Good morning London and good evening New Zealand! We have a global presence in this ChainChat series. Thank you for coming on. I’m Natassja. What you may know by now is that we ask each guest to leave a question for the next guest and the last guest has left this question for you Natalie and Dzhuliana:

What most excites you about Web3 that couldn’t have existed otherwise?

Natalie: We start with this one? OK. My answer now would be slightly different from when I first got involved in Blockchain, so maybe I’ll say my answer now, or can I say two? 

Sure!

Well, the first one is a decentralized way for communities to collaborate and facilitate value exchange. The second thing for me is the tokenization of value. So, new ways of capturing and making transactions and exchanges on different forms of value.

Dzhuliana: For me, it would be the technology and how the technology is written, how the protocols have been written. The core infrastructure of the code, and how that code is written in Web3 compared to Web2 is a totally new system. As I’m a more technical person I love how everything has changed and for me, this is the biggest fundamental change.

So somebody who has worked in Web2 and has learned how to code in Web2 cannot simply transfer those skills to Web3? It’s a learning curve for everybody?

Yes.

OK good to know! So now we’ll dig into some of the other questions starting with who are you? What do you do? Why is Web3 in your lives?

Natalie: Do you want to start Dzhuliana?

Dzhuliana: No, go ahead.

Natalie: The challenges of having two guests!

It’s nice!

Natalie: My name’s Natalie Robinson and my role is CEO at OneUpOneDown. How we’re moving in Web3 at the moment is we’re looking to build a decentralized mentorship platform, so a mentorship DAO. For me, my journey in Blockchain started a while ago out of personal interest, and now for the purpose of the businesses it solves a really important problem that we have in capturing the value that mentors provide and enabling them to receive value in exchange for mentorship. So, we’re really excited about what Blockchain can enable us to do within mentor matching and how it will enable us to reward mentors, but also incentivize behaviors that will go on to create more mentors and mentorship as a practice within the world.

And for you, Dzhuliana?

Dzhuliana: So I heard about Blockchain maybe five years ago, but I just recently started to look more deeply into it, and understand what and if actually, our business needs to move in that direction, what the utility is, what is the functionality and what actually is the reality we could provide. Would it be useful?

If you think of it in a broad sense of matchmaking services, like holiday rentals or Tinder or all these different things where people are matched in Web2, what difference does Web3 make to OneUpOneDown and your type of matchmaking service?

Natalie: We have a Web2 platform at the moment and we started our journey with a centralized service. The challenge that exists for us and almost all mentoring programs is the supply/demand issue. There’s always more demand from mentees than there is the supply of mentors. We have solved that in some way, encouraging participants to be mentors and mentees within the network, so that’s helped us. But we need ways to incentivize mentors. So having tokens that reward mentors for their time that’s linked to the underlying governance and value revenue at OneUpOneDown is what Web3 can enable for us. And also, there are practical challenges that are solved, but it also aligns with our philosophy around value exchange. The value of the network comes from those contributing to it, so we want to reward those contributing to it. There’s movement around the value of Blockchain-based social media platforms, around data, censorship, and things. It’s less relevant to us specifically, but it’s an important consideration.

Cool. We mentioned briefly the good old learning curve, so I was wondering what challenges have you both found along the way to learning more and doing more?

Dzhuliana: So my challenges with Blockchain were around how to find the information that is more truthful, but I think that is a challenge when you start learning anything new. You always try to find all the different points of view and figure out the truth for yourself. Everyone has a different opinion, and then there are facts and data which are not necessarily accurate either. For me, personally, what helped me was talking and building relationships within the space, because I could hear everyone’s different experiences and pain points. I think that’s what helped with the challenge of figuring out what is true.

Just to carry on from that quickly, for somebody who is listening to us, they’re just starting, and they think OK, I have to start building relationships. How do they start doing that?

Dzhuliana: It’s a good question because I myself find that extremely difficult. To go somewhere and just speak with people for example, at a networking event. It’s not easy to just pop somewhere and say Hey, can we be friends? It just doesn’t work that way. This is something that has to do with DAOs, it doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of people on your LinkedIn or your social network, or in-person events, how do you build trust with people you don’t know and want to meet? This is actually something we facilitate very successfully. One thing is through our network, our own platform, by speaking one-to-one and being curious about other people. Invite people to the community so we can meet them! But it is difficult to go out there and find someone!

Natalie: For me, I first got involved in Blockchain in 2016 which was quite early, and I didn’t really have the confidence, even though i was passionate about what it stood for and what we could create, I didn’t really have the confidence to really get involved. I was so drawn to it, the embodiment of a set of beliefs that I really have, but I thought everyone knew what they were doing, and now, looking back I realize nobody really knows what they’re doing. I didn’t have the confidence to participate fully and I didn’t know the language, I’m not technical, and I felt like I had to be if I was going to add any value. It was a challenge, and it still is!

