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

Alright everyone, welcome back to Empire. We have Akram, uh, CMO of Celestia, and we have Austin Federa, head of strategy at Solana Foundation. I hope I got that right, Austin. Yeah, cool. How you guys doing?

Good, how you doing?

Very well, good to be here.

Yeah, living 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. Akram, I think first podcast for you.

Yeah, I'm usually behind the scenes.

Nice. We've been talking to different protocol founders and everybody wants two things right now. They want an Akram and they want a Mert. So you're doing something right, my friend. I'd love to hear how you guys— 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 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 two of the best in the business at doing this and you've just been doing it for a while. And 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 of the strategy role before you were doing— I think you were 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 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 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.

Akram, what would you add to that?

To me, marketing is synonymous with mindshare. And there's just like this larger question, which is, what is the strategic mindshare that I want to create around this brand. And at the core of that is your position. And I think that is your, you know, if I were to give like a textbook definition to this, it's your differentiated role and relevance in towards your target market. So I think about marketing in terms of strategic positioning. The response ultimately that you engineer in the market, which I think is basically a brand. And I do think that New York City analogy is like so spot on because especially in crypto where it's just very tribal and cultural, I think that's like the right way to think about it. Mark Benioff of Salesforce and I, had kind of talked about this as well, where marketing is like, you know, blanketing the market with, with a message. And you, 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, detractors. Towards this city. But man, that New York City analogy, I think, is spot on.

Yeah, that is a good one because I've always thought that comparing marketing in crypto to a Web2 marketing is tough simply for so many reasons. Twitter is a weird place, which we'll talk about in a second. But simply because if you look at a Web2 enterprise, you're oftentimes selling, like Austin said, SaaS or something. So there's actually one very clear deliverable oftentimes for Web 2 SaaS marketers. It's where a lot of marketers come into crypto from Web 2 SaaS. I feel like it's, uh, it's like MQLs. It's like marketing qualified leads that you're delivering to the sales team. 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 Web2, 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 CMOs are, I think, the shortest tenure of any exec position by like a factor of 2. So usually someone comes in, they deploy a marketing strategy, they try and invest as long as possible, and then they're either— it works great or they're fired. And that is like the cycle. And even if it works great, it might work great for 3 or 4 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 Web2. And so This is part of why I think marketing's gotten a very bad reputation over the years is because, like, there's like an 18-month period of time where Facebook ads worked. In all of the history of Facebook, there's only like 18 to 24 months where 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 Web3 where a lot of times in crypto marketing is not really seen as particularly valuable because it's been pigeonholed 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 Web3. And I actually don't think the term marketing, like the term marketing applies, but the titles of people in marketing, we should probably create some new titles in Web3 because there's so few comparisons between the Web2 world.

Yeah, to add on to that, I spent about a decade in the Bay Area working in Silicon Valley and worked in Web2. Before I got into crypto. And in all honesty, I had to unlearn a lot of the things that I picked up in Web2. The marketing playbook in Web2 does not carry over into crypto neatly. And so it was like a really steep learning curve in the beginning, but just a whole different territory to navigate.

What are some of those things, Akram, that just like clearly don't carry over?

It's like the way that you, first of all, the way you craft your positioning, I think is like entirely different. It's much more tribal. It's much more even ideological. It's much more driven by like a vast community and like doing that. I think like very, very few Web2 organizations I know like wake up and say like, what's like our our ideology. And that's like sort of some of the first things that come to mind. I think the way you actually disseminate the message in and of itself also is different because the word of mouth and the way like information travels in crypto is far different. And like the way that these communities are set up are largely different. And it kind of begs the question of just like how you set up your marketing organization in the first place. From my understanding, I think Solana has like a unique model and I'm actually curious about that. At Celestia, we have sort of like this core, core team that handles a lot of that. But ultimately, the brand that you build runs real deep. And that's why I like to say that it's almost like building a religion. Where in crypto, as opposed to in Web2, it's not really like 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. Austin, how did you guys— I very clearly remember the Solana CoinList transaction and Solana 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 Solana and Avalanche and Near and all these different things. Someone coming into the industry today obviously feels like Solana is winning, but back then it was not. So I'm curious, back then, how did you guys think about creating a unique brand?

