Women in Crypto: Karen Chang, VP of Engineering at Stellar Development Foundation

*Crypto has undergone unprecedented growth in the last few years — but when it comes to leadership roles in the industry, women are staggeringly underrepresented. In keeping with Gemini’s mission of empowering the individual through crypto, our series Women in Crypto seeks to shed light on the amazing work that women are doing in crypto and blockchain, with the hope of inspiring more women around the world to invest in crypto and seek jobs in the industry. *

Today we are featuring Karen Chang, VP of Engineering at Stellar Development Foundation. Karen has over 25 years of experience as a software engineer and in engineering management at companies like Netscape, Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Salesforce.

*Learn more about Stellar here on Cryptopedia. *

Tell us about your crypto "lightbulb" moment. How did you get into crypto?

I was working at Goldman Sachs in NYC throughout the 2000s and had lived through the financial crisis and recession in 2008. Most of my friends didn’t work in banks, and I experienced the strong backlash against Wall Street that came after the government bailout. The perception was that financial services companies were taking high risk bets in financial engineering of debt instruments, and because of the contagion effect of the real estate bubble popping, a small pool of participants were able to destabilize the entire global economy.

Wind forward several years, I had come back to SF and was working in tech. I hadn’t been following bitcoin closely until I got into a conversation with an acquaintance who was a true believer in bitcoin and heavily invested. I’ll admit that at the time, I thought of cryptocurrencies as heavy on hype, even though I knew blockchains had some novel uses as a new type of distributed system. Out of that debate, I started reading up on the space, connecting the dots between my past experience during and after the financial crisis and this idea of decentralization in finance — the value of open loop financial systems, protocols, and the runway that creates true marketplaces for financial innovation, low-cost access, and experimentation.

Then, the Stellar Development Foundation reached out. I talked to Jed and Denelle about Vibrant, an app being built in the Stellar ecosystem to allow cross border conversion of currencies, targeted at South American countries like Argentina, where devaluation has been a real and present danger. That use case really resonated with me as an applied benefit of DeFi and cryptocurrencies, and tied into my personal experience in finance and technology in a way that felt meaningful.

Tell us about your role as VP of Engineering — how would you describe your day-to-day role at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF)?

My day-to-day role involves managing our engineering teams, and being responsible for delivering our Stellar SDKs and APIs, full stack product, partner engagement, and infrastructure. I’m focused on making sure our work is aligned with our overall SDF goals in becoming the premier cross-border payment network, and that we’ve got the right talent and organizational competencies to deliver on that.

I spend a lot of time recruiting, talking to my peers in business development, understanding the business context, and translating that into engineering goals. I see a lot of what I do through the lens of organizational readiness — making sure we’re covering the short-term product milestones, while keeping an eye on the overall scale, security, and health of the Stellar network and providing the right tools to our ecosystem of developers so we can make sure Stellar is easy to use.

What's the one piece of professional advice that you would give to your younger self that would have helped you the most as you progressed in your career?

I think for a long time I thought of communicating as a way to express myself. It wasn’t until I got a little older and wiser that I realized self-expression was secondary to delivering a message. And to do that effectively, I needed to build competency around perspective-taking and being able to communicate so that the other person was able to receive the message. In any collaborative environment, I would say the ability to influence your peers and other people is probably one of the most valuable skills you have in your repertoire.

__How can we encourage and facilitate more women entering the crypto workforce, especially in technical functions like engineering? __

I think we need to reduce some of the noise in crypto that can be distracting or intimidating for newcomers. I find the barrier to entry is similar to finance. We like to use obfuscating words or acronyms for concepts that could be more simply explained in plain English. Everyone understands money, right? We all use it, borrow it, exchange it, and we need a place to record what we do with it. Let’s make this space less intimidating by simplifying our words.

The challenge we face hiring in crypto is similar to what I encountered in the mid-90s working at Netscape. At that time, it’s not like there was a computer science degree in internet protocols, so you needed to look beyond a tick-the-boxes approach to find talent. Instead, you prioritize fundamentals and translatable skills that enable people to ramp up in a new industry. Here at SDF, we have folks with astronomy, physics, and law degrees. Some who didn’t go to college at all.

I think certain companies in Silicon Valley have created a culture of perceived academic barriers that have nothing to do with the applied problem solving skills needed for any given role.

That speaks to the second part of my answer to how we bring more women in crypto. I think it’s incumbent on us to find female talent in adjacent domains who are good at logic, are passionate about the interdisciplinary nature of crypto (policy, compliance, engineering, finance), and who show they have the personal grit and conscientiousness to continuously learn in a fast-moving domain of knowledge. I love growing female engineers who can show that kind of trajectory because they will always win the race.

Who are some women that you admire in the crypto space? In tech? In general?

I don’t say this to be self-serving but I really admire our CEO & Executive Director, Denelle Dixon. She was a major reason that I took the leap and joined SDF. She leads with intention and clarity of purpose. With her roots in the web and her vast legal experience, she brings a balance of expertise and leadership. I feel fortunate to work with and learn from her.

More broadly in the tech sector, I’m a big fan of Megan Smith, the former CTO of the Obama administration. She’s been a tech pioneer in the public and private sectors, leading engineering teams at some of the most influential players in the world. And throughout it all, she has stayed true to her beliefs of inclusive innovation.

In general, I’m an admirer of Stacey Abrams and the work she has done in Georgia to expand voting access and rights and how that has spurred not only national discussion but action. She is a vital voice in the United States for equality and for me, an inspiration.

Why do you believe in crypto?

I think blockchain technologies open up the space for financial innovation to enable truly efficient markets. I think this spans not just financial instruments, like the payments space where Stellar plays a key role in reducing the cost of transaction for cross-border assets, but also in really any domain in which there are buyers, sellers, and financial records and contracts.

What is something unique that you have learned from working in crypto?

The main thing I learned in crypto so far is just how many of the use cases require us to solve problems having to do with liquidity. That’s a departure from where I’ve been before — I’m used to highly liquid markets like security assets! It’s not a problem I’ve had to think about too much, let alone think about solving! But price discovery, slippage, and spread problems having to do with new markets for currency pairs in the payment corridors Stellar creates is something we think about quite a bit and a fascinating new topic for me to learn about.