Funding women's health research through AthenaDAO

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web three Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jbird and I believe that dii is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 welcome back to another episode everybody very excited for this one today we have with us Aaron do from Athena da to talk about real use cases for blockchain that are going to change the world specifically Women's Health this is an incredible story really

there's two parts of this episode that we break down today first we talk about Aaron getting into web 3 and how she did it how she found her community and also a true story about some struggles she had when she first entered the space and worked with some not so great actors and that's a challenge that I think a lot of people face when you enter web 3 we're a very new industry with a lot of startups with a lot of new Founders who are really trying to figure it out and there can be a false start that a lot of new people face and Aaron talked so honestly about what that was like and what it was like to go back to her web 2 job after

her fall start in web 3 and then what brought her back in also in the second part of this episode really jump into Athena Dow which is the Dow where Aaron is the comms and awareness lead and their mission is to fund research for Women's Health which is one of the most underfunded and under researched sectors within Health globally and women represent 50% of our population and here's an example of a DA that has just done a token raise and raised over $300,000 that has is using nfts to manage IP and patents which is using nft Tech in a new way to ensure

that the funding that they that they have goes to the people that need it most that aren't getting the funding that they currently need and also a dow that is being governed by a community who has an opportunity to vote on which direction this funding goes in because of what they believe in rather than the current model of centralized science D is all decentralized science well in our current model of centralized science which is what Athena da is competing against in centralized science it's all closed walls and profit driven it's not necessarily focused on the health that

we need to solve and we need to fix and it's not necessarily focused on the people that need the most it's focused on well the people that run these centralized organizations so dii really presents an opportunity and Athena da is really the first example that we've had on the web3 academy show where we really talk about how dii works and how it can change the world really and change lives in such a meaningful way and I think this is what we all crave so much in crypto and blockchain is like yes it's fun to participate in pfps and yes it's fun to own tokens and support the decentralization of ethereum and these are all amazing things but we're all

still waiting for those like use cases that are going to change the world and I think that they're they're here and they're coming and Athena da in today's episode is a perfect example of that you guys are going to love it really excited for you to listen before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsor modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web 3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level with paragraph readers

can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletter this opens new possibilities like creators sharing Revenue with fans i' also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gp4 natively in paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because of the profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on

the opportunity of being early GM Aaron welcome to webter Academy great to be here thanks D I'm really excited for this conversation not only to talk about the projects that you're activ working on Athena da your experience in shifi so much that we're going to get into but we want to start this conversation more focused on you and your journey and your experience in crypto and web 3 and the reason I'm excited to talk about because you and I jammed out a few weeks ago and you just really resonated with a story that I hear a lot of people have of the challenges of getting into crypto because it's new tech and because of the way teams are built and the way things move and operate and you've just got

such a great story so okay tell us how did you initially get into web 3 What attracted you what got you excited for sure it's probably not so uncommon story but it was my husband was he studied political science and economics and so he was just really interested in cryptocurrency and ethereum and smart contracts and kind of what they could do to solve some of the kind of larger issues we see in those systems and then kind of when defi came around and Dows he really just Dove down that rabbit hole so I kind of learned a bit about the space through osmosis more or less for a while but at the end of the day to be honest with you I'm not a finance person like I trading just does

not it's not what get me going at the end of the day so you know you tell me about I'm like that's great babe like go do your thing love this for you but it wasn't something that that I really felt kind of a particular Affinity to but simultaneously I also was seeing like I think so many people have some of the kind of fractures that were being created in a lot of our systems in society whether it be climate change really sort of taking hold kind of geopolitical tensions growing wealth and wage gaps growing as well and so there was a part of me that was also like there's something that's not matching up and so that was kind of like in my gut but I didn't really do much about it for

a while it's so refreshing to hear the good that attracts us all to web 3 this focus on greater ethos on building better systems it's like so many people come for the speculation un fortunately and that's a great thing that web 3 and crypto are enabling us like I think there is a lot to be said unfortunately speculation has L led to a lot of people losing money but it's also a great thing that will bring a lot of people into the space but if you come for that it's like you stay for so much more than that and I love hearing that you came for sort of this like bigger mission of just like making the world a better place which I mean Kudos out yeah thank you it's super

losty but it really was that you know I'm again I'm really not I'm not particularly the traditional early adopter of new tech I tend to be a little bit skeptical if anything believe in its power but I'm also like hold up let's see what kind of the tangential effects of this could be again not a finance person like there's a lot of the things that I do think brought most people in maybe just don't really resonate for me but the more I've sort of talked about web 3 and I I rarely call it crypto sometimes if people don't know web I'm like crypto but it's not just cryptocurrencies because that's where their mind go you know I think so many people just only know about the financial applications and when I really realized just how much more there was to it and once you kind of I think get the

tools that are in the toolbox it allows you to have so many ideas of what you could build or how you could rebuild with these tools and that's just something that's so exciting for me and something that I think we as a people are really ripe for and I think a lot of people are frustrated by the Twitter oh my gosh big time yeah yeah yeah planet is spiraling in a dangerous Direction and hopefully we can fix it I don't know we don't need to go so go too deep down that conversation right now right and I I mean honestly I'm not trying looking to like fix the world I think that's that's a little unrealistic but I do think that we can make some real incremental change and just show that there are other ways of doing things out

