The Exchanges

Q How do you think about concentration versus diversification across them? You can pick one from each and go down it kind of drilling in that way, or you can do all of them in each. A lot more expensive, a lot more diversified. How do you think about that?

A At any point at scale, you don't want 80 to 90% of all your paid growth coming from one channel because too much at risk, right? I would say back in my DTC days, we used to obsess over it, but we would say no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel outside of organic. Also because it's not just channel diversification, it's also the different type of audiences. Because in crypto, for example, We live and breathe on social. Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search. So it's also diversifying the audiences because not every audience and product type is going to be, is going to make sense out of all these platforms and channels.

AI assessment note: “we would say no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel”

Q That's very, very kind of you. I want to start, though, with, like, growth is this unique and weird world with even more wonderful participants in it. It's not the obvious thing to get into. How did you first make your way into the world of growth?

A Yeah, I wish I could say it was a conscious planned journey, but it was all accidental, and half of it was laid out for me, half of it was probably I, I designed, but, you know, I grew up, I grew up in India, did my major in computer science, Harry, like, like many Indians would do, other than wanting to play cricket for the country, which I, I had the passion for until I was in college, and I realized the chances of being the, one of the 16 people out of a billion plus was slightly lower than 50, 60%, so did my, Major in computer science. Started my career as an engineer there. Worked for a company called Sapient. Started there, you know, as a C++ developer, built all kinds of systems. But there were two pivots in my career. The first one came when one of my mentors asked me to be a product manager for an ad tech product we acquired here in Miami in, in, in oh six. So that's when I evolved from pure engineering to building products. And that's how I entered marketing advertising for the first time. And then After twelve-word years, I kind of left Sapien to join, to run e-commerce or Kimberly Clark, Huggies, Kleenex, Quotex globally, and I went on the brand side for the first time, and then after that, I joined Spotify as a VP of growth. Somehow, it worked from engineering to building products to running e-com and really getting into data and, and ad tech, then growth, and then…

AI assessment note: “I wish I could say it was a conscious planned journey, but it was all accidental”

Q My word. Thank you so much for just teeing up the next, like, you know, I write these schedules and then they just mean nothing because I then hear this and I'm like, fuck it, let's just change it up. You mentioned that kind of the true magic of product and a great product experience. Do you believe in the build it and they will come?

A I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing. It is just driven by the product. It's a world where there is infinite choice. There is infinite access from a user standpoint compared to 25 years back where Access was extremely challenging, and until you saw it on the TV, you had no way to know that something new had launched. No longer, right? So this infinite access, there's no sense of loyalty. The friction to leave your product and enter another one is absolutely nothing. So what I mean by a great product is product in of itself is the magnet. It is a strong driver. So for example, Slack has network effects baked in. So as long as you get one client, And you have 10 users within a team or one user within a team. The nature of the product itself inherits network effects where I'm going to ask all my team to join because the value of Slack gets better and better as the entire organization bolts on. But that's not because it was a great product and people found it. You still have to do those mechanics, but the growth itself is inherently driven through the product or through word of mouth. You're still going out there. But the channels and the levels you're using are not your typical paid marketing levels just yet.

AI assessment note: “I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath”

Q Where does growth sit in your mind? We're talking about product. We're talking about marketing. Some people will put it in its own team. These are very different disciplines and there's very different ways to approach it. Where does growth sit?

A Of course, it was planted back in the days of Facebook with Chamath and that team. They spun off something because the core functions were not thinking differently. Marketeers have the value of death of campaigns, so you run a campaign, you spike some growth, and it dies. Product has a value of death of features and makes the product unusable, so they had to, they had to manufacture it that way. At Spotify, we had to manufacture it where I was a VP of growth on the marketing and performing the data side, but I had a partner who was a VP of growth on the product side, for example. At Kraken, three phases of growth, Harry, Phase one was the first 10 years where, like I said earlier, it was all organic. Great word of mouth, early player, category builder. Then, in late 2021, we realized that the next phase of growth for Kraken now needs a conscious engine, and we established data-driven marketing as an engine. But last year, we said, that's not enough. We now need to bring in product, design, data, engineering. So now, growth at Kraken, it reports to me, but it doesn't matter, you could take the entire engine and place it wherever, What's most important is that the growth engine has the components working and humming together, which is data, engineering, design, product, marketing, and all elements of marketing. Whether that now sits in place A, place B, whether you make that engi…

AI assessment note: “you could take the entire engine and place it wherever, What's most important is”

Q That's very, very kind of you. I want to start, though, with, like, growth is this unique and weird world with even more wonderful participants in it. It's not the obvious thing to get into. How did you first make your way into the world of growth?

