Be a Challenger - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

give it up again for uh Lando and Hider gonna have a really good chat here thank you good thank you thank you all right so Lando uh I mean you can see by the cameras here you you know I think a lot of us have watched the show and have followed your career since kind of the early days yeah um you started out kind of young and like kind of in the middle of the pack and every year just getting better and better and better and better and you can see just by like the fans and the audience like people love this idea of you being a challenger uh and so I'm just curious what that means to you and like what that feels like uh what does it feel like I mean every year it's uh is every year is different because every year you have to set new goals you have to set new challenges for yourself um but also the whole game that I'm in is not a it's not a me game it's a team game uh so I have to work with all the people around me which is over a thousand people um um plenty of cool Partners as well on on how we can combat the new year and set our new targets our new challenges and um try beat all of our competitors in that space and uh this year we've we've done just that we started more towards you know third fourth fastest team um and we've come to being the the top Constructor at the minute which is incredible it's the first time in 10 years so um something uh something very special to be part of um but yeah that's that's that's been our Target and we still got a long way to go so we have to keep our heads down but um our sport is about Always setting new challenges because as soon as you kind of get to one part you have to reset the next one and reset the next one so um that is how we uh run our sport nice okay I want to ask both you guys a similar question which is when you're a challenger when you're at the top you're good when you're when you're a challenger and kind of coming up you have to do things differently than other people whether that's a work ethic or a mindset or a strategy so I'm going to ask both you guys a similar question which is how do you maybe L you can uh you can start with this how do you think about like what you have to do differently as a challenger yeah I think um the biggest thing is when when you're the Challenger you might not always have the best things all around you know because that's often why you're the challengers because things are not in place or things are not perfect um so it's how you can outshine your competition and outdo your competition without always having the best of the best um and that brings the best out of you brings the best out of the people that you're working with um and I think it unlocks something new that you have to realize to beat uh the best of your competition uh you have to find things that people are not looking at or people are not working on or people kind of skip over um and Things become a bigger challenge of marginal gains how can you find the best bits of of everything so every stone is not left unturned um and that's how you then get yourself into being one of the best positions you can be in but then there's plenty more challenges that even when you're the top um you can't relax on any space you can't relax on anything uh it's about keeping your team motivated keeping you know me motivated to work hard with the people that I'm working with um and continue that uh the push nice pder how would you answer that what what does it mean what do you do differently and whether it's strategy or work ethic or whatever it is as as the Challenger here I think one it's it's really about uh building an incredible team around us but you know one lesson I've learned is it's not always great to listen to people around you because they'll they'll advise you to do things that uh are sort of an expectation and when you want to be a challenger you kind of have to go Venture into areas that people haven't been into or maybe haven't thought of or aren't brave enough to do it and Jason that's a pretty lonely place and you have to be comfortable with it uh you have to take a bet and and then see it through and it requires a lot of conviction so I think it's um uh don't listen to people all the time agree or disagree no I I completely agree yeah uh let's talk about upgrades maybe yeah so you guys keep upgrade you guys do these upgrades what every other week or every week they're slight every week every week basically something yeah what is it like driving on a new car every week and just like adapting to those changes um I mean that's our sport so our sport is just a race of of upgrading things trying to improve uh the car the team the people strategy pit stops there's so many areas you got to look at um but you've also got to do it efficiently you know you can't just um throw things at and hope things work you need to know how they're going to work uh how to execute those things perfectly consistently Under Pressure not under pressure um but my job is I mean my job is simply going out and driving quickly that's that's that's what I got to do but then there's always a lot more to it on um helping the team develop and helping the team look at the next race and races time three races time 2025 2026 um as much as everything in our sport is about now and next weekend and how we can extract everything from where we are it's also a game of where you got to look one two three years ahead and prepare yourself for those situations so um I kind of keep to myself from uh I focus on my own stuff that you know I can I can control 100% And then I've got to do that extra part which is helping the people around me helping the team like you said because the team is is everything and as soon as a team isn't working uh perfectly and together as well as they can you're not going to be at the top nice hder maybe a similar question for you which is you guys ship products faster than nearly any other company in crypto so let's use maybe the web 3 wallet for example uh you've got full marketplace in there you've got hundreds of thousands of tokens you've got uh like a full Dex in there um I mean on the wallet on the download side I was looking up some of these metrics before 33 million downloads in 2024 90 million total downloads uh and you guys recently decided to redesign the entire wallet I think a lot of your competitors or other folks maybe would have just sat in their shoes and been happy with it maybe like not upgrading the car they would have said we're we're doing well um why do you decide to push this upgrade and like I guess I'm curious how it you think it compares to like upgrading a car every week