Jasmine Xu has always had leading roles historically held by men. She started her career at Facebook and helped make Marketplace a hit. Facebook Marketplace was led by female VP Deb Liu, who intentionally built up the team with women leaders. 

Xu, a psychology and geography major, calls herself “a soft product manager” and says she isn’t the most technical in the room. Curiosity is an underrated skillset for product managers, especially when creating consumer-facing apps and experiences. 

Curiosity led Xu to crypto during her Facebook days. She bought Bitcoin during the 2017 bull market but thought she had invested in a scam when it plummeted. “I thought Bitcoin was like a stock and that I had chosen a bad one. NFTs made me realize crypto is a form of digital currency and there was this whole wide world on the Internet where you could buy things with it,” Xu said. 

“Crypto just feels like a natural evolution of where the financial system should go,” she added. While most of her peers stayed in Silicon Valley, Xu, who had been brought into Telegram groups and NFT communities, saw a need for her skills in crypto. 

With user experience as her north star, she landed on wallets because they’re the beginning step of every crypto user’s journey. She settled at Bitski, a wallet start-up and then moved onto the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, where she launched the wallet product which got 100,000 monthly transacting users in three months on mobile. 

She said Magic Eden made a choice to have its mobile product focus on token trading. “We saw a lot of success in that there were over $300 million of volume swap in the last three months. People really want to trade tokens in this market.”

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Xu has observed a general shift to mobile that meets consumers where they’re comfortable.  

“One really good outcome I’ve noticed in this cycle relative to the past cycle is that the expectation and bar for good consumer experience is significantly higher than before,” she said. “We’re seeing the birth of more consumer-facing apps. In order to reach consumers where they’re at, you need to be on your phone and to be able to abstract out the complexities.”

In order to build technology that’s for everyone, not just early adaptors or niche communities, Xu believes it’s important to have more women in leadership roles. 

Although web3 can feel like a boy’s club, Xu believes some of it comes down to choosing the right company. There are a lot of women in senior operating roles at Magic Eden, challenging narratives about who belongs in crypto. 

Xu believes the male-dominated energy in crypto right now is more indicative of growing pains rather than a cultural regression. 

“Trump launched a meme coin in the past week. Is it silly? Yes. Is it great that people are buying it? I don’t know. They’re highly risky, speculative investments. But it did onboard almost half a million new users who had never seen crypto before. Sometimes it’s the silly stuff that gets you actually interested and excited about the thing. It just doesn’t happen overnight.” 

Creating more diversity in teams and projects doesn’t always require an intentional effort to hire more women. “It’s more like, let’s be kind, ethical people who do the right thing by our colleagues,” she said. “When you exude that type of aura, people will naturally decide whether or not it’s a good fit for them.” 

lead image: Jasmine Xu