I was orange-pilled during the pandemic and never looked back. I've got nearly twenty years of experience between product and marketing across fintech, gaming/hospitality, and institutional crypto. It pays to be a boomer.
irl/meatspace/offchain and onchain
These days I'm working on bringing the biggest names in finance onchain. More on that soon.
Before that, I led marketing at Gauntlet, DeFi's premier quantitative risk manager, as the vault curation business grew from <$200M to over $2B in institutional capital. My team built a $xxxM+ affiliate program to incentivize and capture early-stage, self-service vault adoption, freeing up sales to target larger opportunities within months. I built and launched the Gauntlet Miniapp as part of the Coinbase Base App, the company's first step toward a consumer-grade, retail user experience.
I was hired as the first product marketing executive at Kraken to support hypergrowth in 2021. Before that, I was a Director of Product at Caesars Entertainment and a fintech consultant in a former life. Go Terps.
tl;dr on my approach: DeFi marketing is hands-on or it's just comms. Marketing is a system that expands the funnel and levers conversion velocity as the objective function.
Product marketers with T-shaped experience excel in an AI-first environment. Horizontal roles give way to those who automate growth systems and are able to market across channels. You must sell the product and know it. Then you experiment and scale distribution.
I believe marketers should know some spycraft. Good product people keep competitors in their periphery. I believe in studying their every weakness and looking to (thoughtfully) exploit them with the truth. Similarly, marketing serves as a spiritual red team: find and patch the team's own vulnerabilities outside the tech. I don't work at Anduril, but I have a couple of their aloha shirts.
We must be closer to the bare metal than ever before of getting someone to feel something about what we're building.
I've never been more thrilled about the chaos of crypto and what we're working towards now. Crypto and DeFi are a black hole, no capital can escape it. I prefer to operate at the event horizon and I've oriented my career that way.
I was born and raised in Annapolis, Maryland. Sailing capital of the world. Crab cakes and football. My parents moved to the DC area from Pakistan. They were looking for what most immigrants are after: good ground to grow and raise a family, build wealth, and create a jumping off point for their children. Money was always a topic of family conversation: the ways it worked, what it could and could not do, how to make some. My dad ran a concrete business after working as the finance guy at a family-owned place for a few years. Al Khan Construction. A short Pakistani man hopping out of an F150.
In high school, I managed to squeak by but I didn't care much to study. Played football. Got to play in the state finals at Ravens stadium in Baltimore. Goofed off. After some self-realization, I took college more seriously. Studied at the University of Maryland. Go Terps. I knew I wanted to study business. I joked with my dad that I chose finance because it was the least-slacker major in the biz school. I learned about valuation from Aswath Damodaran's book. One of my professors created strategies for Goldman. Another took us to Omaha for the Berkshire shareholders meeting. We spent a day at the Federal Reserve. I thought maybe it'd be cool to work for the World Bank? I was late to applying to the investment banking and trading summer internships, so I worked for a small PE shop in DC for free. Slept on the metro ride from College Park to Farragut West. I cold-emailed a bunch of VCs and told them I wanted to work in tech-finance. I didn't even really know wtf that meant. I was green. But it seemed like a way to deal with the financial crisis, which had torpedoed plans for many of us in 2008. It seemed like SF/Silicon Valley might have more opportunities than NYC. So I flew out.
I stayed at an aunt's house in Palo Alto, met a couple startups, and spent an evening wandering Sand Hill Road slipping my resume under a few VC doors. I got walked by security a couple times that night. They were confused more than anything. "I think these guys do better with emails, kid." Tim Draper (of Silk Road BTC auction fame…and, erm, Tezos?) of all people responded and invited me to interview with his team. I got grilled for 5 minutes by Steve Jurvetson and a few others before they realized I had no idea what I was doing. "Come back to us when you've been in the trenches a bit." I had somehow snagged a meeting with Frank Quattrone's team just after he formed Qatalyst. Same feedback. I did a few IBD superdays in NYC but none landed. Amazing who you can meet if you just ask.