An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
I recommend breadth-first: create a matrix of the technologies you find interesting, read their white and yellow papers, join their communities, and engage with the problems. You’ll start to see patterns, and you’ll find which areas you are interested in, and then you can dive deep. The sentiment of an expert is that no problem is unworthy of further examination, while simultaneously being realistic about how many hours are in a day. Optimize accordingly.
As a part of our series about Wisdom From The Women Leading The Blockchain Revolution, had the pleasure of interviewing Sara Drakeley of MobileCoin.
Graduating from MIT with a degree in mathematics and computer science, Sara joined Walt Disney Animation Studios as a technical director on Oscar-winning animated movies. At Disney, she led the procedural geometry software engineering pipeline on many family-loved films, including Frozen, Wreck-it-Ralph, Big Hero Six, Zootopia, and Moana. Following Disney, Sara moved to Wall Street to implement trading infrastructure and data engineering platforms, then joined the SpaceX simulation team before joining the MobileCoin team.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us the story of how you decided to pursue this career path? What lessons can others learn from your story?
I’ve always loved math and physics. As a teenager, I wanted to be Richard Feinman. He was the “cool” scientist, playing bongo drums and participating in the countercultural movement. I went to MIT to realize my dream of being a physicist, but after the Automata, Computability, and Complexity course with Scott Aaronson, my mind was blown by the sheer possibilities of computation from a theoretical perspective (and infinite Turing tapes are really cool). I discovered computer science was my true passion. I went on to work for Disney Animation as a software engineer with a specialization in procedural geometry (think, for example, the trees in Frozen, the fur in Zootopia, and the water and waves of Moana). From there, I became fascinated with financial systems, which can even be viewed as giant backpropagating optimization simulations, and I spent time on Wall Street building trading and data platforms. Eventually, I was lured back to California to work on rocket simulations at SpaceX, before Josh Goldbard, MobileCoin’s CEO, convinced me to join MobileCoin and work on the future of payments. From there, I went on to become the CTO of our little startup Unicorn, helping to build the next generation of global payment infrastructure and experiences. The lesson I would impart to others is: the best way to get up to speed in a new environment is to engage. For any problem, whether you have prior experience or not, engage with it. Chew on it, talk about it, and share it with others — that’s the fastest way to build expertise
Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
Some of the most interesting projects we’re working on at MobileCoin include: improving our novel oblivious remote computing platform which enables self-custody of funds on mobile devices while allowing the user to fully control what data they share with service providers. Another key project is evolving our blockchain protocol to include multiple confidential assets, as well as bridges to other chains to provide wrapped assets. We’re also developing a first-in-class global payments experience led by our head of product, Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, who built CashApp.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Early in my career, I don’t think I fully understood what mentorship meant in the broader context of personal development, but looking back, I recognize that Maryann Simmons, a technical leader at the forefront of innovation in the field of graphics, was critical to my development as an engineer. Maryann is an incredible representation of what it means to be an impactful leader in technology. She and I developed a deep friendship, traveling together to film festivals and for snowboarding trips, while she simultaneously guided me on how to be a better engineer. I remember once when I was trying to solve a complicated problem surrounding digital feather generation, she said, “Why don’t you start with the tests. What should it be doing? Write those and see where that gets you.” It was a gentle (but direct) introduction to test-driven development, and an “aha” moment for me on how to structure my approach to problems by starting with what success looks like and working backward from there.
What are the 3 things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
The thing that excites me most about blockchain and crypto is the speed of innovation. It lies at the intersection of distributed verifiable computing, remote services, deep math, and cryptography. Thus, it has attracted some of the greatest minds across academia and industry. It feels like we are early enough in the development of this industry that there are so many low-hanging novel contributions to pluck while building toward a clear vision for applications that exist with a level of speed, trust, confidentiality, and resiliency we have never seen before. I’m also excited by the diversity of contributors in the field. I recall seeing recently that Uniswap’s workforce is 50% women. At MobileCoin, we’ve attracted a diverse range of backgrounds to our engineering team that I’m really proud of. Lastly, I’m very excited about the progression of digital assets and their use cases. At MobileCoin, we’ve been laser-focused on the payments use case because there is a clear need to provide a global settlement platform where users control their own data. When people say blockchain is too complicated, we point to the global financial system which is rife with unnecessary intermediaries (who all take fees) and complicated settlement regimes that are no longer necessary with the current state of technology. Blockchain removes these intermediaries, and with our technology, the payment is final within seconds as opposed to days.
What are the 3 things that worry you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
The thing that worries me most about blockchain and crypto is the challenge of replacing existing systems with superior technology. Even when you have a superior product to solutions with widespread adoption, the catalyst to change has to be enough that it’s worth it to the user. We’ve seen in several innovations around the world that sometimes the best bet is to look for geographies where you can “leapfrog.” For example, this was the case with the development of cell phones. There was more adoption in countries where telephone line infrastructure had yet to be built, and the population could easily adopt the newer technology of mobile devices. Similarly, we are looking at geographies where payments infrastructure may be ready for a leapfrog event.
Another thing that worries me is the general lack of privacy in most blockchain solutions. It is untenable for payments to lack privacy. With a public blockchain, if you try to buy a coffee, the barista, the person behind you, a foreign government, or your ex could all be watching your payment address and see everything you’ve ever bought and will buy in the future. It’s even possible to track your real-time location, as the virtual addresses of merchant establishments are also public on the chain. Many projects are building on this assumption of public data, but I think adoption requires that we put control of data in users’ hands.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?
