WiBT (00:02)
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of Women in Blockchain Talks. I'm Lavinia Osborne, your host and founder of Women in Blockchain Talks. Okay, so we have another guest for you. I'm excited to have this gentleman on the podcast with me as Women in Blockchain Talks is about women in regards to we lead with women, but we're open to all genders.
because as we like to say in the Caribbean's, one hand cannot clap. So today we have Jolly Horsfall from Flight 3. What's up, Jolly? Yeah, thanks for having me on. Another cloudy day in London in summer, so there you go, but great excitement to be on. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. Now, just to say, Jolly's going to introduce himself more fully, but I've known Jolly for the last three years.
Since 2021 when he and his brother Harry, they put on Zeeboo Live. Zeeboo Live was one of the first big events, Web3 events in London, in the UK, in London. And it was very exciting. And I recall it being in Kensington. That's correct, right?
and they had some great speakers. And when you go to these sort of events, there's all these different events. was NFT NYC, all these different big events, Consensus, but they were all in different parts of the world. And then we had Zeeboo Live and it was for the people. And so it was really great. And then last year, 2023, they put on the second iteration of the event. It's an annual event. And I actually spoke.
at that event and it was a great experience. over the last three years, I've really got to know Jolly and Harry really well. They're extremely part of the Web3 space in London, UK. So without further ado, Jolly, would you like to share more about how you got started in the Web3 space? Yeah, think that first event specifically was probably a bit rough around the edges. We had only just started the agency and we was
Harry, who's the co -founder and CEO, and of course my brother. He's had a history of running events. His first business that he sold in 2013 was all about events. They ran a big festival and we were getting sick and tired of having to travel all around the world. So within 60 days, we rang up every marketing manager that we knew and said, how much budget can you give us without having to ask your boss? And then off the back of a cigarette pack, it was like, we can just about make this work. Let's go for it.
We had about 60 days start to finish. Start, make the brand, IDA, get everyone together, get the speakers in and run the event. But I think having it authentic to yourself and how we wanted to create that community really kicked off the start of the event series nicely. So it was a nice base to build from, but it was definitely an exciting journey nonetheless. But I got into Web3 in 2013. So that's a long time. Relatively early. So well, Harry left university and
He joined a VC and they said, you're young, you run something called the Bitcoin stage. So in 2013, he did run this stage. And then he was like, all in, all into research, Bitcoin, these sorts of bits. I'd presented it, but in my economics class in 2012, and I played a few video games when I was younger. I really understood the value that you could place in these digital items or like these digital economies. And then suddenly a few things after the other, bang, got the first Bitcoin in 2013. And then it's been hooked on it ever since, tons of research.
So was trading 15, 16, 17, the ICOs, and then I did like maths and economics. I was just like super interested in Delta as deep as possible. And then during COVID, presented a really good time to research, dive deeper and eventually start a business in it. And something I never thought necessarily that I'd do. yeah, was an exciting sort of journey up until here. I know my personal answer to this, and I'm going to ask you quite a controversial question, but do you think the Web3 space...
is a young person's game because your early, no, your late 20s I would say, yeah? So would you say it's a young person's game? So I'd say it's less, it happens to be very correlated with age, it's more about how open is your mind to learning new things. And there's lots of people who are older who are straight onto Web3, crypto, the latest trends, they've seen in...
say for example gaming, how like console gaming came and then mobile gaming came and then free to play and they know that there's always meta and they're open to that innovation and I think some people if you're getting towards the end of your career you can sometimes become quite reluctant to want to bring in think about how people talked about getting websites for like a store, a department store and I think
Yes, happens to be that younger people are closer to being open to learning a ton of new things. And therefore it just happens that the current assortment of the industry tends to be a lot younger. And in the blue chip Web2 zone, lots of decision makers aren't that pro crypto yet. But over a course of the next five, 10 years, as innovation continues to pile on and that sort of Web2, Web3 gap and Chasm closes,
I think there'll be less of an old, young person. But yes, traditionally there has to be younger people, but I don't think it's an age thing. I think it's a kind of like mindset piece. I agree with you, I mean, because we're as old. There's a saying, you're as old as what you're feeling. Or just you're as old as you think. Age is nothing but a number, ultimately. And of course with age comes wisdom and it's great to have, but I just personally think that.
