Stop Selling Blockchain.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome. My name is Lara and I am the CMO at Wonderland. And I'm here to tell you to stop selling and start telling. So, how many times have you tried to explain what you're building and watch someone's eyes instantly glaze over? It happens with investors, with partners, with the people that you're trying to hire. You're building something [clears throat] real, you're building something important, but it just doesn't really land. And guess what? The reason isn't your product. It's almost always your story. Let's take a step back. Think about your closest friendships. Why are they your friends?

It's not usually about shared interests. You can meet someone and have everything in common with them and feel absolutely nothing. Look at the person next to you here. Most likely they're not your friend and we're all working in crypto. But then you can all of a sudden meet someone with a completely different background, a completely different life, taste, and feel like they immediately get it. They see something the same way that you do. What's happening in that moment is alignment. Alignment on how you interpret the world. What matters, what doesn't, what's broken, what's worth fixing.

And the only way to communicate that is through stories. Stories are how we express values and values are what create real alignment. That's what makes someone wants to work with you, build with you, or bet on you as a company, as a product, or as an individual. This is exactly what's happening when you're trying to get someone to believe in what you built. You shouldn't be explaining a product. You're trying to get someone to see the world the way that you do. There's a place in time to explain product, but it isn't before someone cares about it in the first place.

Most crypto teams are terrible at telling stories and it's costing them way more than they think. Now, I want to be really honest about something before I go any further. Everything I'm going to tell you right now is going to sound super freaking obvious. And if it sounds obvious, it's probably because it is. I've been in this space for years and when I look back at the times that we struggled to get people to understand that what we were doing, it wasn't because the problems are way too complex or the audience isn't capable. It doesn't take a PhD to understand this stuff.

It's because we hadn't really done the work to make things legible. We thought the work would speak for itself. But it doesn't and it never does. And here's the thing, a good narrative is clear. It's honest about what you're doing and why it matters. The difficulty is in being consistent, especially when the work is hard and the story feels like the last priority. So, if it's so simple, why are we so bad at it? I think it's because when you're deep in the work, the story feels like a distraction. Or maybe it's so obvious to you that you're taking it for granted. It's something left for the marketing team, if you ever hire one. I know a lot of you don't.

You'll get to it after the raise, the audit, the next release, and then eventually later never really comes. But there's something else going on, too, and I think a lot of people in this space, myself included, have a very complicated relationship with narrative. We've seen way too much hype. Too many projects that were 90% story and 10% substance. So, we overcorrect and stay technical. We assume the right people will figure it out. But guess what? Most people don't.

The irony is that the projects that are most allergic to narrative are the ones often doing the most important work. They stay small or misunderstood, not because what they're building isn't good enough, but because they never learned to say what it was. So, this talk is about something a little bit more fundamental than marketing. It's about the gap between what you build and what people understand and how to close it. So, let's talk about how things actually go wrong. Because things go wrong in pretty predictable and preventable ways. The first failure mode is that we get way too technical. This is the most common one in this room. You explain what you build in terms of how it works, the architecture, the tech, and all that stuff. And you're not wrong, those

things are real and they matter and they have a place and they have a time. But you speak you skip the part of why any of it matters to the person that you're talking to, the person in front of you. Think about the last time you read a protocol's documentation and still had no idea what it was for. That's not a reading comprehension problem. That's a narrative problem. The builder knows exactly why they made what they made. They just assumed that you would too. But you didn't. The second failure mode is the opposite, way too much hype. Cheapest, fastest, next generation, the future of insert phrase here.

We've all seen it and we've probably done some of it, too. And it works for like 5 minutes. It might get a little bit of attention. It might help you with your next raise. But it doesn't build understanding and it most definitely doesn't build trust. In a space that has been burned by hype more times than I can count, the moment someone smells it, you've lost them. The third failure mode is the most expensive one at all, no story. You built something real and technically serious, something that took years and required expertise that nobody else had. But you never stopped to explain what's changing, why it matters, and why this needed to exist. And without that context, do you really think that something that you spent years building will be instantly obvious to anybody else?

So, people don't get it because you never gave them the framing to understand it. This is the failure mode that haunts good projects. While the work was real, the story was absent. So, the right people never showed up, the right conversations never happened, and the compounding effect of being understood never kicked in. Because here's what understanding actually unlocks. When people get what you're building, they become advocates. They make introductions that you didn't ask for. They frame your work correctly to others. They attract the next wave of people who are who belong in your orbit. That compounding effect is what a bad narrative cuts off.

