Inside Baseball of Building a Crypto Brand | Austin Federa & Ekram Ahmed

Transcript

[Music] all right everyone welcome back to Empire we have a crom uh CMO of Celestia and we have Austin federa head of strategy at salana Foundation I hope I got that right Austin yeah cool how you guys doing good how you doing very well good to be here the dream yeah live in the dream um so you guys are both usually on the other side of the mic um Austin I know you've been on shows Acom I think first podcast for you yeah I'm usually behind the scenes nice we've been uh talking to different protocol Founders and everybody wants two things right now they want an acrom and they want a mert so you're doing something right my

friend um I'd love to hear how you guys so so this episode is something that we haven't really done before which is usually we're talking about like token prices and narratives and uh product launches and what I want to do with you guys is actually go behind the scenes of how these things actually make it on Twitter and how narratives kind of get created and like a behind the- scenes look at crypto marketing I think you two are uh two of the best in the business at at doing this and you've just been been doing it for a while and um yeah I think you guys are both amazing at it so I'm curious Austin how do you think of now you've moved into more the strategy role before you're doing I think you're ah head of comms yeah how do you think about like what the role of marketing is

inside of a protocol yeah it's a good question and I think probably the right place for us to start today because the the question with marketing is always like what is marketing right like when you're dealing with like a product at a company it's very easy to say oh marketing is a way by which we sell things that doesn't involve the sales team right okay great marketing now you can wrap that around a bunch of other stuff we have brand marketing we have product marketing we have all sorts of things but at the end of the day you usually have a product or a service that you're selling at a blockchain foundation you actually have none of those things usually if you're doing the foundation thing correctly you're not like building and launching products you're trying to get people to use

directly you're promoting an ecosystem and so from that standpoint you know comms and marketing is almost more like doing comms and marketing for like the city of New York right you're broadly trying to tell people about the advantages and the reasons why you might want to move to New York have your business based in New York whatever it is but you're usually not going out and promoting specific businesses or specific activities or specific companies that are building in a specific area um and that that's the best kind of analogy that I I can draw it ends up being something that's much closer to what you have traditionally called like a public information officer type position back in the early days before that title was kind of ruined by a bunch of government agencies and police forces

um but that is fundamentally what the role is and I think if you if you start to think about oh we're trying to push a specific company or solution or project building on the network you're kind of thinking about it the wrong way acrom what would you add to that to me marketing is synonymous with mind share and there's just like this uh larger question which is what is the Strategic mind share that I want to create around this brand and at the core of that is a is your position and uh I think that is your uh you know if I were to give like a textbook you know

definition to this uh it's it's your differentiated role and relevance uh in uh towards your target market so um I think about Marketing in terms of strategic positioning uh the response ultimately that you engineer uh in the market which I think is basically uh a brand and um I do think that New York City analogy is like so spot on because uh especially in crypto where it's just very tribal uh and cultural uh I think that's like the the right way to think about it um I Mark Benny off of Salesforce and I uh had kind of talked about this as well where marketing is like you know blanketing the market with

with a message and and and then you have these like ground troops that you know do their thing and kick ass and take names that is also another I think helpful way to think about it which is ultimately what's like the air cover that you're providing or the atmosphere you're designing in this city uh that creates the magnetism and also the uh detracts uh towards like this city um but man that that New York City analogy I think is spot on yeah that is a good one because I've always thought that like comparing Marketing in crypto to a web 2 marketing is tough simply for so I mean so many reasons like tw Twitter is a weird place which we'll talk about in a second but

simply because I mean if you look at a web 2 Enterprise you're often times selling like yeah like Austin said SAS or something so there's there's actually one very clear deliverable oftentimes for web 2 SAS marketers it's where a lot of marketers come into crypto from web2 SAS I feel like it's uh it's like mqls it's like marketing qualified leads that you're delivering to the sales team yeah and it is just could not be more different um in crypto so Austin you're laughing at that what do you yeah I mean so there's this whole like oldest time thing about half my marketing budget is wasted but I have no idea which half right and I think it's like I think it's worse than that I think in web 2 like 95% of your marketing budget is usually wasted um

and if you actually ask people what it is they can tell you about what 70% of the waste is but their job is not to tell you what the waste is the job is to stay employed effectively right like we have a captured interest problem and part of this is like Cosmos are I think the shortest tenure of any exact position by like a factor of two so usually someone comes in they deploy marketing strategy they try invest as long as possible and then they're either it works great or they're fired and and that is like the cycle and even if it works great it might work great for three or four years but then you're you're out again right that's not how it works for a CFO that's not a COO that's not a chief legal officer that's not usually a CEO either it's a very sort of

transactional role in in web to and so this is part of why I think marketing has gotten a very bad reputation over the years is because like there's like an 18month period of time where Facebook ads worked in all of the history of Facebook there's only like 18 to 24 months who they were actually Roi positive for most organizations on a per product sold or CAC basis the rest is now just brand marketing but everyone sort of thinks of it as transaction marketing it's really fascinating um but but this this whole sort of philosophy I think is really carried into web 3 where a lot of times in crypto marketing is not really seen as particularly valuable because it's been pigeon hold into this like small

domain of like oh you run ads or you're like getting people to read our newsletter or we have to do X or Y or Z because that's what marketing quote unquote does and there's been a real lack of willingness by most people to rethink what is marketing in the context of web 3 and I actually don't think the term marketing like the term marketing applies but thep titles of people in marketing we should probably create some new titles in web 3 because there's so few comparisons between the web 2 world mhm yeah to add on to that I I spent about a decade in the Bay Area working in silic Valley and worked in web to uh before I got into crypto and in all

honesty I had to unlearn a lot of the things that I picked up in uh in web2 the the the marketing playbook in web 2 does not carry over into crypto neatly uh and so it was like a really you know steep learning curve uh in the beginning um but just a whole different territory to navigate what what are some of those things acrom that just like clearly don't carry over um it's it's uh like the way the way that you first of all the way you craft your positioning uh I think is like entirely different it's much more tribal it's much more even ideological it's

much more um driven by like a vast community and like like doing that I think like very very few web to organizations I know like wake up and say like what's like our our ideology and uh that's like sort of some of the first things that come to mind um I think the way you actually disseminate the message in of itself also is different um because you the word of mouth and the way like information travels and in in crypto uh is is far different and like the way that these communities are are are set up are are largely different and um uh you know it kind of begs the question of just like how you set up

your marketing organization in the first place uh from my understanding I think salana has like a unique model and I'm actually like curious about that at Celestia we have uh sort of like this like core core team that handles a lot of that um but ultimately like the brand that you build um runs real deep and um that's why I like to say that like it's almost like building a religion where uh in crypto as opposed to in in web 2 it's not really like the the line of thinking how do you guys can we go deep so there's two topics maybe to dig into there there's the team structure which I think is a very interesting topic there's the brand building so maybe we could actually talk brand first um Austin how did you guys you know I I

very clearly remember as like the salana coin list uh salana coin list transaction and uh you know salana and Avalanche were not differentiated at the I mean you you probably say they were from a from a use from a person on Twitter's perspective it was like there's all these new l1s and it was like salana and Avalanche and near and all these different things someone coming into the industry today yeah obviously feels like salana is is is winning but back then it was not so I'm curious back then how did you guys think about creating a a unique brand yeah so I mean the caveat give is I joined in December of 2020 so I wasn't truly around for like the beginning and the initial like position and launch but