how one thinks and how open -minded they are can add to them continuing to feel youthful, being youthful and feeling youthful has nothing to do with age or having a youthful energy even, has nothing to do with age. obviously that piece around you get more risk averse as you get older, typically, generally, obviously not in every case, but Web3 crypto does have that kind of risk on.
focus which might be unattractive to people who's slightly older. So there's a ton of bits going on there. Yeah, of course. So you're the CFO for Flight 3, which is the Web 3 arm of Flight Story, correct? Correct, yeah. Okay. So Flight Story is owned by Stephen Bartlett. And so you get to work, do you get to see him often? Do you interact with him? And what's that? Yes, obviously, Steve's been on an amazing
journey in the last few years of the success of this podcast, Dragon's Den, all of the exciting bits that are happening within the whole flight group ecosystem. So he's really trying to structure things as he's bringing on more and more companies through Dragon's Den, through his ventures, through the fund. Booked him for to be headline speaker for ZB Live in 2022. We got speaking and it turns out like we have a very similar way we approach marketing, what we think about the future. And there was obviously a gap in his life.
marketing agency for Flight 3, a Web3 company to join. So it's like a perfect unison of Web3 and AI and the emerging tech marketing pieces are going to be a big tool to use in the future. And so, yeah, it's been a really cool partnership so far. So we're only about a year in, so it's not long after you do all the bits and bobs, the integrations and these sorts of things. So yeah, there's still like lots more to come. So excited to see what lies ahead there. Yeah, congratulations, because it's a huge deal.
even though the merger did happen last year. And at the end of the day, you talk about Steve being on his journey. You and Harry have definitely been on your journey for the last 10 years and particularly in the last three years. Obviously you run Flight 3, which is a web 3 marketing agency and you're the CFO, correct? And Harry is the CEO, right? What is happening in the market? What are you seeing as marketers?
And I know you're coming from it from the CFO side, but even running the marketing agency in Web3, what excites you? What's exciting to you? What are you seeing on the horizon that maybe other people are not seeing because we're not privy to the information that you may have working in a marketing agency? Yeah, I think there's definitely a number of things. One thing that really excites me, I think, is the amount of talent coming into the space because
Right now, if you go to any of the big conferences, you hear a lot of people talking about lack of product market fit. And that's always been a big problem for Web3. People have talked about the UI being tricky. People have talked about that whole user journey being hard to onboard the next billion users. So I think the first part of solving that is having really talented people trying to solve a problem. We've seen that focus can always be a superpower. And when there's clever people trying to solve something, whether that's the COVID vaccine very quickly and it gets a lot of...
focus on verse like there'll be quite large web 3 problems that people are aiming to solve and so I think that's exciting seeing how much talent there is in the space. I think we're getting a lot closer to consumer applications actually working so the way blockchains are actually reaching some kind of scale cost efficiency piece that you can have a blockchain obscure product that you'll just have on your phone.
And eventually people won't know how blockchain or crypto or all these really complicated bits work. If I ask you, how does the Swift network operate or how do you pay on credit cards? No one actually knows the technicalities behind that. But for some reason, when we come to the blockchain world, people are like, yeah, but do you know how this node does that? It goes on to this, confirms this transaction. So I think the use cases are definitely there. We're getting like one or two steps closer. I've been, this is my fourth, fourth bull run.
first one in 2013, obviously it's just Bitcoin that exists, peer -to -peer payment network. The second one in 2017 was all about white papers, nothing even existed on chain at all. was all just, can revolutionise payments, this and this. 21 was all the infrastructure was getting built, the DEXs, the actual chains themselves, the bridges.
marketplaces like OpenSea, all of that very core infrastructure was built and worked. None of the apps really worked that well other than the money markets, the DEXes, these sorts of things. And now this next wave is, okay, well that's really exciting. We've got all this nice playground to build in and exciting functionalities. What can we go and do that actually is gonna bring on mass adoption in these sorts of things? I don't think anyone's fully solved it yet.
