I was orange-pilled during the pandemic and never looked back. I’ve got nearly twenty years in experience between product and marketing across fintech, gaming/hospitality, and institutional crypto. It pays to be a boomer.

Most recently, I led marketing at Gauntlet, DeFi’s premier quantitative risk manager, as the vault curation business grew from <$200M to over $2B in institutional capital. My team built a $xxxM+ affiliate program to incentivize and capture early-stage, self-service vault adoption, freeing up sales to target larger opportunities within months. I built and launched the Gauntlet Miniapp as part of the Coinbase Base App, the company’s first step towards building a consumer-grade, retail user experience.

I was hired as the first product marketing executive at Kraken to support hypergrowth in 2021. Before that, I was a Director of Product at Caesars Entertainment and a fintech consultant in a former life. Go Terps.

tl;dr on my approach: DeFi marketing is hands-on or it’s just comms. Marketing is a system that expands the funnel and levers conversion velocity as a function.

1. You are a growth agent. Expand the TAM by delivering quality MQLs to sales that convert and keeping leads well-nurtered with measurable touchpoints. Marketing should be selling to at least one customer segment directly. Automate as much as you can.

2. You are a product marketer. Inform, launch, and grow new products well beyond the announcement. Attribution is important, but everyone knows a 10x when they see it.

3. You are Don Draper (or Peggy Olsen). As a steward of the brand, you build the irrational exuberance that unlocks new customer segments and sustains loyalty through market cycles. Taste has never been more important but so is accelerating its distribution.

Product marketers with T-shaped experience excel in an AI-first environment. Horizontal roles will give way to those who automate growth systems and are able to market across channels. You must sell the product and know it. Then you experiment and scale distribution. That is what the next leg up of marketing looks like for digital assets.