Welcome, Melissa. Thank you for joining Diversity in Blockchain’s ChainChat series. How are you first of all?

I'm really well. Thank you so much for having me. 

Each guest leaves a question for the next guest. The last guest left this question for you: How can decentralization lead to more diversity?

If you're looking primarily at blockchain technology and how that kind of decentralization helps diversity, it eliminates the need for third parties to be involved in any kind of transaction. The fact that the blockchain itself is immutable and creates transparent verification allows people to have total ownership, integrity, and autonomy over their work. So this enables many creators worldwide and marginalized communities who never had any inkling of hope to potentially have integrity over their artwork. I'm speaking primarily from an NFT perspective, but it's the same for anybody else who's creating anything, doing a transaction, or building on the blockchain. Transparency enables more justice, equality, open collaboration, and all those things. These are really the principles that Satoshi planned on spreading throughout the creation of Bitcoin and using Blockchain as its ledger. 

This is where we’re starting to see a dent in decentralization, hopefully promoting diversity. I don't think that Web3 technologies are a panacea for diversity. There's a lot of conversation around We are still so early to Web3, that we can change the face of diversity and make sure the Metaverse is really diverse and inclusive. There's definitely an opportunity for that. But is Web3 going to just save the day for diversity and inclusion? I don't think so. We have tools at our disposal that we can use to create more of a sense of ownership for people that never had a possible means to wealth creation, and potentially a way to diversify the technology ecosystem the way it stands.

That's a very balanced answer. Very diplomatic. Tell me about you. What you're up to in this space. Who are you? 

Who am I? I am a former journalist. Still a journalist at heart. Once you do a trade like that, it never leaves you. And I've been a storyteller by trade for the last 15 to 20 years. I started my company WarriorLove Productions, about three years ago. We are a social impact studio and production company. And one of our specialties is Web3. We work primarily at the intersection of technology, social good, gender equality, and climate action. Any partners or clients that need marketing, thought leadership, public relations, media support, or anything falling under the communications umbrella, we support them with that. We also create our own projects. We have a film project called the Mintworthy Film Project. We were funded by NEAR Foundation, which is the foundation of NEAR Protocol. We were given a grant by them to onboard independent filmmakers into Web3, and to provide grants for them. We gave out US$10,000 grants to five independent filmmakers last year. We created Web3 masterclasses for them to understand this intersection of film and Web3, known in the industry as Film3.

In addition, we recently launched our own NFT collection last week, or digital collectibles, if calling them digital collectibles makes you feel better. Many brands are doing that because people have been scared of the acronym NFT. We launched last week. It's called HerVoice. This is a Web3 initiative in partnership with the nonprofit CARE. CARE operates in over 100 countries, putting women and girls at the center of social impact initiatives, including climate action, financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, refugee support, and humanitarian aid. They are doing a lot of work directly in Syria and Turkiye now and have been around since WWII. They were one of the first organizations to understand that if you promote women and girls as leaders and ensure they are at the center of the social innovation initiatives, it moves faster, and the world becomes a better place. 

CARE approached us and asked, Do you know about this Web3 stuff and NFTs? Can you make one with us? We’ve had a lot of stops and starts in this project due to the tumultuousness of the bear market. But we just launched on March 15, in honor of International Women's Day, which was March 8, and also in celebration of Women's History Month, which is all of March. These NFTs are really unique. I don't think there's been anything created quite like this yet.

I wrote a poem about the gift of womanhood and the importance of creating pathways for girls to lead. I wrote this as if I was writing this to my unborn daughter. I'm not pregnant, but if I was, I wrote it from that same energy and spirit. We had two really incredible choreographers create movement to the poem. Then on top of that, we hired a really talented AR, generative, AI-gendered artist to create digital animations, bringing all this together. So it's an audio-visual kind of mixed media art piece. And originally, we were going to have a celebrity ambassador that works with CARE be the narrator of the poem, although that never came to fruition. Two weeks before International Women's Day, I reached out to about 25 women worldwide who work in Web3. They work in social impact and climate action, predominantly in Web3, and they all read the poem. So 26 voices, 25 plus mine, are reading this poem in ten languages, representing 21 countries. It's a montage of voices coming in from different angles. We have Swahili, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Farsi, French, Spanish, and English. And a couple of others.

While we were initially disappointed that we didn't get a big celebrity to be the voiceover, I think this approach of getting all these women from around the world is a better fit. It's more aligned with the mission of solidarity and creating that narrative that there are women worldwide active in leadership when it comes to social innovation and Web3 and technology. We launched on the 15th. We just sold one of the five original pieces and will create a total of 3,900 NFTs. We just launched the original five, but the goal is to launch those 3,900 on Mother's Day in May in the US, and to hold an event in partnership with CARE to promote that.

See the collection on Solis here.

Sounds really good. Is the collection on OpenSea or Rarible?

It's not on OpenSea yet. Probably for secondary sales. But these initial sales, the five 1/1s, are on a marketplace called Solis. I can send you the link later. They're new. They're our partner on this. And they've been wonderful partners. They've been so much more than a marketplace. They've been collaborators creatively, strategically helping with media outreach, their own resources, and internal network, and they've been big. I can't say enough good things about the team over at Solis.

