Crypto’s Branding Problem, Scaling Serotonin, and Yapping with Amanda Cassatt

Transcript

is this something that people need is this solving a problem that people have Founders need to now appeal to institutions more than ever why is the field littered with bodies of companies that tried this before and failed what are you doing differently from them welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing on today's show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at tholl up.co ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome part Partners innovating Finance Global institutional and onchain deep liquidity to drive Capital efficiency now maximize yields on institutional grade liquid staking with

M unlock trillion dollars of capital via F Bitcoin all of this secured by mantle treasury of billions in stables and E Capital Pools this entire EOS system is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned BCS that are aiming to create the next generation of Banking and Financial technology this is mantle all right Amanda welcome to Hong Kong um it's my second time here you is it your first second I've been here for the past few months talking to launch serotonin in Asia oh so I've been hanging out every day here yeah that was kind of my

goal with coming here was like okay there's a large divide between Western and Eastern like culture and crypto Community I was like okay we really need to make this expansion now because I think I'm sure a lot of your clients are like wanting that Asia exposure as well um and so I'm loving it it's a great environment here um but uh but yeah yeah I think every serious crypto project needs an Asia strategy um and then there's no such thing as an Asia strategy cuz Asia obviously isn't a monolith there are lots of different cultures lots of different countes with different communities and Dynamics and so when you when you go in when you want to bring a project into Asia it really means like 10 different things so we've been setting up a lot of infrastructure

here to be able to do that and also to uh take local projects in each of those markets that has local product Market fit and help them go Global awesome Welland it's your first time here on the rollup um you have a really cool story that I'd love to to hear about our audience would love to hear it so how did you get into crypto how how did you stumble upon being the the former CMO of consensus and what's your story with ethereum yeah so when I was 24 which is almost a decade ago oh my gosh stop stop good on I was um a knucklehead bumming around Brooklyn nice and I ended up at one of the first ethereum meetups because I had a startup at the time um that for various reasons got me

interested in payments um to fix a problem we had with uh with paying out our content creators and I was like wow this not just solves my startup's random little problem this is going to change everything this is going to be the substrate for something new and I just graduated from college a couple years prior and i' observed it's really hard to break into the economy that all of these hierarchies at corporates were really calcified and it's hard for someone with intelligence and with drive to translate that into value and perhaps instead of banging our heads against the wall in the current system yeah we can create an

alternative system where drive and intelligence can translate into value even for a young person earlier in their life um and that really inspired me I was told that the system that I'd grown up in was the only way things could ever be um nothing could ever change there was no alternative to it the only Alternatives um you know seem to have had their walls come down in the 90s um and uh it didn't seem appealing and so this was really a new a new world I'd come from media and marketing and I observed this nucleus this kernel of people around the early ethereum movement were brilliant but we're not media and marketing storytelling people

and I wanted to make sure that the nent movement didn't get eaten alive by the tech media culture which is very adversarial uh which was present at the time and so I joined the circus yeah and then as consensus was um getting serious in 2016 I joined as Chief marketing officer not because there was an open position for CMO but just I was around uh it's not like there are people lined up for that job at the time um just a little bit before that um eth had done its pre-sale and they sold $16.5 Million worth of 30 Cent eth because that's how much Capital wanted to buy 30 Cent eth and that amount sounds really low

comically low these days um and of course everything that happens feels inevitable when you look back but at the time nothing was inevitable and it was a lot of work I was the only marketing person at consensus for a little bit um kind of deao CM of ethereum as well um we ended up having some early successes that enabled me to convince Joe Joe Luben to hire some more marketers and that's how our little Department was was born really and then um four years later having run a lot of launches token sales um Enterprise deals government deals um decided to leave and start my own

company seratonin to try to bring those best practices to the next generation of companies I had this light bulb moment that there were good startups being created outside of the consensus ecosystem and I know that sounds obvious too but when you're inside that kind of insular Community um it takes a minute to realize that then hired back a bunch of my original team so a lot of us have been working together for like eight years um and then started serotonin and so now about 2third startups about one3 institutional um and we do every every type of marketing but also recruiting and legal nice cool so we have a very different landscape today in crypto than we did back then as you said like