Yeah. So, I mean, the caveat I'll 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 its core, the early days of Solana, there's basically only ever been 2 or 3 people working, quote unquote, in marketing, right? 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 Solana 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 budget or mindshare or whatever to be developing this like very user-focused, differentiated, created, how do we explain to like the normies what the difference between Solana and Avalanche and Near and Polygon and all these other things are? 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 demo that sort of Anatoly came up with, I think it was Anatoly who came up with this. That, you know, finally got through to people what Solana was building was something called Break. And so it was break.solana.com and 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 as 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 CLI wallet or something. But it was a great demo. Um, and that was the thing that got people to understand, oh, Solana 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 Solana 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 Solana is cool. And so I think the lesson from that is built 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 Solana successful. And that wasn't the Twitter crowd, that was the GitHub crowd.

How much of this, so for people watching on YouTube, you'll be able to see this, October 2020, you've got Toly tweeting about break.solana.com. How much of this do you think comes from the founder? And Akram, 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 Solana 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 Celestia's case, like Akram, I actually feel like more of it has come from you. 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 this idea behind Celestia and like a lot of the slogans that have come up with. I do feel like ties back more to you probably than someone like Mustafa or Nick. But I'm curious how you guys think about this.

Sure. So at Celestia, we took a very specific positioning strategy, which is to create a new market category. And 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 failed to frame the problem, and they don't warrant the creation of the category. So in this case, we're creating this new thing called modular blockchains. And at the end of the day, you're marketing something much bigger than yourself. And 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 where we really celebrate others. Like, we don't— I think one of the mistakes I think that a lot of projects make 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. So in this case, like, we really try to celebrate like others. And so the Twitter account does steer a lot of what others are doing and as best as we can promoting projects in the Modra 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 guys like Nick White, Mustafa, we try our best to also surface them and make them highly visible in their own authenticity. Because people will connect with Nick first before they actually connect with the the Celestia brand itself. Now, I think Anatoly and them have done a fantastic job. And I cite Anatoly as being extremely relatable, extremely approachable. He's kind of up there, but he's responding to anyone and whoever. There's a deeper sort of appreciation for anyone in the community. So I think he's doing a fantastic job. But yeah, to answer your question, because we're creating a new market category, that's why the Celestia account is set up that way.

Can you tell me, Akram, 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 Akram, 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 shared, just— I'm going to put something on the screen, but if you don't want me to put it on the screen, just tell me.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, yeah. 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. So I don't know if you still believe these are the things, but, or if you're comfortable with me sharing this, hopefully you are. But does this come like, do you think that you have to create kind of the 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 one-liner only possible on Solana? Like how do you, if there's a CMO out there who's sitting down to do this, how do you sequence basically these things?

Okay. Yeah. Cool. And by the way, I'm totally happy that you shared this. Cause it's, frankly, it's a work in progress. I'm still trying to figure out the answers here. And so what you see up here, it was kind of like a first stab at some of this line of work, but okay. To start at like ground zero, it's my strong, my opinion. And I get this from Andy Cunningham, who I worked for for several years. She launched the Macintosh with Steve Jobs, and I really picked up a lot of my positioning game from her. So shout out to Andy. But 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 bullshit, articulation of who you are, why you matter, why you, why now. And 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. And reporters take out all the emotion and they get very literal. So at Celestia, our literal position is the first modular blockchain network. 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 Web2 shit 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 so connected to this. And I grew up in the Muslim faith. I know the narratives that were given to me. 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 Kaaba, for example. So anyways, coming back to this, I was like, Bitcoin, that's a religion. Ethereum, same thing. And, you know, Solana 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 chapter in politics, so I'm curious what he thinks about this after. Then there's this tribal trait, and Ethereum 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. Solana is like extremely practical, very pragmatic. Just like, use, 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 singularly go on to. And then there's sort of like this destination. And I was thinking in terms of like a religion, there's heaven and there's hell. And what's the destination that some of these brands posit to their community or to their followers? And then once you get past the intelligentsia of crypto, and I think that's a whole separate topic, there's this analogy that has done really well. So Bitcoin's digital gold has really helped cut through, and World Computer, and like the single— I know Nasdaq speed, or moving at Nasdaq speed for Solana 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 Web2 because you just don't see any of this in Web2. Marketing and branding.

