Blockchain Talkers: Smart Marketing With Steve Lee Of Komodo Platform

By David Weiss on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

How is blockchain going to get big — really big?

Theories abound, revolving around coding breakthroughs, and leaps that would solve the trilemma: What will happen when blockchain grows faster, more secure, and totally scalable?

Meet the marketing Blockchain Talker: Steve Lee is Chief Strategy Officer at Komodo Platform

So much of what comes next for Distributed Ledger Technology undoubtedly depends on the computer scientists — math, programming, and software geniuses that bend the blockchain to their will.

But there’s a whole other class of dedicated professionals that blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin are depending on to thrive, and achieve the longed-for mass adoption: Blockchain Talkers. It’s the army of communicators that have built up around blockchain, who are vital to the industry’s growth, as much as the coders that create the technology.

With their ability to translate this almost entirely intangible tech to others — from fellow aficionados to the general public — Blockchain Talkers are key to making blockchain engaging, understandable, and capable of taking off. They include journalists, podcasters, authors, publicists, video personalities, seminar speakers, conference organizers and more.

In this first edition of “Blockchain Talkers,” we focus on an accomplished marketer. Steve Lee, Chief Strategy Officer at Komodo Platform, is helping to launch the industry’s first open, composable Smart Chain platform. Fully customizable, modular, and open source, Komodo is focused on bringing new levels of flexibility and scalability to blockchain developers.

Lee built up his expertise by working with some of the top tech brands out there, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HGST (Western Digital), and SanDisk. It’s a perfect background for bringing proven best practices to blockchain marketing, bolstered by fresh perspectives.

How is marketing progressing for this field, which changes at a breakneck pace? What were the marketing mistakes of over-eager early entries that gave blockchain a bad name? And what communications tips does Lee have for the next wave of entrepreneurs in the space? Read on to learn more about how to market blockchain, and see the big impact that talented Blockchain Talkers are making.

Steve, my first question is simply “What is marketing?” Please define the field as you see it.

I learned marketing through the “Four P’s”: It’s product, price, placement, promotion. Over the past decade that I’ve been working in this field, it’s evolved a bit. We see a lot of social media integrating into marketing plans as well as content marketing, and now you’re seeing influencer marketing as well.

I’ve predominantly been in the B2B space, and they’re a little more traditional in that sense. I do feel like blockchain is kind of blurring the lines: It has a lot of the tech marketing focus, but it also goes into the more B2C type of marketing, due to the fact that it does deal with cryptocurrencies and investments.

What makes marketing for blockchain the same as marketing for other fields, and then conversely what makes it different?

Blockchain is a technology, and like every emerging technology, a lot of it is about education for people who are unfamiliar with the technology. You see the same with artificial intelligence, machine learning, all the other emerging tech fields.

So in that vein, I think it is very similar to all the technology marketing: It’s all about thought leadership. Mostly, in the beginning, we saw a huge influx of academic-type papers, white papers, a lot of discussions. And the fact that everything is open source is also a good thing. There’s a lot of information transfer. There’s not proprietary technology — a lot of sharing and cross-learning.

And then in terms of how it’s different (laughs), I could go probably go on for an hour about how marketing is different in blockchain, and I think this is one of the things that kind of shocked me. I’ve worked in technology, in high tech and Silicon Valley for over a decade, over 12 years now. I’ve worked in Fortune 100/Fortune 500 companies, so I’m very used to a very traditional enterprise-based technical marketing track: You do analyst relations, you do PR, pre-launch, but you walk them through the technology, you walk them through the competition and then you actually showcase the technology.

I think that that’s what’s missing in the blockchain space. And again, this goes back to the fact that blockchain — although it is a technology — one of the primary use cases is cryptocurrency. This fact that there is a financial aspect to it and an investment aspect, that kind of makes the marketing a little more, for lack of a better word, shady or slimy.

