✨ Watch the full episode on Lens here.
👾 Collect Ellie’s digital collectible here.
Ellie Farrisi’s first tryst with tech was when she learned to program in Basic at school, she loved the joy of seeing her code do tasks. Not too long after she found herself programming a Raspberry Pi in freshman year to make an Amazon Alexa-like speaker, which we believe was probably on par with the actual amazon alexa speaker because of how much she went above and beyond building it. This made her fall in love with engineering and she found herself switching her major to computer science. This led her to be a part of famous conferences of technologists like Grace Hopper where she was able to meet more like-minded individuals and strengthen her beliefs in herself to take on more meaningful projects to supplement her curriculum at university. This was the onset of Ellie recognizing her ever-curious nature and desire to learn and do cool stuff.
Ellie grew up with some hardships in her personal life but that didn’t deter her from striving to do more, to do better, and most importantly believe that You can make your own reality! She drops major inspiration for anyone who is feeling stuck right now, believing that the situation they are in will remain permanent forever- Just trust the process and yourself, put in the work and you will be able to create your own future.
Ellie’s life story so far has been all about connecting the right dots, at university she had heard about Bitcoin and took up emerging technology as one of her courses where she chose to deep dive into blockchain tech, but the actual shift for her happened when she moved to LA and started a podcast during COVID to support the local music community. One of her guests on the podcast was going to start building Catalog, a marketplace for Music NFTs. This led her down the NFT rabbit hole and she loved how it combined so many of her interests in music and engineering.
Soon after this she attended her first web3 hackathon virtually and continued doing projects on the side, she was soon recognized as a crypto-SME in her then job at NBC Comcast. She was also someone who pitched the idea to Universal Theme Park for in-game gamification of assets via NFTs who probably rolled eyes at her back then but apparently have since then actually gone through with the patent.
Ellie at this point was contemplating transitioning from web2 to web3 since all of these ideas were just flowing and with her immense passion to build something that helped others, taking a leap into web3 became easy with LunarCrush where she fell in love with data visualization aspects of crypto.
Ellie followed her passion for tech and simplifying tech for people and that eventually led her down the path of building Bello, an emerging no-code blockchain analytics tool for creators which recently got accepted at a16z’s Crypto Startup School!!!!
But let’s hear the origin story of Bello first!!
The idea stemmed out of a concert at Eth Denver when Ameet Kanon who goes by the name Queen George was giving out NFTs to access her concert. Adam Levy (of Mint Podcast and co-founder Bello) and Ameet both wanted to know more about who was attending the concert. Adam as a content creator himself who was in season 3 of his podcast series had grown his listenership and also tokenized his podcast, was also curious about whether they could tap into the consumer insights to tweak their content for higher engagement. He approached Ellie who was his friend then, with this problem and Ellie being this ever-curious person who loves technical challenges got super excited about it.
A few months down, she got Adam to join her EthGlobal at Amsterdam where they hacked a very rudimentary version of an MVP of Bello.
Ellie with her background as a full stack dev, loved to make tech accessible to people. She loved being the person behind the scenes and found it really rewarding when her work helped somebody. It was out of this intersection of all of her interests that she co-founded Bello. She says “It’s in a way like scaling myself through Bello, as a single person I was maybe helping 10 people but Bello can help 1000s”.
As a CTO, her short-term goal is to scale to a fully public beta version so her hands are full with ramping up infrastructure. Her vision for Bello is for it to be the key integration player for creators in web3. She wants Bello to be the trusted partner for all things insights that can help a creator grow and stay ahead of the competition.
Overall, we know that on-chain data serves as a foundational element in Web3 applications, providing transparency, enabling smart contract execution, supporting decentralized finance, and allowing for data analysis and insights. Its utilization enhances trust, security, and the overall functionality of the decentralized ecosystem.
Data privacy has been raised as a big concern both in the web2 world as well as web3, the tech giants have been known to be monetizing our private information.
In web3, the ownership of your data stays with you, and let’s say you are a creator who has followership, Bello doesn’t track every little detail of the transaction on-chain, it only provides an aggregate analysis of people who are your followers. It uses behavioral analysis in the intelligence layer to provide you with insights to grow.
One of the things she’s really strategic about is, is building in public to have a constant feedback loop to iterate faster and build better.
Ellie always believed in building value first before fundraising, she went for different grants by Lens Protocol, Polygon, etc to keep the lights on at Bello. Her advice to ones raising a preseed or seed round is to focus on community building so that you have more people aligned with your vision to answer the hard questions that get asked by VCs about the value your project brings. There’s power in more voices than one when considering fundraising.
And now that we covered the story of Bello, its time to share Ellie’s experience at a16z CSS:
Ellie is feeling super grateful for Bello being chosen for the first cohort of a16z Crypto Startup School. She says “Feeling really grateful for the opportunity to be here and to be working and spending so much time with people who are so aligned on the vision of crypto, the vision of web3, you're not convincing anybody there on your thoughts.”
A typical day at CSS involves her working alongside other founders who are also early in their startup journeys, nerding out about blockchain tech to having speakers come in and give incredible talks on various subjects ranging from crypto research, and quantum computing to product ideation and building. They also have office hours with 16z’s partners which are a highly valuable resource to brainstorm ideas on your project.
She rightly calls this experience transformative.
Ellie Farisi is an inspirational founder and she says “Being a founder of a startup is probably one of the careers that have the most extreme high highs and low lows”. She recommends focusing on the wins and the positive feedback from your community. You have to continuously give yourself the boost of the good work and the hard work you put in that impacts other people.
She advises founders who are in their early stages to build, ship fast, ship often, and fail fast. But when you reach a stable position, it’s good to refine your ideas rather than shipping fast.
In addition to her work at Bello. Ellie is also an active member of the business community. She is a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences and is passionate about mentoring other entrepreneurs.
Ellie's journey to entrepreneurship is a testament to the power of following your passion and taking risks. By founding Bello, she has not only built a successful business but has also helped countless clients achieve their goals through data-driven insights. Her dedication to her work and her clients is an inspiration to anyone looking to make a difference in their field.
To hear more of Ellie's inspiring words of that will motivate you, don't miss out on the full podcast episode. Catch the entire podcast on LensTube for the video experience or tune in on Spotify for the audio version. Happy listening and watching!
As an added perk, subscribe to our publication to mint our NFT for Ep. 03:
Ellie’s Billion $$ Bitcoin ideas:***
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As a female technologist not be defined by that as her identity. She recognizes she’s a technologist, and founder first and she’s a person who is curious and that she deserves a seat at the table. We think this idea is so powerful!
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She chose Telegram over Discord to stay in touch with the Bello community as she finds it more intimate
