From founder to web3 investor: Maria Shen's journey down the rabbit hole 🐇 The TILT #21
Talking femmes in crypto, the new frontiers of NFTs + DAOlicious communities
For Episode 25 we get stuck into the web3 world with Maria Shen. Maria is a maven of the metaverse, and partner at Electric Capital: an early stage venture firm focused on cryptocurrencies, blockchain, fintech, and marketplaces.
We explore how her background as a tech founder led her to web3, what it's like shifting from founder to investor, femmes in crypto, why she believes web3 is the most interesting space she's encountered, and so much more!
Read a snippet of our conversation below ⬇️⬇️⬇️
Prior to joining Electric Capital, and as a Cornell + Harvard trained computer science engineer, Maria was CTO and co-founder of a startup in the supply chain space as well as having worked as a product manager at Microsoft. Maria is a great advocate for women, minority and immigrant founders in the tech space, especially in web3. She's also a Zoom TV producer... creating two reality shows during lockdown in 2020!
Our conversation with Maria is nourishing and empowering and traverses the topics of:
Shifting from tech founder to investor in the crypto ecosystem
NFT remixing and fundraising with NFTs 🖼
Tokenized communities
DAOs solving human coordination problems
Founding femmes, non-binary + minority folk in the crypto space
Creating the Zoom Bachelor + Bachelorette 📺
Podcast 🎙 Snack 🍏
ST: How has it been shifting roles from founder to investor?
MS: Wow. It has been interesting. I feel like so many questions that I had as a founder in terms of like, why do VC’s act this way? Or, why do they ask this question? Or, why do they make this investment, but not that investment? It makes so much sense to me now.
The answer is actually fairly easy, which is, it's based on the VC business model. Venture capital firms are also businesses. They have their own business model and they have to do things that conform and make sense for their own business model. Right. But…when I was a founder I really didn't understand how VCs worked. So that's probably a huge part of it.
And then I think the other part that's really cool and really fun is, as a VC, I get to meet all these founders and just see what they're working on. And I think as a VC in the crypto space in particular, I can also play around with a lot of things.
Like it feels a lot like play, right? Like especially empty space. I can walk around crypto voxels and that's part of my job. And I can, you know, I can basically like try out writing a smart contract and I can play with all these things. I can play with DeFi and I can play with DAOs, I mean, it's fantastic.
This is just the most interesting space I've ever encountered my life. And I think as an intellectually curious person, which I think is guiding principle of everyone I've met in crypto is that they're a really, really intellectually curious person… there are so many different rabbit holes you can go down.
You can go down, like, what is the history of money? Or you can go down, how are financial products constructed and made? And you can go down the Artspace. Now you can go down, how are community's constructed? You can go down incentive systems and game theory. You know, just infinite, infinite things that you can start exploring.
LISTEN to more of this goodness by tuning in to Episode 25 on Spotify…
Or on 🍏 ↘️
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