‘’You're enabling people to build on this technology so that they create something that is meaningful’’, Anna about the power of the DevRel role.

Celo means zeal, to take care, or be careful, and that’s what Celo is doing with our ecosystem. 

The carbon-negative and mobile-first Blockchain has four foundations of vision:   

Connectedness — striving to connect people to communities, and communities to their people. A sense of belonging is something to feel at Celo. 

Unique Purpose — as a mobile-first platform, Celo believes in all people having access to the conditions that create prosperity. The Organization is building a Regenerative Ecosystem where everyone can thrive. 

Theory of Change — Celo believes that small actions guide you to generate the biggest impact, and this is guiding every project using Celo and the people who take part in it

Sacred Economics — the approach of using the economy for good. Celo comes from the principle of Charles Eisenstein that if we extract things from nature because is backing something valuable in the economy, then we should find ways to add value to actions that will preserve it, instead of extracting it and damaging the environment. An example of this is trees. We keep deforesting because using the space that forests occupy, can generate money, and trees are also a feedstock for many products that run the economy. So, what about finding a way to make profitable the simple actions of preserving nature? 

Following this lead, Celo’s main mission is to scale prosperity and generate a bigger market of nature-backed assets, tokenizing rainforests, scaling carbon credits, and maintaining natural ecosystems.

Is not for just a few, but for all.

Focusing on the Connectedness at Celo, Dream DAO is interviewing Celo’s Developer Relations Lead, Anna Alexa, who works in the core team bringing more builders to the Ecosystem so more prosperity tools are created and implemented, not just in web3 but in the world. 

Right at the beginning of her journey in high school dynamics, Anna shared that the job she wanted didn’t exist yet. In a visionary answer, she saw the emergence of different technologies and how it was going to impact the way people do things. 

After college, graduating with a self-made major that intersected between Tech & Media, Anna began working on community strategies at different organizations. It was only a matter of time, while exploring different opportunities in the web3 space, she would discover Celo, joining the company as a Community Lead, helping to grow the community, working with different projects such as Dream DAO, and growing the Celo ecosystem.

A year later, Anna realized the most valuable work that she could be doing at a layer one protocol in terms of community growth was to work with the community of developers. Since January 2023, she is scaling the Dev Community at Celo, creating awareness and education for developers, managing hackathons, and thinking about the future.

Q: How would you describe your role? How’s it a day in the office with you?

Anna: In my day-to-day operations, we have this two-sided approach for developer growth: developer awareness and education.

Part is partnering with existing hackathons in the space, like ETH Global, and then we also have the Celo-owned hackathons, virtual ones that we organize ourselves. These are growth relations verticals that I focus on.

Last year, I realized what it takes to provide a really good experience for developers, for new people coming in, and for people that are more experienced but want different technologies. I saw what a powerful tool it is for people to come to a hackathon, learn about technology, and ultimately that journey might end in somebody hacking on a project and then making it their full-time job; continuing on with that as a product in the ecosystem. 

So right now, I’m doing a lot more logistics and operational work on the dev team and interfacing with a lot of partners, ultimately putting together a team, deciding on who's going to each hackathon and how we support developers, so we make the best experience for hackers.

To me, hack funds are such a great way for people to get into the space, I'm just super bullish on hackathons and I want to help provide that experience for people.

Q: When it comes to Celo, what do you see as their most significant differential? Something you adore.

Anna: I adore the people that I get to work with and the people that are part of our ecosystem. One of the biggest reasons people choose to build on Celo, or people gravitate to the Celo ecosystem in general is because of the strong focus on mission and the strong alignment on values. That, to me, it's really important and I think that's why I gravitated to Celo in the first place.

I love the culture that we have in this community, I think it's very strong at Celo, it permeates a lot of the things that we do.

Q: When talking with someone, for the first time about Regenerative Finance, and Celo’s mission, how do you make it easier for them to understand? How can we overcome the skepticism newbies have?

Anna: ReFi is really about building systems that incentivize positive externalities. One of the most interesting things we can do in crypto, in general, is redefining incentive structures. If with ReFi we can bake incentives into the protocols that we're building, so instead of making it profitable to destroy forests, we will make it more profitable to preserve them. 

This is shifting the incentive structures from creating negative effects to creating positive effects.

Celo was founded on one of the principles from Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics in which he talks about backing money with things that we want to see more of in the world.

When money was backed by gold, people mined more gold because it was what backed money. So, it was more profitable to mine more gold. But if we can create money that is backed by nature, and this is where capital natural-backed assets come in, then people will have the incentive to preserve those instead of destroying them. That’s why Celo has part of its reserve backed by natural assets. 

I think this is where there's a little bit of skepticism because we don't have that many really good examples of natural capital-backed assets yet. Is still very much a space of experimentation and entities like Climate Collective, for example, are working on it.

Q: As a Community Lead, do you think there is still a challenge to bring more young people and women into the ReFi and web3 space in general? What do you usually do to reach these groups?

Anna: One of the challenges for people it's the uncertainty that because you're not technical, you can't go to a hackathon. But the truth is that this space is so new and perfect for exploration, for people who are just very curious and want to learn. I think those are more important pieces than having some particular kind of knowledge.

It's easy to feel inadequate or that you don’t wanna participate because you think you don’t have enough, but it's a very new space. Breaking down those stereotypes could be really helpful, and having programs that are very welcoming, like Dream DAO, as well as having communities that are very supportive. 

Q: Something you hope for the web3 x social impact space?

Anna: Seeing more real-world use case applications is something that I'm interested in seeing more of. What does blockchain for real-world use cases and adoption really mean, and how it might help solve any of the issues that people are facing?

That’s part of what made me interested in crypto in the first place; how blockchain makes possible a lot of the things that just weren't possible before.

Q: How do you see the DevRel role changing in the future, especially with all the technologies emerging, like blockchain and tokenization, as well as the increasing number of remote communities and DAOs?

Anna: I was thinking about what DevRel means in web3 because a lot of parallels break when you start to apply old models to this new industry. For example, in web2, developer relations, historically, have to do with user acquisition that will eventually pay for or use the product that a company is developing. So the goal of DevRel is to arbitrage between the cost of acquisition of the user and the lifetime value of that user.

In web3 — of course, this goes down to incentive alignment —, is about building a network effect, building sustainable business models, working in crypto, or finding other ways to benefit. You're enabling people to build on this technology so that they create something that is meaningful and that is useful for them. It's more about community building and education. 

It is an interesting industry because it empowers people and enables them, whether that's to build something on their own or to work in the industry, to do something meaningful. People who are developing something are creating value in the world.

Celo’s mission is to empower people and communities to do their best in the economic, technological, and sustainable spaces that surround our daily lives. 

With Dream DAO, the Foundation has supported more than 15 builders to travel across the world to attend web3 conferences, meet new people, and expand their knowledge about Regenerative Finance. Empowering our GenZ community, this partnership has been the reason for many prosperous events and growth, incentivizing our DAO’s members to scale at their best selves.  

If you want to learn more about how Celo & Dream DAO are working together to change the world, you can check out this GenZ-Friendly Guide written by Valeria Zambrano, a wonderful DreamerZ. 

Thank you, Anna, for sharing with me, our readers, and the Dream community about the amazing work you do, and how Celo is changing the way we use and see technology, money, and nature.

For you reading this, if you enjoyed this interview, don’t forget to follow both Dream DAO & Celo on Twitter, and navigate through our Mirror Blog, to check builder’s learning artifacts on conferences and the other interviews of this Interviewing Celo Leaders Series.