#554 Amanda Cassatt on Marketing In Crypto

Amanda Cassatt is the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm and product studio for transformative technologies. She is the former Chief Marketing Officer of Consensys. In this conversation, we discuss brand positioning, public relations, marketing, what most teams get wrong, how to talk about your product, and the positive impact of marketing. ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= OKEx is a leading crypto exchange known for providing the most options for crypto traders and investors. Whether you want to trade spot, futures, options or swaps, OKEx gives you institutional-grade tools and a best-in-class trading engine. The platform offers credit and debit card funding options and supports 40 different fiat currencies, including EUR, CAD, GBP, TRY, INR and RUB, to name just a few. You can invest, trade, and earn yield, all within one place at okex.com. OKEx is not available to customers in the United States. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Amanda Cassett is the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm and product studio for transformative technologies. She's the former Chief Marketing Officer of Consensus. In this conversation, we discuss brand positioning, public relations, marketing, what most teams get wrong, how to talk about your product, and the positive impact of marketing. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Near. Near is an open source platform that accelerates the development

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  25 bucks. All right, let's get into this episode with Amanda. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs POM Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POM Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POM or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Amanda here. Thank you for doing this.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. How did you get to Consensus?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  That is a great question.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I only ask great questions on the podcast. So we're all clear. Go ahead.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  A lot of luck along the way, for sure. So I started my career with a more kind of pure media and marketing background. I worked for Arianna Huffington, actually, at HuffPost.

• 3:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, like directly for her?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was, I worked very closely with her, part of her, part of her team and sort of circle there. And what we did was, Really help move the online media industry from print into digital. Not that HuffPost was ever print, but it was one of the first really mainstream digital media outlets. It really popularized a lot of strategies around aggregation. And while I was there, I'd just been acquired by AOL. And we were, you know, there, there's a shift going on where a lot more of the distribution was happening on social media. Digital media was changing and we started to have this big creator platform where people were creating content and they, they weren't being paid for it.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  And, and it was, it was interesting and I started seeing some of the writing on the wall that, you know, all the people creating content on Facebook, creating content on Twitter, they're adding so much value to these platforms where they're not getting remunerated for their work. So after a couple of years there, I left and I started my own digital media platform called Slant. And what we tried to do was reward creators for their work. And so we had tons of college students and journalism school students writing a lot of first person narratives during the time when college campus life was really in focus in the media. So we had a ton of, ton of people writing, ton of traffic. And we would pay out the creators 70% of ad revenue for the, the stories that they wrote and we would teach them. Sounds like crypto.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you can see where this is going. So we would teach them how to market their content online. We'd teach them how to share it and we would pay them out. So we were, we had basically like a microtransaction based business model. We were often splitting the dollar, we were splitting the cent. And we were dealing with third party payment processors in order to do this. And dealing with those third party payment processors, even though this business model makes logical sense, it made it not really make practical sense. And so when I first learned about Ethereum, the idea that we could have peer to peer transactions and just pay directly, I was like, wow, this solves my random little startups problem. I ended up.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Starting to get really into crypto and I hadn't been part of the community that had really been reached by Bitcoin. Like I just wasn't on those kinds of message boards. It wasn't my demographic. So I came in through Ethereum, which is really unique because I happened to meet some of the early Ethereum folks just socially hanging out in New York in sort of a tech founder crowd. I met Joe Lubin, I met Andrew Keyes, I met Sam Cassatt, married him.

• 6:27Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll talk about that later.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Maybe. And yeah, I just got, started getting really involved and it kind of blew my mind when they explained Ethereum to me. It solved the problem for my business and I thought about, you know, all the different micropayment based business models. I thought about remittances. I thought about what you could do with tax. I thought about all kinds of different use cases and I was sort of mind blown. I knew I have to do this. So then after Slant, I ended up coming back and joining Consensus when it was under 100 people. And there wasn't really like a marketing establishment there. There wasn't really this kind of narrative creation engine there yet. There were some early businesses. There were a lot of engineers, developers. And so what I really did is I built the, the

• 7:13Speaker 02

  marketing function at Consensus, marketing, PR, all that good stuff and grew that and kind of built the marketing engine for helping to bring to market a lot of the early consensus companies.

