“I knocked on the door within, and a universe opened…”

Brian Doyle, who drives education and developer documentation strategy for the Flow blockchain, announced a brilliant idea: Let’s run an internal hackathon. The concept was simple — employees of the foundation behind the consumer blockchain that powers Disney, NBA Top Shot, Mattel, and thousands more, would get a week (pending manager approval) to work on passion projects and compete for thousands in rewards. Encouraging ‘intraprenuership’ is something many larger innovation companies have been doing for a while, afterall Gmail, a tool we are all familiar with, came out of a policy at Google allowing employees to dedicate a portion of their week to passion projects.

Flow Foundation, like so many other blockchain custodians, hosts innumerous hackathons. I’ve personally organized and judged at least five this year alone. But this time, things were different. This time, the community would judge us.

I was nervous. The hackathon week overlapped with Consensus 2025 in Toronto — my hometown. I’d set the intention to work on my project every night before bed. But as the universe tends to humble the overly ambitious, I came home each night barely able to keep my eyes open — my consciousness “rugged” faster than any memecoin could dream of.

As it was written, the conference had come and gone, I’d all but given up on participating. The deadline was Sunday and I found myself sitting in Pearson airport Saturday afternoon, awaiting my flight. Suddenly, my phone buzzed — flight delayed by several hours.

Bored and restless, the internal hackathon clawed it’s way out of the unforgotten depths of my subconcious.

Where AI and Genetics Meet

I was fortunate to be invited as the only Canadian Global Shaper to the 2024 Annual Meeting of New Champions (aka “Summer Davos”) by the World Economic Forum, a transformative experience where a recurring theme was how AI would revolutionize healthcare. Around that time, 23andMe — like Ancestry.com, an platform sequencing your genome for ~$200 — was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was facing bankruptcy, selling people’s most intimate information, and even getting hacked. A single tube of spit, an ocean of controversy. This news top of mind and quite pertinent to me at a personal level. You see, ten years prior, as a starry-eyed first-year undergrad with four grandparents from four vastly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, I’d eagerly sent in my DNA (under a fake name, because even then, we worried about these genetic companies abusing data).

What else could happen when you store data in a centralized database… run by a centralized company you blindly trust… other than ompounding single points of failure with catastrophic consequences?

23andMe offered users the option to download and delete their genetic data, and I went for it. The first thing that hit me was enormous filesize — comprising hundreds of thousands of lines (maybe millions?) of genetic SNPs. Notepad++ couldn’t even handle it, crashing the first several attempts at opening. Coming from a STEM background, an overarching curiosity creeped over me, the nascent muses clamoured out the walls, singing inspiration into my heart. I always found data sexy, and I was sitting on pandoras box. Curious, I set up a custom local LLM (GPT-NeoX, Llama 3, etc.) with the utmost security in mind. No internet, all local. What happened next was insane…. I Knocked on a door and the universe opened.

It was like creating a Google for myself. I spent late nights, week after week, asking the LLM everything from ancient Denisovan gene variants present in my genome to whether keto would work for me based on my DNA. It told me which medications might be less effective for me, and which I might absorb too well. It even flagged a common variant of the MTHFR gene, linked to folate metabolism. Classic symptoms of deficiency: brain fog, poor focus, low energy.

I was compensating with caffeine all through university, never suspecting a deficiency. Even though my diet was packed with folate-rich foods, my body just couldn’t use it.

Standard supplements wouldn’t help. But $10 of methylated folate later, I felt an instant transformation. This experiment actually improved my life for the better, in a way that 23andMe never really could.

“What data could be more important to fully own, other than the data of you?”

From Idea to Product

That deeply personal experiment lit a fire in me that illuminated the scarecely charted void that was the future of personalized healthcare. I’d told friends about my setup, it was cheap and seemed simple, but it required a bit of technical wizardry that most people couldn’t be bothered about.

So, in that airport waiting area, lurching over my laptop, I fired up Cursor and integrated the best LLM I could for AI-assisted programming, aka ‘vibe coding’. And…. I got vibing.

“The best ideas are often simple, solving a clear pain point for a large group of people.”

Considering 23andMe’s rise and fall, as well as the millions impacted by it, I asked: How could blockchain flip the paradigm? Data sovereignty and ownership are at the heart of crypto — what’s more personal than your own genome?

I’d been fascinated for years by decentralized science (DeSci) and how cryptography might transform scientific research. It felt like such a refreshing narrative in an industry overrun by speculation. What if everyone owned their own genetic data, what kinds of apps and services might emerge? I was so absorbed, I almost missed my flight — saved only by a desperate, “Mr. Serag, Mr. Serag, please come to Gate XYZ!” over the airport speakers.

I made it to my gate, laptop in hand, passed a pair of unimpressed agents giving me the side-eye, and finally boarded. Once in my seat, I checked if the plane had internet.

This would become one of the fastest flights of my life. I thought to myself how the best ideas are often simple, solving a clear pain point for a large group of people. The problem is 99% of ideas never leave one’s notepad or hard drive. I was in pure hustle mode to turn idea into product.

Shipping the MVP

As soon as I landed, I whipped up a quick Canva demo and whirled up a live Vercel deployment.

How does it work?

• AES-GCM encryption (trusted by governments and banks) is used with MetaMask derived keys.
• There’s no backend to hack or lose access to.
• Your crypto wallet encrypts, decrypts, and manages what apps access your data, you remain in full control of it.
• Push a button: encrypt your data, store the hash on-chain. When an app needs access, you decrypt and approve.

The MVP leverages Deepseek’s LLM, allowing users to search their genes and have conversations or ask questions — similar to ChatGPT and explore 8 highly personalized and detailed dashboards across ancestry, health, exercise, food, and more.

Because the wallet is the only identity layer, there’s pseudo-anonymity baked-in: no names, emails, or unique identifiers.

Limitations and the Path Forward

The MVP isn’t perfect.

• Data still goes to Deepseek’s servers — even pseudo-anonymous, it’s not ideal.
• The current LLM implementation is basic and can greatly be improved speed-wise
• There is a big opportunity to use Capabilities on Flow that I would love to explore, enforcing a time-frame and specific parts of data that apps are allowed to access.
• There’s more opportunities to tie in multiple people’s genetic data to simulate zero-knowledge what if scenarios and also prenatal gene compatibility screening for dangerous mutations.
• Most importantly, a critical issue is that genetic data is still produced by centralized companies. We need a truly trustless, secure, decentralized way to sequence genomes and derive health data. DeSci could bridge this gap with a type of privacy-first user-centric service. Only then can we unlock the universe within each of us, building composable ecosystems of apps that unlock more and more.

The excitement of what’s possible, and motivation from Brian, pushed me to ship an app between flights and terminals, one that offers, for free, what others charge thousands for. You can test out GeneFlow with sample SNP data right now. In its current form, for free — it offers similar functionality to centralized tests costing $5,000+. This is just a pebble in a massive industry beginning to unfold in our lifetimes — one that will shape generations to come. With these advances, blockchain is needed to guarantee and protect our most essential digital rights.

Thanks for reading! Ali Serag is a Devrel Lead at Flow who is passionate about building products that solve real problems. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn and stay subscribed for more technical, startup and product-centered content.

The Concept of Popup Cities: Accelerators for Community and Innovation

The idea of popup cities is inspired by Zuzalu, a novel initiative that created temporary environments to foster kinship, exchange ideas, and experiment with new societal structures. The popup city emerged in Montenegro in March 2023 and inspired by Balaji’s idea of ‘Network States’, highly aligned online communities that possesses the capacity for collective action, enabling them to crowdfund physical territory globally and ultimately gain diplomatic recognition from existing nation-states. Another one that followed in August 2024 was Aleph in Buenos Aires, that sought to turn Argentina into a global startup and innovation hub, bringing together investors, policy makers, founders and startups together to catalyze how web3 could help address economic challenges the country was facing.