So, the answer to too much hype isn't no story. It's a better one. Let's make this concrete. And I'm going to use Wonderland as an example because we're in the middle of figuring it out. I came on to Wonderland about two or three months ago. Before that, we didn't really have a story. And I think that's a little bit more helpful to everyone here than a polished, useful success story. So, I knew of Wonderland before I worked there and for a long time, the only thing I knew about Wonderland was their work. Their reputation was real, but it was very, very niche and very specific. The people who knew, knew and they knew because they'd seen it firsthand.

That form of credibility is very hard to build and Wonderland had it. But there was a big cost. Because when you do all the work do the talking, you hand your narrative to other people. And when other people describe you, they will describe you in whatever terms make sense to them. And it wasn't that what we do is complicated. It's that depending on what you how you describe it, it sounds like completely different things. You could say we're an engineering firm. That's true. You could say we do research. That's true.

You could say we do applied cryptography. That's true. All of these are accurate, but none of them explain what we actually do. So, when you're in a conversation and you can feel the person in front of you constructing the wrong mental model in real time, you realize that being accurate isn't the same thing as being understood. The partners who worked with Wonderland understood. They knew what Wonderland actually was. But the understanding only lived inside of those relationships. It didn't reach the people who hadn't worked with them yet. And so, the conversations were happening at the wrong moment, in the wrong place, with the wrong people, at the wrong level, and creating the wrong expectations.

Opportunities that should have been an obvious fit never materialized because the framing wasn't there to actually make those conversations obvious. And the thing is about being like being misunderstood at scale is very expensive. Because every conversation that starts with the wrong frame has to spend [clears throat] the first 10 minutes of that conversation reframing that. And at that point, some conversations don't recover and then even worse, some conversations never actually even happen. The absence of a clear narrative has a has a ceiling. The reputation exists in a closed loop and closed loops don't compound.

So, when I started working on this, the first question was, how do we market Wonderland? It was, what is true about Wonderland that nobody is saying out loud? What is that context that the partners have that nobody else does? What we do isn't complicated, but depending on how you describe it, it sounds like completely different things. So, we kept asking, what's true? Two things kept coming back. We work on problems that don't have solutions yet. The part where someone has to figure out what a system should look like, whether it's defining architecture, primitives, or building entirely new kinds of applications that don't really have a reference point yet.

And then the second, the way that we engage is structurally different. Most engineering relationships, for example, dev shops, are transactional. We definitely do not operate that way. Our commitments are always structural. We take equity or token allocation with a base cash component, which means our upside is tied directly to our partner's success. And so by default, we are investing in an outcome financially and technically. But that's not just a business model detail. It's a narrative detail. It changes what kind of partner we are, what kind of problems we're willing to take on.

You can only work on solved problems if you're willing long enough to stay to actually solve them. And structural commitment is what makes that actually possible. So the framing that we landed on was foundational engineering for frontier technologies. Not because it's catchy, but because it's the most honest description of what we actually do. Foundational because we work on the architecture of whatever it is that we're actually doing and it's how we operate. Frontier because we work where the playbook doesn't exist yet. Where someone has to figure it out early then rather execute then rather than executing on something that's unknown.

Now, we're still early. I've only been here for 3 months. We don't know yet what this framing will unlock, who will who it will attract, and what conversations it will change. We're in the middle of finding out. But what I can tell you is that having the right framing changed something internal. It gave the team a shared language. It makes something concrete to back into when we say no to the wrong things. It makes it easier to explain to ourselves what we are and what we aren't, which turns out to be a prerequisite to explaining it to anybody else. External clarity is always downstream of internal clarity always.

Which brings me to my next point. Something about where narrative actually starts because I think most people get this completely backwards. A narrative is something that you discover, not create. A created story, a created narrative is the same thing as something made up. It isn't true. Real stories happen. Real stories are taken from context. And you discover it by getting clear on what you actually believe in before you start to communicate it. For us, that meant getting clear on our values. A genuine true answer to the question, who are we and who aren't we?

Our values came from being honest about the kind of people we are and the kind of work we want to do. So Wonderland, we optimize for people who last. People that are still there when the problem gets hard. We optimize for outrageous curiosity. If anyone has gone to the booth, you can go down a rabbit hole with any of the members there. That allows us to have people that keep pulling the thread long after it's professionally necessary. And that's a big edge that we have. And we optimize for deep investment. Not just in the work, but in what the work is for. Everyone in Wonderland has to believe in what we're building.