How did you think about Austin as you guys were at Solana? So for people who aren't watching, so basically there's this, there's this chart and it's like the views, the tribal traits, the core values, emotional drivers, key attributes, destination, and the analogy. And Akram has basically assigned a word to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos. Austin, would you say so if you go down the Solana column, Solana 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 Toly 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 and 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 a 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 set out to be far more radical than Cosmos. But it, it ended up being conservative because the world has changed. Right. 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 21-year-olds at the hacker houses on Solana 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 the way these things work and exist have changed over the years. And so I think what you have to think about here is like, I think I see people do this all the time where— or 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 translate 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 gotta start from somewhere, right? Like, I think it's really telling under Cosmos and Destination you put N/A. That is the entire problem with Cosmos today, right?

I couldn't 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.

It 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, it 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'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 an identity? And a 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 mess of like, like emergent communities and nations and the whole concept of created ethnicities, which like did not exist under empire 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 Solana, 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 in action.

Do you think that people are going to Optimism or to Arbitrum or to zkSync 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 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 exchanges, 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 fundamentally when 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 Base has been able to do when they've deployed— like, Base is such a cool example because they are using the Web2 marketing tricks for the most part. Like, it's still Coinbase. It's still largely a Web2.5 company, right? And they're pulling people into Base and into this sort of like crypto-lite vision of crypto. And they're doing it because it's easy to use, it's straightforward, and they've got the big blue brand that everyone knows and loves. And like, I think that is really like too oftentimes people are like pulling up L2Beat or something like that. And they're like, oh, well, what checkboxes is a stage 1 or a stage 2 rollup? And it's like, I don't like most people apart from the builder class. Most people aren't looking at that and the builder class now, like, I, so I think we are sorry to like, I know I'm kind of going around in circles, but like, 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 You know, some of the work being done on Optimism and other places, you can build fast 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 base 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 know, maybe Ekram, 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 going to 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. Arbitrum: welcome to the future of Ethereum. So, right, it's kind of like, you know, Ethereum-aligned. Base: base 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, Akram: the first modular blockchain network. It's like just smack people over the head with it. Look at Solana, developers first, powerful developers, fast for everyone, fast chain, good chain, developers, developers, developers. Then you start to look at some of the new chains like MegaETH, right? You start to get into like a little, they need to do things to differentiate themselves with the brand. So you've got like different colors, you've got bright colors. Monad, like seems very fast with this thing on the left. BearChain, super silly. It starts at the bottom of the site. So I mean, this is literally the first time I've ever been to BearChain's website, but it's like, I mean, it's up only, right? It's, it's like, of course this is BearChain'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, the websites are very friendly. They're very consumer-oriented. I see a lot of like, you know, ETH is money. Like, let's fight about economic concepts, like technology first, like pushing, pushing, pushing on like like L2Beat feels like, like if you pull up the L2Beat website, that feels like what the Ethereum community actually is. And so I've always wondered like how much, 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 website.

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 Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos.

Yeah.

And it was 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 the bartender, like the security guard comes out and is like, hey, bar shutting down at the outdoor area, shutting down at 11 PM. You guys got to get out of here. Was actually Ethan Buckman from Cosmos was like, fuck you. Like, we're not, we're not getting out of here. Like, we're staying until 1. You can't tell us 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, no problem. We'll just go inside. Yeah, no problem. And the Solana person was like, we, hey, totally get it. But it's, the bar doesn't close until 11 p.m. and we still have 5 minutes to play. And it was literally a Kroms thing. So it was like the pragmatists, 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 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 Ethereum website, like they feel like destinations that you sort of go into. I think even with Monad, 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, what does that look like? There does seem to be a disconnect.

