Diana Stern

Diana is an operating advisor at Bessemer and general counsel at Palm NFT Studio, a technology company that works with brands to expand audiences and deepen fan engagement using web3 tools.
With a decade of blockchain experience, Diana previously served as payments product counsel at Stripe, where she was a founding member of and lead product counsel for their global crypto team.
She also oversaw user policy legal in the U.S.
and Canada where she identified and cross-functionally implemented legal strategies that resulted in billions of dollars of payments volume with little to no product or engineering work required.
Before Stripe, Diana was the legal innovation designer at BakerHostetler LLP where she helped create the first enterprise smart contracts at big law firms.
Diana started her career at Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP and worked among their global M&A and Technology Companies Group to advise founders and executives on venture financings and strategic transactions.
She also co-created a novel commercial instrument that has been used by thousands of blockchain startups.
An active participant in the broader legal tech community, Diana is a co-organizer of Bay Area Legal Hackers and serves on the Editorial Board of the MIT Computational Law Report.
Previously, Diana served on the board of Ms. JD, a national nonprofit dedicated to building a diverse pipeline of future women leaders in law.
Diana earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in writing seminars and French from John Hopkins University and holds a JD from UCLA School of Law.
In her free time, Diana enjoys Muay Thai and writing poetry.