Stephen: Meme coins, NFT airdrops, this is all going to be on the Around the Coin podcast today when we talk to Diego Borgo. He is an advisor to some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies like Adidas, Porsche, helping them get into Web3. He launched one of the biggest Web3 and NFT projects with Adidas. It's just a really great conversation of how to thoughtfully approach entering the web3 space, especially from a marketing standpoint, but also from a collaboration and partnership and a brand messaging standpoint.

This is such a great conversation. You probably know Diego because he's the mean king when it comes to fun, authentic conversations that he's having on places like LinkedIn. But he's actually really, really strategic and tactical when it comes to helping building brands and creating sustainable opportunities in web3.

You will love this podcast. I guarantee reach out and let me know what you think after you listen to the show.  

This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around the Coin podcast. We have a special guest, a marketing savant, to say the least, Diego, Mr. Pink Hat himself, AKA Don Borgo, I think they call you on Twitter. You've worked with some of the biggest Fortune 500 brands, but you're really focused on Web3 and marketing in a special way to Captivate audiences, but build community.

Why don't you give like the, the one minute version of who you are, what you do, and more importantly, what you like doing. Cause I think we all do a lot of things, but what like wakes you up? You're like, Oh, I can't wait to do that this morning.

Diego: Yeah, thanks for having me, dude. I'm super stoked to be here. Yeah, the short version is I come from a brand background. I spent my whole life and career into that. Started at 15 years old on the agency side and never stopped. So when agency client, agency client, always in this intersection of.

technology, culture, and what's next for brands, right? Back in 2007, 2006, that was gaming. It evolved for me to be blockchain, and crypto, and Web3, and AI, and immersive experience, and all of that. And the last four years I've spent mostly working with Fortune 500 brands from the likes of Adidas, Porsche, Mastercard, Unilever, Salesforce, helping them to navigate through the evolution of the internet.

And a lot of Web3 founders as well on the way, right? Working with triple A founders to get their ways around brand and marketing and, trying to help them to let a little bit of the tech talk behind.

Stephen: I love it. I'm North American, so I'm going to pronounce it Adidas. That's the way we pronounce it. But what was like the early conversations at Adidas? They're so used to like paying high profile athletes, coming up with these expensive and massive commercials. And then the digital wave comes and it looks like the, hey, they have to start navigating this digital space.

What were those early conversations like? What was the content strategy if you remember back at that time?

Diego: Yeah, Adidas is a very interesting company in that sense, right? I've been there for four years. And till like 2000, 2010, they didn't even have an e commerce, right? And then like 2016, they didn't even have like an application. Right. So when you talk digitalization in, let's say the U.S. North America, you, you saying something.

And when you go to places like Germany, where I did this as base, it means something very different. Right. So one of the motives why I was there is that they hire like a thousand, 500 people put in a building and said, we need to go digital. Right. So one of the things I was doing there was part of that, that wave that got into the company to help them ramping up and catching up with everything that has been changing.

Right. My role there had nothing to do with Web3 blockchain, none of it, but I've been in the industry since 2017 and I was really excited about it. Right. So as I saw that transformation happening. I started just pitching people around. I was like, Oh, imagine if you could put the supply chain of your sustainable shoes on chain, and then people that are buying that can have transparency of where it's coming from, which products has been used, who was the owner before, how much carbon has been emission on the way and, and many other use case, like you're making shoes that off up recycled plastic bottles. So why don't you show where those bottles are coming from? Why don't you show the before and after on how much that has impacted the actual community where this is coming from and give that all upstream to the customer. So they can see that.

They are buying the change. They are investing in making the world a better place. Right. And as you can imagine, they told me to fuck off.

Stephen: was going to be my next question is like, what was the event that we know these big companies, right? They're not just like you coming in with your pink hat isn't going to make them change their whole system that's been working and made them billion dollar companies. Do you remember like in a certain event?

Or like, I always know with like Web3 and blockchain, there's always that article we read, that news headline that was like, Oh man, like, what was that event that maybe, or maybe their competitors pushing, like, I know Nike had, was partnering with Artifact. What was that something that like made everyone start to listen to Diego a little bit more than they were the day before?

Do you remember like a certain thing or a series of events?

Diego: Yeah. So it was kind of like more of a coincidence rather, right? So while I was trying to do that on my end and alone by myself more people have joined the company and I started meeting other people. And then we just put this like small group of people on Twitter is like, Oh, we work for Adidas. We're into like Web3 and, and NFTs back there was like NFTs and Metaverse, right?

And one of the guys that started, he was saying like, Oh, I'm putting this strategy together. I just bought a board ape. You should come and check it out. And I was like, bro, you're paying like two grand for a picture of an ugly ape. Like, what is even the point, right? So I didn't get it at all. I was the right click save guy, right?

I was like, well, I could just right click and save that NFT. So why should I bother? So he started like, coming with that idea and coming with that idea. And the first time that he showed me this strategy, I was like, holy shit, I want to be part of this, right? Because the, the, the supply chain, blockchain, behind the scenes, transparency is so complicated.

And I don't blame them for telling me to fuck off because it's so complicated to touch supply chain, right? Let alone give transparency, let alone add another layer of technology, right? But NFTs and the metaverse and all of that early conversations of like mid 2021 was all about culture, was all about like, communities, was all about like, oh, you, we got to bring people together under one belief and everybody's kind of like, hurling around this idea.

