Conversations with the Coop - Alexander Guy - Zerion

Audio and transcript from the February 16th, 2022 installment of “Conversations with the Coop” with Alexander Guy, the Growth Lead at Zerion. To listen live on the next Conversations with the Coop - Follow Index Coop on Twitter and join the Index Coop Discord to get the real Owlpha. Follow us on Spotify: Link here RSS feed for Apple Podcasts: Link here Crypto Texan: Hello everyone. Welcome to Conversations with the Coop. This is where we source questions from the Index Coop community to gain insights from today's leaders in crypto and DeFi. I'm your host Crypto Texan. And today on the show, we have Alexander Guy, who is in charge of Growth at Zerion. Alexander, thanks for being here with us today. Alexander Guy: Thanks so much, Texan. I really appreciate it. And happy to be here. Crypto Texan: Yeah. So let's just get started with your story Alexander, what's your background and how did you get into crypto and DeFi? Alexander Guy: Good question. I imagine when you do these podcasts, you probably get a wide variety of answers, but I wonder if recently as more and more people have come into this space professionally, if you have more sort of like variance in the way this all starts out. For me, I very much have a Web 2 growth and marketing background. So I've worked in a number of different industries, a number of different stage of startup, but mainly in the tech Web 2 kind of space. I've been in that for about 10 years. And I guess like about a year and a half, two years ago, right when the world was coming to a standstill, I started getting into an NFT game called Sorare. Having worked in like tech and kind of been around the space for a while, I was like aware of crypto and Ethereum and then Bitcoin. And I even read a little bit, read a few books about them, but I'd never really, I don't know, I guess this is like super naïve now, but like at the time I kind of viewed like crypto as almost like a sub-genre of all these like cool tech startups that were coming out at the time. So like similar to, I don't know, maybe like AI or something like that. It was like sort of a, in my head at the time, like a kind catchall term that sort of summed up a sub-genre of like the startup industry and space that I was in. But once I really started to get into Sorare, which if you don't know, it's a fantasy football game where like you buy cards that are NFTs, they have different Rares represented in the game, but then you compete for Ethereum and card prizes on a weekly basis. And so like for me, this, I guess was like a sort of a light bulb kind of moment. On the cards themselves, you can see the Etherscan address. And so I click on this Etherscan address. I start looking into this. A really great friend of mine works at Ledger. And given that he was a somebody who I could turn to and talk to a lot about this, I started talking to him about Ethereum and NFTs and just getting more and more excited about the space. And from there, at least for me, I think this is probably true for a lot of people, especially new entrance into this, relatively new entrance into this space. Like NFTs in general, kind of acted as like a Trojan horse for me, where I was super excited by this. I started getting into some other Discords like God's Unchained and Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult, and things like that. So I started like really getting into NFTs and they were kind of like the root into, I guess, a more nuanced understanding, hopefully more nuanced understanding of crypto and Ethereum ecosystem, which obviously is represented in DeFi. And then I think another question that people ask me a lot is about the transition from Web 2 to Web 3. Basically once I had some NFT assets and I started thinking, in my collection, I guess, and I started buying Ethereum and participating in some of the more well-known DeFi protocols like Aave and Compound, and like thinking about out how to do like various yield farming techniques. I missed DeFi Summer, because I was sort of still lagging behind on the whole, like what's going on in DeFi space, but I started using Zerion pretty much once I had some assets that I needed to manage. And after that I started sort of communicating with the team via Discord. And then in sort of about this time, last year, I saw that they were looking for a head of marketing and I just started interacting with the team on their Discord. And yeah, here I am. So it started with NFTs, ended up with DeFi, I guess is a good way to put it. Crypto Texan: Yeah. And you're right. I have seen and heard of a bunch of different backgrounds of people who come into this space. And I think that's just because this space caters to a lot of different types of people, right? I mean, you've got your TradFi finance people that come into this space, you've got your Web 2 people who are more technologically savvy, and then you've got, more from an economic and philosophical background, right? From just like a macro sense, you get those people coming in, and now with NFTs, just as you said, I feel like that's brought in a whole different type of person into this space. And I think that's just going to continue to grow. So, I don't know. What do you think is the next type of person that's going to get brought into this space? Alexander Guy: Well, first of all, it's a really good question. I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that the diverse groups of people that you named are kind of like all motivated by some version of the same philosophical point of view or maybe narrative, which is a lot about taking back control, correcting the wrongs of Web 2 in some ways and how user data and user personal information is exploited. And I think that that kind of narrative fits very nicely into a group of people who I think are starting to really sense the potential with this space. And that's like creators of any kind. I mean, music NFTs are still very much at like the beginning, I guess, but you see artists, photographers, musicians, like I say, increasingly realizing that NFTs offer them a way to not only reap more actual financial benefit, Spotify's recently come under a lot of fire for a number of reasons. But obviously one of the ones I'm talking about is the actual model they have for paying their artists and NFTs obviously offer an immediate solution to that problem for musicians. But I think you see a lot of creators basically finding the confidence and the, I guess like the financial freedom through NFTs and crypto to actually launch their careers, which is fascinating to me. And you don't need, it's not like every NFT project needs to have some kind of thriving Discord with thousands of members or something like that. You see people just very humbly launching like a photography collection via Mirror and all of a sudden having enough money to actually make a career as a photographer and start getting going really in that space. And so for me, I think creators are certainly a key demographic of people that are starting to grasp like the power of what we're all so excited by. I think probably very similarly, and this is not at all like a hot take. I just think like we're still so early in the, like the gaming kind of sector and like how gaming and the intersection of like an NFTs, crypto, digital assets in general interact within a game context. There's obviously so many different permutations that a game can take. It could be a fantasy sports game like I was talking about with Sorare or like a total immersive world, like Decentraland. But I still think that we're very, very early in that story and like gamers are really primed on mass to come into this space. At least that's how it feels to me. I think that's, again, like I said, not exactly the hottest take in the world, but it seems really relevant to me and I just like want to stress it because I feel like we're so early. Crypto Texan: Yeah. I completely agree with you there. And we've seen a lot of push back too from the gaming space related in NFTs, but I t… This is a public episode. 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