From Revolution to the Companies of the Future – Lisa Loud

one of my colleagues is new to crypto says that he remembers when the internet was new and at that time everyone was saying in the media that the internet was just useful for drugs and criminals does that sound familiar thanks I I like this section over here so right now everyone uses the internet without thinking nobody's thinking oh the Internet am i a criminal because I'm using Google so that's what we're gonna see in the future my colleague doesn't want to miss it so that's why he's new to crypto that's why he's jumping in now some day he believes crypto will be on everybody's laptops what everybody's doing so obviously this is a little bit threatening to the existing order right control of money is basically just control so the people who have control now governments institutions they're gonna want to shut it down the problem is that it's hard to shut down a movement you can shut down a person but you can't shut down a movement there's just too many voices to silence so the next best thing if you can't shut it down is to become part of it right if you can't beat them join them and that's why companies now are like ships the governments and institutions if they're smart they're trying to become the rudder on that ship to influence the direction but a well-built company it matters how we build our ships because a well built company is like a ship it uses the best breakthroughs the latest breakthroughs in technology in people technology and it can sense the weather the currents and the direction of the wind so is that what we have now in crypto I don't think so I think what we have is a collection of rafts we've tied them loosely together sometimes and we're trying to cross a very big body of water in this small little raft so crypto was started by the rebels by the visionaries the counterculture geniuses which is great we needed that and it's been taken forward by traders and gamblers we needed that too we needed some adoption but how much interest does any of these people have in shipbuilding I would say not very much so you may be an early adopter of crypto you may not care about process at all but how do you feel about fairness can you remember the last time you did not get invited to a lunch that all your friends were going to how about a time when you had an idea and someone stole it and didn't give you credit for it we care as humans about fairness fairness is kind of built into us they've done experiments on babies and actually babies understand the concept of fairness even before they can talk so how do we how do we get more fairness in life is life fair no I used to tell my kids they'd say that's not fair and I would say honey Fair is where you buy a pig it's not the world so we can make it a little bit better especially with blockchain what is blockchain all about it's about creating equality in the world so the very basis and foundation of our industry is fairness so here's what I'm going to tell you that you may not know the way to build a fair working environment is to build good processes the more fair a company feels the happier your team's will be and the more they can focus on building the world of the future instead of petty squabbles but fair doesn't happen on its own the way to build a fair company is knowing how to structure teams knowing how to manage and incentivize people and creating processes that allow people to be recognized for what they do so early last year I took a job as CEO of a crypto company founded by an Asian entrepreneur he was good he said all the right things to get me on board he told me he wanted to build a company that had good processes that had systems incentives one that was compliant and legally solid turned out he was completely lying what he actually wanted was to cow his American employees into doing questionably shady things maybe illegal by tricking them and setting an impossible task for them and deadlines and then ridiculing them when they couldn't meet them every Monday if you won't believe me but this is true every Monday he would bring all 30 of us into a room for five hours and he would pick one person to praise and they'd pick one person to demolish and he'd spend the next hour just verbally criticizing that person tearing them apart and about halfway through the meeting he would order food for himself and he would eat it in front of us all and we all were getting hungry and we knew that we wouldn't be able to eat for another three hours or so uh-huh this is real like this actually happened and it's a tactic that I've learned in the 48 laws of power people use in order to create more of a sense of power but that's not what you want for a company that's not you want people to feel empowered themselves you don't want them to look up to you and think wow you're so powerful so I I watched my team lose confidence get disengaged the entire executive team left and the managers started leaving by the end of the year this guy had wasted all of his resources his time his effort his money and he wasn't very far ahead so lack of fairness will destroy a company's productivity yesterday at breakfast someone asked at a breakfast talk someone asked Vitalik about minimum steak size he said oh that's a good question and he said I've written an article about that topic then he rattled off I have to read it just look up parametrizing caspere the decentralization finality time overhead trade-off I think it was surprised when all of us laughed but we laughed because for vitalik such topics are every day and part of normal conversation and we knew that for most of us they're not so the brilliance of our founders is a point of pride in these community but companies don't just naturally evolve into effective entities they need to be shaped by people who understand how to do that when I joined bit mechs in 2017 I'd been at PayPal and Apple for more time than anywhere else and so I jumped out of this big tax structured environment and into what seemed like to me the Wild West at that time bit Mex was very small the culture was a trading culture which essentially meant every man for himself and I really do mean man here because I was one of two females at the company and the only one in senior leadership so that was a wild ride we were building as fast as possible to meet the demand and capture the market while also setting up internal processes and structures an infrastructure our daily trading volume started at 100k and by January 2018 it was up to 6 billion a day it was not an easy time but it was a very instruction in informational time I learned a lot of very difficult lessons during that time which I'm I'm grateful for and I want to share some of them with you so I have tips for you I want you to take these tips back to your team your team's and make your companies stronger and I'll tell you why at the end why this is worth doing so my first tip is bring women into your