I think we saw a lot of that in 2017 and 2018 when we had this whole ICO craze. Everybody was trying to figure out how to make more money, and it’s whoever could shout the loudest. And the problem at that time, to me, was that a lot of these investors were relying on influencers, and if you take a good cross-segment of these influencers, the majority of them have no technical background at all. We did see this trend of maybe financial analysts or people in the traditional markets that are coming into cryptocurrency. But in terms of educating the public of what is real versus what is hype and what is “roadmap,” that I think was the big disconnect. A lot of people were investing lots of money into projects that never materialized. That doesn’t do anything good for the credibility of our industry.

I think that those are all excellent observations. And something else that I find makes blockchain difficult to explain and hard to market, is that it can feel very hard to touch or direct experience.

Yes, what’s complicated also is the different use cases that came out. Cryptocurrency is — I wouldn’t say simply to understand — but I think the majority of people who are familiar with blockchain do understand the cryptocurrency aspect.

But once we start talking about smart contracts, platforms, different use cases, this is when I think people don’t truly understand the technology set. For instance, back in 2017, there were so many ICO’s promising all these great things that can be done with smart contracts today. We take a look at Ethereum smart contracts and it’s widely understood that they’re not that smart, right? They don’t actually do this crazy stuff that people promised back in 2017, in the early days.

The biggest issue for me is that what had happened is that a lot of us got into investing and getting interested in blockchain through the technology, and this promise of decentralization and how that can impact social good. However, once the ICO craze came in and the opportunity of profiting became so viable, how many projects came out and said,

“We do the same thing as Ethereum, but more.”

Everybody started copycatting, including white papers.

And you could classify it as blockchain “marketing,” but the way people used to invest would be to say,

“Let’s first read the white paper.”

That’s kind of the benchmark: You go from the white paper to the road map, then you look at the team — do they have people from reputable companies? This used to be a benchmark for investment.

And what a lot of people don’t understand is that no, these guys are working at large enterprises and being offered advisor roles. [They’re getting] free money and they just need to be put on someone’s team site and the wider public will say,

“Oh, they have a Google engineer, and so this means that they’re going to be something crazy good.”

I live in Silicon Valley. I have friends that work at all the major companies out there and it’s not a big deal. But that’s the problem with the lack of information, education and really twisting stuff out of context. Someone works at this place, he’s the director of this place — that means this is going to be a billion-dollar project. That’s so far from the truth.

Talking Komodo

So now let’s turn our attention to Komodo, which is the industry’s “first open composable blockchain platform.” How do you explain what that means to people who are totally unfamiliar with Komodo?

It’s hard because we’re a platform, and the first thing that comes to everybody’s mind is,

“Let’s compare them to Ethereum.”

I think Ethereum was great in that it pioneered the ability for anybody to onboard to blockchain technologies. Being able to tokenize those great smart contracts opened up a lot of possibilities.

But what they did wrong in our belief is that they deployed a single chain architecture model. Meaning, we have one blockchain and everyone is renting a space on it. If you take a look at what that really means, at how computing has evolved, in the very beginning it was a calculator, right? Then they kind of migrated to those punch-card computers, the old IBM machines, and then the mainframes came up.

To me, bitcoin is like a calculator. It had one sole focus, and it’s to calculate and to be a ledger. Then we move into the mainframe era, and that’s where we see Ethereum: They are one big supercomputer, and then much like the client-terminal-mainframe relationship, people can tokenize on it and rent space on that supercomputer.

But we all understand that scalability is an issue, right? If you look at today’s modern enterprise data centers, where you are looking at x86, virtualized, automated, everything’s pulled together — that’s kind of this cloud model, a virtualization cloud model.

Now that’s being taken a step further. When I worked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the last thing I was focused on (there) was composable infrastructure, and HPE pioneered that. What composable infrastructure means is the ability to virtualize and pool resources — so servers, networking, storage, and being able to provide those rapidly to applications. This is already kind of the cloud model, the composability means we can take these resources and give it to an app, and once it doesn’t need it, we can automate those resources somewhere else. It’s this whole orchestration automation layer.

