David Wachsman, CEO of Wachsman: Building Your Brand in Crypto

David Wachsman is the Founder and CEO of Wachsman, a professional services firm focused on Blockchain and based in NYC. In this conversation, David and Anthony Pompliano discuss how startups can get the press' attention, what are the most common marketing mistakes made by young companies, how Wachsman has seen crypto companies evolve over the bull and bear markets, and where the big opportunities in professional services are moving forward. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:12Anthony Pompliano?

  David Woxman is the founder and CEO of Woxman, a professional services firm focused on blockchain based in New York City. In this conversation, David and I discuss how startups can get the press's attention, what are the most common marketing mistakes made by young companies, how Woxman has seen crypto companies evolve over the bull and bear markets, and where the big opportunities in professional services are moving forward. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got David here, we have a whole bunch to go over. You are, I think your last name is well-known in crypto, but you are behind the scenes quite a bit, so we're gonna get you to tell us all your secrets. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Sounds like fun.

• 1:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so you had a life before crypto. Let's talk about that, your background, and then we can talk about how you've built Woxman into the giant it is today.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so way before Woxman existed, all I was, was a PR agent here in New York City. And that means I was like every other PR person here with essentially no specialization. We worked on, I worked on, real estate development projects. So if you wanted to build a skyscraper and you need to go and get some sort of funding, and you had some sort of checkered past, or some sort of challenge before, you need some sort of reputation management. So I'd work with companies that were doing things like that. If you're a cosmetics firm that has a new subscription box with the latest and greatest lipstick you needed to go and get in the beauty publications, I'd work with them. If you were selling industrial LED lights that need to be installed in buildings, and you wanted a bit of an edge in your sales pitch, I'd work with those types of companies. To companies do absolutely no specialization and it was kind of fun.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  I really liked learning a lot about a lot and being able to ask very hard questions to really brilliant people in many different industries. And when you're launching a Middle East food chain in the United States and you're helping them rebrand and retitle their products. Helping them figure out what their slogan is going to be and how that's going to affect the crowd on Astor Place in downtown New York. As opposed to people in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Those are compelling and interesting things to work on, but it was nothing like crypto.

• 2:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, let's talk about what PR is in general, right? So you're talking a lot about it's branding, it is messaging, it's getting coverage. Like just walk through how you think about PR as a discipline in general. And then we can get into kind of how that applies to crypto.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  So let's start more broadly with what marketing is. So marketing is in some way essentially taking some sort of product or service. And helping an audience of customers understand what that product or service is. Perhaps to make a compelling case as to why they should buy or utilize a product or service. That's kind of broadly what marketing is and marketing has many, many subset categories. For instance, advertising is a part of marketing. When you're going to go buy toothpaste, how do you know what toothpaste even exists in the first place? Well, it turns out one way that you buy toothpaste, the way most people do is that they'll go to a store. That's experiential marketing, literally the the access or I should say the act of taking a toothpaste and putting it on the right shelf. Well, PR is something very different.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  PR is mostly in the realm of communications. It's less imagery, it's less, it's not advertising. The type of PR that we do is not pay for play. That is to say, we help companies figure out who they really are. We help them figure out a compelling storyline, a compelling narrative, a compelling brand. That is going to last beyond a single campaign or announcement. And then we help companies get in the real news and in things similar to that, things like, for instance, this podcast. Where you're very, very selective, you turn down almost everybody. But if something has a compelling story and you think it's interesting, you'll say yes to that. And so Waxman helps our clients get into real news sources across the world. We have. No favors to pull. It doesn't work that way. We're not paying anybody a penny.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It's by virtue of the fact that we help take compelling stories and make them a little bit more interesting for the right audiences. More importantly, what that does, the net effect of that, is it helps businesses do better. I like to think of it as handing your business card to somebody before you ever walked in the room in the first place. And what that means is you're more likely to get a deal done.

• 4:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of, I think, the PR and the communication side is just one clearly articulating, here's what we do, here's who we are. And the other, and you touched on a little bit, is also understanding what are the publications or the media outlets that are looking for that type of content as well. Right? Playing matchmaker a little bit in the sense of, it's one thing about if a company or a founder can tell their story in a clear and articulate way. It's a whole nother thing for them to be able to get matched up with the people who are looking to tell that story for them in the news as well.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  100%. And that's from the exposure side. We'll talk about the rest of PR, including crisis communications, including how to plan for disaster or challenges. Cause that happens too with every organization. But yes, in terms of gaining exposure, it's very hard to determine exactly who's going to care about one story at any given time. You might think that this is the most newsworthy event in the world. And I talk to founders all the time who think that what they have is the most compelling event of all time. But it's not necessarily. And we know, because we're talking, me and the organization that I work with, we're talking to reporters across the world every single day in the verticals that matter. The types of reporters who might be interested. And I'll tell you what, we are turned down far, far more often than we are actually accepted.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And that's even with very compelling stories. It turns out reporters are cynics. Professional reporters have gone to journalism school. They are trained to determine what's newsworthy. They then are publishing articles all the time. And so they're getting new types of data. Are readers engaging? Are their editors happy with their work? Are their posts getting more love on some of these aggregator platforms? Are they getting shared on social? So that goes through from the media side. The media is determining what works and what doesn't. They also have their own narratives they want to tell. Some reporters are genuinely just interested in some things and not interested in others. So you have to figure out exactly what a reporter might want to find, want to find out about. And then the PR agency also has a secondary job. Figure out how to tell that story to a reporter. Some reporters will not get on the phone with you. They are just pure email.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  They are disinterested in phone calls. Others, they want to have a face to face to know if you're lying or not. You need to really understand the reporters, what they're interested in, and do your very best to match make.

• 6:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so let's talk about how you took the experience in PR communications into crypto. Like, when's the first time you ever saw crypto Bitcoin? What was that like?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  So this was early 2014 and I was downtown in New York at a bar called Sweet and Vicious. And there was this tech founders night going on. And I was just having a couple of drinks, meeting various folks. And I met the CEO of an early Bitcoin exchange called Coinsetter. So for those of you who don't know, Coinsetter was one of the first VC backed exchanges. Digital Currency Group, actually an offshoot of that, gave money at the time. And they had raised about $2 million in seed funding. So they were one of the first exchanges that were selling Bitcoin. But the biggest exchange in the world at the time was called Bitstamp, which of course is still around. But most of the other ones that you know very well did not exist. The exchanges that did all sold the exact same product, Bitcoin, and all of them had very low trading volumes.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  None of them was actually making enough money to probably operate by themselves with just their trading volumes alone. So they were all trying to find a way to go and get to a Series A to raise more money. So this way they could go and expand operations because everyone building a Bitcoin exchange had the same dream that Bitcoin would one day become popularized. But back then it certainly wasn't. This is early 2014, just after Mt. Gox. And I started working with this Bitcoin exchange and I was able to help them take their new features. Like, for instance, they introduced what's called a FIX API, which is a type of way of connecting a computer system to algorithmically or through a trading system, a trade on exchange. And we managed to make a software feature like that somewhat compelling. Whenever they were able to go and get a new partnership with a wallet

