ep 26 –Strategy & operations for web3 with Uniswap COO Mary-Catherine Lader

Transcript

[Music] welcome to web 3 with Asics and z a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at Asics and see crypto that includes me your host sonal joxie following a brief summer Hiatus since our last episode which was a very popular conversation on competitive forces moats for open source and web 3 and a deep dive on network effects today's episode also goes into how to think about business strategy and competition in a world of Open Source both in operations and in practice as it's a conversation with uniswap Chief Operating Officer Mary Catherine AKA MC later so we also cover organizational structure and collaboration hiring in

web 3 Community engagement how to make decisions on what to innovate on or not decentralization DFI App Store policies and much much more the wide-ranging conversation is based on a live interview and founder q a that originally took place at our crypto startup School a few months ago and was edited for podcast form as a reminder none of the following should be taken as investment legal business or tax advice please see a6nc.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments the conversation Begins by asking MC what the biggest surprise for her was in transitioning from tradfi to crypto that's traditional Finance since before joining uniswap she was formerly a

fintech founder and an investor at Goldman Sachs and spent seven years at BlackRock yeah so first it's great to be here I'm so excited to be part of this I watched every single episode of the crypto startup school before I joined uniswap so it's cool to be part of the second one so biggest surprise I think that as I made the transition everyone sort of said like oh mental models and crypto are very different and I've been watching and engaged in crypto for about six years by the time I joined uniswap so I oversaw BlackRock script on blockchain activity which was frankly a tiny part of my actual job there but it was something I was passionate about and have been committed to since about 2011 when I first bought Bitcoin first got into the space so I thought I kind of knew enough about like people the

players were the companies why certain things hadn't taken uh why D5 particularly hadn't gotten Traction in sort of large Capital markets but I think I underestimated the extent to which some mental models really don't work about why adoption happens so I want to hear more about that like what are some of those mental models that you think didn't work well I think if you come from um certainly from like bigger companies you realize they have so much scale and partnering with them might be useful and one thing I've kind of come full circle on since I've been at unison up is that those Partnerships can have kind of limited use that's one example the second is a lot of go to market tactics don't necessarily work because you don't have the same information to be dealing with right so we don't know much about our users we know some things that you

might not know in traditional web 2 business but we don't know a lot of other things so your whole go to market Playbook has to be completely different your whole notion of like what kinds of endorsements and support and Partnerships work has to be quite different and a lot of that it's obvious and I expected some of it but then living through it you kind of realize okay you know we do have to think first principles yeah not a lot of things so you know one of your Specialties I would say I mean you have many but just thing I think is business models and business models strategy so one question this is a recurring theme of interest but I am curious especially coming from Trad fire to crypto how you think about the competition yeah especially because you are building in the open I remember when

I was deciding to join us web I talked to Chris Dixon and I asked like what are your biggest questions for you in a swap and he said defensibility and just look at everything that's happening and crypto now and Define nfts it still is a big open question and one thing that I think is also happening among those players who already have some product Market fit in an initial product is everyone's not trying to get into each other's space because monetization is frankly just a challenge for everyone if you are committed to building public goods at some layer of your stack if you are committed to not capturing a lot of user information it becomes really hard to think about how you can charge people what you want to charge people for or if that's even your business model right and the rules of the game that you're

playing can change all around you so many teams aren't trying to build a business many teams are trying to release a piece of infrastructure that has a totally different incentive model and there are different mechanisms and economic incentives available so I think it's important to really think about for yourself as a founding team what impact you want to have in the world and that may sound very obvious but the spectrum of outcomes is so much wider and more diverse in crypto than it is in traditional business models do you have to game theory that out up front yes yes so let's figure that out as you go like how do you sort of translate that yes so I think it's important to game theory that all up front and think like okay here's what I hope the product or the protocol

we're building does and who I hope uses it and here's how all these people could come screw us over yeah because they are Anonymous or they just play by different rules they're there for The Vibes they're there for The Vibes there's a lot of people here for the Vibes a lot about we're all I'm also here for the Vibes but like that's not the only thing so I think that's really important to sort of Game Theory out in advance and then having that sort of like long-term perspective of where you want to go and then being a little bit cautious frankly about timing I think timing is one of the hardest things in crypto strategy because many people were saying two years ago it's time to do an app chain it's time for people to start launching chains and I think now some of what

optimism has achieved with the op stack you can it's maybe better timing now than it was like a year or two years ago for lots of different teams to start thinking about launching chains but the timing is just so critical like some companies did it too soon have already kind of had to shudder that okay a couple more questions moving more on strategy and moats so if you were to fill in the blanks like blank is the moat people often will fill that blank saying Community is emote how would you fill in that blank for uniswap what is the moat for unislap how would you kind of I mean like we hate the word mode what would I say like what is the strength I would say commitment to security yeah and community and simplicity right the three things okay so you hate the word Mo I have to push

because that's what I do yeah how do you think about what is the defensibility of Unison yeah especially because you alluded earlier to that kind of model I think liquidity is defensibility in D5 and that doesn't necessarily mean tvl TBL is a total value total value locked right which is the sort of total Capital locked up in a given protocol and people often mistake that as the most important metric the B3 of the unusual protocol is much more Capital efficient so you don't need as much liquidity to have the same experience but if you think about a user if you were swapping what's important to you price is important to you speed is important to you choice is important to you having an interface that's adjacent and connected to the other things you're going to want to do before and after swapping so I think that Simplicity

drives that and liquidity drives price ultimately yeah so those are two things that are important and so part of why I think you have to Game Theory things out is that the benefit of building open infrastructure structure is that interoperability can become part of your defensibility right can become part of why people use your protocol if you are the easiest to integrate with but then you have to think about well what actually means that they still need to use you right and in the case of something like swapping liquidity really really is part of it that's so fascinating so a big theme that stopped my mind for the people in this room is the world of community and where that comes into your strategy and how to think about that and as you know there's always been this classic Model in a lot of tech where your community your core