like you know at at its core the early days of salana there's basically only ever been two or three people working quote unquote in marketing right uh up until the last like year and a half and one of the things that forced is a scarcity of resources in part because I think people forget Labs like almost went bankrupt right like in in Fall of 2020 there were massive layoffs and they laid off like half the staff and a bunch of people switched to just working for tokens like the network was not one of these networks that raised a boatload of money and just sort of like cruised onto mainnet and sort of like launched with big Fanfare like it barely survived

right and so that also forces you to make a bunch of hard choices so there wasn't really like time or bu or mind share or whatever to be developing this like very user focused differentiated how do we explain to like the normies is what the difference between salana and Avalanche and near and polygon and all these other things are the the messaging was like hardcore it was like developers you can't build these things anywhere else and it wasn't like fluffy you can't build these things it was literally like we're building a central limit order book on chain no one else has built there anywhere else the the demo that sort of Anatoli came up with I think it was anat who came up with this that you know finally got through to people what

salana was building was something called break and so it was break. sal.com and uh it was on testnet but it would give you a wallet it would load you up with a bunch of gas and you would just slam the keyboard and type keys and you would see those characters popping up and confirming on the blockchain is real transactions basically in real time you could Click on each one of them you can go to the block Explorer and you could see them and that was the sort of like oh my God like moment oh man it's still up yeah okay so I think all the wallet Integrations don't exist anymore so you won't actually be able to use it unless you use like a c wallet or something but it was a great demo um and that was the thing that got people to understand oh

Salon is like built differently than these other chains and that was not a demo meant for normies that was a demo meant for you know Financial Engineers for lack of a better term who were thinking about what to build and how to build stuff this is part of why the um the brand of salana in the early days it was you know this idea of like chewing glass it was like one Global State machine it wasn't sort of Bank the unbanked it wasn't the world's computer it was very focused on like you have to know why you want one Global State machine to understand why salana is cool and so I think the the lesson from that is build when you build a brand you're not building an umbrella at least not in the early days You're Building like a

tight focused message around what is a thing that you are addressing or solving that other people aren't and that people might want and the goal was very much not to appeal to everyone it was to appeal to the people who actually had the capability to make salana successful and that wasn't the Twitter crowd that was the GitHub crowd how much of this so um for people watching on YouTube you'll be able to see this October 20120 you've got toie tweeting about break. salon.com how much of this do you think comes from the founder and acrom I'm curious to hear your take on this too the founder versus like there's some CMO or marketer in a room like designing the brand and what they want to come up with because

in Solana's case I feel like I mean the salana brand is totally in Raj yeah like the beautiful design the thoughtful stuff around consumer like that is Raj like chewing glass all that kind of stuff that is totally in C in Celestia's case like acrom I actually feel like more of it has come from you um and I could be wrong here but it's like I feel like you really thoughtfully kind of created this like modular narrative and Celestia and like the this idea behind Celestia and um and like a lot of the slogans that have come up with I I do feel like ties back more to you probably than someone like Mustafa or Nick um but I'm curious how you guys think about this sure uh so at Celestia we took a

very specific positioning strategy which is to create a new market category and uh that isn't the I actually don't recommend that for everyone I think there's a whole graveyard of projects and organizations that have tried to create new market categories and it just hasn't really worked out usually it's because they uh fail to frame the problem and they they don't warrant the the creation of the category um so in this case we um we're we're creating this new new thing called maer blockchains and at the end of the day you're marketing something much bigger than yourself and uh it's it's it's actually less about Celestia and it's more about modular and more about

modular ecosystem and more about the modular teams and that's why the Celestia account is set up in a way uh where we really celebrate others like we don't I think I think one of the mistakes I think that a lot of projects make uh in this space is they try to be the main character and I think it's kind of cringe and it's like a turnoff um so in this case like we we really try to celebrate like others and so the the the Twitter account um does steer a lot of what others are doing and as best as we can promoting projects in the maate ecosystem now having said that the truth is is that a brand people don't connect

with a brand they connect with other people and that's why uh guys like Nick white um Mustafa uh we try our best to to also you know surface them and make them like highly visible in their own authenticity because people will connect with Nick first before they like actually connect with the uh the Celestia brand itself now I think I think Anatoli and them have done a fantastic job and and like I cite Anatoli as being um extremely relatable like extremely approachable uh he's kind of you know up there but you know he's responding you know to to anyone and whoever like there's like a deeper sort of appreciation for anyone in the community so I think he's doing a

fantastic job um but yeah to answer your question because we're creating a new market category that's why the the celesia account is set up that way C can you tell me acrom the ordering of these things and I know it's never actually sequential it's never like we do this and then we do this and then we do this but and in crom by the way I you've shared some of your internal docs with me so if I ever share anything that you don't want share just I'm gonna put something on the screen but if you don't want me to put it on the screen just tell me so um you've you know you shared this document with me which is like the views the tribal traits the core values the emotional drivers and this is from a while ago um so I don't know if you

still believe these are the things but um or if you're comfortable with me sharing this um hopefully you are but does this come like do you think that you have to create kind of the uh key attributes the emotional drivers the core values the tribal traits of the brand first or do you think that you have to create the US versus them mentality do you have to create the the oneliner only possible on salana like how do you s if there's a CMO out there who's sitting down to do this how do you sequence basically these things okay yeah cool uh and by the way I'm to totally happy that you shared this uh because it's it's frankly it's a work in progress uh I'm still trying to figure out the the answers here and so what you see up here uh it was kind of like a

first stab um at at some of this line of work but okay to to start at like Ground Zero it's my my opinion and I get this from uh a Andy Cunningham who I worked for for several years uh she launched the Macintosh with Steve Jobs and uh I really picked up a lot of my positioning game from her uh so shout out to Andy but um basically her point of view was that the epicenter of marketing is your strategic positioning and you can break your brand positioning into two that there's sort of this like left brain rational no [ __ ] articulation of who you are why you matter why you why now and the the answer to that is very cerebral it's

very logical it's rooted in fact so it's something you can take to a reporter and they wouldn't have like an allergic reaction to it uh and and reporters take out all the emotion and they get get very literal so at Celestia our literal position uh is the first moner blockchain Network that's that's what we are from there you build the emotional gravity around the brand so it was when I began to get into like the right brain sort of branding part that I kind of was like wait a minute like the the web two [ __ ] doesn't actually carry over here like there's sort of like and I'm looking at these massive Brands and I'm like okay like Bitcoin is like a whole religion

like why are there so many people um so connected to this and I grew up in the Muslim faith I know the narratives that were given to me uh and like I saw the same sort of like Zeal and fervor that you know I see Muslims have like you know when they go to Mecca and they like orbit around you know the cabba for example so anyways coming back to this I was like Bitcoin that's a religion ethereum same thing and you know salana also is like up there so I started to dissect it and I was like there's kind of like this political view that they have and I know Austin has a has a chapter in politics I'm curious like what he thinks about this after then there's this like tribal trait and there sort eum kind of has this utopian thing