These popup villages act as accelerators for human connection, blending physical and digital interactions in ways that reimagine community and innovation. They are defined by having a temporary fixed duration, being community-driven, thematic and utilizing web3 technologies for things like governance and identity verification. EdgeCity Lanna carried this ethos forward, bringing together 600 builders, dreamers, and doers from around the world to explore the intersection of technology, culture, and organizational structures — all dedicated to human flourishing.

Chiang Mai, the former kingdom of Lanna, provided the ideal backdrop. With its cool, breezy evenings, expansive green landscapes, and tranquil pace of life, the city offered a stark contrast to the hustle of metropolises like Bangkok. Everywhere you turned, water lilies graced the rivers and lakes, symbolizing resilience and renewal — fitting themes for a community coming together to innovate.

Chiang Mai marked the third stop on the Flow World Tour, following ETH Singapore and ETH San Francisco. In both previous hackathons, Flow emerged as the most utilized Layer 1 blockchain, but EdgeCity Lanna was a different beast. This was not a weekend sprint but a weeklong “buildathon,” characterized by open-ended challenges and an atmosphere of creative freedom.

The builders congregated at the Mövenpick Hotel which buzzed alive with activity. Purple neon lights illuminated the dark and cool hacking space, local cuisine fueled the participants, and lanterns cast a warm glow over late-night brainstorming sessions. We setup an impromptu “Ment000rs” stage, where the Flow team provided hands-on guidance — not just for our projects but for other streams as well as we quickly realized that we were the only sponsor to have dedicated mentors present. I spent the majority of time at the hackathon but some of my team mates like Antoni were able to sneak off into the forest to have bleeding edge conversations with leading researchers like Andy Ayrey around the convergence of AI Agents like Truth Terminal, memes, social experimentation and web3.

One thing I noticed at all these crypto events is that everyone seems to have a cap (usually black?), at the event mine was inscribed with the question “What Real Problems Do You Solve?”, it quickly became became a conversation starter, sparking discussions about building meaningful solutions that truly improve lives — solutions that make the world “flow” better (pun intended).

Exploring New Frontiers: Building Social Technologies

My focus for the week was on decentralized social applications. Over 6 billion people use social apps riddled with “dark patterns” that exploit human psychology rather than nurture it. We wanted to explore alternatives that prioritize human connection and community-building. Some prompts we provided to help builders ideate were:

• A platform for group collaboration, governance, and event management.
• Incentivizing constructive and community-driven content creation that can be community moderated through decentralized random juries while also being censorship resistant by a single entity.
• Empowering users to control and securely share their data.

The Flow track attracted brilliant projects like PaKT, which gamifies task completion with friends to build positive habits and stop bad ones, and My28Days, a platform looking to expand as a decentralized women’s health app revolutionizing menopause care.

Outside of our track there were two projects that especially stood out to me:

• The Future I Want A narrative based AI world-building art project that offers a journey into an optimistic future that emphasizes technology progression, environmental harmony, flourishing community, and the simple, profound joy of being alive.
• Zurvivor — A platform that leverages programmable cryptography, information escrows, and knowledge graphs to empower sexual assault survivors to anonymously report their abusers in a safe and secure environment that eliminates first mover disadvantage and related fears that come with speaking out.

These projects were of course all MVPs, there is only so much you can do in just one week, but I’m really excited to explore how we can help bring them to life post-hackathon.

Beyond Building: Popup Cities as Incubators of New Movements

EdgeCity Lanna wasn’t just about tech. It was a nexus for emerging ideas like creating borderless, self-governing virtual-first nations driven by shared values that extend into the physical realm.

These discussions extended into panels, unconference style sessions that emerged by the day, and informal chats over Muay Thai classes, morning yoga and lantern-lit dinners. I even found myself speaking on impromptu pannels about biotech, memecoins, and community. The confluence of ideas reminded me of the idea behind design thinking and how we can come up with creative solutions to tough problems by bringing together people with vastly diverse backgrounds.

A Reconnection with the Broader Web3 Ecosystem

One of the most inspiring moments of the week was witnessing Vitalik Buterin and Dieter Shirley, two titans of Web3, share a stage for the first time. I was lucky enough to sit first row and asked both speakers what technological achievement were they most proud of. Vitalik spoke about his pride in Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake, a monumental shift for the industry. Dieter, co-founder of Flow and inventor of the term NFT, reflected on how far we’ve come from Cryptokitties, the power of creating tools by app builders for app builders that meet them where they are at like Cadence and the vast potential ahead. It was the first time ever that these two legends sat side by side and had a public conversation, and hope it was the first of many to come.

In addition to this epic fireside, Dete did talks with Arbitrum and OceanDAO. Jeff Doyle the head of Wallets for Flow did a fireside with Dan Finlay the Founder of Metamask where they discussed the future of wallets in Web3 and I found myself speaking on 6 keynotes and panels spanning everything from decentralized social media to the future of memecoins and biotech.

What’s Next for Popup Cities?

As I packed up to leave Chiang Mai, I couldn’t help but imagine what could happen if popup cities like EdgeCity Lanna became the norm — temporary but powerful hubs for innovation, connection, and human flourishing. These cities demonstrate that when you create a space for creativity and collaboration, you unlock solutions that can really change the world.

So I leave you with the same question I started with: what can creating new purpose-driven spaces in your city do to promote human flourishing? EdgeCity Lanna was a glimpse into a future of how technology can enhance the way we interact with one another, but technology at the end of the day is just a tool. The will to make a difference and the values we want to promote are discussed and instilled off-chain.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more about web3, startups, community and tech.

Web3 development is an exciting new frontier, filled with untapped potential and unique challenges. However, the absence of standardized best practices and hiring standards has left many aspiring developers and teams grappling in the dark. This is where LeetCore steps in.

What is LeetCore?

LeetCore is a novel open-source educational platform, akin to LeetCode or HackerRank, but designed exclusively for Web3. It’s a gamified app that enables developers to enhance their Web3 development skills in core areas such as Solidity, Ink!/Rust, security, oracles, the Graph, testing environments, and more.

The process is simple: developers choose a problem, read through its description and an example of input and output, work on the problem stub, and then submit it. Submissions are run against a suite of tests, and AI personalized feedback is provided, offering users a unique, hands-on learning experience.

Bridging the Gap in Web3 Hiring

Beyond being an educational platform, LeetCore also serves as an invaluable resource for core teams seeking their next hire. With many developers choosing to remain anonymous, traditional hiring metrics like GitHub repo commits or LinkedIn profiles are often non-existent. Consequently, pre-vetting talent has become a critical challenge in Web3 hiring that takes on hours of interviewing just to find out a prospective doesn’t even have basic Web3 development skills.

LeetCore addresses this issue head-on. Teams can create a curated problem set, set a timer, and share the link with potential candidates. This setup allows teams to assess a candidate’s familiarity with common exploits such as reentrancy guard exploits, gas optimization patterns, and more.

In a world where every protocol has its unique hiring practices, ranging from FAANG-style interviews to custom smart contract completion tasks, LeetCore seeks to establish a new norm. We aspire to create a familiar mental schema for developers, akin to the established interview preparation process in Web2, thus streamlining the transition for the next million developers into Web3.

An Affordable and Inclusive Model

While we aim to revolutionize hiring in the Web3 space, we are committed to keeping LeetCore an affordable and accessible tool. The gamified practice problems will remain a free educational public good, while we design an economical business model around the hiring aspect.

Our Mission

At LeetCore, our mission is straightforward: “Helping Web3 devs learn & get hired.” We believe that by providing the right tools and resources, we can help improve security, reduce the number of failed projects due to common technical exploits, and, ultimately, advance the entire Web3 ecosystem.

Join Us Today!