well I think first um there's a reason why we wanted to partner with the team in F1 especially McLaren one is the partnership actually ends up influencing our culture internally when we study and see when our employees go into the garage and see the amount of data and and the work that goes into keeping the team competitive I think all that stuff sort of translates into our culture naturally our teams have been looking at how frequently McLaren upgrades and that that clearly like has an influence internally the other is you know if you look at cryto for a large part of our existence it's been a very engineering Le industry and uh one of the opportunities we saw was you know there wasn't a company that was betting on design you know with a high conviction so one of the reasons why we've upgraded recently is we have this you know philosophy now that we actually don't want to be known as a just a crypto platform we want to be known as a technology company but we want to be actually remembered as a design and and engineer in Le technology company and I think that's a big part of the reason why we took the risk at this level to just completely reinvent our design uh okay Londo what uh hopefully this question is going to make sense one thing we talked about a lot in crypto like Legacy and Heritage and like the old values of crypto or like and the ethos and decentralization all these things I was I was reading about you ahead of this doing a little prep work and read that you uh kind of idolize or look up to Valentino Ross I don't know if that's true or not but I'm curious how you think about like all right You' got this new sport and it's obviously booming right now but how do you think about the the old like the heritage of the sport and like the fash whether it's the fashion or idolizing how these like these these drivers actually race the cars like how do you think about the paying homish to the old school part of the the sport I uh I love the historic part of the sport it's um I don't know a lot about it I was born in 99 so I don't I know I know I didn't know when the sport s and all these things but when you're part of McLaren which is one of the most prestigious teams in in Formula 1 the most successful teams in Formula One ever um you learn about it you learn about the stories you learn about uh how things started and how they got to where they are now and I've been with McLaren for for eight years um and already since then things have changed hugely you know we went from being a very Midfield I mean as much as everyone thinks of McLaren as being always one of the top so there's always that pressure that comes with it but we were not where McLaren should be several years ago um and now we're back to where we should be so that that kind of Journey um learning you know what H what happened what went wrong and also for me like um the people that have been part of McLaren you know when you look at Senna you look at Frost you look at hackin you look at all of these drivers Lewis that have been part of it and and made McLaren what it is and I find it all that times it's like now it's my turn to to kind of show what McLaren can do and be part of that Journey um but the historic side of things is is always something I think I've respected a lot because uh you might not always know what what happens and what's going on but you always respected especially back then like for me how dangerous the sport was the sport was not as safe is as it is now and that's something that's improved massively is our safety as drivers but um like we said at the beginning every single thing has tried to be improved and and drivers or Riders have played a big part in the safety of us now um and have happened in in the past that have helped me you know and helped many drivers uh probably still be living today because there been a lot of crashes where people uh probably wouldn't have survived if things didn't take place like they had done in the past so um every area has improved um and playing a very small part and that is always something very special nice H maybe a similar question to you there are these old values of crypto and decentralization and the ethos but you guys are also uh I'm just curious I'm curious how you think about like either paying homage to them or actually incorporating those values into the products of okx well I think if you look at the recent years we've gone from purely an exchange business to now being an app where you can quickly build a crypto portfolio and decentralization is really important to us people wouldn't have largely expected us to offer up a self-managed self- custody wallet you know we started that 18 months ago because we realized that that was one part of our industry that wasn't really consumerized at the level which we would like to see it consumerized there were a lot of Legacy wallets that had done great work uh in building self- custody wallets in the early days but they didn't really reinvent themselves and they didn't really become interoperable they were just you know very limiting in their offering so I think that's been a big part of what we've been looking at which is how do you not forget where the industry started why we started and how do we make sure that in the current consumer world we we bring that back I know star and was here earlier and he was talking about uh web 3 infrastructure with a web two front end I think that's very important a lot of these things have existed in our industry for a while but I I don't think we did a great job of consumerized them and I think that's one of the key focuses we're we're having in bringing retaining some of that Legacy in our industry nice um so Haider I got a sneak peek of the some stuff on the marketing side that you guys are working at uh working on right now and uh my first takeaway is it's just very very different than what a lot of the competitors are doing there's a lot of there's other exchanges and wallets that they Market in kind of the same way you guys are doing things very differently um I have a question for both you guys maybe Haider we can start how do you think about just doing looking at what the competition is doing and kind of saying that's working maybe we'll copy them a little we're doing things in like in just in your own light I think our philosophy is we see crypto we see blockchains we see the utility on top of blockchains as a big contributor to our lifestyle and and so we see ourselves in many ways as a technology and a lifestyle company so when we think about marketing one of the key things is I personally and I think our team has an allergic reaction to doing what others are doing we don't