• 7:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So what's interesting to me is like in a world that's so technical, that's so kind of built on this idea of we're going to build products, we're going to release them to the world. There's everything from liquidity bootstrapping on out. Marketing and PR seems to be like a skillset that a lot of founders forget about, right? And they just don't think about that. And so how did you look at, hey, I'm basically going to be marketing these, whether they're decentralized or centralized, kind of more technical projects? Like was that a natural thing to do or did you guys have to kind of learn how to do that?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So, so the macro project was telling the story of Ethereum. And telling the story of Ethereum is really different from telling the story of Bitcoin. Because the barrier to entry to understanding what Bitcoin does is a lot lower. Because you just have Bitcoin fundamentally, it solves an economic problem. It solves an interpersonal, social, organizational problem. Ethereum is a computer thing. And you have to have some kind of knowledge of how technology works, how computers work. In order to fully grok Ethereum and what it can do. And so that barrier to entry is just naturally higher. And so it requires a more robust storytelling engine to get out to the world. Not only how it works, which isn't necessarily even what you want to do. But what it does. And that's the thing that you really want to bring across.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  And you bring that across with use cases. So all of the early projects that we were building at Consensus were, and in the way I thought about them, use cases for Ethereum. That demonstrated different capabilities of the technology in the way that you can't just explain it. So, so that was kind of the framing going in. In terms of individual projects in the ecosystem on an individual level. I think like marketing is sort of a dirty word. Because no one wants to feel marketed to. It's actually really reasonable that that's the sentiment around it. We see, we, we, we say marketing. And people who haven't dealt with marketing before, or haven't dealt with good marketing, think, you know, advertising. They think about like Facebook ads, they think about Twitter ads. They're not thinking, this is how I learn about the tools that I need

• 9:24Speaker 02

  in order to do the things I want to do. And so good marketing in this space is about understanding the audience. And the audience sometimes is developers. Sometimes it's enterprises, but no one wants to feel marketed to. People want to feel like they're being introduced to tools and software that they want to use that serves their use case.

• 9:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense that you would want to speak to people in their language. And make sure that they have the emotional connection to it, right?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 9:51Anthony Pompliano?

  When you left Consensus, what did you decide to do?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so after nearly four years as CMO of Consensus, I stepped down to start Serotonin, my company that I've co-founded with my, my business partner, Matthew Isles. Matthew was the CEO and co-founder of Civil, the blockchain media project that was then fully acquired by Consensus. They invested in it. That's how he and I really got to know each other. Because he was also working with me early on, building up the Consensus marketing team. And he had run a digital marketing agency for 10 years before that, brought to market like over 60, mostly e-commerce startups. He actually wrote the General Assembly Digital Marketing Coursework, and so he's educated all these people on how to do digital marketing.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  And we decided to team up because we were basically, you know, we love Ethereum, love consensus, felt like Ethereum was basically de-risked, like it's successful. The rest of the world would think, you know, what are you talking about? It's so new. It's not across that line yet. But for us, you know, Ethereum is used, like it's the foundation of DeFi. And so we were playing with DeFi, we were playing with NFTs, we were playing with DAOs. We want to be out where that kind of edge is. We want to be dealing with that, you know, that really complicated storytelling that hasn't been broken down yet and introduced to a mass audience. That's where we want to live. And so we started working with those projects. So we started, you know, really doing all of the different

• 11:16Speaker 02

  marketing, parts of marketing with these projects. So helping them with, with content, with, with PR, with growth marketing, product marketing, community, and really building strong differentiated brands. And being able to work with a lot of different projects is so cool because we get to basically paint with a broader brush and think about these macro narratives in the, in the industry, and then fit these projects into those narratives in ways that are synergistic and complementary between these projects and between their goals. So we've been able to really introduce a lot of new concepts to the market this cycle. And then we've been investing in having our own in-house engineering and product studio. And so we actually are, you know, just in the process right now of launching

• 12:00Speaker 02

  our very first product, which is called Mojito, which is a Shopify-like backend for minting NFTs. We called it Mojito because it's the, the sweetest way to mint. And the idea that we had there, you know, we, we saw from a number of our partners. So we work with Sotheby's, for example, on, on NFTs, we did the, we did the pack sale with Sotheby's. And we, you know, work with them on an ongoing basis on NFTs. And we noticed that A lot of these really prominent companies or really prominent people would rather not partner with one of the marketplaces. They'd rather just host an NFT sale on their own existing website instead of blending the brands together. So we're like, why not create this backend?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And that's really been the synergy between the, the marketing services that we offer. We learn from these companies what they all need and then we can build that thing now that we have an engineering team.

