Ashleigh Schap ~ Biz Dev & Crypto: Breaking Out of the Bubble MakerDAO

Transcript

[Music] foreign our next speaker is Ashley shapp from maker down give her a round hi guys good morning how's everybody doing got the uh early bird crowd here today huh awesome well uh thanks for coming out it's nice to be here at eth Denver it's uh it's been an interesting year in crypto hasn't it

um obviously remember when eth was like a thousand dollars per that was pretty cool um obviously a lot has changed but in a lot of ways it's been good because it means a lot of the you know kind of shady people have left uh the industry more focused on building all of those things um and that was important there have been a lot of kind of odd people and kind of liars in the space over the last few years some of them you might remember this guy anyone recall him Craig Wright Satoshi uh and this one is a little bit more painful but uh Mark carpalis mount gox 2014.

but crypto's gotten a little bit better about sussing these people out and sort of you know seeing them coming but now we have new lies that we tell ourselves like this one from 2017. that one we all kind of learned the hard way that was tough um and you know still we have some things that we tell ourselves that are not necessarily true like this one you can go ahead and just have bad ux and it's going to be totally fine so that is actually not the worst lie in crypto and I've been thinking about this next live for a little while it's confusing because

this lie that I'm talking about isn't one that sort of comes off as a lie at first it seems pretty innocuous um and that's what kind of makes it dangerous it's something that we all kind of tell each other and ourselves but it's something that's really holding us back from taking this industry to the next level and really delivering on the promise that we've created here and that big lie is this if you build it they will come has anyone heard that said around these parts yeah yeah it's uh it's it's confusing because it's not it's not the kind of lie that anyone's saying to hurt anyone or to trick anyone it's the kind of lie that on its face sort of maybe

looks like it might even be true um but we know because of the anemic dap usage and uh you know low user adoption rates that it's actually not true and you know it's not unique to any one project it's sort of an ethos throughout the space in fact I'll tell you a funny story so in 2017 I met this guy I was I was an investor for a family office so BC private Equity that kind of thing met this guy he tells me that they have just made a big investment in maker and so he gets there and he realizes okay this is fantastic technology fantastic people but there is no business set up and when I say no business like no legal entities

nothing so he starts taking on some of the business development stuff and you know I've been doing business development related work for many years so we have lunch every now and again to you know so I can kind of brain dump him here's what you need to do here's how you get started these kinds of things a couple months later he calls me and says hey would you want to come and join our team and I was like yes absolutely so I talked to the executive team at maker and they said all right so here's the deal we don't really think that we need a business development person but we're going to go ahead and give this a shot I was like okay luckily I was so bored with my finance job that I was sort of willing to take a risk and I think it's worked out fine

but my point is that maker Dow has been a project that's been around for four years and had this same thought in their head and hadn't invested a lot of time and effort into the process of Business Development many projects here are the same and so what I wanted to talk about today is how to one kind of get started on building a business development process practical advice for getting set up talking about growth strategies how to identify what's important what should I be focused on crucially and this is one we're all really bad at how to talk about your project to the real world without scaring them and then finally how to move your Partnerships forward and actually deliver on them so with that

let's get started so step one this is some of this is going to be a little bit basic but some of it I think is probably stuff that some projects have not yet thought about what are we looking for in a BD candidate this is kind of tough because there aren't that many people who have sold crypto things right so a couple of things that I look for sales experience of some kind this is actually more important than knowledge of cryptocurrency if they have the ability to manage the sales process they're already kind of halfway there resourcefulness you don't need anyone that you need to be telling what to do all the time it's a very self-directed kind of business fast learner obviously and people skills

also obviously so once you've got uh your BD team in place a couple other housekeeping items is super super important but also usually overlooked does anyone here have a CRM at their crypto project nice okay that's pretty good it's not not as many as I'd like to see so hopefully this will inspire some people uh CRM is just a way to track all of your contacts all of your projects all of your deals it can be used across teams so BD Integrations Etc vitally important Next Step use the CRM I can't tell you how many projects get one and then don't actually use it and so no one knows

