weren’t sitting around all the time. Our life is so difficult that we don’t have to use machine learning models that do all these things. But once we had it, we were like, “Oh, it solves multiple jobs to be done.” But the improvements that I see in terms of my output and productivity in content writing, that was a specific pain point that a lot of people had, where you would go and you’d have these long transcripts and you’d have to create summaries and it took you a lot of time and very detail oriented.

(00:31:55):

And now we can go zero to one and maybe it’s not perfect, but I have a great working draft that I can start from. And so, I think that is a decent enough example to just show that even if you are category creating and creating something or a business and technology that’s never been done before, you can still try to map it back to what are some specific problems that we’re really solving for people. I think the other thing that’s important to realize with that is that, just because there is a privacy component and you can’t identify the exact users that are interacting with your product, doesn’t mean that you can’t identify and talk to your customers. If you think about a DeFi app for example, you might not know and have the names and address and phone numbers of every single person that’s interacting with Uni every day.

(00:32:39):

But in general, Uniswap can do the assessment to say, “Who are the kinds of customers that we know are using our platform?” It’s people that are… I don’t know, I’m making this up because I don’t actually know. But high frequency traders, institutions, investment like ARMs, they can go out and actually find some of those people and talk to them. In some cases, they do know the exact names of active customers, but they can still go out and talk to those archetypes. They can have an idea of who those target personas are. And even if they don’t match the exact people that are interacting in their platform, there are some proxy for them to be able to figure it out. You can use social listening on social platforms to see people who are interacting with your brand, what are they talking about? How do they identify themselves on their profile?

(00:33:21):

There’s lots of ways to get a sense at an aggregate level of what does our customer base look like. We’re also seeing people look at the on-chain analytics and doing some pattern matching between what other holdings do they have, what other platforms or chains have they interacted with? And backing into there to again create this kind of user persona. So I think there’s a difference between, sure, you might not have the exact demographic information of every customer and contact information, and there’s this privacy component that’s inherent in a lot the technology and value prop, but you can still have a sense of who are we targeting? And you can still get out there and interview different people and try to get feedback and deeply understand the problem a bit more.

(00:34:01):

I think honestly, one of the issues in this space is that, a lot of technical founders do see this thing that they want to create and think would be cool to build and then try to go out and back it into a problem that they’re solving. And I just feel so strongly that it should always be the other way around.

Nick (00:34:17):

After your time at Corta, you went on to another well-known and well-recognized project in the space, which is Ceramic. What did you do there at Ceramic?

Lauren Feld (00:34:26):

Like I alluded to earlier in the conversation, some of the founders that I worked with at Consensus, Michael Sena, Danny Zuckerman and Joel Thorstensson were all working at Consensus when I was there. They ended up being the founders of Ceramic and I ended up joining them as their first business hire, head of growth and helped to stand up all of the non-engineering functions at the org and helping to launch and bootstrap the Ceramic network. So it was a really, really interesting project. One just, I like working with developer communities, super technical developer tool and infrastructure play. We got to work and collaborate with a very broad range of companies, because it’s again, this data infrastructure. So lots of different use cases and companies that we could talk to. And again, just always fun to have my hands on a little bit of everything, some marketing, some community, business development partnerships, a little bit of everything, which is always fun.

Nick (00:35:17):

So using that jobs to be done framework from Clayton Christensen and this incredible background you have in marketing and go to market strategy, how do you make sense of a multi-chain future? And I ask that for people that are a little bit like me, where when you join the industry, you know about Ethereum. And it seems like a monolith, it seems like the incumbent, the one chain. But as you get more knowledgeable, as you speak to more people, you realize there’s a whole bunch of other chains in addition to that. There’s L2s. And so it becomes a little bit perplexing of what makes one blockchain better or more advantageous than another? So how would you walk listeners through understanding that?

Lauren Feld (00:36:00):

I feel my answer is very simple, but the way I think about it is, the job to be done is as a consumer, how can I easily interact with this application that I want to use without friction? I think from a consumer perspective, they really… For the most part, the majority of consumers, people who are in Crypto, I think are a little bit more dogmatic about the kind of chain that they prefer and follow. But most people don’t really care about the tech that they’re using. They care about what the application is and how they’re engaging with it. I use my computer every single day. I have no idea how it’s built. Half the apps on my phone, I don’t know if it’s using React. I don’t know and I honestly don’t care. And I think it’s the same way for Crypto. If I’m going and I want to use a decentralized exchange and trade different currencies across, I want to do it without friction and then not have to worry about having to switch across different networks and all these technical pieces.

