We are extremely excited to announce Ali Goldstein Norup has joined the Flip family as an independent board member.
We say this sincerely: Ali’s a rare, polymathic person. She’s like that one college professor who you find yourself intellectually raving over. When she speaks, you listen, not because your grade depends upon it, but because something in your primitive brain perks up and says, hey, brace for impact, knowledge incoming.
She’s been everywhere, man.
From fine art → business management → asset management → two-time founder (one bootstrapped, one venture-backed) → fintech entrepreneur in residence → to where she is today as Head of VC & startup ecosystem for Google Cloud, Americas.
Ali’s a perfect person to guide Flip from the board level.
She has extensive business, finance, and startup experience, as well as a wealth of experience with mentoring over 40 companies globally, focusing on their OKRs, KPIs, and startup narratives/visions.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s well-plugged into both the crypto and the art world with a hyper focused lens for understanding the economic, technological, and community-based aspects of NFTs.
Having begun her crypto journey in late 2016, she’s earned her stripes within the space. When NFTs found their first waves of mass adoption in 2020/21, she astutely recognized where various nodes of industry were connecting.
Given her start in fine art (she studied Art History at Northwestern University and worked for years within the sector, for instance, at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC and with The Armory Show and Volta) NFTs aesthetically make sense to her. But also, NFTs make sense to her in terms of tech and finance.
In particular, she’s excited that with NFTs and on-chain tech, art (which formalistically and historically eludes objective measurement) can now be constantly and verifiably “priced for perfection.” This is what happens when you get an art-finance-data-tech nerd talking about NFTs.
She’d seen from the engine room how art’s distribution was subject to friction from institutional gatekeepers; besides issues of pricing, the art world has historically constructed barriers between artist, broker, and buyer. Selling ‘good art’ was never as simple as being creative. Buying ‘good art’ was never as simple as having the money. And for Ali, “it’s all about removing the barrier.” With NFTs, theoretically, anyone can create, collect, and speculate with a basic crypto wallet — that’s one massive barrier removed. CeFi to DeFi and voila - art owner!
We’ve now used the word ‘art’ 17 times throughout this article; however, we, nor does Ali, want you to get too hung up on NFTs solely as they relate to art. In fact, that’s yet another reason we’re thrilled to have Ali on our side, namely, that she gets it . . . it being that:
- Art is just the beginning for NFTs (the future will more broadly include collectibles, fractional shares, communities, etc.)
- There’s increasing multifurcation within the NFT space (it’s an industry splitting under innovative pressure, and those split-ends, themselves, are splitting as well — someone (wink, Flip) needed to braid together various NFT marketplaces, on-chain analytics, and social aspects.)
- The real futurist play here goes beyond just the jpegs and into the data. After all, that's a large part of what Ali excels with at Google Cloud, advising companies (web3 included) on how to leverage their data to better understand their market and thus build the best business/product available. If data is the key to maintaining a leading relationship with the future, Ali’s hopeful because she sees Flip as being the informational frontier for NFTs. Whether it's by seeing who’s buying, what they're buying (at what price), or how much and how fast they’re buying, Flip can provide its users with asymmetric hints about the direction NFTs will take tomorrow, next month, and maybe even next year.
So, ya, to say the least, we’re delighted to have Ali as a part of the Flip family.