There's still lots of unknowns, there's still lots of challenges to get through or scaling problems. But we're getting much closer, which is exciting. I think people give Web3 a really hard time. The real innovation, like proper innovation, only really started in 18, 19 when the first few smart contracts started to come staking and these updates came to Ethereum, which kicked off that DeFi summer in 2020. We've only really been innovating at a fast pace for four or five.
four, five, six years is sort of time. And if you're in before 17, you consider an OG and you've seen a lot and I think that's really exciting. But when you're an OG, you've also got to be able to like un -anchor yourself from previous cycles and previous bits, because there's so much new innovation coming, the rate of knots of people like changing stuff, launching stuff, yourself, how quick, where for three years, they they're measuring at midnight on telegram, get this done, let's go here, let's do this. That's what excites me, like the tenacity of people. Obviously,
that comes with good and bad. Lots of are spending a lot of time on marketing and making meme coins. And I think there's a huge amount of value to be derived from that. If you look at society over the last 10, 15, 20 years, people have placed a lot more value in memes, social media, potentially, and I've inverted common sense, useless content that they watch for two, three hours a day. And time is so valuable. And they watch, they go home.
after a long day's work, they did two hours, three hours of TikTok. It's inevitable that there is some value in that meme community culture and you yourself run an absolutely outstanding community and you know the power of that, of the morning blockchain community. people coming together that love a certain token that's a meme, there is like a huge amount of value in that and it does what it says on the tin. It's able to just either go up to the moon or go down and people love that speculation. So that's very much like one side of, I'd say that's more like
crypto. They're also doing a ton of other, if you look at how many integrations and partnerships Bonk has, for example, massively impressive on the actual like marketing and execution side. So what's Bonk just for clarity? Bonk is one of, if not the largest, I'm pretty sure it's the largest meme token on Solana. well, okay. So awesome team over there. But yeah, they're doing some incredible stuff.
Yeah, it's amazing to see that they're valued at, I don't know, exact figure, but eight, nine, six, eight billion dollars. Wow. Yeah. And that's in a very short time, short space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So one of the things you touched on is mass adoption. Okay. And this is one of the things that the space, the community talks about all the time. One of the things that I've noticed even more because of the Euro cup. we just had
the men's European Championship, which Spain won and England came second. We didn't bring it home, but we nearly did. Crying tears, but anyway. And so you see Tezos, which is a blockchain level one. They've sponsored Manchester United, CEX, BinX. They sponsored Chelsea. We see there's a couple of others who are looking or have sponsored football teams.
As a marketer or someone working in marketing, even though you're in the CFO role, you talked about mean coins. Now let's talk about that mass adoption sort of marketing. Do you think it's having an impact on the industry and how people look at crypto or blockchain because of these football clubs being sponsored by these Web3 entities? Yeah, I think there is.
many levels to something so large as a Man United sponsorship. It's obviously a global thing. There's a lot to activate within that whole partnership. And I think you can get a ton of value in terms of the mass adoption. Sports is obviously a good place to start because it has such a large overlap with the expected target market for crypto. you go into sports, you like betting, it's potentially speculative. You could be
maybe more easily onboarded. So I think it's like an easy place to start. In terms of like the mass adoption, it's tricky to know where we are in that. think there's seven to 800 million people in crypto, maybe one in 10 people like own crypto. might need to be fact -checked on that roughly. So I think how much further is mass adoption? It's always talked about.
and never really like the journey of like where we are, what's going to actually hit the catalyst to do that. It's becoming easier and easier on these really good centralized exchange to do your first couple of trades, buy your Bitcoin, really see. I think, you know, that's how you have to do it. Just one step at a time, buy you stake it on a centralized exchange. It's super easy. Coinbase, something like Coinbase is an unbelievably good platform to play around before you start going to do your more research, going on chain and having your own
Metamask or your own actual like web3 wallet, but I think the amount of educational materials out there is just multiplying at such a fast rate and it's got the share of mind that everyone knows what crypto is doing and you're seeing amazing initiatives across the world to get people involved in web3 from all angles whether it's in art, you're talking about Tezos they've obviously done an amazing job at the art scene they've curated of really having that
community there, people doing NFTs, people doing physical art, a hybrid of the both, as well as like sports, gaming, DeFi, all these sectors are now starting to not just become like crypto as an overarching piece, but they're just like in the R &D department within their respective sectors, which I think is pretty exciting. But there's definitely a long way to go in terms of stuff working, creating value and these sorts of bits. And obviously there was a...
