Today we’d like to introduce you to Viviane Ford.

Hi Viviane, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
So I was born on tax day in Northampton, Massachusetts to…just kidding. I won’t start at the very beginning. I’ll start when I moved to San Francisco, 2 weeks after graduating from college. It was 2015, San Francisco was a mysterious city and a dream in tech wasn’t cringey (yet). I ended up moving into a house called the Crypto Castle because the housing search was very messy. When I first moved into the Crypto Castle, I was the only girl amongst 14 boys and the only one not into crypto. I was quickly immersed into the boys’ life and mindsets. They didn’t think death was inevitable, they saw love as a scam, no “rule” of society seemed to apply to them, and bitcoin was the future.

I lived there for four years and even worked for a startup that was founded in the basement of the house. Not only did I get more and more interested in crypto over the years (it was $250 per coin when I first moved in compared to $60,000 now), but I also became very curious about the “engineer mindset”. Why was it so different than, well, my mindset? These engineers seemed to accurately predict the future (beyond the price of bitcoin) because they lived in a world where they assumed most things didn’t work. It wasn’t a negative mindset, though. It was a truthful one. Indeed, most things are very hard to do so most things, most projects, most ideas just don’t come to fruition. And given that truth as a baseline, you realize that the only way things work (and ship) is by iterating little by little on existing products and ideas.

Alright, I’m rambling. But all this to say I got quite the Silicon Valley education. After four years, I decided to spend a year living on farms and teaching people about crypto. This was 2020 so I searched for farms around the world where I could live outside. I went to Chile, Colombia, Austria, and many other countries (24 countries and 37 covid tests). When I came back from that trip, I realized the best way to get people excited about new technology (like crypto) is to make fun of the world that is building it since it feels so foreign and weird to most folks. So I wrote a solo comedy show called New Kids on the Blockchain about my time living in the Crypto Castle. I also explain crypto but make it funny.

As for my crypto life, I’m VP of Community for Aleo where we’re launching a layer 1 blockchain based on privacy and programmability (if you’re interested in any of that, find me online and we’ll talk more).

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The road is always bumpy and thank goodness for that, it keeps things interesting! Both for the comedy show and for my work in crypto, I’m always trying to find the truth in three questions: what am I doing that I shouldn’t be doing, what am I not doing that I should be doing, and what am I doing that I should be doing much, much more of? I think the more successful people in the world have an impressive ability to understand almost exactly the path needed to be done to achieve a goal. They end up taking fewer wrong turns and they don’t work for the sake of working. They work intelligently.

A perfect example if a comedy show I had during a crypto conference. I needed to fill the seats so I just DM’ed people on Twitter instead of going out on the street and barking about my show. Of the 100 messages I sent, no one came to the show and even worse, no one responded. So not only did I waste two hours reaching out to people on Twitter but that was also 2 hours that I could have been marketing the show in more effective ways.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I have two very random loves: crypto and comedy. And weirdly enough, I love it most when the two are combined. My comedy solo show, New Kids on the Blockchain, is about my time living in the Crypto Castle. When I moved into the house in 2015, one bitcoin was worth $250. By the time I left, bitcoin had hit $20,000. It was a whirlwind of an education into the minds of people running Silicon Valley (I lived there with 14 crypto bros).

When I left, I wanted to teach people the basics of crypto, not even from an investment perspective but from a decentralization perspective and the importance of decentralizing powerful technology. I started on farms, teaching people about wallets and HODL and all the crypto lingo they could dream of. But I found that when I left the farm, I would receive a few follow up texts and then nothing. Their interest completely waned.

I figured the issue was the way I was teaching. The truth is education kind of sucks if you’re not interested. So I figured I could make learning crypto a much more interesting endeavor: enter the comedy show. Over the course of one year, I got very serious about writing and performing the show. I put a deadline on the books and every morning at 10am, I would sit down in front of the computer for an hour and write. That was a little over 1.5 years ago! Now, I’m en route to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a 25 show run (the largest comedy festival in the world).

Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
I fear sounding like a deep tech bro with my response but I do love the Lex Fridman podcast. He has a wild variety of guests so you never know who you’ll be listening to that week. I also really like the emphasis that is placed on the interviewer. Lex is there as a sounding board and to ask some guiding questions but I never feel like it is *his* podcast. He is giving the full attention to his guest.

Oddly enough, I feel inspired after listening to a Lex podcast because it’s impossible to walk away from the podcasts without having learned at least five new things (granted, the episodes are hours long so you better be learning something).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vivford.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vivford/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivianeford/
• Twitter: https://x.com/vivford