Women in Web3 Changemakers: Emily Rose Dallara

“A lot of the clients I work with don’t feel that they’re ever on top of anything,” says Emily Rose Dallara, an award winning leadership coach and founder of the Web 3 and Thrive Podcast.  

Dallara is one of the 10 finalists of the 2023 Women in Web3 Changemakers List, an annual competition designed to champion women pushing boundaries in the space. Dallara, along with nine other outstanding candidates, is showing the industry the change women are bringing about during the advent of the Open Web. 

Dallara was selected because of her work helping ambitious leaders confidently succeed without constant self-doubt or working 24/7. 

“There’s always been this golden thread throughout my whole experience, which is helping other people thrive, elevating people, especially women, because we didn’t have much of a voice back then, when I first started out.” 

But Dallara’s expertise in helping others came at a personal cost. Dallara had to learn through challenging personal experiences what happens when the fast-paced world of Web3 creeps ever further into your personal life and what can happen when boundaries are not in place. 

Watch an extended NEAR Foundation video interview with Emily Rose Dallara below.

Burning out  

“I’ve had two burnouts and two layoffs, both related,” says Dallara, from her home in France.  “I just wanted to succeed. I wanted to make all the money that was promised. I wanted to learn as much as I could. And I just didn’t see another way of working. It was a 24/7 grind.”

Dallara began her Web3 journey while living in and working in Bali. “I was very much on the humanitarian side. I did a lot of work in Southeast Asia and Japan, helping with merchant onboarding, and had my own e-commerce platform for women.”

She found a niche helping young female entrepreneurs accept crypto from international clients, creating payment rails for merchants, before joining Bitcoin.com as a marketing manager. A flurry of advisory roles followed, and her CV quickly became a Who’s Who of the crypto community. 

“I just didn’t have the boundaries in place. I didn’t have a support network in place, I didn’t have the experience to prevent that from happening. So I burnt out. And then a bit later when I was a marketing director.” 

Finding a new path

After a period of recovery and reflection, Dallara began to ask herself if she wanted to stay in the industry, and if she did, what would a different path look like. And it was during this period she found that a lot of the clients and colleagues she had worked with had experienced similar issues. 

“Because it’s such a rapidly changing space that’s constantly innovating, they feel that if they don’t stay on top, or they don’t have all the information they need, or they don’t reply to Slack messages all the time, that they’re not going to succeed. That’s what they’re scared of. And so this was a fear that I carried as well. And it took me a long time to unravel that and understand that it wasn’t a valid fear.”

But Dallara used that fear to help her understand what she should do next. After qualifying as an accredited coach, she decided she wanted to help other women learn the lessons she had without having to burn out first. 

“We’re trying to create a bit of a movement. We can’t just go say to the VCs, ‘you need to train the people that you’re invested in as better leaders’. It’s not as simple as that. We have to make people aware first, we can’t make any changes without that.”

Given her experience working at the breakneck speeds of the Web3 world, would she recommend the industry to other women? “It’s a huge opportunity. I would never have been in the roles I’ve been in in web two, it would have been a much, much slower process. It gave me the space to understand what I was really good at, in a really short time because people kept throwing opportunities at me because it was rare to have a woman who was a marketing leader in the space.” 

Dallara advises any women looking at this space to be, above all, curious. “Know that you can make this whatever you want to make it. There’s no rules. You can build whatever you want to build, you can create the role, whatever you want to create. And it’s up to you to determine how you do that. And when.