Cristina Dolan

Cristina is an engineer, entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker. As founder of InsideChains, she works with organizations to digitally transform business models through advanced technology, data and blockchain ecosystems with economic layers that offer members greater visibility, richer data, cybersecurity, new business models and dynamic new products. As an engineer, computer scientist, entrepreneur and MIT Media Lab Alumna, she has lead digital transformation in fintech, insurtech, media and healthtech while successfully working with incumbents and startups throughout her career. Cyber-risk is the most immediate financially material ESG risk, a topic Cristina is passionate about since it threatens the sustainability of organizations, governments and communities. She currently works for RSA building alliances, and has been appointed as a board advisor to several cyber security companies including WISeKey (WKEY, NASDAQ), Crayonic and Cytegic (acquired by Mastercard). In addition, she is an industry advisor to Adit EdTech Acquisition Corporation (ADEX.U, NYSE). She is a cofounder and investor in Additum, an award winning European ‘Value Based Healthcare’ ecosystem utilizing IoT, AI and blockchain enabled reward tokens to improve patient outcomes. In the early days of the Internet, Cristina Dolan, co-founded OneMain.com, which grew to be the tenth largest ISP after a successful IPO. At OneMain, Cristina served as the provider’s Geographic Communities Division President and Chief Strategic Alliances Officer. In only five months, she conceived and built the OneMain cornerstone, Geographic Communities, into a profitable business. At its launch, the company’s IPO became the largest Internet public offering at its time, surpassing Amazon’s and eBay’s respective IPOs. As a key executive of global FinTech software company with a SaaS solution for institutional multi-asset financial trading, she gained an deep understanding of the value of a market ecosystem, new sources of data and the growing regulatory requirements for transparency, security and best execution. The FIX Trading Community invited her to join the Digital Currency/Blockchain Working Group to help identify, analyze and define use cases and integration points for digital currency and distributed ledger technologies across the spectrum of capital markets requirements, and recommend best practices for FIX implementation and usage of this emerging technology in financial markets. Her passion for blockchain and its ability to transform global transactions extends beyond just financial applications, the ability to capture data journeys across multiple systems through blockchain is powering new opportunities within her companies and projects. She is a recognized trailblazing authority and Internet pioneer, and is often invited to speak about the evolution of networked technologies and her success building products and companies. The MIT Center for International Studies, World Future Society, Barclays, Turkey Future Day, CEMC Council Innovation Summit and Battle of the Quants 2017 engaged her to speak on BitCoin, Blockchain and the Global Economy. She is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and recently wrote about Cybersecurity as a Global Threat to Democracy. In the fall of 2016, she was a judge at an IBM Blockchain Hackathon. Over the past two decades she has been organizing events around the hottest trends in technology with industry luminaries. As Chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of New York, she has hosted several events with blockchain industry leaders discussing Blockchain and Smart Contracts, Digital Trust in a Blockchain World and Trust::Data as it relates to FinTech and HealthTech. Career highlights include serving as the President and CEO of the venture-backed MIT spin-out, Wordstream, focused on multilingual messaging. Cristina has also held executive roles at IBM and Oracle where she led sales, business development, and product marketing, winning numerous leadership and sales awards. She was a senior executive in lead technology roles on the founding teams that launched the first Hearst Magazines site (HomeArts) and several ABC/Disney Internet properties including the one of the first Internet streaming audio and video sites in partnership with RealAudio. Cristina has been an investor and advisor to several start-ups and MIT spin-outs, including dmetrics which offers a sophisticated AI platform and decision engine for consumer analytics, sentiment and microtargeting, utilizing unstructured user generated content and was a Rudyard Partners Fund General Partner focusing on mobile investments. In October 2013, Cristina launched Dream it. Code it. Win It., a non-profit organization to promote creative problem solving within computer science education and rewarded the winning student teams with over $250,000 in cash and prizes over three years. Traders Magazine honored Cristina for her efforts in 2014 with a Charitable Works Award for the program. In 2015, Dream it. Code it. Win it. won four Stevie Awards, a Gold for Organization of the Year and three Silver awards for Startup of the Year, Female Innovator of the Year and Female Executive of the Year. She was recently been honored with a 2017 Harold E. Lobdell Distinguished Service Award from MIT for her work in promoting computer science education. As an advocate for computer science education, her TED talk ‘Just Solve It’, addresses the value of being an engineer and solutionist to create opportunities. Cristina earned a Master of Media Arts and Science from the MIT Media Lab, where she focused on interactive information and storytelling. She also holds a Masters of Computer Science Engineering and a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering with concentrations in Computer Science, Communications Technologies, and Business. Cristina is bilingual with fluency in English (native-speaker) and Spanish. As a member of the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation in 1992, Cristina placed first in the US National Championships and Empire State Games in Skeleton. In 1990, she competed in the World Cup Championship in Konigsee, Germany, earning second place among the female competitors. Fluent in Castilian Spanish in addition to her native language, English.