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David Wachsman, CEO And Founder Of Wachsman, The World’s Largest Comms Firm Specializing In Web3, DeFi, Fintech And More…
This is an industry for the risk-takers, for the people who dared to do things that may never have been done before. David Wachsman saw the vision of the borderless future belonging to the fearless. He started his firm, Wachsman, off of this vision, supporting clients and companies who are building this future. In this episode, David joins us to share how he has grown Wachsmann into the world’s largest comms firm specializing in Web3, DeFi, Fintech, and more. He also shares his insights on where we are at in terms of the public’s perception of blockchain today as well as in the global macroeconomic system. Plus, David emphasizes the importance of community input, especially in the Web3 space. Bringing his expertise and experience, David gives us a great show full of information about the future of technology. Tune in to not miss out!
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David Wachsman, CEO And Founder Of Wachsman, The World’s Largest Comms Firm Specializing In Web3, DeFi, Fintech And More…
This is David Wachsman, Founder and CEO of Wachsman, a strategy and communications firm advising the most advanced companies in tech and financial services. I’m here on the Edge of NFT, a show that keeps you on the edge of everything.
Stay tuned for this episode and learn why Web3 firm, Wachsman, believes the borderless future belongs to the fearless. Plus, how a simple napkin holder can hold a special place in someone’s heart. Discover how Blur is turning the world of NFTs into a digital pawn shop with their lending platform Blend, all this and more in this episode.
Our awesome community gathering Outer Edge LA returned to Los Angeles in March of 2023. If you think you missed out, you can still catch up on all the interactive experiences, discussions, presentations and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and sign up with your email address to get a full recap of over 60 captivating conversations and performances. It is time to outer edge and chill.
This episode features David Wachsman, the CEO and Cofounder of Wachsman, the platform that can help companies in all stages and the world’s largest communications firm, specializing in Web3, decentralized, finance, FinTech and emerging tech. As one of the earliest and highest-profile PR professionals in blockchain, David has helped to shape the way traditional media outlets view the industry.
He has advised dozens of companies that are pioneers in the blockchain sector, including Cardano, Ripple, Polkadot, Maker, Avalanche, Cosmos, Chainlink, Stellar, Filecoin, Decentraland, Hedera and Tezos. Wachsman is a leading global strategy, marketing and communications firm advising the next generation of companies in Web3, disruptive tech, finance, FinTech and venture capital. David, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. It is great to be here.
It is great to have you, David. I feel like I have run into you all over the country since Outer Edge LA. For our readers at home, for full disclosure, Wachsman has been an incredible ecosystem partner for Edge of Company over the last several years. We run into each other in Miami at the events there and in Austin. It is like having an old friend on the show.
In addition to meeting up here in the States, we have hung out all over the world together, going to premier events everywhere. It has been fun.
Shout-out to a dear friend of ours, Ron, for making the intro back in the day when we were on the precipice of planning our first big marquee event. I appreciate it, David, that when we share our vision, you are all in. Being early is part of the fun of the blockchain industry. Wachsman has been early to the party and helped many different companies establish and defend their industry position, take advantage of new opportunities and deal with challenges. There is no shortage of those in our space. It creates a more sustainable level of brand awareness. Let’s jump into how you got started in this business. I have never asked you this question all the time that we have known each other and it is a fun one. What is the genesis of all this for you and the firm?
It is not dissimilar, Josh, from how you and I met in person for the first time. I was at a tech party in New York in early 2014. This was after the Mt. Gox disaster had taken down the reputation of the entire Bitcoin industry. I met the CEO of one of the first VC-backed Bitcoin exchanges. It is called Coinsetter or at least it was.
Jaron Lucas, the CEO, was this charming, engaging, brilliant young man. He had this Bitcoin exchange. They were one of the top ten largest Bitcoin exchanges in the United States. They had gotten some money from Barry Silver, who is legendary among others. They were looking to stand out in a market where they were selling the same product as every other Bitcoin exchange in the world. You could only buy and sell Bitcoin at the time. That is how these things worked.
