Patrick Young Podcast Transcript
Patrick Young joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Patrick Young, with over eight years of experience in the Web3 blockchain industry. Patrick Young is the head of go to market for Galxe and Gravity, where he plays a pivotal role in driving strategic collaborations and business growth. Prior to his role at Galxe, Patrick contributed to the success of Chainlink Labs, a leading blockchain infrastructure provider, serving as the head of sales for the Web3 business at Chainlink Labs.
He focused on forging partnerships and expanding the adoption of blockchain solutions across diverse industries. Cementing his reputation as a seasoned leader in the Web3 space. Additionally, Patrick is the former co-founder of Ledger Matic, a platform that enables enterprises and financial institutions to perform compliant digital asset treasury services.
Well, good afternoon, Patrick. Welcome to the show.
Patrick Young: Brian. I appreciate you having me. Excited for the conversation.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I’m excited about this, pushing nearly a hundred people that have been in the blockchain space, so I’m pretty excited. And you’re hailing out of Austin, Texas. I’m in Kansas City. Same time zones.
But again, I appreciate you making the time and we’re trying to time this between these thunderstorms. So jumping in, Patrick, you’ve spent over eight years in the blockchain industry. How has your perspective on Web3 adoption evolved and what trends are you most excited about today?
Patrick Young: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting.
I think when I first became involved in the space, much of the interest and adoption, if you will, was driven primarily on the basis of speculation and feature promise. Now, there was a degree of utility that existed, but the majority of the work that was really being done was forward looking without much underlying product adoption or feature functionality.
What we’ve really seen over the last couple of years now is a transition to an environment where adoption is driven by real world utility, like decentralized identity, tokenization of real world assets and seamless payments. We’re also seeing, you know, pretty broad acceptance from institutions and governments with some institutional players doing things like opening up trading desks, taking, you know, supporting Bitcoin based or crypto based loans.
And we’re also rapidly approaching greater regulatory clarity that I think all of us understand will only continue to operate or continue to drive innovation and development within the space. I think some of the trends that are probably most exciting when it comes to the evolution of the space is around things like tokenization of real world assets, like I mentioned.
Making things like real estate bonds, other financial products tradable on chain, and in particular, unlocking liquidity and bridging that gap that exists between tradify and things like defi. Uh, another one is probably the convergence of AI in blockchain with things like AI powered spark contracts, predictive analytics and automation that is only gonna continue to grow.
And then lastly, I’d say it’s actually user-centric design. That’s really become a focal point over the last couple of years now where projects are finally focusing on mainstream users and improving the onboarding experience and making Web3 apps as easy to use as their web two counterparts. So really this is ultimately just Web3 maturing, moving away from the hype towards real world impact, and then bridging things like traditional finance, ai, digital ownership, and, and more.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I’ve been in the blockchain space, gosh, at least four years, if not longer. Probably longer than that actually. But this platform’s built on Web3 as well. I just love how things have really started to transition. You talked about that. You know, we’re looking at blockchain as a real world application now.
Tokenization of real world assets, you know, seamless, transparent transactions, AI powered smart contracts. Now, I just had a gentleman on my podcast recently. We talked a lot about that. But yeah, people are adopting it now. We’re making the ease of use for Web3 apps more mainstream, and that’s what I’m really excited about.
Patrick, at Galxe and Gravity, you’re leading the go-to-market strategy. What unique challenges and opportunities do Web3 companies face when it comes to go to market execution?
Patrick Young: Yeah, so I think honestly the, the biggest challenge that exists today for Web3 companies that is, is, at least in regards to their, their go-to market strategy, is it tends to be pretty one dimensional, at least at scale.
If you kind of take a more holistic view of the ecosystem. And it’s often an over, you know, our hyper focus on aligning with the narrative of the month or of the year, of the, of the season, whatever it may be, without really under, you know, taking into consideration the larger picture product utility.