• 12:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in that situation, is that a just piece of software or is that more of a crypto type product where there's like a decentralized element and there's tokens and all of that?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Both. So, so, so it's both. So the idea is that anyone should be able to add NFT capabilities to their existing website, just as easily as you should be able to add an online store. We think that eventually it's going to be as ubiquitous to have an NFT as just to have a store on your website. And you don't say, I launched a Shopify store. You just say, here's my store. And I think in the same way, everyone will have these NFT enabled sites where they're just continuously selling NFTs to people that want to buy them. And we think that mojito is that backend that's going to subserv that market demand because we don't need to be out there with a, with a flashy brand saying we're a marketplace. We just

• 13:42Speaker 02

  want to be that backend, kind of like WordPress. We're in this moment of transition where, you know, we had this digital transition. We transitioned from the physical world to the digital world and now it's about transitioning the digital world to the web three enabled digital world and taking all the artifacts that have been digitized, whether that's songs, whether that's images, whether it's video, whatever it is, taking those artifacts, if they have some kind of scarcerfiable value, taking them and putting them in NFT form. And we think that's just going to be massive and ubiquitous.

• 14:13Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about like what goes into telling the right story for something like this, right? Like, how do you sit down and actually form that story? Right? So is it start with the branding of it? Does it start with the client comes to you, say, okay, you know, let's look at what the market needs or what other people are doing? Just like walk us through, if I'm a founder of a project or a company, what is the path for me to be able to do this better? Given that most people in the space are horrendous at it and they'd be the first to say it, right? Like, I don't understand anything about marketing. I don't know anything about this. So like, I just don't do it.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  So it starts with an emoji. So there's a finite number of emojis. You have to pick one. No.

• 14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  You're laughing, but literally that is some truth to it.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I guess I also want to like pay tribute to some of the projects in the space that don't officially engage marketing services, but that are actually amazing at marketing, something like Base. Like there's some of these DeFi projects. They're just hilarious and unique in their ability to market. So I definitely don't think you need to engage like a formal marketing service in order to be really great at this. And I think there are projects that are great at this. I think we're pretty, pretty great at it too. So we usually start with brand positioning and that's the foundation. So building brands that are memorable, that are differentiated and that create a new category. And that's a really important thing. So the idea is like, you could either be one of something that everybody knows what it is, or you could be the first, the biggest, the best of something new that you define.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  And we've brought some new terms into the market and helped define them with our, with our various partners. And we know that those terms, those categories are working through memesis. So if other people repeat those back to us, if other projects are raising their hands saying, oh, we're one of those. Or, oh, we, we work like that. Or, oh, I want to build one of those. That's how we know that we've actually been successful. So that's basically the foundation of the house. And then on top of that, the channels that we've noticed over and over that everybody needs are PR. So earned media, we consider that, you know, part of a holistic marketing strategy. Not something that necessarily belongs off on its own in a corner, but something that should be integrated into the whole marketing process.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Content, there's all kinds of content that you need, websites, decks, white papers, or like Base, you can just write chicken a million times as your white paper. But you still need someone to do that. Yeah, they just wrote chicken over and over, but you know, they, someone did that. So.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  How many pages was this?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  It was a bunch of pages. I remember I, I'd sort of uploaded onto my, um, onto my iPad. I was like, I'm going to read this before bed. And then I open it and it just says chicken.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  But that's great, right? I had a great.

• 16:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It was part of the marketing.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Exactly, like I had incredible, incredible experience with, with, with that white paper, the best one I've ever had. And you don't even necessarily need a white paper anymore. So that was a little bit like 2017 style content. But you, you, you, you need, you need storytelling, verbal storytelling is a part of this. So PR content. Then, um, growth marketing, um, you can't use crypto terms uh on a bunch of paid platforms right now. So if you want to use terms like Bitcoin and crypto, it's hard to run a paid campaign on a platform like Facebook or Twitter. Uh, but there are alternatives and I think the ecosystem is generating its own alternatives. We're actually building one.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  We're building a product called Kismet, which is a peer-to-peer advertising marketplace, which will enable crypto projects to do paid programmatic advertising. Uh, without having to go to any of these platforms where it's banned by directly peer-to-peer connecting with influencers. More on that coming. Um, but there are growth marketing things that you can and should do depending on what kind of outcomes you're looking for. We only really recommend doing growth marketing. Once you can measure things like the actual lifetime value that you can get out of a customer, you're getting some kind of revenue from it. You should be, you know, you doing growth marketing campaigns into your margins as opposed to just spending a ton of money. Um, and then, um, product marketing. So making sure that all of the different assets that a user or a visitor might