Community they used to have this phrase I forgot who coined it I think it was Jeff Moore crossing the chasm this idea that you had your early adopters and communities and they let other people in you guys work with institutions you have early Community like degens who are just hanging out having fun there's just range of people to deal with here so a how do you think about the diversity of the community nurturing the community and then B is community part of the business strategy and how does that yeah yeah it's different depending on the stage of where you are where we are now and being a steward of our community is imperative so we're now 100 people we require every person to go to an ethereum conference at some point in their first year because I think it's just really important that they be

around all the people who have like an emotional connection to uniswap yeah and they do have very much they do right people come up to you and they're like oh my gosh I got the airdrop or whatever and so we think that's really important and it's important to be present in our Discord and Reddit and Twitter we honestly don't do like any events you can waste so much time and energy and the things that are like low Roi and like yep right and that don't really make an impact yeah and we still just believe that like building new things that our users want is the best way to be a friend of our community yeah yeah look Sonny you mentioned the thing about events because the common Motion in devrel or developer relations Is to do a lot of events and it's great that you

talked about those being kind of lower Roi in terms of the payoffs but how do you hear from the users directly or do you even Source their feedback to the product yep we do the way that we really serve well it is a good example like in Discord we solicit feedback and input all the time we also are really conscious you know one thing that's great about a lot of crypto products is you're instantly Global you're not like launching new markets and so we try to do things like different time zones or do things in different languages I never think about that that's interesting yeah so Community is critical and important but you can prioritize it and continue to grow it and Foster it without necessarily doing some of the obvious motions to do that having said that there's a balance in 2021 every time I

went to a conference someone was like oh my god I've never met a human from uniswap before yeah and then Hayden at the very beginning in 2018 and I haven't seen anybody since then so you still have to show up a little bit right right but yeah I think you can do it pretty efficiently that's great okay in your role SEO you oversee talent that includes hiring culture you obviously go to market comms Finance that's a lot and a lot of the people listening are building companies who don't oversee all of that but how do you thou translate that into okay now how do I hire how do I yeah you know do X how do I recruit Etc like how does that play out for you I think that's the biggest challenge and this is hard for any any startup is figuring out how you hire people who

have the right mix of experience and like open-mindedness and excitement about what you're actually building and we're also in an interesting point in crypto where uniswap is a great example like 60 of self-custody wallets that have swapped use uniswap use the uniswap interface not just the uniswap protocol so we have pretty high penetration in the existing community of the existing user base so as we're trying to think about how do we grow yes we need talent and leaders and everyone on the team to understand our crypto native users and to be very sensitive to like the Nuance of what is important what isn't important why they use us in the first place how we are respectful and loyal to that but then also to be creative about how we grow from here I think it's particularly challenging in like BD or Partnerships or things that are sort of

user-facing one example from this morning you know we often will have big Brands excited to like put us in a press release and we say no almost all the time and it's so heartbreaking because it takes a lot of trust for someone to be willing to partner right you know and somebody's trying to disrupt them but if we don't have confidence that their technology is something we would endorse we're not going to be part of something like that and then trying to just suss out and interviewing people we do do a values interview one of our values is built to last oh I think that's really important in crypto particularly now that people have a security mindset building for the long term kind of mindset yeah so we try to do it in how we interview people you know we do a lot of case studies also like how would you

think about launching this launching that but I think people kind of feel it when they meet our team like our office is bright pink and full of unicorns literally and so if people don't come and realize that that's what we're here for then they're not interested anyway totally actually just to Probe on that a little bit more it's kind of funny that you mentioned that the office is full of unicorns because I remember the first time I met Hayden you know the founder of uniswap he was wearing a unicorn tie because it was inspired from the Unicorn tapestries which I think are up in New York at The Cloisters I can't remember where they are but I think they're up there and it's kind of interesting because he's bringing together in a way art technology you know this culture that you're bringing together in your

company which is probably one of the more scaled crypto companies you are bringing together especially in the functions you oversee like a lot of diverse groups and then you're also interfacing and working with engineering and other folks I'd love to hear also how your teams think about working with those teams and if there are any culture clashes or if there are any things you have to do to bridge the groups or how you think about all that yeah so just a little bit of context on what our team and Company look like so Hayden Adams started uniswap as a project funded by the ethereum foundation in 2018 he wasn't trying to build a company which I think is part of the success the protocol he was trying to build something that embodied the values of ethereum and then funded by 16z he hired a couple people in part because he felt

like grant funding wasn't quite enough to build a really resilient protocol and ultimately products on top of it I joined when uniswap was about 10 people in 2021 and when I joined there was one product person one designer four Engineers two lawyers and me lawyers are kind of early hires in crypto startups as you guys probably know relative to other startups and I'm actually a lawyer by training which is part of why I really love crypto yeah it's an intersection of so many different disciplines yeah totally so when I joined there already have been these days where the uniswap protocol had done more volume than coinbase and certainly did more trading volume and crypto to crypto swapping relative to coinbase versus coinbase's overall total volume and the team was Tiny since then we've built out a lot of the functions and

pieces of a company that didn't exist before because Hayden's Vision what I was excited to sign on for was that we should build applications on top of the protocol that for the protocol to really grow and be successful and be resilient over time you needed to have applications on top of it that make it useful and so that's what our company's been doing since then is building those products we've launched a wallet and have a team Marketplace and then improving our web app so sometimes it can feel like well the headline number the vanity metric that many people look at when they think about uniswap is volume on the protocol and it can feel like hasn't changed that much since we built an actual company around it but a lot of it has been building the foundation for these other new products I wanted to give that context that's

