In this episode of The Blockchain Startup Show, I had the pleasure of speaking with Saul Hudson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Angle42.

Saul brings invaluable insights into the unique pressures facing first-time founders. We explore how humility and a willingness to learn can inform a startup’s culture from the earliest days, maximizing the chances for sustainable success. Saul offers a framework for founders to balance the urgency of quick wins with the strategic decision-making needed to build something that lasts.

We also discuss how the role of public relations is changing in accordance with the new model of influence. Saul shares how successful companies navigate PR, emphasizing authenticity and strategic foresight in community engagement, especially during events and on social media. If you’re here for insights on optimizing your communications and gaining the right kind of attention for your startup while avoiding a PR disaster, this is the episode for you.

Episode Outline and Highlights:

[00:02] Introduction to Saul Hudson and Angle42

• Introduction to Saul Hudson's background and his role at Angle42
• Overview of Angle42 and its mission in the Web3 space
• Initial insights into the evolving Web3 landscape and its challenges

[14:30] Effective Communication and Hiring Strategies

• The balance between urgency and strategic planning in startup communications
• Effective hiring strategies in Web3
• Creating a sustainable communication framework for growth

[20:39] Building Momentum in PR and Marketing

• The art of patience in PR and playing the long game
• Strategies for building momentum in PR
• Understanding the role of strategic planning in demonstrating PR ROI

[35:34] How to Create Influence at Scale

• How PR extends beyond media relations to create influence at scale
• The significance of events in building personal connections
• Establishing community and influence in a decentralized world

[52:11] Qualities of Effective PR Partners

• Key qualities to look for in PR partners
• Relevant experience and philosophical alignment
• How honesty and brand story communication are crucial in PR partnerships

[60:06] Maintaining Positive Communication

• Maintaining a positive tone in professional settings
• Importance of positive engagement on social media
• Strategies for filtering out noise and fostering authentic interactions

Embrace Humility and Curiosity

First-time founders can greatly benefit from adopting a mindset of humility and curiosity. This approach fosters a culture of growth and success, where learning is prioritized and collaboration thrives. Embracing humility allows founders to acknowledge their limitations and most effectively leverage the expertise of others. This drives continuous improvement, encouraging exploration and innovation. Together, humility and curiosity create a resilient and adaptive organization capable of thriving.

Long-term PR Strategy

Building momentum in PR is a long-term endeavor, much like SEO. It requires a deep commitment to patience and strategic planning to develop relationships that are not only meaningful but enduring. Organizations must focus on long-term objectives, setting realistic expectations and cultivating trust and credibility over time. This patient, calculated approach is essential for demonstrating return on investment in PR efforts. By nurturing these relationships, companies lay a solid foundation for lasting success, ensuring that their message resonates and their influence grows in the ever-evolving landscape of Web3.

00:02 - Narrator

Welcome to the Blockchain Startup Show with Harrison Wright, a podcast dedicated to dauntless blockchain leaders building our new decentralized future. You'll hear stories, successes, trials and tribulations as we channel into the lives of high-performing leaders in crypto and Web3. Whether you're currently a Web3 founder or leader, or you one day aspire to be, you'll gain crucial knowledge and insights to accelerate your learning curve, handle this industry's greatest challenges and make the impact you've always dreamed of.

00:33 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Blockchain Startup Show. This is Harrison Wright. I'm incredibly pleased to be joined today by Saul Hudson. Saul is the co-founder and managing partner of Angle42, a strategic communications company for startups, largely in crypto, focused on PR. Saul, welcome, glad to have you. Thanks very much.

00:50 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Harrison, I'm glad to be here. I think it's great that you're focusing this on what founders need to hear as advice for them.

01:01 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Hey, I appreciate it. You know the way I see it. There are two main strands of thought for us to explore on the show. One is the stories of founders, and the other is what should founders know about specific areas of expertise? And I'm going to take a. Well, it's not really a guess, because I know from personal experience, but the average founder is not an expert on PR. So I'm really, really interested to hear your perspective on various things that we can talk about.

01:23 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, I think that's true, and if you think of founders, so many of them are also first time founders, meaning it's the first time they're learning how to do a lot of things. So, yes, communications and PR is probably one of those aspects that they are finding out about for the first time, and so I do think that they are willing to absorb lots of advice, because they've got to learn quickly.

01:53 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, you know we could end up going down a rabbit hole here which completely derails the intended track I have for this conversation, but that happens quite a lot, so it's fine. That's this old saying. It takes the average entrepreneur seven businesses before they finally get their successful one. I'm not sure how true that is, but if you look at that, that's talking about entrepreneurs in general, which are mainly bootstrap companies, First time venture founded funders is interesting because you've got so much capital and resources to play with and there's a lot more consequences for failure.

02:22 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

There are, and I think that kind of statistic sounds a bit scary. It's certainly in the experience we have at Angle 42. There's a higher success rate of the companies that we're working with, and it may well be that they've got more runway because they have raised the capital, but there's no doubt that a founder is incredibly brave, is a risk taker and has probably been told a hundred times that most startups fail, right, and so they're going into an endeavor where you're practically facing failure. But I do think that the capital that comes in, that catapults the companies forward, gives them a better chance, right, and it brings with it its own challenges because, as you say, the stakes are higher.

03:09

I think they are typically thrust into leadership positions earlier than they may have expected to be, because at first they've got a great idea and they sell it to some VCs. They get a lot of money and then, oh, what do I do with this? I now have to build a company out with it, and that brings with it all sorts of responsibilities. And we know that you learn on the job and you're probably better at doing something the second time you do it or the third time you do it, but the first time you're hiring or the first time you're trying to work with a PR agency. You might not be the best founder in the world.

03:45 - Harrison Wright (Host)

You just brought something to mind which I find kind of fascinating is that, whether it's the venture model itself, or startups, or tech, or the industrial age shifting to the information age or a combination of all those factors, there's almost been an inversion of the traditional model of seniority. So I've been recruiting for just over 15 years now. The first two industries I was in industrial automation and then oil and gas. In both of those industries I think there was literally at one point in the UK the average age of an employee in industrial automation was 54, because no one was getting into it. Oil and gas was a little different from that, but generally speaking the most senior person was the one that had been working there for 20 years and was probably in their 50s and had a wealth of experience, Whereas now in startups it's often the case that the founder might be 21 and then they hire 50-year-olds to come and work for them?

04:33 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yes, I think so, and I would say that in our case, in Angle 42, we're considered the adults in the room half the time just because we've had more mean. Of course, we've had experience at the various roles that we've had in our careers, but also we've worked with many founders right At this stage it must be hundreds and other agencies are similar. Therefore, we have the experience of doing this kind of thing that, if you're right, if it's a 21 year old founder, of course you should tap into that experience and certainly in in a web three, the average age is not going to be 54.

