Vivien Khoo, founder of Web3Women (W3W), fifth from left, celebrates W3W’s official launch with the founding members in Hong Kong in 2023. Courtesy of Vivien Khoo

HONG KONG — Vivien Khoo left Goldman Sachs in 2019 after a 19-year career at the global investment bank. She felt she was too young to retire, yet too old to spend another two decades doing the same job.

So she stepped down from her managing director role and made an unexpected move. She became interim CEO and global chief operating officer of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that was grappling with a series of regulatory challenges at the time.

Recalling the decision in a recent interview with The Korea Times, Khoo said she wishes she could claim she had long been passionate about blockchain technology and instinctively believed in crypto’s future.

Instead, Khoo believed her long career in compliance and regulation made her a strong fit for the role. If she could successfully navigate the transition, she thought she might build a long-term career in the industry.

What struck her most, however, was the isolation. Unlike her years at Goldman Sachs, she found herself with few peers to turn to for advice. She was one of the few women in leadership in the crypto industry at the time. Even more unusually, she came from traditional finance.

At Goldman Sachs, she recalled, mentorship had been embedded in the firm’s culture. Diversity and inclusion were incorporated into key performance indicators, from recruiting and performance reviews to internal initiatives. Spending nearly two decades in that environment, Khoo said, naturally shaped her mindset.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that after roughly two years at BitMEX, Khoo turned her attention to improving women’s representation in the crypto industry.

The crypto sector remains heavily male-dominated, with women underrepresented in both leadership positions and user participation. Only 13 percent of Web3 startups include a female founder, while just 3 percent of companies have a team made up exclusively of women, according to Web3Women (W3W).

“Women’s representation in financial institutions tends to taper off at senior levels,” Khoo said. “Still, the sector fares better than crypto, where the dominance of technology and trading backgrounds has traditionally limited female participation.”

Source: Korea Times News