We invite all aspiring and existing Web3 developers, as well as teams looking for their next hire, to join us at leetcore.co and be part of this exciting journey. Together, we can shape the future of Web3 development and hiring. Let’s get started!

These days every other person seems to moonlight as a ‘crypto investor’. Discords servers are flooded with excited ‘degens’, coders and investors excited at the possibility of being included on an airdrop white-list. If you came across this article, you might be wondering: What exactly is an airdrop? What is a Merkle Distributor? Why do DeFi protocols use Merkle Distributors? How exactly does it work?

This article will all these questions and guide you through developing your very own airdrop! (Just be sure to add me to it!).

What is an Airdrop

Many DeFi dapps (decentralized applications), DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and protocols have their own currencies called ‘tokens’. Some tokens have utility such as governance tokens which allow you to vote on directions a DAO can take, others are purely speculative get rich schemes. Airdrops are a marketing tactic that Web3 dapps employ to garner a large user base in a short amount of time, a form of ‘pumpinomics’. Small amounts of the total supply of these tokens are distributed for free or in return for on-chain/off-chain actions such as being active in a discord server, engaging with the dapp or liking a facebook post.

How does one create an Airdrop

In an Airdrop model, only specific addresses can receive a token. The question becomes, how do we make sure that the people we want to receive the tokens are the only ones able to receive them?

Think about it, you can send the tokens directly to all of the addresses that are eligible. This is expensive with massive gas costs (especially on Ethereum).

You can store a mapping of all the allowed addresses within your contract. However this would be expensive for the deployer.

What if there was another approach. One that reduces your cost for deployment while allowing the user to withdraw their airdrop tokens. Encryption made blockchain possible, could encryption potentially solve this challenge as well?

drum rolllllll………

Yes. And the answer is Merkle Distributors, a tool popularized by Uniswap, one of the largest and oldest decentralized exchanges.

How Merkle Distributors Work

Merkle Distributors rely on a Merkle Proof that is used to verify that a specific wallet address is eligible and the amount that it is eligible for.

Pre-extracted wallet addresses are hashed using the Merkle tree, and the final Merkle Root is derived.

In addition, the Merkle proof verifies that the root of the Merkle tree is obtained by using the hash value of the leaf element and other leaves.

In the case of Uniswap, and most DeFi Merkle Distributors, the Merkle tree takes in a list of addresses and eligible amounts (usually in a simple JSON format). The tree hashes each address with an “index” and “amount” (the amount the address is eligible to receive) that represents the leaves. In Uniswap, this process is called Balance Tree. Since it uses SHA256 for hashing, this functionality can be implemented in any language including RUST, Javascript and Python.

The resulting Merkle tree can be found here => https://mrkl.uniswap.org/

Using the generated Merkle Tree, Uniswap then utilizes the Merkle Proof library published by Openzeppelin to verify that every address is eligible for token distribution.

This Uniswap repo (https://github.com/Uniswap/merkle-distributor) contains the contract airdrop contract as well as super useful scripts to convert a json object of { walletAddress: tokenAmount } into objects that can interact with the Merkle tree.

The final result is the following:

In this example there are 3 eligible addresses in the form of key value pairs. When an address on a dapp attempts to claim an airdrop, all the frontend needs is the merkle root and the address. With this it can find the index, amount eligible to claim and an array of proofs that validate the claim. If the address is not present, or more than the amount specified is input, the user is unable to claim the airdrop.

You might be wondering, “why in the world is the amount ‘0x64’?”. That is called a hexadecimal string, a hexadecimal is simply a number in base 16. If you are unfamiliar with hex format and want to verify the amount each address is eligible for, you can use a useful online converter to double check. You should discover that 0x64 translates to 100. That address is eligible for 100 coins.

There we have it. We learned what an airdrop is, how it is done through cost-effective Merkle Distributors and where to find the code required to launch your own. You are now prepared to build your own economy :) Use your newfound powers wisely!

“Entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down.” — Reid Hoffman

‘Guys… we got an interview!!!’, I half-screamed in excitement nearly spilling over my fresh Tim Hortons coffee. Salman confusedly looked up from his laptop and Kelso raised an eyebrow, then quickly rushed to close the door in our downtown Vancouver WeWorks office, correctly anticipating my overly-loud excitement. ‘We got an interview with Techstars! It’s the top FinTech accelerator out there!’, I beamed.

After 7 virtual interviews (several taking place right at midnight) with individuals ranging from FinTech leaders in New York, to Barclays executives in London, to Techstars directors in Malaysia, we were invited for an in-person interview.

Up to this point, we had been hustling on a quick-oats diet for months. One lesson I’ve learned over the last year is that Startup life is like a rickety car approaching a steep cliff. An overwhelmingly obvious impending sense of doom arises, logic-driven doubts bubble to the surface. If you persist to the very edge of the cliff, somehow as you go over… a parachute appears in ways you could never have possibly predicted… and you… just… sort of keep going.

I truly believe that every startup has an intriguing story that could be turned into a hit Hollywood suspense film. That is, if the founders have the grit to strive through all the challenges and uncertainties that come rushing towards them the second they set foot towards this epic journey into the mist, guided by a vision of a destination that starts only in their mind.

To help us through the fog and create a culture that embraced opportunities free of the debilitating fear of failure, we made a mantra out of our earliest motto, ‘Burn the Ships’. This was a saying attributed to both the historical Tariq ibn Ziyad and the later Cortes, a saying encrusted with much wisdom, one that saves you from the dreaded ‘analysis paralysis’ many founders face.

We flew for 30 hours halfway across the world. The pitch lasted for 15 minutes, including a Q&A. If we got into the program, doors would open. If we didn’t, we would have been a cash-strapped, early-stage startup that just burned several grand on plane tickets for peanut packets and economy class meals. We burned ships in the hopes of exploring a new world.

Two weeks later, we got an offer, immensely proud to be one of only a few Canadian startups, the first from Western Canada, to be admitted. We were the youngest team in the cohort. Everything was about to change, and we were excited for it.

The Barclays Accelerator, Powered by Techstars is a unique program born of a collaboration between Barclays, one of the oldest and largest banks in the world and Techstars, one of the largest technology accelerators. Startups in the program get access to both networks presenting invaluable opportunities.

The program is split into 3 months.

Month 1: Mentor Madness

Purpose: Direction — Grow Your Network

We arrived at Rise, a co-working space created by Barclays that acts as your office for the duration of the accelerator. We were greeted with our logos and designated desks filled with Techstars & Barclays swag, including the most comfortable hoodie I’ve ever owned. Memories of the plethora of past Hackathons I used to attend in my undergrad flashed before me and my inner swag-pirate came out as I gleefully tried all the Merch out.

As a technical founder, the first thing I did was directly log into our cohort’s Slack, change my avatar to Yoda, and create a channel for CTOs to share memes. The most important skill any team needs is strong communication, and memes can be the strongest form of communication. The CTOs quickly became friends — as the saying Maya Angelo played a role in popularizing goes, “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.’’ Memes feel great.

For the first three weeks of the program we went through what was called ‘Mentor Madness’. At first we were uncertain if we misheard the rather bizarre name — we did not. Six hours were booked almost daily for meetings with mentors. These meetings were very similar to speed-dating. They consisted of 20-minute long sessions where we were asked all the common questions startups get asked and pitched our problem, solution, business model etc.

The mentors came from diverse backgrounds — founders of unicorn startups, marketing geniuses, cunning investors, product wizards and strategy gurus. The whole idea was that within a very short amount of time, we would integrate with the entire local ecosystem. If the mentors couldn’t directly help us, they could connect us with someone that could. This type of networking is meant to very quickly catalyze connections and opportunities. Techstars really does emphasize a ‘give-first’ kind of culture, this is particularly exemplified through the mentorship sessions.