A Yeah, I wish I could say it was a conscious planned journey, but it was all accidental, and half of it was laid out for me, half of it was probably I, I designed, but, you know, I grew up, I grew up in India, did my major in computer science, Harry, like, like many Indians would do, other than wanting to play cricket for the country, which I, I had the passion for until I was in college, and I realized the chances of being the, one of the 16 people out of a billion plus was slightly lower than 50, 60%, so did my, Major in computer science. Started my career as an engineer there. Worked for a company called Sapient. Started there, you know, as a C++ developer, built all kinds of systems. But there were two pivots in my career. The first one came when one of my mentors asked me to be a product manager for an ad tech product we acquired here in Miami in, in, in oh six. So that's when I evolved from pure engineering to building products. And that's how I entered marketing advertising for the first time. And then After twelve-word years, I kind of left Sapien to join, to run e-commerce or Kimberly Clark, Huggies, Kleenex, Quotex globally, and I went on the brand side for the first time, and then after that, I joined Spotify as a VP of growth. Somehow, it worked from engineering to building products to running e-com and really getting into data and, and ad tech, then growth, and then…

AI assessment note: “I evolved from pure engineering to building products. And that's how I entered marketing”

Q My word. Thank you so much for just teeing up the next, like, you know, I write these schedules and then they just mean nothing because I then hear this and I'm like, fuck it, let's just change it up. You mentioned that kind of the true magic of product and a great product experience. Do you believe in the build it and they will come?

A I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath the build it and they will come is still marketing. It is just driven by the product. It's a world where there is infinite choice. There is infinite access from a user standpoint compared to 25 years back where Access was extremely challenging, and until you saw it on the TV, you had no way to know that something new had launched. No longer, right? So this infinite access, there's no sense of loyalty. The friction to leave your product and enter another one is absolutely nothing. So what I mean by a great product is product in of itself is the magnet. It is a strong driver. So for example, Slack has network effects baked in. So as long as you get one client, And you have 10 users within a team or one user within a team. The nature of the product itself inherits network effects where I'm going to ask all my team to join because the value of Slack gets better and better as the entire organization bolts on. But that's not because it was a great product and people found it. You still have to do those mechanics, but the growth itself is inherently driven through the product or through word of mouth. You're still going out there. But the channels and the levels you're using are not your typical paid marketing levels just yet.

AI assessment note: “I don't believe in build it and they will come because underneath”

Q How do you think about concentration versus diversification across them? You can pick one from each and go down it kind of drilling in that way, or you can do all of them in each. A lot more expensive, a lot more diversified. How do you think about that?

A At any point at scale, you don't want 80 to 90% of all your paid growth coming from one channel because too much at risk, right? I would say back in my DTC days, we used to obsess over it, but we would say no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel outside of organic. Also because it's not just channel diversification, it's also the different type of audiences. Because in crypto, for example, We live and breathe on social. Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search. So it's also diversifying the audiences because not every audience and product type is going to be, is going to make sense out of all these platforms and channels.

AI assessment note: “no more than 25 to 30% in any single channel outside of organic.”

Q I just want to go through them. When we think about organic, a lot of people say SEO is going to be less and less important with time. That bluntly, a lot of, uh, LLMs and foundation model usage means that Google's stronghold obviously is dwindling. Will the search in SEO be less important in 10 years time or more important?

A I don't think it's less important. I think the way you optimize for SEO is dramatically going to change because the journey, the user journey is now going to begin from these AI engines, and the AI engines are going to ask that question, but how will the AI engine find you? So you now have to optimize to show up within those LLMs. So as a brand, as a product, you still have to understand how you are going to be discovered. The mechanisms of discovery are evolving dramatically with AI, but you still want to be discovered. So what you have to do, the, the muscle you have to build internally is now from a human discovering you through this algorithm that this company called Google wrote and keeps changing without telling you, as they shouldn't, Uh, now that engine is an absolute machine led LLM based model. So now the challenge for all of us is how do I come on top of that LLM? How do I be become the brand that the LLM is going to recommend?

