For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Staci Warden, the CEO of the Algorand Foundation, the organization behind the layer-1 blockchain Algorand. Previously, Warden worked at the Milken Institute and oversaw initiatives relating to capital market development, FinTech financial inclusion, cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Before that she was at JPMorgan, where she was an executive director leading public sector coverage. She also worked at Nasdaq and the U.S. Treasury. Warden sits on the advisory boards for the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment, and the U.S. Financial Technology Association. As for Algorand, it's a Singapore-based blockchain that aims to be fast, secure, decentralized and “the greenest” with its carbon-negative network. It had about 615,000 active addresses at the time of recording.
For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Staci Warden, the CEO of the Algorand Foundation, the organization behind the layer-1 blockchain Algorand.
Previously, Warden worked at the Milken Institute and oversaw initiatives relating to capital market development, FinTech financial inclusion, cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
Before that she was at JPMorgan, where she was an executive director leading public sector coverage. She also worked at Nasdaq and the U.S. Treasury. Warden sits on the advisory boards for the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment, and the U.S. Financial Technology Association.
As for Algorand, it's a Singapore-based blockchain that aims to be fast, secure, decentralized and “the greenest” with its carbon-negative network. It had about 615,000 active addresses at the time of recording.
We discussed Algorand’s ecosystem, decentralization and real use cases being built during the bear market.
We also talked about:
Jacquelyn Melinek 0:01
Hey everyone, its Jacqueline melanic Welcome to chain reaction, a show that unpacks and dives deep into the latest trends drama and news with some of the biggest names in crypto breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious. Today's guest is Stacy Warden, the CEO of the algorithm Foundation, which is the organization behind the layer one blockchain I'll grant previously Stacy worked at the Milken Institute and oversaw initiatives relating to capital market development, FinTech, financial inclusion, cryptocurrencies, and, of course, blockchains. Before that she was at JPMorgan where she was an executive director leading public sector coverage. She also worked at the NASDAQ and the US Treasury. Stacy also sits on the advisory board for the UN Capital Development Fund, the European Parliament's science and technology options assessment and the US Financial Technology Association. So it's safe to say she's quite busy and I'm not doing enough. As for algorithms, Blockchain, it's a Singapore based blockchain that aims to be fast, secure, decentralized, and be the quote greenest with its carbon negative network. It has about 615,000 active addresses at the time of recording the foundation, which helps grow the ecosystem is on a mission to enable the blockchain to be an inclusive, decentralized borderless global economy, which if all those words sound foreign to you, we will get into it. With all that said, Stacy, welcome to the show.
Staci Warden 1:26
I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much, Jerry. Yeah,
Jacquelyn Melinek 1:29
I'm happy to have you. And I always like to start by asking our guests if you could tell us about someone you've met in crypto in the past year that has inspired you and what have you learned from them?
Staci Warden 1:38
This is cheating a little because I think I did meet him a little bit over a year ago. But I got to know him this year. And I'm going to say at the risk of maybe making the other protocols building on algorand. Unhappy with me, I'm going to say a man named Benedetta. Biondi, he founded and started folks finance. And I have seen him since I've been here be entrepreneurial, be positive, when the chips are down, be helpful, be supportive to everybody else in the ecosystem. I have seen him under tremendous pressure, always trying to find the right way forward. I have seen incredible creativity out of folks finance, and he's building a defy platform that's going to be one of the top five defy platforms in crypto, I'm very sure of it. They just keep coming out with new things. And he's a waterfall of ideas. And we have an impact summit in India. And he says, Hey, you want me to show up at your impact summit in India? He's just always helpful, always positive, very hardworking. He's really an inspiration to all of us. I would say the ecosystem
Jacquelyn Melinek 2:39
is love that we need more people like that we do. Yeah. Building in the crypto world. Yeah. On that note of the ecosystem, what's kind of the focus of developers and community members who use algorand, you know,
Staci Warden 2:51
everybody is doing their own thing in the ecosystem, for sure. So we tried to make the most fertile environment for them. So if you know, if you think about it, like planted our car, and we tried to make the roads work really well make sure the streets are lit, make sure you know, there's good police and all of that stuff. And they kind of build what they want to build. I would say, though, that we have a lot of protocols that are a lot of companies that have taken the time to be regulated, and are trying to work on kind of real world problems trying to bridge a little bit of, you know, the real world and the world of crypto, I don't love that expression real well, because I think crypto is part of the real world. But I think we're seeing more and more engagement there. You know, of course, during the more of the Bumble times, we had a lot more activity, and I think kind of pure decentralized finance. And that's a little bit tapered off. We've lost some protocols. Some protocols can't make it through the bear market. But I think those that are still with us, they have very good sense of product market fit. And they are trying to go after real use cases,