what's going on what's great about ours is if anyone wants to know what's the status of a partnership that we're working on they can just log in and look at it so develop a plan for moving things through the pipeline depending on your type of product this is going to mean different things you're going to need to figure out what the different stages are if it's Partnerships or if it's sales and I'll show you an example of what we do but um and then you want to set achievable goals tied to compensation for your BD people BD people love compensation related goals so sorry this is a little hard to see um but basically you want to kind of keep it simple so the way we organize it is

uh just basically a funnel when someone has sort of said yes and was trying to figure out what's going on we've got tentative commitment when we're ready we're rocking and rolling Integrations and marketing team then the Integrations and marketing team can also log in and participate on those deals online um collateral integration is a separate integration so that's that and then of course one unqualified and lost I would recommend keeping this pretty simple because otherwise you can have just really granular pipeline information that doesn't end up getting used okay so now let's talk about strategy so some of the projects that we talk to love to do this thing where they tell us

about every single thing you could possibly do with their technology and that's great but for your video team you want to have people really focusing on a specific area so I recommend to have each business development person pick one or two core focuses and set their goals around that it's better to go you know personally I don't like to go a mile wide in an inch deep it's better to get more involved on the industry be more knowledgeable about it and you're going to have a higher impact that way oh how do you pick verticals try to optimize for usability of your products visibility of your products and scale so that means don't try to get someone to use your

product that doesn't really need it it's not going to be a great use case it's going to be bad feedback potentially for you visibility obviously if it's a big brand name that's going to use it that's great you kind of want to focus and strategize around that prioritize those kinds of projects and then scale so some projects are only going to be able to use one portion of your technology or you know at a very small level try to focus on projects that are going to maybe be able to use a suite of your products or are going to you know in the case of dive for example be able to create lots of die liquidity and then use a tiering system to help prioritize your targets I'll show you an example as well of how we do this and finally adjust the goals and tiering

system as needed using the feedback your BD people are getting from prospects so one another one of the reasons that the big lie that if you build it they will come is so dangerous is because it stops projects from creating a business development function and the Business Development function is sort of like your front line of communication with your Market the kind of feedback that they're getting is going to help inform other kinds of strategies from product to engineering you name it so basically listen to them all right so this is just a quick example of how we tear this is sort of a stripped down example of how we would tear things out to build strategy into

RBD can you guys see this okay okay awesome so you can see we're trying to go for die users and collateral Partners right so a million plus users that's the tier one a hundred thousand users that's a tier two and anything else is a tier three you can see that a lot of what this obviously means is that most crypto projects are going to end up being tier three that means you need to actually go out and start talking to real companies about what you're doing doesn't that sound fun it's uh it's actually pretty tough and one of the reasons it's so tough is because we have really fun lingo that we like to use

here is the painful truth of crypto we talked about the big lie now we got to talk about the painful truth nobody understands what you're talking it is tough out here guys I love to talk about blockchains and uh you know distributed systems and you know Foxconn or UNICEF or Airbus is looking at me like what what are you talking about you need to talk to these people in a language that they understand and don't talk too much about your own solution I wanted to show a couple of examples of how projects talk about what they're

doing so this is a good example of a quick explanation of what Gollum does read it it's very succinct it doesn't seem like I mean obviously decentralized it's maybe a 10 word but I think that's you know that's acceptable basically allows you to use all your machines to compute great here's a bad one the chain actually not a terrible project they have good Partnerships and all kinds of things and aims to connect blockchain technology to the real world by providing comprehensive governance structure a robust economic model as well as advanced iot integration what like that doesn't really tell you what they do if you can't tell someone what you do in 30

