More than six years ago, when Gen Z was still very much in college — (or even high school!) — Maggie Love found herself at Barnes and Noble purchasing a copy of Don Tapscott’s The Blockchain Revolution.
Her story is one that, in hindsight, created the perfect tee-up for a Web3 career. However, Love didn’t know that at the time. In 2016, while working as a consultant for IBM Watson’s financial services product strategy, she was curious about what the next thing would be in finance, a field she had begun to see as an exclusive boy’s club.
“I had realized post-college that I didn't get all the financial literacy I had wanted out of my education,” Love recalls. “Then I took the Watson job and moved to New York, where I saw that finance people just hang out with a lot of [other] finance people. They all had the secret language.”
While Love was happy to finally be in the club, she was still frustrated. She wanted to break down accessibility barriers and invite those who felt stuck on the sidelines to participate in the financial knowledge she was gaining.
The solution came one day from a colleague: “I was at a corporate strategy meeting,” she said. “And I heard this man on the phone saying, ‘We have to be doing blockchain — blockchain, blockchain, blockchain!’”
Love’s coworkers disregarded the man’s excitement, but she sensed he was onto something. She began connecting the dots and read Blockchain Revolution in two days. As she remembers, she “was totally taken by continued curiosity and excitement.”
She adds a caveat here, noting her motivations had little to do with getting rich or riding crypto tokens to the moon. Rather, Love, who had been strategizing around artificial intelligence for the financial services industry at IBM, saw immediately the potential of a decentralized financial ledger like blockchain.
“[My excitement] was all about cross-border remittances, supply chain provenance and being able to establish identity or credentials in areas where they don't have traditional identity systems,” Love said. “Like being able to say that you own this piece of land in a provable, immutable, non-destructible system for areas where the government can just come and take your land.”
Blockchain was “revolutionary,” she thought, an example of tech for good. “I was like, ‘Wow — I have to be part of it.” Soon after this insight, Love started pitching blockchain projects to her higher-ups, where she encountered roadblocks and red tape — an experience familiar to most trailblazers introducing novel ideas at work.
“So I started talking to blockchain companies,” Love said. She reached out to recruiters and asked for meetings with friends who had connections in tech. Her search led her to an interview with leading Ethereum software company ConsenSys, whose offices were housed at the time in the down-to-earth neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn.
“You have to understand,” explains Love. “People were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and [they were] happy!”
Love, who wore a business-professional skirt and button-down shirt to her interview, felt refreshed.
“I was like, ‘This is energetic. This is positivity. This is excitement. This is people looking you in the eye and wanting to know you, even if you're a stranger.'”
She continued to follow the positivity, knowing it would eventually guide her to fulfill the desires that had motivated her career from the start. Today, Love is the founder of SheFi, an online education community that helps women and non-binary folks learn about decentralized finance (DeFi) in a low-pressure environment. In addition to running SheFi, Love is the founder and director of ecosystems and partnerships at W3BCLOUD, a compute infrastructure provider that builds and operates Web3 infrastructure. She is particularly qualified to lead both a Web3 learning cohort and infrastructure company, given her varied but in-depth career combining both tech and finance. However, a person may look at her activities and wonder how she has the time to execute at such a high level.
“That’s a great question,” laughs Love when asked how she manages her full plate. “I'm actually thinking about SheFi all the time.”
Though she is busy, Love feels fortunate to dedicate herself to work that aligns with her values, noting that it is an “absolute gift and pleasure” to be doing so.
“I won’t lie and say that I don't work weekends and I don't work late nights,” she says. “But when you're aligned with what you do, it can be your hobby. Find something you align with, and it brings out this constant creativity and elevation.”
At just $300 to enroll, SheFi is an accessible and beginner-friendly learning journey that helps even the newest crypto-curious investor dip their toe into Web3. The bootcamp format is hands-on and flexible, with recorded and live Zoom sessions, a Telegram group and in-real-life (IRL) meet-ups during crypto conferences worldwide. So far, there have been more than 1,000 SheFi members enrolled from over 50 countries.
The SheFi Season 8 application is now open. Applications close on February 15.
Megan DeMatteo is BFF’s Guest Editor.
This article and all the information in it does not constitute financial advice. If you don’t want to invest money or time in Web3, you don’t have to. As always: Do your own research.