you look at their visual identity and it feels like kind of Southern California everyone there's like a place for everyone really ideal salana is like extremely practical very pragmatic just like you use like like what do I use very usable like those types of things and then there's a core emotion this emotional driver attributes that they like singularly go onto and then there's sort of like this destination and I was like thinking in terms of like a religion you know there's heaven and there's hell and like what's the destination that some of these Brands like cause it to their to their Community or to their followers and then once you get past the intelligencia of crypto and I think that's a whole separate topic uh there's this analogy that uh has done really

well so bitcoin's digital gold has really helped cut through and World computer and like the single I I know nasdaq's feeder moving at NASDAQ speed for Solano was like really helpful so anyway so I just began to like kind of overlay this this stuff and and I think this is what I mean by like branding in crypto is significantly different than web 2 because you just don't see any of this in web 2 uh marketing and branding how did you think about Austin as you guys were at so for people who aren't watching so basically there's this there's this chart and it's like the views the tribal trades the core values emotional drivers key attributes

destination and the analogy an Acom has basically assigned a word to bitcoin ethereum salana and Cosmos Austin would you say so if you go down the salana column salana is Progressive pragmatic core value is usability the emotional driver is thrill key attribute is fast destination is all apps on a single chain the analogy is NASDAQ speed did this come from like strategic meetings did this come from toally being like hey guys here's what it is was this very Bottoms Up and the community was like hey fast chain good chain guys and you're like great fast chain good chain yeah I think so like the chart here is awesome I think it's it's quite accurate when you look across the board I think

the mistake for anyone to make looking at this chart is to think that this is the way to build a technical product and the brand right these are emergent properties of the technical decisions and the leadership and the community behind each of these projects right I don't think Bitcoin set out to be conservative right it it's set out to be far more radical than Cosmos but it it ended up being conservative because the world has changed right and and one of bitcoin's core values is it does not change and so it has become something that is quite conservative in the crypto world but if you went back to you know 2009 and you were talking to bitcoiners they had the same Zeal and energy as like the 21y olds at the hacker houses

on salana being like yeah we're going to change the world we're going to rewrite the rules of the Global Financial system and like I don't think bitcoin's necessarily changed right but but the way these things work and exist have changed over the years and so I I think what you have to think about here is like I think I see people do this all the time where or found Founders specifically and often technical Founders do this where they try and hire someone to be like what is my brand and it's like that's kind of the opposite way to go about it right you have to articulate what your project is and then someone can trans at that into actionable brand marketing guidelines charts like this which are like

incredibly helpful when you're scaling out a team hiring new people that aren't in the head of the founders but like it's got to start from somewhere right like I think it's really telling under Cosmos and destination you put na that is the entire problem with Cosmos today right I could have figure it out I was I was like banging my head up against the wall I didn't have an answer I guess the destination is every app should have their own chain probably but I don't know doesn't really seem like that's the guiding principle of Cosmos anymore right I don't like I totally agree I don't know what the guiding principle of Cosmos is I would I would throw that up for polygon too it's like don't know and don't know doesn't mean like oh this is such a criticism they don't know it means like it's still in the discovery

phase for what this looks like right like something being blank here isn't like oh they've failed a checkbox it's like it's still up for grabs and the community is still deciding what their what their answer to this type of thing is which goes back to your other thing about like why do these things feel like religions and everyone says religion and I think religion is useful but very incomplete um because Linux isn't a religion right like I think I think it would be I don't know if I would call Linux like a religion I'm not sure I would call it the United States a religion it's an it's an idea that has captured the mind of many people like nationalism is not a religion right like like I think these things are much

closer to nationalism than they are to religion because like part of religion is like it's taking foundational ideological Doctrine and it it's trying to translate that up to the Modern Age and nationalism is a process of pulling whatever cultural detritus you have and assembling it into the concept of a nation which is like a fundamentally invented concept that is usually only 200 years old at best right and so like nationalism is a process of like what can we glue together to form form an identity and religion is like how do we take an old identity and carry it through to Modern time and so when you're looking at the way these things

evolve like this is why they're so frothy why there's so many like like it's very hard and confusing very similar to like the 1880s to like 1930s where like nationalism was just kind of a a mess of like like emergent communities and and Nations and the whole concept of created ethnicities which like did not exist under Empire syst systems at all that is like exactly what we're seeing in the ethereum L2 space today right we're seeing like active nationalism taking place where now people are going from being ethereum people to optimism people or arbitrum people or you know pick your base people pick your L2 people um at the same time like salana like completely pulled an identity out of like literally nowhere

it didn't exist in 2018 and like that process to me feels less like religion and more like nationalism and action do you think that people are going to optimism or to arbitrum or to ZK sync or to polygon because of the technology or because of the brand or because of the founder what is the under as you think about that from a marketer's lens what is the reasoning I don't think many people are going to these for the technical reasons right I I think if the technicals were the fundamental driver of why people were joining a specific Network or a specific whatever there'd be no room for centralized Exchange es right if you're looking at crypto from an ideological perspective from a vision

perspective a values perspective no one would start through a centralized exchange right we would most crypto transactions today still happen on centralized exchanges because what you see there is you see people opting for monetary advantage and that's fundly they're they're trading these things like their stocks of the people who sort of graduate and come into like working on a project building on a project I think there's a there's a vibe that brings people to various different places but I think if you look at like what bass has been able to do when they've deployed like basis is such a cool example because they are using the web to marketing tricks for the most part like it's still coinbase it's still

largely a web two and a half company right and they're pulling people into base and into this sort of like crypto light vision of crypto and they're doing it because it's easy to use it's straight forward and they've got the big blue brand that everyone knows and loves and like I think that is really like two often times people are like pulling up L2 beat or something like that and they're like oh well what checkboxes this a stage one or a stage two roll up and it's like I don't like most people apart from the Builder class most people aren looking at that and the Builder class now like I so I I think we are sorry like I know I'm kind of going around in circles I think we as an industry have not realized the giant

transformation that's happened in the Builder Community right out from under us the last 18 months have completely 180 the type of Builder coming into the space right like if we go back 18 months ago there was one chain that was cheap and fast and there was one place you could build consumer facing applications and now with base right now with uh you know some of the work being done on optimism and other places you can build f consumer applications in different places and so the the type of Builder coming in now is not looking at the technical characteristics of the chain they're looking at the user based characteristics of the chain the entire thing has changed from what is the strongest technical underpinning for me

to build my product and service on top of to what is the strongest Community for me to be able to sell my product and service to it's a fundamental realignment of the entire like user acquisition Concept in crypto yeah do you guys spend much time looking at other people's websites no okay I don't maybe do you I do on occasion yeah okay neither do I nobody in crypto does nobody goes to anyone's websites websites like don't matter in crypto I feel like however it's a really interesting branding exercise yeah so if you look at um here I'm actually gonna share my screen and show you guys this because it's a very interesting exercise in looking at how other people Define their brand so

let's see can you guys see do you guys see this right now do you see ethereum's website yeah yeah okay rainbows butterflies Purple colors welcome to ethereum you look at some of the ethereum l2s very similar the optimism Collective build a world that benefits all owned by all um arbitrum welcome to the future of ethereum so right it's kind of like you know ethereum aligned Bas Bas is for everybody okay so like look at that kind of messaging then look at Celestia so so this is oh this is actually the the term that you said AC Chom the first modular blockchain Network it's like just smack people over the head with it look at