I’m a very mission-driven individual. I believe what we’re building at MobileCoin has the potential to change lives for the better, improve access to payments infrastructure, provide a digital option to existing establishments that can only accept cash due to small margins, and shift the paradigm around remote computing so that users can demand oblivious services and complete control of their data and financial lives. A great example is Ideas Beyond Borders, which is working to translate the world’s knowledge into Arabic. They have previously found it a challenge and prohibitively expensive to deliver payments to their contributors over existing rails. MobileCoin provides a viable option to streamline global payments while eliminating the risk for individuals who may not otherwise want to be identified.
As you know there are not that many women in your industry. Can you share 5 things that you would advise to other women in the blockchain space to thrive?
I recommend becoming an expert as quickly as possible. I’m not saying that to be glib, because there are concrete steps to develop expertise. I love the expression that self-esteem is built by completing esteemable acts. Similarly, expertise is built by approaching problems as an expert would (Dunning-Krueger effect notwithstanding). For any new technology, the space seems bottomless, but you can cover a great swath of it if you are efficient in your exploration.
I recommend breadth-first: create a matrix of the technologies you find interesting, read their white and yellow papers, join their communities, and engage with the problems. You’ll start to see patterns, and you’ll find which areas you are interested in, and then you can dive deep. The sentiment of an expert is that no problem is unworthy of further examination, while simultaneously being realistic about how many hours are in a day. Optimize accordingly.
Another recommendation to women in the space is to build friendships. This is the fastest way to gain confidence. When you are in a room with people you trust, you know that you can say something that might seem stupid, and your friends will still believe in you. A simple step to friendship building: ask about your coworkers’ weekends. You’ll start to see their life outside of work and care about them as people rather than as output machines. Last, I’d say that for me, it has been important to recognize that gender is often a performance, and the art and authenticity of how you perform yourself is vital to who you are. I have gone through phases where I performed my femininity differently, and whatever way I showed up was valid. It is important to me to look back on the women who fearlessly performed their femininity in all manner of ways, and how they were successful because they were authentic to themselves.
Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the blockchain industry?
We need to examine the funnel and pinpoint where we lose people. By the time I was in college, the numbers still weren’t great for women in STEM, and it’s all a game of attrition from there. I’m also a new mom, and it was critical to me that MobileCoin was able to offer paid leave while still allowing me to contribute so that I didn’t lose my identity or sanity in the transition to motherhood. I’d like to see programs across the industry to support women and their health and invest in women for the long term. An important aspect of my life that allowed me to become a scientist and mathematician was encouragement from a young age to explore what interested me. Similarly, if we can identify women with applicable skills in other fields, we can help attract them by showcasing what is special and interesting about blockchain, encouraging nascent interest in the technology at any age, and making sure it is clear that there is a home for anyone in this industry.
What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?
My favorite “Life Lesson Quote” is an anti-proverb that Mark Twain falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin in an essay lampooning aphorisms: “Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well.” Even wrapped in satire, I take comfort in this quote from the “lazy-load” approach to prioritization. If it’s not important enough to do today, is it really important enough for tomorrow? In the film industry, we have a concept of a “CBB,” or “Could Be Better.” The idea is that if the director watches a shot at some point in its development before the final frames are rendered, they can tag something as “Could Be Better,” which means, “Don’t hold up the shot now. Let’s push it through and see.” This happened in a shot on Frozen where Elsa’s hand looked really strange in animation dailies, but the scene was meant to be darkly lit, so the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, gave it a CBB. In the end, you couldn’t see the hand anyway. If they had blocked production, it would have held up all shots that the animators had queued up behind that one, when in the end, it didn’t matter one bit that the hand looked weird. We use CBB at MobileCoin for issues that may ultimately improve things, but don’t obviously affect the user experience, performance, and scalability of the system, or developer ergonomics. I like to say, “It’s only Tech Debt if it costs you something.”
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
With many issues close to my heart, the mission I care about most (and to which I am currently devoting my career) is privacy, and specifically user control of data. Users should have the technology and the right to conceal or share their own data and communications. From advertising campaigns that mine data for sensitive information (like the notorious case where Target determined that a girl was pregnant before her father did), to oppressive regimes that surveil in order to enforce doctrines that may even violate human rights, it is vital that we empower individuals with the tools to protect themselves. Moxie Marlinspike’s beautiful essay, We Should All Have Something To Hide, captures the necessity of private communication quite well. Signal, the end-to-end encrypted communication platform, now supports MobileCoin payments.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I post blogs on mobilecoin.com/news somewhat regularly (check out our Explain Like I’m 5 series to get technology explanations at multiple levels of complexity), and I’ve hosted a few of our Privacy is the New Celebrity podcast episodes, including Episode 21 with Joe Grand, hardware hacker who recovered millions from a Trezor Hardware Wallet; Episode 27 with Bunnie Huang, hardware hacker who reverse-engineered the Xbox; and Episode 26 with Henry Holtzman, one of the early members of the MIT Media Lab and product executive, where we explore why MobileCoin is building a Stablecoin, and the current challenges in the industry with Stablecoins.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Wisdom From The Women Leading The Blockchain Revolution With Sara Drakeley of MobileCoin was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
