Why Crypto is the Future COO Blockchain, Lane Kasselman (Ep 182)

You know, 10 years ago there were 11 and 12 year olds hearing about crypto for the first time and now they're in their 20s and for them crypto is not weird, it's not odd, it's not new. In fact, normal banking, how we think about it, or traditional banking. We have 76 million wallets worldwide and of those 36 million are verified, meaning they've gone through a KYC or know your customer process that enables them to do more transacting. This is the, the main on ramp that most consumers have with crypto and is to be able to buy and sell it. Our retail product is really designed to eventually one day replace the need to have a third party banking system operated all out of one central repository. And that's, you know, hopefully where it's going in the future.

Our guest today is the chief operating officer at the crypto giant known as blockchain.com, lane Castleman. Lane has more than two decades of experience in public policy, crisis strategy and communications@blockchain.com previously he headed communications and public affairs for Uber and AT and T where he played a crucial role in creating a national and international regulatory campaigns and frameworks. Lane co founded crisis management Firm Greenbrier in 2017, which solved complex reputational issues for clients ranging from Silicon Valley unicorns to heads of state to celebrities, and was acquired by the Messina Group a year later. Since 2009 he served as a founder of Castleman LLC, a boutique nonpartisan public affairs firm which has worked with various notable campaigns, officials, companies and nonprofits in the countries, including the Newsom for governor campaign. Earlier in his career, Castleman was recruited by the Markham Group, a leading visual communications messaging firm, to manage advancements with the then Senator Hillary Clinton's 2008 exploratory committee for president. So Lane, welcome to the second McMahon podcast.

Thanks Cameron.

I've got a super fun crazy bio. We could actually sit and have drinks for hours. I've got some funny stories. So tell me about blockchain.com. what was the impetus for you getting involved?

Well, you know, Blockchain is one of the oldest companies in crypto and I think that often gets forgotten when you're talking about crypto because so many companies are new. Blockchain is just about 10 years old, which makes it a bit of a dinosaur in the crypto space. And it's kind of funny to think, just as an aside that, you know, 10 years ago there were 11 and 12 year olds hearing about crypto for the first time and now they're in their 20s, and for them, crypto is not weird, it's not odd, it's not new. In fact, normal banking, how we think about it, or traditional banking is kind of for them, crypto is interesting. And that's what makes Blockchain so exciting right now. One of the reasons I joined so when I left Uber about six years ago, I took some time off and I was given the opportunity to invest and advise in blockchain. So I got to know the CEO at the time and all this time over, everything I've done since, I left Uber and started a company and sold it, become a part of another company. I've always been involved with blockchain.com either as a consultant at some point, always an advisor, and certainly as an investor. And so I've grown to know the leadership team and the business really well. But the business has grown dramatically during that time to where it is today. And so about six or seven, almost seven months ago now, the CEO called and said the company is scaling at an unprecedented rate, even in crypto and I need help. You've scaled companies before. Come in and scale this with me. And so we talked about it for a few days and it was a pretty amazing opportunity to get involved in a space that I believe in, work with a founder that I really like, and also just get mission focused again. I've been a bit of a mercenary for six years and it's fun to be focused on one thing and making it grow. So that's, that's why I joined.

So. And prior to this, you were running, I think it was your own crisis communications firm, wasn't it?

Yeah, so it gets a little confusing. So yeah, left Uber, didn't really want a normal job. Sort of fell into doing some crisis management. Who knew Silicon Valley needed a lot of crisis management? Our firm really took off. I. I started it with another, another gentleman named Matt McKenna. He was president Clinton spokesman for a long time and then he joined Uber to be a new me. He left, we started this company, it took off and then Jim Messina, who was President Obama's campaign manager on the Reelect, deputy chief of staff in the White House. He's got a large corporate strategy firm. He then acquired us shortly after we started and so invested in us. We grew. And then I became a partner in the Messina Group and helped the company start many other business ventures. But all during that time I stayed on as the managing partner of Greenbrier, which is doing well even despite my absence these days.

So what do you think? You learned from a couple of those roles. What do you think you learned that has set you up for the role that you're in now as a chief business officer of blockchain.