Jacquelyn Melinek 3:50
when you said real world use cases. Can you give us some examples of them? Yeah,
Staci Warden 3:55
there's a couple of really interesting verticals, there. One is going to be the tokenization of real world assets. And I think of that in two different ways. So one is bringing liquidity to markets that are not liquid. So that involves kind of splicing up big chunky assets into small slivers that households can invest in. So if you look at something like Rental property income, be able to get the income from an apartment building or something like that, right? That is not something that you and I typically are ever going to be able to have in our portfolio. But it's very good diversified source of revenue, right. So when certain things are going down and rental income hold steady, right. And so it's a shame that we don't have access to that. Well, there are a couple of different protocols building on our ground. One is called lofty AI that enables you in a very web three way right so each property has its own Dow these Dows involved themselves in the governance of those properties. One Dow even fired their property manager at one point and they get revenue from these properties and they don't get this rental income monthly. They get it daily, because it's web three In Web three is a much more continuous kind of source of finance. And so that is one way that I think about a kind of a tokenization. The other way is just to tokenize things that don't exist in tradable form now, so it's not about splicing them into smaller pieces. It's about making them tradable. So another very good example of that is fly Bondy, which uses the travel X platform if you go to the flights and Argentinian airline and go to the fly Bondi website, and travel X has made it possible they have taken airline tickets and turn them into NF T's. And now fly Bondi tickets can be traded on the secondary market, so you can buy tickets for the next four years in a row. And if you decide not to take a trip, then you can trade that ticket to somebody else on a marketplace on flat Monday. Now, Travelex is a couple of different airlines that are talking about coming forward with next year. So we're very excited about that as well. Those are two examples that are kind of tokenization based, I guess. Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah. Another one is called cuantos. And they are, you have central bank, digital currencies, you've got Stable coins, you've got, you know, bank liabilities. And cuantos is now made a digital Euro. It's regulated by the Dutch central bank, and it trades on the algorand. Blockchain in the same way that digital money trades. Well, it's not a Stable coin, but it's a way to bring efficiency and programmability to the euro, right to make a digital and programmable Euro. And they have taken a couple of years to make sure that they're regulated properly. So all of these things, I think they begin to encroach a bit in traditional finance to try to make inroads and you know, for the better, I would say, of both worlds.
Jacquelyn Melinek 6:35
And with these use cases in mind, what are some that don't exist today that you would love to see developers build, if they're listening, this is for you guys to take notes.
Staci Warden 6:47
What I think I would like to see, you know, frankly, more of the same, right, I'd like to see a bunch of different kinds of rental property tokenization, a lot more tokenization of real world assets. So you know, we have another control alt that is regulated by the FCA, they offer the tokenization of wind farms, for example, so that you can buy these things. And I think it's much more important to get the word out and to get liquidity into these markets, probably than doing a ton of other things. But when I look at this in a kind of a futuristic way, what I think is really interesting is the tokenization of things to smaller and smaller amounts in greater and greater liquidity so that small slivers of tokenized assets can function like money. So if you imagine, say a money market fund that is tokenized into tiny, little pieces, why couldn't you buy a pizza with a little piece of your money market fund, for example, instead of having to use cash? I think those kinds of things are super exciting. Yeah, definitely.
Jacquelyn Melinek 7:43
And in the intro, I talked a bit about algorithm. And I want to take a step back and kind of go into that, again, of course, for circling this whole podcast around algorithm and kind of what you guys are focusing on what you're seeing. But of course, you know, this, everyone listening knows this, there are a bunch of blockchains out there. And there's a number of layer one blockchains. And they're all trying to get market share to be the number one slot. So I guess my question here is, if you could define algorithms, differentiating factors, and a couple of sentences or less, what would it be? And then what are you doing to kind of get to that top slot? Well,
Staci Warden 8:16
being a listener of your podcast, I thought you might ask me to do this in one word, so I actually
Jacquelyn Melinek 8:21
will get to that.
