Q&A with Taylor Monahan, ‘the Mother of the DAO’ and Co-Founder of the First Ethereum Wallet
A fascinating conversation with Taylor Monahan where we cover Occupy Wall Street, strict but loving mothers, peeing in water bottles and how crypto can use more empathy.
One of the things I love most about crypto are the people like Taylor Monahan, a surfer/skate rat from LA’s Manhattan Beach who went to film school at NYU, discovered Bitcoin early and then built the first Ethereum wallet when the user experience of claiming Ether from the pre-sale proved tricky. She’s a force of nature on twitter and a prime example of the type of person people speak of when they marvel at the tight and dedicated community of Ethereum developers. Read on to find out why peeing in plastic bottles comes up a surprising number of times, how her first big project was almost called YourEtherWallet and how she just wanted to give everyone a hug when the DAO was hacked in 2016. You can follow her on twitter here and check out her company MyCrypto here.
Matt Leising: Are you a native Californian, or where did you grow up?
Taylor Monahan: Yeah, so I grew up in Manhattan Beach, which is just south of LAX.
ML: That’s where I learned to surf, at the pier.
TM: Today it's very wealthy, like movie stars and pro athletes and stuff. But when I was growing up it was definitely upper middle class. Most of my friends’ parents, my parents, you know were career oriented, that kind of stuff.
ML: My mom would drop us off, me and my buddy, in the morning with our surfboards and then we'd just spend the whole day at the beach surfing, we’d eat pizza at that place right above the pier. And then my friend's dad would come to take us back. It's like, you just drop your kids off 40 miles away from home. Back then it was like, no big deal.
TM: No big deal. When I was a student in middle school, like, 11, 12, 13 [years old], we just had our skateboards and our surfboards. We’d skate all around.
ML: Did you see that movie Tequila Sunrise with Mel Gibson? That's set in Manhattan Beach, right?
The Manhattan Beach pier
TM: Yeah. My childhood was basically just being outdoors. I have a brother, he's 17 months younger than me and so we grew up fighting all the time, wrestling, bickering, you know, like we were siblings. But yeah, we were always playing sports. He grew [tall], I did not grow. I'm only five foot, but he grew to six four. He played pro baseball for awhile.
ML: For who?
TM: The Washington Nationals. He basically did high school baseball. He was a pitcher, it was a huge part of my whole family, actually, the pitching and the travel ball.
TM: He went to Duke and he pitched for Duke and then he got drafted. And so then he did the minors. But it's so different, watching him play college ball and then watching him playing in the minors.
ML: Because everybody's so good at that the level?
TM: Everyone is so good, but everyone is very independent. All of a sudden you go from a team sport to an independent sport almost because all you're trying to do is level up. That was tough because he loves team sports.
TM: We were really close. We would bicker like siblings, but we were really close. So yeah, growing up, skating, surfing, being outdoors, playing sports.
ML: What did your parents do?
TM: So my dad's an engineer, and an entrepreneur. I don't even know how to describe it, but people will come to him with problems that they need solving and then he will solve them.
ML: That sounds familiar [laughs].
TM: Yeah [laughs]. When I was a kid, I was probably three or so, he built a big huge machine in our garage trying to solve a problem for a customer. He did so in our garage and I would just hang out and play with all the little screws and bolts and nuts, and I thought it was the best thing ever. So yeah, I'm very engineer-y, very like takings apart.
ML: Is he a mechanical engineer?
TM: Yeah. He still is, he’s working, still has his hand in too many pots, still solving problems.
TM: And then my mom was a teacher, so polar opposite, very social, all about teaching and education.
ML: What level was she teaching?
TM: She taught high school. It was at the continuation school in Torrance, which is for all of the kids who for one reason or another, can't go to normal high school or get kicked out of school. So there's sort of two types. One is like immigrants or first generation students who don't have the English language knowledge to keep up in school. And the other half is just like thugs, gang members.
ML: Degens.
TM: Yeah. Total hardcore. My mom would come home and she'd be like, ‘oh my God, this kid he's so smart, but I caught him smoking dope in the bathroom. Again. We had to kick him out. Again.’