(00:36:55):

And so I think in general, the job to be done, the way that we should think about the multi-chain future is not about which chain wins and how do we have everything connect and talk to each other. It’s really about how do we just make this a really easy experience for users. And right now there are applications that are successful and that have a large consumer following across different chains, and eventually those are going to want to talk to each other. And if we make that hard for end users to do, then Crypto will never be successful because people will just not ease it.

Nick (00:37:57):

Lauren, what interests me about you is, you go to work at a college at Deloitte, a very well established firm. Then you go to Consensus and I would argue that’s an established firm, but in an emerging industry. But then after Consensus, you go into a lot of early stage ventures, either as an advisor or a participant, or both. I want to ask you this question about failure. And I’m always curious about people like you who jump into entrepreneurial startup environments and really enjoy it, but I’m curious about how they think about failure? Because it seems to me that’s the one denominator that prevents most people from either being an entrepreneur or getting involved in an entrepreneurial venture. So, how do you think about failure? Are you afraid of it?

Lauren Feld (00:38:41):

It’s funny that you asked that because I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot recently and reading a lot of Brene Brown books, which is her self-help books. I love her. She’s great. I think that it’s kind of a nuanced answer. I think it’s funny from me outside, I definitely think people might see me as taking a lot of risk, as you were saying, working with early stage teams, moving around in my career and trying lots of new things. I think I do have… I definitely am afraid of failure in a way that I think stops me to take certain risks. I think I take a lot of calculated risks of looking at the downside, what’s the worst that can happen? And one thing I’m working on right now is really trying to care less about those risks. And there’s certain risks that you can afford to take and others that you can’t. Financially, reputationally, et cetera.

(00:39:29):

I think for me, there’s always this fear just to be totally transparent of what are people going to think? If I move to this next thing, if I move around too much, what will my LinkedIn look like? What will people say if I say I’m going to do this thing and then do something different? And I think one of the things I’ve learned from, I think my biggest takeaway from watching so many other entrepreneurs of what makes them succeed or the main pattern, is really the perseverance piece and that grit. Because I think a lot of the founders that I’ve noticed that really are doing well right now and the projects and companies that they’re building, they’re not first time founders. They’ve done something once or twice and they failed at it. And, I actually think that’s really telling because a lot of people… And I think a lot of people right now are leaving to try and go build their own companies and everyone thinks it’s a sexy thing to do and fun, and they want to be the guy who makes all the decisions and calls the shots.

(00:40:21):

But the reality is, it’s super hard and it’s not glamorous and everyone knows that. And a lot of people will grind for a while, and if it doesn’t work out, they’re kind of like, “I tried.” And I think, real entrepreneurs, they go after something and it doesn’t work out and instead of saying, “I’m not cut out for this or I need to find a plan B”, they find the next thing. They’re ready for the next risk. Or they do the thing that’s frowned upon. They go and go up against the former company that they want to rival or they will take that risk or start building a business that’s totally unscalable. And I think there’s an art in science to figuring out when is the time to walk away and when is the time to push through. And I don’t have the answer to that yet, but there is a difference.

(00:41:02):

I know there are some times where you’ve got to say, “I tried call it quits, the experiment didn’t work.” But I think there’s definitely a fear of worrying about how you’re perceived in the world and a fear of failure in terms of, “Am I able to do the things that I set out to accomplish?” And I think a lot of the times the people that do, they just keep pushing towards it.

Nick (00:41:25):

I want to ask you about Collective Works and what you’re working on now. But before we leave Ceramic, I just want to ask this question about another insight or key learning you had there. Because coming in as the first business hire at Ceramic, the chain has gone on to do very well, that a lot of people are adopting and interested in Ceramic. What was that experience like being head of growth? What did you learn as you tried to scale something as the first business hire at Ceramic?

Lauren Feld (00:41:52):

Yeah. I think the main takeaway that people maybe talk about, but I didn’t quite land for me until I was in that role, but just the difficulty of getting adoption and mass adoption around protocols. This idea that you are driving people towards standardization is really hard and incentives can help, but it’s not the only thing. And there’s so much variability in the world, and especially when we think about technical standards. So many people are building all these different kinds of varied applications that have different requirements. And so, trying to push a large subset of some amount of builders or applications towards some kind of standardized protocol is really hard. And I think that the Grassroots bd is really helpful. But I guess my one learning lessons from it is that, I think being really strategic about how you galvanize that early adoption, there’s lots of different approaches that you can take. I think that is really important and really challenging.