The differences were based on trading volume, which is liquidity and the ability to buy and sell large orders quickly. Execution, whether the price was correct. Those were the business things that trigger why a customer would use an exchange but reputation and brand are something different. They hadn’t established that.
I got to work with Jaron from that point forward in early 2014. We worked together for shaping the Coinsetter brand. They were one of my clients at an older PR agency. After about a year of working together, we cleaned the clocks of every other exchange worldwide. This was before even Gemini had come into the market but the competitors were like Coinbase, bit-stamped some of these early exchanges and we were doing better in terms of media coverage.
Jaron said, “David, what are you doing? You love this industry. You need to work in it full-time.” I went and brought a mining pool, a hardware wallet, a software wallet, a VC fund and an ATM network. I started Wachsman as the first truly professional communications firm in the space. There was an individual, Michael Turpin, who was doing it before me. He has become much more of an investor and is a dear friend, whereas Wachsman has become a professional services firm focusing on Bitcoin and later on the blockchain and Web3. It all started in a bar and asking a lot of questions.
We know Michael Turpin well. Who doesn’t in the space? He is a staple in our industry. It may or may not have been a pushup contest on the roof of his penthouse in Puerto Rico. One said moment in the history of Edge of Company.
Never get into a pushup contest with Michael Turpin on a rooftop in Puerto Rico. That is all I have to say. It is a fascinating story and an organic start to it. A lot of things are that way in this space. This organic start is where things coalesce and come together. There is a lot of ambition and hard work but this organic growth of things feels natural and the momentum in the industry bears witness to that.
You founded things with this specific vision here to support entrepreneurs, founders and risk-takers. As we can see and as you get into these new markets, it is a bit risky but those types of folks that risk big can win big because they are doing some monumental things laying the foundation for the future. Tell us a little bit more about the vision as you formed the company in the Web3 blockchain space and where you saw things going from where you started with what you laid the groundwork for.
When I started the company back in 2015, it was the tail end of a two-year bear market. After Gox’s things slid for two years, the Bitcoin price went down. There was no Ether trading. The top ten coins were different than they are in 2023. There were a lot of people claiming that Bitcoin was dead. I remember going to a conference in San Diego and it’s called Inside Bitcoin San Diego at the end of December 2015. It was in December. It was in this cavernous space and a gigantic venue. There were all of these white round tables like you might have at a picnic but they were inside an area that looked like an aircraft hangar. There were only four booths at the entire conference.
There was a good speaker lineup relatively in an adjoining room with a stage but not that many attendees, maybe a couple of hundred but I feel privileged to be there. They are listening to people like Patrick Byrne talk about the futures of securities trading from Overstock.com. Some of the people building some of the first wallets, like Paul Puey from Airbitz, now called Edge Wallet. Some of these are dear friends within the industry but the boots were sad.
If I were a mainstream reporter at the time, I would have said, “Bitcoin is dead.” I would show a photo of that huge room with four booths and all those empty tables. I would say, “This is the proof.” Bitcoin wasn’t dead because, in 2016, crypto tripled. In 2017, crypto 30X and we were off to the races. The vision has always been to help the founders, entrepreneurs and investors who are building out a brand-new industry.
Back in 2018 and 2019, a colleague of mine, Danny Fan and I came up with the tagline for Wachsing, which is, “The future belongs to the fearless.” We think that our clients, the companies who are building this future, our staff and the 175 people all around the world who wear this logo, are people who we consider fearless because they are doing something that no one has done before. They are doing it bravely and proudly. They are conscience to make the right decisions in a time and place where the rules aren’t fully yet defined. The vision is to go and help them with things that maybe have never been done before.
I have a follow-up question, which is a little bit intriguing and may not have an answer here but I’m curious about your perspective. You see these things emerge in the technology space throughout history, where it is almost inevitable. There is an organic growth that is happening. I’m looking at this series. It is called The Men Who Made America, going through Andrew Carnegie, Vanderbilt, railroads and steel systems. That stuff was going to happen anyways but the right people had to come in and make it happen.