ML: [laughs]. I remember being terrified of CT when I was a kid, I did not want to end up there.
“You can do a lot with $40”
TM: Watching her with my daughter now, it's like I'm realizing just how much she taught me. Like day-to-day, every day, every experience and every opportunity was some way to teach me something about the world, something about people. She's a good mom. I should have paid more attention as I like scream at my three-year-old across the room [laughs].
ML: So, you're outside, you're surfing, you're skating. How did you like school? Were you a good student? Did you gravitate to anything in particular?
TM: I think part of it with my upbringing, with my mom being a teacher and so forth, she taught me how to play the game right. I really valued getting good grades. I valued respecting my teachers, that kind of stuff. So even when I struggled in a subject, I still got great grades.
TM: It wasn't until high school that I started rebelling a bit. I wouldn't say I rebelled more than most teenagers, but I rebelled differently.
TM: I actually started questioning why people should do the things that they’re told, like, why should I go to college? I had gotten really into video and film from skating, right? I was the one with the camera always. We had all the videos and editing them and stuff. So then I took film classes in high school. We had a broadcast journalism class, so I did that. I knew that I wanted to work in film. And so then I thought, okay, I'll go to college. And then during my rebellious years, I was like, why the hell would I go to college? That's a waste of money. I live in LA. I should just work in film.
TM: And then, let's see, my senior year everyone's applying for colleges. So I applied for college and I got accepted into NYU, in the early decision. It was the only college I applied to.
TM: I figured if I didn't get into NYU, I would just try to make it without college, or take a gap year. I hung out with a lot of older people that hadn't gone to college. They grew up in Manhattan Beach and then they stayed in Manhattan Beach. So I think that probably influenced me a bit. At some point I was like, wait, are we sure that this is the best possible way to live life? Especially as I'm watching my older friends surfing and fishing everyday and they’re perfectly happy.
ML: I had two choices, lawyer or doctor. So there was that.
TM: And you decided to be a writer?
ML: I went all the way up to being on waiting lists at medical schools around the country when I finally said, no, that’s not what I want to do. I want to be a writer. So I just dropped it.
TM: I will say that my parents never tried to make me anything, besides they would try to lead my decisions. As long as I had my rationale and it was thought out, then they were fine with it. Even if they probably secretly were like, you know, in bed at night looking at each other, like, ‘oh, she's going to make her mistakes.’
Learn more about MyCryptoWallet here
ML: So if you're 18 and coming from Manhattan Beach to NYU, that must've been a hell of a shock.
TM: Yeah, it was. I mean, I loved it. I loved every second of it. I was in the city, I was away from my parents.
TM: Because my mom taught at Shery [the continuation school] she knew the bad path. So it was like a 10:00 PM curfew. She always knew where I was. I had a cell phone from probably a younger age, but not because I got to use this fun cell phone, it was so my mom could keep track of me. [laughs] I didn't get a cash allowance or anything, but we would get birthday money and stuff, like most kids. But we wouldn't get cash. She had like this special debit card that was linked to her card.
ML: So she knew exactly what you were spending.
TM: Yeah, you can't buy cigarettes or weed on a debit card. And if I said I'm going to the movies then I actually have to spend the money on the movie ticket to prove that I went to the movies. Where with my friends, it was the best thing, you tell your parents you’re going to the movies and they drop you off at the movie theater with like $40 cash. You can do a lot with $40.
TM: Not me though. I have this debit card, that I have to actually go spend $20 to not go to the movies. [laughs] So New York was like freedom. I got a fake ID the first week I was there.
ML: What year did you start?
TM: That would be 2008.
TM: And then the film classes, it was the first time in my life where I was not the smartest kid in the room. I was a good student, and everyone knew that. I would get my homework done, then I’d run around [on the weekends] and be crazy. But NYU was, like, everyone was the kid who was the smartest kid in the front of the class who only studies. This is different [than Manhattan Beach]. I started being a little bit of the class clown actually, because I was like, this is far too serious.