there you know we forget sometimes that as a people we have a history of rebuilding systems that weren't working so this is nothing new in that regard it's just the way we're doing it and how we do it and why we do it that can be a little bit different and hopefully a little more adapted to where we're headed yeah and I think the exciting thing and this is what I think a lot of people are missing right now of we all talk about the onboarding of you know a billion people onto crypto onchain web 3 and I don't exactly know where it's going to come from I don't know when it's going to come I think it's coming sooner rather than later because I do think Tech is exponential what most people don't realize is there is going to be a big wave of people that come for

reasons like you once it's possible to interact in web 3 with more friendly ux in more simple ways so I think yeah there's going to be massive opportunities it's just those things aren't getting a lot of attention yet you know we have wonderful communities and Dows that are all focused on great for good causes but they're they're small because they're not friend Tech and they don't make you a whole bunch of money right absolutely and I mean at the end of the day traditional media is in a tough spot they need to sell papers and get clicks and unfortunately we see it all the time the feel-good stories aren't what make the news right it's oh my God crypto's a scam oh my God nfts have no utility or value those kind of

things are what make people click on stuff and so I think there is some real coordinated effort that that we need to be able to tell the good stories and be able to kind of come together as a space and showcase what we can do for people at the end of the day because that is to me the thing that will get people on board it's not even the prospect of making a lot of money at oake I mean I think that for certain people that resonates but there's also a lot of fear that kind of comes from that a lot of uncertainty because there has been this narrative that's been pushed for years now but solve their problems their tangible problems their day-to-day problems them we on imagine you could participate in funding Women's Health

and helping with the research to further Women's Health wouldn't that be amazing I'm just gonna tease that don't don't say anything yet Erin don't say we're gonna get there later in the episode okay your journey though that's the where you are now in your web three Journey but go back a few years so you your partner interest in defi you're seeing it from a distance C catching up through osmosis how do you make your first leap what team did you join how did you you get into the space yes so I again kind of like learned for a while like I I think a lot of people do was sort of keeping a little bit of tabs but nothing too in depth at all to be honest but then my partner was also working for a few Dows a few different protocols and he was like Hey girl they really need

people who understand comms and kind of how to talk to people and then they really need some women please for the love of God like it's really just a very homogenous group here we need to widen this a little bit it would just really benefit everybody involved so I was like okay I mean I can do this I think I'm confident enough that my skills transfer to a degree I'll certainly have a little bit of a tech learning curve but was very confident that I could do it and I was pretty surprised how it was received it was almost exclusively like comms I don't think we need that no joke everyone was like don't see the value don't see the interest I think we're good I'm like okay really interesting because your stuff makes no sense but okay fine and

then there was even kind of what about the community side I'm generally pretty confident in talking to people and ways that are meaningful to them making things clear Etc they're kind of like UD gen if not not interested so I realized pretty quickly and and let's be clear you worked with Microsoft lvmh major Global Brands and helped them develop branding and com strategy so it's not like you're coming with like you have a lot of experience you understand what it takes to communicate with a customer and to build an audience and create a great message and position yourself all very important to every single business regardless whether crypto or in health care whatever and

these guys I shouldn't say guys guys and girls although it sounds like it's most of the guys I noed I think probably make a few assumptions here they you're on the team you're putting in work and they're like no we don't care no not even on the team they were just like no we're good like they didn't even want to try it out really or they had they had one kind of token comms person who very clearly didn't know anything about comms I couldn't even really decipher what they were doing to be totally honest as I was kind of trying to evaluate their work trying to sort of do my own research on what they saw coms as or how they were handling it it was pretty much non-existent when that sort of turned around was when a one project kind of came back to me that originally said no

we don't need this when they were in some hot water so they need some creds and so I was like okay I think I can do this uh what I ended up doing was talking to a whole slope of people internally independently together Etc to really grasp what was going on um and where those kind of holes were and I created not only comm's plan for them so here's what we're going to say but also a real kind of strategic repositioning like okay you can't just say this stuff you have to do things differently guys because some of the stuff that you're doing is just ridiculous like come on why did you think you were going to get away with that this is all on chain come on like seriously and so created really this whole compan they were like okay

this is great this is so helpful it was just a few weeks in a month in and by the end of it they probably not surprisingly did more or less the opposite of what I said they just kind of Al turned on one another went to the press it was a real real mess and that team was booted about I think six weeks after the end of kind of my contract if you will and so it became really clear to me that there were some very very very pronounced issues in the space it was a team of very young leadership mostly Anonymous but it had come out kind of who some of the people were nothing wrong with young people they're amazing they have great ideas but sometimes running a business goes a

bit better if you have some business experience and just some life experience and some people management experience and some fund management exper experience and that really wasn't the case for any of them so I very quickly was like oh my gosh I'm uphall I'm out get me back to web 2 like this is just not a viable career shift and I wasn't thinking it totally Chang in my career but more kind of adding in some crypto to what I was already doing seeing how I could kind of have one like in one leg out and for me it just felt like an impossibility after that experience it's so tough because like this false start story is a story that I hear a lot in crypto and blockchain because as you

said there's just it's all startups right so right you know most of them are going to fail right like we're not joining wellestablished businesses that are have sustainable Revenue I mean yes there are now more and more but mostly it's just startups and you're going to have a little bit more difficulty so you kept your web 2 job I totally just still have it y yeah exactly you're still still right so you so that gave you some flexibility to come back what was it like to go back into web two were you like I'm done with web 3 and I'm never going that way again were you never still trying to keep a foot in there sure I really didn't keep a foot in but I put on the back burner