(00:42:51):

And especially if you look at the protocols that we have today in tech, there’s not that many. There’s like a handful from the first era of the internet like HTTP and SMTP. And a few that we know and interact with on a daily basis, but there were many in the first wave of the internet that ended up just falling by the graveyard.

Nick (00:43:14):

So let’s turn our attention now to the things you’re working on presently. And as I said there, you’ve joined and started participating in Collective Works. What can you tell us about Collective Works and what you’re doing there?

Lauren Feld (00:43:23):

So Collective Works is my umbrella org, and there’s two specific initiatives that are under it right now. So the first that I’ll touch on is the Indigo Collective. And that is a emerging tech go-to market agency. And we work with a really broad set of projects, so everything from venture funds with helping them to build out and create their platform and portfolio support to protocols and developer tools and Dow Tooling and dapp, so super broad. And then also some emerging tech outside of Crypto. So think AI, Cleantech, et cetera. Really, really fun project for me, because I’ve obviously worked with a lot of different teams historically. And so just the ability to get to also keep my head across a lot of different projects at any given time, work with really great people who we bring into the collective who are really talented in their respective fields.

(00:44:16):

It’s just been a really fun process over the last few months and looking forward to growing that and all the new clients that we’re working within in the next few months. And the other thing that we haven’t spoken about is the Woman’s Collective, which actually started during my time at Ceramic. And like I mentioned, I was there and standing up all these new functions that I hadn’t really done before, going deep into marketing and community and really trying to learn fast on the go and really be able to perform at a high level, obviously in that role. And I looked around and there were so many great female communities to onboard women into the space, web3 Baddies and Boys Club and Surge Women. And they’re all amazing organizations, but they’re really focused on how do we help people, women specifically understand crypto and get immersed into the space.

(00:45:02):

And it felt like there was this gap of, “Well, hey, what about us who are working here right now?” And we really want to level up and finding peers that are really deep and giving each other Alpha really was what it came down to. So I started the Women’s Collective a year and a half ago while I was at Ceramic, and today it is essentially a peer mentorship group for female executives and crypto, so specifically C-Suite to about director heads of level. We specifically focus on operators and builders that are working on projects versus investors, although we do invite investors to our events. But we meet once a month, we have also some async platforms and community platforms and chats, and we get on and we have all different kinds of sessions. Sometimes it’s just focused on goal setting and helping people set personal, professional goals and kind of holding each other accountable.

(00:45:51):

We have people present workshops on their core area of competency. So for example, on Friday we actually have the VP of business development from Alio who’s going to be coming on and sharing her go-to-market strategy and getting feedback from other people that are actively building the ZK space. So, it’s meant to be a very tactical community of people reaching out and saying, “Hey, how have you done this before? Who’s built a grants program? What have you used? What’s worked well?” And just be a really curated space for these kinds of women that are actively building in the space, helping them to get really tactical and high value advice. And then also doing these in-person events and activations, because I’m such a believer of getting people together in person building relationships, and I think it’s just so much more effective to do that IRL versus online.

(00:46:38):

So we’ve started doing activations around some of the major crypto conferences. We had a big dinner at East Denver, which was great. We had 40 women join. We have over a 100 women today also in the Collective, which is awesome. And we’ll be doing another event at ECC. And then we’re actually going to plan a retreat at the second half of this year, which is really exciting. We’ll get people together for three days around Mainnet in New York in September. So, a lot of really great events. And yeah, there’s just been some great… I’m smiling because there was some great testimonials in the last two days of women who were looking for roles to, who found new opportunities through the collective and women that are in Zuzalu. This offsite right now, if you’re familiar with it, it’s like a bunch of crypto folks have co-located there for a few months and they did an informal collective meetup.

(00:47:29):

So it’s just really great to see the community growing and it’s a really unique space. So yeah, that is backing up, that is the Collective Works today or those two initiatives. It may grow in the future to more, but that’s where I’m spending my time.

Nick (00:47:43):

I want to ask you this question about the people participating in the Women’s Collective. Tell us about its members and tell us about the caliber of talent and leadership you’re seeing.