Staci Warden 8:24
Yeah, but I think the thing that really differentiates us is instant finality. So when you make a transaction, you're done on Algren, that comes from the consensus mechanism, our founder, Silvio McCauley, came up with a very elegant consensus mechanism. So as you know, in Bitcoin and Aetherium, and other layer ones, there's always this kind of soft fork that can exist for a little while. And then the collective miners or stakers, they decide on one of the forks and the other transactions, they fall off, they go back into the ether, and they're picked up later, that creates problems in particular for kind of financial situations, right, like real financial applications. And with algorithms, you're done, you're done. So you make the transaction, you're immediately final and the block time is only 3.4 seconds. So we think that that is critical for any really hardcore applications where value is placed on chain, because you're just not going to accept that little bit of ambiguity and uncertainty, even if it's only for 10 minutes. So that's number like one, two, and three, I would say. Also, we have pretty high throughput, it's 10,000 transactions per second, we have a very light carbon footprint, we have very minimal transaction fees. I think, of course, a number of chains can lay claim to that. But we don't require enterprise grade hardware to participate in the network. Yeah,
Jacquelyn Melinek 9:37
you mentioned the green bit. Why does it matter that a blockchain is green? I feel like so many people look at the crypto industry and they're like, it's bad for the environment, or it's a waste of energy. So how does this one go against that narrative and to kind of build a new one? Yeah,
Staci Warden 9:53
I mean, I think that's a good question. So I think if you look at my friends, for example, when I started Everything was Bitcoin in the Bitcoin blockchain and the proof of work does by its nature, it's a kind of an arms race of energy usage in order to append the next block to the network. And now I think it's very much more differentiated. And especially, I think Ethereum did the entire ecosystem of service by moving from proof of work to proof of stake making the case for why they wanted to do making the case for why was important to be environmentally friendly. And I think you know, even in a Bitcoin world, they have some good defensive arguments to make for themselves. We though alcohol and we use the you know, energy of what it costs to like charge a Tesla for a year. So it's never been been part of that though. The light energy footprint goes with the ability to scale because you need to be kind of quick and light touch in order to a have a light carbon footprint and be be able to scale quite quickly. So you've got to have them kind of go together.
Jacquelyn Melinek 10:50
I agree with that. But then also, it's like, there's blockchains, like Solana which correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if they're exactly like green, or they aim to be green. But they also, you know, scale really fast. And they have a high throughput and things like that. So cantha to coexist.
Staci Warden 11:04
Yes. I mean, for example, they do coexist. I don't know that much about font. I mean, I do know that you need the enterprise grade hardware, and it's not super easy to us. And I don't know what kind of carbon footprint it has, but I believe them if they say that it's low. And I think that, again, they do coexist, because what enables you to scale quickly, is to be kind of light touch, right? And so if you have very heavy hardware, you can also scale, but you can certainly do them both at the same time. You can certainly scale and have a light environmental footprint for sure. I know it because we have that. For sure. I do think about a stick up for some of the other blockchains, though, you know, the banking industry does use a tremendous amount of energy, right. And the banking industry, I think, would be the fifth after Russia, the fifth most energy consuming industry in the world. If you'd call it a country, it would be like the fifth largest country in terms of energy consumption. So
Jacquelyn Melinek 11:56
that's a whole nother podcast episode we have to do. But there's a belief held across the crypto community. And I'm sure you've heard this as well, you've talked about it that truly decentralized networks need to choose between security, scalability, and decentralization, and that you can't have all three is what people say. And what that said, I've heard you talk about it. And that algorithm has apparently solved for that trilemma. So can you kind of explain that to me? And how that looks? Yeah,
Staci Warden 12:24
I'll see how we're working on it. You know, I think that might be a better way to say it. All. Right. So you know, scalability, I think I talked about already. And that's the easiest of the three security made some unbelievable strides and security. And when I say we, I don't mean us at the foundation, I mean, the brainiacs over at Al granding that are building. And in particular, it is now quantum secure. So it uses quantum secured keys that protect the history of the blockchain. So even in a quantum attack, I hope we never have one. But if there is, the blockchain can be attacked, at least the order of transaction, the history of transactions we know will be secure from that kind of attack. And that is something that we rolled out last year. And we're extremely proud of I would say in terms of the decentralization I think that if you call it the decentralization, Maxis, the one piece that they complain about in terms of the algoryn network is that it uses kind of a hub and spoke model where the hubs of relaying nodes talk to these participation nodes. And that's why, you know, that's part of where we get the speed. And so on the roadmap this year, and I think they're planning to finish this by q1 of next year, we will become a peer to peer network. So we call this a gossip network, right. And so that means that participation nodes will talk to participation nodes very quickly as well. Now, we'll start by having both available so you can use a relay no framework, and you can use this peer to peer node framework. And then what will happen there, and what people have said is that because these relay nodes are whitelisted, by the foundation that is maybe not so decentralized, because that foundation, you know, says this one's okay, this one's not okay, you have the right you know, technical specs, and the right performance, and you don't and etc, etc. And so we'll move away from also that whitelisting next year as well. And so what I hope will happen is that different businesses will come up and they'll say, hey, you know, we have this model of relay node. And we can run this at a very low price. And we're very fast. And so route your transactions over here, and somebody else will kind of have a different offering. Or you can go the pure sort of gossip network or peer to peer network route. So we think we will cut the final complaint about decentralization on algorithm. We'll address that in this quarter. So yeah, we're pretty bullish about that. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Melinek 14:32
All right. That was a bit of jargon. So I want to make sure that we don't lose the listeners on that one. When it comes to whitelisting and nodes and everything. Is there an analogy you can give to kind of explain that as well?
