Camila Russo is the founder of The Defiant, a content platform composed of a daily newsletter, crypto news, and weekly podcast focused on decentralized finance and the open economy. Russo is also a former Bloomberg News reporter, and author of the book, The Infinite Machine. ^[1][3][5]

Education

Camila Russo attended Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile where she earned a B.S. in Journalism from 2004 - 2008. In 2009, she went to Northwestern University to study for a Master of Science degree in Journalism, Business reporting, magazine writing, and editing. ^[1]

Career

Camila Russo began her career in 2007 as an International News Reporter at El Mercurio. She wrote breaking and feature stories for the global news section of El Mercurio newspaper, Chile's biggest print news company. In September 2010, she served as an Intern at Bloomberg News in New York. In March 2011, she joined Bloomberg fully as an Emerging Markets Reporter, became a European Stocks Reporter in August 2015, and made her way into a Markets Blogger for the organization until January 2019. ^[1][5]

In January 2019, Camila Russo left Bloomberg to become an independent writer with a focus on volatile corners of the market like Argentina and cryptocurrencies. She also wrote a book "The Infinite Machine" based on the foundation of Ethereum and the crypto bubble it helped create. It was published by HarperCollins in July 2020. ^[1][5]

The Defiant

Camila Russo founded The Defiant in June 2019. The Defiant is a media company headquartered in New York, US, dedicated to curating, digesting, and analyzing significant developments in the field of DeFi.^[2]

Camila is responsible for leading the company, interviewing industry leaders for the podcast, and overseeing the affairs of the company. When asked how she started the company, Camila responded:

"The person who first encouraged me to do a newsletter was Anthony Pompliano. He interviewed me for his podcast and we began talking. I told him I had this idea of doing a DeFi newsletter. And he really encouraged me, he pointed me to Substack."

"So I started following his newsletter much more closely as I was getting ready to launch The Defiant. I took a lot of inspiration from him on how he provides analysis on the market and how he has the free version and the paid version and how he has established a closer relationship with his paid subscribers" - Camila Russo^[4]

Camila works alongside Cooper Turley who is a writer at The Defiant, four other writers who write every couple of weeks, a podcast editor, and she partners with Robin Schmidt to make the YouTube content. ^[4][5]

Camila Russo is also a public speaker and has spoken at a couple of conferences:

• CoinDesk’s Consensus: Invest, November 2018, New York
• United Nations’ Women Entrepreneurship Day, November 2018, New York
• Bloomberg Ideas, October 2018, New York
• Compound: Thesis, October 2018, San Francisco
• Token Fest: The Business of Blockchain, September 2018, Boston
• CoinDesk’s Consensus, May 2018, New York
• Blockchain Economic Forum, February 2018, Singapore. ^[5]