05:12 - Harrison Wright (Host)

I. I almost wonder if the number of people who are 54 in web three I could count on the fingers of both hands. Well then, you'll count.

05:19 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

I count as one of them, I think that's brilliant.

05:23 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Um, I I'm curious about your perspective on this. I would say, if we're sort of looking at this from a market segmentation point of view, in my mind there are broadly three archetypes of founders in Web3. Two of them are the young founders. There's one version of the young founder who they're humble, they're curious, they know what they don't know, they're willing to hire expertise and listen to people who have more experience in certain areas than they do, and they bring all these things together to be successful, regardless of maybe being a first-time founder.

05:51

I knew some guys who were 21, $50 million to fund their company, had never had a job before, straight out of university, and they ended up being really, really successful and they fit that archetype. There's also the experienced founder that may be over 40, maybe has a long professional background outside of crypto, maybe founded a company before, but if not, they generally had some sort of senior leadership experience and then brought that into Web3. They tend to be successful as well. The third archetype is the young founder who doesn't listen to anybody and thinks they know everything. That's where the problems arise.

06:26 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, I think you kind of set that up as a straw man, right? None of us would like to be working with that third scenario, but in each case, what works for the founder is this ability to know what they don't know, and that's often difficult to see, because they are typically really talented, special people who have a vision for something that they want to bring into the world. I mean, you have to admire founders for what they are trying to do and, very often, what they're actually achieving. So it comes with the territory that they are supremely confident and that they maybe have an ego. It's therefore sometimes challenging to mix that with the humility that's needed to say, ok, what do I need help with? And whether that's with the internal team to fill that, round out abilities that they have got or filling gaps that they lack abilities that they have got or filling gaps that they lack and when you're hiring from outside, to understand, okay, we are not internally experts at this, we don't have the capacity for this, so we're going to hire, and it could be any kind of service agency In our case, in Angle 42's case, it's obviously PR.

07:48

It's obviously PR. And then what we try and explain to the founder, who maybe doesn't want to listen as much as would be helpful for them. As would be valuable for them is think of it like going to the gym. If you hire a personal trainer, you don't then turn around to the trainer and say, okay, I only want to do sit-ups and pull this weight, the amount of weight that I want is this, but you listen to whatever the recommended regimen is of that person. Who's the expert? Because they're working with men, they're training with many other people and therefore they know what works and what doesn't.

08:18 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Generally, you know it brings to mind I can't even remember where I heard this, but I think my favorite analogy on this is if you think of a company as a kitchen, then the role of the founder is to be the chef. They select the ingredients. They think how do we assemble these ingredients together to create the perfect recipe? While they might need to in the beginning, ultimately they shouldn't be the one doing the work they should be. It's essentially a resource allocation problem, right?

08:47 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, I think that's a good analogy. Initially, some of the companies just don't have enough personnel to be managing those kind of resources. A founder can often get tied into doing activities that may be not the highest priority for them and at some point they have to loosen that. They have to find replacements for that so that they can then become the chef. I think in Web3, there's a type of founder who comes from being a technology person, someone who's building with tech, and they really know the tech, very often the most expert at that particular area of technology within the company.

09:28

And, as I was alluding to before, that doesn't necessarily lend itself to being the best leader of a company. Technologists aren't necessarily the best at communicating what they want to achieve broadly, to achieving broadly Because, for example, if you are coding and you have any lack of precision, the whole thing falls apart, whereas communications more generally is subjective and it has nuance to it. It's not always going to be perfect, but the basic message is being delivered. You can't talk about getting your code basically right, and I think the technologists sometimes struggle to move out from their coding environment to communicating to a wider audience about why what they're building is so important.

10:22 - Harrison Wright (Host)

You know, I had a conversation one time with a client of mine, maybe a couple of years back, and we were talking about, I remember rightly, I was giving him advice on coaching him on how he should present the company to this particular candidate in order that they would be interested in the job, and he turned around and he was metaphorically turn around because we were on the phone but he gave this big sigh. I feel like all I do these days is I'm just a salesman. So, yes, that is your job, this is what you signed up for.

10:59 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

And the people who are passionate about the project that they have built actually enjoy communicating. Because that sales is only finding somebody else. Whether it's one person in an interview call like that, or it's a broad audience at an event, you're basically saying, pay attention to my company because we're going to have a big impact, and here's why. And if they do that, yes, it's selling, but it's also just sharing a passion.

11:27 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Speaking of that, I'm really curious for your perspective on something. So just lifting an insight from a different industry, considering that most crypto companies don't have, it's not sales in a traditional sense, the business development motion, but there's a piece of wisdom that says, say, in software sales, for example, it's a complete mistake to try and hire a sales team until you reach about probably $500,000 a year in revenue, because that sales team is not going to be anywhere near as successful as opening doors as the founder is. There's no process, there's no proven product market fit. The founder needs to be the salesperson for the company until they reach about that stage and then the founder can start thinking about bringing people in to do the sales. If that doesn't happen, nine times out of 10, it just fails.

12:13 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, that really resonates with me, certainly as the person helping with the communications. We love it when the founder wants to be the chief communicator, as it were. Founder wants to be the chief communicator, as it were, and it's precisely because they have the vision, they have also the credibility for what they've built so far, and who better to be able to be explaining what they're doing? Salespeople want to close a deal. They'll use materials, they will get to understand the company, but they will never live and feel it the way a founder would.

12:49 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, makes a lot of sense, and I guess your perspective on all of this could be quite interesting, because, as I see it tell me if I'm wrong but in one sense, the role of PR is not to create messages for people, it's not to be the messenger, it's to help the founder be a better messenger themselves. Absolutely.

13:08 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

What we always say at Dangle42 is don't put the cart before the horse. Don't put the communications first. Let's agree on what the business goals are. You have your strategy for goal setting and we will make the communications work for that. We will accelerate you towards your business goals because the communications align with it. So it's not that the founder has to put on some different garb and pretend to be something else. It's a way of channeling the message around what the business goals are. Channeling the message around what the business goals are. So our role is to help shape the communication around what it's going to look like as this company progresses and is more successful.

14:00 - Harrison Wright (Host)

This could be a big topic, but I don't even know if it's possible to answer this as one question or it might go in many different rabbit holes. But if you're working with a founder say someone listening to this is a founder. They've never hired someone in communications before they're trying to figure this all out, what does that process look like? So you have a new founder, maybe they're just in the process of closing their seed round, they're about to go public. How does that process of figuring out the strategy and then what that looks like from an execution perspective? How does that look?

