Episode 15

Building Things That Don’t Exist With Blockchain, and Rethinking Money and Education with Brittany Laughlin (Ep. 15)

Brittany Laughlin grew up in an entrepreneur household that fostered her passion for building things that don’t exist. This foundation served her well as she found herself working in the tech side of venture capital, quickly becoming curious about a new technology called Bitcoin. Her curiosity and passion for building new things eventually led her to working with Stacks and becoming a leader in the web3 space. Currently, Brittany serves as the Executive Director of the Stacks Foundation, has co-founded her own VC firm, Lattice Ventures, and is a professor at Cornell Law School.

I sat down with Brittany to talk about the incredible work the Stacks Foundation does, why it’s important to rethink money, education, and identity, how Brittany feels about often being the only woman in the room in the crypto space, how being a powerhouse woman informs her leadership style, and why she’s personally really excited about the way web3 is moving society forward.

Meet Our Guest

Brittany is the Executive Director of the Stacks Foundation, making it possible to program on top of Bitcoin. She teaches DeFi at Cornell Law School, welcoming the next wave of legal degens into the space. Prior to Stacks.org she was the Head of IR and Ecosystem Growth at Hiro PBC. She’s worked on Stack's path to decentralization through ecosystem growth, including a qualification by the SEC, and R&D on token economics. She started investing in Web3 in 2013 at Union Square Ventures with their first investment in Coinbase and then continued through her own fund, Lattice Ventures before jumping in as a full time operator. She loves supporting the global tech community and is often traveling for adventures or to meet up to share ideas. She's convinced that the only way forward is more ownership over data and better collaboration on the world's largest problems.

Connect with Brittany on Twitter

What We Unraveled

* Brittany’s history growing up in an entrepreneur household, and working in venture capital and how it lead her to getting started with crypto

* How the Stacks Foundation helps thousands of people despite being a small team, and why she’s really proud of the work they do

* Why Brittany believes technology opens up new markets, removes barriers, and supports people to create value in business

* Financial systems, value transfers going back in history, and how it relates to Bitcoin today

* All the factors that we should be questioning with the complicated US banking system, and how decentralization and trustless systems are an answer to the problems

* The course Brittany has coming, based on a class she’s taught for 3 years at Cornell Law, that will give people a high level overview of how decentralized finance works and a framework to to evaluate web3 projects

* What ‘DeFi’ means, and how the term encompasses pretty much every area of finance you can imagine, including lending and stable coins

* The benefits and tradeoffs of decentralized financial systems versus traditional ones

* The notable differences between communities in web2 and web3, and what makes the Stacks community different in particular

* What Stacks is, the ideas that prompted the project, and what their key focus is now

* The value of having a portable identity that isn’t attached to Gmail or Facebook

* Why Brittany believes that the next wave of web3 users won’t necessarily care about crypto as much as having an experience completely novel to blockchain

* The key areas of growth Brittany sees in web3, including decentralized identity and civil resistance

* Why Brittany is personally excited about the prospect of using web3 technology for good to move society forward, with a huge focus on revolutionizing education

* What Brittany feels founders should do to bring about more diversity and inclusivity

* How Brittany feels about often being one of the few women in the room in a tech space, and what she considers when building a team

Unravel Further