So, you know, fortunately, being in the crisis world, you end up working with the chief executives of most companies. Right. It's not like mid level employees are hiring you to come in and solve an issue. You generally would get called during, you know, people or company's worst days or worst weeks or worst months. And when that happens, you're dealing with the board, you're dealing with the CEO, and usually the leadership team of a company. And sometimes a crisis is not solved in a day, sometimes a crisis can take weeks or even months. And you end up building pretty close relationships with, with these folks. And one of the things I learned both because I was running or building and running a company that eventually grew and got, you know, decent in size, and then working with these chief executives themselves was understanding the nuance of actually what they want to focus on and what they don't. Oftentimes when I'm seeing reports out from people in the company to our CEO, they're really long and detailed and areas that get into minutia that don't really have a measurable impact on the outcome of whatever it is they're writing about, but they want to make sure the full story is known and what they're not recognizing that you don't really become a CEO of a company unless you know or unless you are empowered to ask for more information when you want it. Right. And so it's this odd scenario where employees don't trust that CEOs are going to ask for more information when they want it. And so they just sort of like have this, this innate need to provide all of this information, too much information, and they bury the lead, they bury the point. So what does that mean? Generally you want to be brief with CEOs, right? You want to be direct and to the point because they're dealing with a million issues at once. Do you want to help facilitate their ability to move from one issue to the next?

Have you ever heard of the Colby profile?

No. No.

It's a personality profile that talks in the net. Of it is it teaches you how you start or initiate projects. And CEOs tend to start and initiate by winging it, making it up as they go shooting from the hip, you know, fire, ready, aim. But a lot of COOs and a lot of executives tend to be more fact finders where they ask a lot of questions to start Something. And what happens is because they want all the facts, they assume the CEO does. And you're exactly right, they don't want the facts at all. They want the bottom line and they want to know that you've got the facts. But it's like their hard drive is already full, like their brain's already full. They can't take any more info in. How do you teach the leaders to start to operate that way? I mean, you've learned it, but do you now start to teach them as well?

You know, I'm fortunate at Blockchain to have, you know, many direct reports and some of them, you know, all of them are different stages in their careers, but some are at that stage where they're starting to become, you know, move from exec to senior exec and there's real desire for the mentorship. But you know, this thing in tech happens where, you know, if you're at an AT&T or you're at a major multinational corporation, there's probably a program in place to help you grow and progress throughout your sort of executive development. But in the startup world we just sort of appoint people to roles or maybe we recruit them in. But that sort of professional development thing is really focused on like junior and mid level roles. It's rarely focused on the exec roles. Maybe you have an exec coach, maybe not. And what I found though is that those execs that are trying to move from, you know, maybe junior exec to mid or senior level exec, they're starved for that mentorship. Just somebody to spend a little bit of time stepping away from the day to day work and talking about how their activity and role is being perceived and how it's impacting their ability to grow. So I do that right, which is maybe not necessarily something that all senior execs do or have time for. But like my job here is to help the company scale. The company doesn't scale unless the execs are also growing as the company grows. So I see it as part of my job.

I think it's your almost a core of your job. I actually launched a course recently called Invest in your leaders for that core purpose of giving all managers and leaders what I consider the 12 core competencies of leadership. So situational leadership, coaching, delegation, conflict management, problem solving, time management, all the executive functioning skills that often we assume they have, but maybe they really don't. I've always said that the leader's core job is to grow people. So what's the rest of your job? If you if you kind of allocate, I don't know what x percent of your time is growing people. What's the rest of your job entailing right now?

I came in as the chief Business officer which is, is nebulous, not, not the COO only because that role in the crypto world is more appropriate for somebody with a finance background. So my job is to scale the business. Right. What does that mean? That means that it's easier to define by what I don't do. So I don't do anything on the technical side. Right. So I don't have any oversight on engineering product or in our business, the markets and trading group. Right. So the actual trading of cryptocurrencies on institutional side, I'm not involved in that side of the business or we call our institutional business. But what I do focus on is everything else. So everything that's corporate, whether that's corporate development, partnerships, M and A, it's all in my wheelhouse. If it's external communications, marketing, public policy, or maybe it's operational, right. So maybe it's customer success, real estate, company operations. So all those other things that aren't focused on the day to day execution of the product and the technical side of it are the things I focus on. So I'm generally hopping from topic area to topic area throughout the day.