What is your brand niche? Are you establishing things like community trust and how are you driving long-term value creation back to your core users as well as the broader ecosystem at large? Often, you know, we could get locked in and many of us can get locked into treating, go-to market as almost like a checklist instead of a integrated and evolving strategy that really aligns with solving real world challenges like we just talked about.
Prioritizing seamless enablement and onboarding, I think is another big one, as well as creating loyalty amongst, you know, your own communities. And then in terms of general opportunities that exist out there for teams to take advantage of, I think there’s a couple things that are native to this space that are pretty interesting.
One is community driven growth and token incentives. So tokens, as we all know, let you solve for what you could consider, like the cold start problem where you have an opportunity to reward users, partners, developers for their contributions and participation. You can really use that to turn early adopters into evangelists by rewarding them with things like tokens or governance rights roles within the community, or any number of other community centric kind of carrots, if you will.
And that really helps to develop and establish that organic momentum and loyalty that is pretty native to the Web3 space that you don’t often see within areas like Web two. I think another one that’s probably another big opportunity would be this notion of kind of product-led growth. I talk a lot about product in this conversation already, where people have an opportunity to establish real world utility, to define their niche, and to connect with end users in a very material way because you’re driving real world value to them today.
And again, you can continue to develop into that vertical as this space continues to grow. The space is relatively kind of immature at that in the sense that there’s plenty of room for competition, plenty of opportunities to develop into that leader in that specific vertical or in the space.
Holistically speaking, I think teams should, you know, really focus on solving those real world problems for a specific user group and not be solely focused on following things like crypto trends. So it’s at day of the day when you focus on deep value for a niche. That often beats broad, shallow appeal that might exist even on the basis of an in-flight or top of mind narrative.
So I think in short, like Web3 go to market that is is about building with and for your community and leveraging incentives and staying agile in this pretty fast, evolving, fast changing, evolving landscape that we all operated in today. And the teams that are able to successfully do that. Can unlock rapid and sustained adoption, can build resilient ecosystems and can successfully come mainstays of what this world will look like.
And once we have more broad convergence between the web two and Web3 worlds, be a a solid player and a foundational part of that ecosystem going forward.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Patrick. Appreciate that. Certainly there’s a lot of challenges, but we’re seeing, as we just talked about previously, there’s so many use cases now for getting into blockchain and leveraging some of the power and capabilities of blockchain, of course.
But I like how you brought up focus on that community, build it organically. You bring in that long-term value versus that short-term hype. You’re really solving world challenges and there, like I said, there’s dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of use cases for the technology now. So appreciate your insights there.
Patrick, can you walk us through how Galxe is helping products and brands use on chain to drive user engagement and loyalty?
Patrick Young: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s very relevant and obviously I’m a little biased, but it’s a little relevant or very relevant to the conversation we’ve been having so far in that Galxe is really an end-to-end growth platform for crypto projects and brands.
By providing effectively a unified suite of solutions that lets teams tap into on and off chain data automation, analytics, handle digital identity, facilitate asset distribution, and more to drive loyalty and growth at scale. What we’ve developed with the Galxe platform is a collective suite of solutions that are geared towards.
How do you go from zero to 100 over your lifespan and then even continue in perpetuity from there? Some of the products that help support that from a utility standpoint would be things like Galxe Quest, which allows projects to launch targeted reward based programs or campaigns for both on and off chain actions.
So how do you actually incentivize or entice people to get involved, get education about your ecosystem, your product, your projects, whatever they may be. Through both on and off chain activities that are highly tailorable. Other ones that we support through our suite would be things like passport and score.
Those are two of our identity based solutions for managing KYC and non KYC based identity respectively, both of which are as a collective, have about a million and a half users between them. We have a product called Earn Drop as another example that helps facilitate asset distribution, commonly used for things like airdrop facilitation.