“The answer’s not right unless you questioned it.”
ML: And if you're in New York in 2008, we're getting right up to Satoshi getting ready to release the white paper. Were you in tune enough to know when that happened or what was the first time you came across that?
TM: I did not come across that for years. I was there for Occupy Wall Street. I did not live in the park, but I was at the park for a number of days. It was a big part of NYU life and culture. My class, we entered in 2008. It was right before Obama got elected. My orientation, you know where they have the entire class in one auditorium to basically inspire you and then at the very end, they'd be like, oh, by the way, we're a university, so we're not allowed to say this, but we're just going to say, go vote change! And the whole auditorium would erupt. And I wasn't very political, but I was kind of jaded on politics. I still am, but I was a big fan of Obama, I guess, until I got there. And then I was like, whoa, like what, why? Like this is a lot of group think.
ML: Do you think you're a contrarian just to sort of sometimes be a contrarian?
TM: More than anything I think I get it from my dad. I just questioned everything. The answer's not right unless you questioned it.
ML: Did you get to know Phil Daian at all in Occupy?
TM: No, I didn't. I would say that we were on the very edge of it. I was pretty impressed by how steadfast they were, like, they were peeing in water bottles and there was a huge number of them who were completely camped out, like living there. Again, I was kind of jaded to politics then and the whole system in general. So I was like, okay, that's cool if you want to camp in a park and pee in water bottles, but realistically, is it going to change anything?
TM: I didn't hear about Bitcoin until I think 2012 in a completely different environment. I got back to LA and it was one of my friends, Mark, who is a really smart guy. I had met him, we had built like a Reddit ask community together. And he had somehow gotten completely hooked on Bitcoin and he just kept posting about it over and over and over again.
TM: It was Kosala [Hemachandra] who, I don't know, have you talked to Kosala? He's like the other half of it. He got interested in it because he wanted to build a his own computer and then he's like, ‘Oh, I'm going to build a miner.’
TM: So from Mark's perspective, it was more like philosophical and from Kosala’s perspective it was more the money aspect, the mining aspect, the tech aspect. I was kind of in the middle where I was like, you two guys are smart and this is interesting. And I love the fact that most of the community was operating on Reddit. I was a diehard Redditor still. It was a thing to be part of in a shitty, boring job that I was working.
TM: I was not involved at all in the mining stuff that did not interest me at all. I was never a hardcore gamer. I was always like looking for the games to chat with people.
ML: The social aspect. What do you think it was about Bitcoin, though, that interested you?
TM: Seeing this group of people that were just super dedicated to something and on the same page and they also happen to share a lot of the same philosophies as me. But also different ones. They were better at it. So I cared about privacy and security, but they are like way better at it. They were so far ahead of me.
TM: One of the things about Occupy Wall Street was that I saw these hippies peeing in water bottles. But with Bitcoin, I was like, okay, this is actually interesting, it doesn't involve occupying a park to get it to exist. So in that sense, I think it was more realistic. There's was also this just sort of degen fun aspect of it as well. Satoshi dice. That was just fun.
ML: Did you see in Bitcoin, like you said with Occupy Wall Street, it didn't seem like they're going to really change much by occupying a park, but maybe with Bitcoin, did you see it as leading to something that could change how people interacted with the world?
TM: I think it was a more realistic plan. I would say I was never a hardcore true believer. I got the rationale and I understood what they were going for [in Bitcoin] and you know, that kind of stuff, but I never was like, yeah, it's going to change the world.
TM: Except that when I got deeper into it, I thought, you know what? They might change the world just by existing. And being this rebellious, contrarian group of people providing this alternate world. That might not in itself change anything but the fact that they exist might alter the way that the current government thinks about something or does something.
ML: Ethereum was kind of up and coming at this point as well.
TM: So the narrative for the Ethereum pre-sale – which I didn't even realize was a narrative – was all about the world computer. That was like a whole thing, right? And that Ether is the fuel to run the world computer and everyone will buy Ether so that they can use and run these decentralized apps. The questions that I was trying to ask were, why would a user buy Ether? If we want to buy into the pre-sell are we betting that Facebook is going to buy Ether so that they can run this portion of the world computer?
