Digital Currency Group sits down with Shroog Al Saquabi, a senior digital consultant and blockchain champion at IBM, to discuss the wide-ranging and sometimes complicated world of blockchain. She talks about learning about blockchain from the ground up, the power and transformative potential of blockchain technology, and how the complexity behind the industry and technology poses some of the biggest challenges in terms of education—but also presents some amazing opportunities. Click through to read all of her insights.

Shroog Al Saqaubi is a Senior Digital Consultant and Blockchain Champion at IBM. She’s spent the last 5 years in IT industry, and has been focused on blockchain technology for nearly a year.

How did you first get introduced to the idea of blockchain technology?

I got introduced to Blockchain late 2015, I had heard the hype about this mysterious technology and I didn’t understand exactly what all the hype was about.

Early in 2016, I had a discussion with one of our IBM Middle East and Africa blockchain experts about what blockchain technology is and how it works. The first thing I understood was “it’s like a linked list data structure built on top of distributed database” and he gave me an example about how we can use it to track the provenance of luxury goods.

Then in Aug 2016, there were business and technical training courses held by IBM in Dubai, which were the first of its kind in the region as it was going very deep into the technology and included a day focused just on the writing of smart contracts. I was lucky enough to get a chance to attend them. These courses made things much clearer and understandable, but for some reason, I wasn’t convinced enough that we don’t have yet a technology that can provide the same solution and I started comparing it with some existing technologies. Since then, I’ve dedicated a lot of time learning about this technology and I’ve worked hard to understand it more and more and to differentiate it from existing technologies. Blockchain encompasses a broad category of technologies, every day I find myself discovering something new that makes me believe more that it has a critical role to play in the future of the business world. However, I have to remind myself we are still in its early stages.

At the beginning of 2017, I was appointed as IBM’s Blockchain Champion for Saudi Arabia, and have started teaching the local team about blockchain as well as engaging with IBM clients to help them understand how blockchain can transform their businesses.

Digital Currency Group's Meltem Demirors discusses women's role in the budding industry of blockchain. She notes that women make up a minority of participants in blockchain and cryptocurrency—but many see room for growth. Opportunities abound for mentorship, education, and other ways to encourage and support more women in the growing and rich field, providing what Demirors calls "a tremendous opportunity."

Click through to read more about women's prospects in bitcoin and blockchain, current statistics and the environment and demographic makeup in cryptocurrency today, some of the women who are already standing out in the field, and more.

By Meltem Demirors

When I first started my journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole, I never expected to be surrounded by so many women. People always seem surprised that there are a lot of women who work on various problems — whether technical, academic, commercial, regulatory, or PR — in both bitcoin and blockchain technology.

It’s been fantastic to be surrounded by such a supportive group of powerful, highly intelligent women who are tackling some of the most challenging problems the budding bitcoin and blockchain technology community will face over the coming decades. One of the things that I’ve been excited about working on is more efforts to get diversity into the spotlight — it’s still very much a man’s world, and the stats reveal some exciting opportunities for our community.

Important caveat: This post is not intended to be critical, but constructive so I hope it comes across that way. Feel free to leave critiques in the comments or send me a note at meltem at dcg dot co if you want to provide feedback or talk offline.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Just looking at the DCG portfolio of companies we’ve invested in over the last 3 years, here’s what I found (full disclosure — using mostly publicly available information from company websites, CrunchBase, LinkedIn, etc. so numbers are intended to be directional, not absolute)

Our 67 portfolio companies collectively employ 944 people (amazing!). Of those, 163 are women. That’s 17% which is on the low end for tech, but it is much higher than I anticipated. The geometric average (mean) per company was 12%.
23 of our 67 companies, or over one third, employ no women at all. None of these companies have over 10 employees. This suggests women are typically not involved in the early stages of company building, which may be because:
The most common role for women is (in order) Executive Assistant, Office Manager, PR / Marketing / Communications, Regulatory / Compliance, Finance
There were only 4 female engineers in my sample set. Overall, there are probably about a dozen female engineers in the entire space.
The company with the highest ratio of women employed 50% women, and it was one of only a handful of companies that employed non-white females. The second highest employed 46%. The next was below 30%.

What I see from looking at these numbers is a tremendous opportunity. We can build the community we want if we all work together to address issues at all stages of the funnel. I would love to bring together all of the leaders in the bitcoin community and identify how we can all become more aware, more proactive, and more pragmatic in building a rich, diverse community of stakeholders.

Women in Blockchain: Shroog Al Saquabi @ IBM

Women in Bitcoin and Blockchain Tech — An Opportunity

Numbers Don’t Lie