above: Annie Reardon (L) and Renee Russo

Any startup founder will tell you that there’s a certain amount of naivete and eagerness required that must outweigh the difficulty of creating a business. For Annie Reardon and Renee Russo, co-founders of the web3 firm Glow Labs, that moment came in 2021 when the excitement of leaving their jobs at JPMorgan to go out on their own kept them up all night.

They’d been working on the same development team at the New York bank for three years by then, but their passions lay outside of Wall Street.

“We were into blockchain in 2017, like applying to blockchain engineering jobs, [going to] meetups, we were just really curious about it,” Reardon recently told me. “And then the NFT craze hit, and we started flipping NFTs and really seeing, ‘oh my God, we can make real money here.’”

The pair began investing in projects and diving into web3 games. A year ago Russo launched the DinoMonks NFT project. “We were obsessed with web3, like eat, sleep, breathe it,” Russo said. It turns out clocking in and out for Jamie Dimon couldn’t compare.

“It’s hard to work a full-time job and really be dedicated to something more than just on the weekends,” Russo said. “When we were at JPMorgan it was a great place to start and build a foundation, but we weren’t that passionate about the work that we were doing. We saw passion outside JPMorgan.”

What the young women – both are under 30 – realized was that web3 still needed a lot of infrastructure to increase its mass appeal. The area they focused on was the lack of a way to implement loyalty rewards for web3 users like DAO members or anyone who wants in on your NFT project. Like any engineer worth her salt, Russo and Reardon pulled the classic, well it doesn’t exist so we have to build it move when they wanted to airdrop a reward to their community. Russo spend about 4 weeks and $10,000 to manually put the airdrop together and realized everyone else who was doing airdrops at the time was doing it from scratch too.

The DinoMonks story

That led them to Glow Labs and realizing their time on Wall Street was done.

“When we saw that this opportunity was so exciting and so big we had to take the leap,” Reardon said.  “We couldn’t fall asleep that night we were so excited about building it. That’s when we knew.”

Glow Labs is now offering a way for web3 communities to pass on loyalty rewards to their members. Their current systems, which is done via smart contract and doesn’t involve the client having to program any code, rewards people for engaging on Twitter. That way, projects can know who their highest engaged users are, Reardon said.

“Who’s liking their tweets the most, talking positively about them on social media, being a true voice for the community in the metaverse,” she said. They reward these people with tokens that can be traded for ether or used for in-game transactions. Paying for engagement can be gamed, but Russo said Glow Labs has policies in place to safeguard privacy and other concerns. But in another sense, she said they want to gamify loyalty rewards.

Engage to earn

“The thought of people doing something to earn in that gamer mindset is how we see the future going,” Russo said. “Engage to earn is a fundamental strategy in web3.”

I asked them how it’s been as women founders in the dominantly white dude web3 world. Both have backgrounds in science and engineering, Reardon said, so they’ve been used to a male-dominant peer group for a while. (Wall Street is no Ladies’ Night either).

“We do know that we have an important role to play in representation and showing women that they can become a leader, and a technical leader at that, in web3 and the next iteration of the Internet,” Reardon said.

“I get called ‘sir’ constantly,” Russo said with a laugh. “Because the nature of web3 where everyone keeps their anonymity and you have a cartoon picture as your profile so when you reach out and are like, ‘hey I’ve got this cool new software that I built,’ they’re like ‘sorry, sir, let’s set up a call.’”

More seriously, the assumption that Russo is a man is borne out by statistics such as 2 percent of female founders get venture capital funding, Russo said. She added that only 22 female-founded companies conducted initial public offerings in the last two years. “We want to make that better by investing in more females and having more female investors,” she said.

Read more: Untam3d Is Working to Ensure Web3’s Promise for Women in Asia and Beyond

So where did the name come from?

“We made a beauty booking app, it was called Glow,” Reardon said. “It was something we did on the side, and then when crypto hit we were like, ‘we like this name, we’ll just add Labs to it to make it sound a little bit more technical.’”

“Annie and I are always building and launching crazy stuff,” Russo said.

Glow Labs has been focusing on web3 gaming companies with the lure of ERC-20 tokens. Beauty companies are another target. They had a project with Barbie earlier this year where Glow Labs helped the toymaker track its Twitter engagement so it could offer rewards to its top-engage user.

The startup, which has raised over $4 million in investor funds and is looking to hire a senior full stack engineer, a product manager and a salesperson, can weather the current crypto winter, the co-founders said.

“As long as we keep building for the future, you know, it’s here to stay,” Russo said. “The price of Ethereum goes up and down but that doesn’t really impact the technology that we’re building.”