• 8:31Speaker 02

  or they were working with some sort of mining pool of some type, or they were working with an ATM network. They were just starting at the time Bitcoin ATM networks. We were able to tell that story. And that exchange, although they weren't able to ever raise that Series A, they were able to successfully exit at the beginning of 2016 to Kraken, who I later on worked with. But that was my first foray into the Bitcoin space. I didn't know anything about Bitcoin before that, except all I had heard was that Mt. Gox was a disaster. That the Silk Road existed and that Bitcoin may or may not be used by criminals and only by criminals. That's what I learned or knew of before because that's what I was reading in the news. But then I met this Bitcoin exchange CEO and he was so smart and so compelling. And I started meeting his CTO and then I started meeting all the partners.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  And what I noticed very, very swiftly as I started to read the Bitcoin Talk forums, or I was going on Reddit, or I was going to the Bitcoin in-person meetups, is that the average IQ of people working in the space seemed to be a little bit higher, or maybe a lot bit higher. And consequently, I felt I had to go and find out more. And so in 2015, I started taking on other clients on the side, trying to go and start my own agency. So I brought on a Bitcoin ATM network, a software wallet, hardware wallet, a mining pool, and a blockchain-focused VC and launched Waxman at the end of 2015.

• 9:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so let's talk through what Waxman did in the beginning and kind of what those early days were like, and then we can talk about what it's doing today.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Well, back in the early days, I was the only person doing all the work. So I built the work called Media Lists. I vetted them all. I brought on all the new business. I had to set up all the operations. And then what I would do is I would help our clients get in the news. So I would go and have personal relationships pitching to Pete Rizzo, the editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, or pitching to the owners of Bitcoin magazines and the editors at the time, and the various other publications that mattered. There were some beat reporters that work at major publications even today, who were also focused at the space at the time. People like Michael Casey, who was at the Wall Street Journal, and Paul Vigna, Nathaniel Popper, Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfus at Reuters, and a number of other top reporters who were there. Dan Roberts, at the time was at Fortune and moved over to Yahoo Finance.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  And these are people with whom I built a relationship because I was pitching them stories and as like I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of the time, they turned me down. But what compelled me to do was to continue to build trust with these people. If they turned me down, I'd want to know why, how I could go and make things better the next time, make sure that I didn't spam them or make them feel as though I was doing anything uncomfortable. I wanted to be a trusted resource for them. And when I finally had that motley of clients, I suddenly became a resource. If they needed to write a story in two days' time and they needed a quote on the recent price action of Bitcoin, I could probably get them that. If there was a security breach or a hack or something else going on in the news, they might be reliant on one of my clients, in part because I was able to go and get them on the phone quickly and in a professional way, and it turned out they were interesting.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  So that's how things started. Today, Waxman works with, I don't know, 60, 70 clients worldwide. We work with a large swath of the biggest brands in the entire industry all over the world. We have offices in New York, Dublin, and Singapore. And we have an army of trained staff who have been doing this for a very long time, who have that same type of really strong relationship with many, many reporters the world over. And we've built a bit of an institutional relationship sometimes with some of these reporters and their publications, who know that they can rely on Waxman to be a trusted resource. And that's the thing that we fight hard every single day to maintain. That's our, literally our number one priority.

• 11:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so let's walk through, a customer or a client will come to you, and what are the different types of services that they're looking for? They're looking for kind of PR communications, crisis communications, just kind of walk us through what those services look like.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what we're able to offer are the following, and then I'll tell you what we don't offer yet, or not now, I should say. Right now, we offer PR, branding, strategic communications, and crisis communications on the PR side. So we're going to help people with their content, their own content. So that might be their blog, it might be their Medium posts, it might be helping them author or edit their byline articles that are going to be published in, as contributing publications the world over. We're going to help them get booked on podcasts, radio interviews, TV interviews where warranted. We're going to help them go and get into real newspapers, real magazines, the online versions of these, and such the world over. We're going to help them get into trade publications, both whether it's in the blockchain trades, or in something that's, let's call it, their other part of

• 12:57Speaker 02

  the business. Like, if you're an insurance company using blockchain... You probably have insurance company trade publications that are very, very important to you. And it might be in specific geographies, it might be in certain languages, and we'll help our clients get into those types of publications. That's what we do on the PR side. We then noticed in 2017, as there was a proliferation of events, that it was completely impossible for anyone, myself included, to actually keep track of what was going on. In fact, in 2018, there were 800 events that my events team vetted globally in the crypto space. And so what we do is we help our clients figure out where they should go, why they should go, and then we help them with sponsorships, we help them design their booths, sometimes we'll even throw a conference, we'll throw a dinner, we'll throw something, a launch party on behalf of clients, and we do this all the time.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  So that's PR and events, I'd say. Those are our two primary services. We've delved off into a few other things that we're very interested in, strategic consulting, similar to what McKinsey or BCG would do, recruiting as a service, I think, is very compelling, too, as there are a lot of companies in the space that need specialized people to find, specialized experts to join the industry. And I think that there's going to be a lot of activity there.

• 14:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So let's go right to kind of the most dramatic of all scenes, right, is somebody's running a company, all of a sudden they get wind, or maybe even a story breaks that's negative, they currently do not work with a PR agency, and they call you guys up and they say, "Just help," right? Walk me through those types of scenarios as to kind of how you guys or other PR agencies are able to help founders when they get in that situation.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this unfortunately happens quite often.

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I can only imagine.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And we'll get a call, and it's going to be either from the founder of one of these projects or companies, or often from their investors. And they'll simply say, "We have this problem, can you solve this?" And we immediately go into crisis mode. And crisis mode is a little bit different. It is, there are very few, let's call it niceties, it's getting straight to the bottom of it, figuring out exactly what we've got, what the problem is, and figuring out what we can say. And what Waxman does internally is we create a crisis playbook. We do this very, very rapidly. And this basically goes and tells absolutely every stakeholder in the organization exactly what they can say to whom, when, and how, and why. And we basically make this playbook work so that there is some sort of holding statement,

• 15:23Speaker 02

  some sort of statement you're able to make. Near instantaneously to let people know that you're looking into the problem, that you understand what the problem is, because oftentimes that's not addressed by companies. Founder should know, if you are not telling the world that you recognize a problem exists, people are going to think, and they should, that there's some deep seated problem that might be actually much worse than the actual crisis itself. So you need to go and have some sort of statement that way. And at that point in time, you may have bought yourself a little bit of time. During this period of time, an internal investigation often goes on. We do our best to assist with that, but more importantly, we do our best to help figure out what can be said and to the right party. It might be that there's one trusted journalist who you're going to be able to tell the nuanced version of your story to, someone who is going to ask you hard questions, but they'll be fair.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  And so we may identify a reporter that we might want to work with in this case. It might be that you want to make a very bold statement. You might have a large community on Telegram. You might have a large community just globally in different fora and in different languages. And we'll create a playbook for how messages should be disseminated and when. And the reason that matters is you're trying to prevent panic from occurring. And panic occurring has all sorts of knock on effects that you don't want to have happen. Unfortunately, we've done this many times for companies. I can't really talk about all the cases. I can't talk probably about some, but suffice to say, I feel like some of the greatest accomplishments that we've had so far are when we've taken a really large crisis, or what could have been a large crisis and minimized it, making it easier for the business to succeed.