and I knew I was going to keep it there for a little bit of time I'm kind of a no sort of person I'm like listen you did me dirty not saying seems to be a forever like breakup but we're going to take some time apart and so I went back to my kind of web to clients really Dove back in and to be totally honest with you it felt pretty good like I knew on one hand that it wasn't the most maybe Innovative work or the fastest paced most exciting environment because again working with big more traditional clients of course there's some sacrifice on those fronts but frankly at least it wasn't the dumpster fire that I had just witnessed I was like I will take a little bit of professionalism and a little bit of

experience for a little while because these people are not ready for me and they're not ready for people who are not one of them and I got that so so clearly and I mean I guess I would say there was some silver lining though it illuminated really a lot of the pitfalls that we still continue to see in web 3 today certainly to a lesser scale I would say things have matured but you know we see kind of the potential problems with building an Echo chain having just a very homogeneous very small group of people at the end of the day all just parting back to each other what each other want to hear the shared reality building environment I believe is a lot of what has been problematic about web to it is inherently when you

have a few people trying to build for the many there's only so well they can do that you need a diversity of opinions diversity of backgrounds you I think diversity sometimes gets this like woo woo treatment but at the end of the day you just need representation otherwise how could you possibly understand what other people want and mean and how they understand things and how they believe so at the very least I was like all right I see that there are some real gaps here some real issues I'm also confident that once this does mature because I really still believe very deeply in the tech and what it could Empower I was like I'll come back maybe when they're ready for me we'll see okay so what did get you back we know now that you did come back that's why I come your show so what got you back yeah for

sure I think it's twofold on one hand on a really kind of personal level I think since that the world has gone to a little more I think it's even more apparent excuse my language but you could swear on the show it's fine okay um yeah I was just feeling a little unfulfilled and a little disillusioned with life honestly again if I'm being really blunt here I was waking up a lot of days and being like I kind of feel like life on planet Earth sucks like not to say there's not good there absolutely is I'm able to recognize that but it just felt so much harder than it had to be and like that was just getting worse you know whether it's student like it's just a series of crises it felt like you

know the student loan crisis the climate crisis like addiction housing water you know there's so many like God damn and then simultaneously we're also seeing all these super hierarchical corporations the ultra wealthy sucking out all of the value from all of our existing institutions and leaving nothing for the people so I think that was really kind of boiling up in me in a really big way and I felt compelled to do something about it so my first gut ran was not actually web 3 I was like okay I'm going to start a kind of consultancy think tank like Launchpad for systems redesign sustainable systems redesign started pitching it to a few friends and a very smart one was like

hey Erin it's going to pay for that I was like oh all the people who would maybe give me money are profiting from our current systems largely so that's going to be a real uphill battle and also doing this myself like it was just a a real pipe dream that didn't have maybe a lot of realism or pragmatism in it so I kind of left that by the wayside and then my insistent husband came back and was like okay so it's kind of defi but hear me out shei and I was like skeptical I was like all right let me check it now I guess I could maybe go back into like the defi sphere and I think I looked at their Twitter page and they were calling out for a new cohort and I signed up in

seconds and honestly it was one of the best decisions if not the best decision I made this year this was earlier this year wow yeah they must have had great coms okay what is shii so shii is kind of this educational initiative and Community huge awesome community that really empowers women and non-binary folks to understand grow and I would say own kind of their wealth and value through web 3 and just kind of like all new tech education and experimentation and there were so many things that I loved about it I think again because I was coming from like this more personal space where I was really craving the how like I knew kind of what my mission was I felt it in my

blood but I just didn't know how and again this gave me the sort of like toolbox it really taught me okay so we have these things at our disposition and then it just kind of illuminated so many like it just unlocked my creativity in like the most gorgeous way I was so grateful for it but it also just I mean you have the educational side which is awesome it's incredibly approachable I would recommend it to anyone at any stage and you do have people who know absolutely nothing about web 3 up to people who actually work in web 3 but maybe don't have much experience in dii or don't know much about staking they don't know much about how they can use some of the more dii tools to build their own wealth and so you have a really diverse kind of group of people

which brings me to the community which is also incredible like I think one thing that shi does so well and it's a little intangible but it feels good and this is something that I've kind of been focusing on a lot lately I read this book called bending reality and it's the notion of like how do things make you feel not what you think about them but in your body like do you feel at ease do you feel a little happy do you feel a little giddy do you feel a little stressed tightness in your chest whatever and she I mean Maggie love is behind she she has just created ESP I hate to say it of the hype that is impeccable you feel welcome you feel like you can ask any and every question you feel supported she's put in place all these different little programs and

mechanisms to guide you and help you and pair you up with people and introduce you to people in the community and then there's also the kind of experimentation side really big on using the tools which I think is so I mean you probably know so important it's one thing to learn about them it's a whole other thing to actually try them out out and get comfortable doing them and they do that super super well too so it's been incredible experience you got to talk to talk right if you're listening to this podcast and you're not transacting on chain you know stop listening and go transact on chain because you'll learn more Honestly by trying and experimenting than you will by listening to anything anybody can tell you or reading anything anybody can tell you you need to do that's the best always the best way to learn to grow absolutely

one thing that I love about your entry is you found your your community and I think that is such a it's a tough thing to do when you enter web 3 because there's so many communities and it's tough to know which one's yours there's a lot of false starts there right but I think that for anybody listening if you want to get into the space if you're not already in it or if you're in the space and you still haven't found your community go join a few communities and find your tribe and it makes such a difference once you find a strong community so what did you get from shifi what were the sort of how did it kick you in the butt to the next steps in web three I mean I think it gave me obviously the education I learned so much but it also gave me this structure