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's less important.”

Q When you think about lessons from Spotify, Spotify is such a branded instrumental company. What were your biggest lessons from a growth perspective from your time with Spotify?

A The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to, to grow at a scale of a Spotify, to be a growth stage company. You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at a hundred miles an hour, even when you can see 10 meters ahead. Rather. So because you have the confidence that at the eighth meter mark, you'll see the next 10 and next 10 and so on. So, I mean, that was a fundamental learning I had because being a big organization as Spotify was even back then and much bigger now, or at Kraken where we have very similar journeys, it's very easy to tend to create structure as you now become a thousand plus and 3000 people to create structure and to kill exactly the reason that got you here. And that was my biggest Lessons learned. And second one more directly tied to growth was there's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine. Because it's so easy to, to believe, oh, let's do, I have a great idea. Let's do these experiments and test some things. But you, you know, there's a lot of wasted energy when you operate that way. The magic of, of a growth engine is in the quality of the insight that feeds it. So for example, When Apple and, you know, they came up with their own subscription product, and we were really trying to figure out what's going to happen, what…

AI assessment note: “The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to, to grow at a scale”

Q How do you think about that today? I haven't done this, but if I go to a chat GPT and say, where's the best place to buy crypto? I don't know what it would say.

A You should try it out. And, and we are, we do have an incredible SEO team that is, that is absolutely focusing a lot on how do we show up? We monitor what percentage of search results are coming via traditional search engines and LLMs, and that's increasing. Still very miniscule, but the growth rate is, is, you know, shifting more and more towards these LLMs, and the way you have to optimize your content is very different for what the LLMs are looking for, and we're still learning. These are still very early, early phases, but a lot of the conversation, Harry, nine to 12 months from now, when the percentage of searches shift from Traditional SEO engines to these LLMs. A lot of the conversation for the next two or three years will be, you know, what are the best practices? There'll be tons of agencies popping up to, to figure it out, to make that a business model until it becomes a commodity again.

AI assessment note: “we do have an incredible SEO team that is, that is absolutely focusing a lot on how do we show up”

Q have enough performance marketing. You know what's so interesting, you said it was a dirty word brand. I had Nick on from Revolut, and like Nick is performance to the fucking max. This guy was born with a Lucozade in his hand, okay? And he's gonna listen and be like, fuck you. Um, but uh, so he was, and he's like, my biggest realization is the importance of brand marketing.

A Yes. I've had the biggest realization, the same biggest realization too, but it's not at the cost of performance. So the, the way I think about it is I'm going to use an analogy because this is the same question we discuss at every forum at, you know, at many team meetings is how do you make a choice? How do you think about both? The way I say in, in product led companies, not in CPG again, in product led companies, you have to first think about growth and performance, a lot lower funnel effort as oxygen. You don't have that You are dead. You do not have a chance to come back the next day. You have to know your numbers and you have to move the numbers. So if you have a hundred bucks, make sure you're using enough of the hundred bucks or all of it to hit the numbers you need. That's your oxygen. Then I think about this upper funnel spend. I'm reminding myself not to use the word brand. The upper funnel spend is nutrition, is good food, you know, or just food for that matter. You won't die if you didn't have it. You will eventually die. The difference is the size, the scale, and the pace of the flywheels are different based on who you are and where you are, and the rest of the category, your market penetration, your core product differentiation. But in the long-term sustainable growth, you cannot not have the flywheel of your upper funnel spend that helps build demand and build y…

AI assessment note: “lower funnel effort as oxygen. You don't have that You are dead.”

Q When you think about lessons from Spotify, Spotify is such a branded instrumental company. What were your biggest lessons from a growth perspective from your time with Spotify?