nothing seems nothing seems obvious this in the moment but you look back it's like how could I not have been there how could I not how could there have not been more Capital wanting to invest into ethereum wanting to you know how there not be more marketers wanting to take advantage of this opportunity because there were so many marketers in New York City probably s you know marketing all the entire spectrum of products on the market in everyday goods and services and there's this sliver of opportunity that you know whether it be Butterfly Effect right place right time you you're able to take advantage of that and right so that's props you for that and then you know kind of stepping out and so that that that journey is probably shaped ethereum in more ways than you

really know now yeah I I look back and think um there there are two there are two kind of stories one is is did did what we do accelerate the publicity around ethereum too much too fast and did it take something that was partly cooked and expose it to the world before it was done in the oven um um did it bring in too much money too quickly and make the space too much about the money too little about the tech did it bring in grifters with it um was I the first grifter in it to even care to commercialize it right yeah yeah and I remember when I first started when I interviewed with Joe I said I want to make ethereum like Starbucks on the MLB in terms of how well it's known and that

was like a comedy routine at the time consensus like the ethereum foundation was very academic everyone everyone academic I was the most commercial person there um and I'm I'm not a fan of you know super commercial style marketing how we do things as very um very kind of engineering focused developer focused we really just care about matching projects with people that would use them we really don't like kind of hype driven um vaporware style of of marketing um but even even that I was I was clearly the person with the most commercial goals of anyone that I met and today I when I look at what's when I look at the ecosystem I find myself on that you know Ivory Tower academic side

of the space now that we've been flooded um with people that are here to speculate and that's no judgment on those people those are part of a normal self-interested Market pattern um but the the things that I'm the most interested in intellectually uh in our space are coming from that core of people that are academics that are technologist that are the people at uh at Devcon um more than the people at like they an example n name the but but but yeah it takes all sorts and our movement has benefited I think from bringing in all of these different factions and groups I tend to think of it actually and I tell projects this I'm

curious what your perspective is is I tend to tell them you really need to appeal to both the right curve is how I call it of the normal distribution curve which is like the Terin cheetas the researchers you know these this kind of Ivory Tower or even in a more positive connotation just like PhD level research engineering focus group because they need to buy into the the the legitimacy of the technology of what you're building and order to have that kind of reputation in the space of being like very very in it for the right reasons and also legitimate and I tell you you need to go all the way to the left side of the curve and skip the Middle where people kind of care kind of don't kind of use a chain kind know and just go get everybody's using the these products now

today or could use them and you got to get them too like this this this kind of barbell strategy of like very very intellectually Elite or you know Ivory terres people and then these people that are much more in the trenches or active participants in the market and using Market kind of how I think about like this like bell curve of projects achieving like a certain level of kind of breaking through a threshold uh and so I mean I agree that that we that the best ideas and the core of the space is kind of rooted in that ethos it's sad that we have we kind of lost it a little bit along the way I don't think so I think that core is strong um I think you just have to look to find it because it's it's surrounded by shrouds of

nonsense and the nonsense gets killed every cycle it does yeah it just it just got it's getting killed right now so Libra there is a season there is a season for everything there is a season for BS and there is a season in which the BS gets Stripped Away yes um and I I relish you know both both seasons but um if it doesn't make sense it probably actually just doesn't make sense and maybe yeah and and um it's probably just going to be there for one cycle and there may be Financial speculative opportunities to do with that thing but it's not going to be a project that lasts multiple Cycles one of the things that sweetie that really hit home kind of kind of hurtful was uh he was like he was like you're just

playing on there you're you're yapping but are you saying anything dude I'm like well and according to kaido about 90 minutes old on a big yapper airdrop so I'm not sure if that there structures of some of these of these products are actually incentivizing the right Behavior because you can really just get around with engaging B that was just a funny thing that I saw of yours I was like I'm going to interview her I'm going to ask tweet um yeah yeah so there's this Paradigm that I think is interesting to contemplate um which is the API line and in the future and kind of in the present um some people are helping program apis and some people are accepting tasks from applications that