14:27 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

So it's particularly interesting in work three. You do often get the founders have just raised some money and wanting to announce it to the world, but they haven't had enough money, as it were, to be so public and so vocal that now that they have some runway they want to be able to capitalize on that. So often people will come to us at exactly that stage. I've raised some money, now I can tell the world about my company, and that's terrific because I've got things to say. The process then is shaped by our industry.

15:03

This is a very fast moving industry. It's volatile and not many of us can see too far ahead. And certainly in the day to day of a founder, even though they may have a big vision, they may not be able to predict where their company is going to be exactly in six or 12 months. So I find that the founders have relatively short horizons compared to other industries. I imagine we're finding the same in artificial intelligence at the moment. The tech industries tend to be a bit like that, but others you mentioned a couple earlier they're going to be slower moving and you maybe can make plans for six and 12 months.

15:43

So at Angle42, we always say what is it that you want to achieve over the next three months, and then the founders are really clear because that's right in front of them and it will be oh, I want to get to this amount of users, or in some cases it's I want to raise this next round, or I want to launch a product and have the world understand why it's a good product to use. They will be relatively short-term goals and as communications, we say great, we'll get behind that. We know, therefore, what the strategy is and we will go and disseminate that, help you disseminate that to the media and through the media Makes sense.

16:25 - Harrison Wright (Host)

That's interesting, I mean because my expertise is not PR either is all about fact-finding, discovery, strategizing.

16:51 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

And I don't think Web3 founders have the patience for that. I'm not saying it's wrong to build and plan and have a longer-term idea of what you're going to do, of what you're going to do, but I also know that if you tell a Web3 founder that nothing's going to happen for a month other than we're going to use our big brain cells to come up with good ideas, they'd be moving on because the world may have changed in a month.

17:18 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Here's a question for you. It's a bit out of left field, I know I tend to do, but one of the things that I've observed is look at hiring, because everything moves so fast in crypto. Some founders will say things like, hey, you know, we well, it's not not specifically something to say, but the point is they they want to act with this extreme urgency in a hiring process, which is fine, except when that urgency is a detriment to the result of the hiring process. And if you look at retention, when that urgency is a detriment to the result of the hiring process, if you look at retention rates in crypto, it's really tough to get any hard data on this, but my extensive pattern recognition and experience would tell me the average tenure for an employee in crypto is probably less than a year. I know what it is for senior, you know.

18:01

If you take because this is a much easier data set to run if you take it for you know, senior leadership people, the average tenure is about nine 10 months across the industry and if you think of the cost and time and ramp and everything else to get a new person into the organization, they're probably not really productive, fully productive until at least three to six months, and sometimes longer, they really start compounding the work that they do in year two and beyond with all the things that they've built up.

18:28

So if the team's turning over every nine to 12 months, that's disastrous for the sustainability of long-term growth. So my question to founders sometimes is okay, maybe, instead of trying to get the job filled in two weeks, maybe it takes two months, which does seem like a long time in different types of what we're doing here. But if you get it right and sometimes it does take two months to get it right maybe you keep the person for 18 to 24 months. They do twice as good a job as the person you would have brought in in two weeks. That actually is a huge time and impact saving in the long term. That's difficult to see when you're just rushing from place to place.

19:07 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Do you see any merit in slowing down to speed up in other contexts? I'm not an expert on hiring but certainly it resonates with me when people say hire slow and then if you do have to let people go make that decision and act quickly, so hire by a quick. Why would you hire slow? Because of that extra time afterward that is involved in getting to know the company and in all of the training.

19:31

I think one way of buttressing the support around the founder is by having the outside help like an angle 42. If we take it in the communications realm, we will end up working with companies for years and in that time we will see turnover, a lot of churn in, for example, the CMO roles, the numbers that you've mentioned. I don't have the data but anecdotally that doesn't surprise me at all because that's what we experienced. But it's interesting that we are actually the constant that you've hired the outside help. We will provide that support and it should actually give a little bit more space for people and founders to hire at the rate that you're saying, which is a little bit more slowly, but get it right so that you don't have to do it every few months.

20:30 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, that's an interesting answer. I hadn't thought of it from that perspective. Keeping vendors longer than employees I'd love to see some stats on that. I could believe that. Do you think the same fundamental principle can apply to PR as well? It's not always good to just rush to the next thing apply to PR as well.

20:48 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

It's not always good to just rush to the next thing. So patience is really difficult to engender when you're working in a startup. But I definitely have to educate some founders about how PR is about momentum and is about building up. You don't hire your PR agency and it's like switching on a light. The next day you're in the New York Times. You have to ladder up, you have to build your relationship and think of it like a snowball You're pushing it down the hill, it gathers more snow, it gets bigger. That's great because you get bigger and better, but you had to start off somewhere and the patience to do that is required. So you will, in your line of work, will be going out there finding over time the right candidate, but you're not the first day going to get the ideal candidate. I think that's where it resonates with me that in PR, people's companies get more and more known and they're better and better understood over time.

21:58 - Harrison Wright (Host)

You know, it reminds me a little bit of SEO, which is a marketing discipline I do happen to know a little something about. It must be really difficult to sell SEO services because it's going to take 12 months to show an impact.

22:09 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

We talked about budget earlier and how these companies are capitalized or not. It's really important for them to be able to see a line on ROI, right. You know what return are they getting on their investment? And you've just cited an example where a founder would have to really plan for if indeed it's taking many months to be able to see what the real result is.

22:41

There isn't always an obvious direct line of here's the return on your investment, because if I do get you in the Wall Street Journal or an opinion article in Coindesk, shall we say how much is that worth?

22:59

Can we find a metric that says, okay, I can put a dollar bigger on it? That's harder for us to show. But I think the reason that companies stay with us for so long is that they realize people understand them more. More people know about them just because they've had this outside validation of the media covering them and covering them increasingly as they've progressed and as the journalists have learned about their project and have been eager to write more. Because the key there obviously it's not the return on investment in Xs and Os on a spreadsheet, but it does have the impact that you're not talking about yourself. It's the media, which totally flooded with stories being thrown at them, has selected your company as the one that they're going to focus on, or has selected your CEO as the thought leader that they're going to have on their podcast, on the TV or in their publications?

24:09 - Harrison Wright (Host)

There's something interesting about that as well that just occurred to me, which is that we all love to think we're so rational and so smart and we make our own independent decisions, but the reality is, even the smartest people VCs follow trends. Oh, everyone's talking about this. We need to get in on that. Oh, everyone's investing in restaking right now. Restaking is the new future. Let's go find some restaking companies to invest in. It's not always as rational as we might think. You're right.

