From Amazon to Arbitrum: building a web3 career and marketing a layer 2

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities I'm Jaybird and this is Kyle reedhead and we're here to keep you on the Forefront of technology so you don't fall behind on today's doer Spotlight we're joined by Andrew Saunders the chief marketing officer at Arboretum we're going to be talking about how to build a successful career in Tech

what's the difference between web 2 and web 3 why arbitrum is the top layer 2 in the ethereum ecosystem and how to build your marketing and Community strategy in web 3 and so much more the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of

businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graph and followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-saverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the few future of Social and that's why we partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the

right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today gmgm welcome to web3 Academy today we are so excited to have with us Andrew Saunders Andrew welcome to the show but before you jump in let me give you the bio of this absolute marketing rock star last month Andrew shocked the web 2 World by moving to web3 joined us he is now the CMO over at offchain Labs which is the leaders behind arbitrum previously he was Amazon's Global head of entertainment and culture he also spent a few years at tastemade where he

was the global head of brand strategy and marketing he also spent a few years at nbcu Universal where he's the VP of content Innovation and creative and worked on shows like Saturday Night Live and before that as if that isn't enough I don't know how you've had all this time in your in your life Andrew it's truly amazing I can't wait to hear about it he worked at CAA we worked on with clients including Scooter Braun Ryan Seacrest Ashton Kutcher and Will Ferrell and that's just half of of your bio dude I I welcome the show so excited to have you thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be here okay so let's let's just start why don't you sort of I I gave a brief Bob but you can tell the story is way better than I

can share a quick background of your past experiences with us yeah no absolutely uh you know obviously a very non-traditional path I think like one of the things that I always call out is almost every job that I've had I've created for myself I've created the title I've created the role and I've really kind of built it from the ground up and and that's why I usually nod to this this notion of being an entrepreneur is I do like building within organization something new or taking something that hasn't been working and almost like a Management Consultant coming in figuring out how to optimize it and then how do you scale it as quickly as possible so you know kind of going back to the early days um when I was at CAA co-founded what was called the brand Partnerships team and basically became the bridge between all

of the brands all of their agencies into kind of the epicenter of Hollywood and I think really what that was about was Brands realized that there was an opportunity to leverage culture in really meaningful ways um Hollywood doesn't live on LinkedIn uh it's a relationship-based business and at the end of the day they need someone that can you know speak both languages languages and translate them but also so that they can actually trust and so the that was kind of my role and then at the time I was reporting into um you know one of the the partners founders of the company and uh he actually had the foresight to say I think we can go even bigger and so we actually merged at that time with the m a team and so instead of being beholden to you know brand funding and brand dollars it was let's go you know up to

Silicon Valley and talk to the Sequoias and the gray crops of the world and let's use our ideas and our clients to just bring these Visions to life and so you know we were doing some pretty wild things back in the day um and I think we're that ultimately culminated um you know kind of leaning back into the digital side was was really with kind of Google and the early social platforms um you know at the time I remember folks like Facebook when it was still small um coming to us and saying you know how do we get the celebrities on the platform and obviously I was part of those conversations and then we knew that obviously what that was doing was driving audience and engagement and things like that and so um you know became very very close to a lot of folks in the in let's call it the

1.0 days of social um and obviously that's been you know hugely beneficial long term and then on the Google side you know they came to Hollywood with this 100 million dollar Grant um you know to basically start to launch and incubate Next Generation media companies and so I was on let's call it the tiger team there that was really helping to kind of build and incubate those that we were then bringing to Google for funding um and at the time and I'll get to this in a second one of those companies asked me to actually be a kind of founding partner with them still a little early for me at that point to jump ship um but then NBC Universal called and the quick background on that was um while inside of a talent agency basically Built My Own media company and so we were actually buying and selling

media on YouTube but leveraging our clients as the content creators because it's like who makes better content than you know folks that are have the hot you know most hit shows on TV or you know great story lines and things like that and so you know at that point in time um I started competing with NBC Universal on deals and they turned around and basically said we don't really understand what you're doing or how you're doing it but stop um and come do it for us and it was a little bit of like you know name your name your uh title and move to headquarters and we'll figure it out and so you know that brought me to NBC Universal where the goal was let's build you know an in-house marketing agency um that actually has a good business model behind it and you saw this wave

happening with all the big media companies for a while um but ours was was extremely effective you know I in the first 18 months that I was there I think our team Grew From about three to 60 people um and then was associated with over a billion dollars in Revenue um and so I would argue like we definitely cracked the code and you know as we started to do these pretty massive you know marketing campaigns with folks like Amazon um we took a step back and in my coming for more of the kind of creative content side said why aren't we working with like the best creators underneath the nbcu umbrella and Broadway video Who funny enough had also been a client of mine when I was at CAA creators of you know SNL and a lot of those hit shows um we basically went to them and said

why don't we create a digital series together let's lean into the super fans that are lined up for this show you know for days in advance um and use this to really Drive audience and engagement with younger audiences that maybe you're not reaching through traditional television and so that was the beginning of you know First NBC um SNL digital Series in history and then you know we got really amazing support from Broadway video we had all the cast from the show involved um and we ended up getting a pretty significant kind of Webby nomination on the back of that um then I went to tastemade and the quick story there was once by nbcu Universal contract was up you know wanted to go more startup side tastemade was one of these companies that fell into kind of that Google media funded umbrella

um really like the co-founders quite a bit really like their Vision um and basically said you know I'm ready now if you guys are ready jumped over to kind of build their in-house marketing agency I think that went from about three to 40 people um and by the time I left it was you know it was a worldwide team that was doing a ton of marketing Partnerships and campaigns um and then the the quick background there was NBC Universal via Comcast had invested in them so it obviously made sense for me to jump into the investment to help kind of incubate and grow it um by the time I left I believe we were doing about three billion monthly views um across 300 million monthly viewers globally um and then funny enough Amazon came and invested in us and then about two weeks later said we know this is a little

non-traditional but how would you feel if uh we we poached you and brought you up to headquarters and uh luckily the CEO of tastemade is just a really smart you know kind guy he was very supportive I jumped over and then basically went there to build a brand new marketing practice for them and and I would say the easiest way to kind of think about it is um and you guys know this it's like younger Generations aren't always watching TV you've got you know ad skipping technology um you've got platforms that don't even provide ads like Netflix pre ad platform um and a lot of what I had been doing for the you know past 15 plus years was figuring out how to if either create my own ad products or repurpose things in new ways and so if you think about kind of what is the future of marketing look

like a lot of what I was tasked to do is figure out things like integrated marketing and television um podcast marketing you know sponsorships um and it was it was a pretty great experience I mean I will say like Folks at Amazon are definitely extremely intelligent and um you know part of what was really exciting there was getting access to things like data scientists in uh in in places like India to try to crack the code on measuring things that had never been measured before and uh and we did which was actually really exciting so um so yeah a little bit of background there for you I feel like you just managed to get 20 years into two minutes I don't know how you did that yeah yeah uh definitely definitely the norm

take us the next step and I mean that story is incredible and and um you know obviously a legendary uh kind of career there I guess but now all of a sudden you went from you know the the top Amazon one of the biggest companies in the world and you made the jump over to web three uh and I'm just curious before we like dive deeper into into that and what you're doing now just like what was your kind of rabbit hole story of what what even got you excited about web3 uh assuming it was something before you actually made the jump yeah no no it's it's a great question I mean the I think like at a high level the best way to look at it is you know for my entire career I've lived at this really interesting intersection of you know technology

entertainment you know marketing and media um on a global level right and so you name it I've probably been exposed to it whether it's you know a category of marketing a country to Market in um you know product marketing business marketing brand marketing B2B b2d you know these are all things that I've touched and so I think you know at a high level I look at things differently and a lot of times what I say to myself is well why can't the model from this industry be applied to this industry or why can't I create a new model where I take this aspect and this aspect and merge them together right and so I think at the end of the day for me you know one of the things that I'm always looking for is kind of like what's next um how do I continue to learn how do I

continue to upskill myself so that I continue to stay kind of ahead of the pack which I think as a marketer is just so important right and so you know I known it was probably time for me to to you know go into a new Direction and um you know long story short started talking to a lot of venture capital friends I'm an LP and a fund myself um and that you know happy to kind of give you guys the rundown you know that was kind of what started kind of veering me towards the web 3 Direction but you know on a personal level I would say and this was probably a couple years ago the first time I started to really hear about ethereum um I got really passionate about it because I I one it was super complex and two I could see the possibility and