super helpful and so when we're talking about these teams why do we have any of these teams in the first place right it was a choice to start to build a company and build applications because the Hope was that that would magnify the impact that we could have in general in D5 and that the protocols shouldn't actually meet our team in our company so given that context then how do all those teams connect together and deal with all that collaboration across the groups well Defy is truly truly multi-disciplinary and so everyone has to be able to tolerate each other being in the room yeah and it doesn't mean that you're looking for permission from a different team right permission for illegal to sign off on something or permission for like a PM to say yes this is on our roadmap so we operate in just

sort of small pods everything has to be really really collaborative and one thing that was really important early on was to write down some of our principles around open source development why are we commit to open source what does that mean when do we build in the open when do we not build in the open and those aren't uniformly applied across everything that we build so for example the wallet we didn't build in public but we did open source and if team Marketplace we built in public so they're just kind of trade off specific to each thing but writing all that down was really important because we're never going to hire someone who's going to say why can't we make a future protocol proprietary that's contrary to the entire ethos right but it was very helpful to have some of that stuff encoded so people kind of know how to

interact with each other the last thing I should say about the importance of how we've got things done is that because we are pretty collaborative it's very helpful to have a lot of people in person so 70 of the company lives in New York City and about half the team is there every single day so most people are there about three days a week and that helps us move fast so you mentioned PMS you just kind of quickly drop that in do you guys actually have product managers because that's one thing I really am curious about for how people are going to grow and scale their companies does that work in a crypto company for those that don't know this history there's always been this love hate relationship in Tech with the role of product managers between engineers and designers and you know sales and

community and Google famously like hired a bunch fired a bunch and then kind of went back to the basics so I'm curious that you guys are thinking about that yes so for a few months we've entertained the traditional technology company model we have a PM and that PM is the center of decisions we do not do that anymore we still have PMS and they are wonderful and critical to driving work forward word yeah but what we found is that our new ideas come either from deeply technical perspectives or very user-focused perspectives that are coming often from our design team or the market-facing like BD go to market teams yeah so one end of the spectrum there's this thing we released called permit two that basically just allows you to now interact with a smart contract and

permit it once and interacting with it something like that comes typically from an engineer okay or we have now a lot of ideas around how we can bring the protocol to people around payments and FX and that is largely coming from people who are out talking to Partners or talking users all the time and so I still think you still need PMS to bring everything together but because there's such steep knowledge you need to either meet a user need or change Market structure in the case of D5 yeah and then how do you kind of get things done because obviously you said the PMS are there to help Drive things forward but you also said earlier there's a super collaborative everyone has to be involved given the ethos it feels like those are two very fundamentally at odds yeah like how do you guys prioritize is

there a leadership top-down strategy is the company bottom up how do you sort of structure that like Innovation process I guess each quarter we've done a tiny bit differently depending on where we were in the roadmap for the company but it's a bit of each so again when I joined it was 10 people all 10 people sat together and thought what are the things that we want to build next what do we think of the gaps to driving more growth and adoption like where is our web app falling behind how do we think about obvious competitors to us like aggregators wallets things like that now what we do is we have sort of Bottoms Up brainstorms in each pod and then Hayden Cal who runs design and I and I had a engineering will just sit together with the PMs and land on that so it's kind of

a mix to be honest got it okay you don't oversee engineering but I am curious because a lot of the builders in this room are not all Engineers how you think about smart contract development from a non-engineers perspective yeah have you had to shift any mental models there were there any surprises that you sort of came to when you first came to the world of smart contract development it feels very unlike anything in tradfi yes definitely I mean that's part of what got me passionate about crypto in the first place is like having set my career as an investor wanting to change the financial system I started a fintech company realized fintech doesn't really change things that much it's sort of like a layer on top that like smart contracts is what excites me so much however building smart contracts is many people in the room probably know is a

different way of working than building like a typical consumer app or a consumer product and so making sure that our wallet team operates very differently from like our protocols team because they are having to anticipate issues at different points smart contracts must be safe that sounds obvious but need to be audited it's just being really really security minded and security oriented like we literally do not move fast and break things right built to last is one of our values but our wallet team then has to like get to Market quickly get user feedback and so you do need to have those different ways of operating okay I'm gonna go a little lightning round to you questions so regulation maybe there's a lot of lightning round to answer but definitely want to hear anything that's top of mind for you on the top yeah regulation and

we can talk about what's going on in the current Financial system as well at the end but thoughts on regulation well I think right now every crypto company needs to be really really hard to kill and it's a bummer to be thinking about regulation a lot in the early days of trying to just build a product or build a smart contract protocol and get people to use it I really do think that if you're building something that people will use then you should be confident in the long term that's how I think about it for you to swap like if we're building something that is an improvement on current markets we're building something that's useful for people than like that over the long term but it's specific to every company whether it makes sense to spend time on policy and regulation we spend a lot of time on it because we think that

the promise of anybody being able to create a market is kind of radical in the long term Capital formation and policy speak the ability for anybody to be able to raise capital is part of the promise of automated market makers and of D5 But It's tricky to navigate how that fits into today's rules right but basically my main Takeaway on interacting around Financial regulation for a long time now is that you cannot improve today's system by adapting to today's rules and if we have new rails we need new rules and so trying to kind of fit what you're building into the way the rules are I actually don't think is a winning strategy that doesn't mean you should break them but it means you should to the extent that what you're building requires some policy shifts like very proactively try to seek them I know I said I'd ask ask you about the

