Communicating the Ethereum Narrative

Transcript

[Music] all right well thank you uh everybody is still awake after the lunch good good good all right stretch so just by way of background uh I'm on The Advisory board for ethereum I'm also an investor an entrepreneur a blogger and I spent a lot of my operational experience in marketing which is why they asked me to talk about the ethereum narrative and to do that I thought I would start with a bit of history since

you've heard the history of the blockchain this morning let's just review a little bit the history of ethereum and uh it started with vitalic in November of 2013 almost almost a week less than two years ago I think it was around the 20th of November uh that balic published a paper very shortly after he met up with Gavin who uh published the blue paper and uh there was lots of synergy in between both of them then in January of 2014 vitalic announced to the world ethereum in Miami uh shortly thereafter they started the uh test uh bed and the proof of

concept for ethereum and then following that the well-known sale that happened in July and August of last year and then following that they formed sdev which is the group that started to develop the core technology pieces and almost to the day a year ago they had the dev zero in in Berlin and this is the group of people that were at the dev zero and this is the core really and the extension of the core group that has been very instrumental in developing the early technologies that we know about today and how many of you can see themselves in this picture here's a big blowup can you raise George we really

owe them a big round of applause because they are the ones that started ethereum really this brings me to where ethereum is today and that is part of the narrative what makes it really interesting is that ethereum is more than one thing today and that is this is the most important slide if there's one thing you want to remember is what's on on this slide we all know about the foundation that's kind of how it started and a few months ago a year ago for sure everything was part of the foundation

the foundation was doing everything and then suddenly a lot of things started to come out uh into the ecosystem so the second thing that ethereum is when you think of ethereum the number one being the foundation yes number two is the network in July the blockchain became live so the second thing that ethereum is is this live Network hundreds of nodes eventually thousands of nodes it's out in the wild the third thing that ethereum is is a set of Technologies all of the core extended and third party technologies that are being developed

are also part of ethereum but they are distinct from the network per se and some of them are distinct from the foundation and all of these pieces are growing fourthly what is very interesting is that the ecosystem a very vibrant ecosystem is forming around the first three parts and if you look at the list of sponsors it is a microcosm of the types of companies and organizations that are part of this ecosystem including companies like consensus that are building applications and uh offering services to to companies including companies like Microsoft that are partnering with ethereum Technologies

startups like ogre and uh VCS that are supporting the ecosystem and that is a very important aspect very important part of the ethereum story and finally it's the users it's really about users it's about customers so I'm lumping users and customers together here yes the developers are users but we want more end users and we want more customers as well so these five pieces really are what ethereum is today and each one of them is vibrant each one of them is growing and each one of them is contributing to the whole so that is what you have to

remember the ethereum is no longer just ethereum it's it's a lot more to it and a good Testament to this is what's happening in the marketplace so we can talk about yeah what's we're doing but then really the test is what happens in the marketplace some of you have seen this landscape that I've done about three weeks ago and I what I did there I mapped all of the companies that I knew that were involved in the blockchain space in the financial services and there's there's close to 200 companies on this space and yes you see ethereum at the bottom but really do you know where ethereum is on this chart it is almost

everywhere directly and indirectly in in most of these segments you talk about Capital markets there is clear matter there you talk about the banks we heard about the banks implementing ethereum you talk about trading you talk about uh middleware software development uh consensus others have uh forked ethereum or using parts of ethereum everybody is developing on solidity solidity is going to become the standard for doing smart contracts it's easier than anything else out there so why not use it so that is a good Testament to really to ethereum's footprint increasing into the

marketplace part of my job when I blog is I try to explain the blockchain to non-technical people and I came up with this infographic earlier this week where I explain it in terms of what it is what it enables its impact and where it's targeting this impact I don't have to talk to you about what it is and what it enables because you're you are the ones that are building these things but I would say to you if you are mostly a technical and developer kind of oriented audience I would say start from the bottom up when I talk to the business people I try to make them understand the top and then let them go down to the impact but if you are offering solutions

to the marketplace think about the bottom and then turn counterclockwise up meaning decide about what Ser what industry indes you're going to go after and the most important thing here is that the the promise of the blockchain it's about re-engineering really the reason why it's hard it's okay to try a few proofs of Concepts but the harder projects are going to take a little bit longer and it is really about changing the process inside big companies especially if the blockchain is going into bigger companies and that could be one way or sometimes they want to do something different so that they don't disturb the old processes it's really about new value it's a value

