Transparency in Business Advocate Jessi Baker on How It Can Empower Women
HUFFPOST
By Jennifer Barton
Jessi Baker, the CEO of Provenance, a platform that allows users to understand the ethical sourcing of their clothes and food, talked recently talked with HuffPost about entrepreneurship, inspiring women and why people should care about where their products come from. Jessi did a PhD at UCL in Computer Science, where she started to develop the concept for Provenance. Today, Provenance is one of the first to adopt and utilize blockchain technology to help create dependable, immutable records to enable transparency to exist, without being centralized.
“I’m passionate about more equality in the workplace, and believe that more exposure of who is really behind the brands you’re buying into helps ensure more equality. We encourage initiatives that support both men and women, and many of the smaller businesses want to compete on the fact they’re a women-owned business.”
On Tech Entrepreneurship:
No matter what your background, marketing or tech, understand your business model and how you’re going to make money from day one.
Spend as much time validating your business model with customers as possible before anything else - highly validating your concept and ensuring there is a robust business model there is the most important thing to do.
Focus is also crucial - to do something well you just need to focus on one thing.
Have a radical focus on one product or thing. Simplifying that as much as possible is really important.
Don’t be afraid to try - there are always lots of failures along the way and the whole thing could fail. It’s the best life MBA you’re going to get.
On Drawing Inspiration from Women:
Courtney Boyd Meyers, Founder of Akua, maker of carbon-neutral products out of seaweed.
Alicia Navarro, President and Co-Founder of Skimlinks, who built that company from zero to $50 million.
Dr. Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity Technologies, who helped to inspire a lot of our direction and has done some phenomenal stuff in blockchain technology.
Rachel Botsman, Author, Trust Expert, and Speaker on how technology is transforming trust and what this means for life, work and how we do business.
On Provenance:
Provenance is on a mission to enable every great product to be transparent, to enable a future where we understand about businesses and products via true stories and true impact.
Provenance works with businesses that use our software service, which gives them a platform that allows for more transparency.
Provenance provides a place for those brands to open up that data and to power experiences for the shopper using that platform.
The future of Provenance is building brand trust as the platform undergoes a transition to a consumer focus, enabling the opportunity for everyone to engage.
Learn more about the Provenance Blockchain Solution