Finding users & building partnerships in web3 | Ryan Wyatt

Transcript

[Music] thank you so I'm going to talk about a little more of like a one to 100 Journey uh you probably have heard a lot of the zero to one stories and you'll continue here you have Kevin Rose later which is going to be dope for you all so my background is basically in the Creator economy and then you know I didn't read some like Bitcoin white paper that changed my life to get into crypto I got really in because of digital ownership and being a gamer uh so yeah I met polygon Labs now and uh spent my time at YouTube before in the Creator economy and have just been a die-hard gamer my whole life so as a little kid just you know you know [ __ ] posting and uh you know Counter-Strike

and Quake and Team Fortress classic and just really becoming a gamer uh through and through dialing up the dial-up era 56k modem uh you know 300 ping got really into PC gaming that ultimately led me to in college playing competitively so played Call of Duty competitively and then when I was in college I'm like I got to figure out uh a real job you know that makes money because Esports hadn't really turned into anything meaningful there's really no money to be had it was like beer money on the weekends at Ohio State so there was more to do so I started streaming not a lot of money in streaming at the time it was just in tv nobody was really making any money off of it and so I said all right college is coming to an end I really got to figure

out how I get a job in this industry in the gaming industry and so I I got hooked on this idea that I enjoyed trying to find content of you know World of Warcraft videos or Counter-Strike montages you know and got in this idea that other people might like watching gaming videos that was a little bit crazy of a concept because at the time everyone was saying nobody wants to watch people play video games it's like a stupid ass idea people want to play video games and that did resonate a little bit because I remember my older brother when he had the controller I'd always be like dude I want to play like I don't want to watch you play anymore and so sometimes I doubted myself but I said hey let's go on this journey of figuring out if people want to watch people play video games and so that's

what I did um and it was funny because in the Esports days it kind of you saw this whole idea of people watching people play video games starting to emerge and there was all kind of things that were happening around us of things that were changing you know at these uh MLG land events that we would do one thing was like the CRT monitors for Halo just big TV screens that we would have to bring in then all of a sudden you know the LCD screens came out and then you know uh internet bandwidth like CDN costs were so expensive to upload that we couldn't actually stream content from the ballroom that ended up getting cheaper over time and so there was a lot of these great technological breakthroughs that were starting to happen uh in the space and so I worked at a startup called Machinima it got

acquired by Warner Brothers I then worked at Major League Gaming it got acquired by Activision Blizzard and so Google Ventures had invested in Machinima and had seen some of the stuff we were doing around gaming video and Google at the time was looking to hire the first head of gaming at YouTube because twitch had just acquired Amazon YouTube was really behind on the gaming Wars um obviously they didn't get to acquire twitch and so Susan would just keep the CEO at the time said look we gotta focus on this vertical and come in so they tapped me which was exciting for me as an opportunity I was 27 years old to come in as I had YouTube I had definitely a little bit of imposter syndrome uh it being in the room with a bunch of older execs and I think the one

thing that I was able to realize though was there was a lot that I could learn from them and there was a lot that they could learn from me about really what does it take to be a Creator what does it look to be in this space and so one of the things that I you know like I was talking about is we had to actually bet on a bunch of things that we had no control over so by that it was yeah we have this video platform people can upload videos uh yeah we are going to be able to sell pre-roll advertising um but then there was a bunch of factors that didn't come out so how do you actually get people to upload gameplay well we barely have any monetization tool because at the time we only had pre-roll ads it was really hard and

cumbersome to capture video content you you basically got to wait for the rise of this Dazzle capture card that let people plug their Xbox or Playstation directly and start capturing content streaming was almost impossible because you needed two PCS you needed an upload speed that could actually hold it and the reason the streaming business was just a terrible business because economically it didn't make sense you couldn't drive the ad Revenue to cover the CDN cost for live streaming infrastructure so it's all bad but you had to keep persisting right because everyone was telling me it's like none of these things are working you know you're not going to be able to stream content it's too expensive the economics don't work people don't want to watch gaming videos it's not going to work and ultimately we started to break through some of these barriers and building out you know the

team and some of the things that we had to face where basically you know we had at YouTube nobody that understood gaming there wasn't a team that existed there was no plan on who we target how we build how we target getting gaming creators how we get gaming Publishers and developers leaned in how we get people buying advertising against gaming content the other big problem that we were facing was with YouTube we were a broad video platform and now verticalize uh Specialists were coming in so music was getting you know attacked by Spotify gaming obviously with twitch and Microsoft mixer and Facebook gaming and all these platforms and so we had to think about building vertical specific products but they had to be broadly

applicable to everybody as well which is kind of a conundrum when you're trying to be vertical specific but you don't want to waste product and engineering resources so that whatever you're doing has to somehow apply to everybody and it worked right we did things like Channel level memberships we did digital Goods uh we ended up you know in the in the height of mobile viewing rolled out mobile mid-rolls and really uh started to educate our sales teams on how they could sell gaming at Mass so a lot of that was fun great spent about eight years there 450 million people log in watch gaming content every day it makes it the largest gaming platform in the world generates billions of dollars for YouTube one of the largest verticals and it's about 85 percent of the entire industry's gaming watch time actually is on YouTube gaming because we really