salana developers first powerful developers fast for everyone fast chain good chain developers developers developers then you start to look at um some of the new chains like Mega eth right you start to get into like a little they they need to do things to differentiate themselves with the brand so you've got like different colors you've got bright colors monad um like seems very fast with this thing on the left be chain super silly it starts at the bottom of the site so I mean this is literally the first time I've ever been to be Chain's website but it's like I mean it's up only right it's it's like it's like of course this is be Chain's website so I just find it very interesting to go to those yeah I mean

one of the things that I think is fascinating there is like I am the wrong person to ask like what the Brain Trust of the ethereum community thinks but I don't think those websites reflect most of what I see in the ethereum community say say more I don't see it as soft like those the websites are very friendly they're very consumer oriented I see a lot of like uh you know eth is money like let's fight about economic Concepts like technology first like pushing pushing pushing on like like L2 beat feels like like if you pull up the l2b website that feels like

what the ethereum community actually is and so I've always wondered like how how much of these websites are actually just created by like marketing and branding agencies that are pretty out of touch and how much of this actually is aspirational and how much of this represents like where it is like like the um like the Celestia website like when I meet people in the Celestia community and like who work for one of the Celestia various family of organizations like it's way more like this than it is you know like what I see on the ethereum webs it's aligned to the brand yeah yeah so so true story there was um I was at a bar it was like 10:55 at night I was at a bar playing chess

with someone from um ethereum salana and uh and Cosmos yeah um and a joke no no it was a real story it was actually an amazing an amazing story that only marketers would appreciate and it's about branding and like community building so this so the bartend or like the security guard comes out it's like hey bar shutting down at the outdoor are is shutting down at 11: PM you guys got to get out of here uh it was actually Ethan Buckman from from Cosmos was like [ __ ] you like we're not we're not getting out of here like we're staying until 1 you can't tell to leave all right so that's that's the cosmos ecosystem like very Rebel like radical whatever the ethereum person was like oh

yeah yeah no problem we'll just go inside yeah yeah no problem and the salana person was like we uh Hey totally get it but it's uh the bar doesn't close until 11 p.m. and we still have five minutes to play and it was literally a crumbs things like the pragmatist like the unicorns and rainbows no problem at all and then the and then the cosmos radical so I just thought you guys would appreciate that I love it by the way in terms of these in terms of these websites yeah um I I do agree with Austin I think that there's a lot of marketing agencies and design agencies that are doing a lot of these brands that are frankly just disconnected from the community and like it's it's there's there's disjointedness what I think the

industry is kind of trending to um is that the Mandate is to position the visual identity as like a destination so if you saw the optimism website if you saw the um ethereum website like they feel like destinations that you sort of go into I think even with monad uh it was like the car like kind of going through like the city yeah like that where it feels like um it's something you go to you immerse yourself inside of and it's a whole world that you uh belong to and you know go to that that that's something that I'm seeing um as like some pattern with a lot of a lot of the expressions of these Brands

but at the same time like you know that you know is it really connected to the values and like that look like um there does seem to be a disconnect what would you do Austin you mentioned who did you mention that hadn't figured it out you you in your in your opinion you said polygon maybe so if if you look at the websites of I actually find this really interesting of you know apos make make your move um polygon web 3 aggregated ZK sync the elastic chain um it's a little less clear I think of what the narrative is if you were ZK sync or polygon or Aptos or suie or I mean there's a whole Myriad

of I don't want to pick on these guys um because they're all doing amazing work obviously but uh if you were these guys how would you fix your brand like let's say ZK sync or let's say polygon or something like that hired you now like Austin paying you like a 1010 million actually you probably get those kind of offers all the time if we're paying you more than that we're paying you a lot of money to go fix our narrative um I don't know the dollar amounts but yeah to fix our narrative how how do you do this you got to figure out what the engineers actually want to build like that is like so Engineers inside of your company or the engineers building on you no no so the the engineers Building inside of the is step one and then you

have to figure out what the engineers building protocols on top of whatever framework you're talking about want to build and step one is like how far away are these two things right and if those two things are miles apart like you're done right you got to change one of the two or else the rest of the branding doesn't work and this is why like uh I moved from comms and marketing into strategy is because a lot of this stuff all gets intersectional and if you think of comms and marketing as something that comes in at the end like you've already lost the game right and so like ZK sync is a great example because there's super strong Tech going on there there's a good bunch of Engineers working on it and I can't tell you what the ZK part of

ZK sync gets you I guess it gets you some amount of succinctness and scale but like you get that almost everywhere nowadays right you get you can get you can you can blink and you can get scale from most chains up to several hundred transactions per second and and even more on some places now of course for any ZK sync people like I know more about how what ZK sync does and how it works Etc but like you it's very hard to determine that if you're not already an Insider right I think a lot of times um the folks who are writing these copy and they're doing this marketing material they already understand the protocol so well that they can't remove themselves from it and look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't

understand what's what's going on and so part of this identifying like what actually is going on here what what do you think is the differentiators between this and others and not necessarily like a in a web two differentiator standpoint of like what are what's my product feature comparison chart because that's not really like what we're trying to to do here but like why would someone actually choose to use this this service and product why do I want aggregation right like aggregation is a really hard concept to sell because it doesn't tell me why as a user or a builder I want to be there and the the the articulation of aggregation I've seen very interesting

is like the intent-based blockchains like they're on to something as a concept that like I as a user propose a problem and people bid on the solution to that problem that's fascinating there's a narrative you can run with there you flipped the entire model on its head where normally a user finds a solution and then executes a transaction that solv it like intent-based blockchain systems like who knows if they're going to work there's tons of problems with like that whole architecture that haven't been solved yet maybe they will but like as a narrative structure as something to like hang a hat on and say this is interesting like there's something here like that's a super strong case and if you if you're talking to people about it and you can't articulate why they should

be excited about it that means you've really missed something in The Branding and marketing aom similar question to you if someone came to you and said hey um I'm I'm I'm Aptos we're a fast chain we do have good Tech we we you know move is great we came out of Facebook but there's also suie um there's also movement Labs launching salana is also a fast chain you got other fast chains with manad and mega eth and be chain coming soon how how do you think about creating that brand and narrative yeah um there's a few things number one is the appetite for competition that

is um kind of like the first place that that I begin with um some folks are really just hey put me in front of anyone our [ __ ] is the best we'll take on anyone and they're extremely aggressive they compete uh really really well and like they they're ready for like that intense sort of competitive battle um and then sometimes you see like Founders that are like the opposite where they cannot like take the competition and it's in their best interest to evade competition and that's when you kind of go into like the idea of creating a newer space or something that you can um you can you can really like win in and so like it's a

roundabout way of of saying set up go do you think those people are gonna make it majority of them know yeah the reason that's been my assumption too is like if you if you if you can't cut it and admit where your product is good and where it's bad and have that like adversarial conversation like almost like closeup shop right yeah I'd say nine out of 10 uh folks won't make it uh as they try to evade competition largely because you you go into anytime you're creating something new you're going into um like an education first marketing

program you have to teach this new thing the market will be like like you know like they'll be like huh like you have to you have to do you have to kind of go through that learning curve whereas if you go into an existing category uh that education has largely been done by someone else but it's incumbent upon you to uh articulate your liness and I mean and that's like the word that I begin to think about whenever there's sort of like an existing category that you need to differentiate in like what is what where can I attach the word Only onto yeah now the mistake that I see is that people will select an only or a single biggest differentiator that's irrelevant that the market just doesn't