current banking situation curious your thoughts on that I mean look it's been a really crazy week in trading Banking and nothing proves the importance of defying resilient protocols more than like the challenge of balance sheets but for people who come from Finance one of the things I often say is like imagine if you can have Financial activity without relying on balance sheets or the notion that you can have a market without having a market maker if people have a background in finance they realize that's kind of mind-blowing and I think just seeing what happened with SCB is a concrete example of what we mean when we say you want to reduce trust or eliminate trust sometimes trust can mean a lot of different things and can be confusing and it's easy to argue what do you mean you still have to trust a protocol if you're interacting with it

yeah but you don't have to trust static reporting yeah that is ultimately what you're relying on to know that you can access your money so you know swap protocol did record volume of over 11 billion dollars in volume and that 24 hour period and it's crazy when you come from an environment where times have increased volume like that change the operation National environment right feel it if you're on the trading floor and you're trading 10 times what you're used to you feel it in the energy and in that case the protocol operates independently and autonomously every single person who'd ever built it was probably asleep when a lot of that was happening so that I think just illustrates the importance of these durable New Foundation that defy represents but it's again just like a

really unfortunate time my heart goes out to everybody who was stressed out over the weekend yeah uncertain what was going to happen me too and I do think it's really interesting because until now a lot of the people that have really fast adopted crypto have been in countries and places where the financial system hasn't been secure so it's not great that it's happening but great that people are understanding the vulnerabilities in the system the lack of resilience that so many of us have been thinking about for a long time especially those that went through the 2008 financial crisis and the only generation that doesn't even have the memory of that or any funds and Banks so feeling that vulnerability and knowing that what you guys are building is kind of exciting to hear that so many people came to unislop in that time it'll be

interesting to see how that plays out yeah my first week work I think was when Lehman crashed and I was working on trading floor at the time and another crypto founder was asking over the weekend it was just what felt like and I was like no this is actually not what it felt like like it was like much bigger and much more dramatic for those people who remember but it is to your point a powerful reminder of why it is so important to have in the promise of having like interoperable Risley and audible code at the core of the financial system is really exciting that's super exciting one of the talks that Tim rothbard and our head of research gave yesterday talked a lot about how to think about helping people make the case for crypto how do you make the case as someone again who talks a

lot to Tried by coming yourself from tradify 2 like what's the moment that you think they'll get it what kind of things do you say to convince them Advocate especially when you start hiring more people who are only coming from traditional backgrounds and don't even know what we're talking about how do you think about convincing people to come into this space yeah yeah honestly right now I don't try to convince anybody maybe that's a no disappointing answer but I think right now we're not trying to convince a lot of people instead I'm trying to spend we're trying to spend all of our Energy building it so you don't have to use as many words to convince that's right so like what I did for my extended family is from eight different states all different Industries nobody works in Tech nobody works in finance very

different levels of education and so over Thanksgiving I just did a demo of uniswap our new wallet and open say and everyone was like wait I keep my account my account is mine my assets are mine like you can see it if you just do those demos of a couple of these products yeah and I think that clicks with people for different reasons either because they care about privacy or because they care about lock-in and they don't like and respect the companies they think own their data so different things resonate with different people and I find the most helpful thing is just to show people Show versus tell that is a great note for us to end on we will now open it up to questions from the audience I am Z hi um quick question for you you talked a little bit about having to

shift business models just given the lack of metrics in web3 what are the metrics that you wish you had um given that unisoft has such a wide top of funnel and and just a variety of mainstream users djends Etc so what are the things you'd like to track in an Ideal World I just wish we could communicate with someone if they churn that's the main thing it's not like even knowing data about them yeah so it's not so much that we want to start collecting information we want to think about ways to communicate with users without having to have all their information so you could think about like messaging through wallets but that's the main thing it's just as you look at your funnel if someone's not there anymore you have very limited ability to understand where they came from in the first place and

then how you can reach them again awesome actually just one quick note you were saying that you want to communicate so you can understand the churn as a metric to understand but are there other metrics that you guys also use to measure the success because you mentioned tvl was not a good one but like what is there yeah yeah I think price is important so there's an important sort of relative to other trading protocols we want to be able to say you can get competitive if not the best prices using our unisweb web app so how can we help make that possible performance on the wallet wallets are shockingly in performance and it's like different sort of metrics of Speed and Performance in the app itself we still have funnel metrics we still have cohorts and the kinds of stuff that you would look at for a normal consumer app

it's just you can do less with them because you can interact with and contact your users yeah it makes total sense hi thanks for the talk we know that the uniswap wallet app has kind of been stuck in test flight yes I was wondering if you could talk about uniswap's experience navigating App Store policies what you guys are doing to try to get approved by the App Store Etc yeah so ACC has been an amazing helper on this I think this is an area where investors who've seen many many more companies go through it is very helpful so even though we have plenty of people on our team now who've been through App Store approval many times a16c is on the front lines of seeing how they're treating web 3 companies and so it can kind of give you more current information and perspective

I'm actually really happy with that story time the sense of like I think it was good for us to go test flight first I think that our Instinct having started the core of the team started by launching a protocol where you release it right away to the whole world our Instinct was like a launch is just a launch like just go ga right away and generally available right away and it's an example of the difference in launching protocols versus launching products for a consumer app and this has given us good user feedback and a good way to like reward questions around Community reward existing users what I wish we could have done differently is we sort of built a relationship with them but we built a relationship just with the people who were doing our actual approval and we should have probably spent time in advance and maybe

some of you should start sharing this too we spent time in advance in partnership with a16z like figuring out who do we need to meet and explain to them why we are exactly the app they should be letting in the App Store if they're worried about their brand and they're worried about risk and they're worried about people losing their money like a self-custody wallet from the most trusted name in DFI that's thinking talking about this is exactly who they should be approving and it seems like they aren't necessarily as deep in it and it's not a priority area or a high growth area from their perspective so I guess I could just say there's no substitute for starting to build some Human Relationships that makes sense thanks one more question let's say you all do get approved how much would you all kind of push the envelope on App

