Bette Chen is co-founder of Laminar & Acala. Acala is the cross-chain decentralized financial hub and stablecoin platform of Polkadot that makes it fast and easy to use or build financial applications, improving trading efficiency and saving time. The platform offers a suite of financial primitives while Ethereum compatibility makes Acala the landing pad for Ethereum DApps to access Polkadot’s multichain ecosystem and aggregated cross-chain liquidity.

*For those unfamiliar with crypto, this glossary may be useful.

I’m sure we could talk about crypto for hours but let’s start with the story of what initially sparked your interest?

I got into crypto out of personal passion. I heard about Bitcoin a very long time ago, but I didn’t quite understand it because…

Rita Gurevich is the CEO and founder of SPHERE, a venture-backed industry leader in security assessments and remediation services. Rita founded SPHERE after gaining a massive amount of relevant experience during the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, where she was placed on a SWAT team that had to desegregate all their IT assets based on analyzing what technology under the Lehman umbrella should belong to which buying entity. Gaining knowledge almost overnight on how to analyze all the different platforms and systems in scope, along with the enhanced regulatory environment that began to dominate the financial industry, Rita knew that whether the…

The past 12 months set into motion a very bizarre combination of events which will be discussed for years to come. These events also set the stage for crypto’s real world value to be simultaneously demonstrated across all major narratives. Narratives (or memes) are critical to the adoption of new technologies as they explain not only what to do with a new technology but why.

“Buy bitcoin to hedge against inflation,…, but also to tell your government to f*ck off. Buy ethereum to secure the fledging decentralized financial system, …., but also to tell your bank to f*ck off.” …

Camille is currently the Chief Marketing Officer of WireWheel, a venture-backed startup that modernizes and simplifies how enterprises protect and manage the privacy of personal data. She has been CEO of OmniSparx and Choozy, and a senior marketing lead or strategic advisor for companies including TeamSnap, Eventbrite, iMedical, Mixbook, Fandor, Mozilla, Chic by Choice, Liquid, PETsys, and Pitchtime. She co-managed the San Francisco and West coast presence supporting the startups connected with Portugal Ventures and is the founder of Steal this Idea, which provides multiple forms of support for early stage teams in for-profit and not-for-profit fields.

What initially sparked your interest in marketing?

My interest in…

The pandemic has catapulted most aspects of our lives online, redefining the way we think about almost everything. We find ourselves in a world in which more enterprises are migrating to cloud infrastructures and SaaS applications, more of the workforce is mobile and distributed, and more of our identity and interactions are captured digitally. This transformation has been dramatically accelerated and enterprises are increasingly reliant on third-party solutions to help them make this rapid shift. In this new world, we must also redefine the way we think about cybersecurity.

As enterprises shift more workloads to the cloud (expected to grow…

Stephanie started her tech career in software, as an early employee at NYC-based infrastructure monitoring company Datadog. She has been a product manager in robotics/manufacturing automation as well as led growth in the ML devtool space, and now serves as GM at a stealth startup. She enjoys organizing communities of founders, executives, ML engineers/data engineers/data scientists at some of the world’s leading deeptech companies, and also advises and invests in applied AI/ML companies.

What do you view as the main challenges to continued progress in AI/ML?

The biggest challenges I see can be loosely classified as technical and organizational. Technically speaking, there is a lack of education and experience around successfully deploying models…

Data science teams are doubling every year and each year there are 2x-5x more models delivered into products and businesses,¹ but Gartner predicts that 85% of AI projects will fail to generate value for enterprises. This is partly due to a machine learning (ML) pipeline that is surprisingly manual, a disconnection between the data scientists building models and the ML engineers deploying them, and a lack of basic tooling for this developing workflow. The emerging ML OPs (machine learning operations) ecosystem aims to facilitate better collaboration between data scientists and ML engineers and to create a more automated pipeline with…

Trustworthy digital identification remains one of the main challenges of the internet because none of the traditional, offline methods of verifying that someone is who they claim to be apply. Yet, while digital identity is one of the most foundational and valuable digital assets we have - made even more apparent by the pandemic - many people question whether there is a business to be built around it.

The following article attempts to provide an overview of what digital identity is and why it matters, to explain it’s relevancy now and in the future, and to highlight startups and investors…