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Sandy Carter, SVP Of Unstoppable Domains - #1 Provider For NFT Domains, Plus: Shoutout To Cathy Hackl, Ringer Of 1st Metaverse NASDAQ Bell, And More…

Sandy Carter, SVP Of Unstoppable Domains - #1 Provider For NFT Domains, Plus: Shoutout To Cathy Hackl, Ringer Of 1st Metaverse NASDAQ Bell, And More…

NFT | Unstoppable Domains

Unstoppable Domains is on a mission to return the power of the internet to the people by creating NFT domains that put users back in control of their data. Sitting in this innovative platform’s dynamic leadership team is Sandy Carter, an award-winning tech leader of many distinctions. This podcast episode, she joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to explain how Unstoppable Domains empowers people with a digital identity that they can use as a portal to the metaverse and the world of Web 3.0. The game-changer is how users fully own and control their data, allowing them to keep as much of it private as they want – and even remain anonymous if they choose to. Interestingly, the domains you create at Unstoppable Domains are immune to domain squatting! Sandy also gets deep into what digital identity really means from a Web 3.0 perspective, the significance it would have in our lives, and what applications it could possibly take form of in the future. Tune in and get some great ideas and insights from one of Web 3.0’s foremost thought leaders!

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Sandy Carter, SVP Of Unstoppable Domains – #1 Provider For NFT Domains, Plus: Shoutout To Cathy Hackl, Ringer Of 1st Metaverse NASDAQ Bell, And More…

NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out how Unstoppable Domains is building the foundation of digital identity for the Web3 future and why a high school prom dress inspired our guest’s first successful chicken egg venture. Stay tuned for the community shout-out to a woman who was the first to ever ring the NASDAQ bell in the metaverse. All this and more on this episode.

Don’t forget that we put a little soiree together called NFTLA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to snag tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. See you there.

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This episode features Sandy Carter, Senior Vice President and Channel Chief at Unstoppable Domains. In her role at Unstoppable, Sandy is responsible for driving new partnerships and integrations for Web3, metaverse, blockchain, and NFTs. Her mission is to onboard the world into the decentralized web by building a digital identity platform. Sandy is the Chairman of the board of Girls in Tech and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley.

She is also the author of Extreme Innovation and The New Language of Business, an international bestseller, and the Founder of Unstoppable Women of Web3. Sandy is a Top 100 Chief Tech Leader, a Top 14 Edge Leader, a Federal 100 award-winner, a member of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, a CNN Top 10 Most Powerful Women in Technology, a Forbes Top Digital Influencer, a Top 100 Inspirational Women of Web3, and a long and distinguished list of other awards and recognition.

Unstoppable Domains is on a mission to return the power of the internet to the people. To accomplish this, they are creating NFT domains that put you back in control of your data. These aren’t traditional domains. These are domains with super powers. Your Unstoppable domain is your cryptocurrency address, your login to the decentralized web, and your universal username. Pay once and it’s yours forever. Sandy, welcome to the show. It’s a privilege to have you here.

It’s my honor. Thank you for that amazing introduction.

I was blushing.

Trust me. We could have gone on and on. The accolades are endless amazing stuff. It’s great to have you here.

Thank you so much. I’m super psyched.

We always like to start by going back to the beginning. It would be great if you could give us a sense for our readers who aren’t familiar with what’s going on with Unstoppable Domains from a historical origin point of view. How did you connect with the team?

I was working at Amazon Web Services and having a great time. AWS is a phenomenal company to work for. You learn so much about great leadership. They had asked me to take a look at some of our customers and partners in different technology areas, IoT, virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain. That’s where I first started going down the rabbit hole. It was to sort through those technologies. It was so fascinating to me to see blockchain being used in manufacturing, supply chain, and Web3.

That got me fascinated with the space. I got a wallet and put some money in it. I got rugs. It made me upset. It was the whole initiation that you go through being on Web3. I was fascinated with the next generation of the internet and what it would become. I realized all the tech I was looking at and using at Amazon, like AR, VR, IoT, and blockchain were all of the elements that were needed to create the next version of the internet and the metaverse. One day, I got a call from Matt, who’s our CEO. He said, “I’m coming to Seattle. I want to have dinner with you.” That’s how I entered Unstoppable.

I’m sure this opportunity to play in a sandbox of converging technologies had to do with it because you were doing that already at Amazon, looking at integrations between all the advanced technologies that are coming aboard. I get the sense you saw this as an extension of that playground.