A The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to, to grow at a scale of a Spotify, to be a growth stage company. You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at a hundred miles an hour, even when you can see 10 meters ahead. Rather. So because you have the confidence that at the eighth meter mark, you'll see the next 10 and next 10 and so on. So, I mean, that was a fundamental learning I had because being a big organization as Spotify was even back then and much bigger now, or at Kraken where we have very similar journeys, it's very easy to tend to create structure as you now become a thousand plus and 3000 people to create structure and to kill exactly the reason that got you here. And that was my biggest Lessons learned. And second one more directly tied to growth was there's nothing more magical in a growth engine than the quality of the insight that runs that engine. Because it's so easy to, to believe, oh, let's do, I have a great idea. Let's do these experiments and test some things. But you, you know, there's a lot of wasted energy when you operate that way. The magic of, of a growth engine is in the quality of the insight that feeds it. So for example, When Apple and, you know, they came up with their own subscription product, and we were really trying to figure out what's going to happen, what…

AI assessment note: “The biggest thing I learned at Spotify was to, to grow at a scale”

Q How do you think about that today? I haven't done this, but if I go to a chat GPT and say, where's the best place to buy crypto? I don't know what it would say.

A You should try it out. And, and we are, we do have an incredible SEO team that is, that is absolutely focusing a lot on how do we show up? We monitor what percentage of search results are coming via traditional search engines and LLMs, and that's increasing. Still very miniscule, but the growth rate is, is, you know, shifting more and more towards these LLMs, and the way you have to optimize your content is very different for what the LLMs are looking for, and we're still learning. These are still very early, early phases, but a lot of the conversation, Harry, nine to 12 months from now, when the percentage of searches shift from Traditional SEO engines to these LLMs. A lot of the conversation for the next two or three years will be, you know, what are the best practices? There'll be tons of agencies popping up to, to figure it out, to make that a business model until it becomes a commodity again.

AI assessment note: “we do have an incredible SEO team that is, that is absolutely focusing a lot”

Q So what do you do then? Because it's quite easy to go, I mean, by the way, astonishing on organic, amazing work, well done. But as you said, when they're spending 600, and you're spending less than 10, what do you do then? Because you don't want to go, we'll spend 300, and just blow 300. What's the right response?

A We started with building the engine, and we went from 10 to, let's say, spending 50, and then we are now spending a lot more, which I, we can share, but the focus was, we, the goal is not to be the loudest voice. The goal was, we are going to invest in educating the world on the substance of crypto. At the same time, identify who our core target audience is, and from a growth standpoint, obsessing over, not just spending and bringing people, but obsessing over unit economics. So we spend a lot of energy More so now, like I said, when Arjun coming on board, he's bringing a lot of more diverse perspective on what success looks like for us. So we invest a lot of energy on payback periods, what we want our payback period to be, but not just the typical traditional marketing payback. This is fully loaded payback. We apply gross margin discounts. We apply a percentage of operating expenses on our cost, and we challenge ourselves, can we pay, still pay that back within, let's say, X months? And then what does your Overall cost to LTV ratio look like over a 12, 24, 36 month period. So the goal has been how do we optimize that engine, scale that across geographies, and then if we can prove payback and the CFO believes, okay, if you're spending a hundred, you're giving the hundred back in less than six months, let's say, keep spending because we can see money coming back.

AI assessment note: “the goal has been how do we optimize that engine... if we can prove payback”

Q First, you mentioned that kind of channel saturation. How do you know when you've saturated a channel? When additional dollars won't yield the same performance level of output.

A Yes, we do a lot of experiments to, to look at, because when the CAC's looking good, and we don't just always look at CAC. In our world, we look at CAC and early LTV, then we look at paybacks, but you will see when, when it's looking great, you tell the team, don't worry, just keep pushing, and you start to see a cliff in CAC. Then you know, look, you've reached a saturation point, right? So you pull back and you normalize there. And then We challenge and we, we do tests and experiments to see now as you unlock upper funnel in that market, in that particular market, can it unlock higher velocity, higher throughput? So can you expand the pipes through which new users are coming in by creating upper funnel? And that is how you prove incrementality of their upper funnel spend as well.

AI assessment note: “you start to see a cliff in CAC. Then you know, look, you've reached a saturation point”

Q Tell me, what was the best growth decision you made and what did you learn from it?