Interesting moment where chat GBT came in and stole the show and everything was a yeah Yeah, that was hard to see because it was just so the I guess some of the narratives for blockchain haven't changed in since 2017 so seven eight years now of what they're what it's going to do I think the value of the technology is just Incredible, but it's good. Just takes time to go through bureaucracy. For example, I renewed my driving license two weeks ago
and you just have to send off a form to the DVLA. You get no tracking, you don't know when it's going to come back. You don't even know if you've done it right. No form of anything. Visibility. You get a piece of plastic that's relatively fraud proof but it's not perfect. should just be the DVLA has a verified ETH address. You get minted your...
QR code and driving license on the blockchain and it can just show up on your phone and it's gonna scan this. Yes, that verifies you've got it. Eventually we'll have zero knowledge that you don't even have to scan it. It can just scan something on the blockchain that says, yes, Jolly has a part like driving license. That's valid. It's valid. You can drive in this country. You can do all of this, but you don't have to store the data. So you don't have any data storage problems. It's like fantastic. But how far away are we from the DBLA actually doing that?
very far away. There's a ton of stuff that is going to come that's going to be inevitable, that's going to be in like amazing society but that's not got huge speculative value right now so it's maybe not a key narrative that's coming up so that's quite tricky. Yeah it's still early.
as we like to say, it's still early. When will it get late? Yeah, when will it get late? But it takes time. And I think you're right with what you said about AI taking over the scene. was just like, man, is all this hard work gone for nothing? Because now it's all about AI. as we all know, a blockchain is fundamental to the evolution of AI in regards to having providence.
of the data, providence of where the information came from and the validity of it as well. Blockchain still is important, is in the world of AI. Women in emerging tech. So with that being said, so again, you work in marketing. so one of the things that has come up and that's talked about all the time is, and of course, do events, Zeeboo or Zeeboo Live is obviously an event, annual event that you do.
sponsorship and advertising and the market space has been so hard. So what advice as someone who works in marketing, owns a marketing agency, would you give to smaller companies, startups, community led organizations such as myself in regards to how to best, if there's no budget, there's no budget, we get that. But how would, what advice would you give to as a
marketing agency to companies who are looking for that sponsorship or for that advertisement and you know how to like work through the kind of because we're not in a bear market but we're not in a bull market either so you know when it's just when the funds are just not flowing and one of the reasons I'm asking you this is because we saw with social media and I was talking about this with another guest recently that how
the advertising dollars or advertising money used to go to magazines and newspapers and online forums and of course they've lost a lot of their readership and so now we saw or we do see that ad money going to influencers. However, what I'm seeing now is a number of people saying that influencers aren't actually not getting ROI for our money simply because just because you've got a hundred thousand
followers doesn't mean it's necessarily your audience, whereas going to communities and in a way, Zebru Live, it's an event, but it's also a community, right? You know that those people are interested, are engaged, they're going to the events, et cetera. Putting that all into context and the way that the ad money spend and all of that is moving, what advice do you give to communities in the Web3 space and small businesses, startups? Yeah, I think the...
The really awesome thing about event marketing is that there's a ton of variety and I think you can get huge amounts of value from IRL events. With a small business... Pause one moment. IRL means in real life. With a small business, need one or two contracts can change your business and that is usually forged by interpersonal relationships of...
getting in front of people, finding a way to collaborate or like an integration or a true partnership or you get a client or something like that. And I think Web3 is still such niche base that if an event is doing a ton of marketing to get every prominent Web3 person like a token 20, 49 consensus, these like really top tier events, then going there to hunt out and be intentional about who you want to meet, how you want to, what you need from it.
can provide a ton of value to small and large businesses. And event marketing is like this riddle that if you have an orange and you have the two most important CEOs in front of you and they said they both want the orange, you have to ask them why do they want the orange. And one wants the peel to make an agronium, one wants the orange to make an orange juice so you can make both people happy. And you have the big companies that want...
the main stage, the headline sponsor, the full brand awareness, but not that much like in the weeds. They don't want the booths to speak to the people. But if you're a little startup, for example, at ZV Live, we've got really accessible startup Hally booths that you can go and try your products, go and speak to 100 people, bait test it on the day and get that really key feedback. So I think there's a ton of bits that you can do with events. Obviously there's varying views of whether people think it's effective or not, but massively just basically depends on
What's going to be, you've got to be really intentional with small budget and more importantly your time when you're a startup community, these sorts of things. I definitely think you can get some value, but yeah, it's not going to fall on your lap. As with any type of marketing, people think that they can just lazily, if they put money towards it, then it solves it. But that's absolutely not the case. And I guess in your point to KOLs versus communities, a lot of communities are like, are low key KOLs and lots of KOLs. What's KOLs? KOL is an influencer.