TM: I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, but we only had between me and Kosala, I think we had maybe under 10 Bitcoin.
Ether pre-sale
TM: It wasn't any significant amount of money and so basically we decided to just throw some of that Bitcoin in the Ether pre-sale.
ML: And so you were getting in like the 30 cent level here?
TM: Yeah, we both got in on the pre-sale. Then basically after the pre-sale I didn't really pay attention to Ethereum much at all. It was kind of dead.
ML: Ethereum didn't even launch until 2015.
ML: And even then there wasn't really much on Ethereum, except now we're getting kind of into the DAO when I think that was something that caught your attention.
TM: Exactly. So basically the Ether pre-sale happened in the summer of 2014.
TM: I was doing freelance web development stuff. So I was working for like random businesses, building WordPress sites.
TM: And then [a year later] when Ethereum launched, Kosala called me on the phone. Basically he was like one, do you still have your Ether pre-sale file that was emailed to you? And two, it's in your email so you need to move your Ether because it's in your email and I know your password.
TM: And even though Ethereum had just launched, it's still not a super exciting time in general. Like Bitcoin was still $200. And so I think he bugged me about it for a couple of days. And then finally I was like, all right, I'm on my computer. We're both awake at the same time. What should we do? And so then he's like, all right, so open terminal. And here's how you download Geth. And I was like, ‘okay, so download this thing called Geth, or Go Ethereum. All right.’ And then we're going to type in this thing to generate a new wallet. And I was like, ‘okay, I'm right there with you. Like, I've gotten a new wallet. Right.’
TM: And then he was like, let me find the command to send all of it from the one [address] to the other [address]. And I was like, wait, what? I remember, we were messaging and I had to find my address for the new wallet, but I gave him my pre-sale address, which he knew that was my pre-sale address. So he was like, no, no, that's your pre-sale address. I need the other address. I’m like, where’s the other fucking address, I don't see any other address?
MyEtherWallet is born
TM: At some point I realized like, wait a minute, if this is really ever going to have a chance to make me fabulously wealthy, this typing in terminal while Kosala messages me and laughs in my face, like this is not a good plan. Right?
ML: So you were like literally having to type in your private key one character at a time?
TM: You would type in Geth and you would type in ‘create new account.’ And then you'd import your pre-sale [account]. And so basically you would have these two accounts in Geth. And so you weren't dealing with the actual private key, but then you had to say, send from this address to this address. There was ‘Geth transfer’ and then you type in the first address and then the second address and then the amount.
TM: There were no error messages. The first time I created an account, I thought it worked. And it didn't work, but I didn't know that it didn't work because it doesn't say ‘account not created.’ It just like sits there and does nothing.
TM: And I was like, by the way, not everyone can be doing this. There's how many people who got in on the pre-sale? They raised $18 million, and not everyone is sitting on their computer right now, typing in terminal. People have way more Ether than us, they're not doing that. And Kosala he was like, yeah, no, they are.
TM: And I was like, there's no way. They can't.
ML: And that was the seed of MyEtherWallet.
TM: It literally was because then I go on Reddit and sure enough the whole r/Ethereum was like, what the fuck is this? Where's the paper wallet?
TM: When you see on Reddit that everyone else is in the same boat I was like, ‘okay, let's just spin up a little thing.’ I was like [to Kosala], if I make you a thing with buttons you can click on, can you hook it up?
ML: How long did it take you guys to spin up the first version?
TM: Maybe a few hours. I probably handed it off to him one night and he probably had it finished by the morning.
ML: Was that the first Ethereum wallet that you know of?
TM: Yeah. We shared it with Mark actually first and then Mark was like, ‘you should post this to Reddit.’ People responded to it. The first Reddit posts is actually a GitHub link.
TM: We bought the domain name on my birthday.
TM: Kosala is reading to me, he's on GoDaddy or whatever, reading me all the variations of like Ether wallet names that are like $9, right? We didn't want to spend even a hundred dollars.