• 18:09Speaker 02

  knock up against are arranged into a funnel and that that funnel is linked together by calls to action and that you're measuring the ability to draw people through that funnel to take the actions that you want them to take. That's product marketing and then, um, community. So huge aspect of all these projects is community. Um, you know, oftentimes it's the founders that are doing a lot of the community management, especially early on, as it should be. Um, because bringing on those early people and really engaging them, that's your core. Um, so online, that's, you know, that's Discord, that's Telegram, that's Twitter, and it's whatever you want it to be. And offline, I think, you know, physical in-person events are going to come back. Um, and making sure that you have an interesting differentiated presence at those, at those physical events.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  And then the other, the other, the other bits and pieces. That are that are relevant here are visual design, you know, making sure that you don't just have a great verbal presence, that you have an interesting visual presence. And then understanding how to do entry into various markets around the world. So English is still, in my opinion, kind of the highest leveraged language to have your content, to have your story played out in. Mandarin is a close second. And then there are really interesting markets in in Japanese and Korean. Obviously, there are markets in Europe and Africa and South America, but a lot of those are actually reachable through English.

• 19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of somebody who's done this really well, from like a creation of the product all the way through from a marketing perspective, who do you think's done it best?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are a few, a few, a few examples that I really like. One of the folks on our team actually was a head of comms at Chainlink, and I think Chainlink's done a really great job. I actually kind of call this strategy the Chainlink strategy, where you do a lot of announcements, you make a lot of partnerships, you announce them, and that lets you ping the market over and over and over. And so so I think that's a really interesting thing, especially because, you know, not everybody in the market sees every announcement coming from a company, but the more announcements that you're able to do, the more times you're just putting your name out, and that's more people that are going to end up seeing it. So that's a strategy that we've just seen go really well.

• 20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you do that and make sure that people don't lose faith or like confidence in that? Oh, you said that there was an announcement, there's another announcement, there's another announcement, eventually like.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Well, it just all has to be true. It has to be stuff that you're actually doing, and you have to follow through on the partnerships. Like, you can't just announce stuff and then not actually follow through on the thing that you're saying you're going to do.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Trust of whoever's on the other side.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I mean, having what you say to the market be accurate and following through on it, that's the most important thing. So there's a lot of distrust in the space. And so this is also a really great point, which is you're limited as a crypto project in terms of what you can say credibly about yourself. So you can say, you know, we're talking about brand positioning, I'm this, we produce this, our competitive advantage is this, but. You won't be believed unless you have third-party proof points saying you are this. So partnerships, having other trusted known entity projects, either in the ecosystem or in enterprise world, depending on who your target market is, having them say, oh, we're working with them and we're working with them specifically on this and having

• 21:14Speaker 02

  that testimonial really showcase an aspect of the functionality that's the main value on. So important because you can only say so much about yourself. It's really about piecing together perception from a bunch of different third parties and making sure they're confirming the quality of what you're doing. So investors play a big role in that. So venture investors play a big role kind of validating the quality of projects. Partnerships play a huge role. And then influencers, depending on the kind of project, there are sort of trading influencers out there. There are also technology influencers, really trusted tech leaders and, you know, making sure that you have prominent, respected folks aligning

• 21:59Speaker 02

  with your project and saying great things about it. We're not talking about influencer marketing of the kind where it's like you pay an influencer to go say great things about your project. We're talking about actually authentic, organic influencer marketing by aligning with smart people that are trusted by their communities and partnering with them to tell a story.

• 22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the thing the industry is the worst at, which part of this whole marketing and PR like body of work, are you just like, we're atrocious as an entire industry at X?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's interesting. I think actually branding and positioning is actually the real challenge. I think a lot of people are using the same language, even using the same images. Like I remember in the 2016, 2017 cycle, if I saw one more website that was kind of moving triangles, remember, remember when everything was those, those triangles? And if you were really sophisticated, you would animate your triangles and they would sort of connect with each other and it sort of incets this idea of the blockchain. So there's a lot of similar imagery being used. There's a lot of similar language being used. So it's really hard to stand out, especially with everyone shouting at once. So it's so important to just do good differentiation, good category creation. It's not enough at this point to say, I'm an L1.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  You have to have a very specific competitive advantage. Okay, here's how I'm better than Ethereum. Or here's, here's the niche I'm occupying that makes me, that makes me different. Um, because you don't just get to say, I'm an L1 and say, you know, my merits are just the merits of a blockchain. We're decentralized, we're peer to peer. No, you have to go further. You, they're, they're existing winners in those spaces and you have to disambiguate.