potential that folks had yet to think about or unlock and so I would say you know my rabbit hole was was definitely ethereum and then once I got into ethereum I started to kind of dive deeper into different sectors um so like one of the little tips I give for all my new hires is like download coin gecko go into the category section and start to understand what all these categories are and look at the market leaders and start to maybe listen to podcasts about them because there's so much news out there it's hard to filter fact from fiction and you know authenticity from speculation but um but that was really my start it was like I'm passionate about ethereum I'm going to try to learn as much as I can about ethereum and then that then evolved into let me understand all these ecosystems

what they are what they mean and then that evolved into let me better understand the industry leaders in each of these areas and why they're leaders and you know even with that non-traditional brain of mind listening to all these podcasts I could start to say to myself that's interesting that's interesting I'm bullish on that I'm not on that um but that was uh yeah that was that was my rabbit hole I guess you you jumped into web three at the middle of a of a bear Market let's call it did that play into your decision at all or like were you a little bit skeptical skeptical of coming in after such a big crash or you're just kind of like screwing let's go all in no like yeah I mean this is probably the number one question I do get asked um yeah I mean I would say you know a

couple things I would just call out one I I don't come from money you know so as a kid I didn't have a ton of money and I was a super happy kid that loved life and um you know I think as I've gotten older and I've gotten more successful um you know a lot of people are driven by money I'm not like uh there's actually three which I can talk about if you want there's three kind of factors that I often look at um in terms of you know when I'm looking for a job or I'm looking for a company or I'm trying to make a decision um and I would argue web free pretty aggressively checked all three of those boxes for me and so it just didn't matter to me whether or not it was a bull market or a bear Market

um you know and again I think like at a high level in my opinion I think bear markets end up being the best times to join because it's a great time to build right if you're in the middle of a bowl and you can barely keep your head above water with the day-to-day how do you build a significant organization processes systems all these things right you're you're probably up till 3am every single night doing that and I'm definitely up late right now but I would say you know being in a bear is definitely advantageous when you're built in Builder mode um and I'm definitely a builder I mean that's what I do is come into companies to build um and then I would say you know in addition to that one it's just so early um you know because I've always been a little bit ahead of the curve when I

look at like when I first got into AR and VR and all these different Technologies you forget kind of how long it takes for Mass adoption to occur and how many factors are oftentimes out of your control or what the price points look like to achieve that level of adoption and so I also said to myself like I still think it's very early even though natives don't think it is um and I'm definitely a long-term thinker with a long-term mindset not a short-term thinker um and then I would say you know the other two things just to kind of call out or one I definitely believe in a lot of the higher level kind of goals and Ethos of of ethereum you know of web 3 um you know I've worked with cyber security companies in the past um you know I've been again a tech

digital guy for 15 plus years so there's a lot of things that I think this world stands for that I just personally believe in and again that's one of the things I probably care about sometimes more than money um and then lastly you know if you want want to just jump into arbitrum specifically it was it was a pretty easy decision for me I mean I I knew I wanted to go into kind of either a data oriented company or an infrastructure company um you know again very quickly narrowed that down to let's call it about five companies um what was interesting I think with those interviews was some of them I knew pretty strongly that like it might be a place that I wanted to go and I was using that as a way to kind of you know confirm my assumptions or check certain

things that I wanted to check you know for my own stability um and there were others where candidly I had no intention of ever working there I was like if I'm going to go to that company this is a really great way for me to get a little bit of competitive intelligence before I go and um I won't tell you which which fell into which category but you know with arbitrum I think like you know just looking at the boxes for me as an investor you know not even an employee you know Founders like the founders of arbitrum in my opinion are truly unparalleled like if you look at Ed Felton's background I mean this guy was in cyber security earlier than anyone you know from a research perspective you know he was Deputy CTO of the White House touching things like cyber

security for our entire country um it it's really hard for me to even in my head name five other people that come close to Ed and then obviously if you're familiar with the background you know both Stephen and Harry were PhD students of his at Princeton um and actually fun fact I'm sure you guys have seen this but like Ed and Steven wrote um if I can get it to come up on this screen but wrote um you know a college textbook which I would argue is probably one of the best sources of like understanding you know blockchain technology and crypto what's the book called uh it's called Bitcoin and cryptocurrency Technologies um available on Amazon but you don't work there anymore no but I'm actually technically still an Amazon

influencer so um internally I apparently created so much hype with internal employees that they actually made me a verified Amazon influencer so I do have a storefront and I do get affiliate Kickbacks come on no I'm like I'm being totally serious but um but no going back you know Steven and um and Harry were PhD students of his that were associated with the arbitrum project you know a long long time ago and so again you know push you know push that to the side for a second you know all three co-founders I would argue I've been in this space pretty much longer than anyone I could find um and so you know one of the interesting things is about arbitrim that I found out you know through the process was like the technology was conceived pre-eatherium so they were so

early that they knew that at the end of the day wherever they build arbitrum or excuse me whatever the base layer is there's going to be scalability issues right so they said at that time which I thought is is kind of incredible like rather than building the base layer we're going to build the solution and wait to figure out what that base layer is and then fast forward Here Comes ethereum Who has incredible developers in my opinion the right ethos and mentality and then it was like great we found our base layer and so that alone to me like validated the quality of the founders of this company um and then obviously Tech you know I I've been in Tech long enough that I can look at Tech and look at a product but I think one of the things that was a huge indicator for me was like more than 52

market share before I joined on l2beat um no marketing no token no grants program um and to me as a marketer what that says is it's all word of mouth it's like this product is so good that developers are literally just talking about it amongst themselves and I'm a big believer in like great products don't sell themselves but they really really help um and it's always better to lead with a great product and go find the right audiences and find the right messaging and do that foundational research than it is to take a product that's not good and try to figure out how to reposition it and and do marketing that I could argue is is somewhat deceitful right so you know check on Founders check on Tech um then investors being an LP myself like very familiar with who all the VCS

are both the early crypto folks and the institutional folks who you know some of which came in a little bit later you know but you look at like who our investors are and it really is like the creme de La Creme of web 2 and web3 investors so like check um devs you know one of the questions that I asked in a lot of my interviews with every company was where are the best developers that we can poach from and literally everyone said like oh my God like the developers at arbitrim are next level and and I can tell you like having been here now um they are like the founders are incredible but like our internal developers are equally as incredible I mean these folks are just their next level smart and um I appreciate all of them because they hold my hand they

teach me things they translate things but um it is it is one of the most incredible development teams I have ever come across in my entire career um and then Partners so again this goes back to the L2 beat side but like if you look at the ecosystem on arbitrim1 which you can easily access through like a coin gecko or go to our portal pages and then you look at the ecosystem of Nova which is like a relatively new chain uh I mean it is like the best of the best of web 3 companies and um I think especially for me seeing so many D5 companies building on arbitrine one was also in indicator because as you guys know like different types of companies in web3 have different levels of risk tolerance I would argue D5 probably has the lowest level of Tolerance because you're talking about big numbers and big

money that needs to be safe and secure and so when I see that many prestigious T5 companies building on arbitrum that's also a signal for me of the quality of the tech and then the last thing so like again I'll go through the checklist so Founders check tech check investors check developers check you know ecosystem Partners check and then the last thing that was like incredibly eye-opening for me and um Stephen and Ed and Harry would probably laugh at this because of like the interview that we had but I literally stopped them like mid interview and I was like are you guys actually this authentic and kind and and I I wasn't trying to kind of be complimentary I was like genuinely curious because I had come into so many big egos um through the interview process that I

was saying to myself like maybe I don't want to work in this industry and then these guys were just they were so kind and basically told me like we've we've built our entire company on this culture of kindness um and then even since I've joined like things that shocked me like how diverse the company is um how many females we have in this company in an industry that I thought was going to be predominantly male and I really kind of um you know tip my hat to the co-founders because I think this is very much you know a result of them you know um so yeah so that was the uh that was the arbitrum rabbit hole I guess I love it but before we get into the next question I just want to set some context here on on Arboretum for a second oh sure you basically went

through it I think uh but for the listeners who aren't really sure uh of all the things you said so there's about I don't know how many layer twos on a theory about 20 25 30 at least um better building on ethereum Arboretum is one of them it launched I believe it's the number one yeah yeah in August of last year um and it's one of the only ones that like don't have a token hasn't done a ton of marketing either uh I mean there wasn't even a marketing like you're the first CMO of arbitrim uh so just to add to that and and on L2 beats which is a website which ranks them all based off of the total value locked on the layer 2 itself um arbitrum is number one and it has over 50 I think it's 56 or 52 of all the