ML: And that’s how you got MyEtherWallet?
TM: We actually got to YourEtherWallet. And I was like, ‘Ooh, get it.’ And then I think GoDaddy actually told him, ‘Hey, MyEtherWallet is also available for $9 99.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds better.’ And that's how MyEtherWallet became a brand.
ML: That’s awesome.
“It’s weird to think of myself in this very feminine, motherly position. But for the DAO, I was definitely the mother of the DAO.”
TM: Honestly, it was just Reddit. Reddit [users] kept asking us for features and saying things like ‘this is awesome. Thank you so much.’ They would ask questions. They'd be like, ‘Hey, explain this.’ And I would either have the answer or I would be curious. And so I might message Kosala the question and then he would explain it to me and then I would translate it back to like the regular world.
TM: I got really into helping people in that sense. It was because I wanted to learn as well. And I learned so quickly.
Read more about the DAO: Q&A Part 2 With Flashbots Founder and Crypto OG Phil Daian
TM: Like everything about gas and transactions, everything about cryptography and private keys and encryption and all that. All of that was learned through this process.
ML: That just makes sense to me because when the DAO came around and got hacked it seems like you definitely jumped in and tried to help people try to figure out what had happened. It seems like a natural continuation of what you were just talking about.
TM: The DAO was a huge thing, but it wasn't what got me into the community. I was already there.
TM: Getting into the DAO was a whole process. And then when it got hacked, getting out of the DAO and dealing with that was a whole thing.
TM: Specifically when the DAO got hacked, that week Stefan Tual, who had been a figurehead in the Ethereum ecosystem for so long, right? He had done the pre-sale and he was very very respected. Like that boy went off the fucking deep end.
TM: There are these Reddit comments where he would – and don't get me wrong – people would come at him attacking him, but then he would go right back and attack them. And then specifically it was Emin [Gun Sirer, a Cornel associate professor] who had this post.
The famous call to pause the DAO that wasn’t heeded
ML: They had the moratorium post, right? They called for the moratorium, but nobody followed it. And then it came out that Gun had actually found the bug but not told anybody.
TM: Right. Exactly that. I think it's a little bit complex. They had found the bug, but they didn't realize the implications of the bug maybe?
ML: Yeah. Gun had found it and he was working with Phil Daian, they were shooting emails back and forth and Phil messed around with it but he didn’t think it was anything and said, ‘I dunno, Gun, this just doesn't look like a big deal.’ That was Monday. And then on Friday the hack used that exact same exploit.
TM: Right. And then Stefan basically went off and was like, ‘so you guys found a bug and didn't tell anyone. What the fuck? Oh, and not only that you guys published a fucking blog post about it?’ He was going off. The thing is, Gun was very respected in the community and Phil was very respected in the community.
ML: Well, just to be fair, Phil did the blog that night of the attack because they had looked at it, he knew what it was. So he was able to give a pretty thorough sort of recap of here's what happened. But it was only after the exploit had been made public.
ML: And there were like 10 or 12 other flaws that had been found in the code. This was not the only problem.
No hugs were being given out
TM: At this point my whole philosophy on everything was me trying to fill in the gaps of the community, right? Like at NYU I’m sitting there and I'm like, all right, there needs to be a class clown. Because y'all are too serious.
TM: Here, I was like, all right y'all need some empathy and some like emotional support dogs in the room, because there was so much logic brain everywhere. People would say something, they’d rant on Reddit about ‘this is too hard, or this is stupid’ or whatever. And they would get 30 responses of like, here's how to do it, here's how exactly to solve your problem in 10,000 words.
TM: Nobody was like, ‘yo man, yeah. I know it sucks. Sorry.’
ML: No hugs were being given out.
TM: The thing is like, when people are ranting in that sort of way, most of the time all they want is to be told, like they just want to rant and have someone listen and be like, ‘yeah, man, your feelings are justified.’
ML: Did you feel like Ethereum could have crashed and burned at that point?
