Randi Zuckerberg bats for more women to participate in Web3, crypto

Randi Zuckerberg, a former early employee at Facebook and a sister of Meta Platforms founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, is always at the frontlines of new technologies.

At Karnataka's Global Investors Meet (GIM), Zuckerberg also showcased her creative talent when she briefly sang the song "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" recorded by American rock singer Pat Benatar in 1980. As an early adopter of Web2 and the creator of Facebook Live, Zuckerberg is also very vocal about the opportunities women should get to participate in developing emerging technologies such as cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3.

“I'm very encouraged to see so many incredible women in business here,” said Zuckerberg, founder, and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, while addressing industry leaders, investors, startups, and government officials at GIM.  “What I like to think about is not only how women can catch up in existing fields, but also how we get more women on the frontlines of emerging fields.” 

Zuckerberg said she spent a decade in Silicon Valley and was very nearly the only woman in every room that she was in. She said if women miss out on participating in the early stages of emerging fields, 10 years later, the industry is going to witness the same conversation of having fewer women in technology. 

“We have to make sure that women aren't left behind and are not playing catch up again in the future,” said Zuckerberg. “Recently I have grown very excited about Web3 and again I found myself in yet another iteration of the Internet where there were no women in the room.

Zuckerberg said she is not aware of the total investment that women-led ventures attract in India, but that number is very bleak in the U.S. Less than 2 per cent of investing capital in the US goes to female founders. That number went further down during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“When I say that number, that's mostly white women and not women of color and diverse women. So it's a pretty bleak state of funding for women,” said Zuckerberg. “If we want more women to have a seat at the table, we need to invest in them earlier in the process.”

Zuckerberg also toured several startup and venture capital offices and met many investors and founders in Bengaluru.

“I was really blown away by how much the infrastructure has improved since the last time I traveled here,” said Zuckerberg. “Payments and commerce (has) exploded and the entrepreneurial spirit is very exciting.”

New fields like Web3, which is the third generation of the evolution of web technologies,  would have a huge impact on society. For instance, Zuckerberg said she is starting to see meaningful communities getting built where creators and fans are collaborating and participating in the upside of the businesses together.

But these are also early days for emerging fields like Web3,  cryptocurrency, and NFTs (non-fungible token). She said there have certainly been a lot of ups and downs in areas such as cryptocurrency and NFTs.There have also been a lot of bad players in the space that have ruined the reputation of the field impacting good innovation. She said it would take at least 5-10 more years for the adoption of such new technologies at a larger scale.  

An alumna of Harvard University, Zuckerberg has been donning many hats after leaving Facebook, which includes being an entrepreneur, investor, author, and producer. She was born and raised in New York by two parents, who both had their own practices – her dad was a dentist, and her mother was a psychiatrist. They would always discuss innovation with the family and experiment with new technologies. Her father's dental office was on the ground floor of the house and the family lived right above it. “When my friends visited, they would jump out of fear at the sound of a dental drill going on at 8 o'clock in the morning,” recalled Zuckerberg. 

Her brother Mark Zuckerberg had created his first messaging system called 'ZuckNet' at the age of 12. It was used by his family to communicate within the house.

After graduating from Harvard in 2003, Randi Zuckerberg worked for two years in marketing for the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather. Her brother Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2005 to focus on growing Facebook.  In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg, who by then had moved to Palo Alto and had received funding for Facebook, recruited her.

“When I got a call from my brother (Mark) saying, ‘hey, Randi, I have this little company and I could really use someone who knows digital marketing. I decided to help him out,” recalled Zuckerberg, who later became director of marketing at Facebook (now known as Meta) and ended up staying for over 10 years at the firm.

Zuckerberg said when she got on that plane to California to work at her brother’s company Facebook, which was very small then, she didn’t think of herself as an inventor or a creator.  

“I thought of myself as a marketer behind the scenes, who is helping someone else with their vision,” said Zuckerberg. “But once I was exposed to a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, here I am sitting almost 20 years later, having founded multiple companies of my own and doing things that I never dreamed.”