total value locked on any Layer Two on ethereum so it is leading by a lot uh and it's not trying to do the like growth hacks that is typical with Webster and crypto which is launching a token so kudos to Arboretum for that but Jay I'll give the floor back to you just want to set some context there for anyone who's yeah no no it's helpful and I think like just to add to what you were saying like just to clarify for folks because I know it can get a little complicated and um and yes when I join like just quick context like we had a community manager shout out to be fresh um Community I love that shout out um who is who is incredible like I adore him on a personal and professional level but yeah when I got in here I mean I was

our first marketing hire and the two of us used to joke like each of us is 50 of the marketing team now we're 25 of the marketing team and we we hope to each make that percentage much smaller in the next year or so um but I think like yeah you hit the nail on the head it gets confusing I think the easiest way to think about it is um you know as it stands today off chain Labs is the company that uh is the company of which we all work right um the co-founders developed a technology called arbitrum that has now resulted in two chains one is called arbitrum one which is an optimistic roll-up technology um and you know I think a lot of people think arbitrum they're typically thinking arbitrum one so that's the Shield logo it's at the top of l2b and

then we recently launched arbitrum Nova which is in any trust technology and that's also an l2b I think it typically is hovering around 1314 on its way to number two um and so that's another thing to think about is like if you really want to understand the power of arbitrum you can actually take those two two numbers and add them together and that'll give you a better sense of like where we sit compared to everything else um and and one of the other questions that I get quite a bit just so we're on the same page is like you know what is the purpose of Nova um I think with Nova at the end of the day it was really built as a great environment for social and for gaming um and so you know way to think about it is we went through this competition with

Reddit um where they basically wanted to select a a chain to bring Reddit Community points um you know they did a pretty significant due diligence um they chose arbitrum and then it made sense for us to launch this nhrust technology for for that that and then obviously on top of that our thought process was this is now going to create a great home for gaming companies that didn't think one was the right home before or social companies that didn't think one was the right home before and so now um I would argue there's a home for everyone which is which is awesome make you make it sound so uh so so kind and so gentle and so nice it's amazing I mean it is amazing to have a a tech Revolution that feels like that did I'm just curious and there's so many threads

we could go down here Andrew yeah sure but but because I do think this is something that is not talked about enough is the the difference of the feeling of web3 the the people and the culture of working in web3 and it's a bit of an aside but yeah you have experience from web one from Web Two you were there in the beginning do you notice a difference in the culture after you made this move yeah I mean I definitely noticed the difference in the culture I mean I think one of the things that um I always find interesting is like whether folks want to be called crypto or web3 right so yeah you know where this is going and so I like the joke that I have I think I posted this earlier today is like I

self-identify as crypto and I think anyone that is on Twitter can see that pretty quickly but I would say like and this is very true I don't just mean this to BS like on the inside on web3 like I've always been a very inclusive leader a very kind leader um I you know this is now going to be the fifth organization that I built from the ground up but like um what most people end up telling me is you're so different from any manager I've ever had um your team culture like this was actually an interesting one we did a um like a focus group thing at NBC Universal and I got a call from HR and they're like what's going on and I thought it was in trouble and they were like your team scored highest on job satisfaction in the entire organization and that was because I intentionally

created a very different culture for my own team versus the rest of the company and so um yes like I definitely notice a difference but but even right now I think the things that I notice are it's obviously a much younger industry and so a lot of what I see online and on social I wouldn't go as far as to say like this is crypto I would say this is a younger generation that like up on social that understands it that's more open that's more transparent and and I appreciate that and then I think there's this interesting you know ecosystem of crypto versus web 3 folks and uh I would argue like you could tell who someone is pretty quickly like if they're good if they're you know every day it says good morning we're all in it together they're clearly web three if it's like good

morning time to build like you're probably a crypto person you know yeah so yeah I can see a great meme there of the different GMS and which GM means which who which one you are and I think like even it's funny because like with Twitter as you're seeing like me and IRL me and Twitter are like a little bit different personas but like I have a lot of fun on Twitter as a crypto guy and and I look at that as like how do I continue to engage my community how do I continue to you know get them excited how do I continue to lean into things that I know are going to resonate with them um and a lot of times I'll joke back at folks or I'm you know responsive to them and um it's all in good fun you know I really at the end of the day like I have

so much love for everyone in our community and folks that are like exploring our community um I would say I will never I never see myself as someone that's going to attack someone for speaking their mind or for disagreeing with something um it's you know this is a place where like I would say the most intellectually curious people live and like that level of questioning is part of I think what makes let's call it web three web three is so special and exciting for folks you know like myself one thing I just love is that you refer to it as our community like there's a big difference right away right if you were back at Amazon you wouldn't be saying our community you'd be saying our customers right like there is this big you know shift that's happening in web 3 of this focus on

community anyways I don't want to pull them out no no no I think like one quick little thing to say on that front is uh and I think I put this on like Twitter at one point um you know you name a consumer brand in North America or International like I've probably worked with them to some extent right some 150 million dollar projects some 150 000 projects right um and I think at the end of the day um you know part of what I did in in every one of those projects was like I used it to gain intelligence like I would ask them like what's working for you what's not working for you like what's the secret to your success and sometimes these were like you know founders of companies sometimes they were CMOS sometimes these were you know heads of marketing or media heads um but

I definitely started to see some let's call it signals across the highest performing ones and one of the things about Amazon for me was you know part of why I went there was I really believed in this idea of getting the Bezos MBA and I will say like I have never learned more than I did in my three years at Amazon um and that was probably the most valuable thing that I that I took away um and then in addition to that like I wanted to like I believe the future of marketing is a growth marketing which we used to call Performance Brand marketing hybrid I don't think either should ever live without the other and Amazon arguably is one of the best growth marketing organizations in the world because everything has to be quantifiable and data backed so I said to myself I'm gonna go get my MBA and

I'm gonna go become like a gorilla uh growth marketer which like case in point I've doubled my Twitter in less than a month since being here and it's not because you notice that you know yeah it's like strategies part of it's because you're the CMO of arbitrim though come on yeah part of it to see yes but I would say you know where that comes from though is it's less about I would say folks following me out of speculation and more folks falling out of love for the community and looking at me as like an integral part of that Community but but anyways to take a step back like I know I want a tangent there one of the things we definitely leaned into at Amazon was this notion of customer Obsession which I won't bore you guys with the details but you know I look at

you know whether you want to call them customers Community um you know you know Builders at the end of the day like they need to be the most important thing and you really do need to understand like what are their needs not just today but tomorrow um you know what are their wants what are their wishes how do they want to communicate and so I would argue like a big part of my coming you know into crypto Twitter was how do I become the right member of this community to help build our ecosystem you know build the profiles of our active members and so it you know I don't I don't do this for BS reasons a lot of times you'll say like you know I appreciate this but it's about you guys or like you're the real Alphas here um because I I truly couldn't really

care less about building my personal brand but I do care about building our ecosystem and I do care about building our ecosystem Partners our most vocal voices because at the end of the day like we're all going to succeed together you know and uh someone the other day I posted something on Twitter that said like you know where do you want to see the arbitrum logo like you know dream big you know go crazy and someone was like a rocket uh or maybe it was F1 I think someone said like an F1 car and I said something like might be hard for me to justify the ROI but if there's space for every single ecosystem partner on it and that's kind of how I think you know how I think about some of that stuff and F1 companies don't call me you're already emailing me enough but

um but yeah I mean that's how I look at it and even if you kind of look under the hood of like what I'm building right now in Builder mode um a lot of what I'm building is is strategies and plans and archetypes to bend benefit our partners in ecosystem as much as ourselves and you know you could call that my experience with AWS you know back in the day but I've also worked in things like cloud computing machine learning autonomous vehicles and so when I meet new partners in our ecosystem the good news is like I can typically understand it pretty quickly I can translate into layman's terms and then I can quickly say to myself got it here's where I could see them plugging into some of these bigger picture things in the future um and it's not about money I don't need

all of our ecosystem Partners to write big checks you know sometimes their value comes from you know contributing to a prize pool but sometimes it comes from them having a large audience that they can leverage or their own Community to leverage and sometimes it could be something like completely unexpected um and so uh yeah that's that's my lengthy answer for you I love it I actually want to pull on your your marketing hat a little bit further here yeah so I mean arbitrum a layer two of ethereum I mean a very complicated concept for most people to understand uh I'm just curious when you were coming into this now you're a few months in here like let's take a high level and you don't need to go into details I don't want you to give away your secrets like keep shows within within the arbitrary world but I'm just curious how

do you Market a layer two blockchain like like when you were coming into that just what were you thinking of like okay here's my strategy do you have a game plan or where you're like I don't know I got to get in here and kind of figure this stuff out and then kind of just walk us through maybe the high level like what is that game plan there yeah I'll think about what I can share um yes like I definitely had a game plan um and maybe this was a signal to like which companies I was interviewing with I was serious about but like with the the arbitrim uh co-founders I mean in my last interview I think it was either an hour and a half or two hours but like they sent me a pretty lengthy list of questions like what's your vision you