Lauren Feld (00:47:53):

It’s really incredible. The women that we have in the group today, I am super impressed by and just really thrilled that I get to interact with them. But we have women of solo founders and then women that are running 50, 100 person teams. We have the chief of staff from Alchemy who’s there. We have Evin McMullin who’s the founder of Disco, Lisa Cuesta, who’s the CEO of Aztec. The list truly goes on just like people from some of the top projects in the space and at the executive level, C-suite and VPs and directors and folks who are again, solo founders and running alchemy as almost 200 people. So it’s been really incredible, number one, just to see the breadth of women that we’ve been able to bring together and the different kinds of projects that they’re working on and also their functional areas of expertise that they can bring to the table.

(00:48:46):

But one thing that really stood out to me, especially at that dinner at East Denver was a lot of women that were there were new moms and they brought their kids with them to East Denver and even one of them brought her new son to the dinner. And it was just really impressive to see. It’s something that I think a lot of women think about is, we have this time in life where some people you want to transition and start a family and what does that look like and how do you prioritize between that and your career? And I was just incredibly impressed to see this woman who I know are showing up every single day. They travel to Denver, they’re going to this conference from 8:00 AM and they’re at this dinner until 10:00 PM. Meanwhile, I’m just walking around with my backpack, but they’re literally carrying a car seat, their kid, they have to pop into a restroom every few hours to pump, and it’s just a whole other set of concerns and things to think about and it’s incredibly taxing.

(00:49:43):

And just to see them power through that and to show up a 100%. They’re no part of their output is detracted by that, was really impressive. And I think that, and just seeing also the entrepreneurial spirit of so many women that were there. We had Medha there who’s one of the investors at Variant Fund, she’s one of the investors we grandfathered in who was an early supporter and she is obviously super well known and part of an amazing BC fund. And she also had started SHE 256, which is helping women learn how to code and learn how to get into crypto. And everyone that was there, they’re doing three different things. They have their core job that they go to, they have their nights job and their weekend job, and they are just really thinking about all the ways that they can make impact and also having families.

(00:50:31):

And so, I’m so impressed. I think is the end or the takeaway from the rant. And the way that everyone really comes together I think is very unique also. In our Telegram groups and community platforms, when anyone has an ask, we get at least three or four responses. The other day, I needed some intros to potential marketing folks, and I literally got four names and references and testimonials within two hours. And that’s just when you have such a group of highly connected people altogether in one place, the power of that connectivity is really wild to see. So very, very special group and I’m really just honored that they’re all a part of it.

Nick (00:51:16):

For listeners that want to learn more about the Women’s Collective, and I’m fortunate to have a lot of women listeners that tune in each week and enjoy the guests that I have on the podcast, what’s the best way for them to get involved or to plug into the Collective?

Lauren Feld (00:51:28):

Yes. So right now, we’re working on the website, so I don’t have a specific URL to send you all to, but feel free to reach out to me directly on Twitter, on Telegram. I will send you the application link and if you meet the criteria, we would love to have you.

Nick (00:51:42):

And I’ll put some of those links in the show notes. So I encourage any listeners that want to learn more to visit the show notes and you’ll find links to some of the things that Lauren just mentioned there. I want to ask you this question about Indigo Collective. So we’ve already talked about your experiences in early stage ventures and how difficult it is sometimes for the founders to focus on the right things to find product market fit. Now you’re working on a consulting style enterprise where you’re going in and helping people solve these problems. Is that a huge challenge? Is that really hard to come in with the pressure of the reality of the situation and then founders looking to you and being like, we don’t have the answers, we expect that you do?

Lauren Feld (00:52:20):

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think it’s all about expectation setting. I think it’s all about just being realistic of look like I’m not going to come in as one person, be like your silver bullet, but I can help you ask the right questions and set you on the right path and provide my insight based on what I’ve seen in the space and trying to set you up for success. So I think the main things that I would say are, one, being really clear and scoping and engagements I think is really important to really say, “Hey, what’s the highest value thing that I can focus on?” And so it’s always a mixture of I need to learn about your business, understand from you where you want to go in terms of goals and objectives, where do you think the gaps are? But then there’s always this little discovery phase.