Staci Warden 14:44
Yeah. So what happens now is we say, Look, you are going to participate as we think about this wheel. You're in the middle, and you're the traffic cop between these transactions. And we say you have to be good at that. You have to have uptime, that's 24 hours uptime. You have to have backup, you have to have a good energy supply, you have to use a, you know, Amazon Web Services or another data center. And we look at all of those things. And we say, if they're not good enough, then we're not going to, you know, incent you to run a relay node. And we're not going to kind of allow you to participate in our network in a way that we encourage and we whitelist. And on the one hand, you can of course, understand why we do that, because we need the network to be performance. But if you're a purist, you can say, well, you know, the foundation is saying, These are good, and these aren't good. And so, you know, in a purely decentralized world, which is where we all want to get to the foundation probably shouldn't be, you know, having a view, anybody should be able to run a relay node. And so that's what we're moving towards this year. Okay.
Jacquelyn Melinek 15:44
Okay, that makes sense. And even though Algren is decentralized, you're a part of the foundation, what role does it play in kind of navigating the blockchain or building out its ecosystem? Yeah, so
Staci Warden 15:58
I think we've got a couple of different roles. First of all, we built tools to make the developer experience as good as it can be. So Alcor and they build the protocol. And they kind of didn't really care in the past how easy it was to build on it for developers. And so the Foundation came along. And when I hired our CTO, John Woods, he made this his number one priority that we want to make that a developer experience as easy as possible. So now starting in, we rolled this out in February, you will only need Python you only need to know Python in order to code on Algren and Python is the number one programming language in the world. So it's our job to make it as friendly to developers to bring in developers and to make it as easy for them. So we also do things around that we just finished a big hackathon called buildable hackathon, we partnered with some industry leaders to do that. And we gave you know, a bunch of prizes away a bunch of money away and try to get people to build really interesting protocols on Algren. So we do all of that kind of development, we have Developer Relations is run by the Foundation. So if you're building something, and you've got a problem, you can get on our Discord channel. And you know, so that's probably the biggest thing. The second thing though, is we try to help those people that are building on Algren in financial and also non financial ways. So algorand Ventures will provide funding to companies like an algorithm. And we have a whole team of people that talks to companies and protocols, make sure that they're okay, keeps in touch with them tries to bolster them in friendly kind of non monetary ways. And then the third is governance, we run the governance program. So we now have a very, I would say, large and committed population of governors that vote on various things that we're doing. Last year, we turned over our entire grant making program to the governors. So now if you want to get money to build your protocol or your project, and I'll grant you now submit that to the governors and we of course, help, right, we build a voting tool for them, and we help kind of organize the process, but try not to direct it. Once we take care of the community. You know, we Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. We're there to be complained to, you know,
Jacquelyn Melinek 18:05
everyone's gotta have that job, for sure. All right, Stacy, we're gonna take a quick break before we get into the rapid fire round. Okay, thanks.
And we are back. Now it's time for our rapid fire segment where Stacey will answer some questions I have for her. And since she's listened to some previous episodes, Stacy, you seem to know how this works right
Staci Warden 18:27
now, but you don't give them to me in advance. Right. So there is thinking I know. That
Jacquelyn Melinek 18:32
is true. The guests do not get the rapid fire questions advanced, they usually don't even get any of these questions in advance. So you got to give them a little credit for the responses that they're coming up with on the fly. But to start before Algor and Stacey, you had a career in traditional finance, we talked about it yes or no. Do you see a future where traditional finance is heavily involved in the blockchain moreso than what we're seeing today?
