Katie Perry, ZeroHash | theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Marketing Leaders

Hello out to studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. >> I'm John Furth and co-host of here with Dave Latham my co-host. >> Welcome back to the Cube studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Jill Allen, one of the hosts of NYSE Wired and today we are talking all things marketing leaders. They are the folks shaping the messaging that is reimagining technology, markets and businesses of tomorrow. One thing we know is that crypto is having a very unique moment. The conversation has moved beyond speculation into how infrastructure and money actually moves in the real world. Joining me live for conversation on exactly that is the chief marketing officer of Zero Hash, Katie Perry. Welcome Katie. >> Thank you for having me. >> So crypto, I mean, so much to unpack here from the perspective of marketing, right? Like and I want to dive into so much, but before we do, maybe just to start, let's level set with what exactly it is that Zero Hash does. Give me the company 101. >> Sure. Zero Hash is an infrastructure company. So essentially what we do is we help companies that are primarily non-crypto companies go on chain. Now, people who are not in deep in the industry might hear the word on chain a lot and wonder like what does that mean? On chain is just the terminology meaning these companies are adapting and utilizing digital asset technologies in their products. That could be turning on crypto trading buy or sell. If you've been following the news, E*TRADE just added crypto that was powered by Zero Hash, so that could be as straightforward as that. It could also be using digital assets as payment rails, so that's when stablecoins come into the conversation. It might also mean tokenized assets. So any of those things, if a non-crypto company wants to leverage that technology, make it part of their customer experience, part of their product, they they need to be have the technology infrastructure to do that and the regulatory stack. So, there's a tech layer and a compliance layer that we provide and we were just kind of chatting about AWS. I use that a lot with my friends that are sort of outside financial services where AW AWS exists to help companies build their businesses online via a ton of different ways. We help businesses go on chain in terms of using digital asset technology, however they may be using it within their organization. >> Wow. So, let's go into the marketing side of this isn't because I really think this is a very interesting challenge that you have, right? Crypto in some respects, I mean, it has had a wave enthusiasm, a wave of skepticism, you know, we know that from the narrative perspective, things seem to change like the weather a little bit, right? And that's that's tough, I'm sure, from the perspective of like leading a company's marketing in this space, but also it's something that when it's working well, no one really sees, right? It doesn't have the same brand affiliation, brand identity, tangible, conceptual awareness that some other brands have. So, it's like an interesting one. How do you think about it from the perspective of marketing? Like, what do you think makes the marketing challenge and the opportunity like truly unique? >> Yeah, a few things. I think you hit on it. Crypto is sort of one of those words that has visceral reaction outside of people building in the space. It started really as kind of a core group of people who really wanted this. They had a vision for this decentralized universe that they wanted to build in or live in and it had these sort of cultural associations. It was very community-driven. That still exists, that's still there. Over the years though, you've seen institutions start adopting this technology, institutions that Zero Hash works with. That's a different sort of mindset because instead of tracking the performance of an asset or a token in in the day-to-day, they're looking at this stuff as I'm I'm going to incorporate this in my business so we have long-term durability. So we can more easily pay people across borders or optimize our treasury functions. So the way they're thinking about it is much more zoomed out, it's much more measured, but you still have people, you know, supporting projects and assets and it's interesting even very specific example being, you know, when when we manage our our X profile at Zero Hash, we see, you know, fintech writers talking about, you know, Visa Direct using stable coins, which we just announced those guys as a partner. Big institutional story, it's sending a signal into the future. Right below that, I see, you know, the the anonymous account sharing it saying, you know, this is bullish for XYZ. And so you're navigating multiple audiences and what's interesting is, you know, we mark we're B2B, we market to the institutions and the businesses, but those audiences within crypto are still sort of important to the ecosystem overall. >> Um and do you think a lot about maintaining the loyalty of the more eclectic peripheral player in the space, like the OG crypto pro or gal who is kind of tends to be more about the democratization of finance, about the kind of almost anti-institution play versus where crypto has now come to as an industry? Like does