Finding Gender Parity at the Intersection of Venture and Crypto

It was May of 2018, spring was becoming summer, and Kinjal Shah was prepared to leave her home in Boston and move to San Francisco. Having accepted the position as an associate at venture firm Blockchain Capital, Shah was nervous and excited. As a tourist, the West Coast was familiar. But relocating across the country for a new job was “nerve-wracking” for 24-year-old Shah. A once-in-a-lifetime move, she hoped to make the most of this opportunity. She needn't have worried. In four years, Shah ascended from associate to the only female partner among five at the venture firm. In her current role, Shah carries out investment diligence on prospective companies and supports portfolio companies through offering a combination of strategy, partnership introductions, recruiting and token design. This Woman Is Merging Entertainment and Web3, Despite the ‘Dude-Bro’ Crypto World “I'm sitting at the intersection of two fields, venture and crypto, that have always been male-skewed,” said Shah. “But there's room for intentionality and diversity.” Making a diverse fin-tech community To build the digital financial ecosystem differently, Shah co-founded a decentralized autonomous organization called Komorebi Collective last year, for women and nonbinary crypto founders to enter the market, currently valued at more than $2 trillion. Komorebi raises its capital from the blockchain community and the founders then vote on investments. With this, Shah hopes to create a community for the minority group. “That’s what I want to devote my time and energy to,” she said. It all began as a fun experiment on Twitter. In early 2021 Shah called out to women looking to venture into the blockchain space via her Twitter handle, @_kinjalbshah. This ballooned into her speaking with more than 100 women in the past year. In the process, Shah got paired with the mentorship platform she256, who she continues working with, and Women in Blockchain, a nonprofit focused on increasing diversity in crypto through education and community building, where she spoke with fellow female leaders in the crypto space Mansi Vohra and Medha Kothari. The trio went on to form the Komorebi Community. Nearly hitting its first anniversary this May, Komorebi has raised capital from 35 investors in the blockchain community and “made six investments between $50 and $100,000,” said Shah. In its second year, Komorebi plans to raise a second fund while attracting new investors, largely orchestrated by Shah. “[Shah] is pragmatic and tenacious,” said Komorebi Collective co-founder Medha Kothari. “The way she thinks through all investments she's made is super inspiring." A second daughter to her immigrant parents from India, Shah grew up watching her parents build friendship groups and connections in a foreign land. The ability to be relatable to people is a value that stuck with her from childhood. Seeing her dad run a small convenience store business instigated the entrepreneurial side in Shah, who went on to study quantitative economics at Tufts University. Her first encounter with blockchain was at her previous firm, Fidelity Investments in 2017, where Shah was put on a short-term project. But the interdisciplinary nature of blockchain, its ability to touch multiple specialisms, hooked her. “Blockchains combine a lot of different industries,” she said. “It's finance and economics, but it's also philosophy, religion, sociology and technology.” Paying it forward through mentoring Fin tech has a dearth of women leaders. Research shows that a diverse team leads to greater profits, but only 2% of venture capital was secured by female founders in the U.S. in 2021, per a report by PitchBook. Gender parity is far from being evened out. Shah personally struggled with the lack of mentorship when she first entered the corporate workforce in 2015. Finding people to ask “is it appropriate to say this” or “what are you wearing for that conference” was hard. Having someone to talk about the softer things “can make the experience less lonely." For her mentees, Shah advises them to take an academic approach, read Bitcoin or Ethereum white papers, enroll in open courses, even buy bitcoins. “If we invest early, we can help these women and non-binary folks raise [for others] in the future,” she said.