exchange system that is what the blockchain is in other terms it is about putting any digital asset on the blockchain once you put it there boom it can move freely it can be owned reowned traded sold settled in seconds not in three days which is a very vexing problem that the banks have today how many of you have heard of the Carlotta Perez technological search cycle which is used to illustrate what happens usually when new technology comes into play and how it gets adopted and basically what she did is she she linked the fin the Capital financial

markets to the technology markets and what she found out she analyzed the last 100 years of these technology revolutions and and she found there were two major sides of this Evolution one was the installation phase and then the deployment phase the prosperity phase and in between there is this little Gap where there's a bit of a crash sometimes and where there's a reset things go down a little bit and then it moves up again so a recent analogy is what happened with the internet in the year 2000 there was a bit of euphoria 95 to 2000 crash and then everything started to happen again

and then we are still living in in Good Times in terms of the internet uh I'm not predicting a crash in the blockchain space I think ethereum's evolution is going to be quite different and this is my own rendition this is me predicting what's going to happen with ethereum in terms of adoption and if you think about it today in the last two years it has been more or less about selling the vision and we are now starting the build out stage we are building out tools companies Frameworks and so on as we go forward there's going to be more installations there's going to be

more deployment it's going to accelerate suddenly when there's Network effects when we have 10,000 developers when we have hundreds of daps when we have have hundreds of customers all of this is going to be a rolling ball effect and then the vision realization the vision of decentralized governance of decentralized marketplaces of decentralized applications disrupting not just replacing it's easier to replace it's more difficult to to disrupt and totally change the old systems and we're going to see the whole variety of implementations

so this is what I see in the evolution of ethereum but to do that there's five things I think that the ecosystem has to do which is part of the narrative we have to continue to build daps apps smart contracts Services applications uh languages Frameworks all of that we're still at the beginning we need to make it more Rich so that the ethereum ecosystem stays very strong we need to continue winning customers and users and you all have a uh a part to play with it we need more startups not just in the businesses to business space but also in the businesses to Consumer space so that we can hit and affect more

consumers and we have to think continuously not just about being different because we are different ethereum is different what's also important is to understand how we are differentiated not just being different we win by being different in the way that we understand understand how we are differentiated from the other potential Solutions out there and not about saying anything bad about them but more about emphasizing the differentiation factors that ethereum brings to the four and finally it's a bit of a weakness right now do more marketing I know a bit of that because I spent a lot of my life in marketing but also the first 14 years I worked for H Packard at the time where HP had very

strong technology and they were known for having quality products this is like the in the mid 80s to the early 9s but they did not do very good marketing the joke was that if HP were to sell Sushi they would call it dead cold fish and some of the same thing is happening it's okay because it is driven what in the ethereum the whole thing is being driven by Developers technologists and they like to describe things by what they are but let's put a bit of marketing Pizzaz into the not to just hype it but just to explain it better what marketing does is it brings Clarity into the market it brings a Clarity of messaging

and if somebody understands something then they will do something about it but if somebody does not understand it they will not do anything about it so I would urge everybody involved in the ethereum ecosystem to rethink how they are talking about what they are doing not just in the technology terms but also in the messaging terms of the benefits and what it does to the marketplace so the point of my talk was about the narrative and what is the difference between a narrative and a story a story has a beginning and an end typically when uh we hear about it and but once in a while there's a technology that comes

along and the story is so powerful that it captures the imagination it captures our imagination and what happens when a story captures the imagination of everybody who listens to the story then they start to take that story and make it their own and that is really the power of the narrative the internet has a very strong narrative because if I asked each and every one of you what do you what do you do with the internet and what is the internet for you I will get a different answer because each one of us has their own way of using the internet I think the same thing is going to happen with ethereum it has such a strong narrative and each one of us each one of us that is involved in the

ethereum ecosystem has their own story so my hope and my challenge to you is take ethereum and make it your own story because the best is yet to come thank you very much question yeah okay so we we have uh one or two questions if yep anyone wants to ask a question maybe about how you could help communicate the narrative you believe everything I said then right yes there's one okay just to provoke you um so maybe