It seems like a common theme, confidence or starting a conversation with people, these kinds of social boundaries exist for a lot of us. You know how at some conferences they have like a traffic light system, a red sticker if you don’t want people to talk to you, green if you do. We need something like that next to our online names instead or next to the pronouns some people have.

What has been your greatest resource then? People for you, Dzhuliana? Any online resources in written, video, audio?

Dzhuliana: What I always do is go and try to find the root of everything. You know, the start of Bitcoin or Ethereum, I first would go there and read the documentation or listen to people who built this. My question for everything is, Who started this? Not someone’s opinion, but who started this and who developed it and invented this or the first person who started talking about it. I’d Google it, listen to what’s available, find out what are these people talking about, in order to understand the root. This is my approach for everything.

That’s sensible advice. Sometimes you do get washed away with Twitter and LinkedIn stories and when you’re lacking confidence, it’s easier to be led by biased opinions so it’s good advice to go read the whitepapers and sources.

Dzhuliana: Yes, it’s called First Principle Thinking.

Another one then, what do you wish you’d known sooner?

Natalie: For me, it’s that no one really knows what they’re doing! People are figuring it out as they go and as they build, you just got to get stuck in and it’s ok feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing because you soon find that most other people feel that way too!

Dzhuliana: When you hear someone speaking with a lot of confidence, you can make the mistake of thinking that this person knows quite a lot because they are super certain about something. Then you feel like you need to know as much as they know, but they just speak with confidence. Just because someone speaks with confidence doesn’t mean that they know everything. As I said, you need to go and break through that kind of stuff.

I know what you mean, like breaking it down and leveling with people. Well, that’s the way I do it.

Natalie: There are so many experiments going on, there are so many new things being tried and tested, and then they don’t work, so you try and test something else, so what I mean, the rules are still being created and it’s still a real playground to try things out and that’s an invitation to go in and be curious, learn and try things.

That’s a really good answer that leads on to the next question about diversity because while we have this playground analogy that I like, this is where we want more diverse people in building, experimenting, and testing. So I was wondering with OneUpOneDown, how do you tackle that diversity aspect?

Natalie: Our focus is on mentorship. Woman-to-woman peer mentorship. The origins of OneUpOneDown come from our experiences of working in male-dominated industries for both of us. For both of us, we’ve had men as role models and that’s how we learned to lead, act, and operate, and how we saw what leadership looks like. When being in organizations that were male-dominated, reflecting on it now, we felt like there was a certain authenticity missing, and a confidence again that comes from being around people who communicate differently, validate, and think and behave in ways that are more similar to you. For any individual that is a minority in a group that is similar-minded, will likely, unless they’ve had a lot of training in self-development, be less confident and less able to contribute, therefore operating at less than capacity because of self-consciousness. We saw that as an underlying problem for women to move into leadership positions and operate authentically. We saw the most organic way to enable women and give them that support so that they could validate themselves and realize their abilities as leaders was through mentorship. We’ve been doing that for the last two and a half years, near-peer matching, and Web3 is being created, it’s very male-dominated, by participating in those communities we saw that that was a problem, our solution uses mentorship to give women confidence in these communities and it also serves as a way to onboard more women to participate within Blockchain.

Can I just ask, is it specifically for leadership?

Natalie: Not specifically. Leadership is a good catch-all. It’s designed to give women more influence and step into their capabilities. It may mean that they want to lead others, but it may not. It’s self-leadership as well. It’s not only for women who are aspiring to get into a certain leadership position, it’s available for all. We use leadership as the term because the world does need more authentic female leadership, and I believe having more of a balance between masculine and feminine leadership will solve a lot of the problems and challenges that we have at this time. The underlying driver is to get women into more positions of influence, operating from a more balanced, feminine way of leading.

Dzhuliana: I’d add that it’s more about self-belief and usually when you are in a space where you’re different, in this case for example you might be the only woman, you are different in some way from the group, you kind of feel the difference and want to mix with others, but you don’t need to mix with the others, you need to be yourself… I think that inner courage to stand up and say I’m different, and I’m totally OK with that, and I will be different, instead of agreeing with what everyone else is thinking and feeling because you want to mix and be accepted. Usually, if you are different, you don’t want to be rejected, but I think it’s important that every person believes in themselves and have the courage to stand up and say I’m different, and this is my way, of course, this is why it’s related to leadership, because if you don’t feel up to leading, don’t lead. It’s up to you! But to have the courage to say I don’t want to lead, I will do whatever I want to do.