even care I can't tell you how many times I've done user interviews uh or just like like talked to the market with projects that I'm advising and I'll be like hey like this differentiator that the leadership team cares about what do you think about it and they're just like we don't it's like we don't even think about it so when you you could be famous in this world but irrelevant at the same time and that's like the thing to to be wary of so once you figure that out you package it in the form of a mind virus and so with ZK sync elastic is what I'm seeing there and then with uh with polygon it's aggregated now I think aggregated is absolutely terrible I just don't think it's like cut meets the bar for a mind

virus uh you know going to the aggregated summit is not something that is sexy or uh attractive um and and so once you do that you figure figure that out and then you you wrap it you coordinate the the conversation with it and to Austin's Point like you want to choose something that actually conveys the value proposition uh of what you're building or your technology and I think I mean it sounds kind of obvious but we just don't see it yeah I don't know what elastic means stretchable like I know what modular is right like we can we can debate like and I actually would love to chat a little bit about

like but do you know what but do you know what modular is yeah because but because acrom slammed the modular n no no no so so the The Genius of modular is it was a debate from 10 years ago right this was the whole microservices architecture thing that Kamai was ripping its hair out over in 2009 and so like the people who who like there was a pre-priming of people to have this argument because the argument had already happened right it's like if we started arguing about file systems right like yeah well a bunch of people did that in like the 90s for like a bunch of years and like and so there's already

like a basis to understand I don't know who's taking the other side of aggregated right I don't know who's taking the other side of elastic there's no enemy I get that my my um I think the genius of modular was um CR just to patch you on the back here for a second is you had all these monolithic you had all these chains they weren't monolithic yet you had like salon and Avalanche then you had the new ones like Aptos and suie and then you saw around the corner that there's going to be even newer ones like you know manad and mega eth and stuff and the modular the the modular narrative basically put all of those into one bucket so you're all these mon monolithic people and we over here are the modular and so my problem with um with if I were in optimism arbitrum

polygon zky shoes the thing that I'm concerned about is there's the op stack there's arbitrum orbit there's polygon agay there's ZK elastic chains you got to figure out a way to to basically make some group of those Outsiders there's Anisha there's Cosmos some of you got to cut yourself off from those people basically yeah it's like the the opening of Silicon Valley like the TV show like that first 5 minutes like we're changing the world with short form messaging services like it just like a lot of it feels like that um you to go back to one of things you said about modular though one of the so the modular thing and we've talked about this in private

before and uh it' be fun to talk about it here too is it was incredibly risky and I wouldn't recommend anyone do it because it wasn't really true right like ethereum's modular there's six different clients Sal's modular there's many cents and many right like everything except Bitcoin is fairly modular but like and like Celestia at the time was not modular at all there was one implementation by one core team for all the different module modules right but like the narrative made sense to people it sort of said that like oh there's a different way to build these things and so the the Mind virus didn't hit on the engineers it hit on the non-engineers which is so hard to do because and like

you guys executed it like incredibly well um but it's it it like it was a risky thing because it didn't necessarily have the engineering like backup that you would normally want to push an engineering term um but it landed super well and like it's obviously like it took something that was already happening in the ethereum space fragmentation and it gave it a new name right fragmentation sounds bad modularization sounds like cool and sexy and new and obviously there's some technical changes between the two that like yeah like this this graphic right through City so good I was like oh yeah this thing was awesome me dumb dumb dumb non- Tech Guy oh man this Celestia this

makes sense you you break apart all these things yeah and like we never made Graphics anywhere near this good at salana yeah I want to parse this a little bit because I think there's a big lesson for uh marketers out there you know so when I first met uh the lazy Ledger you know Celestia team at the time um they they kept like harping un pluggable they were like oh know plug yeah and and then me as like a marketing branding person I was just like how the hell do you market pluggable like you know imagine I'm like yo Yano like you know come to the plugable summit or like these pluggable meetups so so so you cannot build a brand around plugable but you can around modular and so the reason why I selected modular is because I saw

the ability to BU build a brand around it and you can get it on swag you can throw conferences around it you can organize the industry conversation there however or having said that um narrative is about tension and that was the thing that I was ultimately like looking for and like I think you know everyone should deeply understand that the modular narrative is nothing without its constant uh compare and contrast with the monolithic status quo and so the the the the framing of the narrative and I remember actually reaching out to Austin about this because we were trying to get an toally at the MRE Summit and we were kind of going back and forth between you know like the title of uh you know the

uh the Fireside or or pen or whatever and it was like modular or monolithic and like just just setting that conversation up was the the the Strategic narrative art and I think if you're really good you build a your goal is to to get a conversation above the brand and then if you're excellent build a debate above the brand and I'm always constantly trying to feed the debate because you want a mixture of opinions and like you don't want everything to be single sided and I think that's probably part of the problem with these other brands like you know zky and polygon it's just just it feels like an echo chamber or this isolation so you should think about what you're positioning in relation to so if you're in an existing

category sometimes I'll get like a big list of competitors and I'm like honestly majority of them don't matter pick the player with the biggest mind share and like create a narrative around them because that's ultimately what you're trying to do Austin what do you think yeah I mean soana did like the B minus version of this in the early days too right like Anatoli ran a podcast called No sharting exclamation point right and what he'd do is he'd invite a bunch of L2 people and a bunch of ethereum core people on and he'd argue with them about charting and it was a huge marketing like boost it was the same thing you guys did with modular Summit right you get a bunch of detractors or you know not necessarily

detractors but people who don't agree with you there and you say like tell me why I'm wrong right like let's argue about this thing and what it also does is it all the people who have like I've never heard of lazy Ledger before let alone Celestia but oh I know totally I like to see him talk like he's talking at this conference this is kind of cool maybe I'll tune in and then it just sort of starts getting this idea of like oh modular is now also associated with non-modular people like isn't that interesting right and so like it sort of takes this step because you know you go back to the old days like Celestia was lazy Ledger right the whole innovation of lazy Ledger was this tiny little micr kernel State thing that was going to be super pluggable and like none you know

it was like very inaccessible from a terminology standpoint but like the core technology obviously it's evolved but it's not that much different than the original lazy Ledger vision for a bunch of stuff is just now wrapped in a package that like you don't need to spend four hours at a dinner party talking to someone to understand what it actually means and salana had the same thing in the early days right it was one Global State machine synchronized as close to the speed of light as possible you know no sharding the protocol was originally called Loom right people forget that because it was supposed to be this like block weave of like how things are getting you know wound together with proof of History proof of History another terrible name right there's there's all of these things that like I

think this is like a lot of this is like the Raj influence the same way you've done this sort of at at Celestia is like if you leave Engineers to their own devices they name things in ways that only make sense once you're sitting inside of their brain um okay Acom how do you know when it's time to Pivot to something new so there was this piece from Deli that said Salon of the modular in August and then actually we hosted a chat um on the main stage of permission list called no no chain is monolithic it was it was David and me and um you know Austin is right like there there is no chain that's monolithic except except Bitcoin I guess you could say so when