A I can give two. The fundamental learning and experiment is how you think about the engine itself. Like, have you built the engine? And for me, the biggest turning point at Kraken in my growth trajectory is what we did last year, where when Arjun came on board, we decided that we want an end-to-end growth engine. We don't want it to be isolated between marketing, design, product. We want a growth engine that has end-to-end accountability and ownership. That is collectively thinking about three very simple things. How do we bring the most relevant Kraken client into our ecosystem and remove as much friction as possible to make them experience the magical moment for Kraken? That's one, that's one first, most primary goal, which by the way, marketing and, and my product growth teams work hand in hand. They are paused, they live and breathe together to solve these problems. The second is figure out whatever way That we can actually build habits, so you bring users back to the platform, and together with product, build utility that gives them more reason to come back to the platform than just coming back to trade. So that's the evolution that we are going through now as we're expanding the aperture of what Kraken is. And third, and most importantly, is do one and two with strong unit economics. Building this engine and giving this very clear mission, I think has been the biggest And …

AI assessment note: “decided that we want an end-to-end growth engine”

Q I just want to go through them. When we think about organic, a lot of people say SEO is going to be less and less important with time. That bluntly, a lot of, uh, LLMs and foundation model usage means that Google's stronghold obviously is dwindling. Will the search in SEO be less important in 10 years time or more important?

A I don't think it's less important. I think the way you optimize for SEO is dramatically going to change because the journey, the user journey is now going to begin from these AI engines, and the AI engines are going to ask that question, but how will the AI engine find you? So you now have to optimize to show up within those LLMs. So as a brand, as a product, you still have to understand how you are going to be discovered. The mechanisms of discovery are evolving dramatically with AI, but you still want to be discovered. So what you have to do, the, the muscle you have to build internally is now from a human discovering you through this algorithm that this company called Google wrote and keeps changing without telling you, as they shouldn't, Uh, now that engine is an absolute machine led LLM based model. So now the challenge for all of us is how do I come on top of that LLM? How do I be become the brand that the LLM is going to recommend?

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's less important. I think the way you optimize for SEO”

Q Okay. You mentioned like the time to wow. How important is time to wow?

A It is very important. The user that's coming to you has five other options. And if you're taking, if they're waiting too long, they've already tried. Also, it also depends on the, on the category. Like if you're buying If you're buying a house, you're only going to do this once, twice, twice in your, in your life. And if you're a, you know, real estate platform, you've got more time. But in a, in a category like ours, people are moving, making decisions by the minute if the market's moving. And if you're not there, and if the friction is too much for them to go through in order for them to experience it, they've already made a choice somewhere else where, you know, there was much less friction. So it's, it's very important to shrink that, whether that is your core experience and onboarding to activation or something like referrals too. We were just, You know, we are, we are about to activate our referral program again, but one of the things we were discussing yesterday is it's not just about how many users refer, but it is very important to know how fast does it take for that user to, for that new user to refer more users and, and how do we create that excitement and incentivize them to do it much early on in their journey.

AI assessment note: “It is very important. The user that's coming to you has five other options.”

Q For those that didn't see it, what was the revenue?

A Even, even, even pre-IPO, you know, in 20, 24 numbers, we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue. Hopefully I'm back here next year. I can, we can talk about 20, 25 growth. We shared our ARPU. We shared the number of funded accounts currently. These are not lifetime funded accounts. We shared assets on platform, you know, close to fifty billion. We shared our volume, which is almost Three quarters of a trillion dollars on platform last year. So all I'm saying is, first of all, of course, then there are Coinbases of the world, which are public companies, so we all know their numbers. Also, it's a strategy that could very well work for some of them. It is not like two, three hundred million dollars of upper funnel spend is wrong. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, in our world, we believe a strong balance is needed, and our strategy, the way, if you give me a hundred bucks at Kraken, the way we think about it is, The way we'll break apart the hundred dollars is, first, we are not going to leave any growth on the table. That's our ethos now at this stage of our growth. If you spoke to me 18 months back, I would have said something very different because not many people around the world knew Kraken. That's why we also did a lot of partnerships. We, we are now sponsoring Tottenham Spurs.

AI assessment note: “we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue”

Q So there's so much for me to unpack here. We go from 10 to 50 to a number that you can't say today. How do we approach channel spend? And how do we think about channel diversification versus concentration?