focused on VOD and short content and live as well but live was something that it was in everybody's mind is a big thing but on paper when you looked at watch time actually did a lot didn't drive much revenue or watch time overall so during that time I was like I got really fascinated with this idea of digital ownership we were spending a lot of time at YouTube looking at things like roadblocks where these games went from highly complementary to driving watch time on YouTube to being a little antagonistic because there's a finite amount of time that people have in a day and instead of watching gaming videos they were growing and playing playing Roblox playing Minecraft and so these same games that had helped us grow started to be somewhat competitive as far as just people's you know time that they have in a day on entertainment and

during that Journey we spent a lot of time on how much people were spending on digital products right gaming obviously very specific and so that got me thinking yeah the way that we purchase and interact and buy today is not going to be significant enough and so counter-strikes the is one of my games that probably 20 years still play today they're about as close to setting up a faux web 3 environment where you can buy skins you can trade them uh you can sell them but wasn't quite there still a wall Garden still had to rely on third-party websites that are violating terms of service in order to like buy and trade offline off the steam store outside of the steam store so I felt like there's something that needs to happen here so I looked around the space of

um where I wanted to be and I chose to go to polygon and I was most excited about polygon because I felt that they actually had the ability to scale the infrastructure and so I started learning more about the space and and I have to give a shout out to the first crypto school here because it's where I started to learn about the space again I didn't have any of these kind of crypto moments or enlightening moments up until digital ownership and so I went down the rabbit hole of uh CSS so thank thank you for this place and digital ownership became the kind of like core Focus for me and the reason why I wanted to jump into space was I felt there was this moment in time that we had really hit an inflection point in web 3 and blockchain uh one I felt that

really from a user perspective if you look at just the value of the user they do not own what they purchased on a digital environment today and that's like very problematic and as they spend more they're going to want more autonomy and ownership over things and the current infrastructure and systems don't enable that to happen so I just fundamentally believed that you had to disrupt the intermediary and actually establish these businesses on a blockchain two I felt that the infrastructure it's not there yet but was starting to be in a place where it will be able to scale so none of the protocols really scale right now and they don't really have to right now at this point right there's not enough transactions happening there's not enough daps that are being built on it but I felt that with polygon with the Acquisitions that we had made

we had spent a billion dollars across three different ZK teams that we brought in-house and felt that with ZK and some of the work that we'll do over the next couple of years we actually are in a place where we can now have daps that are building on top of the protocol actually can do with deal with the volume and scale that we'll start to see over the next three four five years as more adoption happens I think the other thing too is in general philosophically for me I was just felt in order to do your like best work you have to be like where can you drive high impact so whether it's you're starting your company or wherever you're focused like you truly have to get up every day and be what am I and what I'm doing going to drive like the highest

impact on the day-to-day basis and then lastly I just felt that there was this unique opportunity to level up web three particularly on the infrastructure side to start to work with bigger companies bigger Enterprises get them excited start talking about digital ownership start talking about blockchain and so when I joined polygon uh January of last year you know the one thing was okay how do we bring some of the things that are complementary to web 2 into web three what are the goods of what what are the good things of web 2 and the bad things of web 2 that we want to bring over or not bring over into the web 3 space and so for those of you if you're familiar with polygon we have Far and Away established the largest presence and uh Partnerships in Fortune 500

Enterprise companies a lot of our ability to do that has been with one a very specific focus on exactly what we want to do and go after to having a team that's very well-rounded of people that get the web 3 space that are really endemic but also have the polished Prestige leadership skill sets that they've developed over the last decade to be able to run effective organizations and teams and because of that we've partnered with you know you name it all these large companies and yeah some of them are in varying degrees like some of them small nft project where they're just like tinkering on the r d side to just what is this web 3 what is nfts things like Disney which was an accelerator program that spawned other work that we're doing with them that we can't quite share yet and all kind of

Partnerships and so I want to talk a little bit about what we did to establish that team over the last year and a half because basically all of 2022 is where we really want on a rip of bringing a lot of these folks on board and we made a handful of bets handful of categories so one thing that we really believe as far as early adoption that will be really exciting is loyalty and rewards we just kind of felt that one area where people don't have the ownership that they should is in that category so we started working with Starbucks and Starbucks um I mean out of any of the web three or web 2 companies that we work with they get it the most uh Starbucks actually it was the former Chief digital officer who's at Forum three that kind of came up with this idea of how do we expand on

the idea of loyalty and rewards and so that spawned Starbucks Odyssey it's in beta they're basically running a parallel Rewards program they call it stamps it's nfts they're kind of working to figure out how do these worlds converge at one point Reddit was a great example of people that hate nfts web 3 and can we actually approach them with a different angle where it's like don't think about these Apes selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars don't think about kind of all the things that are happening in nfts which like 98 of the stuff happening in FTS was terrible um and so we really talked to them about a different understanding of digital ownership and so they oh all right digital Collectibles not nfts I like this idea tell me more and eight million users later have been now on boarded

into web 3 and kind of what you would call a web 2.5 way it's on polygon they everything happens on polygon but all the crypto jargon and the user journey is all really abstracted away um so they really don't might not even realize that they're operating in actually interacting with a blockchain which I think is awesome and I actually think as you think about scaling and us getting to a hundred million 200 million users a lot of that stuff needs to be abstracted away and I think people are making progress on it if you look at wallets and marketplaces the user journey is getting a little bit better and not so cumbersome another big gap that we had was Creator economy so when we looked at kind of the like pfp Creator space in the beginning of 22 we just weren't in a good spot we weren't a good spot