seconds then you need to work on your pitch so short list of words and phrases you should never ever use on a first call with a prospect and again I'm talking about real companies here not other crypto projects the devil's been problem Byzantine fault tolerance ah bonding curves we love to talk about bonding curves around here guys it's everyone's favorite meme um but just don't mention these if they need to know you can tell them but they they need to know what you do before they they know how you do it um so you're not allowed to talk about any of these things what are you

supposed to talk about lots of people tend to think that when they are going to get on a call with a prospect that this is what they're doing tell them what we do very exciting right that's actually not quite right you're reversing the order the first thing that you want to focus on as opposed to this is find out what they need this is crucial guys it's really fun to get on a call with a big Fortune 500 company and tell them all the exciting things about your project if you haven't learned anything about what their needs are or how you could help them then you're not going to be able to tailor the conversation to what they need and it's going to kind of

fall on deaf ears and most likely they're going to pretend like they understand what you're saying and they're going to nod their head because they're going to be too embarrassed to admit that they don't have a clue and you're going to end up losing a potential partner because you know they're just going to be too embarrassed to admit that they have no idea what you're talking about how can we help you oh dang I forgot to put the animation on this one but anyway so your goal in the first interaction is discover a few key things what do they currently do what isn't working and how could it be improved what are they hoping to achieve and this one's really important because you might have an idea of what you think you're trying to solve for them but actually

that might not even be the case in one example we have been talking to a project that you know I came in hot saying I've made this mistake too I've come in hot really saying we're going to help you lower your interest rates bring all your collateral onto our platform well if I had listened a little bit carefully I would have realized about two weeks sooner that what they're really interested in is having a transparent way to track cash flow through their business they're interested in the The Lending part kind of but they're much more interested in having a you know distributed money system so that's that's good information to know that helps you save time Okay so once you have these answers then you get to talk about your project I

know it's fun once once you start doing that be understood again we've talked about this a little bit already but a lot of crypto projects are not very good at this step practice describing your product to normies that means call your mom explain what you do if she doesn't get it try it again do this many times call your sister call your friend from college call anyone try it a million times record yourself I promise you it sounds crazy but the better you can get at doing this the better and more success you'll have on actually converting on some of these things don't try to boil the ocean focus on one

or two key ideas for ways to work together dye is a die is a money system right so it could really work with any kind of business and all these kinds of interesting ways if I tried to go to FedEx and say hey we want to totally overhaul your entire Financial program they would probably just say okay get out of my office but if I come to them with an idea and say okay we can help with you know last mile delivery payments for example as a project to work on together you can get your foot in the door demonstrate success and hopefully expand to other product lines if there is any doubt that they've understood reiterate I cannot stress

this one enough as I mentioned sometimes people get embarrassed that they don't understand or they seem like they think they get it but then you know they kind of forget one portion of it so don't be afraid to repeat yourself and find some ways to confirm understanding whether it's asking follow-up questions or kind of just testing their comprehension oh this one also very important use their lingo to describe what you do for example in maker we off we usually we say collateralization ratio that just means how much you know what percentage of ether you have to have in order to not get liquidated in the banking World they use loan to value or LTV so

basically you need to learn about the terms of art for the industries that you're trying to sell into that'll make the conversation go a lot more smoothly okay now get them thinking when I talk to makers is sort of a uh it's sort of a modular project right there's lots of things you can do and build on top of it the best way to find out what the real possibilities are with another project is to use real world examples and analogies to help the prospect understand the possibilities themselves if they have this deep understanding of how your thing can work then hopefully this will happen

after the call the prospect may come up with their own ideas about how they could use their products that is when things get really exciting the only way to do that though is to be very very clear and give them good examples that they can sort of work off and extrapolate onto other ideas develop a plan don't be afraid to start small so pick a project to work on together and build the relationship you don't have to change an entire industry and overnight this is a this is important we've kind of talked about this but as I said it Bears reiterating just get yourself in the door we do a lot of pilot projects so we'll try with we'll start with