How do you operate within the leadership team then? How do you stay focused on the core across the organization versus getting siloed?

Cameron is super hard. There's sort of two challenges. One is it's easy to get siloed in whatever the, you know, the biggest fire is and focused on it. And the other is when you have oversight over that many different organizations, there's a lot of stuff that bubbles up that's kind of just fits into the to do column. And you know as well as anybody that like the to dos can zap a lot of your time and a lot of energy. I'm laughing because it's up here to my right. I've got my 10 sort of my personal OKRs for the quarter, like the big things I need to accomplish for the business and they're right there next to my screen printed on the wall or printed on paper on the wall. And so every day I'm like, did I do enough to move the ball on each of them? And if I didn't I just kind of ignore the to dos and focus on those big things which you know, maybe causes some downstream problems. But what I've learned is that a to do email, if you ignore it will always come back again for you to do it later. So I, you know, I know, I'll get to this.

Jim Collins talked about that. Right. It's about focusing on the critical few things versus the important many. And yeah, we have to stay focused on that. When should a company reach out to a crisis firm to help them? Other than like the obvious, maybe think more entrepreneurial, like maybe the 50 to 500 person company. When should they try to reach out to a firm like you were building versus handling it all in house?

Yeah. So you know, a crisis is loosely defined as anything that's out of the ordinary. That could be as simple as like a negative media inquiry. Or it could be, you know, you're CEO is accused of financial malfeasance. Right. Or something else. Right. It can be anything. I think it's the question. The question has to really be dictated by audience. So which audience is impacted by the crisis? And do you have the ability internally to manage or mitigate the impact on that audience? So let me explain. So if the audience is the public, in other words, a crisis is something that's being reported on by the press, doesn't really impact your customers, certainly not your employees, but the press. Well, do you need to mitigate it with them or with the public? You know, so let's use Uber as an example. Uber got a lot of really bad press for various reasons that didn't really impact its customers or its employees. It was just bad press for activities of the CEO or other members of the leadership team. And so mitigating it publicly was necessary to minimize the sort of drop in signups. Right, Right. So like there was a measurable impact to the business. And so the way to mitigate that was do we have enough of a team internally that could manage the press or do we not? Right. So that was sort of the question. But then if you juxtapose that with like, excuse Uber, yet another example, Uber, you know there are many car accidents every day related to Uber. Right. Because there's so many of them on the road. Now if a crisis is that a, a lawsuit has been filed against you for bodily harm against or bodily harm of one of your customers, that lawsuit could have dramatic impacts on your bottom line or on other customers wanting to use the product if the public is aware of it. Again, the question you have to ask is, do we have the right attorneys in house to manage it, or do we have the right communications people, or do we have the right messaging to assure customers that everything is safe? So if you don't have the tools internally, then you rent, right? Then you rent somebody like the team at Greenbrier come in and solve it for you. And then just the last thing is, if you're a small company, you've got 50 employees or 100 employees, you generally don't have the team to really manage any of this stuff, right? And so you kind of need a project manager for your crisis. Remember, we spend a lot of time on crisis. The biggest sort of vulnerability of a crisis is that it causes your company to stop operating and causes your entire leadership team to focus on solving it. And that's the worst thing to do, right?

Well, I don't actually, and I'm glad you mentioned we're spending a lot of time on crisis, but I think it's actually a core skill of yours. Dismiss. But the entire area of blockchain and crypto is going through not crisis, but massive volatility, right? Like, I sent my dad a text two days ago, like, dad, look like everything's back from where it was six weeks ago. And then I sent him a text the next morning. I'm like, but it's down 20% from yesterday. You're managing crisis and fear and insecurity across your organization all the time. And I think a lot of organizations ego gets in the way. Like Ryan Holiday's book said, you know, he goes, the enemy. I think a lot of people think they have the skill set internally when they really don't. So that's why I wanted to just speak to it a bit. So what's the core of what blockchain.com is working on?