are given to them by applications and I think how you perform in the future as an economic actor is really going to come down to are you above or below the API line and if there's some app that's telling you what to say then are you above or below the API line and I think K is a really interesting tool we use it we use it with our clients I think it's super fascinating but I would never let something tell me what to say because it's the last thing I have and I think the people that are shaping thought in our time are not turning to something like that to be told what to say no yeah there's a certain level of of integrity and also

value and genuine authenticity that is escaping us rapidly in this age because of AI because of deep fakes because of things and as you say this is kind of what we have left I think there's really like k-shaped yeah there's a really k-shaped kind of distribution right um there's there's wireheading people are people are just going into the system people are playing people are becoming part of an algorithm people are playing into their direct incentives people are optimizing to death and then the flip side is people that insist on not doing that people that fight to keep a little bit of you know life playeress in the

system and not just be coerced from all sides in terms of how they act that make any sense it does but it sounds like you've done a lot of mushrooms perhaps um answer that every once in a while not right now no yeah that's good that's good um all right so kind of switching into more of an entrepreneu RO I never really appreciate those perspectives um and the way that you think do you agree with that I think it's it's interesting I think it's we're basically accelerating we're like snowballing in in the sense we're like social media especially and like this this instant gratification mechanisms from basically validation yeah from non-human sources drives

people's behavior and there's what you're saying is you can opt into this or you can optt out or you can kind of like play this something in the middle yeah that's probably where you want to be and if you're just yapping just for the sake of Laing we don't like you're saying anything then you may have less Free Will than you actually think you have that's an interesting formulation yeah okay more on that philosophical note how did you take your company from leaving solo taking some of the team with you you just have 50 or 100 people now right 110 yeah okay so I have 10 and it's stressful so how do we like you know how do you go from 10 like what was your process from as an as a leader

going from 10 to 20 and then 20 to 50 and then from there like what was the what was your biggest challenges what did you do well that served you uh and any just like key takeaways and you know yeah I'm a big fan of um virtue AIC senior leadership we've never managed to start a service or product category without first putting in place a really talented senior leader for that service or that product and then really giving that person a lot of authority and a lot of responsibility in terms of autonomously hiring a team we decide together um what the what is of the objectives and then they decide themsel

on the how how they want to accomplish it and they can always escalate to me they can escalate to one of the other partners AJ Elise Cara if want help um but everyone is pretty autonomous especially at the senior leadership level in the company and I really think that in order to grow in terms of personnel and not every successful company needs to or wants to grow in terms of personnel especially if they're building scalable technology but we're in services so we only grow if we if we grow in terms of people and obviously we're gaining efficiency and productivity from using tools and Technologies but we're also um growing in terms of people so if you if you are going to do that if your business business benefits from that the way ours does um it's really important to scale

trust and to be able to delegate because if you concentrate all of the decision-making power in yourself and you're not really willing to let anybody else make a decision then it doesn't work no you're never able to scale yourself that much and I've seen a lot of projects endure that failure mode is is it the same framework from 10 to 20 to 20 to 50 and onwards more or less yes and it's just the capacity of senior leaders in the company to actually hire teams and execute against various kinds of goals um we have a a a a very traditional management structure in in zero where someone who's a um a director is managing um

Associates and uh it it's uh down to the most entry-level Junior person in the company and we have a very crisp um or chart and Report I've seen other types of companies do it a different way um we work with really novel breakthrough Technologies ideas Concepts Founders but our own organizational structure in order to best serve that is not new fangled yeah understood very cool all right then one more on the entrepreneurship side and I'd love to talk some more about strategy in today's landscape because I think it's changing rapidly um can you tell us a story about a time when you when you perhaps had a

breakthrough where you were struggling with something in internally or with a client or with a an idea and either you had a large Revenue breakthrough as a result of this or you had a massive breakthrough that led the company to the next stage of growth that like had this this idea or this conversation or this meeting or this series of events not happened you may not had that breakthrough um just super curious yeah a story a story and a breakthrough Redstone is def's modular Oracle supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin

staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model join the Redstone exhibition [Music] today we've been working for a long time on the serotonin platform um if you go to serotonin doco platform it's there I'm so glad you L I sent it to Robbie I was like bro I'm so glad you like it we hired a really wonderful head of product at serotonin um Michael Williams um and he really taught me kind of discipline about product building he's really like a scientist and in a lab with it the way he generates a hypothesis tests the

hypothesis and I'm really impatient I'm kind of a bll in a china shop I hear about something on crypto Twitter can we build this how long would that take no no no we're trying this thing we're iterating this thing we're so this super super disciplined so I think without this person without without meeting this individual we would not have been able to create what we have and now that platform is used by almost 10,000 people um and we just launched it a few months ago it just came out of beta um um and so that's been going really well and we had to iterate a lot of um times on the idea what we wanted to do like LinkedIn Twitter what they started with is the form factor they started with 280 characters they started with you know here's here's how you do a post here's

how you connect with people and then they brought people into their into their form factor we did the opposite we started with a group of people the web 3 Community um we wanted to create a place where those people could connect professionally and socially and that's not X and it's not LinkedIn and it's it's not any of these places right like X is a place to shout to the rooftops um and to get as much reach as possible um LinkedIn is a drop zone of nothingness but you know some it's the they other API Z line they're they're like well some institutions are genuinely on institutions are made of people and people people read it more or less uh certain people um so there's something there but we wanted to create

a social network for web 3 professionals and then we want to bring that to AI we want to bring it to biotech we want to bring it to some other places and so we tried a lot of things we tried a lot of formats and then finally we figured out that web 3 events are this amazing top of funnel um and so we started with okay how do we scrape the web we hir some interns to some some young humans um and some and some young Machines working together hand inand to um scrape the internet for every single web through event and so we just became the best web three events list for every major conference um and then we noticed that people started their own events on there they would post their own events even if

they were hosting them somewhere else on the platform and then they would have people RSVP on there and then that would create this double Network effect that wasn't even prompted by us to get more people onto the platform and then we've noticed people come in through events and then we can show them the cool social features we built so once you come to an event you can see all the other people that came to it you can see if you have social connections with them UNC common you can instantly connect with them on all of your different channels or figure out how you're already connected you can reach out to somebody really easily so it's like and I especially think of this in bare markets how does our industry regardless the amount of capital from outside that isra isn't flowing into it how can we

organize our own internal structure optimally um for the right people to meet each other for the right business interactions to happen so that when that Capital does come from the outside it's hitting a machine that's really good at doing things yes and so this was this has been working extremely well for you guys but it only started working extremely well so I think the Catalyst that you wanted so hiring Mya go was the first Catalyst and then realizing that people want an organized way to see events and that's a great top of funnel to do so much other stuff in web 3 and we have so much else planned for that platform but you know you look at the user growth of that platform and it looks like this it looks like yeah cuz I signed up like like like for

that poker event I was like I signed up they never seen this before yeah so it looked like that and we had to pay people's salaries and be patient for a while without having traction yet and we're really glad that we you know came out and hoisted up our sale every day because the wind the wind came yeah very cool thank you for that s um okay now looking for we we have a lot of Founders uh marketers BD that developers VCS in our audience and thinking about brand strategy today in crypto so there's a lot of external factors that have happened since the original crypto Brands were launched right the Bitcoins the ethereums they're kind of like the

like the Starbucks as you said they're like the Dunkin Donuts in some way right they're like the those are like the name brands that Bitcoin is like Dunkin Donuts yeah sure what a world Duncan the the the crypto space runs on Duncan and and so that that's where we are right like they have the reach that and I argue like Ripple has and salana has and a couple other name like stable coins have hit that level of like world global acknowledging it to the brands but many many many crypto Brands fail to reach even a tenth of Point yeah and there's a lot of reasons and I think even more so in the last 18 months the barrier to entry of launching a new token to raising Capital to launching a