Store fees so would you all offer the opportunity to buy what about swap fees that sort of thing yeah so when you say push the envelope so far there's no apple take rate on swapping or Fiat on-ramp much like they don't take 30 percent of your Robin Hood trade right I mean Robin Hood trading is free but you know what I mean it's more analogous to like a brokerage in that sense than it is to like an in-game item different perspective on the similar question though is one thing we're really excited about is the opportunity for third-party app stores so as you may have seen in Europe now Apple's going to have to allow like side loading or third-party app stores and that's an area that we're really excited about and

we'd love to collaborate with other web 3 companies that want to help make that possible does that mean building like a separate version of the app that has kind of more full featured functionality and that can be side loaded by users independently I don't think anyone knows how the app stores themselves are going to play out like nobody yet knows what the infrastructure for that app store is whether it's like same map but you have some features that are hidden in the one that's approved by the Apple App Store and others we're not sure but I guess we're thinking about it kind of similarly to Android just like you have slightly different functionality on different platforms as it is what I meant by the app store though is we're excited about helping contribute to that App Store like not just release our own app through it

but think about what that would look like I could do that thank you yeah exactly truly decentralized App Store one quick follow-up on his question because you mentioned it and I think people in this room would want to know more about that you mentioned how you have to kind of Go full lunch it's generally yeah we'll write out at the door does that also mean like no MVP because one tension obviously you mentioned we don't want to move fast and break things but you don't necessarily want to do the minimal viable product but you may not also necessarily want to do the maximum viable product so at what point do you launch between that Spectrum yep I think it depends entirely on the product so we obviously test everything internally ourselves and one thing that we did is especially as we got bigger there are many people were

enthusiastic about crypto but maybe hadn't used it a lot themselves and so we just started gifting Hayden gifted tons of people internally froggy friends nfts and force them to download the wallet and then it's like oh the CEOs sent me an obtain can tell that I don't have our wallet yeah you know so like we just do a lot a lot of internal testing and then for stuff like the wallet it makes sense to do an MVP and I think now going forward do that all the time on the protocols you can obviously do things in testnet I think there kind of comes down to what you're building whether you're building in the open or not yeah great hi thank you for sharing your experiences there's new products that unisol has been building like the nft trading the wallet so how do you evaluate it's kind of a trade-off

between working on your core product and expanding into these new different areas so how do you identify interesting areas yeah so identifying interesting areas the way we've thought about anything and everything we wanted to build was what is a barrier to more people ultimately using core protocols the core protocol basically people using the promise of defy and so we thought it was wallets wallets are hard to use either barrier or a natural growth driver that you could attach to and bring those users to you know Swap and that's why we got into nfts because he thought it was a good top of funnel kind of user acquisition strategy is to have people who get into the space because of nfts but they ultimately are going to need to swap and so can you provide both of those things in the same place as I mentioned I think

that we didn't do quite enough hard thinking about that to like build a product that really captured that so I think that's how I think about it for those that don't know Mary's role also oversees growth as part of being CEO so yeah and I know one of the barriers is also you know getting crypto right like on camping is that something that uniswap is considering potentially so we have a Fiat on-ramp we integrated Fiat on-ramp in December it's kind of hidden but we'll be doing a lot in the next month or so to make it more obvious but basically like what's holding people back and what's bringing people and is there does it make sense can you do better in either of those areas or just like integrate with those sort of adjacent activities thank you amazing talk so much great information I

got a ton of notes already first off congratulations on building a phenomenal product I know it's protocol designers we've used uniswap as the True North in terms of the documentation the smart contracts decisions around open source so kudos for that well I had nothing to do with any of that actually but thank you I'm sure you did in some ways my first question you brought up a really interesting point which was that when unit swap first started division actually wasn't a business that was an idea and I think for a lot of us as Founders we get into this to build ideas and very quickly it becomes about building a business can you talk a bit about what does that Journey look like from going from idea to then business I think it's a really important and hard question in crypto in particular because

so many of us are excited about the ideas and you get into the space because you want to make the ideas real and bring them to life and then when you bring them to life you have users who expect a certain experience and so you either have to cultivate an ecosystem of products or you have to be building those things yourself so people can interact with them simply you don't have to become a business but the way we thought about it was that Hayden felt like he built a great team the team wanted to stick together keep working together we felt like the barriers to broader adoption of the current unit swap protocol and also its promise was the application layer was making it easier to use and so that lent itself very well to a company that then needed to build more

products which meant we needed to hire more people and we want to be self-sustaining so then you get to make money at some point if you want to keep paying everybody so we sort of fell into it a little bit to be honest just because of what we wanted to achieve and so we just talked about being a business as being sustainable that makes so much sense it's almost like the business is a critical component to fueling the idea exactly okay last question you know obviously you're a CEO of a massively successful company I'm curious like my perspective of the role of operations is almost like general purpose Problem Solver like legal go to market all these different things can you talk about what that was like at the smaller scale like the role of a CEO at a small company I think it's the same I think general

purpose Problem Solver is true and it's like 10 people or 100 people or many more so when it was small it was like we have no roadmap should we do a roadmap so you know it was sort of like figuring out the sort of what general gaps or we had no Mission we had no vision statement we had no values it was like how helping put some of that foundational stuff in place and then it was hiring people to run teams that filled those core functions company and someone was asking me last night our head of recruiting was asking me do I think it's more important that we have senior IC Engineers or engine managers and I was like I have a totally unsatisfying answer which is that at our size company everyone has to be a player coach and so you have to have both