it's just irrelevant to uh Market ethereum to General audience because the only people who are concerned are developers and it's the developers who need to develop the killer apps that will uh appeal to wider audience so why would we care about marketing of ethereum it's a good question I think both things have to happen as we said a little bit in the panel previously there is a Bottoms Up the developers have to develop the applications and propagate them and deploy them them and have users use them and that creates a community of users of stakeholders of applications and so on but at the same time there has to be some top down Clarity of messaging as well so don't take Marketing in the

bad sense of the word marketing is Clarity all you could remember about marketing that is important here is Clarity of messaging so just be clear about what you're doing and it becomes a pull if something is clear and you believe in it then it pulls you towards doing something about it so there's so much that the developers can do pushing it up from the bottom up but you also want to do from the top down so they can be pulled by it so it's a push pull situation I think this is how most brands and most Technologies work I mean take the Apple case uh of course there's lots of support from the bottoms up but Apple keeps reinforcing to us in their in their marketing how great of a brand

they are and I think it has to happen from both sides we have another question yes hello yes how's it going um so recently JP Morgan Morgan's CEO Jamie Diamond said that uh Bitcoin is cute now but uh you know when the doj comes and says that it's illegal um you know that's the end of the story um ble Masters just uh I think yesterday uh said the same thing that she fully agrees at the banking conference across the street here at the Central Bank of England uh with this sort of rhetoric coming out of you know people leading major banks that cryptographic tokens that uh may have value they think will

be banned by the government eventually um how do you counter that message um uh in those spaces what what would your what would your marketing suggestion be there what would your uh reaction be to that sort of rhetoric so I I couldn't hear very well the first part of what you were saying because the sound oh sure maybe talk a little bit closer to the mic sure what is your question prely messaging me messaging to people like Jamie Diamond who recently said that he thinks uh you know Bitcoin will just got it it's good that he said that it means that he is scared and I'm very encouraged that uh somebody as uh highly respected as Jamie Diamond is saying uh

no it's not going to happen or whatever um that means it's going to happen unfortunately uh I listen to the market uh the incumbents unfortunately will be defensive I mean I've seen this movie as well before 20 years ago for three years the banks did not want to touch internet payments between 95 96 97 anything to do with electronic payments and credit cards on the internet had to happen via what is was called an internet gateway it was this other thing outside of the banks didn't want to touch it and then suddenly in 98 boom it started to happen unfortunately the banks some of

them are facing the situation right now all of this Innovation we see in fintech like forget the blockchain before the blockchain all of this all of the fintech um Innovation that has happened outside of the banks is because the banks did not innovate enough in the first 10 years of the internet so we waited 10 years All We Got Is online banking and online brokerage can you tell me any other Innovation that your bank gave you up until 2004 maybe that's all we had so then all the fch started to happen in the last 10 years and I predict if the banks don't take the blockchain seriously the same thing will happen with the blockchain yes there will be some solutions that will help

the banks in terms of middle mid office and back office they will save some money that's a big opportunity but some the blockchain based uh applications will also challenge the banks as well but that said I'm seeing I'm a bit more encouraged I'm seeing the banks uh taking the blockchain more seriously than they did back in 95 so they are very open uh and they are doing uh better than what they did in 95 with the internet yes fantastic presentation um how would you recommend um startups who are

targeting uh traditional financial institutions and doing work with financial institutions do you think they should be selling their products and services under the banner of you could become extinct in 5 10 years or focus on the efficiencies and the cost savings or perhaps both I think uh the question is if I recommend going after efficiencies versus other things versus beyond the efficiencies is that the question what narrative as a startup I mean it depends on your capabilities uh

the truth is that banks will big companies just not Bank let not big companies are becoming more open to working with small companies and startups uh for small projects but when it comes to bigger projects and deployments and Mission critical then they will tend to want to work with more established players more or less or bigger companies like not a startup with five people uh so they'll want to see a little bit more uh assurity like Assurance that that the the company is is is uh is going to be around um so I think working with with if you if you have a banking partner uh

and a lot of the banks have what is called Innovation departments now and they are very open-minded find your partner find your Champion within that bank or within that big company and and let them be your Champion internally and and experiment and and then go from there uh but uh that that's what I would suggest you do and I think we're out of time so thanks again thank you