How do you balance the concept that there is some organic growth that is happening? There were 30X and 10X of these different things that were happening. How much of it do you see as organic and natural? How much is this spreading the word in an intentional way that you do a necessary part of the growth? It is a little bit of a chicken in the egg story. How do you see that being involved in the spreading of the word around new technology?
Tolstoy’s greatest and most famous War and Peace is all about how Russian hold cadre of them were responding to the Napoleonic invasion of Europe and eventually into Russia itself. The moral of the story, if there is one in a 1,000-page book, is that fate is much bigger than any one man, even someone as big as Napoleon. I don’t think individual people necessarily are driving the overall trend. Napoleon was the first one to do many of the things that he did and so too did Patrick Byrne, Brock Pierce, Charlie Schrem and many of the forerunners within this industry. The Winklevoss twins were doing things that no one had ever done before. As it turns out, they were part of a bigger trend but we didn’t know it at the time.
The reality is we couldn’t have said and predicted necessarily that blockchain was going to take off the way it was because the death nail had been stated so many times. If you had read newspapers over the course of many years, you would have been convinced this was all a scam. Bitcoin is got to be a scam. After all, there is nothing physical except the minors, people, Asics and everything else that goes into it but they like to talk about the intangibility.
What I’m trying to say is this. I feel like it has been our opportunity and privilege to work with some of the great founders in the space. I can tell you from being there at the beginning, “When the sausage is made, it is not quite as clean and easy to digest as it is when the eventual product is fished.” We have spent many hours dealing with everything from the world’s most irritating crises in every conceivable sub-sector of the industry but also product launches that were hard to define.
For example, Decentraland. We have been spending the years in my old company, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, talking about these fungible tokens, what they represent, what they do and what the teams behind them are trying to research. All of a sudden, here comes this ERC-721 standard. There is this thing called NFTs that had to be defined for the first time. We are going to do this in a virtual world that people like to call the metaverse. It is going to be done by selling virtual real estate in a land that doesn’t even exist yet and that, eventually, we will say, “People will spend their time in.”
That is a hell of a lot to say to somebody who has no appreciation of the metaverse, who is never bought an NFT, heard of an NFT or can even conceive of what fungibility is because back then, fungibility was something that monetary theorists talked about and that was about it. Being able to tell that story in 2017 was difficult. Telling that to reporters who had put it down in a newspaper that would be read by many people and interpreted by many people is a challenging thing to do. I don’t think any of us realized at the time quite how big that industry would become. It was a fascinating thing to do at the time. It wasn’t us that invented the technology. We did help tell the story but we are one of many that have turned this into a gigantic industry.
Wachsman: It wasn’t us that invented the technology, but we did help tell the story. We’re one of many that have turned this into a gigantic industry.
The journey continues. You could take what you shared about the early days of your firm and parallel it with where we are, where there is an exposition of what we see on the inside in terms of the robust amount of building, innovation and progress that is being made in the industry versus the public perception of our industry led by a number of mainstream media outlets as well as challenges that have come through scams that any industry would bear the brunt of and would be impacted if you dissect the fundamentals of FTX, what it was and what it wasn’t. I love to have a broader conversation with you about where we are in terms of public perception of blockchain, Web3 and NFTs. Where do you think we are relative to the history here?
We are at a relatively low point. There are a lot more believers. Millions of people have downloaded software wallets and interacted with a digital asset of some sort, whether it is an NFT, digital collectible or someone who maybe bought Bitcoin, Ethereum or another Altcoin. Millions of people around the world have done that.
The perception of the reputation of this industry is down a lot. It is for a good reason. Some of the most famous individuals of the last few years turned out to be the biggest crooks. You can’t blame reporters who are covering the space. You almost can’t even blame the politicians who are talking about this and trying to go and win elections for talking about this industry and giving it a bad name.
