WiB Spotlight is a new Q&A series by Women in Blockchain where we highlight women and non-binary leaders building in the crypto space.
Introducing Elena, product marketing manager at developer tools company Hiro! Elena has been working in the industry since 2018. In her role, she focuses on understanding the market for developer tooling for Bitcoin layers. Bitcoin layers extend the functionality of Bitcoin without changing the underlying core Bitcoin protocol, enabling Web3 use cases like DeFi, NFTs, collaborative ownership that are often associated with Ethereum and other ecosystems.. In this month’s WiB Spotlight, we talk to Elena about how she first got into crypto and her thoughts on the state of the industry.
WiB: How did you get into crypto? How long have you been in the industry?
Elena: I first got interested in blockchain and Bitcoin while I was getting an MBA from NYU. I took a digital currency class. In that class, I wrote a research paper on crypto adoption in Venezuela. My family is from South America, specifically Venezuela and Cuba. It was just a really fascinating lens through which to see the potential but also the drawbacks of this technology. That’s how I got started.
WiB: Have you always done product marketing?
Elena: I actually worked in non-profit administration before grad school. I was an executive assistant at this mid-size non-profit working in media. I loved that job as well, but I wanted to go to grad school to broaden my professional horizons. That’s how I shifted into product marketing. My first job in crypto was at a startup that was trying to use token-curated registries as a way of creating a more sustainable and beneficial business model for journalism. The internet and digital media completely changed the business model for journalism, not necessarily in a positive way. Journalism as an industry has been around since the 1800s, and generally pre-Internet, there were two business models that journalism relied on: subscription-based business models and advertising. These were called double-revenue streams.
With the internet, both of those changed with digital advertising. Digital advertising works really well if you’re tracking people and serving them content that they want to see, generally for e-commerce. It doesn’t align as well for long-form investigative journalism. Often the most popular content doesn’t meet a very high editorial standard. The subscription business model also suffered. A lot of media companies have had to change their operations. The startup I worked for was called Civil, it was built on Ethereum. It was kind of ahead of its time in 2018, trying to use digital currencies, and token-curated registries, which we would now think of as DAOs, to come up with a way of making quality content and journalism a viable business in the digital age. That was my first stop in my crypto web3 journey.
WiB: What was it like to work in crypto in 2018?
Elena: It felt like I was being put through a washing machine, exposed to so many different concepts and work cultures. I’d always worked at more traditional institutions, where I’d go into the office everyday. Web3 at the time was synonymous with the Ethereum ecosystem.
WiB: How do you think things have changed? Do you think the industry has gotten better or worse?
Elena: Ha! I guess what you can say anytime is, “it was the best of times, worst of times” to quote Dickens. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize. There were things in 2018 that I really appreciated and there were things that were just flat-out embarrassing. That’s been the case every single cycle that I’ve worked in crypto.
In 2018, there was a lot of ambition and experimentation, and honestly just unbridled enthusiasm for how to apply this technology. On the flipside, there were some predatory business models, some approaches that didn’t really reflect my values or why I got into the ecosystem. That’s no different than today.
The headlines for crypto can be sometimes pretty jarring. So many people lose their money in bridge hacks, or cryptocurrencies associated with unsavory activity, black market activity, or things that people might not feel that comfortable with — there’s a little bit of reputational risk with crypto. At the same time, there’s always a new innovation to learn about: that’s happening around zero knowledge proofs, rollups, MEV, and Bitcoin ordinals, it’s all super, super fascinating.
I guess my short answer to your question would be, I don’t know! There are certainly a lot of things that have changed, but I don’t feel competent enough saying it’s changed for the good or better, it’s just continued to evolve. To use a metaphor, we can think of any other industry. If you think of something like medicine, medicine today is arguably way more advanced than medicine 200 years ago. Yet, there are things about the way communities preserved health 200 years ago that we might learn from still. That might be a little too existential.
WiB: I feel like it’s really hard not to feel that way, to not think about the existential aspects of all of this stuff. Every cycle brings good and bad, but with every cycle, more and more people are paying attention and that’s why everything that happens feels even more intense. More people are tuned in.
Elena: I think as more people tune in, you have the opportunity to have a bigger impact, but there are also bigger consequences. As more people get onboarded onto different digital forms of tools, and digital currencies are a part of that, then there are much bigger consequences.
WiB: That all being said, would you say it’s still a good time to get into crypto?
Elena: Oh, yeah! When I am talking to people and they’re expressing interest about getting into this industry, the main thing I tell them is to be aware of what you’re trying to get out of it, as well as to be honest about your tolerance for chaos. This is a very chaotic industry so I think people who are intellectually curious, scrappy and patient to a certain degree — this is an amazing time and will be an amazing time for a long time because this industry isn’t going away.
WiB: An appetite for risk and chaos is definitely essential to surviving in this industry.
Elena: Yeah, and your comfort level with the unknown, as well. I don’t have an engineering background. I studied political science and liberal arts in undergrad and then business in grad school. I work at a place where I help better communicate the values of APIs and SDKs and a lot of technical developer tools. That didn’t happen overnight and it requires a lot of comfort with discomfort. You’re not the dumbest person in the room, but you’ll often feel that way. As long as people know that and don’t get discouraged by that, then I think it’s always a good time to get involved in the industry.
WiB: I have one last question. You were involved with WiB’s compensation project, could you tell us a little bit about that?
Elena: This was an initiative that started as part of Women in Blockchain. Women working in web3 do a really good job of creating different communities and connecting with one another at different levels. I’ve personally benefited from these efforts and am so grateful for them. In the spirit of that, the idea was, if we could work together to create more transparency around our compensation or any trends around compensation, that would ultimately help women working in web3 overall.
The challenges in that type of reporting is that you really have strength in numbers. The more people are willing to share their compensation data, as well as validating that data — there’s a lot of things to consider on how to construct this kind of project so you get clean data. If many people contribute, it’s easier for even more people to add in their data (You can still contribute to the compensation project).
WiB: Do you have any tips for anyone that’s joining a company now or feels like they’re getting paid less than they deserve or compared to their male counterparts?
The biggest thing is finding people you can talk to, either in your company or in your industry. If you’re working in a very small company and you’re new or you don’t have high trust relationships with your coworkers, compensation conversations can be uncomfortable and hard to have. That doesn’t mean you’re working at a horrible place, but trust takes time to build. The more you can find people to talk to, that’s the best place to start.
Once you have people you can talk to, understand what you want to talk about. Compensation is one of things where, if you ask the right questions, you can get really great answers. If you don’t ask the right questions, you might not have very productive conversations. You can ask questions like what is the compensation philosophy at this company, what are the sources you use to determine competitive market rate, and if you have found other sources that show different numbers, you can have a more productive, less personal conversation. Another way of thinking about it is beyond your salary, what’s included in your compensation package? Is it tokens, intangible benefits, health insurance?