We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sandy Carter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sandy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?

While I go into more detail here, overall, the old structures, like tiger teams, aren’t going to work in the new world with all these exponential changes happening. To maintain high morale and effectiveness, you’ve got to be different and think differently. That’s the advice I would give for managing a team in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am COO and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains, a platform for user-owned digital identity. I’ve been responsible for driving growth and developing business strategies in pursuit of the company’s mission to provide user-owned identities to the world. Unstoppable Domains is offering Web3 domains minted on the blockchain that give people full ownership and control of their digital identity, with no renewal fees. With Unstoppable Domains, people can replace lengthy alphanumeric crypto wallet addresses with a human-readable name and log into and transact with hundreds of apps, wallets, exchanges and marketplaces.

Under my leadership, Unstoppable Domains has facilitated the registration of over 4 million unique domains, owned by over 800,000 unique users. This represents an over 50% growth from the previous year. I have additionally been responsible for driving business partnerships from 41 to 1000, including Polygon, Etherscan, and Opera. I also recently guided Unstoppable to enhance our position in the domain space by helping onboard millions of Web2 people into Web3 via the selling of .com domains. Furthermore, in April, Unstoppable teamed up with Polygon Labs to launch .polygon, a new domain ending to make it easier for users to log into Web3 applications, send crypto and NFTs, and create decentralized websites. Polygon has since become the fastest-growing partner in our company’s history.

Prior to Unstoppable, I worked as a VP at AWS, focusing on emerging tech, AI, blockchain, and AR/VR. Before that, I was a General Manager at IBM and a Silicon Valley start-up founder. I am also a Board Member at Altair, an AI company, Chairman of the board for the non-profit organization Girls in Tech and a past member of Diversity Community at the World Economic Forum and the founder of Unstoppable Women of Web3 and AI as well as a founding member of BFF.

I was recognized in 2023 as a Top 10 Responsible AI Leader, 2023 AI Executive Champion – WLDA, 2023 Crunchbase Influential Women in Sales List, 2023 CRN Channel Chief, Top 115 Most Inspirational Women of Web3/AI, 100 Women Davos, Two Lovies Awards for Best Metaverse HQ, CRN Channel Chief, and as a member of Fortune Most Powerful Women.

Have you ever had to pivot?

From a very early age, I was interested in lots of different things. I just had a lot of curiosity. I wanted to know how a truck worked. I wanted to know how a basketball was thrown to go into a basket. I wanted to understand the stars and the Moon. In fact, my first dream was to be an astronaut. The lucky thing was my dad was very encouraging. He sent me to a NASA space camp. I did math classes, I studied physics, I wrote for a newspaper, so I got to experience lots of different avenues that really, you know, helped me with my curiosity overall.

Then, when I went to college, I discovered technology and computer science, and I was just blown away by the power that technology could bring to all of us. At that time, it was really hard. It was slow. But you could see the potential for it getting easier, that everybody – not just tech people – would eventually be using it.

When I went to school, my parents were thinking I was going to be a doctor, because I like to help people. And I was like, “Yes, I’m going to be a doctor.” So I actually went to school, premed to be a doctor. But it turns out, as the world dictates sometimes, that I happen to be very allergic to a lot of the chemicals that they use in hospitals. And in fact, it makes me pass out, which is not a good thing for a doctor to go visit a patient in the hospital, having their doctor passed out on the floor. But it turns out that my advisor was starting a new program, which was a medical program with computer science. Since I could no longer achieve my dream of being a doctor, that’s really where I started in tech, and then because of that I just keep going after the new trends in tech like Web3 and AI.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

In my book, ‘The Tiger and the Rabbit,’ I discuss how companies should form ‘rabbit teams’ instead of ‘tiger teams’ to stay ahead of rapidly advancing technologies. A rabbit team is a team that stays together, dives deep into problems to fully understand them, and constantly looks for the next thing coming. These teams are dynamic, fluid, and can adapt to the exponential changes happening in the world of technology.

I contrast this with what most companies do today, which is forming tiger teams that attack problems reactively. They look backwards and say, “Okay, we have this problem now. Let’s fix it.” However, a lot of people got caught flat-footed because they had tiger teams dealing with AI. They weren’t ready for it.

In my research with about 400 different companies for my book, I found that teams that were very dynamic and fluid, the ones we call rabbit teams, were the ones that could adapt to all this exponential change. These teams break through silos, think differently, and are lean and mean – I’m not talking about huge organizations.

The old structures, like tiger teams, aren’t going to work in the new world with all these exponential changes happening. To maintain high morale and effectiveness, you’ve got to be different and think differently. That’s the advice I would give for managing a team in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Contact Info:

• Website: unstoppabledomains.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandy_carterfounder/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandyacarter/
• Twitter: @sandy_carter