What we’re trying to do at Komodo is very similar. The first thing that we did was we had to understand how to decouple platform services from a single chain. So the benefits of being on Ethereum is you don’t have to worry about security. Everyone’s sharing that security on the Ethereum chain. You have to worry about scalability, but it’s not your problem — it’s Ethereum’s problem to solve. Interoperability, they haven’t really solved that, but they do have the ability to exchange ERC-20 tokens.

So we took all those challenges on the Ethereum side and at Komodo, we just said,

“How can we decouple that from a single chain? How can we give people their own independent infrastructure?”

And the way we do that is, the first thing that we created was Delayed Proof of Work (DPoW). And to simplify it, basically, every chain will back up their transaction history to Komodo. Komodo aggregates all those backups and backs it up into bitcoin every 10 minutes.

What that means is that every independent chain in our ecosystem, if you want it to 51% attack, then you need a 51% hash rate of that chain — Komodo’s chain and Bitcoin — and to successfully attack and replace all living copies at the same time. Even from a cost perspective, it’s very expensive to even try. But from a more practical standpoint, if you could hack Bitcoin, why would you hack an independent Komodo chain?

We solved the security aspect and now we have the ability to scale that out to multiple chains. So limitless scaling per customer and all of these smart chains are now interoperable as well, with integrated atomic swaps. So what we’re trying to do is allow everybody to not only deploy their own blockchain but if they want to create their own platform, they can do that. Anything that impacts them doesn’t impact us — it’s isolated, but it’s still kind of interconnected.

Crypto Metaphors

That sounds like a good explanation of Komodo from a technical, 10,000-foot view. Is that different than how you would explain that from a marketing standpoint?

That is the challenge, right? Because I think the thing with blockchain is that you have to deal with different audience types. In the past, in my prior roles, I was predominantly B2B, so it was a lot easier.

Now we have to think about not only developers and customers, which is your traditional audience, but we also have to think about investors, speculators, even influencers. Everybody has to be involved and each of these audiences has their own specific type of pitch. We have to understand what they value, what is their level of understanding of the technology and what are the analogies and the metaphors that will help them understand it. So we do have different types of messaging for different types of audiences.

I’m glad you brought up analogies and metaphors because I find that for me as a journalist and someone striving to understand blockchain, and all types of science long before blockchain, I was always impressed and influenced by someone who could explain something well with analogies and metaphors. How important are the right analogies and metaphors in communicating blockchain?

I think is extremely, extremely important. Because if you have to deal with a multitude of different levels of technical understanding, metaphors cut right through that. You don’t have to think of a simplified technical explanation, then a little more detailed, and then the super-detailed technical explanation. A simple metaphor can get straight to the point, and at least get that high-level understanding so you can move on into the topic, or else people get lost in the technology and it’s overwhelming.

And who is the source of those metaphors and analogies from the marketing side? Do you depend on your engineers to give them to you first as you progress in the field? Or do you find that you personally are more and more capable of coming up with the right ones?

I’ve had a lot of experience being the bridge — I’ve worked predominantly on product marketing teams, as well as exec comms. My responsibility was technical content and collateral, and being able to distill that to the sales field, to the customer, and to global accounts. I was the person that was to take it up a notch to higher-level messaging.

So it’s something I’m used to. Definitely, for me it’s more about trying to understand the technology, and even reading about how other people try to market their technology is definitely helpful as well.

On Top of the Tech

For you as a marketing professional, how deeply do you need to understand the technology in order to be able to market it? Because you’re not a blockchain coder, you’re not a developer. So how well do you have to understand the tech to do your job?

I would say you would have to understand what the value of the technology is. You have to understand what competitively is out there and what legacy technologies that it could replace. If you get that baseline understanding and understand how far along the technology is, I think that’s another key point that a lot of people miss in this industry.

It’s like,

“OK, you can talk about your vision, but how close are you to actually executing on it?”

I think that that’s something that’s missing from the equation. But I believe that if we push education and actually learning what the technology is that’s a start.