leadership when an organization increases gender balance they see almost instant improvements in revenue and they have fewer crisis alerts they have better decision-making team alignments and overtime better company culture an MIT study in 2014 concluded that companies with an even gender split willing could increase revenue by roughly 41 percent that's pretty startling okay my next next tip for you is hire experience you really have two options as a young founder one is to spend a year going to work for a successful company and learning everything that they do taking notes observing figuring out what works what doesn't work and then coming back to your own company and I'm sure all of us have an extra year to take off from our companies and go spend you know learning all that stuff right and probably not so the other option is if you feel a sense of urgency to get your tech out there and to beat the competition you have to iterate and make it the best you can be but you probably need to hire someone who already knows how to do the things that make your company successful you can hire passionate inexperienced people it's possible for almost nothing but your company is gonna grow more slowly and it's not going to be ahead of the competition unless you've got a long runway so that's tip number 2 hire experienced tip number three this is a hard one except the reality that you are not your customer if I could give you one thing to remember today it would be that I know that most of us here are early adopters and we're here because we want to build something that works for us we want to build something that we need and that's a great place to start but it's not enough if you stop there you're gonna fail you need to ask your customers what they want and then you need to implement it so there's a there's an analogy here do people really need a quarter inch drill no they don't what they need is a quarter inch hole and a drill is a good way to do that but it's not the only way necessarily so ask your customers what it is they need and then build to that that's tip number three tip number four create practical solutions and think small when electricity was invented it was a technology without an application there were no lights there were no fridges no stoves no hair dryers which would be a problem for me and yet electricity was a great invention so we have this amazing blockchain technology but we don't have a lot of real-world applications yet that's where we are and wherever I go I'm hearing people talk about how everything's gonna change the world how it's this huge transformational thing I think we need to start small we've created this technology now we need to start building solutions instead of overarching world-changing things start by changing by solving one problem at a time that's tip number four tip number five if you have to make it change don't wait too long I've been in an organization where a founder had a college buddy college roommate who was well beyond his background and skills and he was wreaking havoc throughout the company so you as a founder need to recognize that your company is more important than your buddy most of us spend a lot of waking hours in a work environment and those environments are constantly changing especially in our industry it's changes pretty exhausting so and change that is imposed on us is even more exhausting it's difficult to deal with and people tend to resist it so how can we make it better a situation is clearly if a situation is clearly not working and it's getting worse we can avoid it we can ignore it or we can deal with it quickly if we deal with it quickly we're handling it we're ahead of it we're not dealing with it in crisis mode and crisis mode is pretty exhausting for people as well so as leaders let's remember change doesn't have to be negative you know when you talk to somebody about something they're changing in their lives and they're really excited about it there's a positivity there's an optimism there they are excited about the change they're making when you talk about changing companies people get scared people get worried and fearful that doesn't need to be the way it is we could we could make change in our companies more positive if we just emphasize the benefit from it and do it quickly and decisively so think carefully about the changes you need to make but don't put them off be brave and be bold and remember that you are building the future and that takes courage that's tip number five tip number six leverage your sense of purpose everyone in this industry has something that tech companies would kill to have an underlying foundational sense of what we're building that will change the world so we all have this in a sense of purpose that is a huge asset it's not enough we have to build around that but most companies big companies they have a financial objective it's not inspiring to people people are collecting a paycheck and that's about it what we have the opportunity to do is build companies where people are passionate about making changes in the world and all we need to do is build the structure so that they can be effective in doing that so that's my six tips but what happens next I think we're gonna see a lot more mainstream adoption we're gonna see mainstream people coming players coming into this space and when that happens we're no longer we don't have the edge anymore we're going to have to move fast and be it's critical that we are the ones who are building the companies that will take us forward into the future we want to take our passion and our purpose and build fair effective and strong companies with competent leadership we owe it to the inventors the founders and the visionaries who started this movement to build that and if we don't what will happen Facebook Facebook will build Libre and dominate crypto payments JP Morgan fidelity will start crypto trading and they'll dominate that space giant tech companies will use their infrastructure their influence and their competitive engines to take over the crypto industry and make it just like every other big business and we will be remembered as the AOL of blockchain will be the early i early pioneers who failed to maintain their level of relevance in a changing world I just joined shape-shift a few weeks ago as CEO and I can say with confidence that shape-shift is one of the companies that in this space that is putting all the pieces together in a way that makes a solid and scalable entity the executive team we is half women and half men and there are experienced people throughout the organization the company is able to adapt quickly to changing conditions and listen to customer needs so I hope you can take some of this back to your team's and make your company stronger because in the next phase of our industry we're gonna require strong save companies to take the lead and bring electric light to the financial world thank you [Applause] [Music] you