know what do you see us focused on for the first three months six months nine months here all that um and uh you know it was uh it was pretty robust I mean and I would say even the Strat now that I've been here for let's call it close to two months the strategies that I'm continuing to push on and Lean Forward on are very very much connected to those those strategies before I join the company um and there's obviously been some you know new learnings and things which I can obviously talk about but um I would say at a high level um let me just take a step back so I've done b2c marketing with really cool Brands I've done b2c marketing with really lame Brands um I've done B2B marketing with you know sexy HQ names I've done B2B marketing with things you'll never hear of right

and I would argue at the end of the day like whether it's B to b or B to C there's still a c right it could be that your customer is a CTO or it could be that your customer is a co-founder your customer is a CEO but they're still a person and there's still a person that has interests there's still a person that has a soul and at the end of the day you know what you're trying to do is you're trying to resonate with them right and so for us you know I I can take the same strategy that every single company in web 3 is taking right right now which is like let's like let's take the complication of web 3 and make it simple for web 2 folks we're not going to be doing that right like because first off I'm like everyone else is

already doing that great like you pull them in educate them and then when they're done I'll come grab them and pull them into my funnel right so I would say like that's a little bit of maybe a secret um but I would say in general like just let's put it this way like Community is number one for me it will be number one for me as long as I'm at this company which is hopefully a very long time um and then how Community let's call it marketing and engagement happens I would say it's going to happen in ways you expect and it's definitely going to happen in ways you don't expect and again like you know claim to fame if you go on my like personal web page I'm not gonna shout out the link um there's a pretty wild video that I

did with a creative agency back in the day for Totino's Pizza Rolls this was like very early digital marketing and I used 10 and Eric is the creative directors who are my clients at the time and you watch that thing and you're like there is no way that a corporate brand made this thing like that's a great example of me like shaking it up or even another great example would be like when I got to NBC Universal our whole ecosystem was disconnected it was all these entities that had a lot of reach and scale but weren't really leveraging one another and um I I can't remember the total number but I think like part of what I did my first month was I built a 76 Channel syndicated connected media strategy to basically take singular assets and amplify them

and that was everything from like how does this move to TV um how do we leverage all of our talent as actual social influencers like things that traditional media companies just weren't doing and that's how my brain works like yesterday shout out to my team um you know I'm the stream of Consciousness but I threw them this crazy idea I was like I have this idea tell me if I'm crazy like here's how it starts then here's what that triggers then here's what that triggers and they were both like this is incredible they're like how did you think of this and I'm like I just think of like we call it associational thinking but like one of the things I used to tell all my marketing Talent was go expose yourself to as many diverse things as possible because then what you're going to do is

you're going to start to connect the seemingly unconnected and that's when like the biggest ideas come out like there's a great book called I think it's called like steal this idea or like every idea is stolen and really what that does and I agree with this strategy is it's like take something that's great figure out how to reskin it make it your own it'll be just as successful which I agree with but I think the things that really like break the internet are things that have never been done before and typically I think the way to create those things is literally by taking models from different Industries um and bringing them into new Industries right which I guess you could argue is a little bit similar to the steal this idea but but not really you're not taking a marketing concept and reframing it you're taking something totally

totally outside of marketing and bringing it into marketing yeah and is that part of the reason why you moved too is this you get to have more fun and be a little bit more crazy like you seem like you're you love these like big ideas and being at obviously at an Amazon or an NBC Universal there's you know much more bureaucracy and you have a big team and you know it's a totally different process to push things through totally totally I mean it's hard to say like it you know shout out to Amazon like Amazon is so different I mean they gave me so much autonomy so much Freedom so much trust on day one like I I did feel like I worked at a startup and and I will say like the leadership of my organization was incredible

um you know they would push me to quantify things they would push me to prove things but like a big part of you know growth marketing and Amazon as a result is test and learn and you know I would come in every six months or every quarter and say here's some crazy ideas I want to test and learn you know here's how much money I need to do them and I don't think once I ever got to know you know like it's it it's and obviously it's contingent on the team you're working for in the leadership but like the xcm team that I worked for was was a pretty special organization of people in general um so I would I would kind of caveat with that you know nbcu as you would expect is is definitely more corporate more bureaucratic um but I think at the end of the day day

it's like the faster you can show the reasoning behind something the faster you get from point A to point B and so your best example is you know at NBC when I first got there they were like we're trying to pitch folks like One Direction to Leverage The Power of the NBC Universal and they're like we know you know celebrity Talent like why don't you leave the charge and we were able again to like Stitch together everything we had a game show happen on the Today Show we did an entire takeover of um of Universal Orlando I mean we had celebrities lighting up Social you know we integrated into all these cool things and I think what that was was just um I would go to every kind of media partner and basically talk about like one here's how this is going to benefit you on an

individual level both marketing and P L and then two and I believe this like I think good ideas can come from anywhere and so I would tell leaders of all those different mecu companies like listen here's my idea but like if you have a better idea I'm all ears and so I think the second folk said to themselves okay one like this guy genuinely is kind to this guy genuinely is not trying to steal my job and three he's giving me an even bigger platform to play with and and bring my brand to life like that was kind of what unlocked I think the success of that you know Billion Dollar Plus Revenue stream was all of a sudden all the mbcu companies and partners were like we love Andrew we want to work with Andrew we want to do things with them because there was no sense of threat and

and I think like even on my own team it's it's a big thing for me like I really try to create a culture of Safety and Security because the safer folks feel the more crazy they're gonna get the bigger their ideas are going to get and um you can always pull someone back but it's really hard when someone's pulled back already to push them out you know yeah absolutely um yes I love crazy ideas [Laughter] so you're such a marketer I can't get you to say anything bad about anybody here tone the line yeah I like no listen like full transparency like I I definitely am a big believer in karma like um there's a great book I read when I was like 22 years old called The Power of kindness but at the end of the day like I want to look in the mirror and

feel good about myself as a person you know as a contributor to society as an employee as a manager and so um this is me like even you know anyone that's interviewed for a role on my team will probably tell you like oh my God he did like a 40 minute pre-call with me to prepare me like what or even like one of the folks I hired at Amazon I coached for probably 10 hours because that's how much I believed in that person and wanted them on my team and she just was like wait what like that never happens and I was like it's happening because I believe in you and like this is the type of manager I'm going to be when you get here um and I think that's maybe a big difference that I see with some of the younger kind of managers coming up is

that they really do care about the personal and professional success of their people not to say that you know older generational managers don't but I would say like there's been less folks that I've encountered you know that have done that for me um and so I at least try to be the type of manager that I always wanted to have um so that I can kind of you know one pass the buck you know for folks that have done good in my life but also just try to like Inspire them to be these types of managers in the future so that the future of marketing leadership looks much more like this you know I can see that people are very important to you right it's it's all about it's all about the person and I think web3 really embodies this because web3 is all about Community right it's about

bringing people together and you've mentioned Community a few times you've mentioned the arbitrum community uh I think there's a specific call for the Arboretum Community what is that [Laughter] you know all right we'll play this game we don't have a uh an arbitrum call even though comment below with a potential arbitrum call or or actually yesterday I think I tweeted like all of our ecosystem Partners could come in and do a call off like one of the things that I I do love about arbitrum and the community is like how strong the communities of all of our ecosystem Partners actually are so for example like treasure Dow who I I really like I I've spoken obviously to leaders there quite a bit um incredible Community like those guys

have just done an incredible job building not only a great Community for Arbitron but a great Community for themselves and um you know I'm not gonna lie like I've bought nfts because of the power of that Community like they get you excited they really do and um I'll throw it out all right their call is um small verse comment below um and then there's other communities like we have lost donkeys where it's like literally anything you write they're like yeah so I I love this kind of stuff like I just think like I hate marketing speak but like a lot of people call it Sonic branding um I think MasterCard did a nice job of this I like their CMO he's a good good dude but um but at the end of the day

like you've got to think of your brand Beyond you've got to think of your brand across all channels right like how do you bring your life to how do you bring your brand to life in podcasts if people aren't watching it on YouTube right like it's not just the host read you got to think about that stuff right and so when I hear these communities have these calls and I see them on Twitter so much what that says to me is like you've got a really good marketer there because not only have they built a really good Community but they've thought about how to bring that brand to life in other channels um and uh I would argue like you know especially at a treasured out like there's some good marketers over there for sure um and then obviously if you look at like you know GMX which a lot of folks