Well, you know, our, our business is pretty diversified and we're one of the few in the space that has so many different business lines all in one company. We have basically three main products, right? We have a retail product which in the crypto world, you may know as like a wallet, right? That's kind of your account. It's where you can buy and sell crypto. You also can earn rewards on it, right? So you can, you know, put your crypto, you can put your fiat in, you know, put $100 in, convert it to a stable coin and then earn rewards back, earn more of those stable coins back. So create value on that token. We have 76 million wallets worldwide, and of those, 36 million are verified, meaning they've gone through a KYC or know your customer process that enables them to do more transacting. This is the, the main on ramp that most consumers have with crypto is to be able to buy and sell it. What's interesting though, if you juxtapose it with like your bank account is you, you know, in your bank account you likely can hold, you know, if you're in the U.S. u.S. Dollars and that's it. But in your blockchain wallet you can have, you know, one of a dozen tokens or all the tokens, you can have US dollars or other currencies and it really becomes a much more ubiquitous account for holding value and then moving it around. So our retail product is really designed to eventually one day, you know, replace the need to have a third party banking system, right? So you know, you should be able to have your paycheck go directly into your, you know, your blockchain wallet and from there be able to have your debit card and credit card and your savings accounts and investing in crypto and operate it all out of one, one central repository. And that's, you know, hopefully where it's going in the future. Second business is our exchange. And if you think about crypto exchanges, sort of like a currency exchange in an airport, you know, you, you go to the airport currency exchange, you're probably not going to get a great interest rate, but that's where you change your money, right? There's a sign on the wall, you get 50 different currencies to exchange with. There's about 130, 150 of those worldwide in the crypto space. They're obviously all digital. And that's where prosumers or professional investors offset their risk. They're basically engaging in arbitrage, right? They're buying currency or token low, converting it, selling it high. Right. And keeping the spread. So consumers aren't really doing that as much. But prosumers, right, the folks that you know, hang out at home doing day trading, they're, they're doing that and then of course institutional, and then our institutional business, which has really been the breakaway hit and kind of the, the sort of banner story of the past 18 months is really a merchant bank. And the, the most sort of easy to understand comparison is JP Morgan is a, is a merchant bank, right? So they've got, you know, sort of like us, a retail side and institutional side. What does a merchant bank do? It is investor type banking services. So we offer two institutions that could be a hedge fund or VC or a family office or even a crypto native company like a mine spot OTC, which basically means you want to buy $1 million in Bitcoin, you could use your wallet or you can call us and like a human will get on the phone, execute the trade for you, probably get you a better rate and handle it for you, right? So if you're dealing with these large volume transactions, you want a human doing it. The second is we have derivatives, right? So just like a derivative product, but based on the underlying asset. And then we offer lending to our crypto clients. And we are the second, probably almost the first largest lender in crypto. And the classic example is like, you know, Cameron, hopefully you're sitting on $50 million with a Bitcoin right now, but you know it's going to be worth 100 million next year because, you know, to the moon. But you want to get a remodel done on the house. And so you need access to 5 million of that. But you don't want to sell it. Where can you go? How can you borrow against it? You can't go to J.P. morgan, you can't. But you can come to us and we'll do a collateralized loan on it. So there's an insatiable appetite for lending in the crypto space and we're, we're satisfying it.

Wow. Okay, so you guys are into some pretty cool areas. I've got a quick, just a quick geek question. How many basis points is the difference approximately between what like a merchant is doing versus a pro trader versus a normal consumer? Like if you're buying some, some bitcoin, what's the difference?

What depends on the token? Depends on the time of day.

Yeah, just approximately Bitcoin, or is it like a full percentage? Is it a tenth of a point?

Yeah, I mean, it could be up to a 4 percentage. Yeah, but there's, there are a lot of factors, right? Depends on the larger the amount, you know, the bigger the spread.

Yeah, interesting. How are you guys funded?

