Head Ambassador Proposal - Lucy Coulden

X: @lucycoulden

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Discord: lucycoulden57130

TG: @lulu_clden

Hey, Lucy here, taking the plunge and putting myself forward with the ambition of becoming a significant contributor towards this exciting new rollout of the Head Ambassador program. I started thinking about writing this proposal when I left my role at Parity in March 2024. Four months, five countries, many conferences, events and support later, it is time for me to pin my face to the OpenGov wall and take my shot!

Intro & Professional Background

Many of you will already know me (hopefully!), but here's a brief introduction & background to myself: I live in London and worked at Parity from March 2022 to March 2024, initially as an Executive Assistant to Bjorn Wagner (CEO, co-founder of Parity Technology & WEB 3 advisor), and later as Director of Executive Operations. Prior to this, I worked at Improbable (a Gaming turned Metaverse-focused company), supporting the C-suite team and at Atomico (a VC firm) supporting CEO Niklas Zennström. Befor tech, I also have spent 5 years in the Private Equity world, supporting both IR and Deal teams and earlier, in recruitment & BD. There have been some calls to share CVs so here is the unabridged version of my along with my LinkedIn.

A constant thread throughout my career has been my gravitation towards forging and nurturing relationships, without prejudice. Regardless of role, seniority, internal or external, I am passionate about people and really getting under the skin of every business that I have chosen to become a part of. With Polkadot, that driver has been stronger than ever, which has led, in particular, to me spending the past few months submerged in the organized chaos that is this beautiful community, working together with a number of teams on event production and delivery, DF funding proposals and navigating the system, solidifying and growing my network so that when the time is right, I can utilize every tool that I have in my kit to bring new teams, cash and passionate people into our ecosystem.

Whilst at Parity, I worked closely with senior management on a daily basis. My role very much evolved over time as as I outgrew the remits of an Executive Assistant and pushed to become increasingly more involved with key relationship management, centered on nurturing existing relationships with major Polkadot stakeholders and subsequently curating events specifically focused on engaging investors with the ecosystem, the momentum of which I continue to build upon.

As part of the ongoing changes, it was foreseeable the my role at Parity was destined to be ‘decentralized along with many others and with this in mind, I began to formulate ideas about how I could strengthen my position with the community and expand on my work at Parity to be able to contribute most thoughtfully and successfully to Polkadot as a whole. After leaving Parity in March, on excellent terms with the concrete backing of management to remain - and hopefully flourish! - in the ecosystem, I was locked in!

Whilst being fairly entrenched in the space for two years, I have not been active in OpenGov for anywhere near as long as some of you, however, as part of my now new independent role, I am extremely eager to get stuck in, looking to delve into, engage & contribute to new facets of the ecosystem. Which brings us to today and what I hope is the serendipitous timing of this exciting, forward-looking vision of the Ambassador program.

What can I offer and how would I look to deliver the most from the role?

As touched on, I left Parity with strong networks but also a lot of continued support from key figures and I believe that I am particularly well-positioned to leverage this and to hit the ground running on the BD and VC side of the business. As well as having unique and direct communication lines with notable figures within Parity and the Web3 Foundation through my central role there, I have already fostered valuable, ongoing relationships with HNW and influential people both deeply embedded within the Polkadot universe and those circling it.

As part of the HA role, I am very confident that I have the networks and skills needed to individually foster and bring in the right types of new partnerships and business opportunities that will bring continued success. Alongside this, I am determined to build upon the previously mentioned investor events blueprint that I had started running with Parity. My aim is to deliver impeccably curated investor events as well as networking opportunities for founders and builders, running both more intimate VIP-style mixers as well as more relaxed events running alongside the main Polkadot and other Blockchain Festivals, of which I already have connections and past experience attending / organizing for.

The first of this series kicked off at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) at Berkeley University, USA in August 2023. I led the event from conception through to delivery and post event follow-up and analysis. Here, we brought three distinctive groups of people together: Polkadot Founders (current and those on the Founders Track programme at PBA), Polkadot senior leadership and external investors (largely CEO / C-Suite representatives from Silicon Valley based companies). Attendees included Dr. Gavin Wood, Rob Habermeier, Bjorn Wagner, parachain leadership, including Unit Network, Nodle, KILT, Oak Capital, InvArch, and C-Suite members from Dragonfly, Goldman Sachs, Polychain, Kraken and others (25 institutions in total). There was a cocktail mixer, followed by a private dinner with a smaller group of people.

With this vision in mind, I had preliminary conversations with some of the main teams currently behind organizing and running Polkadot events and our presence at global events. I have been met with sincere encouragement and excitement for my vision of working synergistically with them. To that end, I am hosting the Venture Hub lounge and stage at Decoded by Decentered Studios this coming week, where I look forward to seeing many of you, and assisting the Polkabiz and PolkaPort East teams with their Decoded side events.

Leaning into my network going forward, going forward I would look to bring in a notable management presence from within the ecosystem to these events in order to bolster credibility and give the investors/prospective projects we are attracting opportunities for direct engagement with core legacy architects and visionaries of the space.

