All right, we are ready for our next talk for today. And for this one, I'd like to bring on Debbie from Privy to tell you all about marketing technical products to amazing audiences. So, without further ado, please give Debbie a big round of applause. All right. Hello everyone.
Um, hi. My name is Debbie. Uh, I'm head of marketing at Privy. We build wallet infrastructure that makes it really easy to embed money into your products. I hope that plenty of you know already know what privy is and if you don't that you're already kind of using it in your everyday life and I know at conferences like this and I I think probably through the entire week everybody has been here listening and talking about what they're building where we see the industry going and so I just thought for today we'll do something a little bit different and I thought I'll take a little bit of what I do in my everyday life and hopefully share some of the learnings and experiences that I have and hope that it's a skill that all of you can walk away with.
Uh so yeah, today we're going to talk about how we explain hot things and I'm going to do it through the lens of Privy since that's what I live and breathe every single day. Uh but like I mentioned, yeah, I'm the head of marketing at Privy. Um aside from that, I was an investor. I became an entrepreneur. I have, you know, founded and exited two companies.
Uh I also wrote a book about crypto and then but that's also not really the introduction that I give to people outside this room. Normally I think I'll be like oh there are a lot of other things I like to talk about whether it's my dog or um my other kinds of hobbies. And so I think a lot of the times we forget that the people that we're speaking to and the audience that we are addressing is ultimately really important in terms of what you're trying to convey. So at Privy, we build things that are technically complex. Uh you know, whether it's wallet infrastructure, policy engine, key management, all of these are just incredibly complex.
Like if you go into all docs, you could take hours and hours and hours just to go through all the detail just on the architecture alone. Uh the thing is that complexity really isn't a problem. I think the big problem is when people don't understand what it means. Um, and so that's what we're hoping to demystify or at least help you guys, you know, navigate going forward. I think the problem is again when people don't understand your product, they're not going to use it.
They don't care. Uh, and to be honest, whether you're building an app and especially if you're building on onchain rails, you know, these days, I think a lot of the times we're abstracting away that complexity or hiding the fact that we're building on chain. uh but maybe you're bringing an infrastructure product or maybe you're building a trading application that has pubs. Uh and again there are so many different use cases that I think sometimes we just assume that everybody are going to get it right away and we think that a good product UX a good product UI is going to solve all of those things. Uh at the heart of it all is really about making sure that you're conveying everything and making sure that people at the end of the day really truly understand what it is you're trying to build.
So what is technical storytelling? Uh and and I I feel like as a storyteller, people kind of look at it and they kind of wave their hands and they think it's something all kind of, you know, completely uh non non-serious. Um and some people might think it's about simplifying the thing that you build. That's about having a better a quote unquote better explanation. Uh the reality of is is that there is no one single explanation.
often often times there is no one single explanation. Uh it is about having multiple way multiple ways of explaining the same thing uh depending on who you're talking to and and the goal is really about preserving what is true with the system while also changing how it's understood. So essentially in a nutshell, technical storytelling is is what I describe as how you bridge the gap between how it works and what it enables. And how it works and what it enables, they're both incredibly important. Uh and our job is really if to get our product into the wall is to be able to close that gap as much as possible.
So at preview we try to explain uh everything we build in terms of what it unlocks without losing what makes it real. Uh and I figured that the most useful way to do any of this is to really walk through two examples. Uh when I did this internally I was fortunate enough to have my co-founder my CTO with me so she could really really go deep into you know how it really work at a technical level. But I'll do my best. uh but I wanted to walk through two very different examples uh and one being our wallet architecture which is obviously the core foundation of everything that is built and the other being uh our policy engine which is an evolving feature set something that we continue to make more and more powerful more and more flexible every day and so you know we'll describe how they work um the way that we explain them uh whether it's in our docs whether it's into a security team uh and then I'll I'll translate what how we put it out into the world and um what what they make possible.
