My Path to ConsenSys
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Charleston
Riley 9:00 AM
#44 Mythbusters (Informed views on issues, events & / or institutions)
X X X X X Robert Dowling (Founder, rePurpose; Innovation Fellow; Student, The Wharton School), Rahilla Zafar (Managing Director MENA, ConsenSys)
Scribbled next to this entry in the Renaissance Weekend programme I wrote the words “Dubai Future Accelerator.”
I didn’t know it, but what happened at this first meeting and the conversation behind this scribble would give me my first taste of what Renaissance truly is –possibility.
When I had gotten my invitation to Renaissance Weekend in the mail, I was confused. I had only heard of it once –in the opening anecdote to one of my favorite books, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. Bill Clinton, then a student fresh off a Rhodes scholarship, was invited to Renaissance as well –and the story goes he kept a small black book where he maintained contact information for everyone he met. These people would later help him get elected to Governor, and eventually, President.
Renaissance Weekend was the first time I was at a place where I felt had a seat at the table –it’s not a conference, it’s an ideas festival where the authorities from every industry meet to discuss the issues in a non-partisan, completely off the record way. Even though the room is filled with astronauts and Nobel Prize winners, Congress people and Heads of State, C-Suite executives and nonprofit leaders, Generals and celebrities, everyone takes the issues seriously, not themselves. Attendees are on a first name basis, and at night everyone heads out through the quaint streets of Charleston and has a good time together.
It’s invitation only, and what happens here is kept a secret amongst participants. But to not include Renaissance in the story would be to cut out one of the most significant parts of this narrative –not only for the story of the past year but also in the larger trajectory of my life. Growing up in the suburbs of New York leaves much to be desired –everything happens in a parking lot, the school system is not designed to push you to an elite institution after high school, and there’s very limited access to the organizations and people who make decisions directing the narrative of the global order.
I had a great conversation in Whistler about the concept of why — why we are doing something or why are we at a given place at any given time, why we meet the people we meet and why the world is the way it is — with Fiona Banister, who is a very clandestine but incredibly skilled social impact investor, and Bruce Pavitt, the man who discovered Nirvana (the band, not sure about spiritual enlightenment — you’ll have to ask him yourself about that). Fiona would say that Renaissance was the first time I was truly in my element. And I didn’t know it then, but what I scribbled down on my programme about Dubai would be the catalyst of an archetypical story of what happens at Renaissance Weekend.
The “Dubai Future Accelerator” scribble came from someone named Rahilla Zafar, who apparently worked at a place called ConsenSys –and at the end of our session, she trying to sell me on something –something called Ethereum blockchain. She told me she was impressed by my ability to advocate for impact focused projects and mobilize people all around the world to build. She told me I should learn more about blockchain and I’d see great value in incorporating it into my work.
Renaissance Weekend is completely non-partisan –everyone from Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff to General Flynn’s closest advisor was in the room, and people put aside their deep-seated commitments to party politics to share ideas. Something we all agree on however is that the financial system we’ve been using since records were kept in the city of Genoa dating back to 1340 is broken, and we are on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution. Little did I know that the technology she was trying to sell me on after the first panel of Renaissance Weekend would be the enabling technology for this revolution — that technology, Ethereum blockchain.
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New York City
New York plays host to a great many good times with some of my closest friends — for the work I do and what I am building though, it’s played more of a recurring motif, a place where follow up meetings from experiences in other cities happen and where I am asked to attend conferences and events.
About a week after the Presidential Inauguration, Rahilla invited me to the ConsenSys Brooklyn office. I was still in the dark about the technical potential of blockchain technologies, and I had not even given it much thought since Renaissance Weekend — but I was nonetheless asked to take on a task for the company.
I accepted but then flew out on my journeys around the world… and I really didn’t think much of it while I was abroad. When I returned to New York from Vancouver the same week that Rahilla returned to New York from Dubai, we naturally planned a coffee chat. From there, the project she tasked me to really took off.
While I cannot publicly say what exactly we are working on, I can say we strategized a plan to execute and it is coming to life as you read this.
She then invited me to the Ethereal Summit, a conference in Brooklyn that ConsenSys was running all about the potential of Ethereum. The more and more I was speaking to Rahilla and her team about Ethereum, the more and more I was interested. I ended up delaying my flight to Kuala Lumpur by a few days to attend this conference.
The Ethereal Summit happened at the end of a particularly hectic week for me in New York.
I was leading a delegation to the United Nations earlier in the week to work on science, technology, and innovation policy in support of the sustainable development goals. It was at the UN where I coincidentally met His Excellency Abdullah Lootah, Emirati royalty and Director General of the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority, who works on implementing data science solutions in support of the Smart Dubai vision — the same vision ConsenSys was implementing Ethereum to support.
But while I was shaking his hand I got a call — the Indian embassy could not make a decision on the Visa I applied for. I was planning on spending time in Andhra Pradesh this summer to continue my work advising a team at the government on economic development and growing an ecosystem of innovation in the state. I was also planning on building out a social enterprise in Mumbai — but the embassy did not issue me a visa.
I rushed to the Indian visa processing center in Chelsea to grab my passport. For the first time in history, a passport was returned to them without the Embassy having made a decision — they did not even return my application, just my passport with a post-it-note saying that I applied for the wrong visa.
I got to the embassy in the Upper East Side and refused to leave without a way into India. After a little bit of negotiation, they invited me back in the next day –thirty minutes and $200 USD in cash later — I had my hands on a multiple entry visa.
That evening was also the first conference call related to the the project ConsenSys tasked me to — Rahilla was on the line, along with Jeremy Millar from ConsenSys, and a key stakeholder in what ConsenSys was looking to build out.