There's ways we can do product placement, there's ways we can bring people together, there's ways we can throw events. So that made so much more sense to the brand, because they do that already anyway, and was just sort of like a different bridge towards that space, right? So. It wasn't like they listening to me or wasn't me like shifting the dial was more like that group coming together and sparking those ideas.

But at the same time, we were sort of like in that weird moment true COVID kind of like after in between kind of situation on which. Everybody was just making shit up, right? And, and we got to be able to run with, with that without having to like ask permission everywhere, right? So I remember to the day when we were in a, on a call, just like flip, flipping through trades on the board, a collection.

And about to purchase an ape, right? I was like, holy shit, we're literally doing it. And then afterwards, we bought an ape and we started like making whole lore around it. So it was a team that started like about five to six people that were just passionate about it. And he got like larger, larger, more senior roles, more budget.

And to the point that. The collection was launched back in December 21 and the brand made like 24 million in 24 hours and every other fortune 500 brand just looked left and was like, holy shit, we need to do that too. And that was my sort of like catalyst as well, because. I've been, I've been a freelancer consultant advisor for more than 10 years and while I was at the brand, I was doing that within the company.

So I just, I just laughed at it at that point. I was like, more brands for sure will be interested in doing that. And then I went on to work with many others after that.

Stephen: And you have a case study, right? It's one thing to say, yeah, I kind of contribute to this, but if you're like, Hey, I took these guys from like, they never had anything to add to their, to their point, like, there's all these blockchain consultants trying to sell them back at that time too, on all these, expensive tools and you need a blockchain for this.

So there's a lot of noise at that time. I'm glad you were able to break through. What do you think for like, and you just mentioned like the huge launch they had. Where would you rank maybe Adidas in the Web3 world versus in the Web2 world? Like in the, traditional social media rankings. Do you feel like, hey, they're, they're further ahead in Web3 than they were in Web2?

What are your thoughts? Especially with like Nike and Reebok, do you feel like they got bumped up in the ranking because they had such an aggressive and successful Web3 launch?

Diego: Yeah, well, we need to split that in parts, right? Because as this industry moves so fast, the launch and the start of it was first mover move, move, right? Really well perceived. I remember like the whole Twitters, crypto Twitters stopped to see that I remember the gas wars behind it, right? Of good old times of paying like one and a half grand for gas on, on Ethereum.

So like the demand was clearly there. Right. And people were really excited. People like start wearing like track suits on their apes and all other communities. So I would say that from that standpoint in time, Adidas was really pioneering it, right? It was the first brand at that scale to come in, do it right.

And achieve like a major milestone. As everything else, things can get trickier and more difficult to keep momentum. In our industry, everybody want to make money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. And as soon as that doesn't happen, then people start getting anxious and nervous. So after that, it was obviously extremely difficult to keep momentum and, I followed from the outside because I left the company right after the launch.

But I feel that in that specific moment in time, it was definitely like a clear difference between like the Web 2 like, but it lasts for a short period because of course Adidas has a 75 years history of Web 2. So, not Web 2, but you know what I mean.

Stephen: What are your thoughts? Cause you're helping brands get to that successful launch point. For those that are thinking about getting into the space, whether it's NFTs spatial experiences, et cetera, how do they maintain, obviously there's always a hype cycle that like drives a lot of the launch.

What are your thoughts about how these companies can maintain their success, like maintain their communities or maybe just tell me what are the mistakes companies are making once they have that success that, maybe loses their community or, devalue, especially with such a volatile thing like cryptocurrency or meme coins or NFTs.

Diego: Yeah, I think that. One of the biggest mistakes is the hype per se. So the big promises, the big bang and, really going aggressively towards it because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a gift and a curse, like getting attention is really hard, but maintaining attention is harder. Right. And, and that's kind of like one of the key problems because then you start falling into that trap of like how you keep feeding this machine.

Right. I remember that once we launched the discord. There was over like 25 to 30, 000 people coming in a day to the discord. Like how do you even manage that, right? It's just like, it's not like gradual organic growth. It's kind of like boom growth, right? And then the hard thing is to keep that up. So I would say that.

One of the core things is that kind of like organic, quiet, step by step, kind of like releasing with time, no big, like big bang and kind of like keep building it. And, and the second thing is, just like being very aware of who your clients are or who your audience is, right. All those companies.

The fortune 500s, if you look more than half of those fortune 500s have done something in Web3 and majority of them try to essentially copy a similar playbook on what Adidas has done, right? You launch NFTs as an asset class. You buy the NFT, you trade the NFT and it didn't work really well because the market has been changing and until those companies were able to do it it was a lot of times it was too late.

So on top of all of that, most of those companies did not understood who their audience were because they wanted to appeal to a new audience in Web3 while their core audience in Web2 couldn't understand what they were doing and were not even, So I feel that those were, essentially a lot of the mistakes I have seen over and over and over and over to a point that nobody's around anymore, right?

Like those big brands are not around in, in Web3. You don't see as much movements. You see some, some stuff here and there, like, the, the sports club, of course, doing a lot of things around engagement and membership. Cause it makes a lot of sense. You see, obviously doodles and McDonald's still sort of like playing the IP element.

Pudgy as well with the IP element, but you know, Nike just shut down Artifact and the project itself just shut down. Right. So, I think that we might see a renaissance of brands coming back to Web3, but it's going to look very, very different than what happened before. Yeah.