• 23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about how you spend your day, is it a hundred percent on kind of the agency and marketing services? Uh, with some of the building in there or do you do other stuff? Like, how do you just think about how you break down, how you spend your time?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So it's a mix. Um, it's, I, I, I sit sort of at the intersection of those two parts of our business. So we have this product studio where we're building products. And we have this marketing services business where we're working with partners. And these things connect really deeply. So what I'm trying to think about all day is what's the connective tissue here? So across our services business, I'm thinking, what's the macro story of what's going on in the ecosystem? Who's telling this story? And how do we get our partners into that story in a way that's going to be synergistic and beneficial to them? And at the same time, what's missing here? What's missing from this picture? How do we build into what's missing in a way that's going to be enhancing to all of it?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I'm a big fan of the rising tide lifts all boats jam. That's always been true in my interactions with the industry. Um, I think it makes a lot of sense. And so I think of myself as kind of a, a puzzle solving storyteller, trying to figure out, okay, there's a piece here that's shaped like this. There's a piece here that's shaped like this. What can we build? What can we connect? What can we augment or tell the story of in some way? Uh, that, that's what I'm always looking for. And when, when I look around the market, the projects that I'm really attracted to tend to be projects where, um, where there's a real skeleton there. And you know, sometimes I compare product, R and D, you know, engineering and marketing to kind of like the skeleton and the muscle on a body.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And you have to have that sort of hardcore of an actual product, something that works, something that makes sense. And then, you know, if it's just bone, you're not going to get anywhere. You have to attach muscle to it and then you can take it on a walk. And same goes if you're all muscle with no bone, you're just gonna flop around and not be able to go anywhere. So it's about that balance of finding teams that really have the goods, but aren't punching at their weight class in terms of having their story be understood by the market. And we help them get there and further.

• 25:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty much you're looking for a mispriced asset.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 25:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing as like investing.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. We're creating, we're looking for market inefficiencies and we're making them into an efficiency.

• 26:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And really what you're doing is you've only can do this with things that have substance, because if you put the best marketing at something that doesn't have any substance, then it ends up not even being that valuable.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  It's not gonna work. Exactly.

• 26:12Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about geographies, is there a difference? You mentioned kind of language earlier, but is there a difference between the US markets, Europe, Asia, you know, any other market?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:24Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of like how you think about what's said, not just the language that's said in?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much so. So in Mandarin and also a bit in Korean.

• 26:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you speak Mandarin?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I wish I did. Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, like in the Asian markets that I've helped launch projects into in general, I've noticed that the communities there are very price focused. Obviously, the English speaking ones and European, obviously, a lot of communities are price focused, but there's no narrative or there's less of a narrative about being in it for the technology. There's less of this insistence that influencers be authentic or organic. They expect that things are pay to play a bit more there. And so KOLs, or which is what they call influencers, are a big part of the marketing tactics. Also, the platforms are really different. I remember when I started doing work in Mandarin speaking, speaking markets, noticing that

• 27:19Speaker 02

  You know, WeChat has these 500 person groups. And it's an interesting tactic because it means you can't actually assemble a bunch of people and speak to them at once and organize them. You know what I'm saying here, but um, you uh, you break it all up. Which means that the process of managing those communities isn't that scalable because you need more community managers. And you have to hire more community managers linearly to maintain all those WeChat.

• 27:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost like somebody wants to make sure that it's very hard to talk to lots of people at once.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, but I'm, I'm trying to, you know, it's a different, it's a different spirit in terms of why people largely, I mean, of course their exceptions are interacting with the space. And the actual platforms have different logic to them and different constraints. So there, there's, there's both kind of a larger narrative difference and there's a um, and there's a procedural kind of tactical uh, difference. And then in the, in the English speaking markets, you know, i- it's very much about having authentic support for these projects. And I, I, I find it kind of um, like almost, maybe tacky isn't the right word, but it, it, it, it feels wrong to have a project. That is talking about price and that's all about price.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It needs to be a project that genuinely just wants to put a cool technology into the world. And then the value of that technology is reflected perhaps by the market, if the market's able to properly understand the value of the technology. But that's the order of operations.

• 28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It almost feels like the some crazy way, the exact same thing that's true in software startups and kind of venture capital of just like. The companies that build products that solve people's problems or that people want, they win and everything else kind of falls to the wayside and struggles. Same thing here, right?

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 29:00Anthony Pompliano?

  If you build substance.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  It totally true, same thing here, but there's just so much exuberance in the market and so much is linked to cycles. That there's not always that logic to it. Sometimes just the rising tide is such a strong tide that it lifts all boats, the good, the bad and the ugly. And so sometimes that makes it hard to see the logic of a project is actually technically superior, succeeding over one that's inferior. But oftentimes that's temporary.