you see when you see something like this is it like okay let me pivot from modular let me evolve let me do a new campaign or like look let's just double down and modular is getting big and Celeste is the most associated with modular yeah um so IR irrelevance is the signal for repositioning uh when you are shrinking into irrelevance you know it's time to switch up your narrative now I think each situation is different uh you have to kind of size up the brand Equity that you've created uh so let's just say you created a new category like modular and um that is like shrinking in irrelevance you have to reposition it in relation to

something that's really gonna that's relevant going into 2025 2026 as best as you can to reinvigorate uh that that conversation and you know that's why I think of positioning as somewhat like hygiene you have to consistant work at it and and change it and um it's you know and I think a lot about politics for example uh you know like candidates for example that are shrinking into irrelevance and that they have to uh you know find find something else to to sort of create a new relationship with in the public eye um I'm actually curious like Austin I know uh you uh your background is in politics um there's like a larger

question that I have uh around probably the same thing but also uh just like what lessons from that you know past chapter do you carry over into into your work in crypto yeah you know it's funny I went in college I did political science uh and then environmental science but it's kind of a subset of that that I'll get into and a minor and E and all of my undergraduate like research work was on uh compliance mechanisms and freshwater management treaties in Conflict zones uh so how do India and Pakistan share Water Resources pretty effectively despite having fought four Wars basically over the indis river but never using like water as a you know weapon whereas like

Israel Palestine like they have the Oslo Accords article 40 that lays out like water sharing and management provisions and it's been a disaster of Water Resource man management uh you know let alone the Colorado River compact in the US which is like a complete mess compared to the Great Lakes compact which like Works quite well um in retrospect it's all just a blockchain degree right and like uh you know the stuff of like Elanor Ostrom and the work you won a Nobel Prize for in like the late I think the late 20 the late SS we says is that how we say refer to that period of time that's right yeah the late a um was all on like Collective resource management of common pool resources and how do you create systems of enforcement for um like the

management of a fishery resource that doesn't involve a police force right it's super interesting stuff um now politics is different than policy right but like with politics at least you used to need a good amount of Truth in whatever you were extending right politics is an action of extending beyond what is normally considered to be defensible but it's doing so from a place of some amount of Truth and you'd see this back in the day right like Mitt Romney would say something on the campaign Trail he'd get fact checked about it and he'd stop saying it or he'd modify the language in which he was using and I think one of the pieces that like I don't know if

modern politics teaches people much about how to operate in blockchain I think post Donald Trump like everything is changed in a way that people have actually taken the wrong lessons from and like we can get into the whole sort of like what I think is wrong with a lot of modern crypto marketing it's a lot of what's wrong with like modern political stuff but if you look at like Senate races and house races and Governor races that is where there's a huge amount of learnings in terms of like how to talk about projects how to create differentiation how to carve out an area that feels true and defensible um and I think that that like that is one of the core things you can learn when you're looking at like politics like my I I wasn't on working on anything like super

high National level or anything like that but like a lot of like local political like races and those sorts of things and it comes down to like what is the vision for the future you're articulating and how do you convince people that you have some credibility to actually get there and I would say that is one of the biggest things we don't see in blockchain marketing today everyone is selling a white paper right the whole horse white paper meme is super true right and people have started getting like pretty good [ __ ] detectors now on that type of thing and so the same way that people used to have that in politics and kind of still within some areas you can you can see the lack of genuine nature and so as much as like when I was looking for a

company to join I was looking for as much of like is this founder genuine and do I do I think they're being honest as yeah there you go as like do I think they have the skills to get there it's very similar to picking a politician in that sense because they're all representing a movement to some extent right and if you're not carving out a vision for like where you want to get to and bringing people along the journey like you're not going to get there yeah I want to shift gears a little bit um how do you guys think about how to build the team and the org structure and who should be on the team and hiring do you hire if you're if you're a Founder

do do you go hire a CMO do you go hire a 23-year-old gen Z kid who like crushes crypto um yeah how how do you think for this maybe a crom you could start with how you structured your team at Celestia yeah um the first thing that I'll say and I wrote a tweet about this uh last week I think hiring a marketing agency or doing anything external uh is a disaster I just think it's a it's a bad move uh so you know frankly uh ever or at the beginning or to solve your problem or like or you like you don't work with any outside agencies can you just expand on that I don't I I I don't um I was the interm CMO at a project while at at Celestia in the uh ma

ecosystem and I uh hired pretty reputable you know firm in this industry I fired them after a month uh and it's largely because like building a brand you do it inside first and like it's well documented that uh you launch a brand internally and then it kind of goes uh you know to the external world and that authenticity really drips so I think first things first hiring like a serotonin or hiring some of these external agencies I think full stop period is not the right move um I I only hire them for if I do if I were to for very for very surgical campaigns like a two week three- week like stint where you need some extra resources I would

never sign anything long term with an agency now in terms of actually structure uring the team um if you find someone that you can build a marketing team around hire that person and then I guess you could call that person like a CMO now I don't even know if we should even use that term CMO but like someone you build the team around now if you can't find that person my immediate sort of thing is content like I just think if you're not able to fire off content on a daily basis uh from your Twitter account um you're you're really losing out and so you want to uh hire someone after you've done your brand positioning so

there's a there's a big difference between building a brand like monad and bar Chain versus like a brand like Celestia uh but once you figure that out hire someone who does content I think the second hire should be a graphic designer someone or someone who brings like a visual layer to all Communications a picture is worth a thousand words and so you know you could be you know throwing out text but someone could throw an image or a graphic or something really neat out there and they will get more attention just because it's extremely visual as human beings are very persuaded by that and then I would you know kind of hire someone senior that manages this group and like kind of begins to like you know you know go go from there um but I think like content first and um like that's

kind of like my visceral sort of like point there um I'll pause right there I mean I I actually before Austin speaks at Celestia we have a two we we now have a three-person marketing team it's myself Alex and our new graphic designer Alina and like I keep a very what what does Alex do content content and do you where does event sit uh devell devell and devell is not on marketing no Dev is this totally separate team totally separate team now there's a lot of cross collaboration and and like we we're you know we work very close with them but yeah like it's like the marketing team at Celestia is solely focused on activating and steering the

Strategic position of the celesio brand so you do all marketing with these three people with you and the and the two and the two others there's events but it lives on devell you have worked with agencies but only on campaigns you don't hire them full-time uh at celes we've never hired an external agency you never hired an external agency okay cool Austin what do you agree with and disagree with uh agency is totally right uh you know I think if you're I mean maybe it's useful to talk about when it is helpful to hire a marketing agency right I think there there's two areas where by the way there's many types of agencies right there's a marketing agency there's like a comm's

firm we can get into all that stuff too yeah yeah go ahead yeah but if you're talking about like a true marketing agency um when you have to do stuff IRL you need expertise right and so like the the difference is I would say the events team is part of the marketing team not part of Devall uh because like you know if you're throwing stuff IRL that you want people to come to like yes there's a developer relation wrapper to that but fundamentally what they're doing is marketing the developer experience and that that in in our orchestration in our world at salana that is considered part of the marketing department so our marketing department is optically bigger but as cool or yeah like when I was running the team here we had um one person on social and

content uh and then we had me and then we had an you know we had events director and we and you know she had well you guys had a VP of marketing or a CMO I don't know what her time yeah yeah so that was afterwards that was after I was running it yeah so like but when I was running which was up until like basically the start of 23 um yeah it was it was just two people and then we had another two people who were on the the event side now when you're trying to do IRL stuff like I think Ellie did 24 hacker houses in one year there's obviously an events agency involved in that too but we're not Outsourcing the design and The Branding and all that stuff to someone else we had a creative director in house who we doing all that stuff with and yes