look at as kind of an arbitrary sweetheart Story I mean not only did they build just in such an incredible like active user basing Community but then you see things like like blueberry Club come out where like here are folks that are now so bullish on GMX that they're buying nfts to like signal their community and then like one of the things they did which I thought was super smart is like they um will incorporate actual like other arbitrary communities into their nfts so you'll see things like an Alchemy hat or like um arbitrary I think we have like tank tops is our kind of go-to but it's just it's such another great way to like connect community in another in another place right because if I go to openc now and you know look at kind of what's in a friend's collection I might see you know

uh something from blueberry club that has an arbitrum logo on it and I'm like oh my God my brand was brought to life in this Channel that I never expected so um so anyways yeah I'm a big fan of calls why do you think though that Community is like such a big thing it's always talked about web three why do you think it's like so important and did you see this in the web like in your previous roles too or like is it just a certain uh part of the internet that we're at now that like Community is possible digitally right or like what do you think it is about web3 that makes just community so important yeah I mean I listen I think Community has is and will always be one of the most important parts of building a brand right um and there's great examples of this

like Warby Parker built a community very early I would argue they helped kick-start an entire d2c Revolution um you know but you look at companies like um you know Nike I mean they've built one of the best communities on earth right like I would argue Nike and consumers are probably one of their most powerful marketing tools right and so I think with web3 like my observation even pre-joining was there's a lot of traditional marketing tactics that folks use to build community so things like sponsor posts and and listen I don't hate sponsored posts I think at the end of the day that's how you achieve scale that's how you achieve efficient targeting um I would argue a lot of brains aren't good at that because I see the ads that hit my news feeds or sorry my scroll and

um they're not relevant to me which means they're probably not doing a great job targeting or when I see the same ad run three times in a day I'm like they don't have saturation caps turned on these are all like marketing talks sorry if I'm going too far down the rabbit hole but um but I think at the end of the day like part of why it's probably even more important in web 3 from a marketing perspective is like you can't build your let's call it customer base um in in in authentic ways um because folks will call you out on that instantly and so at the end of the day if you're trying to figure out well how do I scale my community from A to B quickly um that's organic right and so if your channel has let's call it a million followers obviously that's great you've

got like a pretty nice base to work off of to begin with but like it's going to take you a while to get to 2 million right and so you've got a cap on your reach and scale right now and so if you can Empower you know ecosystem Partners um you know quote unquote influencers in your community to become Word of Mouth marketers um all you're doing is continuing to generate organic earned whatever you want to call it media that's just going to help you build and scale faster and so I think at the end of the day like I almost look at Community as as Word of Mouth marketing 3.0 and I think at the end of the day like if you can't build a vibrant active engaged community you're probably going to have to lean into some artificial tactics and I will say I'm not going to call folks out like

I've definitely seen especially some alternative layer ones doing promoted posts and I would argue like it's probably okay to do that if you're targeting it towards a web 2 audience that you're trying to bring into web3 which is why I think a lot of the exchanges do it and that's probably candidly a similar strategy I would take if I was in exchange but I would say you got to be careful because if you're not you know a a web 2 or like today's consumer facing technology or company um you're gonna get called out quickly it's going to be seen as cringe and you gotta scale and build this thing organically and I would also argue as a let's call it hybrid growth marketer there's very few growth marketers I've met in my career that I think are actually growth marketers and good and one of the the best kind of signals I I

would say is you know look at the person's uh Twitter following right because if they're if they want to be a community manager and they haven't been able to build a community for themselves and it doesn't have to be a million people it could be two thousand three thousand people um but like you guys are a great example I think you guys have like over 8 000 followers like you've clearly built a community for your podcast right and so if I were gonna launch you know a podcast and try to build a community around it I might say well those guys have already done it because I can see the number right there when someone to me says to me I want to be a growth marketer for you or a community manager for you and they have zero following what that says to me is is one

of two things either they've never focused on building their own audience which I think is a Miss strategically for them as as people um or two um they don't know the right tactics you know absolutely yeah so by the way it doesn't take a lot of money it really doesn't right right I think anyway I mean it's great advice it's great advice spend time building your own following there is so much benefit to be had from that I've got to ask quickly how do you see Community versus marketing within an organization do you do you think Community Falls underneath marketing I mean there's this everybody's trying to figure out strategically where this fits and how best to approach it so I don't

know if you want to speak from how you guys are doing it at arbitrum or if you want to speak just more generally about how you see it and how yeah you think it fits yeah I'll talk I'll talk more in general I mean I think yes it's a great point because I think um when you hear the term like Community manager in web 2 where your head instantly goes is like social media manager right this person's managing Twitter and Discord and whatever other channels you think makes sense and that means they're one you know looking for signals engaging with the right things creating valuable content you know responding to questions which I think is huge like I really do believe that like customer service is part of the community experience and I think companies that don't reply to their community members are are making a

huge mistake um and if you want to create a separate account that replies to that stuff so be it but like at the end of the day like you can't leave those questions unanswered I think that's just bad business um but I think at the end of the day the way I look at community and web 3 is it's both online and offline right so you've got community that takes place in in Discord and on Twitter and those might be different you know Folks by the way like we have for example a Twitter channel it's more developer oriented we've got a Twitter Channel that's more broad oriented I'm sure there's a little bit of crossover but like I would argue they're probably somewhat different audiences right and both of those audiences or let's call them communities need to be engaged and managed a little bit differently right so um shout out to

my awesome Dev team like Daniel G who probably a lot of folks know like he doesn't incredible job with our Dev Twitter right and he's a developer and so like he's a great person to answer technical questions and you know come up with content ideas that are going to resonate with that Community right um when it comes to offline it's it's really no different because you know you could be having for example a meet-up event um where the average attendee might be the same person that follows your Twitter who just is a maxi and excited about your technology and excited about your community or you could have like for us we're doing um our first largest hackathon ever at Devcon um which like oh my God the rcps are out of control like we like we I think had a 200 person cap and we crushed that thing

like weeks ago and folks told me like oh most RSVPs happen week of and so as a marketer I was like oh like I don't want to wait until last minute to know we have the right amount of people and so thank you everyone that rcp'd for letting me sleep at night um but like that's a great example where like that's an IRL Community event but it's a developer oriented Community that's down there you know they're building um you know on our arbitrom and and you know maybe with Partners TBD but like I think that's the most important thing is that I think Community lives both online and offline I think within Community you have subsex or in marketing we call it segmentation or personas and so I think the key thing to remember with Community is like one size is not going to fit all right

like we're obviously this giant ecosystem and a place for Builders to come and so there's a little bit more for us to manage but like I wouldn't be surprised if long term you know I've got community managers who are all very different from one another and are managing communities that are very different from one another or engaging with them in ways that are completely different um but uh I guess that's probably at a high level that maybe the best way to answer the question yeah a good answer speaking of community we had our community went through Canada community community who were tweeting a bunch of questions about arbitrary most of them we are not going to ask because they were technical questions they all start with the letter W or that exactly but I do have one question that I do want to ask

um when arbitrum first launched Odyssey actually Jay and I covered it a lot on our weekly roll-up because oh thank you like this is going to be a really good marketing tactic we thought and we were just kind of telling everyone you can watch this happen you can see it on chain you can see the results uh and so now everybody's copying it with mediocre uh dance and so I'm just curious um we had to pause that and you don't have to talk about that at all but is that something you're going to bring back up are you gonna because I don't think you were on the team when Odyssey was launched maybe you were I'm not sure um but is there going to be a new strategy or what can you tell us yeah I mean I'll give credit I mean that was the brainchild of uh Mr B fresh

um but yeah I mean that's that's when I can answer like so yes uh let's speculators gonna speculate at all times and by the way on Twitter like just so everybody's on the same page like I'm never gonna respond to those questions so just stop um but I will play with you and so if you write it expect a humorous response that you didn't expect um but you know just know like I'm not going to answer those questions on Twitter but I will tell you guys like yes like the The Odyssey is definitely resuming I know exactly when it's resuming I'm not going to obviously disclose that today um but it is coming back 100 um and it wasn't paused for any you know reasons that had to do with like Nitro performance or technicality or anything like that so I would just say like in

general you know at any company you're always going to have different company priorities and those could be company priorities product priorities partner priorities and I would argue like there's a lot of big things happening as you guys know like we just launched Nova we just announced Partnerships with companies like Reddit and Google Cloud um you know we just upgraded to Nitro which is now like 10 times faster than before so there's a lot of big things that have been coming as you guys can see and I think this is why I think it might have been AJ um on our Partnerships ahead of sorry our chief strategy officer who coined this but like arbit from Autumn but I think the joke internally was like it's already from Autumn because there is just so much going on right now like internally that it it feels like you