because we didn't have marketplaces set up that you could actually you know if you were a polygon project you could be on um we didn't have all the wallets that were supporting us that people loved and so we had a lot of different gaps where we had this like problem where we couldn't get a cold start problem for the crater economy and so the first thing that we did instead of going after any kind of projects to try to jump start that was let's improve the on-ramps into the polygon ecosystem so we announced Partnerships with Phantoms great wallet magic Eden and obviously we did go pretty aggressive in general towards you know uh like Solana's ecosystem because they had an incredible user Journey they had incredible Creator ecosystem and that was actually something that we were really missing and so we started you

know established a lot of different marketplaces wallets and then you have the on-ramps but you still don't have any of the magic and so we worked with Utes which was a very successful pfp project that was on Solana we had them Bridge their project over and it's really not the project that matters at all it's actually not important what we brought over was creators that are respected in the industry and that category and they're going to do a launch pad so that they can Empower other creators to create projects and content and so we felt that this would give us a little bit to jumpstart the ecosystem ultimately you have to you know cultivating Community takes a lot of nurturing it takes time it takes investment takes development you can't buy a community but we looked at this as one of many things that we needed to do

to get that Catalyst going then we thought about it from a you know we're a decentralized protocol and long term our contributor group polygon Labs needs to spend more or less and less time driving impact to that protocol and so we looked at the space and said where are we making big bets well gaming We Care a Lot obviously I'm biased there but we care a lot about gaming and so immutable was this middleware provider where a lot of games were drawing attraction because they kind of have an end-to-end service wallet apis Marketplace very easy to develop and launch a game on their stack the problem is they weren't evm compatible and they were on Star Wars Stark was an amazing protocol project by the way but they really wanted to go into evm compatibility and their issue was hey

we're losing a lot of gaming Partnerships because our lack of evm compatibility for us it was very complimentary because we said look long term this contributor group of polygon Labs needs to drive less and less and less impact it has to be driven by large Revenue driving businesses that are on the protocol and so we partnered with immutable um and immutable is basically going to spin up a dedicated supernet chain which is our ZK uh dedicated app chains and they're working on it now to be launched in the new year and so gaming projects will not be launched on there it's a Matic staked chain uh gases through IMX and then the last big beat that we made um was Nexon nexon's one of the largest game Publishers in the world uh they have a game called MapleStory Universe

has 180 million users they too are building a dedicated app chain on polygon uh as well and so I say all this because a big theme of what I I focus on you know right now is you've got to like build a team build a culture identify where you want to make big bets and then how you go to market and this is kind of like the team we built and these were the bets that we made and so there's three things when coming in a polygon you know you had already seen a company do a tremendous job going from zero to one they had raised 450 million dollars uh they had really the team and talent there but it was a scrappy web3 native team and now they were trying to figure out like how do we really grow this presence how do we

become more Global and so a big Focus was when I came in was all right how do we have a more diverse background and representation across the the team we had a lot of web 3 endemic folks and that was great but it led to some of the same decisions and outcomes some were good some that were not and so we wanted to bring in a variety of different folks that could bring different perspective and that had different tenure in the space this is a hard part this is like much easier said than done because you are in that in that hyper growth phase you're actually disrupting people that were in rules that already had a thought process that already a frame of reference of what the company can be what it will be and so it's disruptive but important another other thing that

we really learned was you really have to live it and this space is so nascent um if you're not like living and breathing it every day it feels like work all the time so we had people that came to polygon with this idea of oh it's like it could be the next Google and it's in Tech and it's fun and I should go do this but they didn't really live web3 they didn't think about it they hadn't really reoriented their mind culturally about how this space Works how the community works and them trying to pick it up became such a work like they had to spend time after work in order to understand it they had to spend time reading on the weekends and everyone does that that's in the space but if that's not something you enjoy that feels like a lot of work

um and and this one's more of a learning I would say this is not what we didn't we didn't start with this mentality of you have to live it it was something we learned through our mistakes and then big bets I think people get scared to make big bets um do you make them too early do you make the right ones can you actually fulfill it and I and I think you should have a little bit of nervousness and and be a little scared to make big bets but you have to do it right and so I'll talk a little bit about kind of the framework that we use when we think about it so hiring really you should not like do not mess up hiring I can't tell you like there are things that you can do where you mess up and you can pivot quickly

whether it's a product idea whether it's trying a feature you can mess around you can try it you can fail fast you cannot hire fast and then like you're in a tough spot because the problem with hiring fast too is once you've brought those people in undoing that work is really really really difficult um so first we had to go and look at the organization and say where do we just have like very obvious gaps so we spent time looking at where were things that we we had great ZK we had great cryptographers we didn't have kind of the BD go to market Partnerships marketing components built out legal Finance people teams all of this needed a lot of work so we really had to fill these gaps in but again couldn't do it on a quick uh despite the urgency didn't want to do it quickly we really had to

build out core competencies within our leadership group again you're trying to find folks that have experience but also understand where we're directionally going with web 3 and so this was easier easy to identify but hard to build out not rushing hiring was a big one I think particularly where we were at it was like the height of the bull market as well and all it's like what are the other protocols doing what are the other companies doing what everybody else is doing hire this person hire this person we got to bring this person in we're behind here and it led to just a series of bad decisions uh you rush and what happens is when you rush you might not find the right person you might overpay the person you might start to fragment your culture one Higher at a time and in these formative years when you're