especially because we have shared infrastructure like a lot of the infrastructure we use is open infrastructure almost everything you don't need as big a team to do a lot of stuff and so our company's always probably going to be quite small in terms of head count but you still need people who are very experienced or have long-term perspective at least if not experience in this leadership roles so I think it's just the same mindset regardless of the stage cool thank you so much that's great just one interesting note in his question about the road map I was wondering I want to make sure we close this thread on how you think about this what you said about ideation and coming to product and then how you think about product Market fit because that's another I think gem that was buried in his question as well yeah

yeah so I think product Market fit for protocols and products is quite different and in a protocol you can kind of program a hypothesis for product Market fit into your protocol right you have a hypothesis about what kind of incentives or mechanisms you think are going to create that and I think we have struggled frankly with transitioning that mindset to product so like our nft Marketplace our hypothesis was people want to be able to buy and sell digital assets in the same place and all right nft aggregator has very limited adoption because that's just not the right problem to be solving for that kind of a product so I think it's a little bit different for protocols than it is for products and I think we're still kind of struggling with that which kind of gets back to not knowing enough about your

users necessarily when you're starting out and deciding to build something thanks MC go ahead thank you for everything echoing everybody I think uniswab's decentralized model is a North star for many of us we're building in decentralized Commerce for expression and beauty products particularly and I'd like to ask your best practices or advice as a leader with a no code background obviously with deep experience in finance we as a team of a deep experience in Commerce and and lifestyle Industries but are one of the few in the room that don't write code so I'd love to get some tips on how to be most effective one thing I think is really important which I'm a little embarrassed to say I only did a couple weeks ago when I was on vacation is learn to write a smart contract and deploy a smart contract yourself then on

vacation I did yes yes yes so yes yes so my partner is also a crypto engineer and so it was like you know you should just learn to do this and I was like you're right I should let's do this on vacation and it was really helpful because very transfer from as a function I was like oh I talk about why this is important all the time from a conceptual or systemic sort of perspective would having to understand that that's a function in the smart contract and what it means so that's one piece of advice I would say it may not get you any more respect from Engineers but I think it's important for mindset and then just be humble about what you know and don't know you mentioned that uniswap is the North Star and decentralization I really haven't talked very much about decentralization but decentralization

can mean many different things one thing that was really hard but this is not actually the question you asked me but one thing that was really hard the first year that I was there is that a lot of things would happen in governance and the whole point is that the team at unit swap labs should not be needed for any of those decisions or any of those debates as Hayden does not struggle with this he's very self-aware and committed to his original principles of minimized governance where the roles of responsibility for uniswell governance are clear and they should be deliberate upon and acted by the community and the token holders but the company does not vote or participate in governance no employees and Hayden do not vote or participate in governance and so sometimes it was very hard to see things happening on Twitter or people who you

were friends with in the community also excited about and we couldn't participate so I think just thinking in advance about what that's going to look and feel like for you as humans and your team and what you can enshrine how you can like institutionalize your intentions in a way that if you cannot be part of that and that's part of the point those people who are now part of your community have enough information about what your intentions were that you can feel good about how those dialogues and debates happen without you it's very helpful but we're actually building the voting tool as we speak so thank you thank you AMC excellent talk and well moderated as well can you talk about a time where perhaps you came in you joined the team of 10 they already had product Market

fit they're already a great team but can you talk about a time where you had something specific in mind for the team like a direction and maybe there was a little bit of resistance maybe this was something that the team wasn't quite ready for or they thought differently and then perhaps there was a way that you're able to bring the team together and have like a new Direction can you talk about how you navigated that can you talk about how that went yeah so an ongoing one that I think is hard for most teams in D5 is most of the world's Capital so if we want to unlock Universal ownership in exchange that means get more users and individuals or Enterprises it also means get more capital and if most of the world's capital is locked so to speak or get kept by institutions that require

identity and require knowing who you are that's potentially a huge barrier to adoption and I think one of the hardest things to figure out is like when is it a good use of our time to help figure out how to break that and which institutions or guardians of all that Capital we want to work with us productively so when I first joined I would talk about this like very abstract terms here's how big this Market is or here's a big Foreign Exchange Market is here's something the fixed income Market is look at all this money in the world they care about kyc and AML and we need to figure out a solution to that and then over time you realize that that's contrary to the ideals and the principles of permission list Financial infrastructure her and I knew that I wasn't trying to suggest that we should

change anything at uniswap I was rather saying let's figure out how we get these organizations that have so much Capital to start using the uniswap protocol either swapping and buying and selling crypto or using our infrastructure for other forms of money and I think that that's an example of timing right where I think the timing was too soon two years ago right now it may seem like traditional financial institutions don't have any interest in defy I actually think this is a much much better time right because nobody wants just a press release and instead you can start to think about well okay which pieces of the landscape are incentivized to take advantage of the benefits of crypto and smart contracts so if someone is benefiting from time to settle they don't really care about disrupting that process and using smart contracts if

someone is benefiting from customer lock-in they don't really care either so trying to think about who are players who have big pools of capital that would benefit from the benefits of like instant settlement of more transparency of lower cost transactions access and so we've just done a couple different things how we kind of broke through this is one member of our research team and I had a thesis that Warren exchange on the uniswap protocol could be a really good use case and so we wrote a little research paper just kind of explaining how and why would this make for a better institutional Foreign Exchange Market retail Foreign Exchange Market and remittance market and it was kind of high level but it forced us to dive into our assumptions and try to figure out okay well how would we actually make this useful which users are underserved and

don't have access for banks or money transfer operators today so I guess that's the biggest example we haven't cracked it and what have I done I've just like tried to question my own assumptions over and over try to think about which partners are potentially open to the way we see the world and then really try to dive in and do some research on it and I think that we now have a couple ideas around that that are true to our values in D5 but that can open up what we do to a lot more people that's great with part of your question also about how to navigate that internally oh yeah so I spent just tons of time talking to everybody about why I cared about our mission like it was easier because it was 10 people I didn't have to sort of give a talk to the whole

