Steven McKie is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast, evangelist, and expert, having participated in the cryptocurrency space since 2012.
Steven got his start in Bitcoin when he was studying Information Systems and Technology at Old Dominion University. However, he’s taken his experience in the blockchain space beyond working as an IT specialist and engineer to also tackle product development, growth, marketing, and UX design.
Currently, Steven runs Growth and Product Content at Purse, one of the first cryptocurrency applications to provide a practical consumer application for those new to the cryptocurrency space to experiment with the technology. By using Purse to purchased products on Amazon with Bitcoin, Steven has found a way to save buyers 15% on their purchases.
Steven is also the host of one of the most popular cryptocurrency podcasts, BlockChannel.
Here are some of the topics discussed in this episode.
Harness The Curiosity of Your Personas
Some products, especially ones that advocate for the adoption of a brand new idea or technology, evoke a natural curiosity from your personas.
“A lot of these companies were just banking on the rapid increase in the price of Bitcoin to continue to bring in a lot of news and speculators and things like that. That’s one of the really cool, novel use cases of Bitcoin. If you get in sooner rather than everyone else, you have an opportunity to make money. For a certain number of people, that speculative point is enough for them. They’ll hop in.”
Generating media attention through PR and focusing your messaging to hardness this curiosity can result in high-quality users and viriality with your product.
Humanize Your Product
With so many different products in our marketing tool kits and our personal lives, it’s easy to forget that there are real people behind products that we use everyday.
Personifying these products helps create legitimacy in the eyes of skeptical potential users.
“It’s a lot of humanizing this technology and being able to actually communicate the true value add for each of these different Bitcoin-related services and teach people how Bitcoin (or whatever cryptocurrency their company is dealing with) can inject additional utility for people.”
Blockchain Has a Future in Advertising
One of the most exciting things about new technologies that operate primarily in other verticals is the potential applications that they have to marketing and advertising.
“They would be able to trustlessly ensure that these companies that are onboarding into these ad-based systems are actually high quality, and you’re not having just a bunch of garbage or, if it’s just a bunch of AdSense ads, fed into a bunch of weird SEO content on the internet or something like that. It’s a just a way of cleaning up the overall quality of the content of the ads on the internet and also making sure that all the partners are paid fairly along the way and also automatically.
”
It’s possible that the blockchain technologies could completely revolutionize the transactional components of marketing and digital advertising for both the advertisers and audience of the digital media.
Transcript
Note: this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ander: One of the things that I really enjoy about doing these podcasts is looking at all of the new technologies coming out—even technologies that are not directly related to marketing and advertising, which perhaps had a different primary use case, and looking at how those technologies are working their way into different spaces, including, of course, marketing and advertising. That is going to be some of the subject matter today with the person we are talking to, Steven McKie.
Steven, thank you so much for coming all the way into our office here. We really appreciate it.
Steven: Thank you very much for having me on the show, man. No problem. I love coming down towards AT&T Park. It’s always very sunny.
Ander: Yep! Right across the street from our office. It makes commuting a little difficult on Giants game days, but it’s worth being here.
Steven: There’s nothing wrong with the smell of beer and hotdogs.
Ander: Haha. True that. Totally agree.
Now, I explained a little bit in the introduction who you are, what you do, how you got to where you are, but I think it’s going to sound much better coming from you. You’re the Head of Growth and Product Content at Purse.io. You’re the Host, Creator, and Owner over at BlockChannel, and you’ve got a lot to say about BlockChain and the cryptocurrency space. But why don’t you summarize who you are and how you got there?
Steven: All right. Let’s just start when I got into the cryptocurrency space and just leave it there.
Ander: Sure.
Steven: I got into the space in 2012, back when I was 21, and I was still in college. In college, I was studying computer science and, ultimately, switched over to studying information systems engineering, which is a combination of system engineering, project management, and new business. I moved over into that space because I was getting really excited about Bitcoin and the crypto space, and it seemed to be a lot broader for what I wanted to study and what I wanted to eventually specialize in.
So, I made that move over, and while I was in school, I did a lot of jobs from IT consulting and all those other sorts of things, and then, ultimately, before I graduated, I got a part-time job working at Apple. I was working on the retail side, and I was doing business stuff—repairs and all that sort of stuff. I was one of the Apple Geniuses.
When I was there, I met a couple of individuals who were into Bitcoin mining. They were mining specifically alt coins. This was in early 2013. So, I had been in the space for a little while, and I was poor and broke in college, and I was really mad that I couldn’t buy a lot of Bitcoin. I was constantly looking for a way into the space in order to make a quick buck because everyone else seemed to be doing it.
I started working with these guys, and they were like, “Hey, we’ve been working on mining these different coins, and we sell them into Bitcoin. We make this money, and we really want to scale it up, and we just need equipment. We have this facility in Kentucky. Let’s work together.” I was like, “OK.”
I got some friends together. We got together some capital. We got all of our parts. We got everything together. We got it all put together, and for months, we were mining Dogecoin and Reddcoin and a whole bunch of other PoW-based coins. What we would do is we were taking advantage of the altcoin price swings, and we would mine a bunch up early when a coin initially came out, and then we would sell it and put it back into Bitcoin.
That went on for a while until, eventually, where the facility was, there were some issues in relation to heat coming towards the summertime, so ultimately, we had already paid ourselves back, for the most part, so we just sold off the rest of our GPUs and called it quits.
During that time, I was finishing up school, and I did some other side jobs. I did a contracting job with a company called Bitreserve, doing, essentially, rapid-response content strategy for them. I did that for a few months, and that company is now called Uphold. I finished up there, and I was like, “All right, well, I really want to get into the crypto space,” because that was a good taste. I worked a few more months at Apple, graduated, and then put my feelers out on where I could go next.
I got an opportunity to work for a company out here in San Francisco. It wasn’t for a crypto company, though. It was just for a regular, run-of-the-mill tech company, doing data analytics and stuff. I moved out here, took that opportunity. I was there 8 months, and I was like, “Man, I hate this stuff.” My head of HR was always like, “You’re really into this Bitcoin stuff. You’re really into this Ether stuff, and you’re always talking about it on the internet. Maybe that’s the move you want to go one day.” Then, one day, I decided, “Yeah, maybe she’s right,” so I left.
From there, I was just unemployed for a little bit as I was figuring out what I wanted to do in the crypto space.
Ander: Lots of us have been there before.
Steven: Everyone has been a little unemployed in Silicon Valley at some point. I went to LAUNCH Festival, which is a hack-a-thon held by Jason, who was one of the original Twitter investors and stuff. He’s a really cool guy. When I was there, I met Ryan Charles, who was the cryptocurrency engineer for Reddit back when they were going to do Bitcoin and Reddit back in the day, and that was a really big deal. He had since left Reddit and was working on this micropayments technology. I got really excited about it.
I went to the hack-a-thon with him, and we had built this new version over the weekend, working with him and working, logistically, how it would look, the brand name, what was going on there behind the scenes. He took some of his existing work from working at BitPay and working at other companies, and we worked together on that. While I was working there, I got a job working at Purse because I was keeping myself afloat. I was kind of doing my own thing, but at the same time, I was helping these guys with this company.
We eventually raised a bunch of money for that first company. But ultimately, they started
going in a different direction with their project, so I left that project and, instead, decided to assume a full-time role at Purse doing growth and product content that I do now.
At some point along the way, I had started BlockChannel. Since then, since I’ve been in the space, I’ve done everything from funding developments like UI/UX design to product marketing to content strategy to normal day trading to consulting. You name it, I probably did it.
Ander: Everything under the sun.
Steven: Yep. That’s what you’ve got to do in crypto.
Ander: For sure. Let’s take a step back here and talk about a couple of things. Again, I defined this a little bit in the introduction to this episode, but for people who are not familiar with cryptocurrencies and BlockChain, what’s the simplest way to describe it in 30 seconds?
Steven: The simplest way to describe it would just be that it’s a trustless system to allow you to basically share a ledger of all the network participants’ transactions and be able to securely be a custodian of all those different transactions and account for everything that goes on in the network and, at the same time, taking advantage of cryptography and what’s called “proof of work” in order to create a disintermediated network that allows individuals to trustlessly put in value to this system and to pull in value out through a process that’s called “mining.” This is basically where you act as a bookkeeper on that network, and you’re rewarded for that accordingly. Everyone who is a participant in this network can be a part of this borderless transactional system where you can send funds almost instantly for a very small fee anywhere in the world.
Ander: Yeah. It’s really cool. The currency component is decentralized, so it’s not tied directly to gold or to anybody’s direct bank account or anything like that.
Steven: Exactly.
Ander: And, there’s a lot of very exciting things happening within that space. Now, Purse.io—that is something that makes cryptocurrencies and BlockChain a little more digestible to consumers. Why don’t you tell us about it?
Steven: Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. Andrew Lee, who is our CEO, started Purse back in 2014 when they were first looking at the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. Andrew had come out the payment space, working in Atlanta, and he started a payment processing company out there that he had sold, and he had worked at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. He was really killing the game over on the East Coast in Atlanta.
He ultimately met up with an individual, and they founded Purse. What they wanted to do was add utility to the Bitcoin space, and our tagline is “Make Bitcoin useful.” Where there wasn’t utility for Bitcoin in the past for easily being able to buy and sell things online, Purse wanted to come in there and utilize Bitcoin in some novel manner in order to create a service.
The service we initially created, the first product, was the ability for people to be able to liquidate Amazon gift cards, access the gift card balances in return for Bitcoin. Ultimately, that sort of evolved into the capability for individuals to complete other orders from wish lists that are submitted by users in our system. In return, they complete it at whatever particular discount or premium when they buy and sell that item on Amazon for the gift credit. Once that item makes it to the customer, they confirm it, and then they get the Bitcoin that the customer pays into the escrow. It’s a trustless way for another individual to receive Bitcoin on one end and then for someone else to get items at a discount. There’s this double side of incentives here where there is illiquidity in the market for Amazon gift credit—we provide that there.
And then the opposite side—consumers have incentive to buy and sell Bitcoin because, usually, it would be like Bitcoin,“Why do I get it?” Well, a great incentive is go save 15% to 33% off anything you want on Amazon. You buy anything on Amazon every day. You buy things on Prime. You don’t need Amazon Prime. Come to Purse; bring your Bitcoin.
Since then, we’ve evolved substantially. That first product I mentioned was called “Name Your Discount.” Since then, we’ve made this process more and more seamless, and we have another option that’s called “Buy Now,” where it’s literally you just search our site, just like you would with any Amazon site or product, add it to your cart, and just pay with Bitcoin and instantly save 5%. That’s all processed through our network of liquidity. That’s really cool.
And then, this past year, we introduced Purse Merchants. Basically, we allow anyone to be able to quickly set up a storefront, list items, have an inventory and sales transactional history and be able to quickly sell items, and then people pay into an escrow, and then once they receive their items, you receive Bitcoin. Anyone can say, “Have you got an extra phone you don’t want anymore? Old video games? Game console? Old computer parts?” Things like that you can just quickly turn around for Bitcoin.
Ander: Awesome. Now, as you know, the cryptocurrency space is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Steven: Yeah.
Ander: There is a ton of money being moved around this space, but because it’s something that is still not quite yet mainstream, a lot of big companies have not yet gotten involved, even though it has sparked their interest.
Steven: Yep.
Ander: Because of that,t, from a consumer point of view, there’s a major trust factor involved. “Oh, there’s this new thing, a new way to deal with my money, to send my money, to buy things, to do anything else that you would do with your finances.”
My question for you, on that note, is with a company like Purse.io or any of the other companies that are operating within the BlockChain and the cryptocurrency space, what are some of the unique challenges that those companies have to marketing their products and solutions, and how do they overcome those challenges? If you have any specific stories from Purse, that would be awesome.
Steven: Well, first of all, to understand the marketing in Bitcointhus far, you have to really sort of understand its roots, right?
Originally, at the heart of Bitcoin is very libertarian, very crypto-anarchistic, very cyber punky, coming from that background. A lot of the early marketing for Bitcoin companies was very technically oriented, not very people friendly. It was very nerdy, was very jokey, showed a little bit of the inherent immaturity of the space when you get a bunch of geeks together, and you give them a lot of money, right?
Everyone was just sort of feeling it out and just being like, “Hey, we’ve got this really cool thing here. We should clean it up.” Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of the branding of a lot of these companies, where everything had “bit” or “coin” in the name, and every company had an orange logo or something like that. Everything was very gaudy for a while. It was bad.
Now you’ve got cooler companies that have cleaned up the space and the image, like Jim and I and Coinbase. I’d like to say companies like Purse. We’re notable. We’re in the news a lot. People talk about us in a positive manner. We do a lot of positive things for the community and stuff like that.
Since then, accordingly, we’ve moved on from the early adopter phase, and we’re sort of moving along now, it’s a lot of humanizing this technology and being able to actually communicate the true value add for each of these different Bitcoin-related services and teach people how Bitcoin (or whatever cryptocurrency their company is dealing with) can inject additional utility for people. Whether that’s Purse, for instance, where we have customers all over the globe from places like Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, Germany, Australia—everywhere.
Essentially, individuals can buy items from anywhere in the world, dropship them, receive them at a discount. When you have places in political turmoil like Venezuela, where most people make less than $20 a month, so everyone has very cheap socialized electricity. They’re trying to get out of this political turmoil, so they start buying a bunch of mining GPUs and stuff from Amazon or through Purse with Bitcoin at a discount basically to escape hyper-inflation that’s going on and trying to opt out of all of that nonsense.
Bitcoin companies are realizing that we have this technology now, we’re reaching a certain level of maturity, and it’s all about making sure we tell the appropriate story for the appropriate community that we’re looking at.
Ander: I understand all of that from the perspective of people who are already familiar with the crypto space, with BlockChain, and everything directly related to it. In that case, what it’s really about is discovery. It’s about them finding Purse.io or any of the other companies out there.
What about for something that is, ultimately, intended to be a consumer product, like Purse.io or Coinbase? Coinbase is probably the most consumer-friendly version of an exchange where you can buy and sell Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies.
What are some of the challenges that those companies are facing getting through to the non-cryptocurrency community, people who might still have doubts about the technology, about the space, or maybe have just peripherally heard of it through a friend?
Steven: A lot of these companies were just banking on the rapid increase in the price of Bitcoin to continue to bring in a lot of news and speculators and things like that. That’s one of the really cool, novel use cases of Bitcoin. If you get in sooner rather than everyone else, you have an opportunity to make money. For a certain number of people, that speculative point is enough for them. They’ll hop in.
But for a lot of other people who don’t necessarily understand the extrinsic value of money or how the Fed works or how inflation works or how supply and demand works, they don’t have any sort of idea of how that works, and they know that they have a bank card at home that they swipe from Wells Fargo or Bank of America, who takes money out of their account. They’re normal, taxpaying citizens. They file their W-2. They do their things. That’s as far as they know about money, right? They don’t teach you about taxes in high school. I think Lil B made a good rap about that one. He had a song where he was like, “They don’t teach you about taxes in school, but everything is about taxes.” That’s basically the gist there.
As all of this political turmoil continues geopolitically and globally, as there are all these issues and speculations in relation to money and in relation to Fed and relation to potential war, a lot of people are just kind of at a point where they want to feel secure. A lot of people might not feel secure socially, or they might not feel secure financially. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have a way to aid that. And now that we have so many cryptocurrencies and so many different use cases out there), it’s just a matter of finding the right use case for the people.
There’s always going to be a business for selling people Bitcoin. Being a broker of Bitcoin is always going to be a thing, right? During a gold rush, to make money, you sell pickaxes, right? Basically, there will always be a use. There’s always going to be a need for an e-commerce platform, right? So, if you solidify yourself as a leader early on, you’re going to be great.
But as far unique challenges that are just ultimately going to stop us or impede adoption to where we would want to go… It’s mostly just regulatory and slowly getting the mainstream media to really digest these technologies, go down the rabbit hole and don’t just take it superficially or shallowly, and really understand the deep implications of this technology. All we can do is continue to be a deep resource, be open and communicative, and pull and distill as much of this esoteric knowledge as we can down until enough people see the light.
Ander: That’s really, really interesting. What do you think it’s going to take beyond humanizing, beyond getting people to see the light in order for mainstream media to talk about it legitimately?
Steven: The need. The absolutely need. Basically, you have the tail end of adoption, the laggers. You’ve got your early adopters, and then you’ve got your normal come-alongs, and then everyone else, which are basically your moms, your dads, and your grandmas who are signing up for Facebook this year.
Ander: Sure.
Steven: Those folks are going to take a while to come. They have their own wants and needs, but ultimately, it’s going to come down to times of extreme economic negative future speculation. So, if you say, “The Fed is not going to raise the rates,” or “Do you want to strengthen against the USD?” Whatever it is, eventually, it’s something out of necessity because of these economic systems and just because how precariously built that they are. They’re so fragile. They’re so sensitive. Eventually, something very major is going to happen. It’s not going to be a question of “Do I buy Bitcoin?” It’s going to be “I have to.”
Ander: For someone who doesn’t know anything about it—or doesn’t even know it exists, for that matter—do you think that saying, “There is this new way to secure your money that you should know about,” generally speaking, is enough to get someone interested?
Steven: No, not at all. Normally, when you tell someone, “Yeah, you can secure your money personally, and no one can control it.” “Oh, you mean like when I put my cash in the bank?” That’s their answer. To them, “I give that custodial service to the bank. That have a fiduciary obligation to not screw me over and give me my money, and it’s FDIC insured up to $250,000. My money should be there!” They have that trust there inherently because they’ve always had that. Is that enough? For most, it depends!
Ander: Yeah.
Steven: It depends on the person.
Ander: It’s a super, super difficult question, and one of the reasons I’m enjoying this conversation is that there’s no easy answer to a lot of this stuff.
Steven: There really isn’t. A lot of it is just discovery as time goes on. Ever since the first pizza was bought for 10,000 Bitcoins, that was the first initial price discovery for Bitcoin in a market. Ever since then, it’s been an experiment. It went from a techy, nerdy thing on that day to an experiment of us basically figuring out “What are the long-term implications here?” and “What the hell have we made?”
Ander: Yeah. Super, super interesting.
Now, as we’ve briefly touched on crypto space and BlockChain, it’s not just about the money component. I think you described it—it’s a trustless way to manage information, to manage assets, to manage resources.. There are quite a few companies and industries that have found ways to take BlockChain technology and apply it to their specific use case, not necessarily in a way that’s directly tied to currency or to money.
Steven: Yep.
Ander: What are some of the ways that you see that possibly happening with marketing and advertising technology in the next few years?
Steven: Yeah, excellent.
For advertising specifically, this is great. I’m friends with an individual. His name is Brendan
Eich. If you know Brendan Eich, Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and helped start Mozilla Firefox, and now he owns and founded a company called Brave, which is another new web browser built off the top of Chromium, which, essentially, allows users to block all trackers, all ads, everything natively by default. You have this shield, you put your shields up, and it’s like AdBlock, Ghostery, all of those cool plug-ins you use in Google Chrome for privacy, all tied into one in the web browser through your whole session.
His future vision, and what it currently does in its state and form, is it allows you to partner with publishers, and you have your own wallet inside of the web browser that you top up with Bitcoin. Instead of being served ads and stuff inside these networks with these publishers, it basically takes a tiny, tiny, small amount of Bitcoin from your wallet and rewards it to these publishers that you spend time on their websites. Basically, that’s an alternative means of income for these companies that don’t necessarily want to just run ads from some other advertising client.
On top of that, recently, Brendan and his team debuted something they called “The Basic Attention Token,” which is really amazing. They just recently had their crowd sale, and they raised about $32 million in about 30 seconds—in about 2 Ethereum blocks, which are roughly about 18 seconds. So, they raised $32 million, so since then, their token has debuted on exchanges. What their token’s plan is it basically works in tandem with this web browser, and essentially, it works as a form of universal, basic income for individuals in emerging markets, where they get paid to view those ads online for their basic attention for what they do online. Other individuals on the opposite side on the first world are paying to not see those ads.
Basically, the emerging markets can get paid for their viewing experience, and those that can afford it can remove the excess annoyances. Basically, it’s a way to create this system for attention. The more time that you buy… You know, you can set rates and limits for how much it will be for each individual type and content and publisher. I don’t want to explain it in too much depth. I don’t want to screw anything up, but basically, it’s just a way to reward individuals for their time spent viewing things online. Right now, that’s viewing a webpage or a video, or you click on a Forbes article or something like that. You would get rewarded for any ads you saw on that page. In the future, I imagine it would be your time spent watching a video or your time spent on an ad that pops up. You would be rewarded for that accordingly.
I think that’s sort of his grander vision, and on top of that, too, implementing what’s called “zero knowledge proofs” or some sort of obfuscated privacy technology that would allow you to serve these ads, but none of these advertisers or trackers have any idea who you actually are. Your actual, unique identifier itself is blind to them, but they have just enough information that they need. Then you can pick and choose exactly who you want to actually divulge information to for money.
There was actually this really interesting article in Advertising Age, advertising magazine. Ad Age about what BlockChain means for ad tech. Did you see that article?
Steven: Mm-hmm.
Ander: The summary of the article—and here’s a quote from it—is that yes, there is an impact on ad tech. “Establishing transparency and trust requires and central and secure way to record, review, and execute a deal. Today, deals are typically stored in formats and locations that are disparate and nonstandard. Initially creating the standards and enabling collaborations are essential steps in this path.”
Can you elaborate how BlockChain plays into that as it relates to advertising?
Steven: Yes. For instance, a friend of mine (who is also my roommate), Ameen Soleimani, was one of the developers for this company that’s called AdToken, which was underneath this other company called MetaX, which was underneath this other company called ConsenSys.
Essentially, AdToken was a way to pay advertisers who want to opt in to a particular network. Basically, you apply, you get accepted, and then you’re only served ads through this unique BlockChain-based AdToken system. I’m trying to think of the most succinct, simple way to explain it.
Ander: Maybe an example.
Steven: Yeah. So, say I’m an advertiser, and I want to advertise something on Gizmodo.com.
Ander: Sure.
Steven: If I’m Gizmodo.com, then I would be part of this AdToken network, and then I would say, “I want to be served ads by people in the AdToken network, and these are the types of ads that I would want, and these are the categories I would like to get ads from.” Then people who the actual advertisers themselves would apply into AdToken, and then they would get screened, filtered through that, and then they would get paired up with these different individuals and different companies.
They would be able to trustlessly ensure that these companies that are onboarding into these ad-based systems are actually high quality, and you’re not having just a bunch of garbage or, if it’s just a bunch of AdSense ads, fed into a bunch of weird SEO content on the internet or something like that. It’s a just a way of cleaning up the overall quality of the content of the ads on the internet and also making sure that all the partners are paid fairly along the way and also automatically.
Ander: Wow. That is really, really cool. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I feel like we could talk about this for probably three or four hours, but we don’t have that kind of time today.
Steven: Of course! I know how it works in the podcast world!
Ander: Yeah. Speaking of which, you are the host of a podcast.
Steven: Yeah.
Ander: Tell us about it.
Steven: Yeah, I’m the host of a podcast that’s called BlockChannel. I started it maybe about six months back after working with some friends at the BitCoin Podcast—Demetrick, Penny, and Marcello. I was working with them, and they were like, “Hey, man, we like having your voice. We like your opinions. We like your writings. We like you. You’re cool. Do you want to come on the show sometime?” I was like, “Yeah,” and I did that for a while, and they were like, “We should start another show. We really like Ethereum.” I was like, “Yeah, there isn’t anyone really talking about it.”
Ander: Ethereum is another cryptocurrency.
Steven: Yeah. And I was like, “No one is really talking about that, and everyone is talking about Bitcoin, and no one is talking about all these other digital currencies that are also coming up, like Zcash and Litecoin and things like that, right?” So, I was like, “Alright, well, let’s make sure that we can create an audience for them.” BlockChannel serves as a mean to interview the developers from a technical standpoint, the entrepreneurs, get feedback on how they got into the space, why they’re here, where they’re going, what projects they’re working on, and leave tips and stuff for the audience and people to understand where we’re going. I’ll interview these individuals that do token offerings inside the space, or I’ll interview cool VCs, collecting all the mind-share inside the space and just trying to centralize all that information in one place so that we can reach a larger audience.
We try to be really fun with it, be really cool and hip with the music. We always try to have a lot of cool, diverse guests. It’s just a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to meet people, network, and to make sure that we’re having the discussions and conversations that we need to be having.
Ander: Awesome. I’ve got one last question for you, Steven, before we both get on with the rest of our busy days, and this actually is not as related to BlockChain and to cryptocurrencies.
Where do you think, as the Head of Growth at Purse.io, the future of marketing is going? And how can we as marketers prepare for that future?
Steven: Obviously, we all know it’s completely digital now, really. Digital marketing is the king now, and the actual definition of what digital marketing is, obviously, is going to continue to evolve as the space matures. I think that, as marketing continues to grow, it will definitely become more automated and a lot more intelligent, where the systems and stuff where we’re getting information from are reaching the right people at the right time, the right audience in the right way. Ultimately, thanks to BlockChain technology and things like privacy-centric systems and machine learning and AI and things like that, we’ll be able to serve up some really interesting experiences that gather attention. Really, it’s just a matter of taking each of those different components modularly and trying to create different types of cool, innovative experiences that capture people’s attention.
Over time, what that exactly will look like and evolve to, outside of things, like AdTokens and BlockChains and instant settlement, that allows all of these things to be really cool and do all of these neat things. How exactly that will evolve? I’m not sure because it eventually all comes down to anything that eventually rolls into the BlockChain space, just like Bitcoin itself, which eventually became an experiment. All these things slowly become an experiment. As all these digitally based systems move on to public BlockChains and stuff, there’s going to be so much potential for interoperability between all of these different systems and what we can create, I can’t even sit here and tell you what sort of things we’ll have. Really, all I can do is just tight, be giddy, and try to be at the forefront of it every day.
Ander: There are always unknown unknowns.
Steven: Unknown unknowns.
Ander: I forget the exact person who said that.
Steven: There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are also unknown unknowns. It’s great. I don’t know who quoted it. I saw that on Boondocks.
Ander: Yeah, I saw that somewhere, but it’s totally true.
Anyway, Steven, thanks so much for coming to our office. Super interesting conversation.
Steven: Yeah, man, of course.
Ander: We’ll talk to you soon.
Steven: Thanks a lot, Ander. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.