Stephen: and I think to your point, it's yeah, you have to also save some money. Like, you can't just put all your money in the marketing effort of the launch and then not have some money left over to maintain the community, because I think that's what happens. They spend all this money. They're like.

Well, we're not going to pay people to engage the community. What happened to all those Discord community managers? Are they still around? Like, I used to see hundreds of postings a day for them. I do not see any more Discord managers anymore. Are those, has that job completely gone obsolete?

Diego: I wouldn't say it's gone obsolete, but the demand definitely has changed. I remember like seeing offerings, like you would reach out to someone and say, Hey, like how much you charge to manage a community? Yeah. Like Insane amount of money, right? Cause the demand was really high. I just feel that again, like those, those, those movements have those, those elements have changed and, and, the, the, the goal has moved as well.

And I feel that a lot of what we are seeing right now is much more focused on the actual inside the jar audience, which is the Web3 native people that are sort of like within our community. But the more I talk to founders and the more I work with founders in Web3, per se. All of them, without exception, want one thing.

They want to go mainstream. They want to go to the masses. And what has changed within my, my sort of like, theory behind when I started working with the Fortune 500, which was for mainstream adoption to happen, we need to bring the audience from the Fortune 500 tree, web tree. Right? We need to onboard that.

We need to bring them here. And, and that hypothesis that I had has changed the more I work with those brands. Cause I realized that is rather the opposite, right? Is how Web3 companies can meet the real world on their terms and where they are at, and that's for me, the main focus of the work I'm currently doing, right?

So how do you get to simplify? How do you get to understand what people need and how you can solve problems for them? How do you get to meet where they are rather than trying to onboard and, explain to them, because the more you look into, like, even the way we communicate within our industry from Outside perspective, there are three fundamental problems that I see on which I've been calling, that we need a rebrand for a Web3, even has been sort of like my, my overall calling this year, which is the first thing is that anytime you talk about Web3, crypto blockchain to, to anyone down the road, the first thing they say is like Ponzi's, right?

Ponzi's, scams, no use case, FTX, Luna. All bullshit, right? So that is already really embedded on the mainstream mindset. And of course that is a cause of an, of an industry that has been built on permissionless and anybody can come and just. Issue tokens and coins, right? So it's a gift and a curse because if everybody can do it doesn't mean that everybody's going to do with good intentions, right?

And, and, and there's a lot of that in our industry, which it's very difficult to change because it, it's, you can control that, which is again, a gift and a curse within what we would build. The second thing is the tech talk on the language. Right. Like I've been in the industry long enough, but a lot of times when I started looking to description and how founders talk about their products, I'm like, I don't understand what he's talking about.

Like when I first seen hyper liquid, I was like, this sounds super cool. But I have no idea what it does, so I need to like emerge myself to get to, to understand it. Right. So when you start seeing like website descriptions or, the way they're communicating is like hyper secure, zero knowledge, cryptographic algorithm consensus.

I'm like, how can that even be a sentence, you know, like,

Stephen: Yeah. You've just, you've asked chatGPT to give you all the keywords are SEOing on the internet and you've jammed them all in one paragraph.

Diego: a hundred percent. And if you go through all projects, just go to CoinGecko and go like. Top 50 projects and open all websites. 99 percent of them talk to you like that, right? So this for me is a core..

Stephen: I researched these guests on the podcast and I'm on their website and they're like. A lot of my questions are around like, I don't understand what you're doing. The documents don't make sense to me. That's why I like having them on the podcast so they can flush out some of the messaging.

But to your point, yeah. Like I don't get it right away and be like, Oh, I can't wait to tell my community about this new guest because I still don't understand exactly what they do.

Diego: There you go. So for me, that's the second biggest problem, which we have full control on, right? Because we are the ones writing the comms. We are the ones creating the products. We are the ones marketing it. We are the ones branding it. So this for me, that idea of like rebranding Web3, This is a pretty simple project to it's a pretty simple element to be solved.

Right. And then you have the third part of it, which is the, the way we are presenting. web trade to the mainstream, right? So you have a, already an existing image that they have just because they got bombarded by that information. Then they have a position, which is like how, we are positioned the products to them, but then we also have the way we are presenting that, right?

Like the, the, the kind of like on your face, which is, we are very proud to say that this is the wild west. And we keep saying this is the Wild West, Web3 is the Wild West, this is the Wild West. I'm part of the problem. I'm not here to point fingers and say you guys are full of shit. No. My newsletter today is called the Wild West of Web3. Right? And we like it and we think it's exciting. But once you put yourself on their shoes, Nobody wants to be on the Wild West, right? Like it's not, it's not fun. You don't want to like jump on a boat with a drunk captain that doesn't know where it's going. It's kind of like, oh, we gotta figure out a way. Like, no, we don't want to do that. No human. Still..

Stephen: Makes for a good story if you're listening to it, but you wouldn't want to be the person that are like, Hey, I'm going to buy into this boat trip with the drunken, but it makes for a good story after the fact, if your friend did it, then you could tell it to other people.

Diego: Yeah, if he comes back.

Stephen: Exactly. Talk to me. Cause you have.

Diego: like, for me, the core element of it. And we have control of it, right? We definitely have control on how we change that image. How we show it's evolving. How we show and sort of like shift that, so, that's, that's a lot of kind of like how I've been.