So the great news about Blockchain is we've been profitable for nearly two years. So we've done two rounds of venture funding this year. We've raised a little over 500 billion total since the company was started and we have a $5.2 billion valuation. But our funding rounds this year were opportunistic and strategic. You know, the one thing about being in a finance business is it's, it's cash intensive. You need a lot of capital to make loans, right, that type of thing to, you know, using trading protocols. So we do have an insatiable appetite for cash.

Is that the core of those three kind of categories? The wallet, the kind of trading arbitrage platform or the exchange exchanges, and then the Third, which is your biggest revenue source? Which is your biggest margin source.

Yeah. So again, I don't mean this to be like an advertisement for blockchain.com but this, this is what's so great about the company, is that it's about 50, 50 institutional retail. And why is that important? Well, our good friends over at Coinbase. Right, Coinbase, the biggest crypto company in the US their revenue mix is about 97% retail, which is great. Got tons of retail customers, but they're highly reactive to the volatility in the crypto market. So when crypto's up, they're making money, it's going great. When it's down or there's a dip like we saw on Tuesday or yesterday, Monday to Tuesday, things aren't looking great. And so their, their revenue mix is pretty lumpy. But when you add the institutional revenue into the mix, that stabilizes the revenue because the institutional business doesn't react at all the same way that retail customers do. And so because of that, our revenue mix is much more stable. That's very unique in crypto. One of the reasons we're so highly valued and we have such a great list of blue chip investors.

And then the collateralized loan side of the business has got to be huge opportunity for you as well then.

Huge opportunity, yeah. It's. That is really the growth area of the business. We're primarily focused on crypto native companies or native investors. And that's just scratching the surface, but there is quite a lot of opportunity.

Was it you guys that someone just said recently? They just announced you're going to go public like in two and a half years. And so it was like, big deal. Like that's like a political party saying they're going to change something after the next election. Like, is it. Was that you or was it someone else?

I don't know that we said that we are on a public trajectory. Going public trajectory, call it somewhere between 12 and 18 months, but for us, that's not like a kick the can down the road. It's more, you know, blockchain is. The company was built on the philosophy of being very conservative in its approach to regulation, to customer service, to building products that are stable. And so we're slow and thoughtful when it comes to becoming a public company. We're not going to rush it. There's a lot of folks that are just like, give me a spac, I want to go public right now. Right. That's not our way of doing business.

Are you, because of the regulations, having to stay as an office based company or are you hiring people remote as well? Has Covid allowed you to be more remote than maybe pre Covid financial regulations would have allowed?

So we are a fully remote company. We do have offices and we're building more of them. Prior to Covid, a lot of. So the company is London based and we do have a large office on the west end of London. And then I think before COVID there was also one in San Francisco. Since that, you know, those offices kind of closed and reopened. We decided to go fully remote. At this point we have employees in 22 countries. We're building a new office in sort of the financial district in London called Mayfair. We're building. We actually opened a new office in Miami. We're building a much larger office there as our US headquarters. We're building one in Los Angeles. We have a temporary space there. We'll probably open one in San Francisco. Even though I like working from home, I think we'll probably end up having one here too. And then there's other spots around the world. We have a large presence in Lithuania, probably open a new office there. So the idea is employees actually want to go into the office once a week. They do want to work with each other and so we're giving them the option. We'll have offices where people can co locate when needed, but otherwise fully remote. The rule is everyone just always dials in from their own tile. Right. Everyone on their own screen, even if you're on together. So there's, you know, balance across the company.

You talked about promoting people from executive to senior executive. How do you distinguish that and how do you help them make that leap?

Yeah, so I think, you know, it's, you know, like many startups, not, not super clearly defined and that there's a, a path to growing your executive level. I think generally the way to think about it, a blockchain is our management team is made up of folks that will own one vertical. Right. They may own marketing or they may own customer success. And then as you take over leadership of multiple organizations, that's when you're making the transition to a more senior executive role where you're. You have oversight over multiple different things. For example, you know, our chief legal officer has oversight for legal administration and compliance. Right. Which are three separate organizations. And you know, our cfo right. Overseas finance, financial operations. I think that depending on sort of where you are in your growth, you will sort of have oversight of multiple organizations. The way that we're getting folks prepared is first we need to finish Building out our ranks. So we just hired our last executive to the management team a couple of weeks ago. He starts in two weeks. And so now our leadership team is set right. We have our full bench, everybody that we need. And now we're starting to look at, all right, what's the structure look like and where do we want to sort of move pieces around to make sure that it flows properly. And so I think, you know, as we're looking at sort of the next six months, we're looking at which members of the team are, you know, really just crushing it on sort of their core responsibility and really would do well owning other areas of the business.