chain to all these things has gone down so much that there's we just have a lot new which is great it's great for us it's good for business it's good for the space competition experimentation but it's harder to stand out from all the noise and there's a lot of noise so when we're thinking about brand strategy for from like first principles perspective what is the correct mental model or what is the the the way that you view building a successful brand that's longlasting in crypto um maybe we could start from bird's eye of you then we can kind of like get into some of the more nitty-gritty I'm gonna start from the super bird's eye perfect which is um the zerp era okay the era of zero zero interest rates which pre-existed Co it

lasted for a long time so when your interest rates are zero you're creating an incentive to push Capital out into the highest risk highest reward assets just logically right so a lot of money moves into Venture firms and a lot of money moves from Venture firms in into crypto projects you look at the level of fundraising in the crypto space in 2021 2022 off the charts there nuts yeah off the charts we still has hit those highs yet well the capital the capital needed somewhere to go right um and there aren't that many targets for Capital when the interest rate is zero and so our space um is it's almost like that stuff is paint um and uh the more paint

it gets the more stuff gets splattered into the world right so a lot of stuff got painted into the world and um it might just be more stuff than anybody wants or anybody needs and I would think first if you're building something in crypto is this necessary um is this something that people need is this solving a problem that people have or am I just trying to get hype for something last one cycle give return money to my investor and get out of here and do something else and if you're in that ladder Camp I'm not interested in helping with the brand strategy I don't want it to be successful um it makes everything worse and if you are in that first Camp that's where I'm starting I'm starting with

what is the problem that you're solving who are the people that are having that problem what science or technology breakthrough has made it possible for you to generate this solution that wasn't possible before why has no one done it before why is the field littered with bodies of companies that tried this before and failed what are you doing differently from them and then I look and see okay can we package this technology up in a way that conveys what it is really crisply compellingly to the exact audiences that have this problem and we start really small so we start with who are the early evangelists who are the people close to us uh that are in the target audience for this product

Let's test a hypothesis let's go to the science lab Let's do an essay and see okay would you respond to this messaging on this channel would you try using this product is it sticky are you interested in continuing what's your feedback and then as it works you move outward and concentric circles and get more people in looser and looser versions of your target audience group and trying more channels on board and you measure how well that's going and that's a product Market fit based vision of marketing where really you're using marketing from the earliest stages to probe for product Market fit Y and then wherever you're Finding Traction and early signs of fit you're doubling down and leaning into those channels while always

experimenting around the fringes I think our space lacks in many cases the rigor and the discipline that web 2 companies have and that non- crypto companies have um to to try to get product Market fit reading zero to one reading The Lean Startup a lot of that stuff is from 15 years ago it's out of date but a lot of it is still true and you can't survive more than one cycle in the space without getting some kind of product mark Market fit there are some exceptions there are some exceptions to that and there companies that launched ages ago and just had a certain token and their treasury just increased in value so much that they never have to get product Market fit because they have billions of dollars in their treasury funding it this B it yeah

they're they're they have so much money in their treasury that they're just going to exist forever and they're never going to get product Market fit but it's not knows that like it's not going to matter and so you look at some of the valuations and some of these companies raised and they grow into their valuation it's a thing that happened but again back to the surf right like there weren't that many targets for some of this investment a lot of these companies aren't going to grow into these valuations they were too high and so we're seeing a lot of projects with smaller valuations modest modest amounts that they've raised um actually really crush it in the market um we're seeing some really positive Trends and I can go into some advice for things like token launches um how projects should structure themselves but I everyone if

you've raised $100 million if you've raised $1 million you aren't going to get around having a product Market fit based strategy unless you have one of these Treasures of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in which case you probably don't need to come to us for marketing because it's not going to work anyway and you just just enjoy go go to the Caribbean and yeah do whatever you're going to do so or or all this is orbiting around product Market fit as a core concept that is the core concept of everything are you filtering projects when they come to you because I'm sure you get a lot of inbound we get a lot of inbound it's bull bull markets are crazy um you guys are filtering pretty strongly on like is this something that we believe in we take a lower percent of companies that