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Give me an example of like what type of negative press, right? What I really want to get at is I want founders to listen to this and understand, here's how you can communicate. Here are ways to do it effectively. Here are things to avoid doing, right? Kind of really walk away with a bunch of tips from it. But what are the scenarios where when somebody calls, well, there's that founder or that investor and they're like, help? Is it somebody's, you know, there's a nasty tweet about a company? Is it that there's actually like a hit piece written in the media?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  I'll give you a few.

• 17:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, give me some examples.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  How about a hack just occurred at an exchange? So that's happened before.

• 17:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. Or if- And they're calling and saying, we just got hacked. The news is spreading. How do we basically control the narrative and immediately address it?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  How about literally, what do we do? Period. They often don't know exactly what to do. They know that they have their tech team working on this. They know that things are blowing up on Twitter. They know things are blowing up on Telegram. They don't know exactly who to talk to and what to say.

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Because here's the thing, it's very easy to make a huge colossal mistake. The first thing founders should understand is every time you talk to the press, they will remember. They will call you out on that. So never say something that you might have to revert and change your opinion on 24 hours later, 36 hours later, six months later. Simply don't make predictions. Don't say something that's not absolutely factual. It's okay to be repetitive in word choice. You don't need to be poetic. What's most important is being very, very clear. The more you obfuscate things, the more you're confusing, the more people will think that something else is going on. Once again, they have a compelling reason to do so. But so it might be a hack. It might be some sort of other crisis. Let's say, for instance, a founder's leaving the company

• 18:36Speaker 02

  or someone just got sick, or there was some sort of, let's say, massive drop in price of something. Or a report came out from a newspaper painting you in an incredibly bad light. What do you do in these scenarios? So there are playbooks for this. That is to say, much of this has happened before. And you can use those types of examples to help craft the best possible way out. If you are, for instance, replacing one founder with a new executive, there might be better ways than others to go and talk about the way that a founder is changing positions. It might be when a hack occurs that you're able to actually convince people to not immediately withdraw all of their funds. Because it might have been that you got things under control within 10 minutes.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And it turned out it was just one hot wallet and you might have some really good reason why it happened. An investigation could be ongoing and you could be cooperating with with authorities, for instance, as opposed to a thorn in their side. There's and the difference between those two things might simply be the way you communicate.

• 19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so let's go through kind of whether it's in a crisis situation or just in traditional communicating with journalists of all variety, both what I'll call the professionals and the amateurs.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make? So you already described kind of this idea of they say things that aren't factual or they may have to change their mind on. But what's kind of the tips that you give these founders in terms of, hey, when you're talking to the media, here's what you should do?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Here's the first problem I see with. Founders, this happens universally in every continent. Founders want to make reporters engage with them. And so they tend to tell them things they shouldn't. By that, I mean, they pre-announce stuff all the time.

• 20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And this is, I can't explain how important this is. Once information is out, information is out. That prevents it from being news. News is literally about being new. So if something exists on the internet and a reporter who has the capability of using Google simply searches a term once you've made a press release, and it turns out you said that in a blog post, in a newsletter, you said this out loud and someone wrote about it on the internet, they are very unlikely to write about it. And the amount of exposure you'll get from your actual press release will be greatly minimized. That's the first mistake. Just shut your mouth. Talk when you're, when you really should. Don't say things when you shouldn't. Beyond that, be completely honest and be polite with journalists. I can't tell you how important it is to be polite.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  There are some founders out there that for some reason tend to be combative with reporters. I don't see any reason to do so. These people are not your friends, but they are professionals who are trying to do a job. Just be polite with them. It will go a very long way. I know those two things seem pretty simple. Don't say what you're not supposed to and be polite. But you might double or triple the exposure you'll get if you just do that for a little while.

• 21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and part of it too is, you know, look, we've had plenty of founders over the years that we've invested in. They have some sort of interview. And I've seen the mistakes on, I'm thinking of one specific example, where the founder literally was saying the truth with no spin, no, what we can call, I think poetic articulation, just very factual, but was, in a sense, proud of what the company had done. It's in the healthcare space. And the reporter, to their credit, took what the founder said and wrote about it, right? And the way that the article was written was ended up having a negative connotation,

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  even though the reporter wasn't attacking or kind of writing any sort of hit job. It was just that the way that the founder described what they were doing was in a very kind of nonsensitized way.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  So I think I know what you mean. What it comes down to is people may, a founder has a unique vision. It is a focused vision. And what it's very important to have, if not a PR agency, then someone from the outside looking in to tell you how the rest of the world is going to view what it is you have to say. So for instance, in your example, the founder may have had a very compelling argument and it might have been a truly wonderful thing, given all the context, given his philosophy or her philosophy, that might be the case. But a reporter may come in and say, "The innovation that you have turns out to be extremely dangerous," or that it may have other side effects that are really negative. Or it might be that grandma in Iowa may look at the exact same set of facts and have a

• 23:05Speaker 02

  very different perspective. So a PR agency is meant to, and we do this all the time, tell our clients, "No, you can't say this. I know it's compelling, but if you do this, here is how other people will view this." Instead, you might want to frame it a certain way in order that the same information can get across, but at the very least, you're presupposing the questions others are going to ask to prevent it from being a complete disaster. That happens very often, we see.

• 23:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so one is like, they are focused and they're proud of the work. And by the way, they should be proud of the work that they've done. It's just the way that you talk about it is important. The other, and you mentioned, is the combativeness, right? And from what I've seen, founders spend too many hours of too many days working on what they believe is one of, if not the, most important things in the world. And so they're emotionally attached and they're obviously biased in terms of what they're building. And I think that when reporters ask pointed questions, or frankly, just tough questions, honest, fair questions, right? Founders can feel like they're being attacked, right?

• 24:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Or unfairly kind of questioned, and that's where the combativeness comes from. And I think that your framing of like, "Look, they are simply trying to do their job and their job is not to, you know, kind of promote your company. Their job is actually to write about the facts."