that I think was sort of lacking I think the doy old research model and I think shei was very much created out of as a response to kind of some of the failings of the do your own research mentality it's amazing to do your own research everyone should but if you can learn in community and come together at specific times each week you're probably going to learn a little bit better and a little more holistically and so that was very much the case for me I think structure I really really benefited from it's just really easy to let something go when you're doing it yourself and you don't really have any support and you get busy or you get tired or you get sick or whatever and then you fall off and then three months later you're like oh my God what happens she kind of doesn't let you

do that I mean you could you could always leave but the kind of reminders it's twice a week one and a half hour classes it's live with Maggie everyone's in the chat saying like good morning it starts with music there's just a really nice nice again Vibe and structure that I really benefited from and I would say the other biggest thing was probably the introductions it's something that they do I found really well they use something called intros doai where you felt kind of a profile and then it matches you up with people in the community so it could be in your cohort functioned by cohorts there's a few each year I think two maybe three or could be someone from a previous cohort so it might be someone who's been working web through for years and is down to help you could be a new person and Riff on

like okay how the heck did we each get here and it was just this really heartwarming lovely experience every time I did one and I really made the conscious decision to lean into shifi I was very fortunate to have some free time with my agency work there were obviously we like a lot of people experienced some budget cuts end of last year only this year and so I had a little extra time and I was like I'm going to do this fully and I would recommend that to anyone who of course has that opportunity that me doing all the intros I could it's like how did you want to do this I was like as much as possible and I really did and it was so so so nice I've met so many wonderful women non-binary folks who are here for so many different reasons and honestly I

left a lot of them with goosebumps and to me that's kind of maybe the best indicator of just a really valuable conversation that sticks with you for a while so who did you meet that got you excited is that what led to your next opportunity it certainly did so I was really lucky I mean I pin it on a little bit of synchronicity a little bit of serendipity I met this wonderful sheire named Sandra who had done it previously so she wasn't currently doing the program but she just really loved it and was uh still doing these intros and still chatting with new sheers and so we got chatting about why we were in web 3 what we were interested in and I kind of started talking to her about this real desire to reshape our systems that I

just felt like so many things were broken and I just just wanted life on planet Earth to be a little bit better and I wanted to look towards that and she was like do you care about women S I was like wait a second Sandra yes I do I really actually do you know kind of on the flip side I come from a long line of nurses my mother's gynecologist my grandmother who is almost 90 and still alive is a very feisty feminist so I really do kind of have this in my blood in a lot of ways and I and finding a wonderful organization called aena Dow that is working on using the web three stack to fund women's health research and it has just been such an interesting lovely kind of coming together of so

many things I'm interested in and care about I've worked with them since like March yeah okay super excited to jump into Athena down now because that's how you and I first got connected because we were so we've been following D decentralized science for a while we've talked about Vita down on the podcast maybe gosh like six months ago when they raised money from fizer and saw you talking through your newsletter talking about Dai can you just give like an overview of daai and then we'll lead into AOW y absolutely so dii much like defi in a lot of ways is effectively opening up a pretty hierarchical centralized system that is

science so the way science is done today there are kind of a lot of issues with it it's hard for researchers to get funding it's hard to come by they spend about half of their time seeking funding instead of actually doing science it also ends up being really challenging to replicate experiments a lot of them are done in silos and we realize that they don't necessarily hold up in the real world the incentives are really off-kilter so it's really hard for example for young researchers to get much of anything like 2% of funding goes to researchers under 35 years old so it tends to be a lot of the kind of same factors that are able to benefit from the current system not to mention today a lot of research happens at universities the universities hold that

IP and while I have a great reverence for our higher education institutions at the end of the day they might not necessarily be the best stewards of that intellectual property not to I mean I could go on and on but there are just kind of a lot of these sort of inefficiencies and not it's fun because it's not like the experiment themselves so I think maybe there could be a misconception of like wait we don't want to do science faster per se we want it to be you know pressure tested whatever but it's not the exact spirit it's really all the things around it that really just don't have to be that hard and don't have to be that closed off and desid is a movement to really kind of open this up recalibrate the system and something I find really fascinating about it is that it ends up plugging in

really nicely or at least so far is plugging in really nicely to the existing actors so you see some like the researchers are chomping at the bit they're super excited for Athena da for example in our first call for research sh who wanted funding we got submissions from Cambridge from Harvard I mean from some of the world's most renowned research institutions and those people could not get funding that they needed to do research that they believed to be very compelling wow yep crazy right I mean that's a w that is awesome yes and then we also have you mentioned fizer with badow big Pharma for example they're like hey guys we have trouble doing proper moonshot

research you know they they have shareholders they have certain systems in place that make it a little bit harder to really take these early stage gambles but they're really interested in licensing the IP because then they could do the drug development and the drug discovery which let's be honest at least certainly for now like a dow is not going to do that that is a very intricate very specific uh infrastructure system that you need to have access to that we simply do not so plugging into them and then you can also imagine for example having the people because that's kind of the idea of a DA right that it's Community owned Community governed the people being able to make decisions about how medicines or how this IP is licensed what if insulin were owned by the people could we

perhaps have it be much more costeffective and much more approachable for diabetics who absolutely need access to it or they die so to me it just it just makes so much sense we can do better research more diverse research more moonshot research which is a real issue as well that properly Drive scientific innovation forward which really hasn't been the case in the last handful of decades it's stagnated quite a bit Yeah so the thing that really got me on dii was somebody was pointing out to me the challenges with doing research on very like specialized diseases that only have a very small number of people

