'The Frontier is Feminine': How SheFi is Co-Creating an Inclusive New Internet

"Money is not powerful when it is accumulated; money is powerful when it moves." This piece is dedicated to the team at PayPal. Thank you for sponsoring SheFi Cohort 9 and making crypto education accessible to hundreds of women and femmes from around the world – including me – through scholarships.

Little did SheFi founder-to-be, Maggie Love, know that a casual trip to the Consensys offices in 2020 was to sow the seeds for what was to become the web3 canon experience for women and femmes that we know today.

While the conversation in the offices that day enthused over the life-changing gains to be made in DeFi – at the time, platforms like Compound were offering 10% returns for users – Maggie noted the near total absence of women and femmes.

Her response? To ensure that non-binary people and women would have a stake in the future of finance by building a safe container in which to explore the space – all while raising funds for women in STEM.

Four years later, and on the cusp of its tenth season, the platform has blossomed into one of the most recognisable brands in blockchain education. Serving over 2,000 women and femmes across 90+ countries, SheFi continues to innovate in its mission to bridge the gender gap in web3 and frontier tech.

In a context where only 7% of female-led start-ups have been granted VC funding – and just 13% of founding teams feature any women at all – the need to address web3’s sexism problem remains critical.

These days, SheFi is still about cultivating an accessible and collaborative approach to DeFi – but it also goes far beyond that. Seeking to ‘empower professional women to reinvent their careers in web3’, the programme delivers in a myriad of ways.

Considering the carefully crafted, live modules that start with blockchain 101, and weave through some of the space’s most cutting-edge applications (on-chain governance, consumer crypto, or AI, anyone?) to extra-curricular guest seminars and a bounty of digital and irl opportunities to connect with peers; this is where I could easily start reeling off some of my personal Cohort 9 highlights as well as many of the achievements I’ve witnessed and celebrated in others.

Instead, I’d like to hand the mic over to three previous cohort members who are killing it in web3 – DevRel Jamie Steinberg, RARI Foundation Head of Strategy, Jana Bertram and Head of Growth and GTM lead Linda Albright – as they share their SheFi success stories. Let’s dig in:

Jamie Steinberg, DevRel at Reservoir. Cohort 7, Chicago

"What I really love about the web3 space is, because it's fast paced and it's constantly changing, it allows me to learn about new things and push myself personally."

“Before SheFi, I was a teacher in public education, and web3 was a hobby of mine; something that I was interested in and learned about on my own, outside of work time,” Jamie tells me over video call. “SheFi allowed me to turn a hobby and an interest of mine into a career."

When she discovered SheFi, Jamie had already made quite the pivot from music teacher to computer scientist and web developer. But swapping out music’s chords and notes for coding’s functions and loops wasn’t quite working out in the way she had envisioned. "I was looking for jobs in the web2 space and doing a little freelancing, but it was difficult to break through," she says.

Over the course of Cohort 7, the former music teacher learned Solidity, grew her connections, was promoted to SheFi’s City Lead for the Chicago area, and landed a dream job with Reservoir - a role that she holds to this day.

The secret to her web3 glow-up? A willingness to learn and a global network of peers collectively oriented around pulling each other up.

A timely conversation with a connection and friend, Talent Advisor, Rachel Kraska, provided the insight that helped Jamie reframe her previous experience, matching it with her current passions and the demands of the market. “She was able to point me in the direction of developer relations because DevRel combines teaching, educating people, helping them with integration,” Jamie explains, “But it also uses my new skills in programming while testing my knowledge and pushing me further in my learning."

If preparation and opportunity are the secret ingredients for ‘overnight success’, Jamie made sure she had the former on lock so she would be available for the latter. And so, when Reservoir started looking for a DevRel superstar to join the team, she was well-placed to make a move. “Maggie made an intro for my current role at Reservoir, and that’s how I was able to land this wonderful job. I started in November 2022 and I've been here ever since. I really enjoy it.”

Nearly three cohorts on, Jamie remains connected with the community. New and current members may be lucky enough to connect with her on Intros, the AI-assisted platform that algorithmically matches members according to their interests. “I used to do it every week. Now I do it once to twice a month and I still find it very helpful.”

When I ask if there’s anything else Jamie would like to add to the conversation, she brings it back to community. “Don't be afraid to reach out to other SheFi members, regardless of where they're located in the world or what season they were in. I find that SheFi members are really receptive and helpful to anyone who is genuine and is honest with how they approach them and their questions.”

After a pause, she adds “SheFi is what you make of it. If you want to be super active, there's ample opportunity for that. You can learn, grow your networks, and build meaningful connections or casual acquaintances. But I would also say, if you're a busy professional, you're not going to be able to do every single task and every quest and every meeting and every side event. And that's okay. It's totally cool to have SheFi as a resource. You can be as much of a lurker or be as involved as you like. There's literally no pressure."

Jana Bertram, Head of Strategy at Rari Foundation. Cohort 7, New York

"The fact that you have this platform full of women that are open to connecting, to helping, to co-creating. Again, thinking about the Columbia parallel, it's your alumni, right? And your alumni is a powerful network. "

When I catch up with Jana, she is just a week from giving birth. As I am soon to learn, she takes being a badass in her stride.  "I wrapped up the cohort, went to ETHDenver, got a job," she tells me. “That’s the job with RARI Foundation that I have to this day.”

