An Interview with ConsenSys Venture Architect, Rosa Thompson
Rosa Thompson is a YBF Ventures resident, Venture Architect at ConsenSys and driving force behind Melbourne’s Women in Blockchain and Blockchain for Social Impact. Read on for a discussion on her background, views on blockchain and her move to Sydney.
Tell us about yourself Where did you grow up? What did you study?
I’m a Melbournite, I went to school and university here. After uni, I went to San Francisco, largely because I was drawn to the tech scene. I worked for a few startups in the States for four years.
I did an Arts degree and while I was doing it, I started getting involved with the Melbourne Uni Entrepreneurship Society. I remember I did a pitch competition with them, which was the first of many pitches which I have now done throughout my career.
It wasn’t until I went to San Fran I understood the tech industry, especially in terms of startups. I was enamoured by the whole scene over there, I went to a lot of meetups and conferences. I was always meeting really interesting, ambitious people.
You’re currently working as a Venture Architect at ConsenSys. What does your job involve? How did you score the role?
I initially started out in social media, when that was an emerging tech trend and not many people knew a lot about it. I think because of that they were happy to give young people the reins of a company’s social media accounts. From there I got into digital marketing more broadly, web copy writing, blogging, video content production and events. Events are an exercise in very detailed project management. I started to get more interested in project management to move away from marketing.
Being a Venture Architect is kind of a combination of project management and sales, which is something that I’ve done in different points of my career. I definitely tend to be more on the business side of things. I think of there being three main areas in terms of how to get a business off the ground: the tech aspect, the design aspect and the business aspect.
That’s really important to me as I’m studying entrepreneurship and I’ve had various ventures over the years with varying degrees of success. I initially came into ConsenSys to be part of its blockchain incubator. I was trying to set up my own blockchain-based startup, so it was an entrepreneur-in-residence type role.
With the way that the market has gone in 2018, it is much more a time of focusing on enterprise use cases and so in my role I work with corporates, non-profits and sometimes government; effectively exploring use cases that we can turn into small ventures and so there is a really entrepreneurial component in what I do, but it is more of an “intrapreneur” type role instead of market-facing.
You’ve driven the Melbourne chapter of several organisations including Women in Blockchain and Blockchain for Social Impact that we’ve hosted at YBF Ventures. What was your goal when setting up these groups?
I really enjoy community. It’s very natural to me to want to bring people who are like-minded together. We were able to leverage the global concept and network of Women in Blockchain and Blockchain for Social Impact at a local level. Another group that I’m involved with is Web 3.0 Australia who do weekly hack nights.
All of those groups are niche areas of the blockchain industry more broadly. They’re things that I’m personally really passionate about and really enjoy having in-depth conversations with other people who are passionate about those topics.
With Women in Blockchain, for example, when I personally first started going to blockchain events, I was somewhat intimidated because I felt like I didn’t know enough and I was one of very few women in the room. It’s nice to have a group of women come together and feel really comfortable to talk about blockchain without any fear of judgement and be at more of a beginner level initially. A lot of women have become friends through that group and it’s been really good for us all in terms of career networking.
I have heaps of collaborators, we’ve leveraged global concepts and they’re topics that resonate with people. This has created really organic growth.
How do you see the blockchain space evolving?
There are big institutions entering the space in a pretty major way right now. Another trend is that a lot of physical assets are going to be represented through smart contracts on the blockchain which will make them more tradable. There’s a trend around tokenisation in general, shared ownership of physical assets is effectively the outcome of tokenisation. For example, you can tokenise ownership of real estate through blockchain technology.
There are broad themes like that, and in a general sense I tend to think about blockchain as a more secure, more distributed infrastructure that will underpin the internet and applications that we already use. From a user’s perspective I don’t think you’ll notice the change necessarily when you’re browsing the internet or using an application, which in the blockchain world we refer to dApps or decentralised applications. Ideally you shouldn’t really know that it’s a dApp rather than regular app.
User experience is a really huge focus of the whole industry right now because at the moment it is quite clunky. For mainstream adoption to happen dApps and the use of crypto in general will have to become more seamless.
You’re about to embark on a new chapter in Sydney; what will you be doing next?
I’m going to go to UTS to do their Entrepreneurship MBA. I’ll work on one business idea throughout the year, while I’m still working at ConsenSys. It’s something that I’m working on with colleagues at ConsenSys and we do it in our 10% time. It’s a really fun project. I’m excited to be closer to some of my colleagues who are up in Sydney working out of the Tyro Fintech Hub.
We’ve loved having you at YBF Ventures. What was your favourite part about working from the space?
The YBF staff have been really generous with me, in terms of offering me to use the space for events and introducing me to interesting go-getter people and groups.
When there’s been a group of touring business people from a different part of the country or the world, I’ve gotten to speak to them about ConsenSys and blockchain and what I do, which has led to some really good connections. All in all, I’ve found the staff at YBF to be really warm and caring.
Would you rather have a dog with a cat’s personality or a cat with a dog’s personality?
A cat with a dog’s personality.
Words by Leahan Shimon.
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