Interesting. All right, how about yourself and your growth as a leader? What have you focused on? Because you've had some big trajectory changes in your career, especially kind of going from running your own business back into, you know, growing this, this kind of hyper growth company again.

Yeah, look, I mean, for me there, this, this opportunity was like one to go work with a CEO that I really like and believe in. Like he, this is, this is what he's been doing for 10 years.

What is it about him that you like then?

You know, I think that there's probably, like, it's a cliche that like CEOs and tech are just like really smart. And I think I probably have 400 plus tech companies as clients over the last six years. And I can say some of them were, some of them were not right. Rco. And this isn't because I think he's gonna listen to this podcast. Like, he's really smart and that means he knows what he doesn't know and he's willing to ask for help. And throughout, you know, the six plus years I've known him, he's been very clear about, you know what, I don't know a lot about that space. Let's find an expert. Let's find somebody else. And to me, like, that is the true sign of intelligence is that like there's the CEOs who pretend they have an answer to everything because they think that's their job. And it's the ones who acknowledge that they don't, but they know enough to go find the expert who can then advise them and help give them the answer. Marcio is fortunately the one who will go out and find that expert. The other is like, he's just got like a endless drive. He's just like wakes up and like, he's all right, let's do it every day. And he's been doing that for 10 years, which like, I, I haven't, I can't. I don't do that. Right. So I really admire that. Yeah.

I was at a Mastermind years ago and there was this guy sitting off in the corner for two days and he said nothing for the two days. And I was new to the group and I was leaving. I'm like, who was that guy over in the car? And I don't remember his name, but he was a billionaire. I'm like, he said nothing. And they're like, no, he's here to learn. He's not here to talk. And I'm like, wow, that's like, pretty profound. When you joined the organization, when you came into blockchain.com, were there any ripples that you caused that you had to be aware of from the other senior team, or was it fairly seamless coming in?

I think there's sort of two answers to that. So one is, I did consult for like 400 plus companies over six years. So dropping into a company and just starting to do things is what I've been doing for six years. Right. So I don't want to say I had it better than most people starting a new job, but, like, I kind of had it better because that's what I do, right? I drop in, I figure it out, and I started making changes. The other answer is that, yeah, I think there were some ways. You know, one of the first things I did was come in and say, look, there are not enough people working in this company. And some of you have actually maybe done a disservice to the business by not hiring fast enough. So we're going to take a pause right now. No more random requests for, for new hires. And I'm going to do a full audit of the entire company and figure out where we need bodies, where we're lacking, what the ideal number of staffing with, the ideal number of staffing should be in each org, and what the minimum level required should be. And I'm going to take a couple of weeks to do that. And on the other side of it, then we're going to start the hard work and go hire all these people. And I think there were some folks that were like, why are you getting in the way of my current process of just like hiring people as I need them? Why are you, like, adding layers to something that doesn't need layers? Now fast forward almost seven months later. I don't think anyone can remember prior to the staffing. Sure, we have a very regimented process every week on adding new employees. And since I'VE been here, we've added 80 employees. We're 100, I think we're 180, 170 when I started, and now we're close to 260. Right. And so the process worked right by, by sort of disrupting it, I then was able to accelerate it. So I think that caused some nerves initially, but they're all over it. I don't think I caused any other way to stop.

Were there any areas that you forced yourself to pull back on? Were there any areas that you wanted to make change in and you held back on? And if, if you held back, why?