smaller organization it literally takes one bad hire to really throw off a team a company so forth and so you should be spending time with people four or five people different people interviewing these individuals figuring out if they're a right culture fit let them go if it doesn't feel right don't rush it long term people that bring in bad hires it's impossible thing to unwind it's very cumbersome from illegal people perspective and everything else and then organizational structure so on organizational structure I think there's been a lot that we've learned one um you've got to be incredibly fluid and it's okay to change your organization a lot people that come into a new company and they don't like all that organizational

change should not be working at a startup because things are constantly changing in this environment and even 10x so in crypto and web 3 where it's like every day is a different day than the day before and so yes you should be able to change and be very fluid but I think how you communicate and having tacked with your organization and team bringing them along on why you're making these changes what the logic is behind it how you do it in a way uh that isn't rational and doesn't you know you don't want to be a bull in a china shop either as well and so being very thoughtful about it is important but don't be afraid to do it um you have to raise the bar too I think this is one thing where you if you rush hiring as well you start to deviate away

from like a level of talent that you want to withhold like you would really do want to calibrate an organization to be high delivery only do not let B and C players come into your company it's not worth it take the time to focus these right folks because then you have people that are truly inspired they show up they're excited to work every day at the company they know that their peers are going to make them better and they really feel like they're getting pushed every single day this is also a thing once you start to lower your your level of talent that is the talent that you will operate at you cannot fix that it's you're you get you end up getting stuck so as you get as you get bigger you start to do performance reviews you calibrate those individuals against basically your CMB players and so hold a

very high bar from day one don't don't deviate from it and then silos I think another thing that you'll see in organizational changes people that are very just like selfish and focused they just want to focus on what can I own what title can I have how many people can I manage on my team and when you make changes that disrupt that they dig they dig their heels in they become kind of combative and disruptive get rid of those people that just like you should not have those people inside of your organization they're not thinking long term they're not thinking in the best interest of the company they don't they don't have a mentality of we should do whatever it takes to win if we think this organizational change is the best thing for us to win then let's make that change the other thing too about it is

people that are playing a longer term game know the fluidity of the organization so they know there'll be an opportunity for them to take on things in the future that there's just a moment in time that maybe they law a particular team or group that went to another group and so they're also not even not only is it like selfishly motivated they're just short-term thinkers and you just don't want anybody especially in this industry where we're playing a long game to be myopic that you got to live it part was this again this is where we learn the most so we made a big mistake I made a big mistake where I projected a little bit that everybody that I would bring in from web 2 was going to have the same enthusiasm and enthusiasm and fire and belief in web 3 and digital ownership

that I had um and so if I had to do it again I'd still focus on bringing web 2 folks in but I would have went back to one of my principles on the calibration um and so a lot of the things that you really do want to ask yourself in this process is just like how is your call how's the culture different in web3 and I think again because of these nascent Industries these are kind of prerequisites you know people need to be able to have a perspective of what web3 means where do we think users are going in the space why are developers believing in building in the space uh what do we need to do as a decentralized protocol to ultimately take our hands off the wheel all these things are very fundamentally different than anything you ever learn in business school or

about corporations if you think about polygon Labs if our goal is to continue to be more and more decentralized which it is it means that contributor group is going to be smaller and smaller and smaller every single year let's say over the next decade and so when you come into the company and you think it's going to be like the next Google so you're like oh it's this size and it's going to get bigger and bigger and I can run a big team one day and do all of this you've lost kind of the mission and the spirit of what polygon Labs is and what we're focused on and so it's really really important to be very like people talk all the time will come up here and be like culture's really important it's like yeah obviously but I think it's really really important more than

anything of like why do you work here like why are you showing up at polygon Labs every day are you here for a paycheck are you here because you believe in decentralization are you here because you think polygon is the best protocol what is it what gets you up why do you get here obviously you want to maintain a culture and identity with inside of your company that's a no-brainer but I do think making sure that you know why everybody shows up every single day to work is really really important um and the learning curve like this is where we talk this is where we actually learned a lot about why this was really important because you do have to dedicate a lot of time into space because there is no blueprint there's no Playbook like nobody's ever done any of this stuff before you can draw

inspiration there are things you can learn from others that have done things in the space but there's no blueprint for any of you including us on the protocol side so we're like we're all learning from each other in real time you're going to learn from your customers you're going to learn from other developers it's Non-Stop and because there's so much capital in this space that has been injected there's so much happening at a rapid Pace it's very hard to stay on top of everything and so you spending time outside of just even building to stay on top of it is really important we've even had this issue internally where we're heads down on you know like our zkvm protocol and you look up and you realize gas costs right now are not going to cut it like developers and users are not going to use the

protocol the current gas costs it's like problematic right and so you realize oh this is actually what my customers want and you have to Pivot right and so for us reducing gas costs goes from like to a research or an engineer from like P3 to a P0 immediately um really immersing yourself in the community this one is so interesting in most Fields you don't have to like live on Discord or live on Twitter or live on these different spaces you actually really do uh need to because again to the first point the space is so Dynamic really important and you should be begging for feedback all the time like why don't you build on our protocol why don't you build on our app why don't you build whatever the case may be all the time Non-Stop and that really should be informing your product decisions and