I love being early on new tech and how it can impact everyday people and other companies. As I was looking at the power of what was going on, I wanted to be part of it, not as a side project but as the main thing. That’s what brought me over to Unstoppable.

It’s cool stuff. You’re ambitious and perceptive. I love the rabbit theme that always keeps coming back in Web3. It’s not just a new technology. It’s a rabbit hole, which is a cool part of it. I want to go down the rabbit hole of Unstoppable Domains a little bit deeper here. Tell me about the user experience. If I’m a new customer of Unstoppable, what should I expect? What are you aiming for in a UX there?

Part of the reason why I chose Unstoppable Domains is I believe getting your digital identity for Web3 is your first step into the new world. In Unstoppable Domains, you have a name. That name represents your crypto address. For anybody who has gotten a crypto address, it’s this long convoluted series of letters and numbers. It’s hard to remember. It’s such a simple idea and concept that you get Sandy.Blockchain, Sandy.NFT, or Josh.X.

It’s a great game-changer but what brought me into the fold was the fact that now you could use that domain as your digital identity. That digital identity you can use to log into a metaverse, a DeFi app, or a game. You own the data. For me, you own the data. I logged into Instagram or Twitter. I can’t take that influence with me. It stays with the application. For the convenience of using their app, they keep all my data. What I love here about Unstoppable Domains and our digital identity is you have ownership. You get to decide who sees what data, when they get to see it, and how much they get to see it. For me, that is a very powerful concept.

There’s a high-level overlap with a previous guest and collaborator of ours, Brittany Kaiser. She has the Own Your Data Foundation. That’s a big theme of what she’s into. It’s not just about privacy. It’s about choosing, “Here’s what I would like to be private. Here’s what I would like to be anonymized. Here’s what I would like to be public, but I want to have control.” A lot of people are demanding that at this stage in the game. Life is empty knowing that your data is out there swimming around for anybody to pilfer through.

I was traveling with my husband in a car. We were going to a party here in San Diego. It’s a costume party. Everybody is going to dress up like they’re from Texas because we were from Texas. We were talking about Stetsons and cowboy boots. We get home, and everything on Facebook was fringe and cowboy boots. I know they say they’re not listening, but they are. Maybe I’m okay with sharing that data, but maybe I’m not. That should be my decision. It shouldn’t be someone else’s decision.

We have all had our moments and so many conversations. It’s the ones where people say, “We were just talking about that.”

I don’t know what my settings are, but I tell my girlfriend things I want to buy. It shows up on her Facebook, but when she tells me things that she wants to buy, it doesn’t come on my Facebook.

Sandy, do you have any domains you could share of your own that you’re super proud of in the Unstoppable Domain universe?

I do own a domain called PinkMamba. I love pink. I usually wear pink. I’m wearing teal, but typically, I wear pink. I captured that name because I went into the metaverse. I was doing a lecture. I did one that was for business folks. I used Sandy.NFT. I went and I did one for my Carnegie Mellon students. They’re like, “You shouldn’t use your name. You’re in the metaverse. You need something cool.” We brainstormed and came up with PinkMamba. It was there. It was available. I snagged it. I have PinkMamba as well as several variations of Sandy.

Getting your digital identity for Web 3.0 is your first step into the new world. Click To Tweet

You’re talking to our resident domain name fanatic in Jeff over here. He’s the guy that’s always picking up a domain every other day, “I got this.”

I have over a thousand. It’s crazy. It’s like any collection that you get obsessed with, like shoes or hats.

I’ll tell this story in an anonymized way. We were driving in a taxi cab in New York City and talking about a domain that we should get. Somebody was checking, “Is it available?” I’m like, “It’s available. Make sure let’s snag that one.” A lot was going on. We were heading to some talks or something like that at a convention. A couple of minutes later, we try to get that domain. It’s taken. We were all like, “It was the taxi driver. That guy stole our domain.”

If he did, that would be a great story.

It was bought that day at that time. You could see the record.

It’s a Seinfeld episode.

We ended up in better shape ultimately. In any case, I want to talk a little bit more about digital identity and what it means. We’re talking about domains. That is your initial portal into the metaverse and the world of Web3. Let’s talk about individual identity in general. It seems that so much of what we experience in real life will have some digital form very soon if it doesn’t already. How does that influence how you think about what influence Unstoppable can have on that particular aspect of our lives?