Okay, all right. Key opinion leader is the acronym. They like it more because influencer sounds a bit... Flaky. You know what I mean? But I think that there's lots that bring a lot of value. Importantly, in terms of the marketing mix, paid is not such a big part of Web3. So paid advertising is when you pay Google or Instagram or Facebook to be a sponsored ad. So you come up on people's feed, but you pay...
50 pence to be there or whatever it might be, depends what you're like searching. Because Web3 is so niche still, you're selling it, you're a holiday company, it's so easy to do performance marketing to get in front of the right audience and it's a lot more formulaic. Put in one pound, get out one pound fifty of ROI of like, thingy, so it's a lot more of an investment line. at the moment, Web3, no one knows really what works and like anyone who does say they know exactly what works is.
you might have to just triple check if they're doing the right thing because it's moving so quickly. What worked a year ago in Web3 marketing doesn't work today. So there's a lot more experimenting, a lot more going with the flow, news jacking, really staying current in the moment, but true to your like really strong core brand values. And so I think events are the big part of playing that in my opinion, for definitely big and small companies. Okay, lovely answer. So just tell us a little bit more about Flight 3.
in the sense of what sort of projects that you can talk about, of course, you know, that come to you that you're working on. I know one project, for example, correct me if I'm wrong, is Standwith Crypto. It would be great for the audience to just understand the sort of projects that Web3 marketing agencies are getting. And yeah, just talk a little bit about that. So, Standwith Crypto is a ridiculously exciting one. So that's a Coinbase initiative.
They started in the US where they wanted to help keep the agenda point high of making progressive digital asset policy. So you're trying to make stuff more crypto friendly and stop key issues like getting debanks, all the sort of, guess.
difficult grounds that come with investing in crypto, so to speak. So they had a really successful campaign in the US that's got like a million signups and Coinbase wanted to initiate that in the UK. And I guess the mission really resonated with the whole exec team over at Flight3 and we really wanted to be able to like help and support. So we've been just supporting the Coinbase initiative of Steadwith Crypto and we've helped them run a couple of events at Parliament. George Osborne is one of
one of their advisors, they obviously have a ton of advisors, but it's all about with this change of government. Previously, we had a very pro crypto government in the Tory party that wanted to make it a digital asset hub in the UK, and then the switch to labor and it's about trying to make sure that one, there is goods like digital asset, I guess adoption, as well as it brings a lot of jobs to the UK, people want to have hubs here, we want regulatory clarity, we want to be a leading.
situation for having good regulations because I know a lot of the entrepreneurs who are building stuff, there's a whole hoo -ha about where you go and base stuff, all this kind of like legal costs, these sorts of bits. And so I think that making sure that we're having really sensible but I guess progressive and fast policy conversations. And that comes with a really key part in what you do in women blockchain talks is education. Like why do we need this? Like actually speaking to the MPs.
and the business owners and the investors, people like A16Z have come specifically to the UK, which is probably one of the, if not the best venture capitalists in the space. They invest in a ton of top tier projects. They've come to London because they like our forward looking approach to regulation. They want their projects to be in regulatory safe spaces. So that's a really cool initiative that we're helping support and definitely proud to be part of the movement. Wonderful, wonderful.
Okay, so let's talk about Zeeboo Live. Yeah, it's coming up October the 10th and the 11th. So it's not far, it's about what, two months away? Yeah, two months and a bit. Yeah, tell me about it. And of course, like I said, I spoke at the event last year. It was amazing. One of the things that I really appreciated about it.
was the fact that I felt it was very diverse. I felt there was a good number of women speakers. And I think that one of the characteristics that I would say that you and your brother Harry, because they don't come as one, they both come as one, even though they're individuals, but there's no Harry without Jolly and there's no Jolly without Harry. And they bring an essence and a great vibe to the London Web 3 scene, in my opinion.