You know, I'm fortunate to have an exec coach who really did help me a lot with the first 100 days. And so I don't know that I had any significant missteps, at least none that I'm, I'm currently aware of. Maybe, maybe somebody on the management team would correct me on that. You know, I think when I got here, I was maybe a little bit more gung ho about getting more involved in people ops beyond just the hiring audit. You know, I wanted to sort of unpack everything that had been done before. Right. I wanted to fix our benefits. Not fix, but I wanted to improve our benefits. I wanted an employee handbook. I wanted like protocols for offices. I want to, you know, I wanted to sort of really redo everything that had been done so far. People. And what I quickly realized was that that was quite the mats well to deal with and I probably didn't have capacity. And the other was that wasn't an appropriate thing for me to be spending my time on. I needed to hire the leaders in that org to do it and, and maybe put a pin in it. So that's probably the one area where like, I wanted to move quickly that I slowed down a little bit. And you know, now I've since brought in other folks to do it.

Interesting. So you mentioned having an executive coach. What do you work with your coach on and, and how do you think they've helped you?

So I, I, I really do believe in coaching. I think finding an exec coach is incredibly difficult. It's like dating. You've got to interview many, many coaches. I think I went through almost a dozen before I got in line. So it's two things. So one is I generally every time we meet, have strategic questions, right. About like, how do I approach this? Just like this just big thing, right. That I just have not necessarily dealt with before. You know, I've done a lot in my career, but I Haven't done everything. And I certainly haven't run a crypto company before. So there are a lot of things I just don't necessarily know how to do. Maybe it's related to an investor, maybe. Maybe it's related to, like, how to think about growing a new organization within the company. And I just. I need a sounding board that doesn't have a dog in a fight. Right. Somebody who's been there, done it before, advised other execs through that growth. And then the other is my coach. And I think this is why I sort of like him so much, is he has like a. Almost like a training protocol in mind or like a coaching protocol in mind. And so every week it's like half the stuff that's tactical that I need, and the other half is stuff that he wants me to do. Right. So he is like, taking me out of my current role, making me think about things in a different way and really trying to help me grow as a leader.

So some of it, it sounds like, is the Socratic method of. Of getting you to ask questions. But it sounds like he also is a. A bit of a blend where he's a mentor as well. He's been there and he's telling. Giving you the shortcuts and telling you what to do in some cases.

I mean, I. Sometimes I think he's like, reading my mind. It really does. Yeah. It blows me away when he's like, well, I'm guessing this is probably what's happening right now at the company. How do you know that? Right. I guess Yoda. Yoda.

Wow.

Yeah.

So what did you look for in. In looking. I remember when I was looking for mine back in the. The God junk days, and I found the guy being groomed as a CEO at Starbucks. And. And he was spectacular for me. What was the process you used to find your coach?

Well, you know, I. I did it during the zoom era. Right. So it was a lot of zoom. Zoom calls. And generally, you know, everyone who's in the coaching business lease that I met will do like an hour intro session with you. Right. And so I did a bunch of those hour sessions. And first it's like, is there a personality fit? Right. The second was knowing where these conversations would go. Like, some days I'm gonna have a lot to ask about and a lot of questions. Other days I'm just not. I will not prepared at all. Right. And so I needed to get a sense for, you know, does the personality match. But the other is like, what's their program? Right. Are they just there to be a sounding board and give me advice. Cause, like, that's kind of easy, right? Or are they trying to sort of, you know, dissect me a little bit and my company and, like, what I'm working on and, you know, thinking critically about it and then from week to week giving me feedback or thoughts based on that analysis. And so, you know, what I found was some of the coaches I interviewed did research on me and my company, and so came to the table with interesting thoughts about challenges they were thinking I would face. And others were just like, hey, how you doing? Nice to meet you. Like, it was the first time we'd interacted. Obviously, the ones that prepared more, I had a much better connection with. And the current coach, I think that it was like, I interviewed 11, and they're all kind of like within the same sort of margin of error. And then this one was just, like, way off the charts. Right. And the difference was, it was that just like, I talked a lot in the crisis business about being good at crisis is because you're good at, like, predicting things, like, because you have so much pattern recognition. And I think I've actually not ever thought about this before, so I'm glad you're asking it. I think what makes my coach so good is that he's just got really good pattern recognition. He's been doing this for so long, so many Silicon Valley execs, that he can just, like, listen to me talk for 10 minutes, read the situation completely, and give me really helpful, useful, tactical.