This is one of the main reasons I came to Unstoppable. Digital identity has such power of disruption but also power for good. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I was at NFT New York. We had a day with a group of startup folks and founders from healthcare. They were showing me how they’re putting an NFT on your healthcare data. I learned that 60% of people who are misdiagnosed are misdiagnosed because the doctor doesn’t have all the information.

I moved out of Seattle from Amazon. I’m trying to get my healthcare records. I called some people up. They were like, “We can’t give it to you.” I’m like, “What do you mean? It’s my data.” They said, “We have to give it to a hospital or a doctor.” It’s my data, but they wouldn’t give it to me. Think about the power for good of having all of your data like your blood pressure, how you’re doing with your cholesterol, and everything there that’s part of that digital identity.

Jeff, you might have Jeff.NFT or Jeff.Personal and you’re going to keep that with you. That’s data that you might share. Think about all the good that could come from having that data. You can protect it, as Eathan was talking about. You don’t have to share your blood pressure with your boss or your colleagues. You can only share that with your doctor.

Another great example is education. We’re working with a university to provide as part of your digital identity where you graduated from, your diploma, your certifications, and that sort of thing. Think about how powerful that is. When you go apply for a new job, you don’t have to call three people to verify it. It’s on-chain, so you know it’s verified.

My daughter took a class in computer animation at a community college over the summer. Being a great mom, I went to get that transcript. I called the college up because they didn’t respond to my email. They said, “We can get that for you. Fax us this information.” I don’t know about you, but I had no idea where to find a fax machine. That was my first fee. I had to go find a fax and fax the information. The school didn’t email me but mailed me a piece of paper that I now have to save until she goes to college to count as credit.

It’s another value point of having something like that in your digital identity. You can imagine so many things. There are probably even more applications I don’t even know about now that will be part of that digital identity that you will be able to take with you. That will make life so much easier and so much better. You get to choose who you share it with.

Those are great examples of what’s to come. We’re going to do a show with the CEO of DeLorean. Another fun one that we encountered is the new DeLorean coming out. They’re going to do one more than the previous edition. They’re going to have a digital twin of the NFT with the physical car that has all your driving data on it. It stays with you. You own it. I thought that was super cool because we have heard about insurance companies that were trying to take the data from your driving and affect your race but they don’t share that data with you. That goes to them. You get to own your data on your driving and all your preferences around that car on your NFT.

I love that, even going to events or storing the Proof of Attendance for an event. I was working with Hunter, who’s the CEO of Relic Tickets. He was telling me that 40% of people who say they went to the Super Bowl didn’t go to the Super Bowl. They say they went to the Super Bowl, but how do you prove that they went or didn’t go? There’s no way to prove it. Why would someone say I went to the Super Bowl but didn’t go? I have no idea, but I thought that was interesting that you can now save awards and events that you’ve been to.

There’s so much great information that you can store that’s important and can impact the world. People often ask me, “What’s your favorite application for digital identity?” I always say, “I don’t know. It hasn’t been invented yet. It’s coming. Someone is going to invent something.” It’s going to be even more amazing than all the examples I’ve given you.

On the same thread, let’s look ahead. What are some of the other things that you see in Web3 and the metaverse over the next few years? Let’s be futurists for the moment.

If you look at the metaverse, the metaverse has so much opportunity and tech for good to change the way we perceive things. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Education is a big one. I got asked to speak at EDUCAUSE because of the way that the metaverse is disrupting education. I’ll go back to my daughter again. She was learning about Mars. The teacher was giving lectures about Mars. He knows a lot about it. What a great teacher.

He took them into Marsverse, which is a metaverse on Mars. Everybody got to go to Mars. My daughter has energy and excitement. The discussion and description of what it would be like to be on Mars changed dramatically. Imagine that for the way we educate. It will become an experience versus a lecture. That’s going to change the face of education and the way that education is done.

I have a girlfriend. She’s a chief cardiologist at one of the hospitals. She gives time to an organization called Heart for Me. What they do is they go to Africa and other developing nations to teach how to do different heart surgeries. Over COVID, they couldn’t go. What they did was a group of doctors got together and sponsored a trainingverse. In that trainingverse, they can train heart surgeons in all these remote countries on how to do surgery. They practice not on real people but in the metaverse.

She was saying that COVID brought this amazing new tool because the results are better. Surgeons do the surgery better because of that training. Those are some of the examples that I see. Here’s a fun one. I have a friend who was a Vogue cover model. She always wanted to be a technologist. Now that she’s too old to be a model, she is developing virtual jewelry and clothes in the metaverse. What she did was she developed and designed these cool things. She offered me the ability to purchase it.

