Welcome Austin Robey to Unlock!

Hello, Unlock community! We’re very excited to announce that Austin Robey is now Unlock’s Head of Growth. He’ll help us expand the use of our protocol within the indie music industry and beyond. Co-founder of Ampled, a co-op support platform for musicians that’s among the first orgs to integrate Unlock, Austin is a recent recipient in our Token Grant program, and the founder of the fast-growing Dinner DAO, along with being an active member of several DAOs, such as Seed Club and Forefront. Last month he wrote a post on our blog detailing the many ways musicians can leverage Unlock to grow and maintain their fanbase.

I first met Austin in my work as a Fellow studying web monetization with the Mozilla Foundation. Since then he’s dived into Web3 technologies with impressive energy and passion to help Unlock work for independent creators. We also love his strong design background, with an architecture degree from Pratt, and an ongoing relationship as a designer with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. So we can’t wait to see how he better connects Unlock with projects across many creative fields.

What that let me turn the mic over to Austin to talk about his new role, and his vision for helping Unlock:

I’m excited to begin work as Unlock Protocol’s Head of Growth.

In my previous work (as a founder of Ampled, and also as a DAO member of groups like Forefront and Seed Club) I’ve been passionate about exploring alternative economic structures to support creators. Unlock, in particular, is incredibly powerful tooling that I believe can help generate a new foundation for a creator-first online economy.

I see Web 3.0 as a new paradigm that can shift power away from platforms and back towards people. I’ve been impressed by the Unlock team and their foresight and commitment towards the creation of a more distributed, equitable, and open web.

Unlock’s forward-thinking approach to NFTs is unique. While many people currently associate NFTs with pixelated crypto art,  Unlock is demonstrating that NFTs can be much more. Not only can an NFT represent artwork, but it can also be a membership badge, access pass, or passport to participate in digital (or physical) experiences across the web or IRL. This has the potential to radically reshape our entire creative economy away from attention and advertisements - and help us create new business models -- free from corporate walled gardens and monopolistic tech platforms.

We’re still in the very early stages of a new Web 3.0 era for creators and communities. In my role, I’ll be helping tell the story of Unlock, its capabilities, and onboarding great communities to showcase the transformative power of the protocol.

If you’d like to connect, I’d love to hear what you are working on. Feel free to reach me at [email protected] or in the Unlock Discord.

Also, 👋 if you’re in the Oregon area, come say Hi to Austin and I at Eth Portland 2021.