Hey, Linda, good afternoon. Hey, good afternoon. How are you? Yeah, doing well. Just, you know, responding and thinking through the implications of the announcement from Coinbase this morning. It was pretty exciting. Yeah, that is exciting. I'm happy to see that they're going the decentralization route, you know.
like they could have kept the institutional side going and I'm happy to see it. Yeah, I'd love to get into that actually today maybe a little later as we dive into some of these questions that we have for you today. Yeah, yeah, sounds good. Okay, so
I think people will probably be popping in here. I'm trying to actually get a standard kit on something. Let me see if I can do that just in one second. Yeah. Okay.
This talk will also be recorded so we can. Okay, here we go. Also people will be able to tune in later as well since this is kind of in the middle day for some folks. But I'm really excited to chat with you, Linda. It's been
been a bit since we've connected, but lots happened in the crypto world and specifically in the areas that you focus on. And what we're really excited to hear from you about is a number of things. Like we'll talk about the Coinbase stuff and also get an update on the documentary and how that's going.
But in particular, like really stoked to dive it into the current state and future of Dows and a lot of the learnings that you've been getting from just being on the edge of this technology in the space. So I guess with that, Linda, you've been an OG for many years.
I don't know if there's like an official Coinbase mafia, but I personally consider you as one of those. And it's really exciting to see where that initial group of Coinbase folks in the early days has now gone, what they've gone on to do, which is remarkable.
Maybe where we can start is really like share a bit about yourself and your journey in the crypto and I think you know obviously we'll Get get more and more deep as we get into the questions that we want to talk through. Yeah, of course Yeah, I think the term that people use is quite me smafia. It's really awesome to see what everyone is doing and
They're also supportive of each other too. So I guess like for background, so I'm co-founder of a crypto fund called Scalar Capital. We focused on early stage investments in the space and prior to that I was a early Coinbase employee had joined in 2014.
I had a number of different roles there. The way I joined Coinbase actually was I had fallen down the crypto rabbit hole a lot of people do. I really saw Coinbase as this pivotal company in the space that was actually trying to help crypto go mainstream. For me, the point
where I reached out to them was after I saw that Overstock was accepting Bitcoin as payment in early 2014. And so I actually reached out to them and I wrote this cover letter and I was like I'm so excited to work with you guys. I really fundamentally believe in Bitcoin and how you're taking it mainstream.
And for me, I also told the recruiters like I'll work in any role. Like for me, it's more important to just join a company like Coinbase and be part of the journey. And so I joined first as a regulatory compliance investigator. And that was a role working with law enforcement and regulators and I had
zero background in that prior, I had a finance background before that. And it was really interesting, like just kind of being able to learn more about Bitcoin and kind of tracing some of the transactions online and all of that. And then I later moved into a product role on fraud and risks and compliance stuff.
I had a lot of different hats there and for me it was just more about getting to learn how do you contribute to a company that's like really trying to move forward the space in a really early time at Bitcoin. And then on the side right now I'm working on a documentary about Ethereum and we've been filming for the past almost two years now.
So filming various people in the Ethereum ecosystem, following Vitalik and people as part of the Ethereum Foundation, and their upgrade to Proof of Stake, which I thought was like absolutely fascinating story. So anyways, that's high level of what I've been doing in the crypto space.