We talk about creating that flywheel effect and rewarding your communities, the folks that are early adopters and longtime users. Excellent tool there to make sure you’re targeting the right people and handling that in a very secure but scalable format. We also have things like Alva, which is an AI copilot tool, and much, much more on top of that, actually many, many more developments on the horizon.
So definitely stay tuned over at least the next couple of weeks here where we’re gonna have some pretty exciting announcements coming out to extend upon that, that platform of services. At the end of the day, all of this is underpinned by sophisticated on and op chain data and data analytics to fuel that kind of strategic decision making when it comes to how do you accomplish your growth objectives, your marketing objectives, your community objectives.
So with that, you know, what really create is this experience where teams can work within the Galxe platform throughout every stage of their development and long-term growth. From coming out of stealth to operating on testnet, to going to main net, to capturing on chain users, to handling their TG and so on.
So this really becomes, or has really become the backbone for onboarding and sustained growth in Web3. Our platform today has over 7,000 teams that leverage the platform. To handle their growth objectives. And it was also on the other side of the equation, powering the engagement and opening up that engagement to well over 33 million users today.
So it’s really become this kind of essential toolkit for scaling, growing mindshare, driving and building sustainable communities in Web3 and and much more. So very exciting space to be involved in. A lot of it being very relevant to how do we create that seamless onboarding experience at scale.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing and I didn’t know you had diversified in doing so many different apps and projects across your platform, which is really exciting.
But I like what you talked about here is really galaxies that end-to-end growth platform. It’s a collective suite of solutions, which you named several in there. Pretty excited about that. Obviously at the end of the day, data analytics drives much of your decisions and I can’t wait to see us have another chat and talk about what you’re doing when we get back on the mic.
Patrick, last question of the day. Looking ahead, what are the biggest hurdles Web3 must overcome to achieve mainstream adoption, and how are you working to solve through them through your current initiatives?
Patrick Young: Yeah, so I think, yeah, I mentioned it at the outset, but you know, user-centric design is one aspect of it, but it’s really at a higher level.
It’s that lack of having a seamless end-to-end user experience as a end consumer as well as. A developer or a team that’s looking to build on their stack, whether it be from marketing or community angle or critical infrastructure, you know, the space is relatively fragmented still. We have users that have to jump between different wallets, chains, interfaces, just to complete basic actions or to get involved in specific ecosystems.
What that really creates is a level of friction that turns people away before they even really get a chance to see the value that exists in Web3. See the amount of, yeah, value that can be created for them and the amount of utility they can get out of this space. Holistically speaking, I. Now through our current initiatives and a lot of what we just talked about at the, the platform level and the work we’ve been doing with developing the Galxe platform and expanding on the Galxe platform, we’re really focused on stitching those exact pieces together, and particular kind of creating that simplified user experience on one hand where all of our products are interconnected and are able to be viewed and interacted with from a stand wheel, kind of one stop shop perspective.
But also enabling that end-to-end user experience that companies can be relying on to build, grow, and retain their communities so they can map out what does my growth strategy look like over the next, not just six months, 12 months, but how do I look ahead through all of the different stages of my development and how much of that can I satisfy within one unified interface ecosystem of solutions?
Because at the end of the day, when it comes to where we want Web3 to be, Web3 is not necessarily going to scale on the tech alone. It needs to feel effortless, trustworthy, genuinely worthwhile. It needs to warrant your foray into Web3 as opposed to continuing to operate in a, in a web two environment that is.
Brian Thomas: You’re right about that. You know, if you start to make things more natural, more seamless in people’s everyday lives, there’s gonna be a lot easier adoption, as you know. And you mentioned that, but I like how you’re focused on that user-centric design. It’s an opportunity here to build an end-to-end solutions, whether it’s on chain, off chain, but stitching all your apps together and providing that end-to-end solution for your community is certainly gonna garner some great organic growth and buy-in from people across the globe.
So I appreciate that. Patrick, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Patrick Young: That sounds great. Likewise, Brian. I appreciate the time.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Patrick Young Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