So the way that we at Privy and and I encourage everyone if you're building something to kind of you know do this similar kind of mapping in terms of who your audiences are. Uh but obviously we we present on a lot of different surfaces. Um some of you might know us from our socials on X. Um we're also getting a little bit more active on LinkedIn. Uh you might know us from our blogs.
you have probably been to our website. Uh if you're building and have built on privy, you have probably gone deep into our docs as well. Uh and then I think this bit the trust center, I don't feel like feel like probably most of you have not been to the trust center, but that's also because we save it for people who request access to it. Uh but the point of it really is that each of these different surfaces map to different audiences. Uh the way I look at socials and and blog is really a narrative and category layer.
And then the website is an evaluation layer, right? Like somebody lends on your website, they're trying to figure out what it is that you do and they're going off a lot of things on first impressions. Then there's the implementation layer when someone is really evaluating or they've evaluated that they want to build a privy or at least they want to give it a shot. uh they are going to want to know what to do with it and how to actually build privy and that's when they go really deep into the docs and and then we have one more layer as well the risk and assurance layer and that's for CISOs security leads um and I guess the point being is that this is really everything that we put across all these surfaces is the very same thing that we've built just with very different entry points and you can see how like I already mentioned that just maps to different audiences you know for socials and that narrative and category layer it's really important for the broader ecosystem to really understand where things are going and what um what our mission is what our tensions are like where what which part of the industry that we're looking to play do we have a point of view on I don't know prediction markets do we have a point of view on crypto neo bankanks like that that shows people the categories that we're really excited about and then obviously the website again it's probably you know if somebody's looking up privy for the first time, that's where they're going to land on. And that's, you know, a really a fairly broad audience as well, but they're coming to the website with a specific kind of intent.
Are they looking to build? Are they looking to buy? Um, increasingly these days that, you know, could look like an enterprise buyer who might be less technical in nature. Uh, but they're really looking to see what's possible. And then again with docs needs no introduction here for developers, product leads, they're building with privy, that's probably where they're going to go deepest.
And again like I mentioned CESOS and security teams really interested in things that we have in a trust center like sock 2 compliance reports and things like that. So I run through wallet architecture and again this is not meant to be a technical talk if people are really uh interested in the cryptography behind all of this. I'm also probably not the best person to be speak to it. Uh but again that's why we all play kind of different roles here. So uh you know we've broken down our wallet architecture uh in sever in in different spaces.
We have a whole section in our docs about it. We have a very detailed um report in our trust center about it. And essentially how privy works is that we combine hardware isolated trusted execution environments TEES. Um and then when a private key is generated, it is distributed across two uh and um it's distributed via key sharding to basically protect those keys and they're only stored as encrypted shares across separate security boundaries and then they're only reconstructed temporarily within a TE uh for a specific operation. And so when you're signing a transaction, uh that that key is temporarily reconstructed before being wiped away.
Uh and that's how we maintain the security, what we call defense and depth and eliminating any single point of failure. So again, I've probably done like a terrible job of like going into the nitty-gritty, but uh but deep down that's kind of how how the architecture works. uh but for an audience that is you know I think learning about puring for the first time uh explanations like these like don't really resonate and this is really how we translated on our blog. So if you find this blog post about how privy embedded wallets work uh once again you still have that same line about how we use tees and key sharding. Uh but the key thing here is that what does that enable and why does that matter?
And it matters because these wallets are now seamless. They're secure. They're built for scale. Uh and again it also allows uh developers to spin up self-custodial wallets for your users. Uh basically completely tailored to your apps and your end users needs.
Uh and essentially what we're doing here is we are taking technical storytelling which is closing the gap between how the wallet architecture works and what it enables. Um so we're going some form TEES and key sharding to something that is secure by design um but flexible in practice and that's the that's the message that we want people to be able to walk away with. So that's the wallet architecture piece. We'll do another example which is a policy engine. Uh so for those of you who are unaware uh a policy engine is really critical and and wallets because they're essentially programmable accounts.