We utilized one strategy that we learned from UBC’s Lean Launchpad incubator of ending conversations by asking if there was anyone that the mentor could introduce us to. This tactic proved to be a great success with countless warm intros being generated.

The program has half a dozen ‘associates’ with backgrounds in everything from law to marketing as well as three entrepreneurs in residence. They’re present in the office every day of the week for the full day and are devoted to helping the founders with their business needs. The associates organized weekly CTO/CEO breakfasts with daily workshops, most workshops being optional and covering every topic one can imagine.

The CTO breakfasts were one of the things I looked forward to the most. Going full nerd, talking about ethics pertaining to Artificial Intelligence, how to prevent Skynet from taking over the world, Microservices architecture and Kubernetes. The CEOs would finish their lunches a full half hour before us because we would get so absorbed into our conversations.

By the end of the month we were to choose 2–3 lead mentors that would meet regularly with us for the remainder of the program. They would be committed to helping us with product development, marketing and introductions to help quickly scale our company. We also got the chance to have office hours with leading startups who explained their journey and Techstars partners like Twillio, Sendgrid and AWS.

Month 2: Product

Purpose; Progress — Gain Traction

This whole stage was about moving your business forward as much as possible, really delving deep with your chosen mentors and making traction. We had a lot more breathing room once the non-stop mentorship meetings were over. We made huge strides in signing our first beta users. We also further refined our product, hit strong marketing goals, added new functionality and created a very streamlined demo process for investors.

Half-way through the month the startups in our cohort were invited to the FinTech capital of the world, on a trip termed the ‘London Roadshow’. It comprised an intense several days of meetings and events while also managing to fit in some time for the more touristy stuff. From pitching at Barclays headquarters, where we got to engage with Barclays executives, to visiting Rise, the city’s leading FinTech workspace, it was a truly unforgettable experience. It even managed to convince a few of the startups to actually relocate to London post-program. The scrumptious marmite-covered crumpets may have also played a persuading factor.

Month 3: Fundraising

Purpose: Accelerate Your Business

The main theme in the final month was preparing the team for the ‘Demo Day’ end of program pitch and the sea of investor meetings that follows. They brought in expert public speaking coaches with experience training TEDx speakers, celebrities and politicians to refine our communication on stage, messaging and presentation. We would stay up with some of the other teams late into the night practicing. There’s a certain solidarity found in memorizing pitches late into the night. Bonds that can only be forged in the near-drunken state of sleep deprivation where every little antic somehow seems like the most hilarious thing ever.

Finally, it was the big day. 400 CEOs, investors, bank representatives, journalists and FinTechs converged, fancy hors d’oeuvres were scattered on silver platters being buzzed around by sharply dressed servers. Just like the short pitch that started the journey, the accelerator was over with a similar adrenaline-packed pitch that lasted minutes, a pitch that ended with a sea of applause in a gladiator-like spectacle.

Aftermath

Founders don’t simply get abandoned post-program, they still have meetings and access to the invaluable and enormous networks that they’re plugged into. The main things we got out of the program was mentorship, branding, investment, access to powerful networks and friendships that would last a lifetime. It’s a program I would recommend to any founder looking to take their early-stage startup to the next level, especially millennial founders that could greatly benefit from the mentorship of experienced leaders. The accelerator was a period of great refinement, one that for certain propelled our business. It’s now up to us to drive this vehicle to our next destination.

Canadian Startup Fostrum Completes Barclays Accelerator, Powered by Techstars was originally published in Fostrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2017 was the busiest year of my life, is it possible to put so much on your plate that it would topple over on you? If so, I’m sure I came frighteningly close.

I was organizing Canada’s first ever multi-cultural parade, working as a developer in SAP’s Predictive Analytics team for their machine learning embedded Analytics Cloud product, leading one of Canada’s largest tech intern communities, organizing design-thinking workshops, kicking-off my tech magazine, attending as many Hackathons as I could, mentoring a decentralized discussion platform at a local university and taking part in a brand-new summer program that would forever change my life.

The inaugural Summer Institute on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies was being run by Dr. Victoria Lemuiex, a lively archival studies professor at the University of British Columbia, someone who truly embodied the continuous learning mindset.

The program was recommended to me by my friend who was president of the university’s Bitcoin club. The two of us had already spent many late nights over long car rides discussing Satoshi Nakamoto’s White Paper on Bitcoin, and my friend knew that although I wasn’t obsessed with cryptocurrencies, I was particularly interested in it’s underlying technology, Blockchain. It was the technology everyone was talking about — some argued it was just a decentralized database, others preached that it would change the entire world.

I had briefly read about Blockchain’s use of Merkle trees, which I remembered from cryptography-related projects I worked on in my first year when I was enamoured with everything cyber-security related and would read everything I could get my hands on about the world of white-hat hacking. At the time I only had a rough idea about the different use cases for Blockchain, specifically with regard to supply chains and privacy, but I had no idea how to actually utilize it or ‘create’ a blockchain.

Excited about the prospects of learning to be a Blockchain developer, I enrolled in the course along with my close friend, Salman, a serial entrepreneur and true tech genius. The classes would be on weekends, so I figured it wouldn’t interfere too much with the other stuff I was working on.

Over the course of the program, we learned about everything from the difference between private/public blockchains, how to code smart contracts with Ethereum and the mechanics of Hyperledger. We even learned how to create our own cryptocurrency. I had big dreams for my ‘Ali-Coin’ personal project, but needless to say, those aspirations crashed with the markets shortly thereafter.

As I progressed in the course, I found myself suddenly viewed as an ‘expert’ on blockchain — literally everyone wanted to know more about it, the hype was real. One Monday morning I was greeted by an email asking me to organize a presentation at SAP during their Cyber Security Month and gladly agreed. Soon enough, guys in the marketing team were messaging over Skype asking how they should best explain the technology to clients.

Following the Blockchain Institute, I was adamant about starting a social enterprise focusing on integrating technology with social good projects and non-profits. After proposing the idea to Salman and a few other friends, we formally founded Lightbyte. Before we knew it, we were connected with Kelso, the founder of Helping Hands, a local social enterprise that provided care products to the homeless in the Downtown EastSide, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in Canada. We realized that the homeless in Vancouver were often without any form of ID, their living conditions being unconducive to carrying something physical around with them everywhere.

At first we tried figuring out how we could use QR codes on packaging to determine if someone had already picked up a care-package in the last two weeks, however almost no one wanted to actually carry around the empty package for a long duration. We needed a way to verify an individual’s identity. We quickly realized that this wasn’t just a problem for Helping Hands — detox clinics required ID when administering to patients as well, hospitals spent enormous amounts on the same recurring homeless patients because of the inability to pull up medical records and having to re-run all sorts of tests. The problem was much more massive than the three of us originally realized, and we were set on creating a solution for it.

We began having weekly meetings in our offices late at night after everyone had gone home, brainstorming, ideating, conducting surveys. We came up with an idea prototype that would utilize facial-recognition technology or rfid trinkets which would connect to one’s health care-card, a digital form of which was stored on a blockchain. This would be connected to a database that we would connect to all these non-profits. As a clerk at a detox centre, you would instantly know if a patient had just gone to another centre in a different part of the city.

We saw the immense potential in the kind of anonymized data this project could create, a homeless shelter that had high volunteer turnover and poor knowledge-transfer processes could dynamically be sent an automated email telling them to expect a 30% increase in occupancy based on historical data with integrated weather APIs and recommend temporarily increasing beds to accommodate. Nonprofits didn’t need to have technical knowledge to benefit from technology. We could see overall trends in homeless activity throughout the city and make this data public for governmental, academic and NPOs to utilize in creating solutions. Data on preferences and habits that could help non-profits tweak their strategy and services. Data that would aid in identifying what exact week people tended to stop attending detox centres and implement strategies to retain attendance. Data that would shine light on what the homeless actually wanted or needed, not what well-meaning individuals believed the homeless needed.

