Web3 Marketing

5Inventing Web3 Marketing

The building at 49 Bogart Street: steps away from the Morgan Avenue stop on the L train in Bushwick, Brooklyn, covered in graffiti and stickers like most of the neighborhood's other low, converted warehouses. When I joined in 2016, this was ConsenSys headquarters, a single room in a mostly residential building with no security desk or formal process for entry. The building's unassuming façade—seemingly worlds apart from the gleaming office towers across the river in Manhattan—would prove irresistible to nearly everyone profiling the company, even appearing as the lead image in a Bloomberg profile on the “crypto world” decamping to Brooklyn.¹

It was largely here that, as CMO of ConsenSys from 2016 to 2019, I had a front‐row seat to witness the emergence of Web3 and an important responsibility to tell its story. Marketing wasn't a common skill set among the core of builders working on early Ethereum. When I first entered 49 Bogart, the environment was far more academic than commercial: most of my colleagues were computer scientists, engineers, developers, and a few key businesspeople. My new colleagues were some of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. Some had technical degrees from top universities; others were self‐taught coders and hackers.

My path to joining them wasn't an obvious one. After four years of college, during which I was relatively oblivious to the growing crypto movement, I had gone to work for Arianna Huffington at the Huffington ...