prioritization and roadmap at the end of the day you're just building for customers so we have not done always great at this but I've really tried to make sure that culturally Focus Less on what other l2s and l1s are doing all the time and focus on just like what is the gap inside of our protocol like why are people not building or are building with us um and then yeah I think the other thing is I don't think in general people do enough is postmortems bad BD deals bad product decisions uh bad prioritization nobody ever wants to go back and revisit and relitigate this stuff because there's too much of a it happened it happened let's keep moving forward I think that's pretty dangerous so we like to do a lot of postmortems whether it's a deal that we you know didn't go the way that we thought it would be whether

we launched a product that we didn't think would be received the way it would be whether we made a bad decision on a prioritization of something and this sits in all in all facets of our business and then betting big which we have definitely we've done um and a lot of that you only have look and you're in the early infancy of of you know fundraising you don't have many at-bats to bet big you maybe have like one or two you don't have the capital to do it every dollar you spend you think of like that's an engineer it could have been instead it's going to this stupid deal over here is this really gonna actually make or break for it so you got to have these questions of do you believe in it do you actually think you can deliver on it um is this like is it something you can

even win out there um like you're gonna waste a lot of time trying to get a partner excited about you try to take a bet on you as well and so really ask those questions before it'll give you the confidence to step up when you have been able to answer these ones and then scope you know I think we've gotten ourselves in uh some jams because we want to do all these things we want to do everything we look at the scope of it seems reasonable and then the scope creep is like pretty Monumental and so you get excited because we're trying to like supernets is a great example we've been on boarding a lot of folks that are building on supernets but now we're a little bit log jammed of oh man we might have over committed and under delivered you can't ever do that and so be honest

with yourself on the scope side um we'll talk a little bit about go to market but obviously having a plan of not just getting the deal done but how you're going to integrate execute and launch is really important as well and then again do business reviews we have this great Business Review Forum we invite everybody to it's like very transparent we talk about a deal that we're going to do we talk about the cost of that deal we talk about the expected outcomes of that deal and everybody gets invited it's not like a closed door thing because that's where the most learning can happen it's one we say no to a deal why did we say no when we ask questions that way everybody's learning and everybody's getting on the same page you don't have any animosity if it's like the gaming team gets the gaming

deals versus people that are focused on loyalty and rewards and then again um post mortems can't can't trust them enough nobody ever thinks about bringing reviews back in to talk about things that have been done both good and bad right you want to learn from both these things so last I'll talk about um the flywheel and then would love to just answer questions so obviously the way that we've set up our organization is we have a BD team so our BD team sales they're just out all the time talking to folks they're at events they're talking to Partners they're talking to anybody of all size whether it's like uh you know one or two folks that are starting a company off a small Grant all the way to you know the largest companies in the world they're out their job is just that like we have

them focus on nothing else they don't focus on Partnerships they don't focus on anything it's like you have a client is that client going to build with us or not no move on to the next one yes send them to get the deal done and now send them to the solutions engineering team that team is very focused technical team that's really focused on all the answers that you might have when you're you know wanting to build on top of a protocol um three making sure after people build and commit and they're actually on your your platform on your app on you know working with you keep them happy you know your point of getting them on is a little literally only half the battle because then they have a bunch of different options to go other places they can use that as leverage against you like I got this other you know L2

that's talking to me and they want to do a deal and so you really have to make sure you've got a uh somebody look in your infancy you might have one person that's playing like three or four of these roles and as you get bigger you have the luxury of being able to build these teams out in a more dedicated way but you have to make sure somebody's on that account afterwards that's really helping them making sure that they feel loved like don't think that you're done once they integrate and they start using it it's it's a big mistake that people make then thinking about how you're just like in in general engaging with them how you actually bring some value to them how you have constant dialogue with them because things are changing in this space What are you fulfilling for them what are you providing for them and then

last just again it's that retention so we are trying to bring some of these businesses on and ensure that they not only are staying on polygon but they're actually driving success and so the amount of time that we spend with like a Reddit in Starbucks is actually pretty significant in order to keep driving the traction that we're doing and so I think when you're thinking about all these things from start to finish it's just really important first and foremost that like you have you have to just like spend the time to build the right folks and you have to have a great product because at the end of the day business teams they're complementary of a product we have a crap product it's it's a it's a Band-Aid solution that people are going to call out right so all of the business and BD and Partnerships work

you could ever want to do if it's on a Shaky Ground of a like poor product it's just a matter of time before everything falls apart I think what's really important for this room we've been spending more time in DC going back next month you don't have to be engaged in the day-to-day policy conversations but it is it is in a place in time where you need to be able to be mindful of it you need to be able to articulate use cases and I would say if you're not you know uh if you really weren't paying attention in you know any of these classes uh in school you should definitely start focusing on what's happening in this environment and making sure that you're thinking about it as it relates to your company it's actually it's really important and tough times right now in that regard and again like