A trend you can see at ConsenSys is that all of the people who work there are changemakers through and through — they’re not afraid to take risks for something they believe in, and they are all looking to build something that will have an impact greater than themselves. I believe part of the reason for that is Rahilla’s recruiting style — I have never seen anyone else immediately be able to see the best in people and then be able to build such an incredible team through their blended talents.
Rahilla in particular is a fellow Penn alum — she has written two books on the role of women in the global order and how technology is affecting their influence in civil society, Arab Women Rising and the Internet of Women. She spent the last several years traveling across the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Gaza exposing the world to women working in technology in the region, and her contemporaries consider her the top women’s rights advocate.
And it turns out she had been trying to recruit me for ConsenSys from the time we met in Charleston. After Ethereal Summit, I was sold — I accepted an offer to work for ConsenSys in Dubai.
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Dubai
By now, you probably may have realized something about my worldview that a good majority of experiences I have had throughout my life has lead me to believe… bureaucracies are the largest impediment to each of our potential impact and professional development.
I graduated from a public school in the suburbs of New York that was universally regarded as a weak performing institution. This school was a factory for pushing students to community college. Students, including myself, were consistently told that we would not be accepted to any of the schools in the Ivy League. Every time students took initiative, the Administration put up a fight to try to stop them — including when I competed for the All-American Model UN team in Beijing and independent studied for AP exams, many of which the school did not offer.
Imagine if students already marginalized by their social standing or family income were not further marginalized by being forced to attend a failing school because of where their houses are zoned, and instead they were permitted to pool coursework from multiple providers, taking courses based on interest and initiative and from institutions they would not otherwise have access to? Ethereum is designed to decentralize systems like education, it is designed to unleash human potential for acquiring knowledge.
In the United States, each stage in a person’s life and career is considered a rite of passage. We celebrate that people have the freedom to enter career fields of their choice, which is all well and good, but when an American worker walks into their office each day, they are siloed into certain expectations of their credentials and positions — a hugely limiting factor both for the organization who could be wasting incredible potential and for personal development for the employee. Being introduced to more intense, high level experiences could lead to incredible opportunity for development.
In a previous internship I held for a large bureaucracy, my first task in my first week was to attend a conference — a meeting of all of the top level policymakers and executives from relevant industries. Naturally, I did what I usually do at conferences such as these, which was to engage with attendees, forge meaningful relationships and learn a thing or two from our conversations, and keep in touch in the interest of building something great later.
When my supervisor found out about this she was furious — as an intern, I had no agency to speak to the other people attending the conference and was expected only to sit in the back and listen and watch the presentations.
Imagine a workforce where people were able to work on projects and develop solutions to challenges as they please. Ethereum is the enabling technology to flip our rite-of-passage model of the workforce on it’s head, with the potential to decentralize organization and encourage a holacratic model of leadership. Ethereum is designed to change the workforce, it is designed to unleash human potential.
My disdain for bureaucracy runs deep… which is why over the past year I have been in and out of Kuala Lumpur building The Renegade Institute, an organization that solves challenges for marginalized people where our institutions have failed. Perhaps you can see now where my trajectory resonates with ConsenSys and Ethereum.
I have always seen education as a springboard to build something bigger — I see Penn as the springboard for greater adventures after graduation. At ConsenSys, I’ll be working on closing the talent gap in blockchain software developers, building out an academic programme built on Ethereum that develops the company’s engineers so that they can build something of incredible impact at the company.
I will also be working with top government officials and Heads of State from around the world to forge private-public partnerships designed to deploy Ethereum in the interest of their respective constituents. I’ve always been able to forge genuine, meaningful relationships with people, I have always been able to see everyone’s interests and align stakeholders — I have always been good designing policy that encourages economic growth.
In government, blockchain is being used to better track and secure individual personal data, for handling records that involve multiple parties or a value transfer such as wills and title transfers for physical property, and is being deployed for tracking elections.
In finance, the distributed ledger model eliminates the problems facing our double entry credits and debits system, revolutionizes clearing and settlement by storing ownership on the blockchain and thus being able to transfer value without the need of a middleman, and expedites international trade by easily tracking shipments and cutting down on the bureaucracy needed to facilitate cross border, cross ocean trade.
In medicine, patients will now have control over their own data and research would be streamlined. In entertainment, the blockchain allows for a return on investment to independent artists, breaking down the Hollywood establishment who control the funds for huge projects that gross millions and solving the problem of crowd funding platforms such as Indiegogo and Gofundme where there are no expectations of returns. In music, artists now have control over the rights to the content they create.
Supply chain management, internet of things, digital currency, smart contracts and assets, securing data –the use cases for Ethereum blockchain technology are endless, and the time for its deployment is critical. There are millions who will be lifted out of slavery, millions who will have better access to healthcare, billions of dollars of value created and a boom in trade and the economy.
For all of these reasons and more, my work at ConsenSys deploying Ethereum in Dubai will be some of the most important work I am ever a part of.
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Robert Dowling is a junior at The Wharton School, on sabbatical to pursue his social enterprises — the Renegade Institute, the Diplomacy and Policy Council (www.PennDPC.com), and rePurpose (www.repurpose.global). Robert spends his time between New York where he lives, Philadelphia where he learns, and Washington DC and Kuala Lumpur where he works. He’s been recruited to join ConsenSys in Dubai to support the deployment of Ethereum Blockchain at the Dubai Future Foundation, an accelerator designed to bring the future of smart cities to life.
ConsenSys is a blockchain use-case incubator that builds decentralized apps on Ethereum, and was named the City Blockchain Advisor to the Dubai Municipality. Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys and inventor of Ethereum, saw a problem in the current financial system and developed a new model after reading the Bitcoin white paper. He is now responsible for incredible change in enterprise and government as ConsenSys deploys the technology for government, industry, and in the interest of bettering the lives of people around the world.