That’s definitely a focus for Komodo. There’s the high-level corporate marketing — to me that’s kind of fluff, right? You’ve got to move into the more developer-focused marketing, technical marketing, competitive marketing, and then solutions marketing. Which, to me, is what is the real marketing at that point.

The problem is that in this industry, a lot of people don’t even have products. Everything is theoretical, they have to sell stuff that isn’t real yet, so a lot of stuff is about vision. But I think this is a perfect time, this is the inflection point where we say,

“Hey, we, we need to get rid of those projects that are just either scams or just promising stuff that’s not being built.”

Let’s remember that blockchain is a technology, not [just] a financial tool, an instrument — that’s one use case. If we want our industry to survive, we’ve got to promote education, academics and that sort of thing to really legitimize this technology.

Recovering From Pay-To-Play

So you’ve laid out for me the messaging, the demographics, but how does that actually manifest itself in actual marketing actions? What are the tools you deploy to get your message out?

That is a difficult aspect of this industry. We struggled a lot to get press coverage in the past, that’s one of the primary reasons we hired Wachsman and they’ve done a great job for us.

But it seemed like this industry was very pay-to-play. I’m going to be very honest: When I first joined, everything was about,

“Hey, if you give us $10,000 we’ll publish you in a guest-contributed article on this outlet.”

Everything was pay-to-play. So it wasn’t relationship-based at all. It’s purely volume transactional-based, which shocked me.

Because what was happening at that time is that these ICO’s who raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, for them, it’s simple, it’s an immediate ROI. You get coverage, your price goes up. That thankfully started going away, but that was the challenge, how do we reach the audiences that we want? And even two years ago, everybody cared about investment, nobody really cared about the technology — the people who care about the technology are the ones who heard about the project years and years back and have always been in the community.

So how to attract the right audience is difficult. A lot of that is social media, but even that poses a lot of issues — I think if you take a look at this industry, a lot of people used to use Slack and then they had a lot of security issues and people migrated to Discord or Telegram, and it’s just very disjointed. We do need to consolidate this kind of knowledge into more standardized platforms.

And I think getting better media integrity in this industry is also something that I think is moving in the right direction. If we get more of that, the marketing landscape will definitely change.

How important is it to integrate things like events and getting face to face with people. Does that play into it? What are the other ways to accomplish outreach?

We haven’t really attended too many conferences and events. This was my directive, as we didn’t have a product yet. So [when] there’s no call to action, there’s no ROI, there’s no reason to go to these events. And a lot of these events are networking, which is valuable of course.

But again, I think that that’s something that needs to evolve because there are so many events now, and these are largely investor-focused. And now I’m seeing more events turn to more education hackathons. Those are invaluable.

Where we do need to market more is colleges, universities, to students, because we have a lack of qualified blockchain developers. We need to start with the students, and that’s our main focus. We’re not trying to recruit top IBM, Google, whatever tech company you want to name and get their workforce — that’s not what our focus is. Our focus is trying to give free education to students, give them the opportunity to explore and play around with blockchain.

They’re going to be the future workforce, so we believe that that’s the right investment, that’s one area we want to market more — academic institutions that can also take our technology and create better solutions that have a good impact. Those are highly motivated folks and traditionally they aren’t purely profit-oriented.

Coming In From The Cloud

Steve, your previous experiences were with Hewlett Packard, SanDisk, and Western Digital. How did those experiences prepare you for your role at Komodo? What’s the top takeaway you took from those experiences — how did they help you going into blockchain?

I’ve always worked in the data center space, and a lot of people don’t understand the data center. It’s cloud, they don’t care where the data is stored, where it’s accessed.

But all the information in the world is in data centers and it’s being served to data centers, and understanding that industry is extremely helpful on the blockchain side. Because there were a lot of companies and projects who were promising,

“We’re going to displace all these legacy systems,”

and I know for sure to displace a legacy system in a customer account takes years upon years upon years. That doesn’t happen overnight. So there needs to be some level of compromise.