I want to go to the CEO, because you mentioned the CEO a few times and how much you like them and respect them. Have you had your first big disagreement with them yet?

The thing is, I've known him for such a long time. We have had those over the years. Yeah. In my first month, I had a misstep just with a project he and I were working on. And it was an interesting moment because I realized that I had made the misstep. And then he gave me critical feedback. And it wasn't like a CEO yelling at you that you did something terrible. It was all right, so let's talk about, like, what you. Like what you did here was wrong. And let's talk about why. And so talk me through why it was wrong. Help me see the strategy that I didn't see and that was it and moved on. I've noticed since then that's generally how he gives feedback, especially critical feedback. He'll identify something that somebody has done that is, you know, wrong and will give Immediate feedback and then moves on and doesn't think about it again. He kind of squashes.

How about the flip side? Have you been able to turn to him yet and tell him where he's doing something wrong or where you believe he's got the wrong thought related to strategy or something tactical? Have you been able to show him a blind spot?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things that I'm here to do is to sort of help be that balance for him. You know, I think he's been in this business long enough to have some pretty refined skill sets when it comes to how to run the business. But we all could be better. And so I definitely can give him 360 feedback and I do on a pretty regular basis. But then also even this morning we were on a call talking about a deck that we're building and he had a real strong opinion that it should be this way. And I'm like, I think you're wrong, it should be this way. And we disagreed. And then I think I was more convincing and he's like, all right, let's go, let's use your way. Sometimes he wins, sometimes I win. He is the CEO. He makes the final call, but he is open to feedback. I think there's this natural tendency in companies to like not want to give CEOs critical feedback or to disagree with them. Right. That's sort of keep your head down so it doesn't get cut off. And so that exists certainly in tech, especially with founder led companies. But the reality is with our CEO, like he actually likes the feedback. He may continue to disagree with you, but like he appreciates the disagree.

I think it's one of the things that makes the true CEO COO relationship strong or in your case, you know, your role as chief Business development and with him is that they trust that we're not holding anything back. They trust that we are giving our honest opinion and that builds so much trust because they don't think of us as a yes man at all. Right. And I think, I think they are starving for that feedback, especially if it's done one on one. Right. If you do it in front of the board or you do it in front of the whole team, they might get positional. But all right, I want to go back to your, your true younger self. If we're to go back to kind of the 21, 22 year old Lane Castleman, what advice would you give yourself at 22 years old that you know to be true today but you wish you'd known back then.

See, when I was 22, I would have said, save up as much as you can. So in 10 years, buy this thing called bitcoin. Right? Is what I would have. Would have done. I went through a bit of, like, a personal growth transition post Uber. A lot of friends in my life, certainly my wife. Think about Lane as like, pre Uber and post Uber, right? So pre Uber, I was just. I was kind of a jerk. And certainly when I was 22, 22, I was just starting law school, so, like, I wasn't fully cocky yet. By the time I got out of law school, I was definitely, like, a pretty big jerk. And that. That certainly followed me through my first couple of jobs. In fact, my. My. I was at AT&T for about four years. I was a young exec there. My boss there actually made a bunch of money in crypto and wrote a book. And he wrote a book about his time at att, and he changed the names of everybody in it. But I'm in the book. And his description of me is that, like, young, super cocky kid right out of law school who just thinks he kind of knows everything. And I think it's hard to teach somebody who's in their 20s how to be humble, but I think I would have probably given myself a pretty sober lecture about how much more successful my life would have been earlier on had I sort of learned the humility that is so required of leaders as they get older. I definitely learned at Uber. And so when I came out of the other side over there, I was a different person and a much better one.

Lane Castleman, the chief business officer for blockchain.com. thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me. One thing that's super clear to me, you know, whether it's about a founder looking for a co founder, you know, they call it founder dating, you know, or whether it's about a CEO who thinks he or she wants a coo. You can't manufacture trust.