Hmm. What would you do, Austin? You mentioned— who did you mention that hadn't figured it out? In your opinion, you said Polygon, maybe. So if you look at the websites of— actually find this really interesting— of, you know, Aptos, MakeYourMove, Polygon, Web3 Aggregated, zkSync, the Elastic Chain, it's a little less clear, I think, of what the narrative is. If you were ZKSync or Polygon or Aptos or Sui, or I mean, there's a whole myriad of— I don't want to pick on these guys, because they're all doing amazing work, obviously. But if you were these guys, how would you fix your brand? Like, let's say ZKSync, or let's say Polygon or something like that hired you. Now, Gostin, paying you like a $10 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 do you do this?

You gotta figure out what the engineers actually want to build. Like, that is like so—

The engineers inside of your company or the engineers building on you?

No, no. So the engineers building inside of the company 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 gotta 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 zkSync 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 zkSync 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 even more on some places. Now, of course, for any zkSync people, like, I know more about how zkSync 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 in a Web2 differentiator standpoint of like, what are, what's my product feature comparison chart? Because that's not really like what we're trying 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 articulation of aggregation I've seen very interesting is like the intent-based blockchains. Like they're onto 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 solves 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. Hmm.

Akram, similar question to you. If someone came to you and said, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm Aptos, we're a fast chain, we do have good tech, we, you know, Move is great, we came out of Facebook, but there's also Sui, there's also Movement Labs launching. Solana is also a fast chain. You got other fast chains with Monad and MegaETH and BearChain coming soon. 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 I begin with. Um, some folks are really just, hey, put me in front of anyone, our shit is the best. Will take on anyone and they're extremely aggressive. They compete really, really well and they're ready for that intense sort of competitive battle. And then sometimes you see founders that are the opposite where they cannot take the competition and it's in their best interest to evade competition. And that's when you kind of go into the idea of creating a newer space or something that you can you can really like win in. And so like it's a roundabout way of saying set up— Go ahead.

Do you think those people are going to make it?

Majority of them, no.

Yeah. The reason— That's been my assumption too, is like 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 close up shop, right?

Yeah, I'd say 9 out of 10 folks won't make it. Yeah. As they try to evade competition, largely because you go into— anytime you're creating something new, you're going into like an education-first marketing program. You have to teach this new thing. The market will be like, you know, you'll be 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, that education has largely been done by someone else, but it's incumbent upon you to articulate your ownliness. 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 the, where can I attach the word only onto? Now, the mistake that I see is that people will select an onlyness 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 or just like talk 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 be wary of. So once you figure that out, you package it in the form of a mind virus. And so with zkSync, elastic is what I'm seeing there. And then with Polygon, it's aggregated. Now, I think aggregated is absolutely terrible. I just don't think it meets the bar for a mind virus. Going to the aggregated summit is not something that is sexy or attractive. And so once you do that, you figure that out and then you wrap it, you coordinate the conversation with it. And to Austin's point, you want to choose something that actually conveys the value proposition 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? We can debate. And I actually would love to chat a little bit about—

but do you know what modular is?

Yeah.

But because Akrom slammed the modular name.

No, no, no. So, the genius of modular is it was debate from 10 years ago, right? This was the whole microservices architecture thing that ComSci 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, um, I think the genius of modular was, um, Krom, just to pat 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 Solana and Avalanche, then you had the new ones like Aptos and Sui. And then you saw around the corner that there's going to be even newer ones like, you know, Monad and MegaETH and stuff. And the modular, the modular narrative basically put all of those into one bucket. So you're all these monolithic people and we over here are the modular. And so my problem with, um, if I were in Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, zkSync shoes, the thing that I'm concerned about is there's the OP stack, there's Arbitrum Orbit, there's Polygon AggLayer. There's ZK Elastic Chains. You got to figure out a way to, to basically make some group of those outsiders. There's Initia, there's Cosmos. Some 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.

Yeah.

Like it's just like a lot of it feels like that. Yeah, to go back to one thing you said about modular though, one of the, so the modular thing, and we've talked about this in private before, and, uh, it'd 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 6 different clients. Solana's modular. There's many clients 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 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 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. 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 graphic, right? This sort of like city sticking through a 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 break apart all these things.