(00:52:57):

No matter how many questions we have together, it’s always going to take some time for me to actually start working with you and your team and get in to see the opportunities that I see or the problems that I see. Because also speaking to founders, sometimes they have one view of the world, and it might be right like everyone on my team is super unproductive and I don’t know why. And then maybe you talk to everyone that works for that person and they tell you that they change the goal every month and that’s why they can’t be productive. So there’s always two sides to every story. So I always buffer in some kind of discovery room to start working with the team and then provide my view and my recommendations of where I think we should focus. And then really scoping. There’s so many different areas that I could work with you on.

(00:53:35):

What’s the highest value area that we can focus on together in this and whatever that scope looks like. And then what would success look like? And actually having a very concrete definition of what do we want to achieve together? Is it like a certain amount of revenue that we’re trying to bring in? Is it a net new hire in this leadership position? Getting really clear about what that looks like. So at the end we can clearly look at that goal and say, “Did we hit it? Did we do what we set out to do?” I think that’s really the key.

Nick (00:54:01):

Well, that’s super interesting. And so for listeners who want to learn more about Indigo Collective, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Lauren Feld (00:54:06):

Yeah, please go to our website with indigo.xyz and reach out. Would love to chat with you.

Nick (00:54:11):

Lauren, I really appreciate the time you’ve given me and I only have a few more questions with you before I ask you the GRTiQ 10. The first question I want to ask you is, going back again to this really cool lens of jobs to be done. It seems to me in web3 there is a job that needs to be done, which is querying and indexing data from the blockchain. And as you know, a lot of my listeners are very enthusiastic about The Graph, which is a solution for this very thing. But my question is, did you see a need for that job to be done in the different roles you’ve had and as you’ve consulted within the industry?

Lauren Feld (00:54:46):

Absolutely. A lot of teams that I’ve worked with. When I think about my time at Ceramic, we’re this open data layer. And so, obviously there’s all this information and one of the core value props is that it’s public and accessible. But obviously if you can’t actually find it located and make sense of it, it’s not very useful. And so, we had a lot of conversations with The Graph and I know have done a lot of work together in terms of figuring out what would it look like to actually have an index of data on Ceramic or for certain subsets of data. And obviously that being a big important part of the work that we were doing there to make that information useful and accessible to people building with Ceramic. The other place where it’s also I’ve seen a lot or I’ve interacted personally with The Graph quite a bit, has been around airdrop analysis and different teams trying to look at and understand.

(00:55:33):

From a growth perspective obviously, tokens have been one of the major incentive and growth incentive mechanisms. And so, being able to actually look at understand, “Hey, who actually got this token and how long did they retain it for? And what do we know about these users?” For every data scientist had to go zero to one. And so if all of these data scientists had to go and create their own subgraphs and replicate the wheel over and over, it would be highly inefficient and we would not be where we are today. So in that way, I see The Graph as being a very critical piece of infrastructure for really just understanding what’s happening on all of these platforms across the space, without which I feel like we would be collectively, I think a lot less informed about really what’s happening day to day and tactically with these protocols.

Nick (00:56:18):

And the next question I want to ask you is, what makes you optimistic about the future of this industry?

Lauren Feld (00:56:23):

I think what makes me optimistic about the future is the same potential and the same themes that first got me interested in this space, which was really about shifting power away from governments and institutions and corporations to individuals. Because I think that is so powerful and really all those organizations do is introduce trust. And what blockchain now allows is for us to have another way to introduce trust into these more peer-to-peer systems and to really potentially disrupt the power dynamic. The idea of stable coins is disrupting these monetary systems that had been in place for most of human civilization. And so, I think that is super powerful, potentially very scary also. But that’s why I stay in it is because I think that I would love to see, I guess just a little win for the little guy. I feel like we could use that right now.

(00:57:21):

And especially with the SVB crisis and things that happen. It’s funny because people outside the space look on and they’re like, “Oh, like SVB and all these crypto companies, the whole space is a bunch of fraudsters and there’s nothing real there.” But if you’re in the space, I look on, I’m like, “Wow, that is just further proof that government systems don’t work.” And I’m definitely not a full anarchist, but I think that there’s something interesting about saying, “Hey, we are capable of also self-governing in certain ways or creating our own systems outside of what we’ve traditionally seen and interacted with.” So I think that’s what makes me optimistic is just still that potential that we might be able to get there.

Nick (00:58:05):

And the final question I want to ask you is about how you organize yourself and your work? And I asked this because, we’ve talked a lot about go-to market strategies, we’ve talked about framework for jobs to be done. So I know you have an appetite yourself for applying frameworks to help you solve problems and help. But my question is, how about you? What templates or what frameworks do you use to coordinate your own work in the way you approach the things that you’re focusing on?