it How do you think about maintaining loyalty, I suppose, from both audiences? >> Yeah, what's fascinating about our business is we're interoperable across 100 plus ecosystems. So we don't, you know, pick favorites. We build a technology that makes it possible for people using different assets within these ecosystems for those to work together within the broader framework of an institutional use case. Um and so I think with the like the OG people, my personal opinion is they they still belong in the community. They This would not exist in its current state. It would not be It would not be getting the attention of the big institutions without the people that really believed and stuck with it. And they're a different flavor. They're a different style. I think it's great. I go to conferences and you know, there's people I saw like a whole Bitcoin family at the Bitcoin conference. There was a baby in a Bitcoin onesie and the parents and they took their kid to Vegas and then I saw five, you know, Deloitte consultants there to meet with And so everyone's kind of there together. I think it's good It's a good mix. I think it's good for both sides to experience and be exposed to the other. And I think you're seeing that more and more where I I think you maybe a couple years ago the people who were like the originals were looking Here come the suits. Now they're starting to realize that this all works together, you know, the vision they they believed in and want to see that gets accelerated when these big businesses invest in them because when a huge institution invests in this they're not just testing it out, you know, for a couple. They're really vetting it and they're like, this is core to our business we think in the next 5, 10, 20 years. >> And you guys at ZeroHedge have really seen some very legitimate, long-term, traditional, legacy players using and advocate for your technology, right? Maybe talk us through some of those examples and even just the kind of evolution of your own marketing messaging as we see and hear more and more institutional trades, you know, focus on the space here on Wall Street. >> Yeah, so going back a bit, ZeroHedge was founded in 2017, which feels like forever ago in crypto. And so the company has really survived and then thrived through some really tough times. Like some of those crypto winters when the team was building and I wasn't there for that. I hear the You know, I hear the war stories. A lot of the original people are still at the company. It was tough and our CEO and founder talks a lot about kind of the company was founded on the premise that, you know, the original team wanted to they looked at like the crypto space. They're like, we believe in this and they're like, what's the biggest challenge right now? Like, what's the biggest challenge cuz they believed that was the biggest opportunity. And what they saw was the biggest challenge is how are you going to get a Morgan Stanley, a Black, how you going to get these big institutions to believe and adopt in the technology? And a lot of that centers on trust. 2017, you know, very different. I mean, you're talking probably getting laughed out of rooms to today where, you know, we work with BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Franklin Templeton on the, you know, big institutional side. And then also like some of these really uh up-and-coming emerging fintechs, Calshine, Gusto, as well. And so, that was sort of the original thesis was kind of like, what's the hardest thing we can do? And that was at a time when everyone was building like very fun projects and, you know, it was a lot of these sort of uh you know, some survived, some didn't. And this team was like, wait. They they They were looking 20 years down and they're like, what's the hardest thing we can do? This is what it is. So, I I mentioned the word trust. Our marketing as a B2B infrastructure company is really about trust. Um and that comes to life in a lot of the things we do, but it also comes to life in just the product itself. And so, you know, in addition to doing, you know, fun swag and merch and events, you know, we have 99.99% uptime. And like, a lot of our trust comes from like our licensing, uh the product durability, uh ability to handle massive volumes. And so, it's sort of like and you you'd appreciate this as a marketer, like, it's like the boring stuff. >> It's solution-based, too, right? Like, it's tactical. >> Exactly. >> When you think about what changed in 2017 from the perspective of large institutions and banks to now, right? From being like you said, like, maybe laughed out of rooms to suddenly being very much, you know, a talking point across all large institutions, do you think that the buyer profile changed somewhat in that time, too? And how do you think about that from the perspective of your own category and target marketing? Like, who is top of funnel, and where do they live and ingest information? >> Yeah, it's fascinating. I think there's a lot of parallels to the beginning of my career. I started my career at an ad agency that we we did consumer marketing for brands like Coca-Cola and Mondelēz and these big brands, and the agency was focused on digital marketing. And this was at a time when like we had to we were going to meetings and basically being like, "Here's why you