24:33 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Sort of shaping the framing, and I'm so aware of that. I used to be a journalist. I was a journalist with Reuters News for 20 years. The idea is you want to be at the cutting edge, at the front part of that trend, aware of the stories that are part of the trend as it's developing. The key being working in PR is to find how the companies that you're supporting fit into those trends, identify the right trends that everybody's talking about, everybody's going to be interested in, and how your company has a voice. That's important as part of that trend.

25:13 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Makes total sense. It's almost similar to you know. I'll look at the same trends in order to figure out where should we be focusing our efforts in terms of which types of projects should we work with that people will be most interested in working for in the next year. Which types of projects should we work with that?

25:25 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

people will be most interested in working for in the next year. We are all aware of the narratives and the trends because we share the same conversation. The key for the companies is to authentically fit into where those conversations are, and I do think that our founders are natural at this because they are thought leaders they're literally the definition of thought leadership because they're leading people to have new thoughts. Why? Because they've had very new, innovative thoughts themselves, just to develop the vision that they've got for their company.

26:03 - Harrison Wright (Host)

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense going back just a little bit, something you touched on earlier about the impact of just being out there over a sustained period of time, diverging a little bit from just piano. But talking about marketing communications more broadly, an interesting shift is if you go back about maybe 10 years, when everyone was obsessed with digital marketing and content creation and everyone, everyone kept saying cold calling is dead. And you have all these people selling these cold calling is dead packages. Before it was actually dead but it made a good story. But people used to obsess about funnels. Oh well, we need to create a linear chain of events that goes from hey, let's capture this person with this article, then they read the article, then they submit a thing, then we send them an ebook, then they read the article, then they submit a thing, then we send them an ebook, then they go in email and then they book a meeting.

26:49

And that kind of paradigm's fallen apart quite a lot. I realized nowadays that marketing is not actually about creating a linear system of lead generation. It's about creating a combination of omnipresence seen everywhere, but also relevancy. If you're omnipresent but your message doesn't make any sense you're just annoying, right. So you have both of those things You're everywhere that is relevant and then you capture the demand over time in a more organic way that not necessarily one chain. They might see a post on LinkedIn, then they see an article on Coindesk, then they hear you on a podcast, then they see something on Twitter, then one of their reps leaves a comment on their trail.

27:27 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Maybe I'll talk to these guys now, yeah, Harrison, I think you should move into marketing, give up your day job. What you've just described, the dynamic that we have. At the moment, everything is about attention, the fight for attention, and we know that in our own working lives that we're always struggling to avoid being distracted. So what companies need to do is gain that attention and make sure that when people are paying attention to them, it's to the right things.

27:56

We've all seen projects actually be a little extravagant, shill too much and, importantly, it cheapens the project because the attention they're getting isn't on what's actually being built. That's why the media is so important. If you tell your own story, it's just you talking about yourself. If I come on here and tell you how great I am, that's quite different than if you happen to hear it from somebody else. Well, if that somebody else has a huge megaphone as the media and that validates what you're doing, that, I think, is the combination of you get attention through the media, but also you have this validation that it's like a third party has understood that you have some significance in the space.

28:43 - Harrison Wright (Host)

I like the leverage of that as well. I'm going to go down another seemingly irrelevant but not irrelevant rabbit hole here. Have you ever had this concept? I can't remember where I read this, but it resonated with me a lot. Hey, the idea of technology was to free us up and we would all be working 15 hour weeks come the 21st century but actually a lot of time. Tech has meant that you used to have secretaries that would do all this stuff, but now we're all sitting here doing admin work and this and that and these little tasks. That's not the main point that I wanted to make, but just as an anchor. We then come to your social media. So, and connectivity of the internet and community that we now have.

29:20

When I started in recruiting, there wasn't even LinkedIn. Well, no, there was LinkedIn, but nobody was using it yet. It was a toy. My entire job was sitting making phone calls. The only way to stay on someone's radar was to consistently call them, month after month after month, and build a relationship with them. Our whole day would be making phone calls. There was nothing else. You didn't even need a website. You look at the opportunity that social creates, but it's also such a cost as well. I mean, you look at the average Web3 founder on Twitter. They probably tweet 20, 30 times a day. I know I personally, much as I love the opportunity that social has afforded, I spend probably two hours of my day writing things for social media, answering messages on social media. Answering messages on social media, commenting on people's posts. That's great, but I have a company to run, so I spend probably a fifth of my week commenting on social media posts, which is kind of crazy if you think of it, but it seems to be mandatory nowadays unless you get some leverage somehow.

30:15 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

There is an expectation that you have that presence. I think, if we go back to the first part of what you said about the tools, we're all really living this in fast speed at the moment because the AI tools that are coming along and the way I believe we should be approaching it is, yes, it frees me up, in my case, not to have a 20-hour week, but rather to be able to manage tasks, rather to be able to manage tasks much more efficiently so that I can do higher level work. And if I'm freed and the people at Angle 42, if we are freed to use the tools to provide higher value, I think that's much more important, and by that I mean those elements that you're not going to get from routine tasks. It's the strategizing about the positioning, and I do think the tools are great. We should welcome them. We should be aware of all the issues that come with them and try and mitigate against them, but if we can harness the power of these tools, then we'll be doing a better job and the founders will be better for it. And so then you say, okay, well, think about where we are spending our time. Should it be on social media?

31:25

What I would say about social media is that, yes, it's a conversation, but people sort of get dragged into just talking too much. Because I think of social media as media, it's more about content than anything, and founders don't need to be just speaking, just communicating whatever, but rather providing content. If they have content, then people are going to it's sticky, people are going to be paying attention to what's around their project and, as I say, the content comes from. You've been in the media. There's a piece of content to share. You've written something. There's a piece to share. At Angle 42, we do that as well. We don't only focus on the media side of things. We will help people with content so that, yes, they can be posting on LinkedIn, they can be putting things on Twitter.

32:21 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Makes sense. Like all these tools, you have to learn how to use it and not let it use you. You're right, because it'd be very, very easy to just sit there and look at LinkedIn and Twitter all day, dangerously. So, yeah, no, you've got a company to run On the same theme.