And so what I appreciated about it was that vibe was very strong, it was well attended and it was very diverse. Now, of course, we talked earlier on about not ageism, but just about age being quite prevalent in the Web3 space. What are your thoughts about diversity in regards to gender in the Web3 space? Do you think that there is an issue? Just what's your thoughts?
And again, like I said, I thought that you did a great job last year in regards to in representing a diverse crowd in the Web3 space. Yeah, I think there's always room for improvement. I think we only did, in your words, a great job because we had amazing leaders like yourself helping to bring some of the community and the women in blockchain talks and having you guys as a key community partner as well as some of the other London women in blockchain communities is really cool. think.
We always want to do more, like we want to be pushed, we'll always open there to be, hey, this wasn't good, I think we had one or two manuals, which is obviously an absolute no -go. Always taking and learning on experiences. I think when you're so passionate about an industry, that you want to share it with everyone. And I think it's a shame that it's still slightly male -dominated because then it's harder to come in and get those breaks and get the understanding and have those allies. Obviously I think there's...
starting to be quite a good movement where we're seeing public support and male allies come up on LinkedIn and starting to promote and protect. think the inclusion piece is what's really important of you can artificially make the diversity happen of say hiring X number of women and these sorts of things but if you don't actually accept them or adjust your but like behaviors to your culture even, culture to actually
get that bonding and get that glue to help them get results, then it's like slightly superficial. It's performative. It's performative. So I think there's a really big push. think also like SheFi doing a great job. have one of the SheFi scholars who's actually come on as one of the event leads for Zebra Live. So you'll be seeing Sasha about and she's a testament to all the talent and amazing stuff that women have a big part to play in bringing some magic to the blockchain. Starting to see some great leaders come through, which is really exciting.
I think we're not anywhere near where lots of people want to be and I think there's definitely a common goal to improve that but I think there's a huge amount of great work being done by the communities like yourself to actually slowly snowball momentum that is going to in the long term in the next five, six, seven, years.
really improve things because lots of companies in the Web3 space, even Solana for example, it's only four and a half years old, that's still technically a startup to actually get everything sorted and we all know everyone's been out here grinding 12 hours a day. Hard, grinding hard. Grinding hard, so much stuff goes wrong at Fly Through It's EV live, there's a ton of key issues in the team and running the event and anyone who's run events before knows that 10...
million things go wrong. it's trying to make all those things stay at the top of the agenda and we do the best we can. As I say, we can 100 % always do better. It is something that's always high up the agenda. Okay, to round this off and I'm going to just in regards to Zeebu Live, I have two tickets to give away. So to be in the run or to win these tickets.
then what I would like for you to do is to leave a comment about this podcast, an amazing interview with Jolly. And just to end it off, Jolly, what I would like for you to just share, if you can, there's just some advice for the communities. Because for me, when I think of Web3, I do think first communities, and a lot of the communities are actually startup businesses, right? And then of course you've got the startup, the actual startup, like actual tech or the auxiliary.
businesses that you for an industry to to be there has to be auxiliary businesses to support it But from a marketing perspective, what sort of advice would you just give? generally to To stay current find your first hundred Superfans, okay and and listen to them I think that's a really important thing people always going for these huge vanity metrics But the first hundred people who are going to use your product. Mm -hmm Just go on a mad quest to find them hunt them down or not
in person, go to events, get them online, find them in other communities, be active in other communities, give value to other people and a lot more people will respect your brand and you've got to be out there public as an ambassador for your brand. If you're a co -founder or like C -suite or like in those sort of forward -facing roles, go out there, give value, like you'll get a ton of stuff in return. It might be like not be instantaneous, but I think that's really important. And then I think having...
really clear brand values just goes a massive way to being able to make decisions quickly and that definitely helps with marketing because so much of marketing web 3 is execution and if you have to take a lot of time that only one or two people can make the marketing decisions in your team then you could be moving too slow so I think being able to decentralize the decision -making about how people know or live or breathe your brand super super important
Perfect, love it. Thank you so much for joining us today and I look forward to October 10th and the 11th for ZeeBoo Live, baby. We'll see you there, thanks so much. Have a good one, cheers.