know it just feels like it's still summer it's crazy and so I would say like for anyone that wants to continue to ask like the Odyssey is 100 coming back do not worry um like patience is a virtue and and I and I get it like a lot of people want to knock a lot of people want to knock marketers with the whole soon and the eyes and all that so that's why I don't respond with that because like I don't want to perpetuate the nonsense but like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna respond to you but like the Odyssey is coming back do not worry oh and the other thing for folks that missed it is um we have now the number one Guild which is kind of awesome so again brainchild of of be fresh um you know in Discord we launched this

thing where you can become a member of from Guild and there's a lot of like really cool kind of challenges and things that you can participate in to like signal Your Allegiance to All Things arbitrary and a lot of that has to do with like supporting and empowering a lot of our ecosystem Partners which again is very much in line with like how we want to Market um but I would encourage folks like jump in like become an active member on the Discord like go work on some of those challenges but what's really fun is like um and this happened a couple weeks ago like we're now the number one Guild um on guild.xyz which is um I I assume great for Guild like we love those guys but also great for us because it's like another another way for them to engage with our ecosystem learn more about

ecosystem Partners try out some new you know protocols and things like that but it's um it's been really uh it's been really great and we'll put the link uh I assume it's to your site or something so that people can get in if they want to if you want to be a part of the guild um we're going to start to wrap up here but I just I want to pick your brain a little bit and this is outside of web3 outside of arbitrum more of you just as a person in your career I mean you've had this incredibly successful career you've been all over some of the biggest companies doing so much uh and you can tell it's come out in this podcast as to how intelligent you are in so many different areas and I'm just curious what are some of the things or like the

key things you think that you've done or the key things that you've experienced that have like allowed you to have this type of success is there anything that are like I did this every day when I was however older like is there anything that you know you can take away from just growing up in your your whole career that you could you could share yeah no no absolutely I mean it's it's funny like I actually um I believe very strongly in giving back to like the local community and so a couple of things to just call out like I'm uh I'm actually on the board of the California Department of Education so I'm an advisor and a lot of what we're working on right now is actually helping lower income kids in the state of California bypass higher education not because we don't see the value in it but

because it's really expensive and there's a lot of careers right now that I would argue higher education isn't really teaching right you think yeah and like no like this is a no like like I believe in higher education but but I would say like a great example of this would be like what we're doing right now like they're not teaching you how to produce a podcast they're not telling you how to you know build your own podcast audience and so what I'm saying to myself is why can't kids that you know haven't had the same Financial opportunities as other kids um go into apprenticeship programs learn how to produce a podcast and then maybe you guys hire them as a junior podcast producer right and I don't think that going to college is going to affect their ability to help you know produce an effective podcast and so that's a

great example you know of one of the areas we've looked at um and then I'm also a guest lecturer for USC Marshall um shout out to USC blockchain I love those guys we're talking about doing some cool things together um I've lectured for um pepperdine's grad school um I lecture at lmu's marketing Academy and and really what that is honestly for me is like I enjoy giving back I enjoy inspiring the younger generation I enjoy giving them some tools and learnings that took me 15 years to figure out you know to help them get ahead um and I feel like that that's honestly for me one of the best ways to get back at scale because I think trying to Mentor an individual is is really hard um and again that's going to benefit one

person and even if they pass the buckets it's not as impactful as mentoring classes of 100 200 people at once um so yes so I'll give you kind of some of the tips that I often give these folks um the first one is like create your own career um and and I'll say for me like my career is not by chance like I didn't wait for companies to reach out to me and say we're interested in you or like would you like to apply to this job I basically took a step back and said okay if this is who I want to be at the end of my career like how do I get the skill sets or knowledge bases I need to be there and so like just to kind of walk you through mine like I said I want to be one of the best marketers on Earth

and I said okay well how am I going to do that I'm going to get exposed to marketing at all levels in all facets on all sides so case in point like I've worked creative agency side like my team at CAA was all like widen and Kennedy folks right um I've worked media side both in television at one of the biggest traditional media companies in the world and in digital at one of the biggest non-traditional media companies in the world right and then you know by doing some of that stuff I learned production I learned media buying I learned growth marketing and all these different things and then with Amazon you know it culminated with finally going client side and so when you think about like the marketing Trifecta like I've done client agency and media experience across all platforms which is very rare for marketers and as a result I've got

this gigantic um you know repository that I can like jump into and pull things out from that I think is part of one how I'm able to build teams so quickly how many little scale teams so quickly like I just hired our first growth marketer who I'm like super super bullish on and I know for a fact that he was like the top pick of a competitor that had like 120 candidates like and he told me Point Blank like you're you're one of the big reasons I want this job like he's like I Believe In arbitrum by you know for sure and he's like I really believe in arbitrim after talking to you and he's like but I believe in you and the impact that you're gonna have on my career long term and and that's true like one of the things I always say to my folks is like

you're joining my team for life and so I still you know Place folks in incredible roles I still negotiate contracts and salaries for them and I just I look at this as like these are now folks in incredible roles like the number two marketing guy on Amazon Studios was my assistant 15 years ago you know like a very high level marketer Disney was my assistant you know 15 years ago like so you know again like if I can help these folks you know get ahead quickly at a young age and give them the skills that that other people don't have like it's gonna happen for them too and so I would say that's the first thing right so I you know doesn't it doesn't have to be marketer like decide what you want to be at the end and you're like I want to be

the best version of that what would the best version of that have that most people don't have right and then go work at the best places you can to get those skills regardless of how connected they are today to that and then the other thing that I would say and people talk about this always is like building your own kind of expert Network so so I'll do the formal apology here like I can't accept LinkedIn friend requests anymore um because I want to say about 10 years ago I exceeded like the cap limit which people are like that's crazy and I'm like it is like LinkedIn helped me out here but like you know there's like nothing I can do and then when I was at CAA I exceeded no joke I exceeded the cap limit on Outlook contacts so literally what I did and this was I

guess I don't know 10 years ago I built my own CRM system so like all my contacts live in my own personal CRM system they don't live in Outlook um and then with LinkedIn I unfortunately now have an account that like you have to follow but I always feel bad because I assume people are like oh well he's not accepting me because I'm not important enough or you know not relevant enough no I'm not accepting you because LinkedIn won't let me accept you so follow me on Twitter and I'll and then we can message there instead um but I would say like the expert networking is huge and you know the long-winded story there is you know I've got over let's call it 40 000 followers on or no it's not like 35 000 followers on LinkedIn which is you know obviously very valuable for web2

um but at the end of the day like that is an impossible number of relationships to manage and so what I did very early on in my CRM system was I created like top 100 and what I would do is say all right who's the best media strategist out of all these contacts that I have who's the best consumer products person who's the best growth marketer and then very quickly 10 years ago I had my own like expert network of 100 people and these are the people that I've been learning from for the past 15 years because a lot of this stuff isn't taught in college and a lot of people you know are full of BS you know and they're there to build their personal Brands and so you know even for me like a lot of times when I interview folks um I do situational based testing which

funny enough I know Amazon does also but that's because what I'm looking for is more like soft skills like how intellectually curious are you really like how adaptable and open to learning new things are you really because a lot of the more kind of hard skills and technical stuff like can be taught but like who you are as a person like that can't be taught you know yeah so whoever's at Microsoft and listening to this you guys have to raise the caps on Outlook and Linkedin yeah yeah and I actually love the folks at Microsoft I got a lot of good friends over there um so those would be two things uh again going back like you know build your own path gain your own knowledge base and by the way like there's so many ways to get knowledge now it's like you know books

are free go to the library like there's so many great things on udemy which I love um but like don't don't think that you have to go work at like the best company in the world to gain these skill sets and also like I think a lot of people are always worried that like if they didn't work at a blue chip company or they didn't go to the best institution someone like me is not going to hire them like complete opposite like if I see someone where they went to you know a community college but then they like work their butt off and then transition into another College like I I see that as a signal I'm like that's a good signal or if I see like that they went and got all these different YouTube certificates in their own time I'm like that's incredible and and I think like

you know you guys know this but most resumes it's like here's what I did you know my LinkedIn my resume is like here's what I built and um if I can look at a resume from a young person and instantly go like this is a builder like I couldn't care less where you used to work um or where you went to school or even how relevant it is to crypto as long as they're interested in in crypto and web free um and then um let's see I would say another thing there's two other things I would kind of call out that are valuable so the first kind of goes back to that first thing which was like building your own skill set so um one of the things that happened to me when I was at CAA was we were still in what I would call a world of specialized