32:37

Something I was really curious to talk to you about, just to throw a wrench in the works, as the saying goes, is, if you look at, one of the things that I talk about a lot in many contexts is this transition of the industrial or the information age. And I don't know if you've read the Sovereign Individual Yusul or to anyone listening, if you haven't read it, you should read it. It's very, very, very fascinating. But, um, but they talk about, if you look at around give or take 500 years, let's say around the 16th century, you had, you know, the some church, a church feudal age giving way to the democratic age. Those weren't the terms they used, but it was essentially a sudden and enormous shift in how society was structured, where you, where people don't realize necessarily, but several hundred years ago the church was as powerful as the state is today. They wielded that kind of and then, almost overnight, it became irrelevant, and now we have maybe an even bigger shift that's occurring in real time. We're living it this past two decades, but it's dramatically accelerated over the last shift.

33:38

And if you look at the industrial age model, everything revolves around big companies and institutions, especially the media. If you go back not that long, the only way to get your message out at any scale was by using the media, and the media were the gatekeepers for everything. Even if you want to publish a book, you have to get a publisher to publish it. I published a book. I just went on Amazon and uploaded a PDF file and now anyone can buy it. It's a very different world, and then you see as this progression keeps shifting. Now you have individuals who have way bigger reach than any journalist does, and I always love to use the example of Dan Held, the Bitcoin guy. People buy his audience. He wields influence that other people then use for their own things.

34:34 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

So, with that being the case, what does that mean for the function of PR?

34:37

So we're talking about influence and in our industry particularly, there's a cadre of influencers and people will connect with them and see how they can help promote their company.

34:54

But I think you need to see it on a spectrum Is it because of personality and the extravagance that they've got around their brand, or is it because they're genuinely thought leaders whose opinions matter and whose opinions people follow? And along that spectrum, you probably want the thoughtful, genuine opinion leaders who are able to talk about your project because they're genuinely interested in it, as opposed to the ones who you're paying and they are, to use the parlance, shilling your project. Now, if you think of the media obviously not as influencers per se, but rather that they can influence how people are thinking about your project they would probably line up as being some of the most important influencers in your sphere. And the good thing is, everybody knows that, in terms of earned media and the journalists covering you, it's not paid for, it's not in any way advertising. It's on the strength of the story that your company deserves to have told Makes sense.

36:09 - Harrison Wright (Host)

And do you also then see that, if you go back 20 years ago, I'm presuming that PR would be synonymous with media relations, but do you see it as now, broader than that? It's about creating influence at scale, no matter where that might lie.

36:24 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

So I think you're right as the landscape has changed, then the services around it have to change, and there's a broad way of looking at public relations. I'll just give you one example of something that's considered important in our space particularly. We are an events-driven industry. Everybody meets up at events and you see people trotting around the globe all year. They are key moments for the companies to meet journalists and to meet each other as founders and to be broadcasting to key audiences their messages. So I think, for example, public relations services in our industry emphasize events a lot industry emphasize events a lot.

37:24 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, it's really I'm getting on another tangent here but it's really fascinating how different industries are structured in such different ways. I've never been I've worked in probably six industries now I have never been in an industry which is as obsessed with events as crypto is, which is kind of ironic given the trustless, anonymous nature of the industry.

37:39 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

I think community matters so much in this industry and I think we've also taken to heart the idea of being decentralized. Therefore, the face-to-face contact, the in-person contact, day-to-day doesn't really happen. It's, first of all, we're all remote and secondly, when we're in our home offices, we're spread all around the world. So the events become that moment. When you get to touch and feel the industry, it becomes more tangible. I know I love it. I'll meet founders who I maybe have been having calls like this with for several weeks before I will meet them, the journalists. It's fantastic to actually sit down and talk properly over a coffee or even a beer, about what makes a good story and what they're interested in, et cetera. So I know that I get value from it and I can see why everybody else does.

38:38 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Is event strategy part of your remit when you're working with a founder?

38:40 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Sure, because it's part of their longer term goal. Right, they want to build up their reputation and, as I said earlier, we make sure that the communication goals help accelerate those business goals. There aren't events, because there's a captive audience. Obviously, there's a lot of networking. That networking can involve journalists. But, more than anything, there's lots of networking. That networking can involve journalists. But more than anything, it's that they become key moments to deliver messages to a broad audience, and we help with that.

39:10 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Will Barron. I've noticed that the circuit is the only place in crypto is acceptable to mercilessly pitch people to death.

39:17 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Andrew Lane. Yeah, I don't know how successful booth strategies are. I'll leave that to other people to judge. It feels like you sort of have to have one if you've reached a certain level as a company, but then you can often feel sorry for the people who have to work behind the booths.

39:37 - Harrison Wright (Host)

It's funny. You can spot some easy tweaks people could make that would make them much more effective. When I was at East Denver, I went up to this particular booth and the guy just started literally 10 minutes he just started talking at me. Let me tell you about this and this and this and this. So what do you do? I'm a recruiter.

39:55 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Oh, Admire the enthusiasm.

40:00 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Just a simple tweak. Hey, what brings you to our booth? I don't know if you've heard of this before. It's kind of legendary. There was this I can't remember again book or what have you, but one of the big sales. He said he worked with this retail chain. He made just one tweak to what they were doing and they something like doubled their sales. And what the tweak was is normally people come into the store you know how it is. The staff comes up to you, leave me alone, and they say to you can I help you? Even if you want the help, your reflex is to immediately say no, I'm just browsing, because you want to be left alone. You don't want to get into their thing. So the one tweak he made is staff come up and they say have you shopped here before?

40:40 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Simple yeah, people don't like to feel like they're being sold right and actually, in terms of communications, this is key for us. We are trying to have the founders explain right, make themselves better understood, make their project understood in terms of the impact that it will have and, much of the time, that's the role for the journalists or, in that relationship with the journalists, help the journalist to tell a better story. In achieving that, well, there will be better stories out there and those stories will include you. That's the way that we think of it. So you can't be on the notes in sales generally. That anecdote is terrific, just the tweet. But certainly we are advising founders to help other people understand what they're doing rather than selling through communications what they're doing.

41:38 - Harrison Wright (Host)

It's kind of interesting. Take Barachain, for example. Honestly, I don't know a whole lot about what Barachain does technically, because I've not had cause to know, but everyone loves Barachain. I almost don't think it would matter what Barachain actually do. They've just done such an amazing job at building goodwill and a bit of a cult following.

41:57 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

That's going back to community again. This is an industry where community is really important, and if the leadership gets what the community wants, well, then that's a key ingredient for a successful project 100, it's almost.

42:16 - Harrison Wright (Host)

If you look at the supplies in the context of careers as well, which is how I was talking about most recently, there's almost been an inversion of the order of things. So you know, the traditional business model is okay. What business are we going to start? What are we building, and then who is it for? Then we'll build the thing and sell it. Now it's almost. We build the audience and the community, then we figure out what we're going to build for that audience and community. I've seen many businesses today start like that, yeah.