He's spending my time on this and it's not just like the, the pink beanie man telling you that that's what it is. You, you got to look at the numbers as well, right? Cause if you see like the amount of active Web3 wallets that we have in our industry today, active meaning you are there, you go into dApps, you engaging with it, you using on a daily basis, that's about 10 million, right?

Active Web3 wallets that are engaging with decentralized applications. If you're looking to the amount of people that are holding crypto. Right, that, have it, doesn't mean that they use it every day. Can be your friend that you told him to buy Cardano in 2017 or XRP and he bought it and he never came back.

There's about 550 million people holding crypto, right? And if you look into like, the internet Usage, there's 5. 5 billion people using the internet, right? So if what I have told you before doesn't make you believe on, on, this thing isn't necessarily going where we think it is, the numbers don't lie, right?

So if we keep saying that the web tree is the next evolution of the internet and we are building the next evolution of the internet, we're not winning. We're not winning right now. Right. And, and that's kind of like where I think that a rebrand in a way of like. Reshaping the way the industry things and understanding that if mainstream is the goal, then how do we talk to them should be the first thing we should be thinking of.

That's kind of like why I'm trying to raise the flag.

Stephen: And for the rebrand, what do you think about things like AI? And then secondly, like, does the Trump meme coins and the millennium meme coins help or hurt the rebrand, in your opinion?

Diego: Yeah, the, the AI question is, is, is a really good question because I literally made a post about it today, literally today because since it got to be like more a mainstream conversation, especially because of course, ShareGPT, most of the people came about, especially in our industry or a little bit outside of our industry or people that hate our industry, which there's a lot. They just came out and said like "Oh there we go it's over, right? Blockchain is dead, Web3 is dead, Metaverse is dead, AI is everything, right. And the simplest way you can always get back to those people was saying like "look at your phone. Just look at your phone. Your phone is a stack of technology that put together enable you to have magic at your hand.

Right? So you shouldn't be looking at AI as one technology and then blockchain as another technology and immersive experience as another technology. It's a set of technology that is put together under the right use case can shape experience for better. So, I wouldn't say that like Web3 is that, but what I see is a combination of those different technologies where immersive experience is the interface.

Blockchain is the database and logic's AI, right? So we kind of like are evolving that tech stack and, and reshaping the way we communicate and engage as humans on the internet. And obviously now as agents as well, right? So I feel that that's the way I'm looking at it.

Stephen: our phone, right? We're adding more applications and AI is just one of those additional apps that we can now use at our fingertips,

Diego: A hundred percent. Yeah. And there is, there is use case for centralized AI, but there's a lot of use case as well for decentralized AI. There's a use case for web two agents sitting in silos, but also there's use case for, web3 agents. Being decentralized and, and all of that. Right. But the thing that makes me the most excited about Web3 AI kind of like blockchain and AI that the combination of the two.

Is that I cannot think in a world on which AI agents will use the banking system as their currency, right? Or their, their sort of like payment rails, right? Because if you are in North America and I would be in Asia and I send you a wire money to you, it's going to take a fucking week to clear.

Stephen: if it does.

Diego: If it, if at

Stephen: If you don't have to call your bank three times to give them the exact information to deposit into your account before they send it back to the, to the sender.

Diego: Yeah. So if we are going to live in a world on which AI agents will do a lot of things for us digitally, through us prompting and telling them what to do when they come back with results in a global economy, there isn't a better use case than cryptocurrencies and that doesn't even have to be like Bitcoin and Ethereum, whatever, it can be as simple as stable coins.

Right. As simple as stable coins is it's, it's in seconds, it's safe. And it's, it's, a fraction of the cost. So that for me is kind of like what really excites me and everything else can be built upon it. Right.

Stephen: Talk to me about the metaverse. You said the metaverse is dead. At least NFTs have made a comeback, Pudgy Penguins, everyone's coming out with their own token. There's been other elements of like that 2021 DeFi summer. But the metaverse is the only thing that hasn't rebranded or reinvented itself in, 2020 up until 2025.

Talk to me. I don't see any more metaverse gurus. You're on LinkedIn. You don't see any more people at metaverse. There was like the metaverse. I forgot the metaverse woman's name. But even she changed it to spatial experiences. Talk to me about the metaverse. Is it dead? Is it something that's going to be, long term?

Or is it something that needs to be added in? Do we need to add in more elements or do we need to ease into it? Like, we saw a lot of AR applications at some of the NFT events that you go to. What are your thoughts about the metaverse?

Diego: Yeah. I, I got to talk a lot about the metaverse within that, that, that hype cycle as well, when one of the main things I was saying is for me, the metaverse always has been an evolution of how we connect, we connect with each other digitally. As humans and nothing else than an evolution on the interface of that, right?

So essentially the immersive elements to it on, on how we connect, we still like, even now we are on those boxes, right? I see you in a box and you see me in a box and it's all 2d. It's a very different experience than if we would be. together in the room right now, right? It's, it's, it's very hard to convey that feeling of being in the same, in the same room together.

And for me, as we keep evolving our, our connection ways digitally, the, the metaverse immersive experience, virtual worlds, whatever you want to call it. It's just a way on which that evolution keeps going, right? If you think about the beginning on, not the beginning, but. We're probably the same age when we started kind of like interacting with other people digitally, it was like chat rooms, right?

It would go to like MSN Messenger, ICQ, and you're like chatting

Stephen: remember that sound when somebody popped online. Do do do do. You're Oh,

Diego: You what I mean? Yeah, exactly. And that was the first way, right? And then it evolved and then we added a video and imagery and voice and then it evolved and then it evolved and then it evolved and here we are. Right. And, and I think that the evolution will not stop here.