A So let's assume we are starting from ground zero, where all you have is organic, you know, which ones you unpack. Differentiating theory from reality, okay? Because theoretically I can say a lot of things, but reality is you pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily. Start there. Because I feel that spending on growth or spending in a product-led company is like, it's like your oxygen supply. You have to be able to prove what you are getting back. You are taking almost all your spend and putting that on the lower funnel, which is more directly attributable. And within the lower funnel, you're picking channels that you absolutely know are lost touch because you assume that you have some demand out there in the category. You were just not capturing it. So start on channels like page search, you look at some display and so on. And ASA, Google UAC, channels that again are more digital, Users are converting and you can absolutely prove with very little ambiguity on what they're bringing back.

AI assessment note: “reality is you pick the ones you can measure more directly and easily. Start there.”

Q a world where PLG product-led growth has been the only phase so far. How do you reflect on that? Part of my mind goes to, great, it's all about brand marketing, Spotify on a Barcelona deal, and then part of me goes, great, it's all about, kind of, respectfully, growth initiatives, like referral codes, incentive schemes to get existing users, that first cohort, to bring more. What is that answer?

A It's one of my favorite topics, because when people talk about marketing and growth, we talk about as a monolithic craft, and it's not. There's so many variations, and the best way to answer that is, let me talk about one which is the total opposite, a CPG, a traditional CPG, you know, that is not direct to consumer, where the only growth engine that exists is marketing. That's why marketing in traditional CPG calls the shots. They are not, they're not just marketers, they are brand managers, they own the P&L, That's the traditional world. So when we talk about marketing and a product led growth marketer is comparing themselves or hearing stories from a CPG CMO or chief growth officer, don't do that. You're going to put yourself in a box and, and get really anxious because the levers they have and the authority they have will never exist in a product led company. That's the only lever a CPG company has. Now let's look at what happens in, in a product led organization where they got to a billion dollars without needing marketing. Yes, you can say Spotify is all about brand and, and the Barcelona partnership. Actually, it isn't. Spotify is first about an incredible product and all the growth that is driven by product. I can bet my life on that. And then on top of that, then comes a sliver of marketing because in product-led company, brand is not built by marketing. We enhance it.…

AI assessment note: “in product-led company, brand is not built by marketing. We enhance it.”

Q How do you know when you've hit the unlock? How do you know when you've saturated growth out of product and organic versus just a bit of a slow time?

A You see that in your curves. You see, are you saturating what your TAM is? How much market penetration you've had? Is your growth rate slowing down? Is there competition? It also, again, there are a lot more variables too. Are you in a saturated market? You know, where your product is good, but it's not absolute category creator, right? So like, look at Tesla. Category creator, more or less. Yeah, there were some hybrid cars before, but they suck. So they really haven't spent on marketing because Every Tesla is a marketing channel and every Tesla owner, 90% of them are marketing channels and advocates. But when the competition comes in, as it is right now, they are starting to unlock some pieces, whether that is a pricing strategy or starting to think about how do we differentiate the brand itself.

AI assessment note: “You see that in your curves. You see, are you saturating what your TAM is?”

Q Where does growth sit in your mind? We're talking about product. We're talking about marketing. Some people will put it in its own team. These are very different disciplines and there's very different ways to approach it. Where does growth sit?

A Of course, it was planted back in the days of Facebook with Chamath and that team. They spun off something because the core functions were not thinking differently. Marketeers have the value of death of campaigns, so you run a campaign, you spike some growth, and it dies. Product has a value of death of features and makes the product unusable, so they had to, they had to manufacture it that way. At Spotify, we had to manufacture it where I was a VP of growth on the marketing and performing the data side, but I had a partner who was a VP of growth on the product side, for example. At Kraken, three phases of growth, Harry, Phase one was the first 10 years where, like I said earlier, it was all organic. Great word of mouth, early player, category builder. Then, in late 2021, we realized that the next phase of growth for Kraken now needs a conscious engine, and we established data-driven marketing as an engine. But last year, we said, that's not enough. We now need to bring in product, design, data, engineering. So now, growth at Kraken, it reports to me, but it doesn't matter, you could take the entire engine and place it wherever, What's most important is that the growth engine has the components working and humming together, which is data, engineering, design, product, marketing, and all elements of marketing. Whether that now sits in place A, place B, whether you make that engi…

AI assessment note: “growth at Kraken, it reports to me, but it doesn't matter”

Q What's been the most tactically successful growth experiment channel spend?

