‘Crypto Doula’ Maggie Love’s Mission to Make Web3 More Female
SheFi’s 11th cohort opens next week with 600-700 women worldwide, after spreading to 90 countries with 3,000 global members
At 23 years old, Maggie Love found herself at IBM Watson Financial Services in a product strategy role usually held by MBA graduates. She first heard of blockchain in a corporate strategy meeting to discuss the technologies that IBM should bring into the fold. While the other IBM folks chafed at the enthusiasm of the blockchain evangelist amidst them, and asked to mute him, it piqued Love’s attention. Someone this excited about something at IBM was worth taking a look.
That same day, she headed to Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square and bought the first book she could find, called Blockchain Revolution. This was 2016, when Vitalik was writing about Ethereum on Reddit and although information was scant, Love sensed the technology’s potential.
She spent her following days hiding in cubicles at IBM, messaging people on LinkedIn, trying to find her ticket to the blockchain show. She discovered a friend of a friend who worked at ConsenSys, which was the it place in 2017. After meeting with her contact at the ConsenSys office, welcomed by young, bright-eyed, friendly folks dressed in street clothes, Love was ready to burn her corporate attire.
She spent the next three years at ConsenSys, as the director of strategic initiatives, which overlapped with the startup accelerator’s mass layoffs in 2018.
“I noticed who was leftover at ConsenSys after the culling, and it was men,” Love said. “I was also going to conferences, like ETHDenver and EthCC, and noticed that everyone talking about DeFi were men.”
It was a pivotal moment for Love. “I understood that permissionless does not equal inclusion,” she said. “Just because something exists for everybody doesn’t mean people will know about it, especially because crypto was so niche.” The people playing with and building on the technology looked like the same people who benefited from traditional finance.
Enter SheFi
Her mission was simple: Make women the best candidates for web3 jobs by teaching them crypto finance – a dash of TradFi and the language of the protocols that would help them get hired in DeFi jobs. The SheFi name came to Love loud and clear while she was running to EDM music. “It felt very divinely inspired,” she said.
In 2019, Love rolled out an internal cohort with the women of ConsenSys. Then, in the summer of 2020 during the height of lockdown, she opened SheFi up to the public. “It was just friends and friends of friends in New York City. We had 30 to 40 people,” Love said.
Love, who refers to herself as a “crypto doula,” is hosting the 11th cohort next week, attracting 600 to 700 women worldwide. SheFi is now in 90 countries, with 3,000 members globally. Love iterates the eight-week course each time, responding to student questions and industry interest. NFTs, DAOs, web3 social, governance and decentralized artificial intelligence have all been hot topics.
“Newbies have the best questions, because they cut straight to the chase. They haven’t bought into the crypto DeFi Kool-Aid,” she said.
Love is a proponent for in-person gatherings, especially for crypto. “At our first SheFi meet-up in New York, a woman came up to me and said that because of SheFi she got a job at a web3 firm with a creative background, was able to divorce her husband and pay for her daughter’s autism care. Hearing that would have been beautiful at any moment, but her being able to share that with the group and inspire others was a powerful moment,” she said.
“There’s nothing more magical than being in-person. Crypto’s conference obsession is what makes us such a sticky group. It’s the synchronicity and deep bonds we build with people we’re trying to build a better future with, which is something I didn’t experience in my previous work,” she added.
While SheFi is making inroads with women learning and leading in web3, Love has noticed people she meets in her daily life still don’t get crypto, or don’t want to get it.
Entrenched systems
“I went to my fiancé’s 15-year college reunion. He went to Yale, which has a lot of lawyers who went to Harvard Law School, work for the government, and their density is tied to these big corporate companies, this government or this regime,” she said. “It’s more like an establishment versus anti-establishment conversation, those who are entrenched in systems versus people who aren’t.”
Web3 is undoubtedly entering a stage of maturation, bad actors behind bars, regulatory clarity closer than ever, and the momentum of the bull. SheFi will continue to cater to the needs of the crypto industry with the focus on education, events and job support. “This means making sure women can get at least in the inbox,” Love said.