Stephany Zoo: 0:00

I've been in a lot of different industries. I've worked across social impact and investment and technology and healthcare, and I've never been in an industry where narrative mattered more than crypto and Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast.

Joeri Billast: 0:19

My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm honored to be joined by Stephany Zoo. Hi, Stephany, how are you?

Stephany Zoo: 0:28

Joeri glad to be on the podcast today.

Joeri Billast: 0:31

Happy to have you, guys. If you're wondering who is Stephany, she's a crypto native, gtm strategist and investor in Web3 already for a long time, since 2014,. And b2b marketer. And correct me if it's wrong, but you are the head of ecosystem, right? That's your, your title at Caladan usually had an ecosystem and foundations.

Stephany Zoo: 0:56

It's a lot of like relationships, but it is. It's a very wide ranging role within Caladan. I cover everything from the marketing and branding initiatives to platforms, so supporting our 70 plus portfolio companies, as well as ecosystem relationships with foundations, with other funds and people in the ecosystem.

Joeri Billast: 1:19

Yeah, thanks for specifying that. Actually, I wanted to ask you. You know, because it's the title is not always so clear what people can imagine that you are doing. But, as I mentioned, you have been in Web3 since 2014.

Stephany Zoo: 1:33

Yeah, it's a pretty funny story. I was working in China. I was running my own agency and we were basically working with post-Series A funded Chinese startups, working a lot with Lightspeed Ventures, and they actually had a couple of portfolio companies that were crypto companies. One of them was BTC China and, for those of you who don't know, that's like the first OG. Og exchange Only sold Bitcoin back in 2013,. Basically is when it started and I started working with them, and I remember the first day that we had a million dollars in volume per day, which was like a huge accomplishment, which obviously now every second exchange has millions of dollars a day, and so it's really grown a lot.

Stephany Zoo: 2:17

I haven't always stayed in crypto the whole time. I keep trying to leave and it keeps drawing me back, but all the things that I've done have been crypto adjacent, and so I worked for the biggest non-bank FX broker across Africa that was using crypto as an intermediary currency in between exotics. I worked for a midsize brokerage in Europe that also had a bunch of other crypto projects, such as a Euro stable coin, and so, even though I was working at the intersection of finance and tech, crypto was always related, and now we use this bigger term, digital assets, and that's what I've really grown into.

Joeri Billast: 2:55

Nice. And also you mentioned that you worked across four continents or several continents. Yeah, when it comes to the cultural context, you know the cultural differences in adoption, shaping, adoption of web3 yeah, but can you tell me about that?

Stephany Zoo: 3:10

yeah, so I've worked across north america, europe, asia and africa, so really different contexts, and even if we talk about continents, you really have to think about countries like even in africa alone, it's 54 different countries and each one of them is so different and makes working, especially within financial sectors, really different, because the context is so different. I think, on one hand, of course, there's regulatory and the prevailing cultural attitudes of how conservative or how progressive a country is and how they adopt. If you look at, for example, vietnam, vietnam has extremely high crypto adoption. Somewhere I think it's close to 30% of people hold crypto In an emerging market, that's extremely high. But the reason is because they have so much suspicion for stocks and other financial products. So basically, they either hold gold or crypto right.

Stephany Zoo: 4:04

So thinking about the financial history of a country really brings in the context for how they use crypto. Why they use crypto it's for speculation, and then obviously there's a lot of interplay in between cultures. So I think a really good example of that now is like Korea is a lagging indicator of what's happening in the US. Since the beginning of this year, the US has adopted some very open-minded policies towards crypto, and Korea has recently started allowing corporates to also hold crypto within their corporate treasuries, and you can tell what's going to be happening in certain countries because of other ones, and so, thinking about the macro and geopolitics of these changes, I think also really impacts adoption and the types of developments that happens per country.

