As our COO and Head of Business Development, Robin looks after us all, providing leadership and support to all functional areas of the business, making sure we are on-track and properly resourced to achieve our goals. She also leads efforts to recruit and sign on merchants and partners to our ecosystem. In short, Robin spends her days thinking a step or two ahead of where the rest of the team is currently focused, anticipating our needs, removing speed bumps and doing the pre-work that allows us to execute without friction

Our resident startup Jill-of-All-Trades, Robin has spent the majority of her career in leadership roles at early- and mid-stage startup companies where she’s worn just about every hat a company needs filled. She likes to say that her superpower is common sense, but we’re pretty sure they don’t make a superhero cape for that.

4 Questions for Robin

Why Public Market?

When Kanth and KJ initially started to talk to me about the vision for Public Market, I was taken in, not by the technological approach or use of blockchain in the context of eCommerce, per se, but instead by the opportunity to fundamentally change the economics of an industry by leveraging tokenization of a network. Tokenization offers the opportunity to fundamentally change the ownership structure of an organization in a way that aligns the incentives of all participants in that organization’s network. This innovation opens the opportunity for a wave of great creativity in business models that we’ve not seen in many years, and I was excited to have the opportunity to participate in the application of the network tokenization model in an industry that virtually everyone on the globe has touched.

What’s one powerful or exciting new idea you’ve come across recently?

About a year ago, I was attending the TiE Global Summit in Mumbai, India and I ran into my friend Shashi Jain over breakfast. Shashi was looking stressed, so I asked if I could help him. He said that he was getting ready to run a 4 hour workshop with +/- 300 underprivileged Indian school kids, some of whom were homeless- they spent their days begging on the streets, and their evenings doing schoolwork at the shelters in which they slept. Over the course of 4 hours, Shashi was going to help them form teams, come up with an idea for a business and formulate and deliver a pitch. He had only a handful of helpers, so I volunteered to pitch in. What happened in a hotel conference room that afternoon was amazing and inspiring. I was able to witness and participate in helping 300 children, ranging in age from 8–15, as they got a taste of how empowering it feels to be an entrepreneur.

Since that time, I’ve become quite active with a group called the TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE), which established an entrepreneurship curriculum that is now taught in high schools around the world. Once a week during the school year, I volunteer to mentor students in the TYE course at Benson Polytechnic High School, which is a school that provides underprivileged high school students with multiple paths to graduation, and provides training in trades in addition to traditional academic curricula. In a predominantly white city, Benson is notable for being the only school in the Portland Public School district to graduate more minorities than white students. I have been stunned by the creativity and drive exhibited by these students, and honored to help them realize their own entrepreneurial potential. So many of the students leave the course with incredible pride in their achievements, and confidence that they do indeed have what it takes to build a business.

Which entrepreneur on earth do you want to sit down and share a coffee with?

I am fortunate to have had the chance a few times to share a drink with one of the entrepreneurs I most admire, Jen Pahlka, but it is always an interesting and inspiring discussion and I would cherish the opportunity to get more time together. In 2009, Jen founded Code for America, which works with government agencies to help them become digitally fluent, ensure that policy and implementation work in concert to serve the needs of constituents and create strong avenues for civic engagement and citizen participation. Jen gave a great TED talk a few years back: Coding a Better Government — it’s definitely worth a view.

What’s one book that too few people have read?

I have many times read and gifted Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman. Originally published in 1999, it is a true story of how the ingenuity and vision of a Colombian man, Paolo Lugari, drove the establishment of a fully sustainable community in one of the most bleak, infertile and inhospitable ecosystems in the world.

In a span of just a few years, his experiment would be one of the world’s most celebrated examples of sustainable living: a permanent village called Gaviotas.

Robin is in our Portland, Oregon office and when she’s not at work, she spends her time trail running trying to stay fit enough to keep up with her two high energy kids and one high energy dog. She has spent countless hours establishing her own off-grid getaway in Central Oregon, complete with a tipi, tiny house and a “skoolie” named Maude.