I said I'll I'll say it over and over and over and over again don't settle on Talent uh that's been one thing that has kind of changed us from uh organizational and culture perspective and has allowed us to have the success we've had in closing some of the largest companies in the world and that's my speed run on go to market and BD and happy to answer any questions thanks Ryan great presentation I'm Lucia from fuel we'll be building an affiliate marketing protocol um just wanted to ask you can you provide [Music] um like uh more insights on how your BD pipeline is structured like from where you Source these potential new partnership yeah conversion rates and you show like a few Partnerships but like how many like what was the time to

close those or how many other Partnerships you try but they are on hold or failed like no it's a great question so there's a couple different points of Entry that we've been able to see companies right uh one we have our Venture fund which is a 100 million dollar fund uh that was part of our race so we raised 450 million dollars as part of that 100 million of that 450 went into a fund to invest in you know Founders like you all that has given us tremendous deal flow of just seeing all these different people that are building in the space right um so that pipeline's been great from web3 endemic if you will or web3 native whatever you want to classify the other ones that we had to build out it really was bringing in its relationship oriented at the end of the day right so

when I think about polygon it's not like the protocol or POS protocol was something that was so significantly different from a product perspective like yeah it was an L2 on ethereum I think like a lot of people wanted to be on ethereum right so it was there but you really need to start knocking on doors and so you have to bring in people that have some relationships and so the way we first started building out the team was vertical specific so you know gaming entertainment and really try to bring in folks that understood web3 that had relationship building that allowed us to get the big Fortune 500 Enterprise pipeline going that was kind of a space that we weren't operating in no points of contact the other thing that that did for us is when you start to land a couple of those everyone else called so

like when you when you land Starbucks it's like Nike's Nike sales for everybody called us then like oh we're interested in web3 we want to talk to polygon we saw you guys just did X so you can underestimate that first big bet blows the door off on people reaching out uh DraftKings was a big one for us as well shout out Kudos careers in the group um and so it really is that's why I'm like your big bet matters and that is the only way you start to break those doors down so it's like yeah you can hire and you can maybe find like a good talent that can actually have the relationship that might get you that first one but after that that you know there's a flywheel that kicks off that's why we did category bets as well it's like anybody in loyalty and rewards

would be a fool not to reach out to polygon now because Starbucks is in the portfolio um and so you have to kind of think that way and so yeah it's worth it was work did we spend money on it yeah it was worth it though well thanks follow up on that one is usually like for the first meeting you already prepare like a case on how like a project for like a Rewards program for Server works or you yes a million percent right so what we did was like we believe foundationally in these categories create our economy gaming loyal team rewards we had a whole like we have a whole pitch on why you too should believe in loyalty and rewards and then why that should be on polygon um and so yeah I think making sure that

you've got something that's tailored one you got to believe in it right so like we genuinely believe in this loyalty and rewards category it's very Broad and then you start to have specific ones so like when we talk to Airlines like now we have a very specific break it's only a couple additional slides in the broader loyalty and rewards one but it's like very specifically tailored to oh Delta United here's how you should think about it and so we've built on it a little more even nuanced kind of vertical cases but yeah you absolutely should the other thing too is depending on your your your audience right so if you're dealing with like web3 native audience they're going to care about you know TPS and gas and decentralization and validators and all this stuff and you're talking to games and Fortune 500 Enterprise companies they don't care

they don't care right so like don't belabor these points right what do they care about focus and hone in on that I see a lot of Founders that don't tailor their message enough right like I we're having a whole different message with like a web re founder versus Starbucks on what we're pitching right and so adjusting more is really important and I think sometimes when you talk to some of those big companies if you're like web3 native blockchain you're like trying to pitch this future world they just glaze over like I have no idea like how's this helping me with my business you know so yeah hopefully that helps awesome thank you hey Ryan thanks a lot for the great talk I'm Greg at Naval and we're building the wallet platform for for teams and organizations and so my question is

around um you know how you approach uh you know cooperation versus competition we hear a lot about the competition word in in web free and yeah like specifically for example with immutable who could be you know appearing as one of your competitors how did you approach the partnership um who initiated that partnership and yeah yeah I have a lot actually a lot of thoughts on this so I think one we're there's weird like tribalism and competition in web3 that is like actually kind of bizarre I think everybody is like inherently competitive but a lot of that I think we could talk probably for hours on why that is and you know it's users that have high Affinity or financial motivations or whatever the case may be to a project but I think then that pushes too many projects to think competitive at the end

of the day um it really doesn't matter what any of these other Protocols are doing for polygons outcome and success right like arbitrary is doing great things and Salon is doing great it doesn't matter right because at the end of the day we just have to figure out what are our problems on why people aren't building and why are people building and if you just like Hammer that away Hammer that away um I think it's good to be observing and mindful of what people are doing in this space that's part of the education part for me so like I pay attention to what you know an arbitrum does I pay attention to what Solana does I pay attention uh you know what optimism does but I think it just doesn't do much for me right like in a day it's like oh that's cool that's what they're doing so

I think of it more as educational you just you've got to build something that people want to use full stop right and this is a challenge the soul spaces including polygon right and so I don't know what the like me I would love to at some point think about competition in a meaningful way when we have 300 million users and somebody's over there it's just there's no point of me wasting any of my energy on it right now because of the space that we're slow nascent so I think the more that you can really ignore that it also leads to bad decisions you do bad BD deals because you go chase deals you hire people that you probably shouldn't hire you overpay them because they're chasing and just like it's it just creates so many bad behaviors and I actually can't even name anything positive of why you would stay

maybe a little bit of a chip on your shoulder competitive Spirit a little bit of fire it's good for you I can't let it consume you and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you don't have anything that's worthwhile good thank you hey Ryan thanks for the talk I'm Nico from Skylab and we're actually building on chain game protocol on polygon yes so um yeah so I I'm curious like because you're from a gaming background as well right so what's your vision for uh gaming like like web3 gaming in the future that's like have a lot on that as well I could say with you um I think there's a couple things right now we take a lot of what we hear in our silos right now is very much like what western audiences