Joeri Billast: 4:56

Yeah, maybe you see it on the background. You know Rio is from Japan. Maybe you know the coin or the ecosystem. They are sponsoring a podcast also there. It's a specific region, right, japan, a lot of regulation. My question here. The next question would be about because you have the experience of a marketer to an investor are there any patterns that you notice when projects successfully grow or cross the chasm from early adopters to mainstream users Chasm?

Stephany Zoo: 5:24

from early adopters to mainstream users. I think that this is. I think there's very few crypto projects that actually have mainstream users, right, and as of recently, we're seeing more mainstream companies be interested in crypto that are drawing their clients in. So those are the typical kind of like fintech companies like Stride and Robinhood. I think the other direction is really hard and I'm interested in talking about this a little bit later, but it's the way that crypto companies market themselves is almost purposefully isolating, segregating themselves from mainstream users. I think there's a lot of jargon that's being used. There is a lot of. It's really funny to think about how many acronyms that you just hear in a day-to-day when you're doing anything crypto related, and that really separates mainstream users away from us, and so this is a focus and the crypto industry is very young, right? So a lot of marketers, a lot of people who are working within crypto, this is their first job. They don't actually have the context for understanding how to communicate with people outside of crypto because they haven't had the experience themselves.

Joeri Billast: 6:34

Yeah right, yeah, indeed. I want to elaborate a bit at this point, because you describe yourself as a crypto native GTM strategist. So what does a truly crypto native go-to-market strategy look like compared to Web2 playbooks? Maybe elaborate a bit more on that?

Stephany Zoo: 6:53

Yeah, there is a lot more similarity, I think, than most marketers think. Of course, there are the crypto native platforms, so there's Discord, telegram, there's all the crypto events, there's crypto Twitter, but what we're missing is a lot of the core discipline that matters. So I always encourage my portfolio companies to go back to basics right. Looking at things like user segmentation, channel strategy, positioning, psychographics, a lot of that discipline actually gets overlooked and you end up doing a lot of vibe marketing and hype. That only gets you so far, but at the end of the day, you know, marketing is just about communicating to your audience, communicating to your clients, and so having a deep knowledge of who they are, what it is that they want, how they behave, is still the most important thing.

Joeri Billast: 7:41

I need how they behave, understand what they want, and storytelling is important. That's actually what I do a lot with my podcast, you know, with the communities I'm active in with my own retreat, Sintra Synergies. You know storytelling is really something that people like to have. As I mentioned before, we started recording. I live in Sintra, also a nice place to do storytelling. But from your perspective, what role do storytelling and maybe cultural narratives, play in making blockchain relatable, trustworthy?

Stephany Zoo: 8:12

I have never. I've been in a lot of different industries, I've worked across social impact and investment and technology and healthcare, and I've never been in an industry where narrative mattered more than crypto. And you see all of these different narratives whether it's like L2s or it's AIX crypto or it's meme coins, and they really are just these like hype cycles, and so I think the problem is that the industry actually over-indexes on narrative but then under-indexes on the potential of stories as connective tissues. So, going back to that earlier point of how do you do storytelling where you're not using a ton of jargon, where you're talking about the applicability, the universality, the ability to actually use crypto in a way that matters to people in the day-to-day.

Stephany Zoo: 9:07

When I worked in Africa, this is the beginning days of like Deller and Ripple, where we're talking about using crypto for remittances, things that impacted people like every day. And now we're like years later and we're still talking about these things but still nobody is really using crypto as payments and this payment narrative kind of cycles has come back about. And so I think the most important thing in the storytelling is you are making it relatable and you're thinking about how crypto is similar to everything else and not different. Similar to everything else and not different. So much of the storytelling that we have seen recently is crypto's unique thing and is redoing undoing what finance, the financial world, has done previously, and, while there is some truth in that, you can't have an entire industry and ecosystem that stands by itself, and so I think that a lot of the stories that we tell need to go back to how people use, how people apply all of these technologies, because otherwise it's just a bunch of code and not relevant to anyone. I think the relevancy is what we're really missing in storytelling.