TM: I wasn't too concerned about the price of Ether, but I was very much concerned about the community being lost. Because the DAO slack and the excitement around the DAO was so thorough and was everywhere. If that turned evil or if that turned dark or whatever you want to call it, that's what I was scared of being a threat to the viability of Ethereum.
ML: It’s kind of obvious, but it should be said, you were probably one of the very few women in that world at the point. And that's a really empathetic kind of feminine response to this. When you've got a bunch of male engineers who are trying to tell you that, you know, you just didn't do the code right. Or something.
TM: Exactly. And that's the thing, I don't know, I'm not a big gender person, but I do think that gender is a part of it because I've always been one of the guys. So it's weird to think of myself in this very feminine, motherly position. But for the DAO, I was definitely the mother of the DAO.
TM: I do like feeling that when I say things or when I'm doing things that they're having some sort of impact. I'm very rarely the one who wants to be the center of attention or to rule the world. But for the DAO especially, it was so crystal clear to me what was needed. And it was also because it was all on the internet. It was on a slack and on Reddit, two of these platforms that, yeah, I own slack, I own Reddit. I've been doing these things for so long. I was like, I'm an expert in commenting on Reddit, you know?
ML: That's one of the things I love about you is just watching your public discourse. You don't take shit from anybody. And it seems to me maybe going way back, maybe your brother and you, you might've started there. And then by the time you're an expert on online discourse, in Reddit or wherever, and you’ve answered questions and you understand this stuff. That all seems to flow together.
TM: Yeah. I think it's a combo. Me and my brother, because we're so close in age, so close in size until he got bigger than me, we would fight hard. And then it was always like skating and surfing, I was always one of the guys. It's never been weird for me to be the only girl in the room.
ML: How has not only being a woman, but now being a mom in this world and in this industry, has that helped you or changed you?
TM: Having a kid is freaking crazy. Everyone says they grow up so fast and everyone says you don't even know what love is, you can't even describe it, right? So in some ways it, it changed my perspective on things. Because right when I got pregnant, the work we were doing was a hundred percent of my life. I wasn't even taking care of myself, you know what I mean? So in that way, like it forced me to take care of myself.
TM: Your whole being sort of shifts. So I'm like, wait okay guys, I know you're having drama over there, but [my baby daughter’s] really cute. You know what I mean?
ML: So going back over all this history, how are you thinking about crypto and what’s going on? Are you excited or concerned or how would you characterize it?
TM: I think crypto today has more potential than it's ever had before. I think I've gotten to a point, just given my sort of quote-unquote experience, of seeing the cycles and I take it far less seriously than I ever have. So it used to be, this thing that happened would be this existential threat. And then I was like, oh, it turns out we'll survive
TM: And I'm honestly, just frankly, always so surprised by crypto in general. Just by how exuberant the bull [market] is. Even though I was there last time, I still look around and I'm like, ‘how the hell are you guys doing this?’
TM: The other thing that blows my mind is all the things — the quote unquote narrative today — is much different, but all the things that we talked about or heard about back in, I mean, even like 2013.
TM: All of the things that we talked about and dreamed about, I'd almost written off. We were like, the DAO Is awesome! And then the DAO gets hacked and you’re like, maybe not.
TM: Now it's like, okay, DAOs are coming back. But the DAOs that are coming today are going to have such a larger scope than what the DAO ever set out to do.
TM: And it's like real. All the DeFi stuff was fun and the yield farming was fun and disgusting too, but the thing I was most impressed with was how fast we had real Dapps with real usage that were interoperable with each other and building on each other. I was like, dude, you're spinning this token into that token into this token across three different platforms? This is what they promised me in 2014, right? They didn't say it in these ways. They didn't think that it was going to be a profit-greed-profit mechanism of food emojis. But it’s here and it’s real.
ML: Taylor, this has been so great. Really fascinating. Thank you for all the time. I really appreciate it.
ML: One thing I do is I like to ask people who you’d like me to talk to next? Just to kind of keep a community chain going. Who's interesting? Could be anybody, but somebody that you respect and admire.
TM: You know who I would love their life story is Peter [Szilagyi] from Geth.