Jana was no stranger to crypto when she joined SheFi’s Cohort 7. With her partner deep into on-chain governance, and various friends either building on or experimenting with web3 rails, the brand marketing lead wanted to understand the fundamentals behind the new Internet. “I also just wanted to be able to translate to my family what my husband’s company actually does,” she tells me as she breaks into a smile.

But there was more. With twelve years of experience in advertising and marketing, and brand names like WeTransfer and Klarna on her resume, Jana was craving new challenges. “I wanted to be part of something that is exciting and growing; where everybody is growing the pie rather than trying to get from somebody else's plate,” she tells me. "I was really into the idea of building something collaboratively. And I think that's the creative part of me, but also the entrepreneurial part of me. Crypto really gave me that release and that outlet.”

Jana enrolled in Cohort 7 after having met and bonded with Maggie over SheFi-branded cropped tops on sale at DAO NYC in 2021. “I don't know what her organizational skills are like, but they must be out of this world because she actually thought to ping me on WhatsApp to say the subscriptions are open.”

Up until that point, Jana had channelled most of her time into highly demanding career roles. Suddenly, she found herself contributing to communities, hacking, and building side projects in her spare time. Getting serious about web3 required a mindset shift; one that paid off in new friendships and collaborators, as well as cutting-edge insight, and opportunities.

"There’s no MBA in blockchain, right? SheFi is as close as you get to that. In the traditional world, you can say ‘I went to Columbia University’ and people will immediately stop questioning your capacity. I feel like that's what SheFi did for me. It immediately took down the objection of ‘what do you know about web3? You’ve never worked in web3 before’. SheFi provides you with those credentials. People know the programme.”

Remember how Jana landed her role at RARI Foundation shortly after Cohort 7 and a trip to ETHDenver? Well, as it turned out, there was more to that story...

Here, according to Jana, is the tea on how to approach jobs in web3 – and a sneak peek into the kind of top-tier peer-to-peer mentoring that Jamie talked about, and that abounds in SheFi – “I was originally turned down for the role I have now. But I followed up, showed understanding, and pitched them my own version of the role – and that's what I ended up doing,” Jana says. “A lot of the time, teams are advertising for a role that has never been filled, for a project that didn't exist before,” she continues, “Embrace the fact that web3 is flexible. Pitch the role you want to do, that you feel equipped to do, and that you will be passionate about. Because once you do that, you'll do a fantastic job."

Linda Albright, Marketing Director, Cohort 7, Connecticut

What's so exciting about SheFi is Maggie got in, she saw it, and she's actively building a movement.

“Professionally, I’m an early adopter,” Linda says, standing in front of a whiteboard sprinkled with post-it notes and diagrams. “When I joined SheFi, I had already been part of two major tech revolutions: The dot com craze and then Internet marketing when it started about ten, twelve years ago.” In other words, the Marketing Director has been serving tech companies with impactful Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies across the Internet’s entire read-write-own character arc.

And she has some strong feelings about this particular moment in tech’s evolution. “In both of those inflexion points [the dot com boom and Internet marketing], women were not at the forefront. There just were no freaking women,” Linda exclaims with a frustrated tone.  “But this – and I get goosebumps saying this – is the biggest evolution that we're ever going to see. And Maggie is putting women at the forefront. And you and I, and everybody, knows that if this world is going to succeed, women must become empowered and be in leadership positions.”

The founder of Women’s Wealth Revolution, Linda has long been invested in helping women get ahead in tech – not only for the benefit of women themselves but for society at large. “The stats still show that female founders aren't getting funded as much as male founders. But they also show that companies with either a female founder or female on the exec teams do better than companies without.”

In our conversation, Linda seamlessly shifts between bigger-picture thinking and her own personal insight – “blockchain architecture is feminine because you can't get away with anything, not even one block,” she tells me, comparing the technology to the feminine urge to use peer-to-peer communication as a strategy of collective care (hello, mums at the playground).

But it is in her own experience that these tendencies of mutual support and celebration most vividly come to light – from being connected with new opportunities and receiving practical help during a career pivot to being coached through how to set up a wallet and get paid for the first time in crypto. “My life changed because there was a welcoming, female community to take me by the hand and teach me what's coming down the pike,” Linda says. “The female community is priceless. I mean, it always has been (🔫). You just can't buy that kind of support.”

“I decided to fold up my web2 business and go find a web3 job – at my age. I am on the senior side. And I hadn't looked for a job in twenty years. And had I not had the energy and support of SheFi to tap into, there's no way I would have gotten into it. I landed not one but two jobs at the same time. I converted one into a consulting gig, and I took the other full-time.”

Cohort 7 may have wrapped up over a year and a half ago, but the friendships – and networks of collusion – that were forged in previous seasons very much live on. “Jamie's in Chicago and she's kicking ass, and it’s just so exciting and fulfilling to see each other succeed, because that's the feminine way, right? When you succeed, we all succeed. Let's go!”

SheFi Season 10 kicks off on March 4th with applications closing on March 3rd. Entrants and existing members alike can expect all the camaraderie and expert insight of previous cohorts plus a more gamified and community-first experience than ever before. See you in Discord the café, a summit or a local meet-up near you.