Joeri Billast: 10:20

Yeah, of course it shouldn't only be about memes or about fun things, but about you know, a value, and I totally agree with that. Now at Caladan you have portfolio companies with everything from tokenomics to technical hiring. I am curious what do most founders maybe or often underestimate when it comes to you know, marketing, the marketing challenge?

Stephany Zoo: 10:44

No, I think they forget, like, what the purpose of marketing is. Right, marketing is a message that you are trying to send to your customers and your clients. It is not just about creating hype, and so we, in a lot of the conversations, we end up talking about vanity metrics very early on, right? So it's like how many impressions can I get? What is the number of Twitter followers that I have? Where? What big conferences am I speaking at?

Stephany Zoo: 11:14

And those are not necessarily the most important things. They look the flashiest and the prettiest, and so it seems like this is something that is obtainable, and in our industry, there are so many agencies that work with KOLs and do PR, so it can get you these fancy numbers, but, at the end of the day, what is it that is actually driving the business and what is the product and how are people using it? So, going back to that, so I try to draw our founders back into the core concept around, like positioning and messaging. I try to draw the founders back into the core messaging and the positioning about what is most important about their product and why it is making people's lives easier or better, and also a lot of that emotion, if you're talking about the core messaging and positioning for a product.

Stephany Zoo: 12:09

They oftentimes founders. All they care about is the splash, and especially in the very beginning it is possible to make it happen, but then it's not sustained. And so you do see all of these TGEs that have a lot of price action in the beginning and then fall off, companies putting out like huge advertising campaigns and you're spending a lot of money. So it feels like you're doing something. But when I go back and I'm like, what are your conversion metrics? What is actually making a client or a customer act on something? Very rarely are they able to tell me, because they're so occupied with just all this flash they're not really building the fire.

Joeri Billast: 12:52

Like that. Yeah, they are often on the short term to see you know making a lot. Yeah, they are often on the short term to see you know making a lot, doing a lot of things, like you know, like a bull. You know around in a shop and you know making everything moving, but don't really know what is in the China shop. That was what I was saying, and not seeing what is happening on the longer term. Right, yeah, positioning is always. It's also very important. Actually, I'm working with another client that is thinking about rebranding, which is actually a bit more in Web2. But you've led rebrands that won design awards and changed perceptions. So, caristo, here from you what makes a rebrand succeed in fast-moving, skeptical markets like crypto?

Stephany Zoo: 13:35

The joke is that almost every company that I've been at, within the first year I do a rebrand because it just. It's not that I'm discontented with what the brand is, but oftentimes, especially for a technology focused or finance focused, you end up. Our company's previous name, alpha Lab Capital, really was something that our founder just took out of the blue right. He was like oh we, you know, we generate alpha and we are like a lab, so Alpha Lab, right, but you really have to have a good reason to rebrand, whether it is that your brand name no longer serves you. For us at least, it was this change from being an internally focused high-frequency trading firm doing a lot of prop trading to being a more services-oriented, external-facing company where we needed a brand that clients could recognize and remember, which is why we made the Caladan name. In case you're wondering, it's the home planet of the House Atreides from the movie or the book Dune. And it's because it's a liquid planet and one of the things that we do is making markets fair and liquid. And back to that first principles of what is it that you stand for? You can do. There's some really great kind of branding exercises out there where you can say what are your core values, what is your positioning, what is the message that you want to send to your audience? And then that meat of it and then comparing it to what your current brand stands for and seeing whether or not there is a need for a rebrand.

Stephany Zoo: 15:08

And a rebrand doesn't necessarily have to be an entire name change, an entire visual identity change. It can just be one part of it, and we have seen some companies do this successfully when they've changed like a core technology or core offering, and other companies that maybe have struggled doing it. I think Polygon is a good example. They have gone through many iterations of what their underlying token and technology is, and every time they do that they try to rebrand token and technology is, and every time they do that they try to rebrand. But maybe the positioning is not super clear, and so then we're left adrift with what is the original message? Is it compatible to the current one? And so it's once again not just the fancy visual aspects that people see a lot of the times.