After meeting with hospitals and other non-profits, we were disheartened when told it would be many years before anything like this could be implemented and integrated with the Canadian medical industry. Getting nonprofits to start using cameras was also met with reluctance. Our surveys proved that only 20% of the homeless were okay with having a picture of themselves taken for identity verification, a grass-roots effort to build trust was needed. Other team-members started getting busy with school and their careers, the project was put on hold.

Over the experience, Salman, Kelso and I learned a great deal about each-other, we worked very effectively together, we were enamoured by technology, discussed philosophy and ethics late into the night, had a knack for entrepreneurship and were all into finance, we loved ideating and innovation but more importantly, we were all also doers.

The innovator flame never dies. It was reignited when we met a few months later at a local Blenz coffee shop for aromatic hot mocha and started discussing the power of data, the problems with financing digital companies and the struggles startups go through. We discussed the promise of non-equity diluting revenue-based financing as an alternative, penned out sketches, and quickly realized how analytics and distributed ledger technology could come together to disrupt the way digital businesses are financed.

Soon after, I stopped my classes and decided to work full time on creating Fostrum, a cutting-edge financing engine that would be a catalyst in financing the digital economy.

The following several months consisted of incessantly being interrogated by well-meaning friends and family about when I would return to school and a diet that consisted almost exclusively of quick Oats. I was surprised to find myself quickly developing quite a taste with every bowl.

We joined Entreprenuership@ubc, an incubator program at the University of British Columbia, during the program we met with over 60 startup CEOs, Banks and Institutional Investors through which we were able to come to a product market fit. The validation acted as further fuel for us — banks couldn’t finance digital businesses that lacked physical assets, venture capitalists were only looking for the 1% of the companies they considered ‘unicorns’. Our solution would be able to make the 99% investable, would be friendly to founders and enticing to investors, most importantly, it would ignite unprecedented innovation in society. The positive social ramifications of Fostrum was evident, within weeks we were shortlisted for the WSA Young Innovators Award and invited to present at the World’s Challenge Challenge competition.

Following the incubator, we saw how we could grow exponentially if we’d join an accelerator program and applied to the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, one of the top FinTech programs in the world and notoriously more difficult to get into than Harvard. After 6 rounds of interviews, we were admitted into their 2019 Cohort. We decided to celebrate, with Oates.

As my journey continues, stay tuned for Part 2 of journeys yet to come.

The Fostrum team has just completed our first week at the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars along with 9 other startups from around the globe, hand-picked by Barclays and Techstars. It’s a program that’s harder to get into than Harvard and the reasons are obvious. In a single week we’ve propelled our business by strides and made countless invaluable connections.

After a brief introduction to the overall program we jumped straight to work. We began with a thorough yet precise pitching workshop by Idit Neudraper from the “The Redhead Technique”. She helped prepare us for the following day where Kelso, our CEO, presented Fostrum at the Barclays opening event in front of hundreds of executives, investors, and stakeholders.

Over the next few days we sat down with the Techstars associates who we will be working with daily in order to strategize marketing, business development, and product opportunities. We also met with a Techstars Managing Director, Hilla Brenner, to discuss what smart goals we have for the next several months and even had a fireside chat with David Brown & David Cohen, the co-founders of Techstars.

To end the week, we met with executives at Barclays where we discussed how Fostrum will completely disrupt the way digital businesses are financed.

Looking forward to the next few months of disruption backed by titans in the tech and banking worlds.

The Fostrum Team

Fostrum Enters Barclays Accelerator Powered by Techstars was originally published in Fostrum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What core values are most important to you and how do these values influence how you operate in your daily life?

At the top of my list is loyalty. Not in the sense of blind faith in people, or always following the hierarchy, but the kind of loyalty where you can really grant trust to people and know that they will accept that, respect that and take care of that for you.

Do you feel that it is important to go against the tide and be different?

Yes, I am a huge believer in that! I was quite rebellious in high school, going “Against the tide” is definitely in my DNA! I think what is important is that you shouldn’t just fight against the status quo for the sake of going against the tide. I think that the thought process should look more like this: “I think this can work better, this idea excites me, others might like it too. How can I make this happen given the reality of the situation we live in?”. I don’t think it is about simply going against the tide, it is more about not being afraid to have a new idea and finding a way to make it happen. It is a bit different from my old rebel days where it was all about fighting authority.

How do you think this attitude compares to other industries? Do you think tech is different in that sense, being a field that prides itself on change and innovation.

I’ve been in tech for so long that it is hard for me to say what other industries are like. My gut feeling is that it is similar in most industries. There are a lot of things in every business that work really well and don’t need to change. You don’t need to be always flipping things upside down, but if you never flip things upside down, then you will never be able to leapfrog ahead. In my opinion, we need both! There are things that traditionally worked and made sense, those we should keep. But if you are going to do something really new and crazy, you can’t just go with the tide because it doesn’t go fast enough. It is when you come off that path for a little while that you can actually leapfrog forward.

In your career what has been your biggest risk and why did you take it?

This is very difficult to answer, because I take a lot of risks. Most of them are risky because they are unknown, not because they are a dangerous activity. For example, agreeing to doing something that you know nothing about, or taking on a team that you know little about, or moving to a new country that you have never been to… The unknown factor is the risky part. For example, I am the head of a global engineering team and I have a degree in English. What do I know about developing products? But I’ve worked in software development for over 20 years. It might seem risky, but I jumped in with both feet. Another example is when we took everyone in the Labs across Canada to the Star Wars movie two years ago. You could say that was risky because someone could come and ask us, was that a good way to spend company money? I thought, yes! But they could have said you shouldn’t do that. I think the biggest risks are taking on unknowns.

I am curious about your process, how do you determine whether you should take on those unknowns vs keep them locked in your brain and unvoiced?

When it comes to taking on unknowns, my simple test for myself is: do I think I can add value? If I think I can, then I go for it. I don’t have to know everything or be an expert, but if I have skills to bring to the table, then I jump right in. For what to spend my engagement budget on, I have another test: If I was stuck in the elevator with our CEO, and he asked about Star Wars, would I be able to defend it? Would I be able to say ‘yes, yes it was worth it!’. Whether it is the CEO of the company or your manager or whoever you’re addressing, who is potentially going to be the one to throw you out the building. Can you pass that test? Can you stand behind what you did? There must be a business rationale or a people rationale to why you do what you do…

So it is never, “my gut feeling told me to do it”?

There has to be a reason behind it. That’s the difference between the old rebel me and the current me. The rebel me would just go on instinct. The current me does that too, but finds a business rationale to back my rebel side up.

There is a growing number of young people and university students who are interested in the tech industry, what kind of advice would you have for the people who are coming into our industry?

A few things. First, I think it is super important that everyone understands the world we live in. These phones and computers are not magic and they actually have circuitry behind them, electronics, and software that make them work. And, that there is a person, or robot, assembling those things and programming them. I think people need to have a general idea about how things work although not everybody needs to know how to code it or understand exactly how it works. Whatever it is that you are studying, you need to think about how technology will impact your field. Whatever business you are in will be impacted by technology. So, in my opinion, not everybody needs to take a Computer Science class, but everybody needs to pull technology into whatever they are working on.

The second one is that there are a lot of important skills not written on the typical job description for a specific role. There are things that you have to do that aren’t just sitting down and coding, even if you are a Developer! Technology is not built by one guy sitting in a dark room alone wearing headphones, that’s a massive urban myth. In reality, it is a very creative and collaborative process where you really need to be able to work with other people in some fashion. It doesn’t mean that you have to be extroverted, but you have to be able to work in teams. People also need to be very adaptable to work in high tech because everything’s changing so fast. I am worried about how students are schooled these days. You go to university and it takes 4 years. What you learn at the beginning of those 4 years might be irrelevant by the time you reach the end of those 4 years. You need to be able to adapt your learning as the world continuously changes in front of you. So building up resilience and the ability to change is vital. I don’t know how they can teach this in university but that’s what we need to learn. I have been in the industry for 22 years, only because I have been able to roll with it. I have had many different roles and responsibilities, but I was ready to take on whatever was coming next. And you have to be able to take on whatever is coming next.