company but I just had long lunches and dinners with every single person there to explain why changing the financial system and Defy is something that I was passionate about and so I think I have their trust that my intentions are the same so if I use like a word or an acronym that triggers people they're not blaming me or they'll tell me and I'll stop using it but it's honestly kind of hard in hiring people who come from Trad five because we make assumptions about the way the world is and the whole point is we want the world to be different thank you so much thank you and just for those in the room who don't know the acronyms that MC mentioned with kyc know your customer AML anti-money laundering we do have a great primer on illicit finance and how to navigate that hey MC thanks for the talk my question

is really around hiring so I have two questions the first one is what kind of people do you hire and then where have you seen success we live in a world where the experience of yesterday doesn't apply to today and there's very few people with experience doing this exact thing so how do you think about it when you hire and then the second thing is really about you when you decide to join uniswap like you come from a company with a world renowned brand you know great 401K health benefits everything great pay strong balance sheet and then you have like this guy and the T-shirt with a cool logo and 10 people like what were the few strong conviction points that made you come over in other words if I want to hire you in two years what do I have to do to get there yeah yeah great question okay

so the first question on uh who do you hire what do you look for in the profile where have you seen success yeah and I'm not sure that we've gotten that perfectly but we have an amazing amazing team now we're 30 people a year ago we're 100 now people haven't been there for very long so I think for the most part we've done it pretty well one it's really important that someone's passionate about our mission our company mission is to unlock Universal ownership and exchange so at a very high level anyone in the world should be able to own things and be able to participate in exchange and it's important to us that people like care about that that resonates with them they can have so many different reasons why that's the case and then having demonstrated that first principles like whether problem solving or launching something because

you can't really just operate in heuristics and pattern matching in the way that you can in a lot of even tech companies relative to crypto where people come from referrals referrals referrals have been very very helpful to be honest once we got to a certain stage of like 30 people then we really leaned on referrals and incentivized people for referrals one other thing I should mention that is I think very important to our company is and part of what I think has helped us build better products we're actually 40 women as well which encrypt them is very unusual and our smart contracts team is actually 50 50. women Engineers I think it just became self-fulfilling in that women who were really past question about crypto or smart contract Engineers we're like oh this is a place that has more women and that made it more compelling and

interesting to then work at uniswap so I think that's powerful because people who are working there every day can tell the story that many more times and magnify the impact of recruiters I don't think that any single background is the most important thing we really don't pay attention to educational background that much of the four or five people who built version one two and three of the protocol two of them we weren't even sure if they went to college so people can demonstrate their capabilities in other ways on me why I decided to join uniswap so I've been obsessed and passionate about crypto since about 2011. I first learned about it when I was in law school I'd come out of spending three years as an investor at Goldman Sachs in their internal hedge fund during the financial crisis was like I want to work toward improving the

financial system that is when I think about the impact that the internet can have on the world in my lifetime it seems like in media it's sort of eliminated business models and created a lot of good mixed outcomes and financial services if it can reduce cost create transparency expand access that Arc should be positive over the course of my lifetime and good for people in the world and so how and where can I contribute to that so I was passionate about crypto early on but for many years like 2011 to 2018 19 a lot of crypto was focused on infrastructure or very foundational layers where as someone who's not an engineer I couldn't be that helpful I just like couldn't contribute that much and a friend of mine who'd known that I'd been passionate about

blockchain and crypto for a long time joined uniswap as general counsel and oh Marvin Marvin adore Marvin Marvin yeah yeah he'd been an open internet Advocate and policy advocate in sort of the early 2000s and 2010s and then he was General Counsel of protocol labs and when he came to uniswap he called me and said this company is incredible the founder is amazing you have shared so much of your sort of vision for the world the impact is huge we have no person who has like business experience or operational experience here and the whole time I've known you you've said that you are like an entrepreneur by nature and like everything I did at BlackRock was starting new businesses from zero and scaling them to hundreds of people or zero Revenue scaling it to 100 million plus and I did that 2.5 times when time

failed and he was like since I've known you you've been passionate about blockchains said you have an entrepreneurial spirit and you've worked at a big company so if you're not going to come to uniswap tomorrow morning you should just look in the mirror and look at yourself and say I am a big company person and I was like what that was so mean and I spent days with Hayden talking about what he wanted and what he hoped for and how I thought about the sort of potential impact of financial system broadly honestly it wasn't a hard decision it was really easy it just was I had this like long-standing interest and I think that you'll find that as you're hiring people there will be people who've been watching crypto have been passionate about it but they haven't found the product or the opportunity or the founder that speaks

to them and they think is a fit yeah so the core is having a great company and the tactics is referrals and say you know if you don't commit you're a big company person exactly guilt them into it thanks for sharing hi I'm saying thanks for the talk I love the talk so at the end of 2021 I also trying to look up the uni spot as a female engineer I'm always the only females in the room especially in the crypto world and when I look up you know they swap a job dashboard everyone who work at a uni Spa at that time it's all like miles so it's kind of scared me away I didn't apply at that time and so it's really glad to hear that you guys are emphasis on the diversity and

equality at the working space so my question is around you mentioned there are three strands for uni swap could you share more about what's the best practice you apply for the commitment to security and also the building in the community yeah so first of all in your first comment on diversity yes the team was originally all male one woman I think I was like the third woman or something like that and it was just something that honestly was really important to Hayden and his view was like if the point is to build tools for all people then we have to have a diverse team and I think we're fortunate if you're a small team a small company you can do a lot and have a diverse team if you're just thinking about it honestly you don't have to change a lot of your practices and stuff