• 24:27Speaker 02

  That's very important. So let's talk about that for a second. Here's the difference between advertising and PR. In advertising, you are paying for a spot. Which is a wonderful thing. If you are a supermarket, you absolutely should be hosting advertisements for the food production companies that are essentially selling their wares in your store. But if you are a newspaper, you have two different sections. You have the advertising sections and then you have the news section. The reporters are absolutely not there to promote what you have to say. That's what the advertising section is for. If you want to go and take out an ad, they would say, be my guest, go pay $60,000 for a full page ad, and we're happy to go and put this on page A7. But if you want to be in the news section, well, the journalists and the editors, they've

• 25:11Speaker 02

  got all the control and they're not there to promote. They're there to tell what they think is an interesting story to the audience that they happen to have. And it's very important to know when you're going into an interview, this is another tip for founders, make sure to know who the reporter is, what they typically write about, who their audience is and what they're interested in. If you're not briefed on that before you go in, you may be talking either over their head, or you may be radically oversimplifying something. If you're talking to a technical expert and you're just giving the high level and you're start, you're talking about your new scalability protocol and all you're talking about is how Bitcoin works. You know, to a technical reporter, they're not going to care at all. They'll never write about you. But if you're trying to go and explain something very, very technical and sophisticated that

• 25:56Speaker 02

  only caters to the world's smallest audience, and you're telling this to a reporter at USA Today, that has an audience of people that stay at the Holiday Inn. Well, you're doing it wrong.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And I guess part of this also is as founders get more comfortable talking to the press, like you see this with, you know, folks, the first time they go on television, right? Or the first time they give an interview, it is very raw. It is very, just kind of blunt and honest, right? And then when you see somebody that you, you know, I think you and I would consider they are professional in terms of engaging with the media. It's not that they are lying in any way. It's not that they are hiding factual information. They just have become very, you know, in tune with how to engage with the media, how

• 26:46Anthony Pompliano?

  to present information in a way that is easily consumable by the end reader or listener or watcher. But then also how to. Give information to a reporter in a format and kind of framing that they're able to use in their stories. Because it's something else that I've seen a lot and I think you and I have talked about previously is like, most founders, I get the sense of they're basically telling the reporter their stories if the reporter is the end consumer.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Instead, they need to understand that the reporter is there to get information from you so they can write a story. You're providing them the tools, right? And then the reporter is going to go do their job.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is a little bit different, I think.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  It's very different. So two major things to take from that. The first is, yes, reporters are gathering facts to write their own story. They are not republishing your press release. It will not look or feel exactly like the press release that you may have issued or the statements that you're making precisely. They're going to take their own spin on things. That's what they do. They're storytellers and they're using your facts as part of telling a story. There are some reporters that don't write about announcements at all. It might be folded into a trend story of some type, or they might be talking about several different companies. You shouldn't take that as an insult. That's simply how they tell stories to their audience. The second major thing is, yes, founders, they tend to not necessarily be media trained or not think that they need it. Media training is a service that Waxman does for its clients.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  And the reason we do it is it has a huge effect on what the output's going to be. One of the things that we tell people is speak in short sentences. If you aren't able to get your point across fairly quickly, it's not going to be something people can remember. If you, it might be, and I've spent some time with founders, they cannot just speak, but they think in paragraphs and even pages at a time. But no one that they're talking to is going to be able to absorb all that information and turn into something compelling. Talk about things in small staccato-like sentences. Explain things in a clear way. Make sure someone fully gets it before you move on to the more advanced or next topic.

• 28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So let's talk about, there's a lot of companies of various sizes that you guys work with, right? Everything from some of the largest companies in crypto down to smaller teams. Let's talk though about kind of, you know, the person who's, you know, one, two, three people. They haven't raised any money. They've kind of just built, you know, what, we can't really call it company yet, right? It's more of like a project that they've built. They're trying to get some awareness for it. Any tips for those types of people as to things that they can do, you know, kind of as, as my, my partner Jason Williams would say, balling on a budget.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Anything there that you think could, could help them?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So the first thing that they should do is figure out what they have that's unique. So it turns out the same thing that may pique investor interest might pique reporter interest. And then make sure to focus on just that. If you're going to be announcing, I'm assuming that you have at least something beyond a white paper, some sort of working product, some sort of user base. Figure out who that user base is, figure out who that would be attractive to, and those are the reporters that you should be talking to. So for instance, if you're, if you have a crypto project and you might have something a little bit faster, a little bit better, or that supports one of the, the major blockchain protocols, start with that target audience. So if you're all about EOS, you're all about EOS. If you're all about Hashgraph, all about Hashgraph. And look, think, look by Googling

• 30:06Speaker 02

  and see who are the reporters that write about that ecosystem. Pitch of those people. And again, pitch in a very compelling and brief way. Tell them exactly what you have, see if they're interested in learning more. And then if they are, give them more information. Exactly what they asked for, not any more than that. Don't flood them, don't spam them, just give them that type of information. That's one. Two, recognize that what is newsworthy over time, well, it gets more challenging. So in crypto, two years ago, if you said that you were a middle manager at some large enterprise company and you were behind some sort of project, that was compelling news. People couldn't believe that someone was, that was a mid-level manager at Amazon was getting into crypto. Well, about three weeks

• 30:47Speaker 02

  ago or a month ago, my company announced that the former prime minister of Denmark, who then became secretary general of NATO, was joining the advisory board of the company. That is how much things have gotten more sophisticated in blockchain. So you should recognize that Your announcement, if it's closer to the first than the second, is probably not going to be that compelling. I'm not saying that you need to have a prime minister to come on board. Barack Obama does not need to be on your board of directors, but you do need to recognize what you've got and then be okay with what you'll get as a result.

• 31:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it feels like a lot of what you guys deal with is what I'll call more like the professional media, right? So this is, you know, large publications, everything from television to print to podcasts, etc., but also professionally trained reporters. How does social media fit into all of this, right? It's this platform that is so intertwined in crypto, and there's so much conversation, and everyone seems to be there on the Telegram, the reddits, the Twitters. How do you look at that?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  So I think social is fascinating, and it's absolutely evolved. It wasn't too long ago that everyone was on Slack until people realized that Slack was exactly how people could pretend to be Vitalik and ask for Ethereum. And then they went to Rocket Chat, and then they went to Discord, and now people are suddenly on Telegram, which is pretty great. But the conversations themselves, I'm not sure that they've entirely evolved. The crowds sometimes are just enormous. It's very hard to keep track of everything that's going on in every Telegram channel. In fact, I'd be interested to know, the average person in crypto, how many different Telegram chats they're subscribed to at any given time, and how many they actually read?