And the other thing is that we need to understand traditional enterprise and how we can fit into that. That’s the dynamic that you’re seeing today, is that if you take a look at all enterprises looking at blockchain, none of them are talking about public permissionless blockchains — they’re all talking about Hyperledger because Hyperledger is a project that’s led by the Linux Foundation, pushed it through the enterprise, and they are enterprise-focused:

“How do we integrate with your existing systems? How do we give you all the requirements that you need?”

Versus the blockchain side that’s just trying to shove technology down your mouth:

“Trust this, this is better than what you have. This is going to revolutionize.”

They’ve heard that all before. So to understand that is important.

Another thing as it relates to platforms — look at Ethereum. Imagine if AWS said,

“We can give you your own servers, managed service offerings, however, we have only one server that the whole world is sharing. All your data are being mixed into it.”

Every single person would say,

“No way. Absolutely not.”

I started my career when virtualization and cloud were actually starting up, and so I had this unique experience of being at the forefront of cloud technology, and at that time, nobody wanted to adopt cloud. You had all these companies that were saying,

“Hey, offload your data to our data centers for cheaper.”

But all those [potential customers] were saying,

“Well, if my data is in your data center, I don’t own my data and data is my most valuable asset. And if that data can be accessed by other people or seen by other people, there’s no chance in hell.”

That’s pretty much what they said. From that came the hybrid model: The hybrid cloud model was,

“Let’s take your non-mission-critical data and off that to cheaper cloud storage, and run your less important apps in the cloud for cost savings, with all the mission critical stuff on premise in your own data center.”

And I think that that’s that level of compromise that this [blockchain] industry also needs to bridge, is to understand what the landscape looks like. And a lot of these projects [are] just saying,

“Look! We have the greatest, best technology!”

And none of these guys have ever worked in the enterprise space, right? So it’s hard for them to really build that credibility.

But investors think,

“This is going to replace all the databases. Billion-dollar business.”

So I think that that’s the misinformation. The lack of education is something that definitely needs to change, but I think it’s moving in that direction.

Blockchain Talkers Needed

Steve, so how key are talented “Blockchain Talkers” such as marketing professionals to the future of blockchain. How important is someone like you to the future of this industry?

(laughs) I wouldn’t like to give myself too much credit. I think it is important to be able to have that conversation with even the naysayers. Too often it feels like a very cliquey kind of thing, like either you invest in blockchain or you don’t.

And there’s plenty of people who tried to sway people, but I think they sway them in the wrong ways. They promise technology that’s not available yet, and I know that rubs a lot of traditional enterprise folks the wrong way. Another thing is people who are promising profits and that, again, is detrimental because we are technology: Although it can be used as a financial tool that’s not its sole purpose. So it’s important that more experienced professionals enter the blockchain space, and bring the best practices from our own industries to make this industry better.

Here’s my last question: What is a powerful micro-lesson you can provide to blockchain entrepreneurs or fellow blockchain marketers to market their companies or concepts better?

I think it’s

“Take it slow.”

In 2016 and 2017 we saw a lot of trickle marketing:

“We’re going to have a pre-announcement to the announcement, we’re going to have the countdown timer, and then we’re going to have a roadmap.”

It’s kind of tactical — yes, you’re trying to align dates to get a huge influx of price action.

But to be successful now the important thing is that these investors and the audiences that are reading about projects, they’ve heard it all before. So you can’t use the same tactics and the same kind of messaging. I think it’s important for those guys to take their time: Develop your white paper, develop a lot of content, all your messaging, [make it] competitive.

This is something that we had to do live. But if I had to do it all over again, I’d say prepare everything first: message tested, get some feedback from people in different types of industries, different customer segments and different audience types. Then once you get that feedback, refine it, test it again, but then be able to push everything all at once aligned to an actual product launch.

I think that that’s the confusion, that people want to just hype things up and then they wonder why there’s no price action: People don’t care. It’s because there’s no product, there’s nothing. We’ve heard these vision statements before, we’ve heard these crazy solutions that are going to revolutionize the world.

Show me how. That’s the next step of marketing for blockchain: Show me why I should care. Show me why this would be great.

— David Weiss