• 29:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's almost like the sustainable strategy is what I described, but sometimes you can have an unsustainable strategy and still benefit just because the market forces.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Right. So you can't go in and say, I've noticed that this token is performing really well. So I bet this technology is really high quality. That's a very difficult jump to make and be correct necessarily. But I think in a really exuberant market like this, if you have good technology and you're able to tell a good story around it, you can get the market to reflect that back to you.

• 29:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've recorded with Sam. He's on like the farthest end of the DGEN.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Sam's my husband.

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Interest. Yeah, Sam is your husband. Where are you on the spectrum? If like, let's say like Bitcoin maximalism is like on the farthest one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum is like the whole DGEN, yield farming, et cetera. Where do you kind of think of yourself in terms of like where you spend most of your time?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I would say like ideologically, I'm like the DGENist DGEN. But I appreciate that the whole spectrum is necessary in order to get everyone there. So we work with projects that are all over that spectrum and very happily so. Cause there's this macro picture, which is that there's value moving from the centralized economy that's controlled by a bunch of individuals discretionarily. There's value moving from that context into a decentralized context. And it doesn't just hop over there. It needs to move over there over bridges. And those bridges are often centralized companies like Coinbase. Like they're basically a toll booth on that bridge. And that's why they've been so financially successful because

• 31:02Speaker 02

  they're literally just charging to be that link. So you can have this centralized trust. You can have someone, you know, custody your crypto for you, but you can get the upside of participating or the community incentives or whatever it is of participating in this transition toward decentralization. You can, you can have these decentralized coins. And so we're seeing all these businesses cropping up along that spectrum. You know, we're obviously seeing a huge rise of DEXs. And so, you know, maybe the value hasn't that that moved into Coinbase, maybe now it's moving into DEXs. And so you see this progression. And so maybe, you know, I'm very values aligned with what's going on. At the at the extrema of decentralization because I think that's really interesting and I think

• 31:47Speaker 02

  that's driving the whole thing, but I recognize the need for the entire bridge and support, you know, all of it.

• 31:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If I shut off the podcast and I asked you, what's like the biggest thing that you think you know that other people aren't paying attention to right now, what would you say?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Um, I would say that a lot of the trends that are coming from DeFi actually aren't flashes in the pan and are long-term things that are going to stick with us. So for example, I think there's something really macro. There's a macro negotiation going on about the value of engineering talent. Like, that's a huge macro, right? So, right now, VCs, even in the last cycle, in in non-crypto companies, VCs have been able to use capital to eat a certain chunk of cap tables and engineering talent gets remunerated X amount. And things like fair launches and these kinds of DeFi protocols that VCs can't really buy into are

• 32:45Speaker 02

  a refutation of the types of cuts that VCs have been able to take. So there's a

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So VCs get slammed down to smaller percentages.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. So there's a macro negotiation being done at the level of the technology between engineering talent and venture capital. And I think that's a really interesting thing that's going on. And I think, you know, engineering talent is calling out venture capital as undervaluing them and overvaluing themselves. So that's interesting.

• 33:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And one thing real quick on that is, I guess, there's like a Venn diagram of the people with capital and the people with engineering expertise that, like, if you sit at the center of that, that's actually the most valuable position to be in, right? Because you can put large pools of capital to work and also you can do it in a technical way and that's where the return is.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think also the other the other trend is, as we build out this decentralized ecosystem, increasingly, the financial products that you're using, the, you know, things that you're buying, things that you're dealing with, you don't have to take your money out of the system. And so that's that's the other thing that I think is going on is You know, right now, we have this bridge. We have these toll roads with these big toll booths on them. But what if we're moving into this world so much that we don't need to move back? And we can actually live our full 360 degree life in our decentralized context without having to go backward into fiat? I think, I think that's what's being built here.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that everyone I bring in here is pretty much convinced that's where we're headed.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And so I don't know if I know things that, that, that other people don't. I probably know about some things that are gonna launch that are pretty cool, but yeah, feeling very, I'm very excited about where things are going.

• 34:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I have three questions for you. You could ask me one to finish up.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Most important book you've ever read?