• 32:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I was gonna say, forget subscriptions. How many do they actually open, let's say, on a daily basis? I bet you it's less than five.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  I'm sure it is. But there might be one or two that are their favorites where they're a huge contributor. And what's really important from my perspective is that the messaging be the same for all platforms. If you are trying to tell a story, or you have some sort of announcement, or there's some sort of crisis, make sure to go and deliver the same message everywhere, or at least a derivation of it that has the exact same general concept. Because if you're feeding one channel one set of information, another channel, another, what you're gonna do is you're gonna confuse people. And what then happens is people stop trusting your company, and once they stop trusting you, everything else falls apart.

• 33:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And keep on that thread for a second about trust, right? How much of the communications of a organization are about getting the end user, potential customers, right, partners, whatever, to trust the company versus the individuals, right? Like, you know, if you think of Facebook, right, there's the company, and then there's Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and a whole host of other folks. If you think of Twitter, there's Twitter, and then there's Jack Dorsey, right? Where's the line there? And is there a kind of a sequential type strategy of you want people to trust the founder and then the company, or the company then the founder? How does that work?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  That's a fantastic question.

• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So all I do is ask great questions. Come on.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Well, this, this, this, this one's very interesting. And I'll tell you why. It turns out a lot of companies have absolutely no brand appeal at first. They have none. They have a new name. They are still have a product that might be, let's say, not ready for prime time. You can't do reviews on products that aren't out yet. So therefore you have to trust something. Something has to be compelling. And you might want to build to a crescendo moment when a product is released, when it's finally available. So how do you get reviews for a product six months down the road? When you have no brand today? Well, what you often do is you start with building what's called thought leadership. And you hear this concept a lot, and I know it sounds incredibly tacky. What it comes down to is reporters themselves, six months from now, are more likely to go

• 34:26Speaker 02

  and open up an email from about someone that they've heard of before, that they've talked to before, to potentially write a review of this product that comes out in six months if they knew that person in the first place. So how do you build that personal brand and narrative? That's the thought leadership. That means making someone expert. That means getting them to comment on news of the day. If they have an expertise, if they have the right academic background, utilize that. If someone's worked as a PhD in theoretical physics and they've worked on the motion of asteroids in deep space, for instance, those types of people maybe could talk about space, but they could probably talk about a few other things that are related to physics or things where physics suddenly gets into the whole blockchain space.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  That gives them enough of an expertise to let them talk and opine about other topics in the future. If they write an article, it's like a byline article or not, that if they're able to publish one, two, three, five of them, suddenly they might have a bit of an audience on social. So then when a reporter down the road is looking to figure out, should they write a story on some pitch that came through the door? That person might look more compelling. It's all about building that personal narrative that then transmutes and essentially provides brand value and wrecking and brand equity, I should say, to this company that down the road needs to do a product launch.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I mean, look, what you're talking about, and I'm thinking out loud here, is I've noticed that as founders, social followings have increased in size. It's like this self fulfilling prophecy. All of a sudden, different media outlets, everything from, you know, the really large professional ones, all the way down to kind of industry type publications, write about them more. And my hunch has always been that if somebody has a large social following, the media wants to write about them, because then that person will share the article and they'll get more traffic.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  That's 100% the case. You've got to remember, media has been essentially consolidating, because there's no money in media right now. And we've seen that over and over again. Reporters don't get paid nearly enough, editors don't get paid nearly enough, and they're looking for ways to compete in an increasingly small market, because there's so much free content out there, and near free content out there that they're competing with. This is the problem with the internet. So yes, they absolutely do care about how big a following you have. And if you aren't someone who was in the White House, or 10 Downing Street, but you have 500,000 Twitter followers, you still might get covered.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy to see, I think, how individuals have used this, right? And it's not just crypto. I mean, look, you know, one of the best examples, I think, is is Austin at Lambda School is doing a fantastic job. And it goes back to this idea of like, there's a level of authenticity and transparency, while still understanding the boundaries of which to operate, right? And I think that what you're describing in terms of, look, there's a lot of times where saying nothing actually may be the right strategy, or ways to promote or present information that is well received by media. But then there's the levels of authenticity and transparency, right? And I think that that balance is really hard to strike. It's fascinating to me that some people are just natural at it, right?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And some companies, some companies have their own brand narrative. So Kraken has their own voice on social, and I think it's a fantastic voice that they've been able to to basically put together. It's a company voice. It's not just Jesse Powell's. Love his voice, he's fantastic, but it's, they have their own kind of company narrative, and that shines through their social. And it feels authentic, and they can be playful, they can be very, very tactical and serious, but it comes off right. There are other companies that simply don't have that, and you need to build that over time.

• 37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  What you need to do, I think, is gain trust. I talked about that earlier, and I think that we should keep coming back to trust with their audience, or with their potential audience. And the way with which you say something is one way to go and establish trust, just as much as the content of what you say.

• 38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, look, if you look at, you know, let's take Kraken and BitMEX, for example, right? So Kraken with the whole BSV, should they delist it? Should they not? Like, I thought it was a very clever move on their part to ask. They literally ran a poll on Twitter and said, should we do this? Right? And the audience responded and the in such a collaborative environment like crypto to take that approach, I think was pretty cool. Right now, people argue, should they have done it? Should they not? You know, whatever. But I thought that just approach to a big decision being somewhat community informed, right? So not even necessarily saying like, we're going to do whatever the community says.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  As opposed to what Binance did, where they just?

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, which, which, but, but again, right? Like, I think that, uh, you know, you could make the argument that even though Binance handled it differently, Binance handled it in the way you would expect, given their founder, their marketing, their voice, etc., right? Like, he warned people, he said he was going to do it, right? And then he did it. And so like, two very different approaches end up with the same result. But I think that there's certain people who are fans of Binance, who aren't fans of Kraken and vice versa. And that's where you kind of get it. But then you look at something like a BitMEX, right? Which, you know, I would say their reputation is across the board. Some people think they're great, they got tons of liquidity, all this stuff. And some people think, oh, my God, I can't believe these guys are providing all of this leverage and, and stuff in the ecosystem. But they've got some of the best research, right?

• 39:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, all of a sudden, you start looking at the research and you're like, I don't care what you think about the products they're offering, etc. It's hard to deny that this isn't good work, right? And that's, and that's part of the voice and the thought leadership, I think you're talking about. But it's the company and it is outside of Arthur Hayes's voice, which is more kind of fun and playful and just, you know, he's just having, he's living his life.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Well, you, well, first, I'm incredibly biased because Waxen represents BitMEX. But I'll say this, Arthur is one of the smartest, sharpest people you'll ever meet. I'm sure you know him on a social level and he's, he's incredibly compelling. And he can drill down on absolutely any subject in about 30 seconds, like very few people I've ever met. But their research is phenomenal. I love that. One of the things I love asking basically any company that can gather data is can you give me some of that data to pitch out? Because reporters love it. It's a goldmine for them. It lets them create whatever narrative they want. It gives them a resource, something objective or something objective they can work with. And Bitmex is one of the best research departments by far that you're ever going to find. And we found that to be an incredibly effective tool at engaging audiences in a

• 40:36Speaker 02

  new way by showing that yes, there is this very, very professional research-heavy side of Bitmex that many people didn't know about before. And yes, they built this colossal exchange, of course, and tons of liquidity. And it's brought, I think, new dimensions to Bitcoin in general. But what they've done with their research, I think that a lot of companies should be looking at them and saying, how can I do something similar? How can I add something new to the overall discussion that's actually compelling? It's not just my opinion, but something based in fact.