guys need a Facebook page." And they were like, "What? I don't we need that." And what what I saw in that experience is like, you know, those audiences started to grow, those platforms grow grew. Next thing you know, Oreo has a head of digital. And it's like this random person who's like the digital czar, and they're all over here, and that's like their job is to be like the innovative person. Over time, that slowly seeps into every single role at the company. You know, the integrated marketing person knows digital, the PR person knows digital. I think that same thing happened or is is happening with digital assets, where maybe a few years ago and there's still like head of you see still a lot of jobs head of digital assets, but now it's sort of part of everyone's function. If you're on a legal or compliance team, you got to know your stuff in digital assets, you know, it's not a product. So, it's not just this one person who's the evangelist, it's spread out. Uh and from a marketing standpoint, it's great challenges and opportunities because now we have, you know, call it eight different categories of businesses we can go after. Within each of those, there's four different buyer profiles. You have the compliance person who cares about the licensing, you have the product person who wants to get in the details of our API. You know, you've got the ops person, and so each of those requires a different message. And all of that though needs to make sense and ladder up into like a bigger picture brand story. I think that's like the most fun part about B2B marketing. >> And on that brand story, how do you think about that from the perspective of social media where the actual conversations and listening is happening? Especially now, right? As this like world of AI and LLMs and people doing their own research. Yeah, another marketing leader on this morning who said, you know, I know that technical buyers go to Claude or OpenAI or whatever it is, ChatGPT, to get advice on products, get recommendations, right? What's happening in the crypto space around that? Like are technical buyers or potential customers using these, you know, LLMs as research and qualitative reckoning? Like how what are you seeing? >> They absolutely are and that's become sort of pillar of our marketing activities. That's very important. Uh we actually use a tool called Profound and what they do, their service exists basically ping all of the LLMs or the main ones um with queries that somebody might be typing if they're researching your company. So someone might be saying, I'm looking for a digital asset infrastructure provider for stablecoin payments, who's the best? Uh they'll they'll use their technology to ping that out and then they'll get the data back on who's ranking the highest and then they'll understand why. So they'll come back to us and say, you know, you guys are doing pretty well in this category but actually you're a little weak in this area. So with that insight, we know we're weak in discoverability in XYZ product in LLM. We can then incorporate that into our messaging, our press releases which gets picked up by LLMs, our Wikipedia page. There's all these things we can use that signal. Um and so SEO, you know, people doing that within Google was, you know, pretty established practice. Now there's like LLM optimization and um our growth lead on my team is very focused on that right now. Making sure and we can actually with these tools you can track over time share voice and understand in aggregate. It's it's very important. Um, but it's still one of those things and this was similar with Google where you're sort of guessing what you can do to get in there cuz it's always changing. Uh, the LLMs aren't super transparent about saying, you know, these websites matter more than others. You know, you know third-party here you have an article in Fortune, it's a trusted third-party that counts a lot. Wikipedia pages count a ton. Reddit counts a ton. Can't really control Reddit that much. So, all these factors come in and then you sort of make tweaks and then you see what worked and what didn't and it's it's a fun exercise, but it it's very important for especially a technical uh, purchasing decision where there is multiple players and you want to quickly get to a short list. >> Wow. I mean, it seems to me based on the conversation we've had in this series that like a lot of people are learning in the moment, right? Like there is no tried and tested playbook here. You kind of have to all learn as you go. >> Yeah. From the perspective of the technical roadmap for a company like Zero Hash where there is obviously, you know, it's an infrastructure, it's an enabler. How do you think about solution messaging and technical messaging? And how do you think these worlds of crypto tech meets, you know, reg tech meet regular tech meets AI are crossing. Like there is a little bit of cross-pollination, but also I feel like a little bit of confusion perhaps. What are your thoughts? >> It's a unique challenge because we we exist to simplify something that's extremely complex, time-sensitive, and expensive for our partners. And so, the messaging has to to show that. You know, we need to establish that we're simplifying something, we're abstracting the complexity. But the flip side of that is we need to show that we