Not just be good at building it. Which brings me to a line we drew very early on that clarified many things for the company. We will never work on something that we don't believe in. It sounds simple, but it has real consequences. It means we say no to things that could pay really well, and it means that we're smaller than if we actually just optimized for growth. But it also means that when we say that we're invested in our partner's success, it's absolutely true. Because we only work with partners whose success we actually want. And that's the thing about values. When they're real, they constrain your behavior instead of just decorating your website, and they become the most credible part of your narrative. Because anyone can write great copy.

Not everyone will turn down work that they don't believe in. So your values are proof that your story is true. It works both ways. So before you work on your narrative, ask yourself, do you know what you actually believe? Do you know what you would say no to? Do you know what kind of person you're building this for? Because if you don't, no amount of good copy will fix it. People feel the absence of real conviction. They might not be able to name it, but they know it's there. And there's one more thing I want to talk about before I close. And it's the part that has taken me the longest to internalize throughout my career.

And I think it's one that a lot of people in crypto, if they internalized it, they'd be better off. You can have the right values, you can have the right framing, and you can be honest about what you're doing and why it matters. And your narrative can still fail if you haven't been specific enough about who it's for. This is the mistake I see most often after the very obvious ones. Teams write for everybody. They stand down the edges, they soften the language, they make it accessible to absolutely everybody. And in doing so, they make it resonate with nobody in particular. I don't know if you guys have heard the expression a friend to everyone is a friend to no one, but it's the same thing with narratives. A narrative for everyone isn't really a narrative for anybody.

The most powerful narrative actually repels the wrong people. That's not an accident. That's the point. When Wonderland says we only work on problems we believe in, that's not an invitation. It's a signal to a specific kind of person. The kind who has worked with teams that didn't believe in what they were building and felt that difference in their day-to-day partnerships. The kind that is building something genuinely difficult and needs a partner that they know is going to stay there for the long term. The kind of person that reads that line and feels somebody something.

Everyone else reads it and moves on. Self-selection is a great mechanism. You're not trying to convince the wrong people. You're trying to be unmistakably clear to the right one. So when you're writing your narrative, ask yourself, who is the one person that this needs to land for? Not the average person in your target market, not some random figment of your imagination. The specific person that if they read this and they feel seen, it's the exact person that you would want in your orbit. Write for them. Be specific enough to feel like you wrote this for them personally. And trust that the people who aren't that person will self-select out.

The right narrative doesn't cast a very wide net. It casts the most accurate one. Which brings me back to where I started, friendships. The reason the best friendships stick around is because someone was honest enough about how they saw the world that another person recognized it. That's all that narrative is. Saying things clearly enough about what you believe that the people who believe it can find you. So the teams that build the most important things in the space won't be the ones that solve the hardest problems. They'll be the ones that make what they built legible.

Clearly, honestly, and precisely enough to tell a story that isn't for everybody. It's just for the right people. That's it. That's the whole thing. >> [applause] >> Thank you a lot for your presentation. Now we have time for a cute for a cute questions if you have one. Okay, no questions? Okay. Sorry, quick quick one. Thanks for the for the presentation. In from your experience, what's your preference to talk about what you do or the benefit that you um provide for your customers? Um

because it sounds a bit like the approach is here to be really clear about what you do for who. But that doesn't always tell the person what is like is it meaningful for me? Do you have a point of view on that? Um sort of value-based versus feature-based. Yeah, absolutely. I think that you have to have a mixture of both, right? So if you look at a traditional sales funnel, it starts with top of funnel, mid funnel, and then bottom of funnel. Top of funnel, the way that you get somebody interested in something is if you find something that resonates with them and then they're drawn in a little further. Once you get them hooked, then at that point you can start saying, "Hey, this feature would benefit you and this would help you and this would help you in this and that." But if

you don't show them the context of why it's relevant for them in the first place, that can be very difficult. And it's especially difficult in the crypto industry because the normal person that would actually benefit from a lot of our problems from a lot of our solutions, um doesn't actually understand what we do. So that's the thing with crypto is like we're trying to go out after institutions, the regular person, all that stuff, and none of them know why they should even care. Most people feel hear crypto and they're like, "Oh, that's money." And they don't realize that there's a bunch of infrastructure below it. So I think you need to contextualize it a lot more when you're coming from industry that's so niche.

Any other questions? Okay, amazing talk. So see you soon. And I hope to to to hear great things about you. Thank you. >> [applause] [music]