• 41:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And where do you see kind of the, maybe the types of companies that haven't been

• 41:13Anthony Pompliano?

  coming forward, right? So like, the way I envision, you tell me if I'm wrong, is like 2017 was this huge boom in ICOs and just a lot of nonsense, right? There were also some good companies being built, but for the majority of the enterprises or projects, they were just nonsense. There's a lot of money flying around. And then in 2018, we kind of had like the purge. It feels like now, most of the companies that are left have some sort of legitimacy, right? Now, we can argue, are they the right technical solutions? Are the people running them, you know, good or bad actors? All the things that people debate on Twitter every day. But is that what you're seeing? And how does that translate into like, the types of clients that you guys work with, right? We're, I'm assuming 2017, you're getting pitched by like, a million ICO projects. And like, maybe

• 41:58Anthony Pompliano?

  you're at like, zero of those pitches today, or maybe not? I don't know.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  So we turned down a little over 1,000 companies last year, because that's how much was going on in the ICO space.

• 42:06Anthony Pompliano?

  In 2018?

• 42:07Speaker 02

  In 2018.

• 42:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yes. But 2017, I couldn't even tell you. I don't think we had an apparatus at the time to figure that out. But 2018, a little over 1,000 companies. What we're seeing this year, on average, is that the average company is simply much better. The potential new business prospect, they're more compelling, more professional, more interesting. And that's in part because people have been in the space for longer. You got to remember in 2017, people that had been in blockchain for even two years were few and far between. Most people had simply picked this up in late 2016, or early 2017, or when ICO started in the first place. So let's, let's look at the numbers. In 2015, when I started Waxman, the total crypto market cap was a little less than $6 billion.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  So in 2017, we, we, sorry, in 2016, crypto went from about 6 billion to, or 6, 7 billion, to 17 billion in one year. So it, 2.5 X.

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty, pretty big.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  It's great. And then in 2017, it went from 17 billion to almost $800 billion, which is just comical.

• 43:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, did you hear that from 17 billion to $800 billion market cap is insane in a 12 month period?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous inflation, and there had to be some sort of correction. And consequently, what you saw was enormous mainstream interest. You couldn't turn on CNBC without seeing Cardano's price flicker across. You couldn't go and turn on Bloomberg or Fox Business without seeing the same thing. People wanted to know, where is Dash today? People were having these inane conversations as to why, like these, not even technical conversations, why there were these price movements in crypto. These, no one cared about crypto at the time, or six months before that. They had no idea what they were talking about on TV. And I think that led to a lot of the overhype that we saw. And it led to a lot of companies starting that shouldn't have started in the first place. But today, the people who've been working in blockchain have often been working for a number of years. They may have worked on other projects

• 44:01Speaker 02

  before. They've seen what's worked and what doesn't. They've seen how things have pivoted. And I'm telling you, I'm seeing a lot of very interesting stuff today, that I think is going to be very compelling products and services, six months, a year from now.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What, um, what do you think is kind of the next 12 months of crypto in the mainstream media look like? Right? Do you see that interest kind of as it's waned over the last 12, 14 months in the bear market? Do you see that recovering? Do you see it kind of like, there's just more rational coverage? Or how does that play out?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Well, there are definitely some reporters who have had, let's call it blockchain disinterest. They've just seen too much, they've had overexposure. We recently had, in my New York office, two reporters from a major Business publication come in to give us a lunch and learn and they talked with all of our staff about what they found interesting today and they had seen so many pitches over time and they were just saying, "Look, if it's not something unbelievably compelling, we don't care." "It has to be something that's completely groundbreaking. We've seen it all." People pitching us solutions to every one of life's problems from, "Vaccines will be cured by this new coin," to, "We're going to change the way the fish on your menu is marketed essentially and sold and the price in it and we're going to do it overnight."

• 45:15Speaker 02

  And these miracle cures never came about. So I'd say in general mainstream reporters, they have lost any, if they ever had any optimism in a panacea-like product for crypto. But they are compelled by how substantial it has become. We're certainly seeing with Bitcoin, with Ether, and I think with a couple of other major, let's call them top coins, we're seeing that those are real financial products and then we're seeing that reporters are interested in DeFi. We're seeing that they are interested in securities meets blockchain. They're seeing a lot of interest there. And I think that the sophistication of the players in the market helps to substantiate that and make it actually newsworthy.

• 45:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's interesting to the idea that like, most crypto companies pitch themselves as crypto companies, but a lot of them actually, they use blockchain or they use some sort of decentralization or distributed ledger technology, but they're not really a crypto company. Like they may actually be better off not presenting them that way because, you know, many people know that my girlfriend is a reporter at Fortune magazine and you see just like the eyes glaze over when a lot of these reporters, you know, not just at Fortune, just at many of the publications. The second they hear Bitcoin, blockchain, crypto, it's like, "Yeah." Like I've been there, I've heard that, I'm not interested.

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so do you see that as a strategy people are employing where they just start to almost de-emphasize the Bitcoin and blockchain part of it? Or is that still kind of the core to some of the communication strategies?

• 46:49Speaker 02

  So there are many times where we'll simply say, "You're a fintech company." And we won't even use the word blockchain. It turns out that if you want to go through their tech stack, you're going to find blockchain somewhere in there.

• 46:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  But that's what's compelling. If you are-

• 47:03Speaker 02

  If you're working on some sort of real estate deal that happens to use blockchain as the way that your security essentially is formed, what's interesting is the real estate project. It's where it's situated. It's how, what the IRR is going to look like. That's what's interesting, not the fact that it happens to be using some sort of blockchain for trading and settlement down the road. No one cares. So make the story about what's actually interesting. We do this all the time with companies. And I think the great thing about blockchain is an extremely, extremely horizontal technology. And I don't want people to think that you and I are up here hating on blockchain. It's a incredible technology, and you and I have talked a lot about that. It's applicable to not everything, but a whole lot of things. And it's going to go and change the way a lot of industries work.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  But it's, it itself is not the only solution. It's just a technology that allows for better products and services to exist. And I think that we need to make the focus more about that than on the fact that they're using a type of distributed ledger tech. That's it.