globally that struggle and suffer from those diseases while the Pharma companies it's not worth it for them to go create that drug and do that research because it's just not a scale so if you have dii you could have a bunch of people self-fund research and like who would care more about research than the person who's struggling with the disease right nobody so there's so committed they care so much and now you they can self fund it and they can use blockchain to govern it to bring to make it open source to bring it onchain so it's immutable so it can be shared across I mean just anybody out there who is gets constant I think we all struggle sometimes with the like like oh what's

the real use case for crypto you know and obviously I could tell you a million of them but like dii is one that never gets told and it is an amazing example to me yeah I'm certainly a little bit biased but I think it is the probably best use case that we have because it's such a tangible issue it's something that I mean I'm American so the healthare system in the US obviously is flawed a lot of people are aware of this but they just don't feel like they have another option and I really believe you know if we kind of zoom out this kind of macro Narrative of crypto or of web 3 or of blockchain whatever you want that's where we need to put our interest and our voices is how can we solve real problems that people experience in their

daytoday lives and health is huge it's huge and as you said the kind of patients being able to fund the research themselves to have a hand in it to govern it to make decisions around it it's incredible you can imagine one of the great kind of examples is rare diseases as you said you know these people are kind of begging for any semblance of research or solution even if it's a little bit risky because it's truly that are very Swift death and there's just not that many focusing on it funny of my sister actually does medical coms too it really runs in the family and she did a lot around whereare thesis with patient groups it was excruciating for her you know she just saw the helplessness and the frustration and almost anger that came out they're like

how is this our reality and how can we not do better by my four-year-old who is probably not going to make it you know to be really transparent so it's pretty incredible yeah we can do some really amazing things and it just brings together all these stakeholders you know at the end of the day almost like it's a fun it's a Research Institute it's a community it's all these things in one place you can imagine if you go into like a Discord you'll find researchers scientists practitioners patients advocates I mean the whole gamut and people are just chatting you know they'll show up and be like hey have you found any research on like X Y and Z we'll have a research topic and be like so here's what we've got and then like oh what does that mean

can you like translate that a little for me and then they do and it's just this lovely discourse that makes science more comp comprehendible comprehensible and more open and more participative in a way that I find really beautiful and also probably very very successful I hope it's such a it's such a common theme that I think you find when you enter web 3 it's like this concept of Open Source permeates everything we do like we all believe that everything should just be open source and I'm not just talking about code when I say that right like talking about research there's so much more of a willingness to share and to build together you know W to use like we we're all going to make it and we all can make it okay so I want

to come back to Athena da So you you're in shifi you have this great intro you meet that founder of Athena da Women's Health dii I mean all these things are coming together it's amazing how this all happens right truly amazing what you were meant to do it sounds like is where this is going I kind of think so honestly I mean it's funny and talking to people about it almost without fail like wow I can really Cent your passion and that's because I really really do love it and I really just believe in it you know kind to rewind a slight bit maybe I can mention like my mom's gynecologist I also personally experienced a lot of the kind of shortcomings of the system and that's really compelling too you know you have a lot of women who have been disserved

by our current systems and I think will very much rally behind this kind of cause for me it was excruciating periods to be totally transparent I talk about it freely because I think most people don't and we should it's important to understand I was like you know in high school and I inev my parents would send me to school they're like girl you can't miss school you got to go to school and I would just have to go home because I was in so much pain and I remember one time crying to my mom me like Mom I got to go to the doctor like this isn't livable this is crazy and she looked me straight in the eye I was like girl I'm the person you would see and I'm telling you there isn't anything for you there are no options are going to just put you

on birth control which has a whole slew of issues and if you start young all the more it effectively eliminates your period your natural period cycle strips you of your normal horal cycle and that is incredibly detrimental to a young teenage girl and her development that will follow so I had that kind of moment of personal realization of just how much this lack of well I didn't know at the time but now I understand lack of funding lack of research lack of attention placed on women's health really is impacting women dayt day and just how much of a disservice we're doing to half of the population like we are not talking about rare diseases here nothing against rare diseases but this is half of the damn world that we have just left by the wayside context we

haven't had women in clinical trials until like the late 80s early 90s there's no clinical trials like usually we can go back 50 you know 60 years when we're looking at medical research because it helps if you have a lot of time and there's nothing for women before before what 90s 80s yeah approximately women were effectively believed to be and I'm not even joking here little men they were like they're just little so if you just give them a little dosage it's com spoiler not really how it worked we have a little bit different a little bit different organ structure a little bit different hormonal structure and so we realized you know now for example like heart meds

are really kind of classic example they are ex excruciating for most women they just don't work particularly well because they're usually heavily overdosed or MISD doed let's say for the average woman and so we have yet this real lack of information lack of data and actually a lot of people who are fund biotech and are interested in funding biotech cite this lack of research and lack of data as part of why they are hesitant to fund it because like we just don't have the numbers behind it and so that's really why a fodal f focuses largely on the research bit it's very purposely science first because a lot of what we see which are which are wonderful and helpful but we have like these trackers these sort of