NFT | Unstoppable Domains

Unstoppable Domains: What’s great about Unstoppable Domains is that you have ownership of your data. You get to decide who sees what data, when they get to see it, how much they get to see it. That is a very powerful concept.

I have this amazing pair of earrings that I purchased in the metaverse, but I was the only one who got to buy them in real life because I had them in the metaverse. I have a jacket. Everywhere I go, you would think I was wearing Chanel or Louis Vuitton. Everybody wants my jacket because it’s one of a kind. I see retailers, brands, education, and healthcare changing the game. There are so many impacts that the metaverse will be disruptive.

There are so many inspiring ideas that you threw out there that are happening in real life. I saw an article listing hundreds of examples of the adoption of NFTs by big brands that people may not even realize. Burger King is doing things with NFTs and Ben and Jerry’s. The list goes on in terms of the use cases. One of the ones you brought up was one of the original ideas that inspired Jeff and me in a previous venture.

We had a hat company with interchangeable patches. We always felt like there should be a digital twin. You should be able to tell us because we had to produce a certain minimum of patches. You don’t want to waste products. In a way, what you described is a way for fashion designers to have people vote on what they produce and to vote it in a more sustainable way.

There are a lot of cool use cases. I love the hands-on education one too. I was doing online training in the piano industry for piano technicians for years. Around 2015 to 2017 was when it got started. It’s exactly like you’ve said on a number of occasions here. You don’t know what the advantages are going to be. You will find out that they’re going to be amazing. When you do these new technologies, you see a couple of basic advantages. That’s why you get into it.

Most people see the drawbacks because they’re always comparing to, “There’s no real heart there. There’s no blood spurting out, so it’s not going to work,” or whatever it is, but then you get in that actual environment and say, “There’s not that, but there’s this. There’s the chance to do it over.” You never know. I love the open-mindedness that you have about these new domains, especially in education. On this theme, what’s next in the pipeline for Unstoppable Domains?

We have a lot coming down the pipe in terms of utilities. We announced a new mobile app. We have had a mobile app, but we upgraded the mobile app that allows you to back up your data and information because your digital identity is getting a lot of good information in it. It’s going to be important that you can back that data up and that you don’t lose all that information about yourself.

You go to conferences. Let’s talk about NFTLA coming up. With that mobile app, you can take an NFT like your Lazy Lion, your Fame Lady, or whatever you have and develop a QR code in the app. Instead of giving out an old-fashioned business card or saying, “This is my Telegram. What’s your Telegram?” you can have your QR code on your phone and have people scan that and get your Telegram, information, and domain name. Maybe Jeff will have a thousand domain names that pop up there, which is a nice utility as we’re getting back into the workforce. We’ve got lots of other stuff coming out, too, that will add more utility to domains and the power of how they will be used in the future.

There’s a lot to this space. We also have great partnerships with OpenSea. We have done some great auctions. I don’t know, Jeff, if you picked up any of these but we did premium domain auctions with their custom pictures like Christmas.X with a Christmas NFT. We did some for good. We partnered up with Girls in Tech and did an auction. People donated one-of-one collections of NFTs. We had the largest fundraising day for Girls in Tech in the history of Girls in Tech through selling those NFTs with OpenSea. We have done stuff with Crypto.com. There are many great things.

Let’s do it.

It’s a piece of candy.

You are going to laugh. It’s chicken eggs.

We need the background on this.

You can finally buy that prom dress.

You could have a prom at NFTLA. There you go.

NFT | Unstoppable Domains

This is innovation happening in real-time.

I purchased a sleeping bag.

Do you have a camping trip planned?

What is her name?

It’s Media Day over there.

That sounds good.

Icee is a great idea.

It was cool.

NFT | Unstoppable Domains

About Sandy Carter

NFT | Unstoppable Domains

My team once had an Oscar type event and presented it to me that showcased my character. My oscar was a gigantic exclamation point which they said represented passion, leadership and success.

I have loved every role I have played including General Management, Sales, Start-up Management, Marketing , Strategy, and Ecosystem Development. Some of my favorites have involved turnaround executive management and creation of new categories like SOA, Smarter Workforce, and Ecosystems. I have the ability to manage multi disciplinary projects and to navigate complex situations, solving them with both simplicity and teamwork.