something small see how we can work together and kind of push it forward from there this one is sort of less intuitive and a lot of people miss this one but it's really important ask them to commit to something whether it's a deadline a portion of the partnership that they'll be responsible for or sharing development costs so this helps them it helps you assess their level of seriousness about what you're up to it makes them more committed to what you're working on together and it also helps ensure better outcomes right if they're engaged in the process and they have dedicated some time or resource whether it's money or anything else then they're going to be more committed to the success of this project and then finally this is you know just

kind of a housekeeping item but I also find that many people did not do this and it really helps just draft up a document outlining the scope of the project what you're working on what's expected from both sides I often usually put timelines in there as well to help everybody sort of stay on track and you know just have everybody sign it it doesn't need to be binding it's just a it's an agreement Okay so we've done all these things right and they've agreed to partner whoo now what I love I had a little too much fun with the animation sorry um okay okay are so bad that I just really like nothing else from this don't

announce anything publicly until there's a working prototype or at least something real to announce preferably until it's out and live on mainnet we see a lot of medium posts out here guys about projects that have not been built things that are not in existence at all actually have this pet theory that number of medium posts announcing Partnerships is an inverse correlation to the success of the project it's it's bad it's really bad so it also hurts your brand even if it doesn't hurt your brand right then it might give you a little bit hype a couple of retweets that you wouldn't have otherwise got that day but let's say the project that you've partnered with ends up being a flop that

can look bad on you don't resist the urge to announce anything to the public until there's something real to announce it helps your Brand's strength it also improves the impact of everything that you do announce people have told me recently that maker is great because although there's lots of hype surrounding it it's not over hyped that's important don't assume that they will hold up their end of the bargain you need to follow up it would be so great if everyone just agreed on something that we're going to do together and then everyone went out and did it and we came together for a great release that's not how it goes does anyone has that ever happened to anyone all right lucky man over there but in general that's not how these projects go whether they're internal projects or

external projects treat them the same project management is key and don't and this one's for Mike over here don't wait to the last minute to rope in your technical or marketing teams they don't like it and uh you know it's just it's just bad business okay do here's some things to do set time guidance and stick to it as much as possible it's pretty straightforward bringing other team members to help as needed legal marketing you name it use other daps to help build the solution this one is pretty interesting maker has a disable coin and a lending protocol but you know we don't have uh We've integrated request Network button in some of our projects we've integrated

other daps to help build an entire solution that are over and above what our products and our core products can do stay organized this is going back to the CRM guys I'm telling you if you do this your life is going to be much easier start planting the seed for other deeper Partnerships so as you guys are kind of nearing the first stage of your partnership coming to a close start to how start to request an invitation or um intros to other people in the organization other teams start to work your internal contacts that you've built at that company to Parlay that into additional projects

and finally once it's out and once it's done help them get as much press media Twitter attention as possible so spend time with your marketing team coming up with a plan for this blow it up we you want this to be a win for them too not just for you so quick case study got a few minutes left here how am I doing on time I'm okay um so quick case study viant Commodities I'll go through this there are physical commodity company that's interested in using blockchain to streamline their business so we met them at a conference in Singapore and they were like hey we don't really know that much about this stuff but we're a company that you know buys a bunch of metal keeps it in warehouses ships it around sells it borrows against it Etc

how can we how can we use this blockchain thing first call we discussed their current business find out their pain points I found out that they have a paper trail problem there are so many Warehouse receipts Etc that need to go into just any kind of basic transactions so they're hoping to use the blockchain to improve liquidity and also reduce some of that paper overhead then I go on but only once I've discovered their issue then I go on to explain what maker Dow is at a high level testing for comprehension along the way then we come up with a suggestion to maybe try a pilot of tokenizing a warehouse receipt for aluminum and

having them borrow against it follow-up email included a graphic which demonstrates what this process would look like I cannot say enough about how much prospects love to see Graphics it's really hard for them to conceptualize all this stuff so insofar as you have the ability to make something to visually show them how to move forward and what it would look like that really helps second call discuss the technology in more detail reiterate points that they don't understand and that and to just touch on this the second call was probably like an hour and 15 minutes that it was more granular they really wanted to understand how the how the liquidation mechanisms work all those things that's great I had to repeat