like Monitoring Solutions for women but we don't have anything to actually treat the condition or treat the symptoms or treat whatever they're experiencing and this can go from everything to proper just period pain that can be really debilitating through to conditions like endometriosis PCOS they touch on average one in one in 10 women and they take I think for Endo it's like seven years to diagnose on average and with very painful uh procedures women are told constantly it's just period pain being being a woman is painful effectively that's also been a narrative that's been pushed for a very long time can trace it back far and yeah it's just we realize that that's not the case menopause ovarian aging our ovaries effectively

die in US much younger than the rest of our bodies we don't know why fertility decreasing globally that might be an interesting thing to invest money in so that's really where Athena Dow comes in it's kind of this all right we need to get the research we need to get those numbers we need to get that science fact information so that we can then enable the rest of the ecosystem to develop in a way that's actually serving women and I would say the last kind of thing on that what's fascinating and this is something that the founder of of Athena Del Laura mentions or has mentioned quite a lot recently is this notion of like girl economy we kind of saw this come up this summer it's a little playful but at the end of the day the takeaway is is if you make things that

work for women they will spend money on them and we are living in a time where women have money women are working it's different than it was 40 50 60 years ago so we're coming into an era where I think we will start to see many more solutions that are actually addressing women's realities the gaps that they see and providing real solutions that again really focus on the root cause instead of just like hey here's some ibuprofen go lay down because this doesn't work okay wow very very very sobering like these are sobering stats and it's you know super important to discuss and I get so excited about these conversations

because so much right now in blockchain web 3 is still at the infrastructure layer like we don't have enough like you know real use case like really impacting lives so okay where is a lot of this is okay the 's mission is to impact women's health for early in Athena Dow's Journey tell tell us where you guys are at right now and just give us a little bit of yeah the lay of what's to come sure absolutely so a theod functions in a cohort model so we have cohorts that mean that we effectively laser focus in on a specific research area unlike some of the other biod dasas we see like for example a sow that's working on

psychedelics or valow that's working on synthetic biology women's health is so vast and so we do we privilege this sort of cohort based focused model and it's working quite well so far the initial two cohorts are reproductive Health Focus so the first one was ovarian aging which means as I mentioned you know our ovaries are aging much faster than the rest of our bodies we go through menopause which puts us at risk for a lot of other diseases it's not just hot flashes and you know memory loss and brain fog and the classic symptoms which are still awful which are serious too we're super serious too menopause I think a loan in the US is estimated to cost the economy like26 billion dollars or something absurd and we spend almost nothing per patient on it it's just

insane so there's a real economic interest in this as well it's not just a moralistic concern so we focus on that first the goal of that we funded our first IP nft so it's a new primitive evely using the nft framework that governs IP or that allows her kind of fractionalized ownership and governance of Ip and that was around with a doctor called Mario cardo who's out of I believe was working on developing hopefully some molecules that are patentable that would Stave will increase fertility and Stave off menopause which would be I mean just a freaking huge accomplishment because again the tap the population and every single woman will go to menopause not everyone will have a kid not everyone has endometriosis every woman will

experience menopause so that's a huge thing the second cohort is on endometriosis and PCOS underfunded misunderstood poorly diagnosed and pretty prevalent conditions that a lot of women suffer from and the next ones I won't give anything away but they will be they will not be on reproductive health so we are going beyond that we're looking at things for example like they like oncology some rare diseases potentially microbiome there's there's kind of a lot of different focuses that we can take and those are already sort of in in the early stages and with each cohort we fund these IP nfts we have three in the works around the ovarian aging side on the Endo PC us cohort we are currently in the process of vetting projects so we do a call for projects

and do a reproductive Health Report around this or a Health Report around the same subject in this case it was a reproductive Health Report focusing on where we're at what's the landscape and it's amazing because it's really qualitative information and then we do a call for for research submissions and so we just closed that earlier this month for Endo and PCOS and that will then go through our deal flow working group so that means we have a lot of highly qualified very intelligent science people who will be vetting all these projects making sure they're what we call translational because a lot of research isn't isn't necessarily something that will go on to become a solution for people and that's what we're really after so they kind of

evaluate all the projects and then they'll go up to governance they'll go to the Dow anyone who holds a token will be able to vote on which of these all very promising research projects they might want to see funded and then we fund the research and then we also have the opportunity need to continue funding it if it produces really positive results we can keep that chain going and if not we can move on to something else the goal I would say for the Dow is certainly of course to see something through from early stage research through the therapeutic that would be really incredible and very much where we're where we're headed wow incredible it's amazing I think what's so fascinating to me is you're an example the is an example of an organization that is using blockchain at many

different phases or steps of your business right and I think that's one thing you know that a lot of the businesses or a lot of people that are trying to understand blockchain get really siloed on like one thing like oh it's just it's a form of money and that's all it's going to be but you're showing I mean just the way that you are using nfts to manage IP and fund research through through that is like that alone is such a a big piece of what you're building and so it's just it's so cool to see how you're integrating blockchain at so many different levels absolutely yeah I mean really just kind of looking at the issues with the

current landscape and then seeing how we can solve for them using again the stack that exists I think that's cool too you were talking earlier a little bit about how a lot of things are still at infrastructure level which is of course so important such critical work but I think it's also really wonderful that we are able to take take what already exists and use it now today to actually do something that again will hopefully improve lives soon or relatively soon amazing yeah yeah okay I want to talk about your token raise you just did a token raise tell us how did it go yep it went super well we are very much in a bare market so we're really really happy and proud that it was successful we were