• 48:00Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I think that makes a lot of sense. You earlier mentioned New York office, but you guys have offices in Dublin and Singapore. How does some of the media coverage and/or quality of companies change when you get outside the United States? What does it look like in some of those other markets?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  So the Dublin office essentially services EMEA clients, and the Singapore office services APAC clients, not the media there. What's very important is our New York staff pitches to the South China Morning Post, the Irish staff pitches to the Los Angeles Times, just as much as they may pitch within their own geographies. So we service clients based on where we're most proximate time zone wise to where the client is, because we want to have as many hours in the day to work with that client as humanly possible. But yes, we certainly see coverage everywhere, and we see companies evolve everywhere. Over the last six months, I've spent the vast majority of the time outside the United States. I've been, I most recently was in Paris and Dublin before that. I've been in Singapore

• 48:57Speaker 02

  and Hong Kong and across Europe. And I spent this time working with not just my offices in these different locations, but with companies and seeing kind of what's happening outside of the US, outside of Canada. And what I found is, is that there was an enormous amount of hype that occurred in Asia in, let's say, end of 2017, early 2018. The interest disintegrated far faster there than anywhere else. I think not enough people are talking about Europe right now. Because what we're seeing there are really great projects, really great progress. Europeans, and I know I'm painting an entire continent with a broad brush. They tend to be more understated and less likely to hype things up. I think you're going to see great things coming out of Europe this year in crypto.

• 49:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, nothing like some Americans to really rally up the troops and get some hype before the actual substance.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Well, we're the kings of tech and tech publicity, right? We've got Silicon Valley and we've got here in New York. So I think it's very easy to underrate what's happening elsewhere in the globe. It's also very hard to pay attention to everything at once, given the amount of noise, amount of players. But again, watch Europe.

• 50:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I'll give an example of a company. You know, if you take like an eToro, right? If you take eToro versus a Robinhood, they both help customers go ahead and purchase different types of assets in a consumer-friendly, you know, kind of mobile or consumer-friendly experience. Everyone knows Robinhood in North America, but eToro is actually bigger, right? When you look at the financials and the types of assets they offer, et cetera. And I think it's a great example of you've got a European-based company that probably actually would be better known simply by having, you know, being based in a different geography, which is pretty crazy to think about.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  It's amazing. You can't walk in London without seeing an eToro sign somewhere. It might be that your bus seat has eToro on it. They're just gigantic in Europe. And we've been very, very lucky to launch eToro in the United States and eToro X.

• 50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I actually forgot about that, yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  And eToro X actually was launched just last week in Paris. What we're seeing, which is their new exchange, everyone should sign up.

• 51:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man, I see you with softball.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  That was too good.

• 51:10Anthony Pompliano?

  The Twitter trolls are going to be all over you. You just gave them a fucking softball there.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  But that's a very good case. They were not known at all. If you asked a reporter, for instance, in San Francisco about eToro a year ago, they'd say, who? But if you talk to someone in London or if you talk to someone in Berlin. They would all know who that is because it's a platform that lots of people are using, not even really for crypto, although they they actually have OG crypto roots. Like the the CEO actually wrote the colored coins paper with Vitalik way back in the day.

• 51:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Wild.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty nuts. But they were best known for, of course, the social trading of securities and commodities and FX. But coming to the United States has been a challenge because no one had heard who they were. And they knew about these other trading platforms. They've been using them. They've been familiar with them and their brokerages. So I think that shifting onto something new is going to be a challenge. But what we've seen with Etoro, and I, and I, obviously, I'm a big believer. We've worked with them for over a year now, is that they are, they've got the tools to really market well. And I think we'll probably see a lot of exciting stuff this year.

• 52:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the, we actually had Yoni on the podcast at one point. And when he was going over the just early days of writing colored coins and Vitalik saying, I'm gonna go start Ethereum. And he'd be like, I don't know, I'm probably just gonna build Etoro. He's, you know, tells some great stories and laughing about it. So it's cool. All right. So last question for you before we get into the rapid fire is, what's the one thing that you wish founders would walk away after hearing kind of all of these tips, etc., in terms of if I'm a founder and I'm thinking about communication, marketing, you know, PR, etc., what's the one thing I need to know?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  You need to look outside yourself. Spend time thinking about, and when I do diligence on on companies, one of the questions I ask that most investors don't ask is, who are your perceived competitors? And the reason I ask that is a lot of companies think that they are the only ones servicing a certain market. But reporters are inherently going to bucket you in some way, shape or form with others. If you can't find a way of delivering uniqueness and differentiation from those perceived competitors, you're not going to have an edge. You're never going to go and get the press that you want. And if you don't get the press you want, you may not be able to meet your business objectives. That is one thing. The second most important thing is realize that PR, advertising, marketing in general, is a tool to meet business objectives.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Do not think about exposure for its own sake, brand for its own sake. It needs to get somewhere. If you can't determine what business objectives PR and marketing can help you get or or reach. Then you're never going to go and be satisfied with the ROI and spend on it. Whether you're hiring internal staff, hiring external agencies, to devote your own energy and time to it, because it's a huge investment. PR requires, if you're a founder, that you're going to be doing interviews, you're going to be approving articles, you're going to be approving press releases, that you're going to be fact checking things. It's a huge investment. But if you don't have those business objectives clearly outlined, it's going to be a huge waste of time.

• 54:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. What, rapid fire for you, what's the most important company in crypto other than your own?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I'd say Digital Currency Group, because I think they're everywhere.

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, meaning that they just have their hands in so much different stuff?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  They, Barry and his team were very, very early, were very, very smart, and managed to go and invest in a lot of the most important companies that we know today.

• 54:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw a report recently, I think they did over $100 million in revenue with eight employees at the parent company.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 54:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's pretty insane. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 54:39Anthony Pompliano?

  He told me not to ask about any regulations, but I can't get away from the rapid fire questions.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Well, I'm here in New York, and the bit license has been something that I think is, has been proven onerous. Of the first 22 companies that, I know that's not a rapid answer, that applied for a bit license, two were my clients at the time. One took over three years to get approved.

• 54:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  They did absolutely everything right. They had the world's best lawyers, the world's best compliance team. Took over three years to get a bit license. If it takes more than three years to go and operate a business, and if you're basically are building on a pending bit license, a business that depends on the outcome being a positive one, people aren't going to take risks like that. And I think New York should not be essentially compelling companies in crypto, really good ones, to not operate here. So I hope that, if anything, the DFS becomes a better partner to making sure that the best companies, and only the best, are able to operate here in New York.

• 55:27Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What, what's the most controversial thought you have in terms of something you believe that everyone else will disagree with you on?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 55:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't disappoint.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  I like the Ripple guys.

• 55:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that that's, well, there's a lot of people who will complain and say that they may not like Ripple, they may not like XRP, but in terms of the people behind the company, my whole thing is, how do you not like somebody you've never met before? Right? You don't have to, you don't have to like them, right? For all the people on the internet, like you don't have to necessarily like somebody, but you can't not like them until you've had a conversation.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Well, let me, let me expand on that a little further.

