The Age of the Tech Bro Is Over
Meet the women overriding the Silicon Valley archetype
The internet has entered a new age. You’ve probably heard about it, even if you haven’t experienced it first-hand. People are calling it a revolution, the democratisation of internet technologies, returning the power to decide how the internet works to the people using it rather than the companies running it.
Yet, despite going through, arguably, some of the biggest changes since the internet was born, the face of this latest upgrade has remained decidedly unchanged: Scruffy, socially-awkward, well-off white boys in the United States. Though the social awkwardness is probably engineered to make these men more relatable, there’s nothing particularly accessible about their stories. Most people can’t afford prep school fees of $40K+ or have a spare ten grand to “dabble in technology” like Zuckerberg’s parents.
Yet despite this sometimes-obscene wealth, the almost-exclusively-male faces of the internet revolution have done a particularly good job presenting themselves, their stories and fortunes as “self made”. Brand management has become a question of hiding privilege and telling a story of normal guys, just like us, but conveniently more talented and hardworking.
Women like Nastya Adamova and Catie Romero-Finger are bored of this story and, frankly, so am I.
Introducing Nastya Adamova, COO & Co-Founder
Nastya is the COO and co-founder of BABsLabs, one of the world’s only marketing firms to focus exclusively on selling Web 3 stories. Even after Russia’s latest invasion forced her to leave Kyiv in February, for Nastya, breaking into the Web 3 world as a woman would have been near-impossible, had she not come of age in war-torn Ukraine.
“I’ve worked in male dominated industries my entire life, even industries whose main customers are women (like international trade for fashion and shoes), all of my clients were men, top management were all men. I spent far too much time being the only woman in the room.
When I was a child, girls’ education in Ukraine focused more on learning languages, on humanitarian industries, while the boys were encouraged to learn math, physics, engineering, everything relating to real “science”.
Over the last ten years, things have changed dramatically, however. In Ukraine, the IT industry exploded, but there weren’t enough qualified technicians or experts to “man” the field. To try and deal with this, many companies created internal education centers for coding and many of the newcomers were women. They started low down, entry-level, with the possibility to learn while still working.
Getting women into tech is one of the reasons Ukraine was at the forefront of the crypto revolution, which, when the war intensified and Russia invaded again, saved so many of us.
Around 30% of Ukraine’s tech industry is made up of women. When you create the structural conditions under which women can easily transition into tech, they do. Ukraine created a unique environment in which women could and did get into tech in high numbers and the whole country benefited from this.
As Nastya explains, the women who ended up in tech fields succeeded visibly. At the Hackathon she helped organize in Kyiv back in December, the winner of the backend development hack — one of the hardest parts of software development — was a young woman. After she claimed first place, three or four companies tried to recruit her.
It’s not enough, however, for companies to be recruiting or even led by women.
For Nastya, it’s not only important for BABsLabs to focus on being a woman-led company and leading industry-wide change by example, but also to focus on women-led projects. This is important because too many marketing agencies which try to get their projects in front of VCs are male-dominated and don’t understand women-led projects well enough to properly tell their stories.
“For example, one of our clients turned to us because they had tried another agency and this agency had turned their story and brand into weird, kind of violent, and utterly inappropriate misogynistic content.”
Focusing on selling the stories of women-led projects helps to make sure these projects land with a marketing agency that understands the subtleties of the brand as well as the interests and beliefs of the women that stand behind it.
Introducing Catie Romero-Finger, CEO & Co-Founder
Like Nastya, BABsLabs CEO and Co-Founder, Catie, has always worked in male-dominated industries. It never bothered her to be one of the few or even the only woman in the room, but what did bother her was the lack of change. New hires would come and go, but the conversations stayed the same: Men talking about things that are supposed to interest men. It never felt like innovation and it certainly didn’t feel like the revolution the internet was supposed to represent.
Web 3 was supposed to change all that, it is inherently different. The tech, much like human society, is complicated.
Unlike in the Web 1 era, more people have computers and the cost of access is far lower. It’s no longer enough to just have cash and computing power; to succeed in Web 3 you have to understand what the new era stands for: Democratisation, decentralisation, an open-access, equalised playing field.
That said, the industry is still very male-dominated and, more than that, very white.
In the creator economy, for example, Latin America should be the natural place to go. According to research, the proportion of people online is up to 20% higher than other regions. The market potential is endless, yet everyone is looking at the heavily-saturated markets of the US and APAC.
The focus is very Anglican, probably because you don’t have much representation. Fewer Latinx leaders means no one looks to Latin America. The same can be said for African nations, a continent with an average age of 30 — perfect for crypto adoption, new ideas, and innovation.
What is the point of being decentralised if we aren’t genuinely looking to decentralise and diversify our focus?
The entire existence of Web 3 is premised on making room for these conversations and taking the results forward. The industry is moving so fast that it’s possible to see genuine results in real time. The speed at which the industry moves makes it possible to test-run new approaches, experiment with new voices and storytelling angles, and to see whether these hit home — all well within the time it takes to develop and launch a traditional, corporate Web 2 product.
Changing up the strategy and going after these emerging markets is no longer an idea that has to drag its feet through multiple management levels and approval processes before it’s put in front of the rich, white guys up in the boardroom.
All Web 3 needs to strategically level-up and break out into new markets is authenticity.
We don’t need another American thinking they get street culture in Kenya, we need a group of Kenyan Web 3 creators or marketers to help craft that product and story.
I spent far too much time working for a system that just did not want to change. Web 3 has given me a sense of power in that it is asking for innovation, it wants people that want to revolutionise. I want to be a part of that.