I aim to create spaces where founders and builders are offered valuable networking experiences with investors, but also a stage and opportunity for our existing ecosystem MVPs to support and offer feedback to other newer prospective businesses that are being introduced to and encouraged to interact with Polkadot. There is a wealth of experience within the Polkadot ecosystem but also a huge space in which new businesses and individuals can prosper - ensuring that these two factions have access to and support each other will have boundless benefits to the community overall.

I also envisage these spaces becoming flagship mixers for other Ambassadors to come together and to also ‘show off’ the community, building excitement with valuable individuals & projects that they are already working on bringing into the space. As well as helping us all in converting warm relationships into future growth, these events would organically attract the attention of exciting new opportunities which we can collectively then start to nurture. Curating and representing these functions from the role as a Head Ambassador would certainly bring them even more credibility and in turn I believe they would provide a lot of benefit and value back to the program and polkadot as a whole.

An environment known for exciting people and visions will attract the continued attention of serious investors. A space with serious investors will attract exciting visionaries.

Relevant experience/achievements over the last 2 years, including work post-Parity

• 2022 Decoded NYC, Speaker Management
• Assisted in delivering Polkadot’s event presence at:
  • Davos 2022
  • Coinbase Consensus 2023
  • Proof of Talk Paris 2023
  • Web Summit Lisbon 2023
• Polkadot Evenings: Investor x Founder (dinners, mixers) - a concept that I created
  • 2023 PBA Berkeley. Investor x Founder mixer with key Silicon Valley investors including DragonFly, Goldman Sachs, Kraken, Electric Capital, Polychain
  • 2023 Silicon Valley VIP Investor Dinner. Lead, organized and hosted the event which targeted increased engagement with external Investor pools (with attendance of Dr. Gavin Wood).
  • 2023 Web3 Summit VIP Investor Dinner. Lead, organized and hosted event with high profile attendees, including Ed Hesse, Bjorn Wagner, Fabian Gompf, Mark Cachia and a number of key target investor groups.
  • 2024 PBA Hong Kong - Investor x Founder mixer
• Pro-actively sought out to re-engage with Parity's Investor Relations professionals of the past to market-map a (to that point undocumented) list of previous and current investors / leads in order to reinvigorate that internal aspect of BD and then begin pinpointing future opportunities.
• Opened new and increased lines of engagement between notable larger DOT holders & Parity, documenting current support and access to technical updates, events, and OpenGov and looking engaging with them on how services can be improved/tailored specifically to increase both the value offered and the value they, in turn, could then provide back to the ecosystem.
• Organised and hosted a number of intimate leadership retreats & gatherings for key players across Parity and Web3.
• Member of the Investor Relations Society. Recently completed a number of courses and attended their Annual Summit in London, June 2024.
• Member of the Black Swan Community

Since leaving Parity in March 2024, I have worked with a number of different projects and attended a number of community and external events with the aim of immersing myself within the wider community, deepening my understanding of the technology and hoping to build upon some of the initiatives I had started.

• Sub0 Asia, March - speaker management & agenda support
• Token2049 Dubai, April - attendee
• Decentralised Lugano (Scytale), May - attendee
• Polkadot: Dawn of RWAs hosted by Xcavate in London, July - assisted with invitations, attendee coordination, event execution and data gathering post-event 2024
• Decoded, July - working with Decentered Studios on delivering Decoded. Managing the Venture Hub and lounge across the two days.
• 2024 Polkabiz Investor x Founder evening, July - supporting Polkabiz in delivering their first key event since receiving funding
• 2024 PolkaPort East private investor dinner, July - leveraging my network to assist the team with their event

Wrapping things up

Before starting to write a proposal, it was important to me that I took the time to read over the past wins, difficulties faced and community feedback with the previous Ambassador program to recognize its hard-fought achievements and hope to retain a lot of the value it brought as well as to understanding how the community thought the new program should next evolve and blossom into its new form. More recently, I considered it important to see who else was applying for the new programme in order to ascertain how my skill set would be a welcome and complementary addition.Having done so, I hope to be positioned to provide real value back to the community and genuinely deliver on the vision this new version of the program promises.

I am vehement about continuing a journey within the space to the point where I have self-funded travel and been happy to work for free on all the bits and pieces that I have been involved with since leaving Parity. Whilst I am not yet as known in the ecosystem / governance realm as some other candidates I hope you can see that I am very much ‘on the ground’ and involved in promoting Polkadot however possible. I hope my unique insight and connections will bring a slightly different skill set that is needed and one which can help enhance and complement the work of the other great ambassadors already in place.

I wholeheartedly believe in this program and how much I would be able to contribute to it; whether it's fostering and converting relationships; creating innovative, unifying spaces for the advent of new partnerships and evolution of old or providing whatever necessary support and organizational structure that will be required in order to robustly grow and build out the program past its inception.

If selected to join the ‘dream team’, I would remain agile and responsive to evolving market dynamics in order to maintain my tenure. I honestly cannot imagine a next chapter I would rather commit my focus to than continuing to work in this arena - hence taking the plunge and putting myself in the firing line (finally!).

It would be a privilege for the opportunity to give my all in continuing to push Polkadot to the forefront of people's minds and elevating it towards its extraordinary and wonderful potential! I'm here and keen to engage, so please feel free to ask any questions you have, and I will do my very best to answer.

See y’all at Decoded in Brussels this week!

Lucy