Staci Warden 18:54
100% up?
Jacquelyn Melinek 18:55
Do you think Trad fi institutions will ever take over the crypto world
Staci Warden 18:58
not take over but I think we'll meet in the middle.
Jacquelyn Melinek 19:02
Speaking of your career, what three skills from your past Do you carry with you now?
Staci Warden 19:07
So one is leadership. Two is understanding of markets from banking and three is maybe mental toughness just I've been through some you know, I was at the NASDAQ during the.com crash I was a JP Morgan during the global financial crisis so when a bear market comes in crypto, it's not my first time to pray tough, tough times. Yeah,
Jacquelyn Melinek 19:33
yeah. You're in crypto during the bear market. I mean, they're all comparing
Staci Warden 19:39
them all I'm just saying I you know, I happen to be there during
Jacquelyn Melinek 19:42
No no, of course not. We talked about the use cases in the beginning of this episode, but which of the use cases on algorithm is the most exciting to you right now. So
Staci Warden 19:51
this is where you get me in trouble, you know, by you could give a little
Jacquelyn Melinek 19:55
bit longer of an explanation. But I
Staci Warden 19:59
you know, I have spent my entire career caring about financial inclusion. And so I really care about that. And I care about access to capital. So the more people that have company can bring into the financial system, the more excited I am about that. And so just a couple that, you know, one is called Hassan pay, and some pay is making really all of the meaningful payments now into Afghanistan, they are on our grand, and they allow illiterate women, and they target women, they allow illiterate women to pay, and they've paid over a million dollars in electricity bills in Afghanistan, and you can keep this money away from husbands and fathers and brothers and away from the Taliban if you have a. And there they are. They are, you know, ready to roll this out. And they are thinking about rolling this out into refugee camps globally into other war torn areas. And so that's the protocol that I really would like to see those guys succeed. For sure. Yeah, another we do is working on disaster relief payments in the United States. And this is a care wallet, again, where the identities of disaster relief victims are going to be held on our grant. And so that the money can flow faster, because the aid organizations will know who you are. And they can get you money in a much more confident way. Because they understand your history, you can build an identity for yourself around what's happened to you, where you've taken money in the past what your needs are. And so these kinds of things that help the pipes get money to people that need it. These are the kinds of things I'm super excited about. I'm also excited about our great NFT platforms, of course, and our defi protocols. And I love all right, dad, those are two that I think are pretty cool.
Jacquelyn Melinek 21:38
All right. Fair enough. Going off of that, yes or no? Do you see a world where Algren could expand into the US further?
Staci Warden 21:46
I hope so. But I don't know, you know, we stay very far away from the US regulatory perimeter. And we just don't have the confidence that this is an environment that we can build in. And so we don't sell algo into the United States, and we're always company. But it would be great. I mean, the United States is a huge economy. And I think that US citizens are very crypto friendly and very interested in it. So I hope I hope so. But I'm not super good at predicting these things. So I won't Yeah,
Jacquelyn Melinek 22:14
I mean, that's gonna have me jump out of the rapid fire questions, because I want to talk about this a little bit more with you know, is there a future where Algren would dive deeper into the US market, which we just talked about? But what would it take for you to come here? Is it regulatory clarity? Or is it something else?