So it is important for students to build themselves, rather than just focusing on skills?

Yes, everyone with a Computer Science degree is coming with the similar skills, programming expertise etc. So, how are you going to be differentiated from the guy sitting next to you? The way you are going to succeed more is by doing these things outside the core skills you need for your job. It doesn’t mean you have to be a great speaker, it doesn’t mean you need to be the team leader, it doesn’t mean any of those things… But you need to understand that that’s how it works inside of a software company. Those skills are going to be critical.

We often talk about skills off the future, sure there are technical skills, you need to understand cloud computing, you have to know more about what it means to deploy a product for the cloud, difference between on-premise and cloud etc. But when we talk about the skills of the future, we are talking about critical thinking, collaboration, cultural awareness… Those are the skills of the future. Because the technology is going to keep changing. The guys I went to school with were learning Pascal (programming language) at the time, is that still being used now?

A lot of the times, we are not learning these skills in school or university, how do we go out of our way to learn those skills?

You have to learn how to learn, and how to re-learn. And be ok that what you learnt yesterday may be completely obsolete today. And coming from a dinosaur like me, I can tell how things can quickly become obsolete. However, I am not going to become obsolete, no way! That’s not my plan. This advice is for all of us, not just for young people. We all have to realize that stuff changes.

How do you think individual’s learning experience would be different if they start with a small company vs a giant company like SAP?

I can tell you from my personal experience, we were first a startup and then we became this big thing. Co-ops and interns who came in when we were smaller, they did very broad things and worked on more than one thing. Whereas now, the company is a lot more specialized. This is true for any employee in a big company vs a small company. In the small company, every employee wears a bunch of different hats. I remember, we used to put the CDs in the boxes, shrink wrap them ourselves and then drive to the airport to deliver them to be shipped out to the fulfillment house. Even though I was running translation and it had nothing to do with my title, I remember being late here and running the CDs to the airport. Yeah, we had CDs we had to physically ship! And boxes and paper manuals! I think that’s just the nature of a startup, you work on more things. It has less structure. A big company will have a lot of structure and infrastructure. So I would imagine the experience will be different from that perspective, more hats, different opportunities. Here, you will be really integrated in a team that has specific responsibilities, unless you are in my team where we still are in the middle of everything and doing 500 different things in a given day.

Young women in tech alot of the times feel intimidated, they feel that they are not being taken seriously. As a female leader in tech, what is your take on that?

Personally, I have seen these things go on. At times they were directed at me but I am one of those people who just refuses to accept nonsense. If you are not going to look at me when I am talking, and look at some guy instead, well, sooner or later you are going to regret that because I am the one making the decision. It doesn’t matter if you are a female or not, if you feel that you are not being respected, it is not acceptable. Assume it might happen, because it can happen to anyone, and know that it is not okay. When you come across it, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to handle it?

I don’t accept anything like this in the moment, I don’t say “hey look at me” in that scenario I described before. I just keep talking until they hopefully become convinced. I wouldn’t embarrass the person, sometimes they don’t know or even realize it. A lot of the times this is unconscious bias, plenty of people don’t realize that they are being rude or disrespectful to someone. Usually it is about being yourself, being authentic and continuing the discussion. If someone is really rude, then I would say something for sure. Don’t be afraid, it is not acceptable and it shouldn’t be that way.

It seems that culture also plays a big role here, especially in a multinational company like SAP.

Culture is king. There’s that saying: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s how people feel about the place that they work that can make or break a company’s success. In a big multinational company, it’s definitely more challenging as each country, each location, each department and down to even each team, there are wildly differing sub-cultures.

The most important thing about culture is that it needs direction. At any company, large or small, a clear vision and purpose give culture a shared destination. Leaders must make this vision clear and accessible for all employees, establish corporate values or behaviours that will serve this shared vision and then it’s up to everyone to live the promise. It will look very different country to country, location to location, department to department and team to team — and that’s what’s so amazing about culture. It is a journey and ever evolving. As long as you are journeying to the same destination, with a mutual understanding and respect, culture is your key to success.

‘Run Simple’, it’s one of SAP’s most talked about mottos. What does that mean to you exactly?

It is on the wall, right there behind you. We call it the ‘operating principle’ at SAP. If you always try to imagine that everything should be easy to do, and that you should be easy to interact with and what process you put into place, what products you should produce, interactions you have with people should not be cumbersome and complex. It is a mindset more than anything. I try to look at it that way. I want to be easy to work with. The focus is not only for us as a company, it is for the customers. They should have a single way to interact with us. They should be able to come into a single site and understand what SAP does. We need to be simple to work with.

By Ali Serag El-din and Salman Alam with guest interviewer Semih Sezer

Part-time Rebel, Full-time Leader was originally published in Earl Grey Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Could you quickly introduce yourself, and tell us a couple of core values that you would absolutely never compromise on?

Sure, my name is Jordan Jensen and I work at Concur. I’m a senior director focusing on employee experience. I’ve been here for about 12 years, spending the majority of my time in Human Resources. I then moved into my current role which is somewhat complementary to HR. It’s been really cool to make that transition and know that we’re all in it together.

Values for me are really important, and they have definitely been tested in the past in some of the other jobs that I’ve had. I’d tell you that they’ve never been compromised here. If anything it’s about transitioning into motherhood, while also caring about my career and ensuring that I don’t put too little into that transition of parenthood and being a wife, as well as not compromising those things for work, which is sometimes a challenge.

Authenticity is huge, showing up as yourself is the most important thing you can do to ensure your life goes in a direction that you want. I think the quickest way for you to veer off the path, and towards a way you do not want to go, is when you are not true to who you are. When you forget to surround yourself with people that allow you to be that person. It’s really really important to not have versions of yourself, because then you get into a place where you forget who you are very quickly. It’s a fast way to forget your core because you’re unsure which one to be, it’s much easier to just be you. There are of course different elements and layers of who you are, but you have to always be true to what those are, instead of create new versions. That’s a big one. If I’m in a place and around people that don’t stay true to who they are, I feel really challenged. I don’t know how to show up to them. So I’ve noticed in situations, if I’m having a hard time reading somebody because they don’t know who they are or don’t know their values, I don’t know how to show up to them and it just feels inauthentic. So, I would say ‘authenticity’ in general is important.

The second thing is mix, I think some people, including myself in the past, prioritize looking for balance, but nothing in your life is balanced, you’ll never create a 50/50, or an 80/20, I think what’s important is that you’re always figuring out what is the right mix for you and it’s very dependent on what your priorities are. It’s important to keep in mind also that your priorities can shift, so depending on what’s going on in your life, your job may need more ‘you’ in the day or there may be things happening in your family and they need more of ‘you’. Perhaps you need more of ‘you’ because you’re unable to show up to those two things if you aren’t showing up to yourself. That mix is going to shift around all the time depending on where you are in your life. Whatever it is that you believe to be most important in that time, own that, and you’re going to be safe. The only person that should create boundaries for you is you. That said, if you don’t create those boundaries for yourself, someone else will.

What are the most important factors that contribute to positive employee experience, what tend to be the most overshadowed in the industry?