42:43 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

What we're really needing for a successful business is product market fit, and if you have the community, well then you have the market and you have your testers and they tell you basically what your market fit is. And so it's good to have community. It's also good to be agile, responding to what the community tells you.

43:07 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Actually, I've never thought of it in those terms before, but it's just putting the market before the product instead of the product before the market.

43:14 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

I think you're onto something.

43:17 - Harrison Wright (Host)

That's interesting. Let me ask you this, saul You've worked with hundreds of founders. What are some of the In any field, in any kind of consulting field? I know in my field there are innumerable problems that people have with hiring. In the end, it all boils down to it's one of these seven things. What are the things that founders do wrong with PR?

43:41 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

What do founders do wrong with PR? A few things, not all, thankfully. But if there's an early found common mistake, it might be that they misunderstand how PR works, and that's up to us to educate. Usually it's a mixture of two things. One, expecting immediate results I hired you on Friday. Why aren't I in Decrypt on Monday? There are real reasons for that. But if you work with us, you'll be in Decrypt and you'll be in Coindesk and you'll be in Wall Street Journal and then you'll be happy. But there is a sense of recognizing that PR itself is something that is built up.

44:32

And the second thing is having overblown expectations about how much attention everybody else should be paying to your project, and this I get. It's a natural tendency to think, because you're having a project that you hope will have a huge impact on the world and a benefit for the world, that you want everybody to be interested in it. When that moves from, you want them to be interested to. You expect them to be interested in it. When that moves from, you want them to be interested to. You expect them to be interested in it, and you're in deep then that they aren't interested in it. You're actually failing to do the work of working out how to get people interested in it, and we can do that in PR. So we have some time. We'll build up your reputation and if we work together, we will be able to show people why your project is as important as you yourself believe it. But those two things overblown expectations. Impatience tend to be what causes the biggest problems for a founder when they want to get value out of PR.

45:41 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, what about just in terms of personal communications as well? Or when they want to get value out of PR yeah, what about just in terms of personal communications as well? Like big foot in mouth moments, like the jewelry company guy who said his jewelry was overpriced junk and then destroyed the company.

45:53 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, do you remember that story? You don't want your leaders saying that kind of thing about your product. We obviously train. We do media training. You know I used to run the Western hemisphere for Reuters with 700 journalists, so I have an idea of how journalists behave when they're talking to these founders. We help them to be authentic and to be clear, but also to understand some of the pitfalls in exactly what you're saying, avoiding saying the wrong thing.

46:27 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, makes sense. It's such a strange environment. A lot of people working in crypto today have never known any differently. But if you go back just before social media and the internet became the central point for everything, everything was so much more one-to-one. The stakes for everything are so much higher. Now you can achieve scale that you never could before with messaging, but also you can destroy everything on one moment by saying the wrong thing.

46:50 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

We've had to do crisis communications from time to time. Without going into confidential details, mistakes happen and it's not going to happen often and maybe not with all the companies, but there's a likelihood that sometimes it will. And then you need people who've helped other companies deal with that, and usually it involves acknowledging what's happened, analyzing how it can get fixed and pledging and following through on the commitment to make it right. So, yes, stuff can go wrong, and sometimes it can be because of what's been said, but there is a way of redeeming yourself.

47:32 - Harrison Wright (Host)

It reminds me of how just remember there used to be so many terrible restaurants and they would just keep on going because there's always a new victim. But in the age of Google reviews, it doesn't work like that anymore.

47:42 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

No, we've all learned to live with the immediacy of social media and the scale of social media, and I think that so many people are spending so much time on it that actually that has become quite natural. Nowadays People are aware when they're on social media that they are talking to a large audience.

48:04 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Something I've learned that I think would apply here is, in the end, going to the theme around having a bit of patience. Things don't happen overnight. The back end is more important than the front end. The average company not just talking about crypto they put 80, 90% of their efforts into acquiring customers, promising them, yeah. Then they win the customer. Then they do a mediocre job, or at least not an exceptional job, but a job that does not live up to the promise that was.

48:33

On the front end. They have a disappointed customer, customer churns. They think they have a sales and marketing problem because they keep needing to find new customers or you know users if we're talking about a b2c, you know community type player, um, whereas actually maybe they don't have a sales and marketing problem at all. What they have is an expectation management and customer experience problem. If they were to fix that suddenly they would need 20 of the sales or marketing because they're keeping and retaining and growing.

49:00

On the back end. It's like, if you see a lot of really exceptional businesses, they almost don't need sales and marketing at a certain point, depending on the field, because they have this viral engine where one customer refers two more, two customers refer four more and they grow based on the back of the experience they're providing, and I've definitely seen where you know you take that in a community sense in Web3, they're so focused on hey, let's drive people to the Discord, for example, we need some numbers in our Telegram channel, but there's nothing of substance there, so there's nothing to keep people there and it's just a game of acquiring numbers over nurturing the thing that they're building.

49:45 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

And the companies need to be good at making that assessment understanding. Is it the sales problem or is it actually that we're not providing enough value to retain and have our customers recommend us?

49:55 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, 100%. Have you seen any particularly egregious examples of the publicity? It doesn't have to be one from personal experience, just in industry more broadly. But the publicity and the glowing features in block works and so on are not matching up with the reality and it all comes apart.

50:13 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

There's always an aspect, when you're clamoring for attention and there's pressure to build up community and have your numbers look good, there's always a pressure to exaggerate, and I think there was. If it's not now, we can talk about before launches whether it was in the old ICO days or it's now in the TG days that the most egregious thing seems to be to have these artificially inflated valuations, which is only setting yourself up for disappointment. It's something I'm not really understanding. The worst thing in an ICO used to be maybe the pressure that if you're going to list on an exchange, the VCs were pushing you to have I don't know 100,000 Twitter followers or whatever the metric needed to be.

51:10

Unfortunately, I think this year too often for the TGEs, we've had this metric of FDB being driven to the moon and new companies that you've barely heard about on paper have a $1 billion valuation and we don't know where that came from. And we now understand. Well, it was just sort of artificially created, and that's the kind of exaggeration that doesn't do anybody any good.

51:39 - Harrison Wright (Host)

You know I'm taking a little bit of a tangent here again, but it really breaks the mind that if you look at metrics it's going to be the death of you, I think, if you look at them in a wrong way. And I think if you take the entire field of marketing and communications from, say, 20 years ago very difficult to measure, you had advertising, you had print media and these sorts of things Very difficult to get any metrics out of them, much more qualitative than the field is now, and that has its downsides. The problem is now everything's measurable. People only focus on the measurable things and misinterpret them. I'll give you an example.

52:11

About 10 years ago I ran a recruitment company in a completely different industry and I had my email list which I built up organically, and we ran webinars. People would sign up and have guests. They'd bring their guests and we'd personally speak to hey, do you want me to add you to our email list? At one point I think I had about 450 people on my email list. It wasn't big, you know. I was getting 40 to 60% open rates. I was getting 13 to 20% engagement. It was a really useful email list.

52:36

Then I ended up going to work for a different company and I had an email list. You know 40,000 odd people. So this giant list is less useful than my 400 person list I had before, because half of it was scraped and pulled from different places. But just you know names added to a list. There was no. The numbers were there but there was no substance behind it. And I realized, you know educational platforms that provide content, kind of like Blockworks, but this was in a completely different industry. I worked in that space of content platforms that would sell native advertising and things like that. Some of our competitors. They had these giant lists they boasted about, but it was all fake. They just scraped data and put it in a list and then they would boast about it and people would buy it. It was all a mirage.

53:20 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

Yeah, you have to measure right. You can't assess where you're at unless you measure, but you have to be smart about how you're doing the measuring. I think this is one aspect where I see quality in the founders, because they come often from a technical background. They understand numbers and they're used to analyzing data. I think they're good at that at knowing what the metric actually shows them.

53:51 - Harrison Wright (Host)

You know, this could be a really interesting topic of conversation is, if you look at I have seen many cases in many different fields where people get given the runaround by agencies and they'll spend a lot of money, they won't get any results but, hey, everything looks good and I think a lot of the time it comes back to the person hiring the agency doesn't know enough about that field to know what to manage. And in any field, I'd say in any service business, I'd say 20% tend to be really good, 80% not so good, but they know how to sell. It must be really difficult as a founder to know, hey, how do I pick the right PR agency to work with? I know you have a stake in this question, but if you're advising founders, hey, if you're picking a PR agency, actually any kind of communications related firm, what are the questions asked? These people are legit, they know what they're doing, versus, hey, they're just going to sell us a Marat.

54:45 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

It's probably important that they understand where the referral came from. The strength of the referral is clearly important. Is it from a group that they respect and then make sure that they do their due diligence in getting to know what the agency is. We're all quite different, I think. In our case, we're considered crypto native because we've been around in the business for eight years. We are also considered a little bit more serious than many just because we tend to go for the high end. What does this mean?

55:18

If you, for some reason, have decided that you need high volume, low quality, to be able to produce lots and lots of media hits, we're not for you, so don't end up hiring us. But if you want the opposite, then hire us, and I think you do that by jumping on a call, asking the questions and getting to know what people have already done. I do think that's an important aspect of it, because the shop window always looks good, the deck that's sent around, the case studies that are shared. But if you get the opportunity to just ask and sort of live feel how the agency is able to adapt to what your needs are or tell you that they're not a good fit, then I think that's valuable.

56:09 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Would you say. The key is to make sure you're philosophically aligned.

56:13 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

The business goals are what directs it right. And so when you say philosophically, as long as we're talking about, this agency understands where I want to get to and they are able to get me there, then that's good. If they have no idea where you're going to get to, you obviously can't hire them. If they do know where you want to get to but they honestly are not the right fit to get you there, then don't do that. If they do know where you want to get to but they honestly are not the right fit to get you there, then don't do that.

56:41

And you might say well, what do you mean? Surely you should be able to do PR for everybody. Partly it's to do with experience, the beats that you've been, the verticals that you've worked in. Sometimes it might be do you have the technical chops? Because you're dealing with a deep tech type of company and often enough for us it comes down to a group doesn't really care about the quality of the journalism that's telling the story. They just sort of want to see things in here, there and everywhere, as if that will help the brand because somehow there'll be brand name recognition. My argument against that is that on board, yes, your name gets recognized, but in this cheapened way that you're actually doing yourself a disservice.

57:30 - Harrison Wright (Host)

It makes a ton of sense. Just as an aside, something that I always really appreciate is service companies that have the honesty to say you know what? We're not the right fit for you. We're not going to take your money. You should go and do this instead.

57:45 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

There's. There's different reasons for it. One key reason is there are others who can do it, so if that's what you want, focus on that. The other one is it's a relationship, right, as is the parlance said vendors before. I much prefer the term partners because I actually think it's the better reflection of what happens, and in that partnership, it's both of you together. We don't want to be in a relationship which is, from the outset, going to fail because it's a mismatch set going to fail because it's a mismatch. There's too many good clients out there for us to want to struggle with a team that's not a good fit for us or where the goals can't align. And so find yourself a fit because there are other options available, and find a partnership where you're going to be able to work and collaborate together because you both are able to get the results together.

58:43 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Exactly right, saul. There's so many things we could talk about, and I could drag this out another hour if I wanted to, but is there anything we didn't touch on that you think is particularly important advice for founders when it comes to communications?

58:59 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

So I think founders have to be positive. We've had challenges that we've gone through and it's too easy to lose sight of why they founded the company. They're called founders because they founded the company, because they had a vision, because they can bring something into the world that they believe is going to have a big impact on the world. Keep that optimism that it can happen and keep that positivity that you're going to make it happen as you communicate. Otherwise nobody's going to believe it. And I'm not talking about being salesy. I'm just talking about share your belief, share your passion, because people will engage with that and then they will see what is behind the project that makes you feel passionate about it.

59:51 - Harrison Wright (Host)

Yeah, that's actually a great insight. It's like the old saying you know, if you don't believe in yourself, why should anyone else? There you are.

59:57 - Saul Hudson (Guest)

And these founders have a ton of belief, to even start, that they're going to change the world with what they're bringing.

You know you did bring something else to mind now that you brought that up, and it's a different kind of slant on the idea of being positive. But I realized something a while back. You know me for years. Hopefully you would agree. I'm generally a very positive person.

There's something about my natural writing style that sounds really cynical, and it's not that I'm negative. You could read my stuff and oh why has he got a bone to pick with everything and everyone? I'm not like that. But when I write, just I don't know, sometimes the way you talk or frame things comes across differently in writing. It took me a while to realize that hang on a wait, this method, this way that I'm putting this across, is not congruent with how I want to come across or how I want people to feel shit. Actually, I had a post I put out just yesterday and the TLDR of it was hey, if you do this thing, this is bad and this is stupid. It wasn't as exact words. I can't remember what I put, but so wait a minute. No, that's the sort of rant self coming in again. I just reframed it instead of hey, the positive thing about this is blah, blah. This is for the people who keep doing that thing, and so it turned into a positive message instead, and the substance of what I talk about hasn't changed.