think about web3 so it's like very anti-nft very anti-block chains you know and I think that's kind of just the mental state particularly in the US I'm highly encouraged just in general when we speak to game developers in the East nexon's a great example Square Enix also builds with polygon they have completely thought about it very differently and they are still very anchored on the best way for us to generate secondary sale revenue and for people to actually fully own these things is building on a blockchain and we should just get ahead of it because ultimately people are going to push for more of these user ownership rights and then we'll be ahead of it when you look at like big established game Publishers in the west they just don't need to they've got a model where the user is an incredible

disadvantaged spot that they monetize that very heavily it's like Call of Duty war zone it's like they just make a ton of money then they launch Another War Zone you buy all those skins again right and they don't want to have to worry about sacrificing that primary sale point for the potential opportunity of what it means for the ecosystem and they're not it's not in their best interest all of this stuff is disruptive right um to anybody that's serving as any sort of intermediary so they're game Publishers and game developers that are large is inherently not in their best interest to build games on blockchain unless they are having a much bigger thought process in the long-term view on it hence why I'm super bullish on the thing that's going to break through in gaming is going to be from web 3 endemic companies like yeah we're in with Nexon

we're in with these big game companies it's good for us to do that but like the the breakouts are going to come from that category reminds me even of YouTube you know Minecraft when you looked at Minecraft when it first came out you're like this game is a joke right like nobody's gonna play this game and then you know for 10 years it's the largest game ever on the platform small ND team right um so I'm really bullish on that now the way games it's going to be as simple as just nfts marketplaces digital ownership but now I'm starting to see games where they're doing like really fun concepts of you know put putting your nft up in a match or a wage or a battle where it could be burned right or it could be taken from the other ones and there's a bunch of stuff that we'll have to unpack

there's extraction games where you win the item if you win the game but like cheating is going to be a really big problem right and some of the issues that happen there and if you look at games like valorant and Counter-Strike the amount of money that they're spending to like you know for for yeah for hacking is like really sizable and so it'll take a little bit for these things to kind of play out I still think your base is just marketplaces and digital ownership just being on chain when you start getting a little bit more cute or creative and clever with the things that you can't do on chain to have different game experiences there are things that complicated a little bit yeah thank you very much yep hey Ryan my name is Adam I'm building Bellow we're building data tools for the crater economy and shout out to polygon

one of the reasons we're here we've got a grant from polygon I love that it's awesome I'm gonna like go through the bear markets yes good no good that's it's important question for you how integral is on-chain data in the day-to-day of like managing and executing on these deals at polygon Labs so this I love these are great questions by the way um we we have this kind of we talk about this all the time internally because we want to be like in a more objective driven organization and so we want to be data driven in the way that we like establish our okrs internally and everything but the problem is on chain data is like easily manipulated it's like can be very deceiving right you know you have like some you know some project that launches that let's say is unsavory and it's like boosting

your numbers but it's not the projects you want but you're like oh it's more wallets and you know transactions and you know yada yada right um is so for us I think it's the irony of blockchain being transparent but getting poor data if we got really really good data and we aspire to get really good data so we think about like metadata and smart contracts and all this stuff and what we can do to get better data we would we would love it so like any companies that think about how to provide better stronger signals from data on chain would be really valuable the space could benefit greatly from it whether you're doing like Affiliates whether you're a business that wants to be able to assess this data I would say we try to prioritize it and all of our okrs and when we do it our all ants and

talk about it but it's always with an asterisk right you know and what we we ultimately do is we'll look our data scientists will look at it and we'll have to pull out notes of what you should ignore it's like oh this game launched this is kind of a bad game don't think about this so anybody that works on better more accurate meaningful data on chain would be very valuable thanks for the thanks for the great talk I'm Nikita we're stopping scam with chain Patrol we're stopping scammers and fishing I love this too all right you know all the RuneScape doubling gold and all that kind of yeah yeah um uh my question was when it comes to like MMOs and kind of these games like building an economy is really hard even like a World of Warcraft and now you're saying I'm taking this economy and

opening up to this all to all these other economies and so how do you see um one is like what is the incentive for them like an MMO to like to go to make that leap yeah and then uh how do you see them dealing with some of these challenges with like you know destabilizing their own economy because something happened in another world MMOs are like definitely going to be like look at Diablo's auction house and completely ruined that game right um and that their Spirit was in a web 3 digital ownership like they rely on philosophically with how like we feel about space um there's a lot of challenges there I don't know that I necessarily have the answer because the other thing is there's like Challenge and opportunity right so if you're like an MMO and now you have these this open economy and

ecosystem then like you know uh people can you know institutions Venture firms can come in buy those assets buy the tokens and it can really cause a disturbance in the economy but I also think as a player there's a ton of benefit that could happen there as well right if you have a you know a rare item or you were early in the game and you hold the you know the gold coins or whatever the case may be and now all of a sudden those have become valuable they can drive it so ultimately I think it's like how it influenced game mechanics too much with Diablo you have a little bit of that you can just skip any of the grinding and playing just to like pay to win and buy right so so it's so nuanced on here but I think it's enticing if