myself on five different things five different times that's okay too be patient with it stick with it and then I suggested the pilot partnership to test viability Next Step emailed them the memorandum of understanding basically the partnership outline that we discussed that included a scope of work timelines it also included 20 grand to share the cost of developing a an aluminum token for them I know it's a little scary to put that out there because they're like hey I have this really big company that I want to work with I don't want I'm going to do all this work for them but like we talked about getting some level of commitment from them is going to help move the project forward third call demo to CDP to ensure that they understand it seeing seeing a demo

of how your product works really helps and then we got the technical teams together to create a development plan currently the mou is in place the development is in progress and everything's looking good and we are like everyone in this room awaiting multi-clateral dye launch so we'll see what ends up happening this isn't a this isn't something that you'll see on Twitter yet because it hasn't happened yet there's no mainnet implementation this is so you know mum's the word guys um but basically that kind of walks you through my process on how I would do these things final thoughts don't be afraid to go whale chasing what that means is there are a lot of big companies out there that are way

more interested in this stuff than you might think so don't be afraid to call them up talk to their Innovation team their CTO even their CEO get them talking come up with some ideas see what happens your success depends on your ability to listen understand a problem and propose a concise and coherent solution be an educator but for the love of God lighten up on the jargon they do not need to know all about the minutia of how this stuff works finally business development is on the front lines of the market so whether you're a project founder or a product team lead an engineering lead use your

business development team to help you formulate strategies in other areas what are your what are your what is your Market saying about you what are the things that they say oh man I wish you guys could do this whatever those things are your business development person is going to be the first one to hear them most likely so talk to them engage them in your conversations we're usually pretty nice and that's it follow me on Twitter turbo geek Tuesday snarky commentaries try not to tweet storm too much but occasionally I have something I really want to put my foot down on and uh yeah are we if we have a couple more minutes I can take a question or two if anyone has any so the question was over the next year

what are some of the biggest opportunities in the space and what are some of the biggest obstacles to overcome hmm I mean the biggest opportunities in the space I think are going to be um really anything any payment stuff Financial stuff those are kind of those are the things that make the most sense just intuitively to people um they can be implemented relatively quickly and what's interesting about them is that they can allow us to do things that we can't currently do with our existing system so when I think about is this project a good fit for blockchain my first thought that I go to is is this something that we can't do with the technology that we have in place so that's where I would focus in terms of what's going to be big biggest

obstacles uh you know basically everyone thinking if you build it they will come not getting out there and getting real users the DAP usage is concerning so we've got to get it up and the only way to do that is to you know get our feet on the floor and get marching all right so apart from maker is super obvious product Market fit what would you say is Makers uh biggest thing that they were able to execute on that really led to a lot of success that maybe other projects have not done

hmm that's a really good question biggest thing that we were able to execute on equilateral diet will die well people have liked that but in terms of from the partnership side it's been it's there have been so many right it's it's UNICEF UNICEF is now taking diet donations and we're working with them to produce a series of hackathons that are going to be Progressive hackathons so that they're actually building technologies that can be used in war zones and um and refugee camps and things like that those are pretty cool um but trade shift is probably our most exciting partnership that we're working

on right now from a technology perspective trade shift is a global supply chain Payments Technology Company and they are working with us to allow their users to directly collateralize their invoices from small to medium businesses so that they can vastly reduce their factoring rate and get paid more quickly than they do in the real world so those are kind of just some of the things but in terms of to just fully answer your question what maker is really good at is just pushing forward in general these things are not these things are not easy you know I have a cute slideshow that makes it seem like it but you've gotta stick with it and keep going so that's probably the biggest secret to success I'd say I think my time is up guys but thank you

so much for all coming out and uh catch me after