Lauren Feld (00:58:34):

It’s a good question. I think there is just probably small strategies that I use. One is just trying to be really good about time management. I used to always say yes to everything in every meeting, and I hated those people that were like, “Oh, I’ve learned to say no.” But everything, I really do understand the value of it now of if I’m going to show up and not be present and be thinking about other things and not be able to engage, there’s just only so much bandwidth that I have and I really want to dedicate input into certain things right now. The other thing is just doing the hardest thing first in the day. I just operate better in the morning, so the hardest thing I need to do that day, bang it out first thing and try not to procrastinate on it. Trying to honestly take breaks throughout the day, a little break in the midday just for lunch.

(00:59:17):

I used to always just sit and eat lunch at my computer and work through it. But just taking 20 minutes to close the computer and just focus on having a break has helped me to reset, come back, recharge, going on a walk at five or six and then coming back and working for another hour has also been really helpful. And I just set calendar blocks for everything that I’m going to do. So even if it’s just following up with someone, I’ll have a 10 minute calendar hold to send this email or 20 minutes that I know I need to run out and do this thing. And so that way I can really organize my time to know what can I actually accomplish today. And so those are no fancy productivity tools, except Calendly, which is definitely lifesaver. But those are my hacks.

Nick (00:59:57):

Well, Lauren, now we’ve reached a part in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week to help listeners learn something new, try something different, or achieve more. So are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Lauren Feld (01:00:11):

I’m ready.

Nick (01:00:22):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Lauren Feld (01:00:25):

I think the one that’s stuck with me the most is a book called Essentialism. And it’s just that it’s all about how can you do less and focus on what is essential. And I can’t say honestly that I’m living that well today. I am definitely just trying to do way too much, but I think that it’s a good way to think about life and just do what’s essential, do what matters.

Nick (01:00:48):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Lauren Feld (01:00:52):

I don’t know if everybody should watch it, but Euphoria is definitely one of my favorite shows. I think it’s just great, great television, very entertaining. So 18 plus, I recommend.

Nick (01:01:03):

If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Lauren Feld (01:01:07):

Rumors by Fleetwood Mac.

Nick (01:01:09):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Lauren Feld (01:01:12):

Telling the truth is easier than remembering the lie.

Nick (01:01:16):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Lauren Feld (01:01:22):

I’ll say this one because I’m just looking at this huge water bottle on my desk. But actually the more water you drink, the more you’re capable of drinking. I used to not be very good at drinking a lot of water through the day, and I bought one of these huge water bottles and now I finish it and some every day. So once you start drinking, you just keep going and it actually works.

Nick (01:01:44):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Lauren Feld (01:01:47):

Reminders on my phone. I set them for every single thing and my boyfriend laughs at me because anytime I have to, I will just be whispering into my phone at night like, “Remind me at 9:00 AM tomorrow to put this thing away.” And I just every day have 10 reminders and I don’t complete them until I do it. And so it’s made me a little neurotic, but I’m very on top of things.

Nick (01:02:09):

Based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains why people find success in life?

Lauren Feld (01:02:18):

Yeah, I think I’ll say two, which is cheating a little. But what I said before, perseverance, continuing to go at things even when you’re knocked down. And I think two is just really not caring what people think about you.

Nick (01:02:29):

And then the final three questions are complete the sentence type question. So the first one is, complete the sentence. The thing that most excites me about web3 is?

Lauren Feld (01:02:37):

The potential to shift the power paradigm from corporations to consumers.

Nick (01:02:42):

And how about this one? If you’re on Twitter, then you should be following…

Lauren Feld (01:02:46):

Me. Because I don’t have a lot of followers and I’m trying to be more active.

Nick (01:02:51):

And the last question. Happiest when?

Lauren Feld (01:02:55):

I’m happiest when I feel deeply connected to people I love and care about.

Nick (01:03:07):

Lauren, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. You’ve been very generous with your time and I love a lot of the answers. It’s fun to hear how you approach some of the challenges you’ve had in your career and the insights that you have learned along the way. So, thank you so much. If listeners want to learn more about you and stay in touch with the things you’re working on, what’s the best way to stay in touch?

Lauren Feld (01:03:27):

Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me here. It was super fun. Best way to stay in touch, web3 Lauren on Twitter or at Lauren Feld on Telegram. If you want to DM me.