come to us than I think like Harvard admits and students although that may be changing but like I really think marketing is the art of making possible things happen yeah you set yourself up for failure if you're trying to make the impossible happen and being the one who's responsible the only reason I'm here is because I helped ethereum come to Market which was always possible but not inevitable and I helped accelerate that timeline and make something that was possible because of its technology because of its Community because of its propensity to drive Network effects I helped make a possible thing happen and so when we look at potential projects to help Market at um at serotonin we think is there going to is there potentially

going to be fit for this like we're scientists we in the lab you we're thinking about this if we take this as our hypothesis if we see this company or this project as our hypothesis is it a hypothesis worth testing in the market right um and so we get most of our business from Venture funds and so they've already done their DD um and that lowers our DD burden um on that project because we're very kind of judicious about making sure we work with high quality projects then when things come over the transom which is the minority of projects we do diligence and make sure we think not necessarily that it will work but it's possible it could work um and it's a good good founder good team that we're interested in it um and then about a third of our work is

institutional yeah we've uh adjusted our strategy as well this year such that making more concentrated longer term bets based on our thesis that we've developed as like technical you know we've done hours of these podcasts with Founders talking about the the lowest level infrastructure stuff and and and it's working and and we we found last 18 months more than anything saying no gets you way closer to the bigger yes that is actually going to be more impactful for your bottom line for your team for your reputation for your brand and that kind of level of exclusivity is extremely valuable I think and I think teams really respect like what what you just

said I respect that so I know that teams that are looking to be your customer do as well thank you yeah so I think that's a very powerful force now you mentioned some of the other cool stuff that's going on with just token launches go to market like that I'll kind of weigh the landscape so we had VC High FTV low float meta like about a year ago it kind of started and that was really like when it's you know six the last six months it was really pushed back against we went all the way to the other side and just found out that you know there was somebody paying the Argentinian president's sister to laun beam coins so we're coming somewhere back in the middle probably in the next year or so somewhere in the middle between like

oh VC coins are bad or meme coins are bad we have crowd sales now Echo Legion some of these platforms um but again we have a lot of supply of new tokens on the market like you said there's paint like freaking paint the whole room so like what are we what are you Jacks and Pollock up in here literally for $10 million you would paint the whole room with all a lot of the future crypto projects in which is sad but that's a state of it's not it's Healy it's you know got to burn out the the uh the dry brush otherwise it's going to be worse what is that is that controlled ssession yeah sometimes like controlled sort of some yeah controlled burn there yeah which is what we think we're kind of

going through so when we're looking at new token launches we're looking at even you know coming out of stealth for some projects or branding digital there there's a lot here maybe we could just touch on some of your core ideas and tips and thoughts around what makes a successful token launcher what makes a successful visual what makes a successful product launch yeah so for the token thing um I I I used to love the Ico era the good thing about the Ico era was that um people would buy your token and because they have to spend money on it they obviously care about it and they're liquid usually immediately but they wouldn't buy it unless they

plan to at least hold it for some period of time otherwise why bother bu out it um and those are better buyers like if you if you're putting in money you're going to be a better holder than someone who's just getting aird dropped something without having had to put in money and you get you get counter examples like how well the Unis swap token distribution went which really started this trend of these big air drops um but that was distributed to people that had paid a lot of money in transaction fees and yeah that were sending a lot of volume of transactions through Unis swap so those people in way had paid in they had this skin in the game they had they had paid in but then everyone copied that model um and did

these retroactive distributions which of course regulatory Arbitrage it gets you out of the primary issuer kinds of issues um and so that became really popular and so now we have airdrop farming uh we have we have a whole kind of rewards points farming you know industry which is funny um and the problem is you're you're giving money to people that are just going to sell it immediately who have no no plans to keep it um and so I think mechanisms that get buying from the original holders is going to make for a better cohort of folders because like at the end of the day if you distribute a token to people that are going to sell it the price is going to go down if you distribute a token to people that are going to hold it the price is going to be better right