aiming to raise 250k we raised 126% of that congrats thank you in a bear like that's huge in a bear for Women's Health which yeah you know it comes from a lot of more traditional crypto people and that's who's in the space currently and so I think that is that is a pretty commendable feat but one of the other kind of things that was wonderful about it was the way that the the participation happened so we ended up seeing I think it was 87 of our around 110 bids were under th000 bucks and so that was a real signal to us that we had a a community that was engaged and really believed in the project but also that hopefully these tokens were going

to the hands of actual community members of people who want to be able to have a hand in kind of shaping the future of women's health and not just you know kind of bigger ticket more big wig style checks so that was pretty pretty heartwarming and and A really lovely again signal that we're on the right track something else that we did with the token raise I I think was really fascinating is and I think that D does pretty well we we're getting even better with time but is understanding that we're speaking to a wider audience so doing something like bidding on a token auction is not necessarily an easy or understandable or comfortable experience I think even if you have transacted on

chain and so we understood that early our core team and founder were very adamant about we need to make this as comprehensible and comfortable as we can for people so we for example launched on bio xyz's Launchpad bio XYZ is molecule their accelerator that launches bodas and also creates some of the kind of infrastructure tooling that they need to succeed so we were the first to launch on their new Launchpad we helped kind of co-develop it did a lot of ux testing with some of our contributors but also some of our community members for example a little example is you know we're going through and we're like some of these terms are confusing like I'm even asking myself does this mean that or does this mean that it could mean

three different things and we put a ton of hovers so it still remain very easy to look at on first glance but if you had questions you could just click a little hover not even click just hover over something and it would give you a kind of in-depth uh explanation we also hosted these daily sessions called D 101 and it was just really diving into what is dii what is a themea doubt what is a token option what's token people could come and just ask whatever questions they had and we did those several times a day for a whole week our team was on them regularly answering lots of community questions it was great what else I mean we did some Twitter spaces we we did a whole newsletter series just really made a big effort to bring as

many people as as wanted to partake in this in a positive way and to do comms it's ironic how it sort of comes back to your initial experience in crypto web 3 you you worked with a team that did not care about comms at all and so it's sort of the unfortunate thing about where we're at right now is that we've kind of become a little bit of an exclusive club or an exclusive Society of like you're in crypto or you're not and that's a bad thing and I think most of us on the inside recognize that but the only way to solve that is to like put in the effort like you guys did to slow down and teach people from the beginning

because let's be real here most people are never going to go set up a wallet fund it with crypto and then learn how to use that use that wallet in a browser click a Bunton of transact like yeah freaking right yeah right I mean we are lying to ourselves if we're over here like no no I think people totally do it the cause is worth it the mission's worth it no it ain't like no mission is worth that you could be like you're gonna maybe get like 50 Grand I swear people be like oh God this is so annoying it's probably a scam anyway I think we have to be really real with ourselves on where people's heads are at and that's something that I really just have always loved I think I feel like I take a kind of like psychological

approach to comms just really trying to grasp sort of the Zeitgeist and then also just what people need where their heads are at and I think truly a lot of people are kind of sitting here like is crypto a scam and is AI going to steal my job you know I think that's kind of where the average population is at and so if we think that they're just going to magically do all these like 12 different steps it's just simply not going to happen so even at Athena Dow you know we have a huge mission to also like on this kind of education side it's educating around women's health so obviously where we have gaps that there is a gap some women don't know surprisingly enough but then also about web 3 so that's a real a real choice that the organization has made to make

crypto more approachable and more understandable specifically specifically for women so it's something we're really excited about um I'm personally really excited about because again I think for women especially this is the type of project that might just bring them in that might just hook them be like oh wait I might be able to navigate my period better I might be able to navigate infertility better I might learn actually what freezing my eggs means and How likely it is to succeed or how much it costs you know just get this really tangible understanding of their realities and their bodies with crypto effectively I think that is just such an incredible incredible kind of use case as we were saying and I think it takes something like that

coupled with the desire and poition to want to really get them on board and doing what that takes and not underestimating because it's a lot and get some people who aren't in crypto because again if you know how to use a wallet and you've done this before you're not going to be able to spot the jargon you're not going to realize that coming onto a Discord and seeing 75 GMS it's going to seem super weird some not in crypto guys like no one who's never donees for it's gonna show and be like is this like a robot like what I think there are so many little habits that we're so used to that you need some one from the outside to be able to point it out for sure I think it's the job of every every crypto company right now in my mind to participate in the education

of everyday users right it's just something we all have to commit to and if it's ironic that we want this like open- Source Club but as a result of really this incredible culture that we've created which like it's tough to deny the impact of culture it's amazing the culture GM alone is so meaningful I I I say GM to people in my day-to-day life that own crypto and I'm like oh sorry I know you don't know what that means hey how are you good to see like General Motors what exactly yeah I thought the first time I was like I don't get it cars we yeah we gotta work hard to welcome the masses and to let everybody

in to make it make it more accessible but thankfully like we're at that moment you know where a lot of the tech is being abstracted it's becoming much easier and real use cases like Athena Dow are now coming out allowing every day people to participate I think we're we're at a very exciting you know Tipping Point I wish that everybody was talking about Athena down not friendtech and that your token raise got the 200 million tvls that they got but you need some speculation somehow in your token you'll get there yeah I mean

it'll come too I mean I I think I'm confident that that will come down the road but yeah I super agree I think we're at a fascinating really compelling point in time in web 3 and I I absolutely believe that this will happen you know I'm not here thinking like oh this might not get adopted like no I think it will but how well we're able to shape the tech now in a comprehensive Collective very like wide angle way it's critical right that's kind of like my okay what could go wrong maybe I don't think it's that it's not going to NE get adopted but it's that maybe we'll end up having some of the similar very familiar