like that to just like go to a zillion conferences just focus on it okay so on community and security two things one is I think it's a mindset and some of your engineers right it's just having Engineers who care a lot about security think about smart contract code we did a crypto Jeopardy game at our last on-site and one of the categories was hacked D5 protocols and most of our smart contract teams could list all these different hacks and why they happened and follow this and think about it intensely all the time then the other thing is Audits and picking the right Auditors and especially as a new company sometimes you have a long waiting period before you can have one of the top two three audit firms audit your smart contracts but it's worth doing that and we often have had things audited twice on that

last one it seems like in D5 the packs are often mainly Bridges than the core protocol itself how does that kind of work on the whole yeah messaging and building side because you don't really have control over the bridges yep so the bridges are it's really scary another thing that was really tough for a long time people in the community would sort of be agitated about why Universal wasn't deployed on more chains and that is a governance decision the labs team has nothing to do with that it's voted on through governance but the community was pretty cautious about supporting deployment to chains that had bridges that basically required a multi-sig or had some limited security capabilities yeah that one's really tough I think like security culture meant that for two years unisop wasn't deployed on other chains that uh

Sushi swap for example was because part of the principles of the community was to care about security but there was a hack this past week unfortunately Euler which I thought very highly of and thought was doing really cool things was hacked because they integrated another piece of code and so those are my only two pieces of advice they may sound pretty obvious on community I think from the very very beginning just like talking to everybody at conferences a couple key conferences about what you're doing so you get people kind of excited but then from there there's a lot of tools to keep Community engaged that we don't deploy at all or use at all like giving things to your users and giving people access to stuff honestly the airdrop is the thing that comes back over and over that people are excited

about so now that there's a lot more thinking around how you can be creative and thoughtful about airdrops and keep people engaged there are other companies that would have more advanced thinking on that because they did it more recently than we would call it thank you thank you you mentioned earlier that a lot of money is still tied up in Trad fi and in thinking about you know what the systems look like there versus what we're moving forward towards when you think about strategy how much of that strategy is geared towards building things for the Brave New World versus building things that are kind of catering to or tying back to try to find getting that over yeah that's kind of a question around sort of like internal navigating things where I might have a perspective that might be different from

people like early employees of the company like Aiden and I completely agree that everything we're doing is for the Brave New World and that's our strategy as a company we're not spending time sitting with people who are excited about how they could use blockchain technology with Trad five players helping them explain blockchain technology to them because I was the person that everybody pitched at BlackRock for years and years and years until they agreed to partner with coinbase like I have an appreciation for how long and hard those things are and I don't think that's the best use of our time at uniswap I also think that defy especially is likely to have more consumer driven adoption and Hayden I have different reasons that we thought that and we've debated how that's going to unfold no one really knows exactly but we are entirely building for the

Brave New World and then that just means you have to be realistic about how do you anticipate what growth is going to look like and so that's part of why we've been trying to simplify the consumer experience make the consumer experience easier it's just fewer hurdles right and at some point there will be that inflection point where people start to move over in Mass hopefully yeah thanks hi I'm safe I'm just thinking through how to manage corporate treasuries better and I'm sure this is something you've you're thinking about you can illuminate what uniswap does because I know you guys have a centralized entity that probably pays payroll and rent and things like that but also have decentralized funds how do you go about that how do you think about it yes so we use four different banks and we keep like half of our cash and

money market funds or treasuries so how do we think about I mean we just operate under the assumption that it's important to be hard to kill so to speak and so you don't want to rely on a single platform that's kind of obvious now I suppose after the weekend everybody felt the pain of relying on a single company but that's what I would recommend so right now the reason we've shipped most of our cash increasingly into higher yielding but pretty safe assets like treasuries is obviously because of better treasury management higher yield we did do stable coin lending last year and the year before but yeah just use multiple Banks was there a question of whether to allocate some portion of it to like Bitcoin or east or something like that yes yes yes yes so we have actually did do that and not just Bitcoin and eat we

actually purchased tokens so I say we I mean use web Labs the company that's built all the products that are now on top of the protocols what we focus on we also bought a couple other protocols because we wanted to participate in governance so we wanted to sort of illustrate and demonstrate as token holders ourselves and other D5 protocols and support the defy ecosystem that's amazing thank you thank you hey MC thank you very much for the talk I'm curious because you're from a traditional Finance background I've always been thinking the lack of credit lending might be a hurdle for defy becoming mainstream adopted what do you think of that the lack of lending the lack of credit lending so it's all over clatterized well some people have tried to do less collateralized lending protocols and they've had a hard time succeeding so far I think the hardest

part is like typically how you make up for having less collateral is you have more information about your borrower so there are trade-offs there if you want very limited information what information can you get that can help you underwrite something I generally agree that we have to figure out more reliable risk supported ways of doing credit hopefully that's something you're working on no actually I'm working on launching game but yeah credit lending is always a very interesting as well there is a connection indirectly with those two because technically you're on chain gain reputation anything you build on Jane is Clues into your reputation which can then feed your credit so they're all connected awesome well just to quickly sum up it sounds like decentralization building an open everything is different there's also more of the same and hopefully all of

you get to the point to be able to hire and Emcee yourself thank you so much MC we really appreciate you being here today thank you for listening to web3 with A6 and Z you can find show notes with links to resources books or papers discussed transcripts and more at asicsncrypto.com this episode was produced and edited by sonal choxi that's me the episode was technically edited by our audio editor Justin golden credit also to moonshot design for the art and all thanks to support from Asics and Z crypto to follow more of our work and get updates resources from us and from others be

sure to subscribe to our web 3 Weekly Newsletter you can find it on our website at asicsnzcrypto.com thank you for listening and for subscribing let's go [Music]