Leap of faith from politics to Upland – a busy world of Web3, blockchain and metaverse
Danny Brown Wolf, Chief of Staff at Upland, meets Jillian Godsil…
Danny Brown Wolf has had the same career but in two very different worlds. The first was in Israel where she worked in largely non-partisan politics and foreign policy and the second was in Web3 – currently in the Upland metaverse where she works with community, often a substitute for politics in the digital world.
She very much knows the skills are transferable: people and politics.
It began in university where she specialised in public international law, focusing on international humanitarian law (the law of war) and the formation of nations.
“Part of my training was to explore how states come into being and how do you define a state from a legal perspective.”
At her first job she served as a Political Advisor at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations, focusing on international economic development. She worked with Caribbean and South Pacific nations, gathering what she now calls “needs requirements”. She worked to understand what kind of assistance the developing countries needed and how Israeli technology and knowledge-base could provide help in terms of water, agriculture, and health needs before building programmes to provide that help.
Closer to home she worked as a Legislative Aid in the parliament, working in different parliamentary financial and economic committees, where she saw first hand the lack of transparency not only to the public but within parliament. Part of her work was helping the work of the Economic Development of the Periphery.
“It was very exciting looking at natural ecosystem assets, identifying them, and then figuring out how to use those assets in the creation of new innovation hubs.”
She also got to work in conflict resolution in Palestine using economic development to share knowledge and create powerful relationships between women in both counties. One of such projects which received a USAID grant for example, brought female engineers from Israel and Palestine together for a capacity-building program for them to rise as managers, while learning together as people not warring citizens.
“It’s not often that a private citizen can improve macro politics in terms of peace resolution, but by using economic development we were able to effect real change.”
Her early policy career and insights placed her perfectly to understand – and want to work with – Web3.
Brown Wolf and her family moved to the States and while waiting for her green card, stumbled across the UN Food programme that used biometrics and Ethereum smart contracts to distribute aid to Syrian refugees in Northern Jordan.
Brown Wolf was blown away by the technology.
“It was like it was magic. Blockchain was solving a huge issue in transparency in aid distribution. I felt like I had to learn more.”
Around the same time, a friend of Brown Wolf’s who ran a female VC fund was giving a lecture in New York talking about Ethereum and covered topics such as tokenomics and different use-cases.
“I suddenly realised the power of this technology went even deeper than just supply-chain use cases. It offers the power of a dissident technology – and financial freedom. Coming from a Jewish family that escaped the Nazis in the 1930s I understood the use of a form of assets that a government could not touch. It would have been as relevant then in Nazi Germany as it is today for countries like Venezuela and Turkey running hyper-inflation with government-controlled payment rails.”
Brown Wolf did not move directly into the Upland metaverse, but worked for a Layer Two blockchain protocol out of Tel Aviv called Orbs. While working on technical infrastructure to scale the limitation of Ethereum, she worked across nearly every department gaining a holistic view of blockchain including product strategy, product marketing, and business development. Uniquely for blockchains at the time, she worked both with crypto-natives as well as large enterprises.
“We worked with customers, with large enterprises, trying to figure out how to use blockchain in their business. Mostly, in the early days they were looking at private blockchains as going fully decentralised on a public blockchain was seen as too big of a risk. We built a hybrid model for them allowing for decentralisation over time, while still maintaining the benefits and essential elements of public blockchains.”
In 2022 Brown Wolf was poached to go and work with Upland by a headhunter. She tried to refuse saying her sweet-spot was B2B, and not B2C. She did not know what metaverse was being pitched.
“When I heard Upland I thought it was Web3 gaming but the recruiter pestered me until I met Dirk and Idan (the two co-founders) and heard their vision. Then the penny dropped. I realised Upland was an economic platform. It may have started as a game, and there are gamification elements, but the real value proposition is the economy of Upland.
“I was intrigued as their future plans centered on User Generated Content (UGC) and open architecture to allow other developers to connect to the economy. The other main kicker was the metaverse was mobile first. Not everyone has or wants a headset, not even a new Apple headset, but everyone has a phone.”
Underpinning the metaverse is the community according to Brown Wolf. “We keep in mind the community at all times. Building a Web3 company is totally transparent and we build while knowing the community can see any changes on chain even before we announce it.
“The community has even created analytic services that abstract data directly from the blockchain. They make decisions independent of Upland and choose to develop it and its ecosystem organically.”
Examples of the community activity can be found in the Brazilian takeover of an area of Queens, New York, the explosion of car racing games and stadiums across the metaverse and developers joining the ecosystem such as the new shooting game, XNFT.
This is down to an active community and the open API for developers to use, in addition to continuously delivering new features such as wearables for players to use and creators to make. A partnership with Ready Player Me delivers unique avatars and increasingly there are new metaventures or in-game business ventures which range from shops offering FIFA items or factories to make map assets, and showrooms from which to sell their user generated items.
Cafes are soon coming to provide a digital, immersive space where artists and content creators can monetise experiences in different ways. Additionally, Cafes introduce a service economy to Upland where they can hire each other to create experiences in cafes that didn’t exist before.
Working in Upland is controlled chaos with lots of activities happening in tandem.
“There are a lot of verticals happening at the same time. Genesis Week, partnerships, new cities being opened – while we are also working on social features, like expanding chatting within the app so players don’t have to go to Discord or Facebook. The immersive internet is the future of social networks and we’re building the foundation to be the leaders in the space.”
Another key focus is the local culture tied into the digital geography. Upland is mapped to the real world, so virtual locality is often enhanced by real-life locality.
“We take real life local culture and then bring it into the metaverse. That is going to be a big focus for the coming months as new cities are being launched with local partners”