like it's just obvious it's like no matter how you cook like a piece of meat if you just put it in fire it will get cooked like like that those are just the basic Dynamics around it and so a great way to determine who is interested in your project is who's willing to put money toward it right I think Mega eth did a great job of that with their one eth um nfts which yeah people got annoyed about it because they were going to have to put money in but I think that's the mechanism so much push back for that and I thought it was silly like they raised so much money they obviously don't need the money it's it's about the principle they did a they did a great job and I think you know Echo Legion all those things I think they're doing a

great job I think do you think this is the like the new thing that P think and as team mins or I think contribution based system yeah I think I think when you're paying some kind of money to get this thing you're going to be a better holder than someone who's just getting a free year job and I will I will stand by that they have a lot of social capital or expertise in something not money you know every project should make their own decisions of you know who who they think should hold their token um and I don't want to make blanket stat notes about about typ about types of people and about types of people and how valuable they are um I mean you can look on chain people's past wallet Behavior right which I'd

recommend doing by the way like if you want to distribute things to to good people look at what they've done in the past it's it's transparent in many cases so some things like advisor ships that's very Case by case like maybe there are 10 of those people 20 of those people for a project that's different from you know your like an airdrop where suddenly there's 100,000 like wallets participating but you don't get anyone actually that you want in your in your community so like focus on people putting something at stake whether it's money whether it's whether having some kind of stake in the project and then um in terms of the token itself I think making sure that the token captures value in some way that there's some

teeth to the token and the tokenomics is really important I think um the Regulatory and I'm not a not a lawyer but I think the regulatory situation in the States is becoming really friendly to Innovation distribution and to technology yeah and to technology and as long as you're not a rug pull or a scam and you I'm sure you will be you know prosecuted if you're one of those things long as you're building something genuinely and you attempt to follow the available rules which are few and far between looking forward to having more of them um I I think you don't have to do crazy linguistic dances um around whatever it is that you're offer ing you can say what it is um be transparent

about it and try to make sure that whatever you're selling has has teeth and is going to benefit the people that buy it um and then get product Market fit for all comes back there doesn't it get product Market fit for your product it has to come back to that it has to come back to that unless you're a mcoin if you're a mem coin and your token is your product good luck but the style of marketing that I'm talking about is unrelated to that like just literally not talking about that that's that's a different category than what we play in yeah and I'm neither condemning nor praising the existence of that category but the way we do it's for me personally in some cases like I bought some the L A couple hours of my My Life

um had fun met some people I mean everyone everyone has different things that matter but we we don't Market meme coins because how how do we do it like you should if if you're making a meme coin yeah totally so yes that's uh okay so that's the token side we up couple more minutes what about the what about the individual Founders or the the social layer of the te right I think you been speaking about this as well and maybe it's somewhere in your circle was this idea of like founder Le marketing being the most yeah because you're a great example of that right thank like you are Amanda you you associate that with serotonin and it's like boom Click Boom great right and so like that is I think an association that

a lot of people want to make because people buy from people right like you're you're selling a token you know buy I'm buying from the founder effectively I'm put my trust in the project and the product Market fit and in the numbers but I'm I'm typically liking the the person or like putting some value on this person's credibility and future worth I I I think that's not unique to our space right like there's a reason we talk about Elon there's a reason we talk about Sam Alman there's a reason correct like if you look at like the world coin price it's a bit of a referendum on Sam Alman right like remember when his board briefly fired him the world coin price crashed and so this is far from you know a crypto only phenomenon it's something that happens in the public Capital

markets as well um you see it a lot with things going on with Elon and the prices of his various uh companies so I think in general the majority of people have an easier time connecting with a person than connecting with an idea um and no judgment on that but it's um it's important for Founders if they're capable of doing this if they're willing to do this to go out in front of their project and talk about it and be the exponent of it and um use their own product um be the kind of person that their product actually serves a need of um understand that target audience communicate with them directly you can go on X and Test ideas you can test um taglines you can test brand positioning