A The easiest one is our SEO team. We tried a phrase on a landing page, which focused on, you know, the, uh, the traditional ELMR framework. And it said back in the day, we would say, come to us because this is what our product does to really changing that to respond to their psyche. And we changed that to a phrase called trade like a pro. This is for a pro product. And, and we saw substantial basis point lift because we were now connecting our core message to the desire, uh, that our users had to achieve a status to be part of a tribe. So like trade like a pro. So there are tons of them like that, you know, onboarding flow. The decision to partner with an external partner that can shrink six steps into one single step. A single decision to take in the phone number And autofill everything else because you're using a service that can use that as an identifier to bring all your information. In other words, tons of experiments, Harry, that we've done, which I call drive convenient value. So they give convenience and remove, by removing friction, but you're able to prove incremental value. Because if you do one, not the other, you don't grow. If you give value, but it has too much friction, people will not use it. If you remove friction and it's very convenient, but it's not incremental value, then it's still going to be hard for you to use it.

AI assessment note: “The easiest one is our SEO team. We tried a phrase on a landing page”

Q a world where PLG product-led growth has been the only phase so far. How do you reflect on that? Part of my mind goes to, great, it's all about brand marketing, Spotify on a Barcelona deal, and then part of me goes, great, it's all about, kind of, respectfully, growth initiatives, like referral codes, incentive schemes to get existing users, that first cohort, to bring more. What is that answer?

A It's one of my favorite topics, because when people talk about marketing and growth, we talk about as a monolithic craft, and it's not. There's so many variations, and the best way to answer that is, let me talk about one which is the total opposite, a CPG, a traditional CPG, you know, that is not direct to consumer, where the only growth engine that exists is marketing. That's why marketing in traditional CPG calls the shots. They are not, they're not just marketers, they are brand managers, they own the P&L, That's the traditional world. So when we talk about marketing and a product led growth marketer is comparing themselves or hearing stories from a CPG CMO or chief growth officer, don't do that. You're going to put yourself in a box and, and get really anxious because the levers they have and the authority they have will never exist in a product led company. That's the only lever a CPG company has. Now let's look at what happens in, in a product led organization where they got to a billion dollars without needing marketing. Yes, you can say Spotify is all about brand and, and the Barcelona partnership. Actually, it isn't. Spotify is first about an incredible product and all the growth that is driven by product. I can bet my life on that. And then on top of that, then comes a sliver of marketing because in product-led company, brand is not built by marketing. We enhance it.…

AI assessment note: “Spotify is first about an incredible product and all the growth that is driven by product.”

Q How do you think about proving efficiency with that, proving attribution? How do you, how do you answer that?

A It's harder, but it's possible. What we do, Harry, is not just the partnerships. We have a whole portfolio of upper funnel spend. We do audio, video, digital display, and if you think about what the difference is between that and lower funnel, it's just messaging, by the way. Same channels. Just the messaging is different. We are talking more emotionally, culturally, relevance versus formal, action, offer. That's the only difference. Sometimes we create this, you know, really complex differences between, oh, this is brand versus performance. Well, Same platforms. I can use TV to run a lower funnel DR campaign. I can also use TV for a very inspirational moment that really makes you step back and think about and remember me as a brand. So the way we think about attribution and quantifying the impact, which by the way, we get rightly so get challenged every day, every week. We spend the Sunday with Arjun four hours huddle to tell him exactly how we are proving every single dollar, which was truly fascinating and a great discussion. The way we do it is four different ways. One, we do match market test. Very simple. Because in crypto, the category is across the, across the world. It gives it a great benchmark. So when we are unlocking upper front in market A, but not in market B, where Bitcoin price is the same, I can show differences. So that's a match market test. We do a lot of c…

AI assessment note: “The way we do it is four different ways. One, we do match market test.”

Q For those that didn't see it, what was the revenue?