want to do what others are doing and there's been a lot of companies in our category that will focus their marketing on education and our theory is like I think people are generally quite smart and they will do their own Discovery and their own learning and I don't think we need to do that for them to to a degree that other companies are doing it that's one second is if others have already done that and taken that page out of a Playbook I don't think we need to exhaust the system with that so what we've leaned into is how do we entertain all of you guys and make sure you guys have fun whether it's through the World of Sports or entertainment or what have you and I think some of the marketing I've shown you today I'm really excited for everyone to get to see it because it's I do think it's you know going back to the principle of not always listening to people yeah similar question for you how do you I mean how do you think about you could easily you could easily race a I mean you could easily get through your race and you're like the you know these guys did this why can't our car be like this or you can focus on your own lane and it's probably a balance but I'm just curious how you I think um I mean for us we have the two sides we have the actual racing side how can we make the car quicker uh and we have the commercial side of it all so from from the car side to beat our competition we cannot simply copy you know everything in our sport is about Innovation is about creating our own style of doing uh our own style of things creating new things that people have not done before or ever thought about that's our only way to beat competition uh we're only going to be just as good or probably worse if we copy and we see what other people are doing and kind of go in that direction even if it's the right one you have to find your own way of doing it because that's the only way to believe that you're going to be better than than them one day so you have that side and you also have the commercial side which is um us entertaining our fans entertaining the public um and again is we don't want to just copy what other people do we want to create a new engagement a new way for people to engage to us to kind of enter McLaren as a family um and uh and that's very important to us that we're a team that care a lot about it um the more people the more fans we can have the more we can uh attract you know companies and partners like okx and then in in turn create a better race car and kind of meet cooler people who can uh play a bigger part in helping us become a better team nice what's it been like uh you know Formula One if you look back maybe a decade or so ago was uh maybe 15 years ago it was it was uh geographically very i' would say like European focused and wasn't as like Global of a sport uh and now it is I mean you're I mean you can see the audience here and I'm sure when you go to the states it's very similar too what's it like just it's probably post maybe the Netflix show and stuff like that but I mean what's it been like just having the sport go completely Global uh I mean I I love it that I got to travel around the world and have a lot of fun and go to cool places you love it I see how much get mobbed back there you should yeah I mean for me like dreaming as a kid of just being in Formula One you don't think of any of these things all I dreamt of was standing on a Podium and and driving race cars you that was my dream but then you get all the other bonuses of meeting people and and traveling the world and going to special places and you kind of never thought of that when you were when I was a kid so you have that side um but you get to amazing places you know especially the American races with since Netflix came out uh during covid um things then just took a big turn and and in in a positive way that people understand our sport in a much better aspect um but also there's just a lot more fans a lot more people watching Formula One and um the more the area nice what about for you guys haer at okx because there are a lot of localized exchanges who do very well in their in their different regions and okx is probably the one of one of the biggest if not the biggest Global wallets and exchanges how do you think about appealing to like local markets but also just this Global audience so one of the things that we've been been doing if you you know look in the last one year or so is we've actually really become onshore and we're building local entities and we have you know local CEOs running local businesses and I think that's very important because if you just if you're a global brand that's localizing language and not the full product culturally it doesn't work so I think that's been a a key Focus for us is making sure we are not just localizing the product we're actually in the market we're understanding people's needs and we're reshaping our product to fit that culture we're doing this in Brazil we're doing it in Turkey recently got approved for a Singaporean license one of the I think only few crypto firms who have achieved it and we have more you know coming uh in the pipeline so I think we are a global local platform and I think you're going to continue to see that from us nice uh in the same way that the Netflix documentary was a inflection point for the sport do you have thoughts on what the inflection point for crypto could look like in the next couple of years I think I think it really needs a consumer application that's beyond just the movement of money and speculation you know I I I would like to see the next big consumer app built on top of blockchains that comes in maybe the gaming sector or maybe a lifestyle sector and I think we need that you know we need that product Market fit at a at a global level for crypto to really get recognized in a big way more than what it is currently being recognized today nice I'm getting the sign that we got to wrap it up so I will ask you one more question which is any predictions or thoughts for this weekend um I mean I I only have one one goal and that's to to be on top um I got a yeah thank you um I have a big big points capap I got to catch up um it's going to be if if possible I think it is one of the biggest points turnarounds in history of of Formula 1 so it's it's a big challenge it's been one of the biggest challenges for many years in Formula 1 but um I strongly believe that that we can do it as a team uh we already are on track to do that and also from a driver point of view that uh that I can do it too nice we're all rooting for you this weekend so I appreciate it very much all right thank you everyone please give a big warm Round of Applause thank you