You and I, Josh, know well how much progress has been made in this space and the amount of technology innovation here. The reason why I devoted all of my time to this space wasn’t that I was excited about Bitcoin. I kept seeing IQ points flood the market that has not gone away. We have billions of venture capital dollars that have been spent building out zero-knowledge proofs, optimistic rollups, scaling solutions and ways for us to go and build a decentralized internet with infrastructure including storage, compute, GPU and bandwidth, all powered by blockchain-based technology.
When it comes to public perception, it is much easier to go and talk about the mistakes of this industry than it is to talk about all the progress we have made, necessary important progress that I legitimately think is going to improve society but we have to go and get past this somehow. We need to see some real wins, major improvements and things that regular people can do with blockchain technology they couldn’t do before blockchain. Once they had a chance to spend some time enjoying life with blockchain-powered X, we could go and tell the story, “Without blockchain, this wouldn’t exist.” We are not there yet.
Wachsman: When it comes to the public’s perception, it’s much easier to go and talk about the mistakes of this industry than it is to talk about all the necessary important progress we have made that is going to improve society.
Eathan and I talk about this a lot. We as a company talk about this a lot. We are constantly trying to showcase and highlight projects in the space with real utility pushing the edge of technology. Before we have that broader conversation, I wanted to get your thoughts on one trend of the day, which is meme coins. We got Pepe out there doing this thing. We got Turbo.
I was at a fascinating IRL Alpha conversation. I encourage anyone that lives in LA to visit on Thursdays at Budman Studio. Budman hosted our first live episode. It is a special place for us. They have this live conversation around trends and meme coins come up. There are two sides to it. Some people in the audience were like, “It is all good. More power to it for speculative trading on Blur and meme coins.” It is all part of the fun and nascent nature of our industry, which is meant for cowboys and whoever wants to be part of it.
On the other side, there is a perspective like, “This is not good. We don’t need meme coins now. We don’t need leverage NFT trading on Blur. That is not going tona get us any further when we are trying to have this broader narrative around maturing as an industry and NFTs not being speculative assets to digital collectibles.” Are we going to continue to see this trend toward hybrid economies of tokens and NFTs? Is all of this going to continue to be splintered with more fast-moving projects that don’t necessarily have a long roadmap but are a lot of fun?
We need to separate the two things, serious projects and meme coins, in our heads. We need to do a better job of talking about this wide separation and tall wall in between as much as we can to everyone we possibly can because meme coin has been around for a long time. Anybody who has been in crypto since 2014 or 2015 saw a million Litecoin forks that turned out to be nothing other than either fun on one side or scams. We have seen Dogecoin, which has turned into a top-ten coin over time. We have seen all sorts of different projects. During the ICO era, we saw an enormous amount of scams.
Doge is ahead of Solana in terms of market cap.
Without naming names, I went to an event at Consensus in Austin. I saw a meme coin that is trying to create its version of a metaverse. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that we are seeing meme coins being taken seriously by the people who buy them and make an attempt to make use of them. Some people are building real things.
For example, remittance tools are far cheaper and faster than classical FinTech or financial services. We need to be talking about things like that to the extent we can and not talking about Pepe coins because meme coin is fun as they are. Those of us who are within the industry already know about this separation. It is clear to us but to someone off the street, a regulator or a banker, these things blur together far too much and it is causing bad effects.
The fact that we are seeing in the United States, many companies lose their bank accounts because they are somehow associated with this industry. It is sad. These are bank accounts for companies that are trying to pay employees, pay their taxes and do everything properly but because they are next or adjacent to an industry that has meme coins, we see all sorts of negative effects. That is why it is important that people out there who maybe did buy some of these coins and made a lot of money that is great. Make sure you are not talking about it in a way that is going to cause further damage to an industry that is already beleaguered.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
Impatience.
Who are the stars on your team?
No idea. It is Miami. The world is my oyster.
Thanks, Eathan and Josh.