I don't think it's the last, the last station, but I also don't think that we're going to go as extreme as that dystopian world of like wearing virtual reality glasses and being kind of like fully immersed and all of that, because I'm not really bullish that, that's going to be what's going to replace the phone.

Cause what we are all looking for is like, what's going to replace. That device, right? And, and I don't think virtual reality is that there's a lot of attempts through augmented reality or mixed reality to do it so far. Very, very, very far from it, but I do believe that we will keep evolving the interface of the internet.

And, like the metaverse is an evolution of that. However, it's going to look like, I, I like saying that if you look into Minecraft or Fortnight and all those, those games right now, that generation that's coming from, from, from, spending time within that. Are already expecting the word to be like that when it evolve.

And it's nothing more than an immersive word. They're immersed into those virtual words and they will expect brands to show up that way. They will expect products to show up the way they will expect applications to show up that way when they become the main consumer. So I cannot see a word on which.

That does keep, doesn't keep evolving, but I don't think it's going to be as dystopian as fucking glasses all over and people sitting in dark corners of their house, 24 hours a day.

Stephen: You talked about, being the pink beanie man. Talk to me about that. Did that, you wore it once and then everyone's like, Oh, there's Diego. Or was it like, Hey, like I'm going to make a conscious marketing brand anchor and always wear this pink beanie. Tell me about that.

Diego: Yeah, I think the latter doesn't work, especially for personal brand. Like people that really try hard to make something work. I think, I think it's just not organic. It just doesn't work. It becomes, it becomes its thing because people want it to become its, become its thing, and it's kind of like a.

A gift and a curse, because you cannot show up without it. But the, the way it started was funny. I was going to a conference, speaking of conference and was back on a day where I still had like, PFP as my profile on LinkedIn and people didn't really know my face. And then they were DMing me like, Oh, like to meet you at a conference.

How, how do, how do you got to be? And then I just had a bunch of beanie on my, on my bed that I just bought. And I look at all of them, I was like, Oh, black, blue, green. Oh, there's a pink one there. Like that's going to make people find me. And then, because if I say like, Oh, I'm a guy with the black beanie on, there's like a hundred of them, right?

It's winter. But with the pink one, I was like a guy with a pink beanie might not be that common. So I used that once and then people recorded the talk and then I put on LinkedIn and then I started doing podcasts. And I remember the first time that I went to a podcast without it. And the comments were not about the content.

We're all about like, who is this guy?

Stephen: That's hilarious.

Diego: I was like, okay, there's something here. I'll keep going. And then, everywhere I travel in the world, close to any of those conferences, people come to me and say, Oh dude, like I know you've found a pink penny. Blah, blah, blah. It's quite cool.

And there we go. So that's kind of like how it became what it is.

Stephen: That's awesome. I love stories like that. And yeah, it feels natural. It doesn't feel like I am going to put this pink beanie on and people are going to now know me as the pink. And you can kind of tell when people do that and they're changing all the color schemes with everything they do. What's interesting about you is that you're advising a lot of different companies.

I don't want to get into your finances directly. Absolutely. But can you tell the audience, like, especially those subject matter expertise, how can they get into advising? Is it, is there money? Is a lot of it volunteer work? Like, what would be your guide if you're like, Hey, if you're a subject matter expertise freelancing, this is a great way where you can collaborate with companies, give your ideas and then maybe either make tokens or financial gain.

Can you talk to me about your advisor?

Diego: yeah, totally. So I've been, I would say like the first thing, this is not for everyone, right? Like it's, it's, it's, I come from a background on which I've spent most of my career being consultant, being freelancer, right? So I'm used to that because if you think that. Having a full time job and the market is volatile.

So you can lose your job and stuff like this is on steroids, right? Cause they're, they're weeks. You're going to have their months. You're going to have a bunch of clients or months. You will have no client, right? So there's a very big risk element to that. Now, if you think that that's uncomfortable. Add a layer of the most volatile industry in the planet, which is Web3 to that, and then you have a perfect storm for people that like taking risks, right?

And that's my case. So it works for me. It's not for everyone, but I value freedom of choice. Over safety and over money. So for me, doing what I do, which I love, is a way for me to be free and do whatever the fuck I want. Right? So that's why I choose that. So I just wanted to clear that part up. Because it's definitely not like the most like, the most profitable way to look into business.

Right? Because you don't have your 100, 200, 300k yearly salary pinging every month. It's kind of like, oh, what am I going to do now? Especially one thing changed so fast, right? NFTs were everything yesterday and now they're nothing. Metaverse was everything yesterday and now they're nothing. And now Web3 is dying, it's not dying, what's gonna happen?

And then it's pumping and then Trump launched a memecoin, then everything goes down. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah,

Stephen: mark, we're the marketing side too. So like the marketing side is always the first budget to go, right? If you don't have enough money to pay employees, the marketers, the biz dev and anything on to do that. And sometimes even the compliance, unfortunately, those are usually the first cuts to be made when layoffs happen.

Exactly. Yeah.

Diego: if you're advising because you're not getting shit done. So, I painted the picture because, you know, like, I, I just love it. And, and, and for me, it works so well because I like being troll in a room where everybody's trying to figure out what's next. And I am really good at like collecting information and having a point of view of it and not just having a point of view, but, giving guidance on things that happen to make sense, so, and I also like to always be challenged on like, okay, like this thing changed what's next, this thing changed what's next, literally spend the last 10 months super deep into AI and blockchain.