Yeah.

And like, we never made graphics anywhere near this good at Solana.

Yeah. I want to parse this a little bit because I think there's a big lesson for marketers out there, you know. So when I first met the LazyLedger, you know, Celestia team at the time, they kept like harping on pluggable. They were like, oh, you know, I remember this. Yeah. 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, yeah, no, like, you know, come to the Pluggable Summit or like these Pluggable meetups. So you cannot build a brand around pluggable, but you can around modular. And so the reason why I selected modular is because I saw the ability to 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, 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 compare and contrast with the monolithic status quo. And so the framing of the narrative, and I remember actually reaching out to Austin about this because we were trying to get Anatoly at the Modular Summit and we were kind of going back and forth between, you know, like the title of, you know, the fireside or panel or whatever. And it was like modular or monolithic. And like just setting that conversation up was the strategic narrative part. And I think if you're really good, your goal is to get a conversation about the brand. And then if you're excellent, build a debate about the brand. And I'm always constantly trying to feed the debate because you want a mixture of opinions and you don't want everything to be single-sided. And I think that's probably part of the problem with these other brands like ZKSync and Polygon. 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 mindshare 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, Solana did like the B-minus version of this in the early days too, right? Anatoly ran a podcast called No Sharding! 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 sharding. 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, the, all the people who've like, I've never heard of Lazy Ledger before, let alone Celestia, but oh, I know Toly. 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 LazyLedger, right? The whole innovation of LazyLedger was this tiny little microkernel 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 LazyLedger vision for a bunch of stuff. It's just now wrapped in a package that like, you don't need to spend 4 hours at a dinner party. Talking to someone to understand what it actually means. Hmm. And Solana 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 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. Hmm.

Um, okay. Akram, how do you know when it's time to pivot to something new? So there was this piece from Delphi that said Solana the modular in August. And then actually, we hosted a chat on the main stage at Permissionless called No Chain is Monolithic. It was David and me. And, you know, Austin is right. Like, there is no chain that's monolithic except Bitcoin, I guess you could say. So 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 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. So let's just say you create a new category like modular and 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 that conversation. And, you know, that's why I think of positioning as somewhat like hygiene. You have to consistently work at it and change it. And it's, you know, and I think a lot about politics, for example, you know, like candidates, for example, that are shrinking into irrelevance and that they have to, you know, find something else to sort of create a new relationship with in the public eye. I'm actually curious, like, Austin, I know you, your background is in politics. There's like a larger question that I have around probably the same thing, but also 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 in econ. And all of my undergraduate like research work was on Uh, compliance mechanisms in freshwater management treaties and conflict zones. Uh, so how do India and Pakistan share water resources pretty effectively despite having fought 4 wars basically over the Indus 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 management. 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. In retrospect, it's all just a blockchain degree, right? And like, you know, the stuff of like Elinor Ostrom and the work she won a Nobel Prize for in like the late— I think the late '20s, the late aughts. We say aughts. Is that how we say refer to that period of time? Right. Yeah. The late aughts was all on like collective resource management of common pool resources, and how do you create systems of enforcement for, 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 has 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 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 bullshit 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. 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 you go hire a CMO? Do you go hire a 23-year-old Gen Z kid who like crushes crypto?

Yeah.

How do you think for this? Maybe Akram, you could start with how you structured your team at Celestia.

Yeah. The first thing that I'll say, and I wrote a tweet about this last week, I think hiring a marketing agency or doing anything external is a disaster. I just think it's a bad move. So, you know, frankly—

Ever or at the beginning or to solve your problems or like, or you like, you don't work with any outside agencies. Can you just expand on that?