Excellent. All look out for those as well. And then your own journey. From beginning to end. What challenges have you found along the way, whether with the project or, in general, learning more, doing more in the Web3 space?

How much time do you have? Being an entrepreneur is one of the most rewarding adventures and privileges and one of the world's most exhausting, frustrating, and tedious challenges. For a long time, while doing a lot of freelance journalism, I was also consulting and doing content strategy for social impact organizations and initiatives. And a lot of tech startups. When I started my company, WarriorLove Productions, I was living in Puerto Rico three years ago and met a few phenomenal women. I wanted to collaborate with them. If I brought them in and created a team, I could bring in more clients and make more money. And we'll all have that collaboration and community.

Then when we entered Web3, we started to promote ourselves as a Web3 focus studio, and the floodgates opened phenomenally. We had a tonne of business rushing toward us. This was during the Bull Run, and everything was really hot. Everybody needed help with their storytelling. And we did really well in the first half of 2022. The second half, no, not so much. We lost a number of pieces of business all at once. I needed to keep my team paid the same amount for as long as I could. They're all contractors, but we really became a family. I did whatever I personally could to make ends meet and to keep them paid, and I don't regret it at all because they've done so much for me and so much for WarriorLove. Some of them were working with me before I could even pay them; their loyalty has been tremendous. And so I don't regret that at all. But from a business standpoint, that was not a good idea. A couple of partners ran out of funding and couldn't pay us for the months we worked. And there was nothing they could do or that we could do. 

But I'd say I just learned a lot about burnout and the indicators that I might be heading toward burnout. It was so easy to get triggered and return to this mindset of scarcity because the market was so tough. Wondering, How am I going to make ends meet? Professionally speaking, it's been one of the most rewarding journeys and also one of the most challenging and hardest too. I've learned a lot, but overall, business has been just up and down and up. A lot of people have been going through that. At least people working in Web3.

But not just that — the inflation, the economy, this banking crisis we're in right now. There are so many strange things happening all at once. It's hard, especially for startups. I feel for all my colleagues who are trying to fundraise right now. With regard to HerVoice specifically, there were so many stops and starts to that project. Again, CARE approached us to partner with them in January 2022. We wanted to launch on International Women's Day of 2022. Even though Web3 works at lightspeed, we couldn't do that. Then we thought about launching in the spring, but there was the Terra Luna issue that happened. Then the bear market. We said okay, we're not going to sell right now. Then we thought about October. International Day Of The Girl falls in October. Then everything happened with FTX. And finally, I said Listen, we can't delay. There may not be a good time for a really long time. But we have to do this and the NFT. While that's the product, the mission and the vision are so much bigger than an NFT. It's so much bigger than a token or access to a community or membership.

It's really about this message of solidarity among women, not just among women, but around people of all genders supporting women's rights. It's really this message that women are very much leading the narratives. The stories just need more amplification. The lesson with HerVoice, in addition to working on being better with finances, really, is that sometimes you just have to jump. There may not be a good time. A lot of startup entrepreneurs go through that where they keep testing and researching. Then eventually, you just have to put out your MVP. You have to put out your Minimum Viable Product. And you have to get feedback to learn how to iterate and improve it. And in the case of HerVoice, we have to put it out there and just see what kind of response we get and see if this resonates with people emotionally. I could talk to you for days about the lessons I've hopefully learned and absorbed for good this last year.

Do you have a slogan for HerVoice? Can you summarize the mission in a line? 

The slogan needs to be adjusted. But our tagline is Turning women's voices into action through art, and innovation. That was a slogan that CARE actually suggested to us last year. One of the reasons the team at CARE wanted to get into Web3 is because they have so many incredible programs. They invented the Care Package right after WWII. So they know what they're doing. They know about humanitarian aid and how to elevate meaning. And they see the Web3 ecosystem as an audience to tap into to not only garner support financially through crypto but also through the sense of community in Web3. Not all Web3 communities are about solidarity and collaboration, and teamwork. Some are just about quick cash grabs and making money. And that's fine. People are still helping one another, giving each other tips. But a lot of the Web3 communities that my team and I have been privileged enough to be a part of this last year have been so focused on sharing wealth and on educating other people, particularly bringing more women and people in marginalized communities into the fold so that they can create wealth. Between CARE's mission to balance the playing field for women and girls and to really promote social justice, that same kind of spirit of Web3 that's all around equalizing the playing field and creating more opportunities for equality and equity. Right. It's not just equality, it's equity, and they're actually distinct. And so there's a lot of alignment between what some communities in Web3 are doing and what CARE is doing. And that's really the convergence we want to promote and hopefully drive more social impact.

Excellent. As you say, there's never a good time, or there may never be a good time. Maybe I'm blindly optimistic, but now is a good time because of all the goings on with all of the banks in the US and things like that. People will have their interest piqued a little more in the Web3 and crypto world as well, and hopefully, that will put the project in good stead.