Natalie: Ironically, often those people are the best leaders because by being that way, you inspire others to be that way for themselves and I think that leadership is one of those words that is very overused but is also very powerful, important word.

It’s true. Where do you think other Web3 companies for want of a better word — or projects, groups etcetera can and should focus their diversity efforts? What steps can they take to ensure that moving forward, this new world is diverse?

Natalie: It’s an interesting question. One of the great things about Web3 is how it’s community focused. It’s built around communities, the development, the marketing, it’s a different way of doing business. This also creates a real opportunity to measure contribution and who’s participating within the community. How that’s concentrated, or how spread out it is, who participates and who doesn’t. A lot of the Blockchain communities are anonymous so it doesn’t have to be tied to identity, and I think that’s really where diversity and inclusion need to go eventually, beyond identity, and more about the participation of as many people as possible in a way that is fair and equitable. So introducing tools to communities that can be used to visualize participation, and language, there are so many things that can be introduced because of how communication is within these communities. There are some really exciting opportunities to measure contribution and engagement.

We’ve thought about anonymity before, maybe it was us that were speaking about it one day? It’s good insofar as it gives women and minority groups the chance to stand up where if they have a photo or physical presence they might not be able to, but at the same time, it makes it difficult to measure and rectify who is participating.

Natalie: Totally! But it’s not like it’s just I’m being perceived as a woman so I won’t contribute, it’s actually all the conditioning that we have that impacts our ability and confidence to contribute. Then also the way communication is done, it could favor one type over another, or how things are interpreted. That’s the thing about diversity, ultimately, it does go far beyond identity.

Backgrounds, experiences…

What would you say Dzhuliana are some of the steps that companies, projects, organizations can take to ensure they are more diverse?

Dzhuliana: If we start thinking about why this anonymity is powerful, it’s because it gives people the courage to step in without their names and their face being heard. Why are they doing it? Because people judge. And it is very natural for us, it is nobody’s fault, it is how our brain works, the brain judges. My approach would be to start thinking from other points of view and try to be more empathetic, asking yourself why you need to judge. And if you’re more aware, and start embracing diverse thinking and diverse people in any kind of area, that helps everyone. But you have to be aware that it’s natural for the brain to judge, in order to stop this judgment and see how we can be more aware.

Reflect more and be more critical in our thinking, ask ourselves if there’s another way of thinking. Diversify our own thoughts first and then that translates onto others…

We normally keep these to about half an hour so I’m going to ask you one more question, then ask you to leave a question for our next guest.

The last one from me is general, do you have any other insight, wisdom, things you want to share, or things you’re excited about just to summarize?

Dzhuliana: For me, what excites me is that we are in years and in a time that we see a huge change. Every change is good and interesting and gives people an opportunity to experiment and to change their perception of words like failure. Failure has been felt like a negative word, but failure is so much of an experiment. If we fail faster, that means we learn faster. It’s a great opportunity for all of us to embrace failure and try to fail more and faster and not have a negative perception of this word.

Natalie, anything to round up?

Natalie: I just want to thank you for the work that you and your team are doing because having different voices talk about Web3 and Blockchain and what’s important to us in contributing to it is important. When you asked before about what can be done? It’s more stories, and more voices, from a diverse range of people, and I think women have such a lot to contribute in this space because of the values that underpin Web3 and the collaboration and community that exists behind it. So I wouldn’t let the tech intimidate you if there’s someone listening or reading, thinking it’s too technical. There’s much more to it than that. Obviously, the tech is an important part, but some really exciting things are being built and the way that people exchange, collaborate, do business and create value, so if you’re even just a little bit curious, take the first step and reach out to someone. One other thing, the community is so in-service to bringing others on board, and the idea of all ships rising is very much a philosophy within Web3 so yes, reach out and get connected. Follow your curiosity.

Totally agree, everyone is super helpful. I’ve not been too shy asking questions because generally, people are of that mindset and interested in value exchange, so you know you’re in a good place with like-minded people. So why don’t you both leave a question and we’ll let the next person choose one?

Natalie: An easyish one: What was your gateway drug into Web3?

I write these down every time and I don’t know why because it’s recorded. Dzhuliana?

Dzhuliana: What was one action you have done in the last week to support diversity in the space?

Lovely. Well, I want to say thank you to both of you for coming on. We will encourage people to check out OneUpOneDown, especially if they have something to offer as a mentor although it’s open to everybody. Look forward to keeping in touch and following your work.

Dzhuliana: Thank you for your effort and everything you’re doing in the field because it is very important to have people like your organization to give us the stage to speak and spread the message.

Thank you! Have a great rest of the week!