• 34:29Speaker 02

  You know, I think every business book is based on how to make friends and influence people. And every other like business advice book is some kind of, you know, derivative or like bastardization of how to make friends and influence people. So that one's just been incredibly powerful for me. One of my favorite just books in general that I always love and always come back to is Enders Game. I just, I just love that story and I, I got to a point once where I always knew what the next line of it was gonna be. And I just love, I love adventure. I love sci-fi. I think that's part of the spirit of the space. You know, some of the Neal Stephenson stuff is awesome. So I read a lot of fiction, read a lot of sci-fi. But in terms of business, how to, how to win friends and influence people is what's up.

• 35:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Classic for a reason.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Because it's actually a really marketing style book because it's about, and it's amazing that someone had to invent this now. But instead of thinking about what you want and telling people what you want, you think about what other people want. And you present what you want in the context of what they want. And that's the ultimate marketing mentality is just not just thinking about yourself, thinking about what other people want, what other people need, and shaping things so that you're meeting their needs and building things that you meet their needs.

• 35:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not rocket science.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I mean, but someone had to come up with that, right?

• 35:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, which is wild.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Sleep. Uh, our friends over at Eight Sleep sent me a thermo-regulated bed so I can get super, super cold. I sleep like a baby now. I used to sleep like five, six hours. Now I'm like eight, nine hours. What's your sleep schedule?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  I sleep a lot. I'm a big sleeper. I do, you know, eight, nine hours. I have an Oura ring. I have a Chili Pad. We have a lot of like.

• 36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You should get rid of the Chili Pad and you should get Eight Sleep.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Um, so we, we can even edit out the, the reference to that. But you know, I'm a huge fan of having, you know, a nice, cool. Nice, cool sleep environment, very dark, like to really, really close the blinds. I love the Oura ring. I love tracking my sleep. I think it made me have healthier habits to just kind of see like what gets measured gets managed.

• 36:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Do you sleep a lot? Are you a big sleeper?

• 36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Eight, nine hours.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 36:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, need it. The eight sleep is game changer. Both my wife and I, like, when we lay down on it, she actually likes a little bit warmer. I like it colder. It's great because then she doesn't try to like come over and take part of the bed. I stay over there.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  And I do like a little, a little CBD before bed.

• 36:48Anthony Pompliano?

  CBD?

• 36:49Speaker 02

  That's my.

• 36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a company, uh, House of Wise.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought, I thought you might know it. CBD company.

• 36:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. House of Wise is, uh, focused on female, uh, use cases of CBD.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Uh, got it. House of Wise.

• 37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. It's great. Uh, aliens, are you believer or non-believer?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  I think there's an infinite universe and, um, if that's the case, then there's probably all kinds of, all kinds of stuff.

• 37:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotta be out there, right?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Gotta, gotta be out there. I, I, I, I think there are all kinds of intelligences, you know, like it, it, it isn't necessarily our kind of intelligence. Um, I think, you know, ants look at us and they think nothing probably. And I think probably there are other kinds of intelligences that have the same.

• 37:31Anthony Pompliano?

  We look at the ants and think nothing.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we think that they're a bunch of ants, so there might be something looking at us that way.

• 37:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, that's crazy to think about, but yeah. Uh, you could ask me one question. What do you have for me?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  What question? Um.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Hmm, let's see.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  What would it take to convince you to buy ETH?

• 37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think it's so much like convincing me to buy ETH, right? Like.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  What would make you, what would make you buy ETH?

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, I thought Sam was gonna ask me this. I thought, uh, here's the deal is everyone forgets. I'll say one thing. Everyone forgets. I actually started, uh, similar to you. The way that I found crypto was mining ETH.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:13Anthony Pompliano?

  People don't.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  So, so if you, if you're mining ETH, then you know, I think that counts.

• 38:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I was mining ETH very early on. Um, I still, uh, so I did it personally. Um, actually, here's a wild story for you. I took my Facebook. Stock and I sold it. Fifty percent of it or so I put into my bank account in cash and 50% I bought GPU rigs. And I started mining and the pitch to me was from somebody who just was like, hey, there's like data centers, but better. I didn't understand the difference between ETH Bitcoin, anything else like it just was, hey, you're going to buy this computer and you're going to mine it. Started mining it. This is like end of 2016 or like mining ETH and all of a sudden it's like 10 to 30 to a hundred dollars. And by like May of 2017, it's like a hundred bucks. And I was like, what is, you know, like, what is this thing going?

• 39:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, uh, one of the mistakes that I made was I started trying to, oh, it ran up to $200. I should sell it and then buy it. Like, what? I'm not a trader. I don't know what I'm doing, right? Uh, but I kept those machines for quite a long time. Then what I did was a company that I'm an investor in, uh, with a friend of mine, Jason Williams. He, uh, is also a very large investor on the same company. Um, we then built a mine there onsite. It's a power company. They take car tires to turn it into, uh, electricity. And rather than sell it on the grid, built this mine. So technically it is still mining ether. So it's not so much like I like fought it or done any of this stuff. Um, there is this weird thing of like, if you own a bunch of Bitcoin.