Um and I think especially we had just had a conversation earlier um about agents and now you know agents are going to be equipped with wallets. Uh you know it's incredibly it's incredibly important that we have human defined guard rails uh so that an agent doesn't go rogue with the wallet and the assets in there. uh but privies policy engine in in in a nutshell in terms of how it's work is defined by three core primitives policies rules and conditions. Policy basically defines what a wallet is allowed to do through a set of rules and a rule is composed of boolean conditions and an action basically allow or deny that is executed when a request satisfies those uh conditions. So what that means is that I could say that if a transaction is over $100 USDC I will deny it and if that transaction gets tries to get passed through um it will not be allowed to happen.
So that's a very simple very simple example of a policy. I think deep down like like I said I don't think anyone's really going to go down into am I talking about a set of boolean conditions again that that's not really something that really resonates. Uh and so we need to figure out like what does that actually enable and honestly why does it matter and why do people care? Uh and so again we've talked a lot about policy engine um you know repeatedly and I think in in a lot of different use cases whether we're talking about trading whether we're talking about AI um again policy engine same wallet infrastructure same kind of feature set but can be used across a lot of different um instances for um our end customers. And so really what a policy engine does, like I mentioned, it defines how the wallets behave in your product.
Uh basically what they can do, what they can't, and under what conditions. And really moving your wallets from just a passive infrastructure to a system that can be governed. And here what the main message is is that money movement becomes safe, flexible, predictable by design. And in this instance is technical storytelling closing the gap from what were rules and conditions on one side uh to programmable behavior. Uh and I like to call this kind of the the punchline is that technical storytelling is what happens when you take boolean logic and you are able to translate it into business logic.
So I've rambled on for quite a bit. uh but uh I think as a as a day-to-day marketer and I think the the fun fact is that I was never trained marketer. I always consider myself like an accidental marketer that I kind of stumbled upon this. Uh but I think importantly I just wanted to say that technical storytelling is not just for marketers. It really matters to every single person no matter what your role is.
If you are in product and you're you have an idea and you're in product, it's really important to align the team on what's possible. If you are an engineer, you're a developer, uh we need you need to make what you built understandable. And obviously, if you're in sales or you're in go to market, you need to help customers see the problem that uh that that they're solving. So technical storytelling is just a really really important skill to allow you to take a single idea that you have and have it be able to travel from your brain. Whoever came with the idea first uh have it travel from your brain through your team and eventually uh hitting the market.
So uh so so yeah highly encourage it's something that everyone takes a little bit of time to um invest in or think about and to help you with that I have basically kind of three principles for practicing storytelling every single day. Uh the number one thing is to start with what changes. So not what you built um not not really like but not not what not the work that went into it not what you built but really what becomes possible like what are you building right now that um the current market or the current solutions out there are not solving for. Uh number two is to really translate systems into capabilities. So it's again taking how something works and you know and turning it into what someone can do.
Uh and then lastly is to give people language that they can repeat uh you know so that the idea travels bey beyond you. So you know I think when I say hardware isolated tees is not really something that you are going to be spewing out at a dinner party. Uh but you know I think trying to take a piece of nugget and a thing that you're really wanting people to remember about why it matters and putting it in terms that anyone after they meet you they can say oh I met that really cool person. uh they build they build really cool wallets that seem really safe, secure, and flexible. And that's what people I want people to be able to leave the room are remembering that.
Um so I'll I'll end with this. Uh you know, I don't we're all builders. We've all probably been in the space for a few years, maybe some longer than others. Uh and I think we've always as an industry always kind of hit the mark where like we're struggling to find product market fit or we're struggling to like break out of this initial group of thousand strong community of users that we've had uh and really to what I think what is missing a lot of the times uh you know I would say a few years ago we could have argued that the infrastructure just wasn't there crypto UX was just bad. I think we've got to the point now where we have uh we have all the tools to make a really really good uh product that's built on chain.
Um and the blockchain itself is also getting quicker. So you know I feel like we have less and less excuses as an industry. And so to really make your product scale I just want to impress upon a point that you first have to be understood and once you're understood um what you build will actually gets used. So hopefully that was useful. Hope everybody enjoys the rest of can and happy storytelling.
[applause]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.