I don't. I don't. I was the interim CMO at a project while at Celestia. In the, uh, modular ecosystem, and I, uh, hired a 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, into 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. I only hire them for, if I were to, for very surgical campaigns, like a 2-week, 3-week stint where you need some extra resources. I would never sign anything long-term with an agency. Now, in terms of actually structuring the team, 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 from your Twitter account, you're really losing out. And so you want to hire someone after you've done your brand positioning. So there's a big difference between building a brand like Lonad and Barachain versus like a brand like Celestia. 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's 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. Us 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, uh, point there. Um, I'll pause right there. I mean, I, I actually, before Austin speaks, at Celestia we have a 2— we now have a 3-person marketing team. It's myself, Alex, and our new graphic designer Alina. And like, I keep a great—

what does Alex do?

Content.

Content. And do you— where does events sit?

Uh, DevRel.

DevRel. And DevRel is not on marketing? No, no, it's 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 closely 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 Celestia brand.

So you do all marketing with these 3 people, with you and the, and the 2, or with, and the 2 others. There's events, but it lives on DevRel. You have worked with agencies, but only on campaigns. You don't hire them full-time.

Uh, at Celestia, 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 comms firm.

Yeah, 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 DevRel, uh, because like, you know, if you're throwing stuff IRL that you want people to come to, like, yes, there's a developer relations wrapper to that, but fundamentally what they're doing is marketing the developer experience. And that's that in our orchestration, in our world at Solana, that is considered part of the marketing department. So our marketing department is optically bigger, but at its core, 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 title was.

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 2 people. And then we had another 2 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 1 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're 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 checkpoints, 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, uh, 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 though, 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 that was primarily trying to promote its messages about Solana 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 projects on Solana 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 some folks who worked in comms, right? And their role was not like, how do we tell Solana Foundation, Solana Labs, Solana Project comms better? It was like, like we had someone work with me, Chris Kreuter, and it was like, I'm going to take Chris and deploy him to help these teams on Solana 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-lite internal. And I think that was really helpful in helping companies like Jito, like, begin to understand how do we approach these types of things and how do we start engaging with this productively?

How do you, 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 a 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 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 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 2 months. I don't actually ask them to do anything.

I should be giving a promotion to go poach Blockworks reporters. This is awful. We're cutting this section.

This is terrible. Hey, we'll probably get more too.

I've actually seen this done, uh, done really well. Like, I'm an investor in Andreina, or yeah, and Lila over there was a CoinDesk reporter. She's done a great job. We had a reporter, Bessie, who went internal on the comms team at Arbitrum.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brandon Echter, who runs all the content here at Solana Foundation. He was from NPR and Science Friday.

Yeah, there you go.

And like Science Friday was like the perfect background. You got to go produce a 3-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— 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-holer can tell you the clicks that led to the— it's like, all right, I was on like the World War II page. All right, then I got into like, like the Nazis doing drugs. All right, then I got— it's actually a great interview question. All right, maybe let's, let's shift. Crisis management. So there are— crisis management is tough, I will say. So for context, my wife runs a crisis management firm. So I've seen some, some, some real nightmares. 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 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 just like turn off comments Sometimes people will make up these elaborate stories and it's like a clear lie. 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 stab at this first. Yeah. So proactive and reactive. That is largely, you know, at the highest level, the way to think about it. I think I'll start on the reactive side. Something happens and for some reason I see like the responses in crypto or like the way that they're handled just like in a very cold and like unrelatable way. And so almost always 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 whenever I lead communications in like a crisis situation, 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, you know, we screwed up, or this, you know, it 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 with Sui, 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, but yeah, which comes off as like pretty, uh, just unrelatable.

Yeah, but yeah, maybe Austin, you feel free to jump in there.

Yeah, I mean, the number one rule of crisis comms 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 you do not need to jump into this thing instantly.

Sleep on the response. That is the number. Like just sleep on there.

Yeah, it's not even sleep. Sometimes it's like just— okay, so the biggest piece of advice, like before a crisis happens for every founder out there is have 2 or 3 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, we, you know, we published that op-ed that said only a fool would vote on crypto.

Yeah.

And it was the most intense reaction I've ever had at Blockworks in 7 years. You know, we had, we had, we had, 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 post this? Dinner on with people who are like, what the hell is this? And so but we ended up publishing, we ended up writing a response. It did not come from Blockworks. It came from Mike and I personally. Yeah, first thing. But the second was, I mean, I wrote it, Mike rewrote it, and then we sent it to our 5-person brain trust. And they're people who give us critical feedback every single time. And we've just like kind of trusted confidants, you know?

