For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time.  Before diving into web3, Scott spent almost 8 years at the cloud analytics and data platform Teradata and throughout the years he held roles of senior architect, director of cloud solutions and worked his way up to VP of the firm’s global cloud. As for Space and Time, the company aims to be a verifiable compute layer for web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK proofs, on a decentralized data warehouse. Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic action used to prove something about a p ..read more

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Tegan Kline, the CEO and co-founder of Edge & Node.  The company is focused on creating and supporting decentralized applications, or dApps, and protocols. It was also the initial team behind The Graph, an indexing and query protocol, or what some have referred to as the Google of Web3, which aims to organize open blockchain data and make open data a public good. Tegan began her career in investment banking before shifting to work as an executive VP of a patent marketplace powered by blockchain and analyzed by AI. This kickstarted her car ..read more

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Melody Hildebrandt, CTO of Fox Corporation and Mike Blank, COO at Polygon Labs. Why these two companies? Well, Polygon Labs, the layer-2 blockchain focused on scaling Ethereum, and Fox Corporation, the well-known media conglomerate, joined forces in January to tackle deepfakes as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent.  Fox released Verify, an open source technical protocol for media companies to register content and grant usage rights to AI platforms, while also allowing consumers to verify content through Polygon’s tech.  This ..read more

For this week’s episode, we’re resharing a conversation I had in June 2023 with Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden.  When we recorded this episode, NFT sales were down around $640 million at the beginning of the month, compared to today where February 2023 NFT sales volume hit $1 billion, for the first time since February 2023. Looking back on this conversation, we decided this episode was a great addition to the NFT series to add some context for what a crazy year it has been, how much things have changed (and some things stayed the same) especially for people building in the NFT ..read more

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Steve Kaczynski, co-author of the book “The Everything Token,” and co-host of a web3 morning show Coffee with Captain. He also co-authored the first Harvard Business Review article about NFTs and outside of that, he consults with agencies and brands about building their web3 strategies including his role with Starbucks where he is a community lead for its NFT-focused loyalty program, Starbucks Odyssey.  Before getting into the web3 world, Steve worked in communications and marketing roles at places for over 15 years.   Jacquelyn and ..read more

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands.  Yat co-founded Animoca in 2014 and since then it has invested in over 400 web3 projects across a range of sectors like DeFi, education, infrastructure, blockchain gaming and the metaverse. Animoca also has its own NFT collections, blockchain products and games like its web3 NFT-based community Mocaverse, the blockchain game and NFT collection REVV Racing, and The Sandbox, a decentralized virtual world with over 40 million mobile installs. The company has also worked with other wel ..read more

This year, Chain Reaction is doing monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. To start things off, this month we’re focusing on NFTs.  For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Devin Finzer, the CEO of NFT marketplace OpenSea. He co-founded OpenSea in 2017 and it quickly climbed to become one of the most well known – and well funded – NFT marketplaces. Two years ago, it raised $300 million in a Series C round at a $13.3 billion post-money valuation, bringing its total capital raised to over $400 million. Some of its investors include firms Andreessen Horowitz a ..read more

This week we have a bonus episode with Hester Peirce, commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Jacquelyn moderated a fireside chat with Commissioner Peirce at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business alongside Eddie Cullen, a former candidate for New York City Mayor in 2021 and co-founder and CEO of Crescite Innovation Corporation. They discussed a number of timely topics including the SEC’s spot bitcoin ETF approval, policy making to keep crypto innovation alive in the U.S. and the commissioner’s Token Safe Harbor Proposal 2.0 and whether she’s considerin ..read more

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Chris Dixon, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Chris has been at the firm since 2012 and founded and leads a16z’s crypto team, which invests in the web3 world through four mega-funds with over $7 billion under management. He’s also an author of the recently released book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.  Prior to a16z, Chris co-founded two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch, both were acquired by McAfee in 2006 and eBay in 2011, respectively. He also attended Columbia University for his bac ..read more

This is a bonus episode, where Jacquelyn interviewed Alex Blania, CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity, in a fireside chat at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco.  The startup was co-founded by Alex, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. To date, it has raised about $250 million from investors like a16z, Bain Capital Crypto and others. It is also the entity that created a crypto-focused project called Worldcoin.  The startup is well-known across the venture capital, AI and crypto spaces for its futuristic-looking Orb device, which scans peoples’ irises then assigns them a “Wor ..read more