skills right and every company wanted like the best creative director that had been a creative director for 10 years and if it was for an auto brand they wanted you to have been an auto creative director for 10 years right and I would argue like that is the most short-sighted mentality of all times right and so a lot of recruiters that I became very close friends with over the years would say things to me like you're a unicorn I don't know what to do with you and what I would tell them is introduce me to your smartest people because they will instantly know what to do with me what to call it or I will come in and I did this with a five-page PowerPoint presentation that tells them exactly what to do with me and what the benefit is and that's honestly like how

a lot of my jobs came to be was like that type of conversation and so what I would say is like it's not a bad thing to be a master of something um you know or or and but it's also not a bad idea to be a jack of all things and the reason why I like being a jack of all things is one it gives me a broader you know view from the sky on everything which I think is super super valuable and two I can adapt in two seconds into something else right so if all of a sudden you know paid marketing falls off the face of the earth I can go be like a design leader if all of a sudden like Ai and Dolly are doing every single piece of design I'm a copywriter right um and so I think like having yeah and

so I think having like a diversified set of skills and value propositions is like it's so important for your longevity and future and so I always say to folks like go build that future skill set and try to make yourself a unicorn right and and I think it's also like how you pitch yourself to companies like and this is what I would always tell other unicorns that I talk to is I would say like you need to basically pick a lane and then everything else needs to be value at right right so like for me I'm a market I'm a creative marketer an entrepreneur but I'm able to do b2c B to b b to D I'm able to do Omni Channel I'm able to do every every international country and region and so they look at me and they go wow this is like a

marketer that has so much added value on the back of it right whereas if I go in there and go I'm one part marketer one part creative director one part media strategist one part brand builder of course they're going to go we don't know what to do with you right because that's like confusing right so I think that's another thing to call out and then and then I'll give you kind of like the last thing which which leans back into maybe one of the questions you asked earlier which was like why did you decide to go to arbitrum like you know you know how do you decide you know future career opportunities I'll give you kind of how I evaluate job opportunities because I think it's very very simple and I think it's very very valuable um there's three things that I look at from like a value proposition right so

the first is obviously compensation right I think the biggest thing in this bucket is you always want to be paid what's fair but I personally believe that you never want to be greedy in your ask and the background there is like if you're greedy and you're asked you're probably going to be the first one to go and I would argue from day one there's always going to be this question of like were they really worth that much right and even if you are and I guess this is more of maybe a startup mentality than like a big business mentality like if you're coming into a startup like you are an owner in that company right and the last thing you want to do is take away more money from the operation that company to fill your own Pockets when it could be used to further grow and Propel that

company which is going to end up being a much bigger opportunity for you down the road than your annual salary right so I think that's that's an important thing to think about like you always want to be paid what's fair I've gone through exercises just so you guys know where like I created pay parity for an entire organization of females because I was like you guys are underpaid in my opinion for like what your value prop is in the market um I don't think it makes sense to overpay you but I think I think it makes sense to pay you the appropriate amount because also like I don't want you getting poached and I don't want you leaving and I also don't want you to have negative sentiment about the company or brand as a result of that so like I majorly bumped you know all my

female employees salaries to to do what was right right um and that's going to benefit not just them personally but the business you know a lot of them are still there today which is is great for that business because you guys know turnover is like one of the worst things when it comes to operations um so I think you know compensation fairness is huge the second is what I would call like knowledge value so if you're going into an area that you have yet to be in how much opportunity is there to learn new things that again are going to make you more of a unicorn or again build more of your knowledge base so again for me it was you know I'm a retail investor I'm an nft Trader you know personally but like if I get in here I'm gonna learn a whole lot from

like three of the smartest folks and and longest you know running folks in crypto so for me arbitrim I'm like you know compensation very fair fair company um value proposition of knowledge through the roof right and then the third one is what I would call like new relationship values so I would argue like relationships in business are so important for so many reasons as you guys know so I think there's also this notion of like am I going to build relationships that I don't already have and so you know take a step back for someone like me that means you know incredible developers and builders in this world you know Venture capitalists and and financiers that maybe I don't already know you know it might be for example like native Community managers that are awesome at organic growth

marketing that one day belong in you know traditional companies so I think like for this job for me it was so easy it was like you know compensation value check knowledge value triple check you know new relationship value triple check and so it was it was it was an obvious decision for me I think where a lot of people make the mistake is they might be up for two different jobs and one of those jobs is willing to pay them you know 2x the base or it has a more lucrative bonus structure and then what's happening is they're they're looking at it from just that one lens and then they're not saying to themselves holy crap like I could have you know gained so much knowledge over here that would have made my price point even higher than that in the future you know or I could have had this Rolodex of

relationships that was going to end up actually bringing me that future opportunity that pays 3x so I think like those three pieces are really how I look at everything and then a lot of people tell me like when do you know it's time to jump and it's it's that it's like if at any point in time I feel like the market has changed and my compensation is no longer fair you know I'm going to vocalize that and see how they respond um at any company not arbitrum um you know knowledge value if I feel like I've extracted as much knowledge as possible either from my own company or my or my partners or the industry as a whole you know the second I'm not getting value there I start to look at that and go hmm you know and the third thing is the new relationships if I'm

like okay I now have all the relationships that I really need because you don't need every relationship then that starts to dwindle and so I would say for me like what typically drives me jumping to new companies is a new opportunity comes in where the knowledge value proposition is significantly higher than where I'm currently at and the network relationship value is significantly higher than where I'm currently at I would say those tend to be two biggest drivers for me and like most folks that really know me now they like they can sense when the jump is coming like you you've now got the problem after doing this show of F1 is going to call you yeah a bunch of a bunch of young people are going to call you for Career Mentoring advice a bunch of people in

Arboretum are going to ask you to Mentor them internally actually I I generally I will say though like I do spend a lot of time with Folks at Arboretum and I would argue like you know the the co-founders have been like amazing mentors for me so far because they know I'm not native they're like you're a guy that loves crypto but like you're not native and we acknowledge that and so I I'll just give them a quick shout like you know those guys spend so much time with me you know helping me deep dive into topics that I don't know um you know explaining things to me using metaphors but like it's nice for me to also be at a company where like I feel like I have you know three mentors from day one that I really am like learning from and benefiting from and

then on my side like you know anyone internally that reaches out to me that like wants help with something like I I always right because at the end of the day like your own company culture is so important and I'm such a firm believer in like I guess we'll use like web free speak like you return your co-worker slacks before you return anyone else's right because the last thing you want to do is slow down your own people or slow down your own team but I think like it's just such a wonderful group of like Giga brains that just really support each other and um I would argue like the notion of mentorship at arbitrum is like it's like a spider web I think honestly a lot of people are mentoring a lot of people for different reasons and I've got you know be fresh you know mentoring me on things

that are crypto native who's you know significantly younger than I am because I'm like I can learn a lot from him on a topic that I'm not an expert in even though I don't like the word expert in general you know yeah I want to give you a chance before we move on to the speed round to give the show for Arbitron give us a good shell yeah yeah I'm gonna listen I'm gonna less I'm gonna try not to sales pitch it to you guys I'm just gonna kind of Nod to some important things and um I think again like one of the things just quick another shout to our community one of the things I love about the arbitrim community because it is so active and vibrant even during a bear market like people that I have lunch with literally tell me like crypto

Twitter's dead but I see so many arbitrary posts and I'm like I'm like I promise it's not all me it's all the community but I what I love about the arbitrim community is like a lot of times questions are directed at me on Twitter and then community members who I don't even know who they are just jump in and answer them and I'm like yeah that's correct and I love that like that's one of the things I actually appreciate the most about our community is just like how supportive everybody is of each other but um all right let us shill um so let's talk arbitrary for a second so arbitrum one which I know we talked about a little bit earlier um is the first fully operational leading ethereum to secure scaling solution um and I think the first fully operational is really the thing to lean

into there like this is real technology this isn't speculative this isn't vaporware like this has existed for over a year you know the Nitro upgrade was obviously a bit of a celebration of you know a one-year kind of main net launch so operational I think is kind of the key word there um and then one of the things is like we're obviously continuing to accelerate you know numerous web3 Landscapes and the easiest way to think about that is look at our ecosystems that are being built look at the categories if you go to our portal Pages you can see them which I'll give you you know some links to but like no one will question the acceleration and activity happening in web3 um tied to arbitrum and there was also a really great Bernstein report that just came out that literally said like arbitrim has the most engagement of I

think any blockchain right now um shout out to those guys thank you for making my job easier um but I think like aside from that you know there's obviously hundreds of projects not just in the US but like all over the world um that have already deployed on arbitrary one and I would argue like tons and tons of folks just continue to line up and ask for you know portal verification or partner help with onboarding or things like that um but obviously you know every single time a new partner enters our ecosystem what that means is just even more robust more active ecosystem for everyone so I think that's the big thing I talk about is the multiplier effects so if you're going to build somewhere part of why you build on arbitrum is like you're are coming and you're building in a place that has such a large engaged audience