Stephany Zoo: 15:55

It really is about what it is that you stand for as a company and you know how you want to communicate that to the audience. I feel like I'm just like repeating myself about the messaging. That is the point that I just want to drive home, because I think, with so many brands, one message from their founder on Twitter, one from their website, one from the types of events that they do, one from the press articles, one from podcasts, and you're left being like very confused, and there's so much noise already in the industry that you really want to pierce through all of that and be very clear on what your messaging is. There is a trope in traditional advertising, which is, for somebody to really understand what you're saying, you need to communicate it to them nine different times in nine different ways, right? So if that's like a video and then a tweet and then a podcast, but you consistency is so important and that's what I really want to drive home.

Joeri Billast: 16:54

Absolutely Also in traditional marketing consistency. I thought it was seven, maybe nine. You know, the more, the more you show up actually, so that you get that you are top of mind and, of course, not just creating noise, because people they don't see noise. You know there's so many noise today. I gave a talk in lisbon not so long ago about you know how, how ai is creating a lot of noise and how you can, what you can do to actually really stand out. Let's talk about something else, because you also have been active in women's empowerment and social impact initiatives. How do you connect this with your work in emerging tech and finance?

Stephany Zoo: 17:32

yeah, I think it is recently. I'm currently putting together a big institutional event for Token 2049 called Signal, and I am and it's a convergence of these big crypto traditional crypto companies like Coinbase or Gold Galaxy A lot of the big Singaporean corporates as well Galaxy a lot of the big Singaporean corporates as well so DBS and Stanchar, and then also other financial services companies like Franklin Templeton and Fidelity, and one of the things I care a lot about is that we don't have manels. So, like all male panels, this is also a very like high level event where it's all C-levels and heads of departments and things like that, and it is so difficult, unfortunately, to find women in leadership positions to be speaking on these panels, even when I'm thinking about all the female VCs that I know, the ones that are making decisions, it is still, if you go to any crypto conference and you like look out, it is like a sea of crypto bros in black shirts and like just a couple of girls. It's very obvious, right? And there's some really great organizations within crypto, like SheFi, that are putting on programming and welcoming women into the industry, and it's not just about the bias, it's not just about affirmative action of getting women onto panels or into leadership positions.

Stephany Zoo: 19:01

I think it's actually just diversity of perspective. I think that when you're making products that everybody uses, when you're impacting financial systems like, you just need other perspectives and you need creativity, and that's one of the core reasons why you need women to be leading a lot of these initiatives as well. I think we're really lucky actually at Caladan that our COO is a woman. Our head of investments is a woman, so we have a lot of women in leadership positions and they're very effective, they're very efficient and they work just as well as men, and so I think it's less about just the equality and more about the equity of having voices in the room.

Joeri Billast: 19:45

Yeah, absolutely. I was speaking on a panel at Coda in Porto and there was a woman on my panel and it was about blockchain and AI, but normally she was invited to go on a Web3 or Women in Web3 panel and she said, like, okay, now I want to speak about something else, really like on the normal panels, which should not be really, like you know, about women. That said also on my podcast. I think I haven't counted it yet, but I think it's quite. It's a quite good balance. You know, if you will look at more than 250 guests that have come on, so I love to have also, you know you mentioned different continents. That's also. You know, people from everywhere around the world, so that's really exciting for me too. Now, yeah, let's talk a bit about resilience. So what can entrepreneurs actually in emerging markets teach founders in Silicon Valley? About creativity under constraints, because resilience is often something talk about too in my communities and my retreat yeah, I think they're.

