Recently, Coinbase had the honor of partnering with The Violet Society, an organization whose mission is to build community and career mentorship for women and gender-nonbinary professionals in the tech industry, by sponsoring Violet Hacks, a hackathon where a group of about 200 of these professionals gathered to design, build, and pitch various products to a panel of judges in a friendly competition.
Members of the Coinbase Engineering and Talent teams at Violet Hacks in San Francisco.
Over the course of the event, we witnessed many amazing and talented engineers, designers, and product managers hack on a wide range of projects including an AI skincare product recommendation system, a GitHub productivity suite, a customized makeup tutorial app, and even a pet adoption matching app. It was incredible to see how much ground these teams covered in less than 24 hours.
Violet Hacks kicked off with an opening keynote address from Katia Ameri, founder of Mirra, and went on to provide a full slate of informational sessions, panels, and workshops for hackathon participants to attend throughout the weekend. They could take a quick break from hacking in order to learn about UX design from Laurel Beyers, a principal product designer at Nyansa, product management from Ana Pischl, a lead product manager at Zeus, or even attend an “Intro to Blockchain” workshop facilitated by Gloria Kimbwala, founder of Shule. Throughout the weekend, we had great conversations with attendees about Coinbase, who we are and what we do, and about the challenges that we face as women in engineering, in tech, and in this current financial system.
Coinbase is proud to support endeavors like this that empower and support underrepresented minorities in the tech industry and are a critical step towards breaking down the barriers and stereotypes that still inhibit fair representation.
At some point in your career, you will probably find yourself interacting and working with people who do not share life experiences and world views similar to your own. At these times, it’s important to work on expressing your thoughts and ideas clearly to them and, most importantly, listening to them and understanding where they are coming from. Building a team that is welcoming to those of all different perspectives, ideas, and backgrounds is in large part about fostering a culture where we focus on self-awareness and empathy as muscles to grow.
At Coinbase, our mission is to leverage cryptocurrencies to build an open financial system which promotes economic freedom and financial inclusion. In this system, access to financial services should be equal, easy, effective, and secure. This is a future wherein the availability and opportunity for access to financial services transcend socioeconomic, educational, geopolitical, cultural, racial, and gender divides.
For this reason, the topic of inclusion is top of mind at Coinbase as we strive to define the role we play in influencing the cryptoeconomy. We recognize the need to build out a team that can help represent the myriad perspectives of the populations we are aiming to serve.
In our recently published Culture Doc, our CEO Brian Armstrong outlined six tenets of our culture, one of which is to “Focus on the Customer.” Building a more heterogeneous team enables us to be more sensitive and empathetic towards all of our customers’ needs and concerns as we continue to scale. With intention and deliberation, we can focus our efforts on building products that will speak to customers with a multitude of backgrounds, life stories, and experiences all across the globe.
If you’re curious about crypto, finance, technology, or security, and would like to work with some of the amazing engineers here at Coinbase on some of the ambitions outlined here, get in touch with us!
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