pitfalls that web 2 had and I think we have again an opportunity to really bring in more people and get the word out in a comfortable as you cable and familiar way that people are are down to partake in but be open to that and seek that out um because it will only serve us all I really really believe that but yeah it's totally GNA happen I think this Tech is too great it's too much of a people's technology to not push through and again I think it's what collectively we're all longing for I think people want to not be held by a few massive corporates that can decide to do whatever they want with our lives um we're seeing that if you let the

market or corporations Take the Lead they're never going to choose the masses they simply do not but there might be a way for us to do a little better and open things up a little bit yeah it's really exciting hell yeah right I'm on team I'm on team let's go okay before we wrap here and get into a speedrun some fun questions I do want to give you a chance we talked about the doubt how can people find you how can they find out more how can they get involved and I'm also going to set you up to show your agency and your newsletter because you probably won't Shi them yourself and they're both awesome so I want to make sure you do I appreciate that thanks yes definitely follow along with aaou join their Discord follow them on Twitter it's the best way to keep up with what

we're up to there's a lot of exciting things happening the next three and six months are going to be incredible I won't give it all away just come and join and you'll see on my newset we put links links for both those in the show notes yeah perfect thank you and then for my newsletter yes I started this thing called currently digesting when I started Chi because I felt like often when you first get into the space there is this there's so much information it's so easy to just consume it and then move on to the next thing and I had so many instances where I was like really reflective about macro questions about okay if so much of our lives are going to be lived online on our phones what's that going to do to our eyes and to our backs and to our you know like literally

like how is this going to shape our bodies that I mean just really big questions and so I started this newsletter where I talk about it from time to time and then my agency I mean if anyone's interested in some General brand strategy or comms work absolutely it's called content Cooperative obviously we're still around we are actually doing more and more in the kind of tech Bas AI Consulting and and those kinds of things it's a really nice becoming a really nice Bridge with my rep pre-work so that's really cool what else can I tell you I think that's it oh check out shi shi is amazing if you are a woman or a non-binary person and you would like a little more education would like cool Community would like access to this network it's literally 300 bucks for three months of Education it is the

best deal there's scholarships available for people who might need them it's wonderful as well care recommended enough amazing amazing okay couple fun questions before we wrap here great what is a mustre book you find yourself recommending easy one invisible women so touches on Healthcare but all the weight that sort of the world was sorry D built by dudes and very much for dudes everything from yeah Healthcare through to like the seat belts in cars really wom are more likely to die uh car deaths because the seat belts were dummy tested on a male dummy body wow yeah and there's a lot of examples of just really Illuminating and you just

kind of really are like oh my gosh there are so many ways that again life is just a little harder for 50% of the population and maybe doesn't have to be fascinating book definitely not especially the 50% that created all of us I mean come on like those are the ones that we should you know hold up on a pedestal one thing you've bought recently for under $100 that brings you Joy this is like a little T maybe but I finally have found the best SPF 50 like oh my God tell me my wife is gonna love this is is it from France uh I think it might be England okay I got it on cult Beauty and I will send you the link after so you

can put that in there if anyone wants it but it's incredible put the link to spf50 that'll be a first that we've ever done the show notes because also it's for men too but spf50 just like it it keeps your skin looking good for longer but it's usually really cakey and really unpleasant it just doesn't feel good on your skin or it's really like white and pasty this one's great super light Illuminating love it and it's like 25 bucks so I'm going to add in one more thing just I'm so far under wait what's it called what's what's it called it's called oh my God I'm like I think I forget the name but I'm gonna look it up while I'm telling you my second thing my second thing is cheit because I'm in the US right now and I didn't know how much I missed freaking cheit but I did and

yeah I Boston chees lately and I was like really pleased with it I don't know if I've ever had a cheit I don't know if we have cheit Ina in Canada I eat a lot of um not Cheetos but uh like cheesies we call them in Canada like similar Cheetos I don't like cheit more like a cracker right like not a yes it is more like a cracker okay my French would kill me saying this it tastes like real cheese he's like you don't no no it's not that is such a lie you don't know what real cheese is but I don't know they're just good I find them like pretty addicting and big fan last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what

would you write on it honestly I think I'd write like life on planet Earth doesn't have to be this hard and then just like a QR code or like a way that people could like call me like let's just talk about it guys let's talk about it I think like again A lot of people are feeling the weight in so many ways but feel like there's no way out feel so helpless in Shifting the Paradigm and it's also what I love so much about web 3 that I'm totally gonna just like show web 3 to them in a really lovely way but yeah I think we finally have the prospect of a real paradigm shift and I think that would be incredibly comforting to a massive number of people and I think just giving them that hope

giving them that little tidbit of like hey PS like it doesn't have to be this way guys and you can really have a hand in making it a little bit better like come along for the ride let's see what we can do wonderful what a beautiful message it always amazes me how many people on our show don't show crypto or web3 or blockchain at all when we ask them that question like the most common you one of the most common answer to that question be kind be kind that's the most common answer I mean that too it all comes back to there is this under layer of why we're all here in web 3 which is this belief in building better

systems and you said it doesn't have to be that hard we can do better Ain I love it I thank you so much for the time today thanks for sharing really excited to follow Athena da definitely will recommend Chi to lot of people really appreciate your time this has been wonderful day thank you so much for having me on I I really love chatting with you too awesome thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web

through insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one