And now everybody's calling that it's already dead because tokens are down 60 percent in 7 days, right? Overall, across the board. So I'm like, hmm, maybe there's time to start figuring out something else or it's time to double down and really understand what's happening there because If you believe that.

Stephen: I think people miss that second point that doubling down is where I think a lot of people miss. They're always looking for the next thing and they don't know like, Hey, this is probably going to come back in some kind of cycle. I'll just be the most knowledgeable about this subject when it does come back. I think people don't like that aspect of it.

Diego: That's the point. And that's why you see so many people, as you alluded to, shifting from metaverse to whatever and then from that to that, and everybody was an AI expert and now there's just AI experts on LinkedIn. I'm like, holy shit, everybody's an AI expert now.

Stephen: Now, the deep seat. Now, they're not even just AI experts are deep. See, that's where it's and. It's funny, because I go back and check those people, I remember the Metaverse queens and kings, and I go back every now and then and just like, kind of want to see, like, are they still into that space? It's interesting.

Diego: I would say that for me it works so well because one, I am that type of character. Two, I really love learning and digging and being at cutting edge of stuff. And if nobody knows, we figure out together and we're going to understand blah, blah. And I am also really good at like bringing those different pieces together.

Right? So. That, that's why, that's why for me it works and makes sense and having exposure to a bunch of clients at the same time that I don't get too caught up with execution so I can have a, five, six, seven different projects at the same time gives me exposure to a bigger picture. And when I'm at the table, a lot of times it's like, Oh, I need to connect with that person.

Have you heard of that? Here's a new use case. Do, do, do, do, do, do. So I'm just pulling stuff together. And then when they start putting this together, it makes sense for whatever strategy it's going on moving forward, right? So that, that's the way I look at that. Now, if you, if you look in the financials of it, it's really difficult because it varies so much, right?

There's a point of, if you're at the top of the hype and you're the top man at the top of the hype, it's going to be one price. But that's not going to be sustainable and that's going to keep shifting and you're going to need to be able to sort of like plan ahead and, and, and understand it's a.

It's a, it's a, it's a business model that works for someone that is looking for that freedom element. And it's a business model that works for like a one man show. It's really hard to scale. So, like the way of scaling is either ramping up your price or having more clients, right? There is no, there is no water element.

There's ways in which you can create IP products, digital products, companies, and so on. But then you're outside of the advisory model, right?

Stephen: That's awesome. I'd actually like, how do you get leads? Cause I know you have a school community, so you're educating people how to market and web3. So maybe if they get into a job now where they're web through marketing, you're probably the first person they're going to call if they have a budget for advisory, or is it simply word of mouth being at conferences or even just podcasts like this, because I think people look at you like, Oh, that's the mean guy is so funny, but when they hear you talk, they're like, Oh, this guy knows his shit knows exactly, exactly what companies are doing wrong and what they should do.

He's not just here, like, sending things through a meme generator and getting lots of views. He's very thoughtful in the process. What's your main lead generation?

Diego: Yeah, so from a channel perspective, it's definitely LinkedIn. I'm very blessed to be in a position which I don't do outreach. So, like I get inbound on DM and then we see how things go from there. So all my clients have gone through that same process, especially through LinkedIn. I spend 25 hours a day on X, but I've never got any business done from there.

So it's just a way for me to stay at the really edge, right? From a, from a content perspective, especially as a consumer. I do create stuff there, but not as much. And then the, the, the mix of exposure, it's, it's, it's overall, like, I love podcasts because, like, I, I, I like, I, I look at thought leadership and content creation.

In a similar manner than stand up comedians look at it you know how they go about like creating a show? They put a bunch of, bunch of jokes together on paper. And then they start going to like very small comedy clubs, right? And then they just start trying out, start trying out, start trying out.

Depending on how the audience reacts. They see where the gold is and they see where the things that are not so good are. And then they start iterating, iterating. And for me, like podcasts is a lot of that. It's just me throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks and how I feel about it and how the host reacts and how the commentary from the audience is.

And then from there, I start creating content of it, like short content on LinkedIn, see if that's what people are picking up on, if it really works. If it does, I have a newsletter and then I go write 3, 000 words on it, right? And if it does, then next conference that I'm on a panel, I'm gonna keep hammering that and then I'm in a live audience and I'm really seeing people's reaction.

And if it does, then I go on a keynote and then I'm having like 15, 20, 25, half an hour on stage by myself telling a story. Right. So that's the way I do it. And, and, and I use all those different channels for that content creation, but also the channels then become almost like an acquisition model for me because people get to know who I am and.

How I think and how I operate and if that resonates to them, then it becomes inbound on LinkedIn.

Stephen: I think that's an interesting thought process of kind of going through like picking up on the little points that resonate and then building it out, getting more feedback and then using it as a long form content, like, and then basically that, chops up to, distributing mini clips that will then, feed in more feedback, bring in more people.

That's super interesting. What's one thing that, what would be one takeaway from your course? Like if you're a marketer, traditional sense, or a lot of you all listen to this or entrepreneurs tech, they may have a one marketing person or a team. What's the one thing they need to know if they're looking to enter the web3 industry.