Staci Warden 22:29
Yeah, I think I will not be doing anything. And I think until our lawyers tell us that it's safe for us to do so because we don't want to contravene any laws or, you know, do anything but but what I think is I read and hear about the things that have happened in the last year, I think, probably going to need some legislative clarity. And I think the chances for that are probably a little bit better than they were a year or two years ago, because I think the courts have come to the SEC and said no, you know, maybe your understanding that does not I think the SEC may to certain extent, they said that we have all of the legislation we need and it may become clear to everybody that maybe we don't have all the legislation we need in order to regulate these markets properly. Right. And so if we can get the legislative level, you know, Japan now has legislation about Stable coins, right. So I think we need to have some of that. This is very complicated stuff regulating this stuff. Right. And so the rules that we wrote in 1934 1935, it's not a surprise that they're not quite fit for purpose for the kind of environment that we have now and the rules
Jacquelyn Melinek 23:30
that the US government wrote Algren, wasn't as the foundation isn't really building in the US, what are your thoughts on the recent April SEC lawsuit against Bitrex? Which kind of tangentially involved Algren for alleged security law violations? Like how are you navigating that? Yeah, I
Staci Warden 23:49
kind of feel like it's like a drive by shooting, you know, we're just like walking down the street minding our own business, and then like, gangs, or like having a fight and like, some stray bullet comes over and hits us. And we're, the answer is we're really not doing anything about it. You know, we weren't named in any way, you know, there was nothing for us to do. So we just kind of left out and fight it out. And, you know, we do we don't think we're security. So we can just keep saying that. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Melinek 24:14
And the last question on the US in regards to this conversation is Do you feel like you're missing out on the US market? Or do you think the US market on the other hand is missing out on Ahlgren? How do you kind of navigate not having a footing here?
Staci Warden 24:28
I you know, this is not an Al Gore and specific answer. I think if you look at crypto more broadly, I think it's a shame that there's been so much progress made around the world and as a US citizen, I am unhappy that my country is not participating in this because I think crypto is broadly going to be very good for the things that I care about financial inclusion and access to capital and improving the way that finance as a whole works. And I'm sorry that US citizens like myself will not be able to avail ourselves of that in the same way. that other countries can where there's been really good strides made. Now, having said that, I do think there's maybe some advantages to a little bit of a second mover advantage. So if the United States is taking this opportunity to learn, and watch what's working and what's not working around the world, and we ended up a little bit late, but with a really good legislative regulatory framework, then maybe it'll have been worth it. Right? Yeah.
Jacquelyn Melinek 25:24
And with everything said, What is one word or phrase you want Algren to be known for? Long term?
Staci Warden 25:31
Well, the phrase would be that we enable real world solutions at scale.
Jacquelyn Melinek 25:37
And I want to follow up on it, because we're almost at 2024. Yeah. How will you build toward that vision next year?
Staci Warden 25:43
Okay, so number one, we're going to deliver the developer toolkit for Python and improve this developer to get another ways to and this is huge, is we are going to start incentivizing consensus on the network. So this will make the network more secure, and also more decentralized, that's going to be a very big deliverable for this year, we're going to move to a more peer to peer network, of course, as I talked about earlier, so those are going to be the big things on the tech front. And then on the community front, we're just going to keep helping the companies that are building on algorithms succeed, right? It's not about what we're doing so much. It's about helping our great companies succeed. And then we're going to partner with those companies and try to drive partnerships to drive business to them and to drive activity on chain. So those are the big goals for 2024. For sure.
Jacquelyn Melinek 26:32
Amazing. I love it. You had it ready to go. You got it right. Stacy, this is great. Can you leave us with a piece of advice that you've carried with you throughout your time as CEO? algoryn? Okay, so
Staci Warden 26:47
my piece of advice would be really care a lot about product market fit. I think when you start in a bull market, you have some idea in your head, maybe of you know, how is the foundation going to help me? What can I do when everything is like frothy? And how will this help me? How can I participate in all these different hackathons and maybe make some money and do all of this stuff. But if you ask yourself, if there's no foundation, if there's no grant program, if there's no Venture Program, do I have a good business? And do I have product market fit with your business? And you answer that question properly and correctly, then you will do well, and that's one of the reasons why I admire Benedetto, because I think he asked himself that question every day, and every day, he figures out a way to make sure that he has product market fit. And that's why he's such a successful company now. Yeah,
Jacquelyn Melinek 27:38
I love the call back to the beginning of the amazing Stacey, thank you again for coming on today. It was an absolute pleasure.
Staci Warden 27:45
Thank you so much, Jacqueline. I love your podcast. And thank you so much for what you're doing for the ecosystem more broadly.
Jacquelyn Melinek 27:50
Thank you. We'll be back next week with conversations around what's going on in the wild worlds of web three with top players in the crypto ecosystem. You could keep up with us on Spotify, Apple Music or your favorite pod platform and subscribe to our companion newsletter, also called chain reaction. Links to the newsletter and stories we talked about can be found in our show notes. And be sure to follow us at chain underscore reaction on Twitter. Chain Reaction is hosted by myself Jacqueline melanic and produced by Maggie Stamets with assistance from Rashad Kearney and editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator and Henry pick Yvette manages TechCrunch audio products. Thanks for listening in. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai