Twittertainment, social media strategies for startups, how to use crypto principles to avoid another FTX + interview with Jehan Luth of Banyan

Listen on
November 22, 2022

This week’s pod ep is another Partner Meeting + guest interview combo.

Here’s what we cover during the Partner Meeting segments:

  • Twitter and our thoughts on the situation
  • An update on the continued FTX fallout and how classic crypto principles like Proof-of-Reserves and self custody could help us avoid similar situations in the future
  • G20 summit
  • Domestic midterm elections and potential ways a gridlocked gov might affect the economy
  • Startup Advice of the Week: social media strategies for startups

After the partner meeting segments I chat with Jehan Luth, Founder & CEO Banyan. Bayna is a global infrastructure company for item-level receipt data that allows its partners to enrich transactions. This is a super interesting topic that led to some great tangents about how new tech enabled data collection will unlock a whole world of studies and possibilities.

Transcript (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Welcome everybody. I'm Mark Peter Davis, managing partner of Interplay. I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs advance society and this podcast is part of that effort. Today's partner meeting, we've got a whole bunch of conversations we cover ranging from what's going on at Twitter ftx, the G 20 happening over in Bali, and we have a special guest on today, Jahan.

The CEO of Banian, super interesting FinTech data company, and we take a kind of left churn and talk about a tangent of using data to illuminate the interaction between what you eat and the medicine you're taking. And the truth is no one doctors, nobody else knows what is going on inside your body and even on like a statistical level across the population.

You know, my partner Kevin, recently did a full body. Uh, where they looked for cancers preemptively. There's all this preventative health stuff, and what keeps coming up as a theme to me is really how little we know about medicine still, even though it feels like we've made so many advances and how much frontier there is in terms of using technology and data to be opening up, uh, potential.

So we get into a session where we're talking about. You can be taking huge amounts of data. You can figure out what everyone is actually eating and then cross overlaying that in terms of what types of medicines they're taking. I'm sure they're doing a little bit of that now with the two, if you're taking a couple of types of medicines, they've got a little data on that.

But I really, really believe we are on the frontier, the very precipice, uh, being able to take huge sums of data, crunch it with AI and start to make draw causality. It might be there's something weird in the water you're drinking. That if you're on a certain type of medicine causes cancer. We don't know what the hell is going on right now.

Um, and just wanted to throw out, I think there's a huge opportunity here for all the entrepreneurs. Listen to this. Uh, please take out the mantle. I think there is a lot to be done and there's a very, very big human cause, uh, to be had here.

Mike, how was your breakfast? Honestly, delicious.

Mike Rogers: I did like a nice soft scramble. Little garlic, little onions, little fresh sour dough, little hot sauce,

MPD: breakfast of champions. You're like a culinary expert.

Mike Rogers: I'm like a culinary beginner, but you know, we're doing the best we can. There

MPD: we go. All right, let's talk tech.

What's happening in the tech world? And I actually wanna cheat and just push you into a direction. Let's talk about Twitter.

Mike Rogers: No, I was gonna say, why don't you just open up Twitter and see what people are talking about on Twitter today, and we can talk about whatever they're talking about. Except everyone on Twitter today is talking about the death and talking Twitter, which something tells me is in the, was in the roadmap plan of Elon Musk's brilliance in how to get people reengaged and talking on Twitter.

Right. Checking this

MPD: could way more often.

Mike Rogers: Yeah. The Twitter is a

MPD: Twitter attainment. Opportunity. It's a Twitter. I mean,

Mike Rogers: he keeps posting on how maus are growing. He's like, ha, by the way guys, keep talking shit. Watch where maus grow. Right? And then he's like, oh, Twitter's dying. Great. Maus grow. It's like a Game of Thrones episode of Twitter's Twitter.

That's right.

MPD: That's right. . Do you think, uh, he's going to successfully reposition the company or There's a lot of media that's out blasting him right now for making a lot of change. Or do you think he's driving off a cliff?

Brett Palatiello: I think that he's a,

Mike Rogers: obviously a brilliant man, but I think he's also a genius in like gorilla marketing.

Use whatever term you want, or Elon marketing, right. For using some sort of, uh, controversy to stir engagement. I mean, he's done this before time and time, and again with Tesla, with space. And I think now he's doing it in his own public town hall, which is now his Twitter that he controls. But I think he'll figure this out.

Absolutely. Uh,

Brett Palatiello: do I think it will be

Mike Rogers: clean? Not at all. I think he looked at a business that was upside down and. You know, like a lot of companies in the tech ecosystem today are gonna have to make some really hard cuts to get this business in a place where investors will value it again. And at the end of the day, like he's a businessman and he's trying to drive value for his investors.

And I think, you know, looking at 75, 80% cuts is something that he's doing at Twitter, but I think a lot of CEOs around the ecosystem should be doing as well.

MPD: Yeah. It's, you know, it, there's dimensions of this, this one's so complicated. It's more than a business dynamic that is not only front and center by nature of the business, it's also become extremely politicized.

Questions about Trump rejoining The left is obviously attacking him, right? Uh, so I'm looking at this and I'm trying to distill out all the noise and just in my head, figure out where is he on his journey in terms of building a great company. Because I, I actually believe if he nails this, he has a chance to displace.

And to really turn over the landscape of social media. Not overnight, but over the coming years, there's only a few plays that have hundreds of millions of adopted users. And you can take a technology anywhere you want to go right over time. Yeah. I look at this, I think this is, this is kind of blue sky window for him, but it's been a tumultuous month or so.

How else would you do this if you were coming in and had to rip off a huge band? How else would you do

Mike Rogers: it? Yeah, I guess some could argue that he took a little bit of a brass tact here and, you know, quick, like how fast he moved. Right? And, you know, so one side of the argument is, well, this is a textbook case and you know, how to, uh, product, uh, product innovate and, and move quickly.

Uh, the other side is like, well, If you're driving a 10,000 pound truck, you can't take a hard right turn cause the truck will flip over. You could take a hard right in a little sports car, but you can't take a hard Right. In a, in a 10,000 pound truck. And he took it to hard right. In a 10,000 pound truck.

Hard right. Hard right. And we're, we're seeing that now play out and, you know, I think the, actually the best conversations about where Twitter are going are the conversations on Twitter. And if you follow some, some smart minds on there, you can see both sides of both sides of. The end of the day, I think Twitter's too valuable of an asset and clearly it's the engagement is too high for this thing to disappear.

I think some of the memes are people saying, Twitter's dead is, is hilarious to me. Twitter's not dying. Now, will there be some bumps in the road for sure, but there's no way that Elon and Co are not gonna find people who wanna work on this really hard project. Cuz at the end of the day, engineers love working on hard projects.

And when a guy like Elon Musk steps up and says, Hey, we have a really hard thing to build here. Are you interested in joining me? Yeah, the, the, the soft people who don't want to, you know, get their hands dirty anymore, great. They should walk away and go find jobs somewhere else. They're good people.

There's nothing wrong with them and there's nothing wrong with that decision. But I think Elon will find, uh, find the right people to help him write the ship Here.

MPD: He's resetting the culture, uh, yeah, in a way that a lot of people won't like, but you know, there's a potential to make kind of a SWAT team internally.

Um, also he's doing it in a market where there's an abundance of. All the big tech companies are laying off fantastic people and everyone's just gonna reorganize around new missions. And Twitter might be the mission for a lot of folks who, who wanna do something super challenging.

Mike Rogers: Yeah. And to your point of what it looks like, who knows, right?

Is it just a better version of the current Twitter? Is it a full move to more of a social, less platform like Facebook? Does it replace it? Does it change it? Who knows? I think that's a long term question. In the short term, it's how do we get the right rails back up so that we can have a healthy dialogue in the digital community?

And I think seems to me that's what Elon's trying to do. And personally, I'm quite optimistic that it'll get it done and.

MPD: Yeah, I am optimistic too. I, I think he's gonna pull it off. Uh, and I, I, my comment earlier, I, I just was highlighting this concept that his option set isn't adding little features onto Twitter.

He can literally take it over time anywhere he wants to with an engaged user base, incrementally. Uh, and I think the sky's the limit. So, um, you know, also acknowledging tough time for a lot of people who are dealing with change of jobs. Getting laid off or being unhappy in the new work environment. These are all things that I get that's not, that sucks.

Totally. Um,

Mike Rogers: but this, but. I'll call it like a productivity riff, right? Is what we're really seeing right now across the tech landscape. It's a, these companies got big and fat and you know, you hear the stories. Let me just be clear. This is not a, this is not everyone, I'm not generalizing the, the tech workers of America, but you did hear and the stories of.

Engineers at xyz PMs at xyz, you had 1, 2, 3 jobs because they could do their job at big company in 10 hours a week and they had consulting gigs and second jobs and third jobs. And you know, when you hear enough of those stories, you know, it's not just a one-off thing and, and that there really is too much bloating in the ecosystem.

So I think what you're seeing across the board is on the talent side. Hey, the good times are, are kind of over as they were before. It's time to buckle down and prove yourself again. We gotta work a little harder. And at the end of the day, I think I saw a good tweet on this, so we'll give a little reference back to, to Twitter.

Uh, there's an opportunity right now for top talent to go into Twitter and make a name for themselves. And there aren't that many moments in time where you see an opportunity like this and say, Hey, if I want to go build a name for myself in the industry, I can. Storm the gates of Twitter right now and put my head down and work my butt off for the next two years and come out as a whole different engineer person, product leader, et cetera.

Uh, this is that kind of moment. I think it's that moment across a lot of companies. By the way, I think Twitter's just the most public one. Very interesting to be continued. Yeah. Let's see what happens. I'm, I'm pretty bullish that we'll find out what happens on Twitter.

Chris Zhang: All right.

MPD: Let's get to the latest chaos in the blockchain universe. What have we got?

Brett Palatiello: Yeah, so the FTX fallout, uh, is still unfolding. Uh, we've seen other exchanges and lenders, uh, halt withdrawals, which obviously is a bad sign since they. Either Lent Ed, um, or they, they potentially had some of their assets on ftx.

Uh, we're also seeing companies that unfortunately had their assets on ftx, and now they're looking for, uh, they're giving away equity to make up for that shortfall. Um, so the, the details of FTX are pretty gory, um, and it's pretty terrible about what happened. I wanted to, uh, deviate a little bit from the actual nitty gritty of what happened and try and move forward and see what values of crypto, uh, could we embrace more going further, uh, going forward that would've, hopefully avoided this situation.

Totally. And there, and there are two, uh, things in particular I wanted to discuss. One is proof of reserves and the other is self. So proof of reserves, um, imagine you hold a deposit at, at an exchange, um, would allow the exchange to post a cryptographic proof that they indeed do have assets on their balance sheet, okay?

And they would also provide a cryptographic proof that they do take into account the fact that your deposit is a liability on their books. Now, what do I mean about cryptographic proof? It allows you to anonymize all of the data that they have on their balance sheet, and this would be done under, uh, the guidance of an auditor.

So you have some assurances at the edges that there's not things that are going to be manipulated. Um, and this would give public, uh, again, an assurance that they have the deposit as a liability, and they also have an. Which would back that liability in the event. That's say I wanted to withdraw money. Um, and this, we've seen proof of reserves come up, uh, frequently in the past.

Uh, and Nick Carter is somebody who's been advocating for this for a while, who's a partner at, uh, uh, castle Island Ventures. We saw it after Mount go. Um, we saw it a little bit last year, but I think finally now we're gonna start to see all of the exchanges that take custody of people's assets start to, uh, show proof of reserves and do it under an auditor.

Uh, FTX did not do this, uh, which is, which is a terrible thing. Now, this necessarily wouldn't have, uh, stopped them, uh, from doing essentially. I mean, there's a lot of fraudulent activity. Um, but they probably wouldn't have wanted to do this cause there was shady things going on on their balance sheet. So that would've given people an indication that, okay, this is an industry standard.

People exchanges post proof of reserves, and the fact that you're not doing it is an indication that something is wrong under the hood. So I'm, I'm gonna start seeing even VCs for services that take custody of people's assets. Um, we're gonna start seeing VCs require companies, uh, post proof of reserves so that it, it eliminates or at least tries to mitigate their liability as well as, uh, the scope or, or space for bad actors to take money and move them around, uh, or at least catch them early.

Um, so this is something I see becoming more and more of a standard. We're seeing Obi and finance, uh, all starting to. Proof of reserves, um,

MPD: under, and they're posting this on their website. How do you, how does a, an average consumer know the reserves are there? That's a

Brett Palatiello: good question. Um, there needs to be more built out, um, in terms of making it user friendly.

Um, because in my opinion, it can't just be enough for somebody to look at, say, uh, an announcement by Binance for. And they say, oh, we, here's our purpose reserves, you know, we passed it. Uh, you know, all assets, uh, and liabilities are, are accounted for. It needs to be in a user-friendly format. So I should be able to unha, uh, part of the cryptography and see that I myself have a balance at finance that is on their balance sheet and it corresponds to, uh, the liability or the assets that they are also attest.

Um, so that's part of the infrastructure that I think needs to be built out because realistically, I should be able to not only see my balance on, let's say finance, but I should be able to see the proof that I indeed am being taken into account, uh, on their balance sheet internally. Um, so that's something that I need, uh, that needs to be built.

Um, and the other, uh, well, one other thing that I wanna expand on that is this is different than your traditional audit, right? Which is relatively opaque. Um, this would, since all the assets are on chain, this would potentially allow for more frequent at stations. Um, so it wouldn't be some, you know, months long process of, of, uh, analyzing a balance sheet.

Uh, it would all be on. So an auditor would be able to go in there and say, okay, you know, we can verify that these are indeed on the blockchain, which is part of the benefits of blockchains, right? Uh, it's open and transparent, but it's sometimes not clear. You know, which wallet corresponds to whom, and you know, what, uh, what they're actually doing with those liabilities because money moves around, but it is transparent and you can cryptographically prove that its in strong conditions.

If, if

MPD: this was done. This would advance the transparency and reliability of blockchain financial ecosystem players ahead of what's being done in the traditional market. Right? Like this would actually be Exactly, this would take it from being more opaque. Too far and away the most transparent solution probably in the market.

That

Brett Palatiello: is exactly right, which is, uh, some people are really selling that well in Washington, which is you have these big banks that are extremely opaque. It's very difficult to track the money. You have these big audits, you have this massive regulation, um, which part of part of which stifles innovation, right?

I mean, a tremendous amount of the costs. Financial institutions is compliance, hiring people to make sure they are following the rules and things like that. And it doesn't necessarily leave a lot of space for investing in technological innovation. It just doesn't make sense. Um, so blockchains are a way to make this all transparent.

And with ai, uh, you can stress that it goes even further that you. Have not only a much more transparent system, but you also have the tools to be able to analyze what is going on in a much more, uh, transparent way, but also a much more comprehensive way. So it should be something that, and, and the Federal Reserve has written a little bit on this, uh, should embrace that transparency, especially for, uh, the financial institutions that basically, you know, connect every part of our, our daily lives.

So, um, so yes, this s uh, the benefits. Of blockchain transparency and IMU and trust minimization. So, uh, so yeah. And the other thing too, why people are stressing Conserv is that with SF and involvement in, in Congress, uh, you know, there's angst around the industry that, uh, you know, in him a bit. And if they couldn't trust in him, somebody like, uh, you know, how he was presenting himself, then they probably can't trust crypto.

So, you know, there's a lot of people pushing forward with this, which is okay, you know, regulation needs to be smart, but let's try and find a market based way, uh, to, uh, make people follow the rules and not be able to do bad things for, um, and the other one is, uh, self custody, which is really a core value of, of crypto.

So self custody is basical. You have your, your wallet on a blockchain, um, and you have a key that matches another key. Um, and if you want to sign a transaction with part of your key, then it goes onto the blockchain and, you know, balances are moved around. Um, and you own that part of the key, right? So you are completely in control of your, your balances of your, your self custody and your assets.

Now, this up, this up until this point has been very burdensome, right? If you lose your key, you lose all your assets. That's a pretty terrible way to live, uh, especially. I mean, I think most of us are pretty spoiled now with, uh, with banks. I mean, you know, all this money are, have our money in banks. Most of us don't even think about it, uh, at all.

Um, let alone, you know, going into web three and putting all our assets there. So how do we make it so that we can have services that are safe and secure without giving somebody else control of our money, uh, especially exchanges and banks. Um, and that's through self custody. Um, and one of the things.

Blockchains are trying to integrate is called account abstraction. Um, and I'm gonna try and abstract away, uh, a lot of the nitty grit details, but the way accounts currently are on blockchains is that public encryption. But in the future, what you would like to have is flexibility and how you verify transactions.

So imagine, uh, a situation where I lose my key, right? How can I recover? Right now, if I lose it, I'm done. But in the future you can customize how you verify transactions or recover your keys. So for example, I can say, mark, I'm gonna give you, uh, you and Will and Mike and Chris portions of my, if I lose it, I reach out to you guys and you are have parts of my key, and you put them together and I then recover that key.

It's called social. Right. So you have a trusted group of people that you can then have come together and restore your key. Um, there's, so what account abstraction is, is it allows you to customize your experience so that it makes it easier for people to actually self-study their assets. So there could be, say a trusted institution that holds a portion of my key and if I lose my key or whatever, I can get that portion from their.

And mix it with the part somebody else has. Um, so it needs to be made much more feasible. And account abstraction is something that's working towards making it much more feasible for people to take control of their own assets while feeling safe and secure. So, um, so yeah, those are two things that I anticipate people are gonna, uh, value more going forward to, uh, eliminate the risk.

Bad actors, uh, but also being, uh, much more safe and secure and practical from the perspective of a, a consumer.

MPD: Thank you for that update. I mean, the irony of all of this is this is exactly the type of behavior that blockchain is being created to prevent, and it's an infa, it's a fallible system still. There's more work to be done, but I think this illuminates holes in the system as you've identified, and the path towards creating a better financial system for everybody.

Hey, thank you for your time. All right, Fong. What are we gonna learn today?

Phuong Ireland: So today, mark, we're gonna talk about social media and social media strategies. So we all know how important social media is to your overall marketing mix, but it's really complex. There are a lot of different platforms. They all have their own audiences.

They all have their own features. And to make it even worse, they're changing all the time. So to get social media to really work for you, you really have to create a very deliberate strategy. Um, and as you're doing that, remember that it's not an exact science. What works for one industry may not work for another.

What works for one business may not. Work for another. What's worked for you at one time period may not work later. So you always have to be reassessing and and evolving. So to help you do this, I've come up with a list of things to keep in mind as you're developing your strategy. First thing, set goals.

You're not gonna be able to figure out the right plan unless you know what you're trying to achieve. That goes for a lot of other things, but specifically it, it works here. So your goals could be any number of things, driving brighter awareness, building an audience, driving traffic to your website, driving conversions on your website, and even customer service.

Number two is to define your audience. So if you haven't done so already, and you should have, when, when you're, um, uh, building your marketing strategy, uh, create buyer personas and determine which of these groups you're targeting with your social media strategy. Number three is focus on a few key channels.

So this is quality over quantity, right? So don't just create content and copy and paste it on a bunch of different platforms. That's not gonna work, and especially if you don't have a ton of resources. Be deliberate and targeted about which channels you focus on and how you show up on each platform. So to think about which platforms make sense for you, look at your competitors, see what they're using.

Look at what's working for them from a content point of view and how engaged their audience's, their audience is from each channel. And then go back to your goals and your buyer personas who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to get them to do is really gonna impact what channels you. So, for example, if you're going after Gen Z or a younger millennial, um, customer, they probably have Facebook profiles, but they're not really engaged on it.

So if you're going after them, maybe focus on TikTok and Instagram. Now, when you've picked which platform you wanna be on, you have to understand each channel and how people use them, and you have to tailor that your content to work on that platform. So, for example, Twitter's really great for conversations, so it works well for things like customer service and for increasing your brand awareness as you're starting and joining discussions.

LinkedIn obviously is good for sharing professional advice and so it's great for B2B companies. Um, and we all have our gripes about Facebook and I don't really remember, remember the last time I checked my personal profile, but it's still a very important platform for businesses, especially if you're running ads.

Or if you're a brick and mortar business and you're targeting local customers, or you know, if you're catering to an older customer base. Now, last bucket is around content. So you have to create good, varied content and a lot of it, so if you break it down, content has two to three components, right?

There's visuals, there's copy, and then there's also audio. And all of these things have to work together. Now, when it comes to vi visuals, here's some. Don't use images with too much copy on them, especially if you're running ads. Facebook won't approve them if there's too much copy and it's just less engaging for your audience.

Use more photos with people and faces on them so you know, I know you wanna show your product, but faces and people get more engagement and they add more emotion and personality to your brand. Um, you need to have a variety of content, but obviously prioritize videos because the top platforms favor videos.

And don't be afraid to use videos that aren't perfectly polished and produced. The more organic, the more it looks like user generated content, the better it's gonna perform. So throw away your brand book. It's okay if it doesn't look exactly like what's on your website and what's on your marketing material.

And then remember, mobile first, 80% of the time spent on social media is on people's phones. So make sure it's optimized, your content's optimized to look good on, on a phone. And then very lastly, remember, content gets sta stale. So especially if you're using them for ads, create a lot of it and test, test and test.

And don't forget to test. I love that. That's what I.

MPD: This is a big topic, uh, and it's super, super hard to do well. Yes. I think, um, headline here for most entrepreneurs out there is if you are building any sort of brand, you need to be doing this at some level. And if this is not your instinctual DNA on your team, hire an agency.

Yeah, that is my, just jump into it because it. Very hard to do well, and it has to feel authentic and well and polished at the same time. And we all know the stuff that gets the most attention on social media is not the stuff you actually wanna be producing for a company. It's the hype and arguments and noise.

Um, So to find this fine line between being on brand yet still engaging is really challenging. Really

Phuong Ireland: challenging. Yeah, it is. And I think it's, um, you know, I think just working with people outside your company in general, even if you do have. Uh, you know, a few people or a team for social media having a different perspective and other viewpoints working.

You know, even if you have an internal team working with a, a range of freelance creators, you know, you never know when your next, you know, uh, viral videos gonna come from. So it's great to have a lot of perspectives, um, and see what works. Cause I think what comes from your team often has a very specific point of.

MPD: The other thing too is each platform has nuances, right? Mm-hmm. , there are very specific algorithm things you need to understand for TikTok versus Facebook. And if you have one social media person who's, you know, attempting to be a pro across all platforms, it's very hard to be exceptional. It's very hard.

The tricks of the trade just vary and are very nuanced. So another benefit of an agency for this is you can get a small percent. Of an expert in each field's time, usually for the cost of one person or less, so Exactly. Um, there's just too much knowledge required to be effective in this very developed social media landscape.

Thank you, Fong. Great topic, super helpful. Uh, I know a lot of people need to get better at this and it's relevant for a lot of companies. Thanks,

Brett Palatiello: mark.

MPD: Hey Chris, let's talk about the market.

Chris Zhang: What do you got? Yeah, yeah. So if. S and p is any indication. I think this week has been a pretty calm week, relatively speaking, uh, versus the rest of the year.

Um, I thin