Diego: Yeah, the, the main thing, because I would say that based on your question, all of them are a web and web two companies. The main thing you have to look at is what's in for your already existing customer. Don't get, don't get distracted by the next shiny object. Don't get lost on the exciting tech. Don't think that you're going to be able to enter the web tree audience and get people's attention because it's a really, really, really different audience.

A lot of people are in this for the money, so they want to make money and run money, make it, make money and run, make it money and run. So keep focused on your already existing customer, how you can make the experience you currently provide in the product you're currently serving them or the connection they have with your brand better by using this technology and how does that impact their lives?

If you can find the answers for that by using AI, blockchain, crypto, NFTs, immersive experience, whatever it is, then you use the technology for it. But don't go the other way around. Don't start with the tech and try to shoehorn into like your already existing audience because it's not going to work.

Stephen: Yes, don't go after what's cool and try to reverse engineer that for your audience. Find what your audience likes and then create the experience for them in the Web3, industry. What's a, what's one of the best, immersive experiences. What's one of the best immersive experiences you've had, whether at a conference or just one of the coolest experiences you've had Web3 industry?

Diego: I would say like the Clever, the one that makes a lot of sense that I have seen was Unilever with the Toothpaste, Close Up?

Stephen: No, no.

Diego: I don't know if it's a thing in North America, it's called like Close Up, it's a toothpaste brand, let's leave it there. And it's part of the Unilever group. And imagine how difficult it is to sell toothpaste, right? Let alone create an activation digitally to, build brand awareness around your toothpaste. And let alone use immersive experience for that, right? So if you think from an agency side, imagine getting that breathing.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, you're like, yeah, yeah, toothpaste brushing the thing that people don't like to do in the 1st place. Yeah.

Diego: Yeah, so what they did was really exciting because Whoever's got that briefing, I don't know which agency did it, but the, I, I, I went to talk to the guys from Unilever afterwards to understand, cause I, I, I used to work with them. So the way that the brand is positioned is that close up brings people together.

Fresh breath is a way to, bring people closer and love and kiss and blah, blah, blah. Right. So like, that's the brand standpoint. Like they stand for bringing people closer together. So what they did as an immersive experience was that they went to the central end. During the pride pride month, pride week.

I don't remember exactly the term and they launched an experience called a plaza of love where everybody would be welcomed the way they are to come up and share the love, right? Man, man, woman, woman, whatever gender you got come in, you welcome. We want to share this moment of love, bring people together.

And there are countries in the world where people from the same gender cannot get married. And then they put a platform on which they are marrying people digitally within an immersive experience. And the marriage certificate was an NFT. So on chain, immutable, forever, you married in the metaverse. And that for me was like, wow, like.

Brand awareness you, you going against the brand strategy, you keeping to the core of what the message is, bring people together, you're leveraging a new platform for it. You're using the technology in the right use case. And then you adding something else to it, which also makes sense from a tech stack, which is you giving someone a new experience, right?

I'm sure the people that have been through that were like really excited because of the, the, the sort of like a digital collectible that came out of it.

Stephen: Yeah. And it's inclusive, right? You're also adding in the element of being inclusive and like bringing people together, that inclusivity of everyone. You don't mean just certain people. You want to bring everyone together, which is kind of cool to your point.

Diego: So that was really cool. And, like you haven't seen a single toothpaste flying, right? Which would be the first thing. Yeah, let's do a game where, you squeeze toothpaste and you have to do it. There was no product placement. It was a pure brand play, right? And I found that like really exciting from a creative standpoint.

Stephen: That's awesome. Talk to me about like wallets. You talked to, before we started recording about airdrops, that's how a lot of these layer twos and other projects. Air dropping tokens or NFTs. Absolute Labs has this concept of like wallet relationship management instead of like CRMs, where like you're trying to collect email addresses and phone numbers.

This is more using, people's wallets and their behavior to then utilize that to like leverage things like airdrops and other, surprise and delights. Where are you, are you using any of this technology with some of your clients or what are they using? How can they manage their Web3? You drop, you airdrop an NFT token.

Who knows what the person is going to do with it after they receive it or whether they wanted it to begin with. How do you all manage, like, where, what's your CRM for the Web3 space?

Diego: Yeah. So I, I've been working for a company for a while now called Cookie Tree. I don't know if you're familiar with them and they do a lot of like marketing fight, right? So it's a lot of that element of how do you go and analyzing chain behavior and how do you sort of like can create demographics and target groups based on which activities they have done on chain, right?

Because one of the most exciting things of. A wallet as an ID versus an email is that you can see behavior by analyzing that wallet, right? So if you look into the Web3 native user that have collected NFTs, have collected ARD, have connected their wallet to different decentralized applications, have transacted into different protocols, have holding certain coins.

You were able to start creating patterns behind it and almost like personas to identify what that user likes or what that user is like. And the most interesting thing of all of that is that you don't need to know their name, you don't need to know their address, you don't need to know where they're coming from.

But you have the most powerful thing, whichever marketeer is around, which is the size of the wallet. Are they spending money? Do they have money to spend? And if yes, what they would like to spend money on. Right, so it becomes an interesting Element of looking into that and, and cookie, there are other platforms similar to it.

I'm just talking about cookie because it's a company I work with and I can, talk by experience is, is doing is a lot of that. It's, is that element of analyzing it, there are platforms that go further. They connect your already existing tech stack, let's say Salesforce or SAP, whatever it is from a, from a, from a newsletter, from a CRM perspective.