This statement keeps coming up, and I know it’s very cliche but I’ll try talking about it in a way that isn’t so cliche. People don’t leave jobs, they leave bosses. I’m a big believer that an organization has the ability to create several loyalty lines to an employee. So if you think about a given employee, there’s one line that could be very strong to their manager depending on their relationship. That manager leaves, that line isn’t enough to keep the employee. An organization is responsible for allowing an employee to create several loyalty lines. After the manager line, there is a peer network that can be strong. There’s also wellness — when an employee feels that they can take care of their well-being at that company. That can be a loyalty line. Senior leaderships’ connection to employees is a loyalty line. Let’s say that there’s a situation where an employee gets a recruiting call from a friend or former boss that went to another job at a new company. There are factors that will keep an employee, and there are factors that will push an employee away. I believe that the more loyalty lines we can connect to an individual employee, the better off we are at allowing them to be happier at work, and the greater chance they will stay at the company.

I think what’s overshadowed the most and what I’m really learning about is recognition. Recognition is really hard because people feel recognized in different ways. Some people like to be recognized in a front and center way, for example, pulled up on a stage and applauded. There are others who would absolutely hate that, who would find that anything but rewarding, perhaps they’d even find it embarrassing. Some people would prefer an email. Others a quiet gift-card. Some would just like a simple high-five. It may even be different depending on where that person is, in the world or even emotionally, at the time. Recognition is something complex and organizations, including us, need to get our arms around this so we can figure out what keeps people in place so that they feel ‘this place is worthy of my time’. Employee experience is about moments of truth for an employee in a job. A moment of truth could occur during their on-boarding, where they think ‘I either made the right decision or I didn’t’, ‘this on-boarding is great’ or ‘I feel the company isn’t even ready for me’. These moments of truth happen all the way through transitions in one’s life that happen while at work. How are they encouraged to honor the other parts of who they are outside of that place? This could be another component of their experience. If the employee is undergoing a transition and their manager doesn’t necessarily acknowledge, understand or respect that, that’s not a great experience for them, especially if they give so much of themselves to their job.

I think when we talk about employee experience it’s so many things. It’s about being strong partners with the other people in the business that are a part of what you would consider your “people strategy”. It’s multifaceted and not owned by any single person or team, but there are moments in an employee’s time at work that impacts how they perceive that place. Those moments are owned by all of us, at any given time. My boss, Jenn McColly recently put it this way: We can think of employee experience like Facebook, where there’s a heart, thumbs up, a happy face or a sad face, even an angry face. What would you give your experience in that moment? In the moment an employee is having lunch with peers, maybe it’s a heart… But there may be another moment that day, where it’s a frowning face. As influencers of employee experience, we hope that cumulatively you have more ‘hearts’ than you have ‘frowning faces’.

How is humility important for people just starting out in their careers within tech? Do you feel that this particular industry needs humility more than others?

You kind of have this fork in the road starting off in your career. You feel vulnerable, and you maybe have some insecurities. And you have a decision to make. You can either acknowledge those feelings for what they are and work towards feeling more confident by owning those feelings, or you can overcompensate for those things by showing arrogance or pretending to know when you don’t. Then you start digging yourself into this hole. It’s about realizing when you’re feeling those things and knowing that they are there for a reason, instead of ignoring them and overcompensating by doing something else that is not you, that’s inauthentic. It’s saying to yourself ‘I’m feeling these worries for a reason, so how can I feel more confident?’. The first step is to acknowledge that you are feeling those things, say that’s okay, and find your confidence. It’s there somewhere, and it’ll build from there. It’s much harder to do this when you start building from, let’s just call it the ‘overcompensating path’, when you truly don’t know what you are doing, but wanting everyone to believe that you do. The out come of that is in-authenticity and fear. Fear that that someone is going to catch on to you. That’s scary.

I think humility belongs everywhere, it is blind to industry, ego and intelligence. You can be confident and have humility. Not having the right answer, or acknowledging that you are wrong doesn’t mean that you lack confidence, it means that you have confidence. Being able to make decisions and remove your ego is a sign of humility, and it’s going to allow other people lean to into that and trust in you. You’ll be able to move further and further into your career when you start off with that humility, as opposed to ego. You’re not going to have to go as many steps backwards. You might have to take one or two steps backwards by admitting you are wrong or made a mistake, but the size of those steps are small in comparison to the steps you have to take when you don’t. It’s super easy to go down the path of ‘I know, I know, I know, I know’ when you don’t — faking it until you make it. But it’s so hard to come out of that when there is already an established perception about you, that ‘you know’. That’s now someone’s belief about you, how do you change it? From experience, just don’t do it in the first place. Just start off with the real you.

There’s a lot of talk about personal branding. I want to know what the relationship is between humility and building your own personal brand, where do they conflict? Where do they go well together? Is there a contradiction at times?

I don’t believe there is a contradiction with humility and brand, but I do think there can be conflict with authenticity and brand. Personal brand to me is how you want people to perceive you, or what you want to be known for. Those are the types of things that come to mind to me when we talk about personal brand. I would describe myself as someone who is vulnerable, transparent, doesn’t have secrets, has humility, and can be self-deprecating at times. I have no problems with saying I’m wrong, I actually have relief in those moments realizing it. Apologizing to me is not hard. Let’s imagine it’s your 100th birthday and you’re still alive, people are coming to your birthday, you might be in a walker or wheelchair sitting on the side in the audience. What do you want people to say about you when they get on stage? Do you want to be known as that jerk that got everything he wanted at work, or do you want people to say ‘he was a mentor to me?’ or ‘he taught me valuable lessons, and he created a safe-space for me to be who I was.’. It’s like that Maya Angelo quote, “… people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I think about brand in that way. How do you make people feel when they interact with you? That is your brand. What do you want to be known for? It’s not about what do you want to have power over or control in. It’s not about what do you want to win, or what award you want. It’s about what do you want to be known for that makes you different, makes you unique or special. What do you want your family to think about when they hear your name? Your family could also be the people that you work with. I truly feel that way about the people I work with. I’ve been here a long time, and in that time they’ve seen me grow. If you can be around people that let you be yourself, they become chosen family to you. You may not be a person that likes or appreciates work relationships in that way, or feels safe doing, but you can at least start with being comfortable in being who you are by being around people that allow you to do that. Brand comes along with that. Brand shouldn’t be inauthentic, it shouldn’t be something that you have to control. If you create a brand that isn’t you, you’re going down this disingenuous place with people that are seeing you as someone you are not. Then, sadly, you’re trying to live up to this expectation to be somebody that you think they want you to be. But really, they just want you to be you so they can be them.

Could you share a story about a time where practicing humility gave a positive outcome you didn’t expect?

I had an internship in college, and when I showed up, I was eager and excited. There was an on-boarding event and all of that cool stuff, and I was hearing all about everything everyone else was doing and couldn’t wait to meet my manager and find out what I would be doing. I showed up, found my desk, met a few people, met my boss. She was excited to meet me, but she honestly told me ‘I don’t really have anything for you to do’, that she had been slammed and wasn’t prepared. I remember thinking at that moment to myself ‘it’s fine… it’s gonna be fine… she’s gonna figure something out… maybe I can do something for her today and then we’ll know what to do next’. I went to my desk, organized a few things, and looked through marketing materials. I did that for about 10 days, just showing up. I am sure I used to block my calendar to indicate ‘arrival: 8:00 O’clock, Noon: Lunch, 5:00pm Leave’ and there was pretty much nothing in between other than maybe making copies for some of the EA’s, looking through papers and faking busy, playing office. About 10 days in I thought ‘I cannot go back to school saying this is my internship’.

Obviously nothing was magically coming together, there was no solid internship project for me, so I decided to just kind of create one. I didn’t know much, really anything about the industry, but I knew that I could talk to people. I knew that it might be scary for me to initiate it, but once I started talking, that was a skill-set I knew I had. So I decided to just jump right in so I set up meetings with everyone I possibly could, I even setup a meeting with the CEO. At this point I was a bit confident as I set up so many meetings and was receiving so many accepts that I thought, I’m just going to send one to the CEO, I’ve got nothing to lose! His EA accepted for him. I’m sure I thought he had personally accepted my meeting at the time., I just created some questions and wanted to understand more about why people came to work, wanted to know more about their experience, what advice they would have for me, what would they tell me if I was their daughter, if they were to do things again and start where I was, asked them about their first mentor.