to begin with right and I think part of why this community by the way is still here in the bear Market is like a lot of these folks are Builders right and Builders are still here because they're here for the right reasons and they're here for the long term and so like they're still on crypto Twitter they didn't come in just to speculate and pump for like six months like they came in for probably the same reasons that I did they're probably going to be here for as long as I am and so I think like the longevity of our community and the sustainability of our community is just such such a differentiator and such an important thing to kind of remember and understand um and then obviously like recent edition of arbiter Nova which we talked about you know means gaming and social apps like reddit's Community points

um or now also calling arbitrum home right so that was a big thing for me coming in was I was really excited to know that like we're not just a home for leading D5 companies we're now home for leading web 3 companies across the board you know and and I understand for companies that didn't build on us in gen 1 maybe why you know Anova would have been a better product back then for them but my argument is like come multi-chain on to us right or move on to us like we're here you know we're active and from what I've been told like a really kind of incredible developer experience I'm not a developer obviously um and then the other thing that I think is really important to remember is that like both arbitrary 1 and arbitrum Nova leverage the security and decentralization of ethereum right and

so a lot of times what we're focused on is like how do we create a builder experience that's very similar to ethereum because we want it to be intuitive we want to be familiar we want to be fully evm compatible but then we're always thinking about like are there tiny little tweaks we can make to our ux um to maybe make things better or make things faster or make things more intuitive um so all I hear from developers is like what an incredible developer experience it was and then in terms of just the arbitrum ecosystem obviously it's not just for developers it's also for you know users and consumers but you can Bridge your etherically to arbitrum you know to natively pay for gas and that's uh typically using the bridge so that's bridge.arbitrum.io or you can also send your eth um to arbitrum one via all your

favorite exchanges so we're on places like binance um FTX um you know buyback crypto.com and we have most of the major uh exchanges both centralized and decentralized on arbitrum um so I think those are two routes to take and then you know again like on arbitrary what I would say is like both for Builders and for you know users um what's going to happen is you're going to experience like super fast transaction speeds significantly significantly lower gas fees um and what does this mean it just means like greater personal and project success right so the way I always kind of talk about this with new partners coming on is I say like you know you're going to come on here you're going to build you know it's going to be faster the fees are going to be lower but then once you're there like that's going to

get passed on to your entire community of users right and so if you're building for example a game and you're thinking about building it on you know a layer one you know Aura Layer Two I would argue like that gameplay experience is probably going to be better which is part of why we launched Nova because it's going to be faster the transactions are going to be faster it's going to be a better customer experience for you as a result of what you're building right so that's kind of one thing I always talk about and then also you know right behind me um with the recent migration to uh to arbitrary Nova it's now also like 10 times faster than before and like one of the things I love to see on Twitter is folks that just like use it either post Nitro or use it for the first time and

like it's just like eyeballs popping out of the head and I'm like there's a reason we're over 50 like you know I I didn't need to Market to you just come and use it you'll see for yourself um and you know I would just say like in general like you know if you're a developer specifically like if you want to see why so many folks are choosing to build on Arbor trim again with like no incentives to date um just go to like arbitrum.io that's our website you can join the communities where there's obviously insane amounts of Engagement and like arbitrary maximalists um and then you can dive into our developer docs like shout out to our Dev team we have some really great developer docs White papers Dev Center and again I would argue like these are such great developers that like you're getting to

read white papers and Dev docs from like I would argue some of the smartest Minds in crypto so like even for me like a lot of times I look at that as a place to learn you know better than listening to a podcast that might be more speculative or pump oriented you know um and then obviously if you're a builder you can Bridge your assets super super quickly and the thing that we always say which I I thought was uh but it's true um is that you can literally build your first app in only five minutes so like tons of developers yeah I know because again if you're already accustomed to like that eth experience it's like I'm already on here I'm already doing it and so I would say that's part of what we're so proud of is that like you can just get on here and

start building right away you don't have to convert tokens you don't have to go through any like Hoops um it's just so easy um and um I would say like in general like part of what we always say is like what we're really trying to do is make web3 development the way that it was meant to be which is it should be secure it should be cheap it should be fast and most importantly like it needs to be friction free like we know that there's already this barrier right now between web 2 and web3 the last thing we need to do is create barriers to building and growth right so we really at all times really just try to remove the friction and I would say like part of what I love about the community too is they're so vocal like they'll say things like

here's a tip that I have or here's something that could be better and then the first thing we do is just jump on that because we're like if that's what our community is saying we should prioritize that you know yeah for focusing on developers and making it easier to build that's what we need right that's all you know and you said this earlier it's so interesting you're not trying to focus on the onboarding of like the new user learn how to use web3 you guys are focused on let's help developers build the yes you know and if like that's that's huge that's huge okay speed round question and fire these questions at you uh and if I don't like it I'll say pass you can

pass you can pass if you don't like it yeah uh first question what's one token could be fungible or non-fungible that you'll never sell oh man so do we have to preface this with this is not investment advice um yeah it's easy I mean like you know I I guess I would say ethereum like I I own ethereum I continue to stack ethereum like I'm just a big believer in ethereum um and then I'll give you another one because that's like the obvious answer for me um chain link I I love chain link as a as a technology I love the company I did interview there also and um really was kind of Blown Away by like how smart

those folks are how kind they are and um what I found out with arbitrine which was interesting is like how deep the relationship actually is between arbitrum and chain link and so that was actually something that I was really excited about when I got here the CM of chain link like literally reached out to me within a matter of weeks and was like let's do stuff together and I'm like great I'm like I would love to now I get to work with both companies but I would say chain Link's another one where like I I just I hold on to it because like they just have so much market share they have such a leadership position and again everything that I've seen under the hood of chain link has continued to reinforce I would see a lot of the reasons that I chose to come to arbitrum

you know great technology great developers great ecosystem you know et cetera so again not investment advice but like those are two tokens that I personally hold that like I'm never gonna probably sell yeah awesome thing you've purchased recently for under 100 that brings you Joy all right this is an easy one um I have this uh they are the official action figures run for run the jewels so we've got LP and Killer Mike in full effect um quick background for you guys I um have a very good friend who uh was one of my clients when I was at CAA who's

now one of the managers to run the jewels um and so I've hung out with um LP before I haven't hung out with Killer Mike yet but like I I really love them for so many reasons like one I love the music two like they're just such high quality human beings like like honestly like my one of my favorite music artists is nipsy hustle and like part of it is it's really hard to look at how much he did for LA and for the local community and not look at him as like a hero and look at him as a prototype of like what everyone should be doing and so I would argue like you know Killer Mike he's in Atlanta he's not in LA but like he's the exact same like he just he puts so much good into the Atlantic Community he put

so much good into the world um that like that's a person that I have no problem like spending money on so like I've got run the jewel t-shirts and action figures my kid who's like two has like a run the jewel shirt which is dope um but like I look at that as you know what I'm doing I'm putting money into the pocket of someone who's putting good in the world and like that's a big thing for me is like I always want to put good into the world however I can you know cool amen amen okay final question yeah if you if you had a billboard which one billion people were going to see okay what what would you write on that billboard um yeah I would write Arboretum has the best community uh parentheses blue heart

comma orange heart and parentheses and then obviously underneath I'd put the at arbitrum Twitter handle just a marketer yeah and I probably would put like be Fresh's face in the bottom right corner saying jump in uh I want to be in a marketing meeting with you this sounds so fun yeah it's pretty wild like um and I think that's what's fun too is like I I try to bring really good energy to like everything that I do and one of the funny things in the interview was like it was very high energy and I was sick at the time and I said to the the co-founders I was like so sorry guys like I have covet right now like and I was like put on the on a plus side this is like 80 of the energy

that you're gonna get when I start and they laughed like they thought it was great but um but yeah I mean I you know marketer at heart but I definitely think at the end of the day like again don't stifle creativity like the the loudest and wildest people sometimes have the best ideas but so do the introverts that like are too nervous to come out of their shell so like I have brainstorm techniques that I use to let introverts bring their best ideas to life you know and things like that so yeah um so yes I I'm a marketer at heart I always will be but at the end of the day like we're never going to follow a traditional marketing Playbook here it's just that it's not who I am you know Andrew this has been just an absolute pleasure thank you so much for the time thank you guys

so much I really appreciate it it's been fun it's been a blast awesome thanks so much everybody listening in have a great week we'll see you next time peace thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you

friends and see you in the next one