Startup paid $ 50,000 to Facebook designer to start crypto business

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Party Round has announced that a Facebook product designer is the winner of its BigTech scholarship. Lauren Connolly is a single mom who has worked in Big Tech for over a decade. His idea is to create a crypto-focused financial literacy platform.

Lauren Connolly just won $ 50,000, so she quit her job at Facebook.

For the past three years, Connolly has worked on product design for the future Metaverse company. She was responsible for helping design the COVID-19, voting and climate clearinghouses that you sometimes see on the app. The scope of his work was a billion users, and his designs were sometimes endorsed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.

Despite her accomplishments, the 30-year-old was tired of working in Big Tech.

So she applied for the Party Round BigTech Fellowship (in partnership with the financial platform MainStreet), which offered Big Tech employees a one-time grant of $ 50,000 “unconditional” to quit their jobs and start a startup – without expecting to receive capital or reimbursement. Party Round is a startup offering a fundraising tool for founders and has made a name for itself for its viral marketing campaigns.

There were 600 applicants, according to Connolly, and she found out on Monday that her idea had won.

“They contacted me and said, ‘Congratulations!’ And that’s when I walked into the wall at Bedford Ave station. ”Connolly told Insider.

Her winning idea is to create a crypto-focused financial literacy media company with the goal of empowering women and people of color to achieve financial freedom. According to a survey of 3,000 crypto holders from cryptocurrency firm Gemini, 74% of those surveyed said they were male and 71% said they were white.

“I feel like in crypto or in Web3 you hear a lot of people saying things like ‘We’re all going to get there,'” Connolly said. “But it’s like not all of us going to get there if we just perpetuate the same existing systems.”

Connolly, a single mom, was playing “Minecraft” with her son when friends tweeted the app to her. She applied on the spot on her phone.

“He said ‘Mom, I need you to find this recipe for the craft table,’” Connolly said. “And I’m like, on my phone, I’m like ‘I can’t right now. I’m sowing seeds.'”

At the time, Connolly was working “every hour of the day, seven days a week” on Facebook, she said. Prior to her current gig, she worked for other tech giants like Spotify, Yelp, and Mozilla as a product designer.

These are very competitive positions in companies that pay well. But she took the plunge to believe in herself.

“I feel like for the same reasons it makes sense to stay, there is also the same security to leave,” Connolly said. “When you write it down on paper you think to yourself, ‘OK, what am I really afraid of?'”

She calls her company Lumos because understanding the world of crypto is “kind of like walking around in the dark, and as you learn certain things you light the way,” she said. declared.

She also co-founded the company with Maya Bakhai, a 27-year-old woman she met during a crypto encounter on Twitter. Bakhai previously worked for several years for renowned basketball player Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures venture capital fund.

According to Connolly, the duo plan to use this grant to create a demo cryptocurrency called a “penny token,” which allows users to learn how to buy and sell cryptocurrency for under $ 1.

“Someone once asked me, ‘Do you want to get rich by building something for 10 million people – or 100 million people?’” Said Connolly. “I was just like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about?’ Like, forget me. I want to make 100 million people rich. “

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