you can crowdsource um the best the best way to present yourself totally it's so valuable and so question public we don't do that for Founders so we don't we don't they ghost r or anything but we talk to them about how they're doing it right we give them feedback we give them access to data and resources but at the end of the day like there's a reason Trump is doing his own tweets there's the reason Elon is doing his own tweet has to be authentic yeah and finding your voice on there I think is part of the founder feel at for FS I a lot of the ones that I speak to they're like I just don't have time or I can't make time or I I can't how does Elon have time how does Elon have time there's some way he has time Elon

is ironic to me because I'm like I don't ever want to be as rich as him because you get to a certain level where you're like rich like that you have more problems and more things to worry about than if some this sounds like some cope I got to say that sounds like some cope there is the level where you get to that's like success and you have problems that it's that impact world I would be happy to have elon's level of wealth and success but I'm unable to achieve it because of my lower confidence than his you it that's just me right speaking for myself through yourself through me through the podcast but uh I hope uh I hope someday it's otherwise like I think he has some vulnerabilities he's not open sourcing stuff right like like

right now there's no one presenting a different version of confidence than that one I think there's a gap yeah all last take from you um and just kind of wrapping up what's your current view of the ethereum culture and social layer and has it has it repositioned throughout your experience of you know 20 2015 2016 2020 21 and now where we're at now we kind of went from like underd to bitcoin we had the Bitcoin Maxi versus ethereum Community then we kind of came up in like w 2020 21 we're the best smart contract platform the winners now we're like at a point where there's

a lot of competition coming some infighting happening some different a lot of cooks in the kitchen just kind of setting the SK the scape here for you what's your what's your view and yeah yeah what's your view of the eum social I think there are 11,000 crypto Twitter accounts and those 11,000 people are the only people that are familiar with um any kind of struggle going on for the heart and mind of ethereum and outside of that in the institutional world and it's really institutional buying that moves markets at this point they have no idea what you're talking about if you if you mention that that battle for hearts and Minds um and so I think like ethereal eyes and groups like that are

really smart for going straight to those institutions um and having kind of the grown out conversation uh so I applaud that going on over there and I'm I'm supportive of that of that effort I don't think the ethereum foundation is the right Organization for everything like at consensus I I worked on the marketing of ethereum from consensus not from the ethereum foundation so that was always a role that was housed inside a for-profit company I think etherealized is taking on this role of like institutional BD which is not a role that the ethereum foundation has historically taken on ethereum Foundation is focused on the technical road map of ethereum um and I think that's the right Focus I obviously as a community member have my opinions on the

technology road map and the right things to build right like I'd love to see ZK and full privacy at layer one I was anxious about the transition to proof of stake because I liked how a proof of work algo connects the value of uh the token to something external like the price of energy um so so I like I I I've had my own um moments with the road map I have my own opinions about it but the core ethereum Foundation has some brilliant technical mines in it and they're they're building against that road map so ethereum doesn't look like any other community in terms of how that's laid out Bitcoin has no you know official Foundation because it has no official and then you have salana which is really viewing it like a like a

business like a like a normal like a normal business and it's good that ethereum has um you know chocolate ice cream and strawberry ice cream next to it Manilla ice cream uh as a compare and contrast you're it has comp comption from the left from something that's less decentralized but lower fee more scalable it has competition from the right uh from something that really isn't programmable but has the Lindy effect um and really has a strong meme for being digital gold um and so that competition makes ethereum better um and I think it also makes salana better I think it also makes a Bitcoin is what it is it doesn't do anything doesn't do anything to bitcoin um and I'm happy

that ethereum has those challenges from the left and the right to keep its road map in order and to keep on generating the right institutions um to advance it its position and to keep differentiating I think we'll see as we already have in the market in the last eight months Bitcoin strength due to institutional flows totally that is what we see with ethereum scene in terms of like bifurcation of Assets in crypto which have institutional flows and adoption I think it's something that you'll probably as you said a third of your clients already kind of in that Realm MH Founders need to now appeal to institutions more than ever your your project needs to hit prod m fit and needs to be appealing to institutions I believe from investment perspective from

a value creation perspective for them to actually really reach kind of like the next era of crypto Investing For for those institutions and for for the founders for reading the products themselves so oh man it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much GRE thank you hope you have a great week you too thank you