you're building to see what it's like to actually have an economy where you don't really control it right and that you actually just take your hands off of it so it's it's Unique like I look at um um a game that I invested in as a bright star right where they actually only have some like some aspects of the MMO like digital items that are going to be on chain to avoid some of these like disruption disruptions in the economy which I think in the meantime is probably some like fractioned approach where you have a lot of it that's off chain that doesn't matter and for those that want to participate in the like more vibrant economies the other thing is crypto unicorns has done really cool stuff where your nft basically is like worthless unless you're constantly utilizing it and like actually spending time with it because

my concern more is people coming in land grabbing assets and entities with money sitting and hoarding on them and then you your cold star problem got even worse like now it's like you're barrier to entry is miserable um so yeah I think look it's you guys are in the you're in this like exploration phase there's no there's not answers to it right there really isn't I think there this is why it's a beautiful and troubling phase to be in this is where a lot of the breakout success in companies are going to be it's like this you know early adopters first movers and there isn't really a clear answer to MMOs and the other thing too is you don't even know when you do open economy to like 20 million users if you get to 20 million users right what does that even mean right so there's a lot of

fluctuations I think ultimately the people that play and participate in those games are going to have to be much more in tune with what that means like hey dude you might buy like a five dollar skin that could go to 500 bucks or your coin and currency could get thrown off because that's the thing you choose to be it's like you got to take the go with the bad you choose to do a free economy you're going to get a free economy thank you yeah I just have a Walmart quick question yeah like around like hackers and cheaters in these games right now when you control a database if something goes wrong you can just change it right yeah and how do you think games like maple story or somebody else like how are they approaching you know um dealing with like bad behavior when

it comes to like these assets might be hard to move around are they putting in some sort of like you know override into the contracts where they have like a team that can you know that can make changes or yeah any other yeah so I can't share too much like what they're specifically doing but obviously all of the game devs this is real they're really focused on it a little bit different issue with Nexon who's got a lot of capital to focus on you know antichi anti-hacking um so I I worry less about what they're going to do but like a midnight societies that drop games Dr disrespects game I think these extraction games where there's a valuable asset it's going to be really problematic and they probably should be thinking about things the problem is when you start to do some of that stuff in the smart contract it's

like are we really web3 and to what extent and so forth uh but yeah I mean I think I think when you're putting the object on a pedestal and you're playing to get that object you're going to create a bunch of really I don't know how you get around it I mean you have to spend tens of millions of dollars annually to really stop anti-cheating and anti-hacking stuff so I would caution folks that are in the web 3 gaming space that are like early Founders to to not think about ex like the like putting items on a pedestal that you win randomly giving it away so forth is it because you don't want to do anything where it it invites cheaters to get a leg up and a lot of games you don't need to if you're not doing it then there won't be an emphasis

on it so I think just if you don't have the budget don't do a game where you put an item on a pedestal right because you need to spend a lot on prevention you got to spend a ton yeah a ton it's like not cheap at all and it's like and it's not foolproof it's one thing in like a valorant Lobby where you're spending all this money to sell and you get one player that did she get through the RR gets messed up in that room you can fix it you know if they just won the 10 000 nft item your communities chalked they're done with you not playing the game anymore thank you yeah hey thanks for the talk Lewis uh from Shield security we're trying to build tools that look Beyond Just Fishing and uh smart contract audits so my question uh is about employing people in hiring

can you talk about kind of the pools that you Source from and tactics to slow down the time it takes to keep the bar High still yeah honestly we we've tried it all so I can't I can give some insight so for executive hiring um finding firms that could very articulately speak about the web 3 space was hard but we spent a lot of time finding them and they were worth it so we found some that were prestigious exec firms that were awful didn't get it not helpful at all and then we dug into some of the endemic groups and then obviously you've got you know some of the more reputable amazing VC firms like a16z are able actually to help with sourcing I ultimately think at the end of the day it is like it's linked like LinkedIn was

pretty powerful as well um even putting like job posts on my LinkedIn for roles people reaching out to our recruiters and then going through it um we would do we spent a lot of time on just screening like screening screening and and getting people the tough part is a lot of people always want to Outsource the screening stuff because like oh you know as you're asking questions again find out but the thing that we quickly learned is a lot of good employees ask questions about your company like when did somebody that's worthwhile they have a bunch of things that they want to know about polygon and so a huge indicator is when you talk to anybody in screening and they don't have any questions for you it's like just kick them out of the queue as well immediately so I think you've got a number of things it's like

one you have a couple different buckets to Source from I think your your peers sharing on social is actually great signal it's particularly in this space I think when you are looking for a big hire it's worth putting a little bit of money into the right firm to find the right person because there are not many of them uh in the space and then I think the most important part is yeah that like builds your pipeline be really like have a lot of rigor around the hiring process of who's going to own what responsibility right like are you testing role related knowledge are you testing culture are you testing product knowledge what area of like there's four of you which one are you going to interview for and which one are you going to own get together and do those individually don't talk about it

and then come together and talk about candidates the way that you actually set up a process to take these candidates in is just as important as like the work you do to Source them that's why I think like the phone screen having people that get the company doing it that can answer the questions and then actually having a great hiring process is important these are some of the things like I try to bring some things in from Google into polygon and some was good and hiring was a good thing but then you bring other things like over process and too much that can be bad and stop this from being agile so we had to kill these things hiring is one that I think was a really good like setup so I spend just as much time as you do on the second part as you

do on sourcing awesome thank you yeah of course please join me thanking Ryan thanks everybody [Applause] [Music]