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it, it's so important. Um, so that, 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 Solana. 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 what 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're 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 wrong with apologizing. Now, the lawyers will get pissed at you for apologizing because they think it's some omission of guilt or 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 1,000 other DeFi protocols out there. There's a bunch of other chains. Like, you have to have that empathy when you're talking to people.

Akram, anything else you'd add there?

No, I think that's on the money. It's usually when your intellectual dishonesty—

Yeah.

And that goes with like even communications outside of crises. Like I think one of the bigger sort of phenomena that I see inside crypto is that people overstretch. They kind of BS a lot. Intellectual honesty, especially with devs, goes a long way. And like, that's just the way like they are. And I think anytime you kind of sidestep or beat around the bush with the truth, you're just giving more rope for media, other folks to like keep fishing for the truth. And 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. Akram, I was with a CMO of a protocol the other day who said, hey, Akram has a list, a private Telegram chat with the top 100 KOLs in the industry. And that's why Celestia has been so successful is because of Akram's Telegram group. So I'd like to hear about your Telegram group.

Yeah, I have a private Telegram group of like the heads of states of projects, mostly marketers. And Austin, I got to get you into this after that as well.

But figure out a way to charge them a lot of money.

Yeah. But it's, to be honest, it's really a communication lever.

Do you actually have this group or come?

I do. Yeah.

It's not KOLs though.

I'm not a KOL.

No, I don't wanna call it a KOL. Yeah. It's just people I've met around, like the industry. So I know every single one by name.

Okay. So I think that right there is actually what I was trying to drive at, which is there is a real mistake that I see marketers making around what a KOL 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 KOL, is my understanding.

That's actually— so what I have heard, and I think this is accurate, is influencer 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, okay, that makes sense.

That makes a lot of sense.

If all you're doing is publishing opinions, key opinion leader.

Okay, so the— I saw— I reviewed this list for actually a different marketer of like, hey, here are the biggest KOLs in the industry. So I've never heard of these people. They're like, oh, but they have 400,000 followers. And this YouTube video gets like, look at this video, it's getting like 80,000 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 Illuminati. They're like the, the in-crowd. They're the founders and the investors that matter. Those are your KOLs. Those are the KOLs of the industry. And Akram, I think what you've done such a good job of doing is, I mean, I don't think you care about that. I don't think you could list one YouTube influencer, but you know John Charbonneau and Hosu. I'm making up these names. John Charbonneau and Hosu and Zuckey. And like, you know, you're able to say, hey, John, take a look at this new thing that we just launched at Celestia. I don't actually know this, but I would assume this is how you think about KOLs instead of the traditional version of like, look at how many followers they have.

Yeah, yeah. To be honest, I don't even use the word KOL. It's not even— it's not how I think. I think 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 paid advertising or any paid media because I think you should really strive on earned media and attention. And I think if you can't, there's something wrong with your position and narrative. You should be earning attention on your own. As far as like, let's just call it influencers. I spend a lot of my time as a CMO just really meeting people and I don't know, I mean, it's kind of like influencing influencers and building really authentic relationships and understanding what the win-win narrative really is. And I like to separate that group with formalities and no formalities. And so sometimes an announcement might be 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, 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, what do you think? But it's not really like a hard ask. In pushing sort of what that is. I don't really think of it through the lens of KOLs. It's more 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 you start— maybe it's like the brain trust sort of thing too 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 gonna 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 Blockworks and you say, hey, we're launching this thing next week. Here's an embargo. Like, you want to, 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've done that before for Solana. 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 3-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 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 going to 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 versus institutions versus crypto natives versus retail, um, and a whole host of other things. I am out of time, so maybe we can do this as a part 1. Um, I enjoyed this. If, if people like this, uh, Akram's on Twitter, @akram. I think there's an H in between the A and the M. Austin, I think, is Austin_Federa. Pretty simple. But yeah, Austin and Kramm, thanks for doing this.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us on.