• 56:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Right.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  A lot of people look at Ripple and they say that's not a blockchain.

• 56:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Okay. But I don't think that something has to be a blockchain for it to be interesting. Independent of that, we need to make the conversation a little bit broader. Things can be blockchain-like, and that's cool. Is a DAG a blockchain by itself? There are all these new structures coming out. What, we were used to, and talking about Bitcoin, just proof of work. But what happens when you're sharding, when you're using proof of stake, when you have all these really compelling new systems, five years from now, 10 years from now, who knows what the architecture is going to look like? But if we only allow ourselves to like a very small subset of technologies and everything outside of that is the enemy, I think we're looking at it wrong.

• 56:42Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I think that's fair. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Man, probably some sort of history book, I'd say. I don't know which one exactly, but I love history books and I love fiction. I think literature is incredibly underrated today. People read news articles, they read what's on Reddit, but very few people are actually reading fiction anymore. You know, I, about two weeks ago, I went to Barnes and Nobles here in Union Square, and it was like a graveyard. There was no one there, the only people buying anything were buying gifts, basically. They weren't buying actual books, they were buying the junky things you sell on the side. And people consequently, I don't think are reading fiction as much as they should. That's what gives you a command of language, and command of language, I think, is necessary in essentially anything you do, especially, of course, in comms.

• 57:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you have a favorite fiction book?

• 57:29Speaker 02

  I really love Tolstoy. I love the way that he's able to tell history and make it compelling, while at the same time, fully explain the human condition from a number of different perspectives.

• 57:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We've got to talk about aliens, and then you can ask me one question to wrap this up. Do you believe or not?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  I do. I absolutely believe there's got to be something else out there.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  It's a very big world and the one sad thing I'd say is that SETI at home doesn't have nearly enough hash power today because all those people turn to mining Bitcoin, Ether and everything else. So we may never find the aliens and it's entirely due to Bitcoin.

• 58:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's pretty good. What about the depths of the ocean, right? So here's, uh, here's my thing is everyone always talks about space aliens. They started coming prepared for that question. So then I started thinking, well, we actually know more about, you know, the moon or Mars than we do our own oceans.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Are you James Cameron?

• 58:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, no, no, no, no. But, but here's the thing that actually started to scare me a little bit. Now people send me these articles, right, on aliens, on the oceans, whatever. There's some wild shit in the ocean, like that, like the whole like Loch Ness monster thing, right? That's not necessarily the ocean, but the idea that there's like some kind of creature that we haven't seen or we rarely see and we don't really understand, et cetera. That's like fact in the ocean. There, I've seen, I probably now have four or five people who sent me these articles. And there's things that kind of look like a shark, but sort of like a blowfish, but sort of like a seal, you know, like whatever. And I'm just fascinated by the fact that, you know, we spend all this time looking up in the sky and you can get in that ocean, you have no clue what's down there.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Well, the way I look at it is just think about the resources that are there that we can utilize. There is, what, 70% of the world, Earth is covered in water?

• 59:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  So essentially because we're so bad at going down, we're not very good at building types of vessels to go down there and mine, we're not able to go and get some readily available resources or nearly readily available resources that we could use to make life for humans much, much, much better. So I think certainly we're going to see a lot of tech going towards that and investment towards that in the future. But look, you got to find a profitable, you're an investor. Would you put tons of money into something that's extremely high risk? That there's no necessarily way to get your money back? Well, maybe I shouldn't be asking you that.

• 59:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you shouldn't ask me. This is exactly what I do.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  That's essentially what it's like to invest in these types of ocean mining companies.

• 59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and I think also, you know, Adam Draper came on and he was talking about, you know, building these islands, basically where there's, you know, kind of all new rules and monetary systems, etc. in the middle of the ocean. But there's this billionaire, have you heard about this guy? So he's like one of the, I don't know, 500 richest people in the world or whatever. His whole thing is he wants to reach the deepest point of all seven seas or oceans. And he's gone to like three or four of them and he builds single man submarines. And like, my whole thing is like, I get it, right? It'd be cool to like go down far in the ocean, but like the deepest point in the ocean, it just feels like there's so much pressure down there that like your submarine cracks,

• 1:00:34Anthony Pompliano?

  you're done, like there's just no coming back, right?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  So that having been said, I kind of get it. I really do want in my lifetime to be able to leave this planet, even though I'm just going to orbit. But the club of people in the history of the world who have ever left Earth and looked back is very, very small.

• 1:00:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  And I believe as humans, we are compelled to be explorers.

• 1:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  That's why we've reached and found absolutely everything that there is to find on this earth, or we've tried, and why we're going to go into the stars as well. It's something that compels us, it gives us a reason beyond ourselves to be part of that initial club. I mean, that's, that's something that I want to do. And what about you? Are you going to go to space?

• 1:01:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I would go for sure. I've been thinking more, for a number of years, I would go do something crazy every year, usually grab one of my brothers and go. And I haven't done one in, I think, two years now. So I've been thinking more about what to do. I've got one of our founders who will go unnamed. He made an investment and he texted me after we made the investment and said, by the way, I don't tell investors this until they've invested, but I run ultra marathons in my free time. Like, you made a good bet. And so he's been trying to get me to go run one of these like 100 mile races, which is crazy, but like it's running, you know, I've done a marathon. I actually did the original marathon in Greece and that sucked because it was far. So.

• 1:01:57Anthony Pompliano?

  farther doesn't exactly appease to me. But I don't know, I'll come up with something and then maybe I'll come on and I'll talk about it.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Now, if you could run a marathon in space, now that would be a newsworthy and compelling story. I'll tell you what, you'd have headlines like crazy.

• 1:02:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I guess on the moon, it would be harder because of zero gravity, right? To run a marathon, yeah. But your body wouldn't hurt as much.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Right? You could probably just like hop.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, your body wouldn't hurt as much. Maybe that's the thing to do is train to be an astronaut and go run a marathon on the moon. You think we went to the moon?

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I know some people who actually don't believe that. And I always joke with them like, why do you believe that? And the best response I've ever heard was, how come we can't see the flag?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  How come we can't see the flag?

• 1:02:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the flag that got planted.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  A million, like a million miles away or however far away the moon is.

• 1:02:46Anthony Pompliano?

  They're like, with all the telescopes we have, why can't you see the flag?

• 1:02:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, they're being ridiculous. But all right, listen, enough with the aliens. I appreciate you coming on. I think that a lot of people will get, you know, value out of just hearing kind of your perspective. You deal with this stuff every day. And I think it's just misunderstood by a lot of folks. So thanks so much. We'll have to have you come back on in a little bit.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Pop.

• 1:03:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.