ABOUT

ANNA

Photography Taken For Forbes Women Magazine, 1/2020, February 2020 Edition

Interview by Malgorzata Mierzynska

Maciej Zienkiewicz Photography

Aga Bora Make Up

Anna is a multi-award winning Polish born serial entrepreneur and FinTech & Blockchain Consultant and Thought Leader.

She is an Economist by education from University College London, and is an ex-Investment Banker by training having worked in Portfolio Management and Restructuring at RBS in London. In her early 20s she quit her job to follow her passion and establish her first startup, Nightset. She raised funding and scaled the company which was recognised by the likes of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Technology and Real Business 50 Fastest Growing Companies etc. The company won the third place prize in the Mayor of London’s London & Partners Business Growth Programme. She was chosen to be an ambassador for the #SaveNightlife campaign working with the NTIA (Night Time Industries Association, who helped save Fabric and work with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Night Czar). She grew the company into Nitechain, in order to introduce blockchain to the leisure sector and create rewards protocols to enable people to monetise their day to day activities and achieve better economies. As an early adopter and having been drawn by the potential of blockchain to drive social impact, she founded Distributed.Academy, a leading global education provider that is driving blockchain literacy and innovation aimed at management and technical teams. Distributed.Academy enables institutions to understand blockchain technologies, explaining how blockchain can be applied to specific sectors like Healthcare, Logistics and Energy etc. They have already provided education to over 100 students from the best universities in Poland and trained them to become blockchain developers.

As a serial entrepreneur and having gained significant technology and leadership experience, Anna works as a consultant alongside leadership teams helping with commercial strategy, finance, partnerships and product for a variety of companies from Blockchain Infrastructure, Wallet and Custody Services, E-commerce to Payments. One of her favourite projects was Pigzbe where she acted Head of Growth and Business Developer for this a digital piggy bank and pocket money service for children aged 6+ with a mission to help them improve financial literacy skills and incentivises good behaviours. Anna manages products from contract negotiation, developers recruitment to features inclusion, A/B testing and delivery. She helps with business strategy and restructuring to ensure performance, sustainability and optimised cash flows/ burn rate against KPIs and milestones, identifies efficient growth opportunities, analyses trade-offs and risks. She has built and connected an extensive network of partners, investors, startups and corporates across Europe, Asia and the US and helps to close commercial partnerships and funding.

For her work she has been recognised by the likes of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Technology award, Innovate Finance Top 100 Women In Fintech, twice in Forbes 30 Under 30 Poland, Women as Future Leaders by McKinsey & Company, Top 100 Rising Stars Award by WeAreTheCity & The Sunday Times, TechWomen100 and the Blockchain Founder of the Year prize in the BMW i UK Tech Founder awards.

Certifications

Harvard University, Cybersecurity: Managing Risk In The Information Age (due November 2020)
CFA Level 1
FCA and PRA certificates in Ethics, Securities and Derivatives

Qualifications

Masters of Business Administration, Quantic School of Business & Technology, Online Global MBA
BSc Economics, University College London, London
IB examination, II Stephen Batory High School, Warsaw

ANNA's VENTURES

1.

A multi-award wining consumer application and a SaaS solution for the business side.

Nightset is a platform that shows people all the best places and parties on a night based on a live crowdsourced content directly from venues.

Through the app you could see what's happening and where to go out with personalised music and venue type recommendation. Nightset would enable you also to meet like minded people.

On the business side, venues collect data, understand demographics and turn their clients into their ambassadors and build relationships.

Visit nightset.co for more information.

Nitechain was designed to improve the nightlife offering for all stakeholders (including DApps, consumers, venues, event hosts and DJs) and create better experiences and seamless nightlife journeys whilst reducing frustration.

Nite Token was designed to be an open source cryptographic ERC20 Token governing the nightlife and leisure ecosystems.

By it's architecture, it provides access to dapps, rewards the community for meaningful contributions such as sharing recommendations and bringing friends and enables transactions to happen. It would natively

supports: staking, forging ERC-20 into ERC-721 tokens and capturing event.

2. NITECHAIN

3.

Distributed Academy (www.distributed.academy) is a leading global provider of blockchain training and education and seeks to drive blockchain literacy and adoption and solve the developer bottleneck crisis in the industry. We accelerate talent by through our programmes which train developers into the best blockchain talent and also provide corporate and government trainings to help organisations better understand the transformative power of blockchain technologies in their industries and then to help them implement it through project based work. We help companies to understand how blockchain technology can enhance their business, identify how it can be applied and even open up new markets in ever-diversifying sectors.

4. Global fintech &

blockchain conference

Anna co-founded the Global Fintech & Blockchain Conference in 2019, the largest university led conference on Fintech and Blockchain globally that hosted 29 speakers and 750+ attendees and had a 250 person Hackathon. Speakers included the Co-Founders of Monzo and Starling Bank, Board Directors at N26, Curve and Loot, Partners at Consensys, CEOs of iwoca, DueDil, eToro and many more.

GIVING BACK

Anna has been appointed as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper - a self governed, non for profit community which works towards solving the most pressing issues relating to local economies around the world such as climate change, poverty and gender inequality.

Anna sits on the advisory board of The Oxford Guild Society, the largest university society of any type in Europe and the world as of 2015 according to Forbes, The Times and the BBC, with tens of thousands of members and branches across leading universities. She helps to raise sponsorship from technology companies such as Visa, Amazon, iwoca, and to organise talks from Woody Harrelson, Rothschild CEO, and Nobel Prize winners Tawakkol Karman and Malala.

She co-founded and organised the Europe2SiliconValley Trip for 20 top UK students (out of 5000+ applications) and set up meetings with GoogleX, Uber, Airbnb, Tim Draper, YCombinator’s CEO, Facebook, Twitter, Pantera Capital, General Catalyst and many more. She co-founded the 400 person Global Female Leadership Conference at the University of Oxford in 2019. Keynotes and panellists included Natalia Vodianova, Founder of the Naked Heart Foundation and world famous supermodel, philanthropist, entrepreneur and member of the Special Olympics International Board of Directors, Rachel Lord, CEO (EMEA) of BlackRock which is the world’s largest asset manager, Elif Shafak, world renowned author and women’s rights activist, Michelle Peluso, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of IBM and ex-CEO of Travelocity, Stefanie Reid MBE, three time Paralympic medallist and five time world record holder who is also a biochemist specialising in stem cell research.