sometimes they're hiring like execution people which are basically you can think of as like freelance graphic designers to like produce work but like all of the brand checkpoint all of the like decision making stuff like obviously we don't have like people who are like printing stuff in house right but like at the end of the day it's all getting approved by internal folks it's not getting approved by like an agency or something external from that perspective even like the visual design of like how a hacker house would look that was all like Ellie our events director like orchestrating what that looks like and then someone else goes and implements it so I would I would draw a little bit of line between like hiring additional execution help versus hiring like

decision making help and decision making you absolutely always need internal um that's kind of what I would say initially on on that I would also like I totally agree that like content is like important in these spaces as you get bigger it changes though right because in the in the early days the goal is for the project to be making noise to be creating distinction to make people aware of it but like we switched probably somewhere um in like mid 2022 from a an organization is primarily trying to promote its messages about salana and sort of what was going on you know from

its perspective into something that was almost more of a support agency for others and so if you look at that sort of period from about like you know mid 22 until like mid 23 it was very much about like how do we help the project projects on salana with distribution channels how do we help them Reach more people how do we Elevate their own voice and their own sort of perspective on things and there's a lot of like other reasons you want to do that it's good from a decentralization standpoint it means you stop being the sort of bottleneck where people are getting information about the ecosystem through and so some of the folks we started to hire at that point were like f some folks who worked in comms right and their role was not like how do we tell salana Foundation salana lab salana

project comms better it was like like we with someone work with me Chris CER and it was like I'm going to take Chris and deploy him to help these teams on salana who have like cool interesting launches coming up figure out how to do comms better and so there's a weird world where we sort of built an agency light internal um and I think that was really helpful in helping companies like jeto like begin to understand how do we approach these types of things and how do we start engaging with this productively how do you um how do you think about hiring crypto natives versus hiring experienced marketers the problem with crypto native people is they tend to not be very good at getting work done

or working within organizations um just to be honest right it's very like there's a reason a lot of people find themselves in crypto and it's because they they can't do anything else right like they couldn't get a job running marketing at like a more traditional company or even working in Marketing in the more traditional company and so it's a sifting process to find the crypto native people who are like who have like the so it's social skills it's not anything it's the the social skills to work within an actual company one other piece I'd say though is that like I will only hire crypto experienced folks with the one exception which is I think not the exception

people expect which is I will hire journalists who don't have any crypto experience um two of my most successful hires yeah why is that because their job is to understand things right for for years they have been you know oh man a news event just happened that I know nothing about I need to go find who are credible experts who understand this to get me up to speed so I can write an explainer on what just happened and like that is like training to understand new Concepts and it's also low ego enough like one of the main problems with like marketing and comms people is they typically are fairly High ego and they're high ego

because they're generally pretty insecure because they get fired all the time right and so it's very easy to find people who just like they're bulldogs and they come across as being really competent but they're just really loud or they're just really aggressive and so what's nice about journalists is they the vast majority of them don't want to be the subject of their story right or they would out be there they' be out there doing like the influencer thing or like the Tucker Carlson thing or something along those lines and so they tend to be really good people to convert into internal marketing people especially on the content side the other thing is like whenever I hire someone I assume they're going to be useless for the first two months I don't actually ask promotion to go poach block Works reporters this is

awful we're cutting this section this is terrible more I've actually seen this done uh done really well like um I'm an investor in andrina or um and and Lila over there was a coin desk reporter she's done a great job um we had a reporter Bessie uh who went internal on the comm's team at arbitrum yeah yeah uh Brandon ector who uh runs all of the content here at salana Foundation he was uh from NPR in science Friday yeah there you go and like science Friday was like the perfect background you got to go produce a three-hour long science show every week about like in-depth technical Concepts like neuroscience and then like flip it over to Nuclear Physics the next week like that's exactly the type of

brain I want on crypto stuff because crypto changes so quickly we have um I have this interview question I love to ask which is what's the latest Wikipedia Rabbit Hole you went down and you know everyone's got a quick answer because everyone you can make up a topic and it's on Wikipedia but yeah a real rabbit ho holder under can tell you the clicks that led to the it's like all right I was on like the World War two page all right then I got into like like the the the Nazis doing drugs all right then I got I I it's it's actually a great interview question all right maybe let's let's shift um crisis management so there are crisis management is tough I will say so for context my wife runs a crisis

management firm um so so I've seen some some some real nightmares um crypto companies are uniquely good at handling crises sometimes because they are so close to their users that they can talk directly to them they're also uniquely bad um because it's all on Twitter so sometimes you know actually I don't want to call anyone out too much but like I don't know sometimes people will just like turn off comments sometimes people will make up these elaborate stories and it's like a clear lie um I'm I'm just curious how you guys think of Crisis management like when do you be proactive and get ahead of the story when are you reactive when do you not say anything is there a framework that you have or it's

just more of a gut feel I'll take a step about this first um yeah so proactive and reactive that is largely you know at the highest level uh the way to think about it um I think I'll I'll start on the reactive side uh something happens and for some reason I I see like the responses in crypto or like the way that they're handled um just like in a very cold and like unrelatable way and uh and and and so almost always you you you never want to like at least in my

opinion like I like to keep the core brand like very clean and like very pristine and and whenever I lead Communications in like a crisis situation uh having the founder or one of the faces of the brand just you know tell it like it is and like connect with other humans and just say like hey look um you know we screwed up or this you know should have been the other way and like I think I think there's something to be said about you know that on the on the reactive side and I I can't remember but like the the stuff that happened withu and we can get into that um I think they LED comms from their main account is that was that the case but if so I think it's been deleted but since so far yeah which comes off as like

pretty uh just unrelatable yeah um but yeah maybe ausome you feel to jump in yeah I mean the the number one rule of Crisis coms is do not communicate anything that you do not know to be true like full stop the place everyone gets into problems from day one is they say something or they make a commitment or a promise to do something in the future that they don't know how they're going to do and so like Step One is like take a step back hit the pause button like do not need to jump into this thing instantly sleep on the response that is the number like just sleep on the yeah

it's not even sleep sometimes it's like just okay so the the the biggest piece of advice like before a crisis happens for every founder out there is have two or three people whose opinions you respect who do not always tell you yes and have them on speed dial when it comes to a crisis and send them your response first Mike and I Mike and I call this the Brain Trust yeah we um we you know we published that oped that said only a fool would vote on crypto um and it was the most intense reaction I've ever had to blockworks in seven years you know we had we had we had our we had some of our investors we had our biggest customers

we had internal employees basically saying like who the hell are you to to to to post this um I was at dinner on with people who were like what the hell is this and so but we we ended up publish we ended up writing a response it did not come from block works it came from Mike and I personally was the first thing but the second was I mean I wrote it Mike rewrote it and then we sent it to our five person Brain Trust and they're people who give us critical feedback every single time and we've just like kind of trusted Confidant you know yeah so yeah I mean it's so important um so that's like step one but like really like communicate what you know to be true do not communicate