And they connect that already existing ID with your own chain activity, and then they're able to paint a bigger picture of that, right? So, there's, there's a lot of ways on, on, on, on which things like that can, can be a complementary way for, for going to market or for shaping up. offerings or even, enhancing product development.

Stephen: That's awesome. Talk to me like we have five minutes left. Talk to me about some of the projects you're working with. I know you're with Pith Network, helping them there. That's interesting. Hyperliquid. You have some really amazing companies. And then maybe some things either you're bullish about those companies or any other, trends that you're seeing, especially going into 2025 where you're like, I don't know if this is anything yet.

But I find it interesting that the people I surround myself with are already starting to talk about it.

Diego: Yeah, so this network is one of the clients I'm working with right now. So it's top 100 market cap, DeFi protocol leader, doing quite an interesting work for a while now on like. bringing Threadify closer to DeFi and, bridging that gap and, and and having the mission of really creating a global economy, right?

A global financial economy. So that's interesting because it's like on the DeFi side of things, which of course, for me is the biggest use case and the most stable and clear. And quote unquote clean use case that we have within the industry because Bitcoin came from that angle and everything evolved towards that direction.

So this is, this is something that I'm excited about that I've been working on for about seven months, working with them on the rebrand and how they're gonna get more towards the mainstream and the way they communicate with the mainstream and how they can simplify their message. The other side of it is, I spent the last ten months deep into AI and blockchain, right?

So, and what I mean deep is, I've worked with A bunch of different companies CraterBit being a launchpad for AI agents that was their CMO for five months. Cookie, Cookie Tree, which also launched cookie. fun, which essentially is an index for AI agents data. I've been advising them for a while now.

I'm part of a company that's launching an L1 for AI agents as well. There's not AI, which is another company that I work with, which they're in the intersection of gaming on, on Tone, on Telegram, but also, with AI and, and of course, blockchain. So, I spent a lot of time with that. I invested on over 30 different projects, super early stage, within that intersection of AI and, and, and blockchain, and the DeFi, right, the decentralized finance with with AI as well.

So I'm really excited about that. As I said before, a lot of people are calling it that already just because, number is down. But I'm really, really curious and intrigued about not just the benefits that the AI is already creating to society, But mostly the problems that it will cause and which technology is in a good position to solve it, right?

So if you look into deep fake and fake content and not knowing where things are coming from, whether it's true or not, did Trump got arrested in New York? Those pictures are real. Did the Pope wear that puff jacket? Is that true? Like all of that, like, is Elon Musk kissing Trump in that video?

And you might have seen it. So we just don't know what's true. Oh, Coca Cola, new advert. Is that really coming from Coke or some, someone else just made it up? Like this is a huge problem. It's already started, always existed digitally, but AI is just like scaling it to the moon, right? So I feel that blockchain is really well posed for that sort of like proof of source, proof of content, proof of whatever, where it's coming from.

So I'm, I'm really intrigued by, by that use case. I am spending a quite disturbing amount of time in the centralized AI at the moment with the hypothesis that whoever controls AI is gonna tell the truth. And if that's big tech controlling it, we've just seen what happened with DeepSeek, right?

You go in and start asking questions about the Chinese government, you just got, oh, let's talk about something else. Do you like apples? Like, no, bro. I want you to tell me about the politics in China. Oh, let's talk about math. I can solve problems. You know, like, this is one example with Gemini. We see exactly the same when you would prompt something about like, the, older times or ancient times, and you start getting some, some DI inclusive imagery of like, like African American looking Vikings.

Stephen: yeah. Yeah,

Diego: like, I think we've got a little bit to walk here. Right. So you start seeing a lot of that. element on, on who controls, AI controls the truth.

And I think, super early stage, but I think there is a role for decentralized AI, right? Where peer to peer data training has its place. Where, a more unbiased LLMs training has its place. And also the element of People can not take it down, right, as it is decentralized. So if you look into Bitcoin, there is a, there is a huge bounty on Bitcoin being hacked or taken down because whoever can do it can extract all the money that is in that network and so far nobody has done.

Right. Which makes me feel that it's not possible to be done, or at least so far it wasn't. Right. So if we, if we use the same stack of technology for AI and we keep it, decentralized and we train LLMs in a more unbiased way. There wouldn't be a way of taking it down. Right? And I'm excited about that counter answer for a more dystopian world where big tech owns AI and the truth is based on whatever they dictate.

So I'm just excited about that. It might be nothing, it might not turn into anything, but I think there is an interesting use case there.

Stephen: And we've already seen it, for those who are like, Okay, easy there Diego, like you should wear a foil hat versus a pink

Diego: Whoever, whoever is listening in, I'm wearing a file hat right now.

Stephen: Well, we saw that in the, we saw that firsthand in the media when it came to the election. We saw that when it came to COVID. The media was, even up until the Trump inauguration the media was saying like, Trump may not win, and it was like a landslide.

So, we've seen it, and to your point, not that people don't even trust the videos, people are no longer trusting the news, the outlets. They'd rather listen to Joe Rogan or the all in podcast or this podcast versus listening to those that are supposed to be the pundits around the world. Diego, thank you so much.

I know you got to jump. We really appreciate this conversation. I think we need to have you back at the end of 2025 and just see where some of these predictions are. Keep on rocking the pink beanie and thank you so much for joining us on the round the coin podcast.

Diego: Thanks, brother. Thanks for having me.

Stephen: Awesome.

‍