• 39:46Anthony Pompliano?

  If you sell it, you pay taxes. So like, I do think of a lot of like, people get locked in, right? Like if you went and you, uh, are at consensus, you buy a bunch of ETH, you, you know, get paid in ETH, all this stuff. If then all of a sudden one day you're like, ah, you know what? I'm going to go buy a bunch of Bitcoin. It's like new dollars into the system, right? Rather than.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Which gets to the point again about keeping everything in the system.

• 40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy. It's crazy, right? But like laws have to change all this stuff. Uh, the other thing is, um, there's an argument for a pure financial gain, right? So like, forget, uh, the, um,

• 40:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Forget like the narratives around the assets, the tribalism around the assets.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  I help make the narratives around the assets. I can forget that easily. I can, I can.

• 40:30Anthony Pompliano?

  If I say, here's 20 assets, which one's going to perform best financially, right? I actually think Bitcoin and Ether are like in the same bucket in that spectrum. The returns are quote unquote commoditized by crypto standards at this point. So even if Bitcoin goes up 20X, right? And it goes to a million dollars or so from where it's about right now. And that takes through the next half and five years. Most people in crypto are going to be like Bitcoin 20X, five years? Like, that's such a small return for such a long period of time, which in the traditional world sounds nuts.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 41:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Ether, maybe that's 30X in five years, right? People are like, that's not that super interesting, right? They want the 100X in a month. They want the, you know, the DJ and stuff, right? And so I think that a lot of times in some weird way, there's almost like this barbell strategy of like, if you have Bitcoin and then you want pure financial return, like something I invested in recently is built on top of Bitcoin. So, you know, it makes a ton of sense for where I spend much of my time. But it has a lot of the elements and it went up a bunch in a very short period of time. And so when you think of that, I think it's more so, uh, you're making an opportunity cost decision from my standpoint, right? Now, what people forget is if you're going to use some of this stuff, you need ETH, right?

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you want to buy NFTs, for example, what do you need? Usually you have to use ETH to do it.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Mojito is going to enable people to pay with credit cards.

• 41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, perfect. But that's a good plug. That's a great plug. But, but I think that a lot of times too, you have to separate out, like, are people using it? Or are they holding it as an investment asset, right?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Hence, stablecoins.

• 42:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think that a lot of times what ends up happening is people are forced to use an asset. There's some systems where you're forced to use Bitcoin. There's some systems where you're forced to use ETH. Sometimes actually you're forced to use a stablecoin, right? And sometimes there's something else. And so I think it's less about like, um,

• 42:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Some like religious view on like anti ETH and it's much more about Bitcoin. I'm obviously a big believer in. I feel like that is the safest bet in the industry. It's actually like the least risky thing to bet on just because of the asset, the monetary policy, the adoption, etc. And then it's like, if I'm going to do anything, I want to do like the riskiest things I can find, right? And so you get that like almost barbell strategy within an industry. Now, you and I sound absolutely insane, like a traditional finance person.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  So.

• 42:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean? Like you, you, I think would have the viewpoint of like ETH is the thing that is the least risky, you know, in your opinion, or whatever, like is very not risky.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you'll go do a bunch of other stuff, right? And so whether it's Bitcoin or ETH, forget the debate for a second. That's actually like the least risky stuff in the industry.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 43:08Anthony Pompliano?

  But to like a traditional financial person, they're like, you guys are nuts. Like this is really, you know, half a percent of my portfolio is the riskiest thing I own. Like it's going, you know, either to zero or up a lot. And so I think it's all perspective of just like, how do you want to allocate your assets? And for me, it's outside of Bitcoin, it's pure financial return. And so the further out on the risk curve you can get, the better you're going to get a return rather than just basically get like the second biggest thing.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great answer to my question. And I feel like the times of being tribal and religious about these.

• 43:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Stupid.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  It doesn't make sense. I mean, in a bull market, you'll get a lot of people throwing off the shackles of religion in a, in a bear market, people band together. So let's see what happens.

• 43:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Humans are great at psychology. Humans have come to psychology all the time. True. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Um, my Twitter is Amanda Cassatt, C A S S A T T. And my company, Serotonin, serotonin.co.

• 44:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Thank you for doing this. We'll do it again.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.