I remember going into those conversations thinking ‘I know nothing about this place and these guys know everything’. I felt so vulnerable, so vulnerable. I firmly believe that the best way to practice humility is to own your vulnerability. I’m so glad I did because I went into those talks thinking they knew everything, and came out with this realization that ‘Whoa, I’m so not the only one feeling vulnerable here, and not the only one finding courage everyday when I get to this place’. I was going down their memory lane with them, we were on the trip together. As vulnerable as I was walking into those meetings, as shaky as my hands and knees were walking in, most ended with a hug and a promise to keep in touch. I can think of one particular person that I’ve kept in touch with even 15 years later. The humility component of that was I didn’t know anything about where I was. I could have sat there and done nothing, but I kind of just took ownership of the situation, entering conversations not knowing very much, asking a lot of questions, together learning. I think it’s where I truly learned it’s okay to be vulnerable, it’s the most courageous way to really experience humility, because it’s scary, but I think that fear is there for a reason and I think it makes us human.

Last question, ‘fake it till you make it’, what are your views on that popular phase? There’s plenty of pressure on people all over, but particularly in tech to embrace that mindset in their career.

It’s super common advice and it works sometimes, in short stints. I don’t think it works in lifelong decisions or things that impact you forever. Definitely not great advice when you are going into your career. It perpetuates this epidemic of people pretending to be something they aren’t. Fake it till you make it is so dangerous, because if you go into a situation faking it till you make it, you aren’t going to make it because you are faking it. At the end of the day if you are faking it because you are afraid of failure, from experience, you will fail anyway! And it feels a hell of a lot worse. I got fired once in the past while trying to be someone I wasn’t. And looking back, I think they fired a version of me that I didn’t even like. That sucks! Faking it till you make it takes you down a really bad road. Like I talked about earlier, if you don’t know something and you continue moving on forward like you do know, you’re going down such a steep, steep hill that is so hard to climb back up. If I am being totally honest, I wouldn’t have known how to come out of that experience had I not been fired. Because I was so deep into it, into being this inaccurate version of me, I needed someone else to make that decision for me. Looking back, it was such a gift to be in that spot, but I do think that there are some serious consequences to taking that advice.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in tech, but there’s also a lot of pressure in general with social media. It’s changed so much about how we think things “should be” or “are”, creating these personas where people feel the need to define what they know about someone based on such a small sliver of what they post. It’s typically happy stuff, you want your stream to be a happy place, you want that picture to be framed, but what’s on the outside of that back-frame? I think there’s this unrealistic expectation that we put on ourselves and I do think it’s in work, in tech, outside of work, in the world. You think about the health of the economy right now and how all those things are showing up in social media, and it starts to drag some of those behaviors. When people feel vulnerable, sometimes the worst comes out. I think if we are not afraid of that feeling of vulnerability, then the best will come out.

By Ali Serag El-Din and Salman Alam

Being You: A conversation about Brand, Ego and Tech — #3 was originally published in Earl Grey Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ali: Could you briefly explain what Blockchain@UBC is and its purpose?

Blockchain@UBC, is a platform that has been set up by both myself and Dr. Victoria Lemieux. It was conceived to research use cases for Blockchain technology in the field of records management. It caters mainly to information professionals. We look at use-cases for different sections in both industry and also academia as well as civil liberties.

Salman: How did you get involved in the Blockchain sphere?

I stumbled into it backwards, I came into Bitcoin with no prior experience with the technological environment, in fact, my first red pill, if you like, was silver. Looking into the precious metals market, I got a lot of this silver… I was convinced that I was about to make a fortune but then the price soon went south. A year later, I heard about this thing called Bitcoin. I thought, well, let’s see what I can find out about it. I knew the banking system was printing money and the history of where that goes, so I thought this Bitcoin is worth getting into, especially as it has a finite supply. I thought, ‘ahh maybe Bitcoin can be the asset that rises in value’. I was more interested in Bitcoin the currency than the Blockchain technology behind it. My involvement in the Blockchain sphere became more prominent with my participation in Dr. Victoria Lemieux’s research of Blockchain technology for record keeping.

Salman: Your interest in the legacy banking models and search for a better or alternative system, somehow led you to come across Bitcoin?

My initial liking for Bitcoin was on how it holds against inflation, then I saw it as a means of holding wealth outside of the banking system. Now, I see it as a hedge against the collapse in the value of financial assets which include fiat currencies. I started to learn about what the banking system is actually doing to save itself through various practices. But they all amount to a great transfer of wealth from society to the banking system. Bitcoin, whether we are talking about the currency or the protocol, offers a much more reliable and decentralized system for society. So far, the banks have no means of manipulating it in the way that they have done with precious metals. We haven’t really seen the situation before in history where society has a viable, non-institutional alternative to banking, that anyone can enter and appears to be agnostic to anything the banking elite does to undermine it.

Ali: Do you remember where exactly it was that you first heard about Blockchain?

I heard about it from the Keiser Report. Max Keiser was pushing Bitcoin in the spring of 2013. I started watching these YouTube videos, I noticed some channels where people were talking about it. It seemed almost like this underground movement of libertarians, technologists, entrepreneurs and their ideas about politics and economics echoed my own.

Salman: What excites you most about Bitcoin?

I think the fact that it’s got institutional support. At the time when I bought in, in early 2013, it was the anarchists and cyber-punk people that were championing it. I see Bitcoin as potentially continuing to influence the Blockchain’s evolution, playing a role in high-value mechanisms like the supply chain and pension systems. Bitcoin may even break the banking system’s manipulation of gold and silver… we may even see a reconstituted US Dollar backed by the Bitcoin protocol!

Salman: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions that people have about Blockchain?

I’m glad you asked me about that because i’ve been to a fintech conference on Wednesday and I can’t believe all the nonsense that people still come out with about bitcoin. There was a keynote speaker at the conference whose knowledge had not been updated since February 2014. He was saying that people who hold Bitcoin are wishing to avoid paying taxes, are most likely to be criminals, involved in illicit drug trafficking and money-laundering. He also said Bitcoin is anonymous, it is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous, which means that although the public can view all the individual transactions, the parties behind each of them are expressed as a communication between two machines, or from one Bitcoin address to another Bitcoin address. The Fintech community still don’t get it. They like the idea of the cheapness and the speed of transactions which the Blockchain leverages, but I think they’re going into it for the wrong reasons. Every time I read about banks talking about the lower costs of running the Blockchain, they are almost always on the cusp of saying that the automation will help them to justify making staff layoffs.

Salman: It seems like they have true capitalistic motivations in diving into Blockchain as opposed to social good?

I would say that Bitcoin upholds the old principles of productive capitalism more than the speculative capitalism of the banking system. The banking system has got used to getting free money from the government (quantitative easing) at zero percent interest. It has made a small number of people rich, but this is not capitalism. The underlying fiat currency is created through the monetization of government bonds… it is effectively created as debt. This type of fiat currency steals value from the people who use it because its quantity of supply is far in excess of that which society requires.

Salman: What are some of the top applications you see in Blockchain?

Top one is remittances, real-time transactions for any type of digital value and peer-to-peer co-operation. Much of society’s ideas about itself have been shaken by government’s incessant need to make people dependent on its centralized infrastructures that have slowly become corrupt. A recent documentary called Hypernormalization likened the Occupy Wall Street protests to a movement about management. Blockchain may well become the same but on a much larger scale.

By Ali Serag El Din and Salman Alam

Blockchain and the Big-Banks — #2 was originally published in Earl Grey Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.