Stephany Zoo: 20:48

having worked in Africa and Southeast Asia, I have seen some incredible entrepreneurs and I'm very lucky to have invested in a lot of them. I think the main thing is just focus. When you have less resources, when you have less time, when you have less funding right, I am very proud of my portfolio of companies who raised these million dollars at like a couple hundred million dollar valuations right, I think that's great. But then when you have that amount of money, it feels like you have an unlimited amount of time and an unlimited runway. And, to be honest, even when you look at a lot of these dinosaur kind of foundations who have been around for a long time, but then they have these treasuries that are like billions of dollars, so technically they do have nearly an infinite runtime. They can just operate their foundations and their companies for years and years without actually needing to do anything or be really pushed to do meaningful big things, because they have endless runway, right. So I think when you have those constraints, you are forced to look at what your main quest is and how you are going to achieve that main quest. It forces a lot of discipline with if I say I'm going to A-B test these things within a specific user segment. I know that I only have a couple thousand dollars to see whether or not this is going to work. If it does, great. If it doesn't, then I need to cut it. That discipline to do.

Stephany Zoo: 22:17

There are so many things not to do as well it actually.

Stephany Zoo: 22:20

I think the constraints make people more strategic and people might say what is strategy?

Stephany Zoo: 22:25

And I think strategy is just all the things you shouldn't be doing, and I do encourage also entrepreneurs to write down all the things that they're not going to do that quarter, right. I think a lot of people will do like OKRs or KPIs for that quarter of the things I want to achieve. What about all the things that you should not focus on during that time? And maybe those things that you shouldn't focus on are going to be done in a later quarter should be done some of that sequentially. But when you have so many resources, you can like continue to hire more people and put them on different projects, and that really takes away from what your core product or your core value proposition is, and I think that entrepreneurs just like me it's great when they're visionary, right, and so many of them have gotten to where they are, but that's why it's really great to have a COO or a business partner somewhere in there who is this very focused on execution. That's really the most important thing.

Joeri Billast: 23:18

Yeah, I love that. I did some child project management too before, and then there was this Moscow principle that I like to use must have, should haves, could haves and won't haves, and that's actually a bit about that. You know you have a whole bunch of things that you can do, but what is actually a must have, that you know absolutely you need to do or need to live? What is then the should have? That is the next priority, then that is the, I would say the could have, maybe like the nice to have. Yeah, that's more like, you know, bells and whistles or something that you can put on top of what is the one want to do right now, but maybe in the next part.

Stephany Zoo: 23:51

So, yeah, I think with that is also the way that marketing teams are structurally run in a lot of crypto companies.

Stephany Zoo: 23:59

Right, if you have had experience at a big company, you know there's a CMO on top and then there's a lot of different functional like heads or departments.

Stephany Zoo: 24:09

Right, there might be events, there might be digital or performance marketing, there might be corporate communications, there might be branding, but because so many crypto companies are a lot smaller and you have a handful of people on the marketing team, right, that marketing person ends up doing everything, and so it is much more difficult to actually do attribution and say what is moving the needle is actually events.

Stephany Zoo: 24:34

What is moving the needle is doing Twitter spaces. What is moving the needle is our email blasts or whatever it might be. So they are just trying to do all of the things and throwing everything all at once, and so you can't isolate what's working, and you know there is a lot of pressure on also that one or two marketing people to perform. It is up to the marketing person hopefully, that they have the previous experience at a bigger firm, at an agency, whatever it is to have the discipline of saying this is how I'm going to run a campaign, this is how it's integrated and this is how I can isolate what's working, what's not, so then you can go and scale, repeat the things that are working.

Joeri Billast: 25:17

I love that. Yeah, indeed, it's really important, because I thought you're just doing something just for the sake of being busy. Let's talk a bit about culture. I think you called yourself somewhere a cultural propagandist Propagandist.

Stephany Zoo: 25:33

Yeah propagandist, a cultural propagandist.

Joeri Billast: 25:36

Propagandist. So how do you see culture actually being shaped by crypto communities and how should brands engage responsibly in those spaces?

