Bridget Greenwood TV

Bridget Greenwood, founder of The 200 Billion Club and The Bigger Pie, talks to Liz Lumley about empowering women in the DeFi space. 

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain – the world of decentralised finance (DeFi) – can be an intimidating place. It is filled with evangelists with firm beliefs that our traditional institutions are no longer fit for purpose and a DeFi world is the future. These evangelists, bitcoin miners and crypto investors would rather die on the hill they are holding onto for dear life than adhere to old fashioned ideas of wealth management and long-term investments. This community prides itself as outside the traditional financial ecosystem, despite the regulatory interest and various central bank projects to develop digital money. This is also the world where financial advisor, consultant and investor Bridget Greenwood saw her future. 

Career history: Bridget Greenwood  

  • 2022 The 200 Billion Club, co-founder
  • 2019 The Bigger Pie, founder
  • 2017 BitcoinBro, chief sales marketing officer
  • 2001 Insight Financial Associates, independent financial advisor

Having left a job as a financial advisor in the early 2000s, finding it very difficult to combine a career with motherhood, Ms Greenwood also felt that a collective lack of trust in incumbent financial institutions emerged as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. 

“The financial crisis in 2008 was a man-made crisis, and the people who made it didn’t get affected by it,” she says. “Bitcoin was looking to say: ‘There are times that these centralised organisations just can’t be trusted, so wouldn’t it be great if we had an alternative financial system that was devoid of an essential body so that it can’t be corrupted in that way?’ I think that's a wonderful idea. So that’s why I was very interested in coming into [the DeFi space].”

Despite the DeFi world having a reputation as a ‘boys club’, Ms Greenwood says she was introduced to an entire community of women carving out spaces, using blockchain and distributed ledger technology to build companies that address real world solutions, such as identifying safety and authenticity issues in supply chains affecting the food and fashion industries. 

“The women in the space, they speak multiple languages, they have multiple degrees. They have career histories that anyone would be proud of,” she adds. 

Ms Greenwood admits that during the height of the crypto hype, such as the rise of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, many conferences in the space would hold after parties in strip clubs and exhibition halls would be filled, not with women building companies, but women hired to look pretty next to companies built by men. “Crypto was a tech that started in finance – put those two together and it is going to men who are largely the owners,” she says. 

However, the recent rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has changed the demographics a bit, she says. The NFT market has emerged as part of the art and content world. And while most of the current NFTs are “owned by men”, women see NFTs as an opportunity to come into a space that is relevant for them, she adds. This change in DeFi demographics has been “over the last seven to eight months”, says Ms Greenwood, with many commenting on the increased number of women attending and speaking at CoinDesk’s recent Consensus event in Austin, Texas. 

However, before the explosion of NFTs Ms Greenwood sought to support the burgeoning community of women in the crypto space with the launch of The Bigger Pie in 2019 and The 200 Billion Club in 2022. 

The Bigger Pie is about supporting women in blockchain and emerging tech by providing a community to network, gain insights, share opportunities, learn and collaborate. The goals of the organisation are to help founders get funded and connect with event organisers to help them with female experts. 

“It’s called The Bigger Pie because it’s not that if you bring women in we’ll have to take some people out,” she says. “The more people you bring to the table, the more you will be able to grow this nascent industry.” 

Founders who have benefited from The Bigger Pie community include Dr Amber Ghaddar, co-founder of AllianceBlock, Zara Zamani, chief solutions officer at ChromaWay, Thessy Mehrain, co-founder of Liquality, and Sofie Blakstad, founder of Hiveonline.

Ms Greenwood, along with Ms Ghaddar, launched The 200 Billion Club to help female entrepreneurs navigate the process of pitching and fundraising. It focuses on both deal flow and pitch aspects of the investment process. The 12-week programme aims to give female founders coaching and feedback from 50 plus venture capitalists, who manage £900bn in assets under management. Legal, intellectual property and regulations courses and training is provided by CMS Law and others. 

“I talk about women so much,” says Ms Greenwood. “But we have some wonderful men in this space, and we need male allies. We need people who put their money where their mouth is. We're seeing a lot of senior leaders, who are male, championing and fighting and supporting the need for diversity in this space, so I definitely want to make sure that this is a problem for everyone to solve.”

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