anything more than you know to be true it doesn't do any good to speculate in public a lot of this comes from outages right like I I've unfortunately had to manage a lot of outage crisis comms at salana um and you know there's a there's there's a few things people always don't want to do the first is they want to communicate further than what they know to be true you you really can't have that because they want to like oh don't worry we're working on it it's like no no no like if you don't know the thing is like don't go past what you know especially if you might have to backtrack on something like an outage or a very technical comms piece of problems um the other thing that is just you know and you talking about this have empathy like comms need to have empathy the

number one thing that many crisis comms firms will tell you is like never apologize they're completely wrong like if this is something that you or your project created or should have known better about like there is nothing nothing wrong with apologizing now the lawyers will get pissed at you for apologizing because they think it's some omission of guilt or it think it opens you up to something but at the end of the day like you need to be making decisions and communicating in ways that is respectful of your community because you don't have a captive audience here like they will just leave and go somewhere else this you know this isn't apple right and like what are you going to do buy an iPhone from someone else it's like no there's a thousand other dii protocols out there there's a bunch

of other chains like you have to have that empathy when you're talking to people anything else youd add there no I think that's on the money um it's it's usually when uh you're intellectual dishonesty yeah and and and that goes with like even uh Communications outside of Crisis like I think one of the bigger sort of phenomenon that I see with inside crypto uh is that people overstretch they kind of BS a lot and and uh intellectual honesty especially with devs go goes a long way and like that's just the way like they are and um I think I think

what anytime you you you kind of sidestep or beat around the bush with the truth you're just giving more rope for uh media other folks to like keep fishing for the truth and um you want to create a situation where there's nothing more to report on because you just addressed it head on yeah yeah yeah I agree with all that um Acom I was with a CMO of a protocol the other day who said hey Acom has a list uh a private telegram chat with the top 100 K's in the industry and that's why Celeste has been so successful is because of of aom's of aom's telegram group so I'd like to hear about your telegram

group yeah uh I have a private telegram group of um like the heads of states of projects uh mostly marketers uh and Austin I gotta get you into this after that you know as well figure out a way to charge them a lot yeah um but it's um to be honest it's it's really a uh communication lever uh do you actually have do you actually have this group of chrome I do yeah it's not K's though I'm not a k ACR no I I don't want to call it a k it's just people it's just people like met around uh like the industry so I I every single one by name okay so I think

that right there is actually what I was trying to drive at which is there are there is a real mistake that I see marketers making around K what a k is by the way they used to be called influencers and then like people in like I think the Asian crypto exchanges didn't use the word influencer so they shifted to K is my understanding that's actually so what I have heard and I think this is accurate is influencers started setting off flags at the IRS got it because if you're paid to promote something that is both taxable income and you have to disclose it on like Instagram post that that makes sense that makes a lot of sense so all you're doing is publishing

opinions key opinion leader um okay so the I saw I I reviewed this list for actually a different marketer of like hey here are the biggest K in the industry I like I've never heard of these people they're like oh but they have 400,000 followers and this this YouTube video gets like look at this video it's getting like 880,000 views I was like but they're irrelevant they're like they're clearly not irrelevant they have 400,000 followers they have 80,000 views on YouTube and the thing that I think I just want to drive home is there's this group of people they're like the crypto aluminati they're like the they're The In Crowd they're the founders and the investors that matter those are your K's those are the K of the industry and AC I think what you've done such a good job of doing is I mean

I don't I don't think you care about the I don't think you could list one YouTube influencer but you know John charbono and hu I may these names John charbono and hu and zucky and like you know you're able to say hey John take a look at this new thing that we just launched at Celestia um I I don't actually know this I'm but I I would assume this is how you think about K's instead of the traditional version of like look how many followers they have yeah yeah um to be honest I don't even use the word kol it's not even it's not how I think I think I I've seen some Brands pay for this stuff and I think it's absolutely cringe to pay for publicity frankly I just don't believe in paying for uh for paid like advertising or any paid media

because I think I think uh you should really strive on earned media and attention and I think if you can't there's something wrong with your position narrative uh you should be earning attention on your own as far as like um like I let's just call it influencers I spent a lot of my time as a CMO um just really meeting people and um I don't know and I mean it's kind of like influencing influencers and building really authentic relationships and like understanding what the win-win narrative really is and I like to separate that group with like formalities and no formalities and so sometimes an announcement my coming out and you get to a point where you have absolutely no formalities with this person or who has

like a heavy hitter following and you're just like hey look I got this coming out need you to say something or you know what do you think or whatever and you kind of negotiate it in advance but because there's no formalities um it's like you know you it's kind of helpful you know in in the publicity of it then there's like a broader list where there is formalities but you still have to kind of know them and then I just say hey like we just published this uh what do you think but it's not really like hard ask in in pushing sort of what that is I don't really think of it through the lens of KS it's more just um just relationships that you've built deep enough rapport with that can serve as a communication lever because then the amplification is much more thunderous if

um you start it kind maybe it's like the Brain Trust sort of thing too to to carry over Austin I don't know if you have a take on this yeah I mean I think a lot of the influencer community especially in crypto is pretty unnecessary um from a paid standpoint right there's projects that pay people to do stuff that pay for promotions they give advisory grants for promotions it's all um it look it's all Downstream from utility right like if your project has a good enough com

strategy if it has a good enough interest if people are curious about it influencers are going to make content about it whether you pay them or not because their followers care about it right like you're solving the problem at the wrong point if you think that like oh I'm going to pay a bunch of these like influencers to make videos and tweet about my project and that's going to like make people interested in my project that's that's the opposite right you've got to do things and get stuff that get the influencers natively interested in what you're doing so they start producing content about it now once that relationship sort of exists as you're talking about you can totally go to them and be like hey we got this thing coming up next week like I'd love to read you in early on it will you do

an embargo the exact same way you go to block works and you say hey we're launching this thing next week here's an embargo like you want you want a quick access to the press release and like this is something actually that like I think uh you know Apple of all companies does like fairly decently they're starting to bring a lot more like YouTubers and influencers to like apple events and they're giving them the same sort of like sneak peek access to the new iPhone a week ahead of time that like a journalist would get but they're basically doing it on the same terms they're not paying them right or if they're paying them all they're doing is like covering hotel and flight right like we we've done that before for salana like we have and we extend this offer to journalists sometimes too is like 99% of them say our ethics policy

doesn't let us do it but to be fair we say like hey if you if your budget doesn't allow you to come to breakpoint but you editorially would like to cover breakpoint like we'll we'll give you an economy class ticket and like a three star hotel and most news organizations say no some of them say yes but like a YouTuber often will say yeah sure I'll do that and I'll come but we're not paying them to come we're just giving them access to be able to attend and I think that's the way to if you want to do those type of things that's the way to think about doing it anyone who gives out tokens or or direct payments or something like that in exchange for this stuff I think it's um it's it's a pretty negative signal and if it gets out everyone is gonna be mad at you yeah

that's the other piece yeah true um guys there's a lot more I want to ask about about you know onboarding the masses versus marketing to crypto natives marketing to Enterprises vers institutions vers crypto natives vers retail and a whole host of other things I am out of time so maybe we can do this as a part one um I enjoyed this if if people like this uh acr's on Twitter acrom I think there's an H in between the A and the M Austin I think is Austin federa pretty simple um but yeah Austin androm thanks for doing this thank you thanks for having us on [Music]