From Venture Capital to Founder Mode: Mia Soarez Launches Walkin at ETHDenver
Following her departure from Fabric Ventures, the Walkin founder split her Denver schedule between launching the platform, interviewing founders and investors for Genzio, and judging ETHDenver’s #BUIDLathon.
Mia Soarez returned to ETHDenver with a different title this year. Previously working in events and marketing at Fabric Ventures, she arrived as the founder of Walkin—and took the interviewer’s seat for Genzio.
At Genzio’s Media House, her guests included NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi and Fabric Ventures co-founder Richard Muirhead.
For Soarez, Muirhead was a familiar face. Before launching Walkin, she had worked at Fabric on international events, sponsorship and marketing. A year earlier, that work included the firm’s ETHDenver brunch with SevenX Ventures, Outlier Ventures and Magna.
This time, she had her own product in the mix.
Walkin launched for ETHDenver, bringing conference side events into a single discovery and registration platform. Instead of finding an event through one group chat, registering through another website and repeating the process for the next gathering, attendees can browse events and register for several with one click.
The organizer side addresses the same fragmented process: event listings, guest approvals, invitations and reminders. During February, Walkin was already sending registration confirmations and reminders for Denver gatherings, including Genzio’s Media Cube House.
The team was also adding features specific to its Web3 audience. Ahead of ETHDenver, Walkin enabled wallet connections and POAP functionality, allowing organizers to distribute digital attendance collectibles to guests’ wallets.
During its launch period, Walkin recorded 11,181 users and 24,413 sessions between February 3 and March 3—more than 2 visits per user on average.
Alongside the product work and Genzio interviews, Mia Soarez served in ETHDenver’s DAOs & Communities judging pool. The track’s winners included A Bank For DAOs, collaborative storytelling project Sekai and governance platform Tribuni.
Beyond Denver, Walkin is in talks with Paris Blockchain Week, Consensus and TOKEN2049 about bringing its side-events experience to their conferences.
