Kirsten Pomales

Kirsten leads Recursive's team operations, strategic advising, and product architecture.

As an engineer and consultant, Kirsten has spent the past 8 years helping enterprises and technical teams launch and scale blockchain-based applications.

She spent the past few years as CEO of a venture-backed protocol infrastructure for marketplaces, TalentLayer. Here she led a team of 20 in deploying and building an open-source ecosystem around their protocol. The protocol was highlighted in 2022 with a European Union Seal of Excellence and substantial grant for their work on marketplace data interoperability.

Before TalentLayer, Kirsten spent 3 years as a consultant working on various enterprise blockchain products, including one of the biggest blockchain banking infra deployments in North America. During this time she also was co-chair of the Enterprise EOS Alliance, an enterprise blockchain industry group, and the IEEE's Blockchain Governance Working Group, a 200-member open-source standards organization. Kirsten has been featured as a speaker on blockchain infrastructure design by the European Commission, Fedex Institute, Consensys, and many others.

Aside from her work in the blockchain space, Kirsten has also previously founded multiple Web 2 software companies in the marketplace and data aggregation sectors. Before getting into tech, Kirsten worked for 5 years in public policy in the US, lobbying on issues related to freedom of speech, cronyism, and energy regulation.

Kirsten cares about building decentralized tech and open-source software that challenges current paradigms; reducing power held by governments and corporations, and enabling people to find freedom through self-ownership.