A Even, even, even pre-IPO, you know, in 20, 24 numbers, we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue. Hopefully I'm back here next year. I can, we can talk about 20, 25 growth. We shared our ARPU. We shared the number of funded accounts currently. These are not lifetime funded accounts. We shared assets on platform, you know, close to fifty billion. We shared our volume, which is almost Three quarters of a trillion dollars on platform last year. So all I'm saying is, first of all, of course, then there are Coinbases of the world, which are public companies, so we all know their numbers. Also, it's a strategy that could very well work for some of them. It is not like two, three hundred million dollars of upper funnel spend is wrong. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, in our world, we believe a strong balance is needed, and our strategy, the way, if you give me a hundred bucks at Kraken, the way we think about it is, The way we'll break apart the hundred dollars is, first, we are not going to leave any growth on the table. That's our ethos now at this stage of our growth. If you spoke to me 18 months back, I would have said something very different because not many people around the world knew Kraken. That's why we also did a lot of partnerships. We, we are now sponsoring Tottenham Spurs.

AI assessment note: “we shared a billion and a half in net revenue, not gross, net revenue.”

Q Final one for you. What are you most excited about today? So for me, my mother's got MS. I'm very excited about what AI does for drug discovery and prevention of relapses. I think it will make something that was previously incurable, curable.

A Yeah, I was struggling because there's so much mess happening around the world, man. It's so tough. I'm a Buddhist and spend a lot of time every day chanting in the morning and thinking about, you know, how we accomplish world peace based on the principle of cause and effect. But if I have to be true to what I dream and think about every single day outside of my family and my life philosophy of Buddhism, I would say it is to create, to create a world of financial freedom where Access to wealth is not limited to a small subset of people around the world, and I'm obviously very grateful that I have an opportunity to live in, in this part of the world. I grew up in India, and more of the world is not like US and UK. While for us, a movement like crypto is a diversification strategy, it's an asset class, for a big part of the world, it is a way to survive and live. So I hope that there is more in Paris and focus on the substance of this movement. And not the superficiality and the, and the surface.

AI assessment note: “I would say it is to create, to create a world of financial freedom”

Q How do you know when you've hit the unlock? How do you know when you've saturated growth out of product and organic versus just a bit of a slow time?

A You see that in your curves. You see, are you saturating what your TAM is? How much market penetration you've had? Is your growth rate slowing down? Is there competition? It also, again, there are a lot more variables too. Are you in a saturated market? You know, where your product is good, but it's not absolute category creator, right? So like, look at Tesla. Category creator, more or less. Yeah, there were some hybrid cars before, but they suck. So they really haven't spent on marketing because Every Tesla is a marketing channel and every Tesla owner, 90% of them are marketing channels and advocates. But when the competition comes in, as it is right now, they are starting to unlock some pieces, whether that is a pricing strategy or starting to think about how do we differentiate the brand itself.

AI assessment note: “You see that in your curves. You see, are you saturating what your TAM is?”

Q Do your CACs get better, cheaper over time, Because you have a bigger brand, more people know you, they hear about you, or do they get more expensive as your core audience saturates and you have to expand to a less obvious ICP?

A Yeah, so now we're talking about brand and, brand and growth, brand and performance. That's the, that's a fun, challenging, but never dying dilemma. So, a lot to unpack there. First, I would say whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing, Made the biggest mistake and did the, the biggest injustice to labeling them, because the moment you call one type of marketing performance and the other type something else, which is AKA brand marketing, inadvertently means that one performs and the other doesn't, which is absolutely incorrect and wrong. And for, for founders and CEOs and companies that haven't spent in this, their foundation is based on that, because a lot of their marketing understanding is from 30 years back, the age of the madman, where It was a cost center. It was spray and pray with great marketing and people would come, but I feel that first of all, there's a fundamental flaw in our thinking that one type of marketing works and other doesn't. They both work and both are absolutely must in the long terms to build a long-term sustainable growth model. The differences are they play different roles. One is needed to your point. Let's say you saturated your demand. There's no more demand out there. Doesn't matter what level of discount and scientific lower funnel targeting you are doing. There are no more people. You have to create new demand by be…

AI assessment note: “whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing, Made the biggest mistake”