It took me a while to realize hey wait, this probably sounds really negative and I'm not even intending it. And nobody wants to feel bad, do they? They don't, and the natural medium is to be talking. That's how we generally communicate and that's how we are best at expressing ourselves. Depending on how we've been taught to write dictates what kind of tone we set, and you're unlearning some habits there. Um, as a professional writer for such a long time, this is something that I enjoy.

Nothing wrong with a little bit of cynicism from time to time to make you stress test your ideas, but I think that once you've got them clear, present them in a way which can be uplifting to people, so that they're going to buy into what you want to achieve more if you can be positive about it. Let's face it there's too much of deliberately trying to grab attention by emphasizing the do or. We were almost trained to be snarky on social media, and that became quite draining to everybody. Now you want to just be authentic. You're not a snarky on social media, and that became quite draining to everybody. Now you want to just be authentic. You're not a snarky person, so don't feel like you have to resort to snark on social.

It took me years to figure this out, but for a long time in the past I was running around in circles, linkedin especially and I know LinkedIn is not overly popular in in crypto, but I'm a recruiter, so linkedin is, unfortunately, my natural home, even though I might prefer twitter, um, but there are all sorts of sales influencers who give their advice on this is how you should do this and this is how you should do that, because sales is very important to running a b2b service business. So I followed a lot of these people and, um, they said are you? There's always this new thing is oh yeah, I've been thinking about it wrong, I need to do it that way, I need to do it this way, and it took me years to figure out. Literally just running in circles because they're deliberately being extreme in what they're prescribing, because that's the only way to get.

If they were to have a moderate voice and say, well, there are five different ways you can do this, and here are the pros and cons no one would listen to them. Ironically, on the one hand, we're hiring PR, we want to get attention, we want to draw people to us, but I think actually, from an individual point of view, you go back 20 years. The challenge is how do I get information? There's not enough information. I need to learn Now. There's too much information. Actually, if you want to succeed at anything, you need to tune out ruthlessly 95% of it and just listen to what matters. Otherwise, you'll just run around in circles forever.

And make up your own mind. Right, You've absorbed all that information.

Then just have the courage of your convictions and do it your way. Exactly, everyone's got the thing they want to sell you, even if it's just an idea. You mentioned right at the beginning of the episode, saul, about being the adults in the room. I kind of feel that as well, which is ironic because I'm not even 40 yet. But by crypto standards, I feel like I might as well be ancient, but not necessarily because of my physical age, but just because I started in this line of work.

In the analog age we had computers, but the first few years I did recruiting, we had physical files. So we'd get a job, we had physical forms, we'd print everything out, we had word processing or whatever, but we'd have physical forms. We took a job intake, we'd fill out the form, we kept candidates and files alphabetized by sector. So we matched up. Let's go in the files. And we looked through the files. We're like, yeah, this guy, this guy, everything, this guy, this guy everything was on the phone.

You know you're talking about meeting people at conferences. Very occasionally we would have face-to-face meetings and I might meet this person I had been talking with on the phone for three, four years. Sometimes I had no idea what they looked like. So you build up this image of the person and you meet them. You're not like what I imagined. It actually worked really well for me back then because I started when I was about 20 21, and people would hear me on the phone they'd think I was 35, but if they saw me, you know I I think it would have cost me a lot of credibility because no one takes the you know freckled 20 year old kid seriously, right I think the modern version of that is not knowing people's height.

When we're on these, uh, remote calls, I've had such surprises when you imagine somebody is short and they're actually really lanky, or the other way around, which is nice. It means we should get to these events and we should meet each other more.

On that just out of curiosity. How tall do you think?

I am.

You're 6'7", I'm 5'6" or 5'7". Good, wear heels Could be fashionable these days. Um, the. The point I was getting to with all of this was I'll be candid and this might sound crazy to people listening, given my profession and the expectations of said profession. But social here is not entirely comfortable for me. I've gotten used to it. Now it is, but it took me a long time.

I got on Facebook because people kept telling me I needed a Facebook. I never would post anything on there. Honestly, you know, I've been running this company for nearly five years. I didn't post anything regularly on LinkedIn until maybe a year ago and I did just fine without doing that. But I think there's a certain expectation and pressure that comes with being in a public environment all the time and I don't think it's necessarily a natural thing for most people maybe founders who come to founding and had an existing crypto twitter audience before. Maybe it is not natural to them, but I think definitely for the older entrepreneurs among us, getting in custom to a world where you have to be posting things that millions of people can see all the time and everything is judged by public actions, I think there's a mindset shift and a comfort zone that has to build with that, and I think there are industries where you don't need that. It's a nice to have, but I don't think crypto is one of them.

We put too much emphasis at the beginning, when we are posting, on how perfect everything needs to be because we wrote it and we pour our heart and soul into it and we forget that it's just a fleeting moment in the audience's view. So kind of like, get over it, get used to posting and then after a while it feels more like it's second nature rather than something that you have to sweat and toil over and worry because you end up second guessing yourself. Just be yourself. You know what the persona is for the particular medium. In this case, it's not Facebook where you're showing baby photos and stuff. It's your business and you know what you want to say for your business, because you've been doing it for a long time and you've got things to say. So I'm glad that you overcame that. I think it's such a natural, normal process that people at the beginning actually tie themselves up in knots about thinking that their posts have to be perfect.

Actually, that's a really good point and in case anyone's listening to this who struggles with this issue, I remember when I first people I had coach begging me post on LinkedIn, make posts. I had so much resistance to doing it but it took me so long to write anything. It was this huge and then I would just hover on not wanting to post it. And then I'd post it and I'm like, how's it doing, how's it doing, how's it doing? And then, yeah, it took maybe a week, two weeks, and it just became. Now I just posted, I don't care, I don't even care if no one sees it or likes it or whatever, or maybe it blows up. I've also noticed and everyone says this and I've spoken to about it I can't predict which posts will do. Well, I'll spend an hour writing this amazing post, or so I think, and then it bombs. I'll just fire out a thought in five seconds and it blows up. That happens all the time. Take the good.

It just shows you that by doing more than once, by building up, some of them are going to take off and I'm sure they're all good posts, Harrison.

The ones I read from you are Probably because the ones that aren't good don't show up in the feed. Joy is the algorithm, but thank you, you're welcome. Well, saul, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure to have you.

It's been a great conversation. Thanks for inviting me, Harrison.

My absolute pleasure To everyone listening. Thank you for taking the time and we'll see you soon.