have credibility in the technical side and depth of the licensing. So, it's this interesting balance where we exist to simplify, but if our message was just, "Hey, we make this easy for you. Trust us." That doesn't work. And it also, you know, the depth of which we get into the technicality of what the product does depends on the buyer. If we're talking to an executive, a CEO, an ops person, they might not be in as deep of the product. We're really focused on solutions messaging. I think one big thing about where crypto's gone is like crypto is some is a technology that exists to solve business problems. And there are so many business problems they can solve. So, you want to optimize your treasury management, digital assets could help you with that. You want to move money across borders with less fees or maybe quicker, digital assets can do that. So, a lot of the sort of top-line messaging is here's a business problem, here's how digital assets solve it. When you get down to like the product layer and the technical decision makers, you start to layer in more of how does it work, you know, and then we get into we have an API structure that makes it easy. We have a modular product structure. You integrate once with one product API and then you can build from there. But, we're not going to use that for someone just looking for a solution. And what's fascinating about all this is when you talk about even discoverability in LLMs, someone might search they have a business challenge and they might not be thinking stablecoins is the answer, but we want to appear there. We're there to educate that this is a new technology that could help them solve that business challenge even if they've never even considered it. >> Wow. And do you think the industry broadly within crypto is doing a good job of coming together and unifying their messaging so that that kind of overall thesis of this is also an option is landing? Like that's the one thing I feel like it's a very collegial space in some respects. >> Yes. >> But, that collegiality isn't necessarily landing in the PR narrative around the space. Like what are your thoughts on that? >> Agree with you on like the collaboration within the industry. Um, I've never seen more competing companies have amazing relationships between executives. There's so many committees that exist, working groups that are bringing people together. And it's so unlike a lot of the industries I've worked in where there's been times where someone's like, "Oh, I'll just call up so-and-so." And I'm like, "Don't we go head-to-head with them?" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, we're all working towards the same goal. There's an I think the feeling there's enough for everybody. We're at the very early stages of this stuff infiltrating sort of the core systems. And so, I think that is amazing. I think when people can come together and work together, even though there's obviously we're all we're all competing to some degree. Um I agree also though that those good vibes we we need to you know, we're we're not fully there yet with people outside of crypto. You talk to someone outside of crypto, like when I took this job, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to take this job." And they're like, "Oh, like FTX?" Cuz that's what people know, right? They And so, it's it's understandable. And what's what the challenge is going to be is increasingly these digital asset use cases within products people already use. So, like right now, if you want to if you're watching a game on Sunday and you want to make a a make a trade on Kelshi outside of market hours, you could instantly fund your account with stablecoins. You might not even know that's what you're doing necessary necessarily. So, this is all going to become invisible in just another way money moves. People might not even know it's crypto. So, how do we sort of fix that reputation if it starts to be underneath things. I think we'll be a challenge for the industry. But I think we've come a long way. I think I get less of that the more time I've been uh at uh Zero Hash. But there's still you know, a little bit of a hangover from things that happened. And and um I think that's just because what tends to penetrate the mainstream are not usually the positive stories or a great business case study. It's kind of course going to be >> very public prolific brand voices that get a lot of media. Like this weekend, Mark Cuban talked to somebody about Bitcoin, right? Like you know, there's some voices out there that just get a lot of media pick up, right? It's a pure engine at the end of the day, too. And I think as an industry, like many other industries that are peripheral, you know, it's it's a hard hill to overcome sometimes. But it's certainly fascinating, and the conversation around marketing and what's happening in this space is really interesting and profound. I'm going to actually look into that because again, I feel like we could all learn something. >> I didn't even get paid to say that. Maybe I [laughter] can get a discount next time. >> Exactly. Well, Katie, thanks so much for joining us in the cube. >> Thanks, Gemma. Nice to be with you. >> I'm Gemma Allen here at the Cube studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This NYSE Wired Marketing Leaders. Thanks for watching.