Stephany Zoo: 25:45

So I think there is culture within the crypto communities and then there's culture outside of the crypto communities and, very candidly, crypto is not doing a great job of being culture outside of the crypto community. Almost like all of the news that you see is like a crypto founder getting kidnapped or a crypto founder there's a scam or something that is negative. And I worked in China for a very long time and I always said that China was really bad at soft power and branding itself outside of China. If you sit inside of China, you're like, oh wow, all of these things that China is doing. That's really impressive and very effective, and I wish I could communicate these things outside of China and that people would believe me. And I think it's like the same case in crypto.

Stephany Zoo: 26:35

I think culture inside crypto actually has so much positive attributes around community and really helping each other out and accessibility, sharing technology, really pushing each other, questioning things which I think are all great but outside of crypto, nobody sees any of that.

Stephany Zoo: 26:56

So I think it is really our responsibility as crypto marketers to be using our brand to tell more positive stories and to have both the patience and the foresight to communicate our internal culture externally so that when we are having these bigger cultural conversations about what crypto is and the place of crypto in culture externally, so that when we are having these bigger cultural conversations about what crypto is and the place of crypto in culture, it is a lot more positive.

Stephany Zoo: 27:24

I think for a long time, like the badge of honor of crypto, has been like we're like a rebel force or we're the underdogs, and, to be honest, that's changing right. Institutions are coming in. Now we have all these dads, so there's going to be a huge amount of retail and people outside of crypto that is starting to own crypto either directly or indirectly, and there's also a responsibility to handle all of those things well. If all the dads in the world go down, then you know everybody who has held one of those stocks externally is basically going to say horrible things about crypto. I think just acting responsibly is the first step of communicating internal crypto culture externally.

Joeri Billast: 28:06

Awesome. And let's come to my final question, because I already mentioned, you know, the panel that I was moderating about Web3 and AI. I'm doing a retreat just before the web submit. You know Central Synergies we will be talking about. There will be Web3, ai people there, so imagine you would be there and you would talk to those people, a circle of founders. What is one shift that you would urge them to prepare for when it comes to the convergence of Web3 and AI?

Stephany Zoo: 28:35

when it comes to the convergence of Web3 and AI, maybe a hot take, but I think that almost everything I've seen in the convergence of Web3 and AI has been not very substantive. It is a lot like. I've seen a lot of the agent-related stuff. I've seen the decentralized compute. We actually have a number of portfolio companies that are like in that space. I think that it's been crypto founders dabbling in AI and what actually needs to happen is AI founders using crypto is going to be what actually integrates the two industries better together.

Stephany Zoo: 29:17

I think we're still a bit far off from. I think in AI, everything's accelerated. So even when I'm like, oh, we're a little far out, that might just mean like we're a couple months or a year out. I feel, because AI is also shifting so dramatically constantly, there is a level of hubris, I think, within crypto people where we're like, oh, we know what fast moving industries look like because there's a new narrative or a new technology that comes in crypto all the time. But AI is going to amplify that million fold and so we're going to be the boomers. We're going to be the ones that are like left behind and but I do think there are some going to be some far reaching applications. It's just not quite there just yet.

Joeri Billast: 29:58

Absolutely. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing too, Stephany. Yeah, thank you for all, for everything that you shared, all your experience with us. If people now they want to connect with you or they want to follow you, they want to know more about Caladan, where would you like me to send them?

Stephany Zoo: 30:15

I am the world's worst tweeter. I use X like as a marketing person.

Joeri Billast: 30:19

I use X maybe like once a quarter but you can follow Caladan at Caladan XYZ on X. Well, Stephany, it was really a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Stephany Zoo: 30:34

Great to be here as well. Thank you.

Joeri Billast: 30:37

Guys, what an amazing episode with Stephany. I'm sure this episode has a lot of value for people around you, so be sure to share this episode with them. If you are not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to hit the subscribe button. And if you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this would help me reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.