Yeah, crypto or Bitcoin is doing well right now the last couple of days. My Twitter feed is saying it's bitcoins heyday. This is it. This is bitcoins time. And so we'll see if that's the case. People who have relied on banks are looking at what we need to find. We need to find an alternative. Look at Satoshi’s white paper. A friend of mine had coined the term Satoshi Is Female, and she made T-shirts and started the whole movement around it. We were starting to create an NFT collection for that, but then when the bear market hit, we decided to wait because I could just imagine the jokes like, Satoshi is broke, man. If you're going to make a statement like Satoshi is female, you need to be more strategic about the timing. My friend’s name is Nyla Rodgers. She's a really dear friend of mine, and her thinking around it was if you look at the Bitcoin white paper, what Satoshi is talking about there is harnessing cryptocurrency and blockchain for justice, equality, equity, transparency, openness, collaborations, all the things that I mentioned earlier around how decentralization can promote diversity. When she read it, she said Satoshi is clearly a woman. It's not that no men lead with those prerogatives or those priorities. But predominantly, we know statistically, a lot of women do. So yeah, sometimes the only time is now. I'm glad you think now is a good time because against the banking crisis background, it’s an unusual time to ask people to buy things. I'd say that's where I feel a little sensitivity around things. When I'm promoting things. I'm saying, Oh, here's this digital collectible. And, you know, a big portion of the sales are going toward CARE. So it's going toward a really important cause. But still, asking people for money is not the greatest feeling right now. 

Progress over perfection, putting things out there and seeing what happens, pivoting when necessary, changing, tweaking things. We have to keep doing and keep building, right? Again, basically, you have to put it out there. What's your plan for the future of HerVoice?

Yeah, excellent question. So right now, HerVoice is a small community, starting with the 26 voices narrating the actual NFT itself, including me and our artists and our team at CARE and Solace. They're a big part of engaging with the community. We want to launch the 3,900 NFTs on Mother's Day and do an in-person event, potentially in Los Angeles, in partnership with Solace and CARE and get some spoken word artists, maybe create a scenario where the poem could be heard in surround sound. The creative director of my company had a dream about HerVoice about a year ago. He envisioned that the NFT was filled with choreography and the poem, and AI changed the sound and did all these amazing things. The way he designed the sound was really intricate. In certain scenarios, it could be experienced as immersive sound and the right setting with the right kind of speakers. It’s predominantly English. But then Swahili will come in, Hebrew will come in, or a Russian voice will come in, you know, Turkish, all these different voices to make a real montage of the poem.

One of the most beautiful things to happen was during a Twitter space with all the women narrators on March 8 on International Women's Day, some of the women, whose first language is not English, said that when they read the poem in English, were like Okay, it's fine. Then when they read it in their native language, some of the women who are mothers said that they started to cry. They couldn't even make it through because it really hit them. It struck an emotional chord with them to say this to their daughter because of how the poem is written. It's written as if a mother is watching her daughter grow all the way up through, her prime, and while she's blazing all these trails, creating new trails and doing all these miraculous things, and being able to just bask in the trail that she blazed. It was really special to be able to hear what it meant emotionally to the women who contributed their voices.

I would be curious to hear it as a mother of two daughters. I want to ask you if you can leave a question for our next guest. 

Sure. Hmm. I'd love to know from anyone working in Web3 what their greatest learning experience has been about humanity while working in this industry.

Excellent. I would also like to hear what they say about that. So many great projects out there. It'll be difficult to choose when so many people are doing great things. But what would your answer be to that question?

Just how huge people's hearts are is really noticeable in this space. There's greed, obviously. There are definitely some people that have gotten into cryptocurrency strictly to make money to make more money. But that's their right to do so. It's also there for wealth creation, right? But the innovation around it and blockchain itself is the most remarkable. A couple of years ago, I went to the Zaatari refugee camp on the border of Jordan and Syria because I wanted to see one of the grocery stores there that's run on a blockchain. The World Food Programme worked with a startup in Jordan to create a system allowing refugees to go in and have their eye scan biometrics come up. Then the money they need to pay for the food is transferred directly without a bank or third party involved. The World Bank decided they needed to create a system like this because just having the third-party banks at all was just costing too much money. And this is really — I don't want to say simple, because I don't know what went into creating the technology. But it just seemed like such an elegant way to use blockchain.

This was a year or two after the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) craze was going on, when everybody was doing one. I was more focused on being a journalist at the time. I was receiving so many really crazy pitches, even from companies that were putting hamburger review sites on the blockchain. They were just doing startups and putting it on the blockchain so they could do an ICO, and everybody was sending white papers, but nobody had a product built. And I really wanted to see a real, tangible, physical, real-life thing in-person that I could touch and see and smell. And almost taste. So I went to this refugee camp to see it. It was great to see. And this is, I mean, I feel like that's just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done using Blockchain from an infrastructure standpoint. There's still so much that we don't know is going to happen with this technology.

So much potential, and that brings us to a close nicely because, with more diversity, there's always going to be more innovation. Then the sky is the limit. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been great to speak to you.

Great, thank you so much.