#78 Championing Crypto: Coinbase’s UK Country Director, Elke Karskens

0:00We're working really on updating the financial system that was built over 100 years ago. And our mission is really to create economic freedom and opportunities for everyone.

0:18We have not had anyone from the crypto space for quite a while. So I was very excited about this one. Elka Karskens has had an amazing career in internal communications and B2C marketing, working for some of the world's most disruptive companies. We talk about her time at TomTom, Skype, Facebook, and most recently Coinbase. We discuss at length what makes these companies so special, and we talk about the culture at these organizations, especially Facebook, which had such a profound effect on her career. We also discuss crypto and her view on how Web3 and blockchain is potentially going to change the world of banking.

0:59we talk about how she manages her successful career alongside being a mum of three and also the importance of believing in yourself to learn and adapt elka has moved into industries which have been quite alien to her to start with in very senior roles so she's had to pick a lot up quite quickly and that could be quite daunting it was fascinating to hear her talk about that this is an inspiring conversation with a lady who has contributed so much to companies who have disrupted legacy industries. This is an amazing conversation. I took so much from it and I could have spoken to her for so much longer.

1:37It's Elke Karskens.

1:43Elke, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders podcast. How are you in sunny Amsterdam today? Gary, thank you so much for having me, you know, doing well. I've been really excited about this one. I'm a big fan of Bitcoin and crypto, as some of the listeners know, and we're really looking forward to chatting through your amazing career. So let's start with this one then, Elke. What does good leadership mean to you? That's an interesting question and one that I think throughout my career have done a lot of thinking about. I've had the fortune of working at some amazing companies throughout my career.

2:13I've been at TomTom, Skype, Facebook, obviously now at Coinbase, and I've been exposed to some amazing leadership and I think what all of these incredible leaders have in common is is very much the ability of fostering and creating an environment and of safety and trust and really empowering people to thrive at the most basic human level like professionally as well as personally like all that people are looking for is being recognized valued and respected and I think if you translate that to the workplace as well like creating an environment in which people can thrive and be their absolute best and are not afraid to take risks, calculated risk, obviously.

2:51It will create a sense of belonging and longer term, like greater commitment as well. And at a company like Facebook, the leadership was truly outstanding. And I think it definitely informs and has set the example of what other companies perhaps want to start sort of embracing a little bit more as long as they can, if you think about them standing the test of time. I think an example there is like we had all of these posters around the office that really talked about like fail harder. And what they really did, like they encouraged people to really to try new things. And we had this culture of celebrating failure or perhaps better said more like learnings.

3:27And because there was an environment of safety and trust, people felt that they can do new things. They very much believed in people's competence wholesale and overall. Like if you are good at one thing, you're probably good at something else as well. And there was a lot of freedom to be able to try new things. But again, like if you don't instill an environment in which people feel comfortable taking those risks, you're not going to get the best out of people. And more often than not, I think when you give people that freedom to try new things, you'll see results both on the business side as well as on the personal side.

4:01I did a lot of work back in the day for our SaaS business, which was called Workplace. We did a lot of studies. We asked people like what fundamentally makes you join a company or stay at a company and beyond the core benefits of obviously like pay, like secondary, primary benefits. Like people want to be heard. They want to be valued. They want to have a voice. They want to understand what the leadership stands for that they work for. So I think fundamentally good leadership demonstrates itself in a culture and environment where, yeah, where I guess safety and trust is truly fostered. We're going to see a shift in the companies that will be able to stand the test in time because of how these leaders show up.

4:40And especially with millennials and Gen Z, like what is expected and the norm and what truly drives retention looks very different than what I did 30 years ago. Yeah, the younger generation, they obviously don't like this autocratic, top-down leadership style quite clearly. And they vote with their feet, don't they? Just look at the attrition rates in companies who manage in that way. We have obviously had Steve Hatch on the podcast, and I recall him talking a lot about this point, actually, about having this balance between structure and basically staff having creative autonomy to have their voice heard, to be innovative, to push things forward on their own accord.

5:22it comes from that culture in silicon valley i think doesn't it which is and that out of that culture has come some of the most impactful technologies in the world and you know it's uh it's definitely about getting that right yeah and the celebration that good things come from anywhere and i guess this is a story that has been told multiple times but like at facebook like the social plugin so the likes of the like button etc like those were projects that were built by people who weren't tasked with building those particular functions and features these were part of of hacks which we had at the well i assume meta still doesn't today but really giving people the freedom to to yeah explore areas that they're interested and are passionate about and being given that freedom to explore that further i learned a lot from facebook very much on on the front of like empowerment the celebration of failure and really embracing learnings and i think we see that at coinbase as well like continuous learning is one of our key values and and that sort of pulls through as a red line in how we operate and the work that people take on.

6:24Yeah, for sure. I want to come back to that, Elke, because I think that's fascinating. And I'd love to break that down a little bit more and certainly talk about what lessons you took into your role with Coinbase. But first of all, let's rewind the clock back to the beginning. Let's go back. Yeah. Growing up in the lovely city of Amsterdam, obviously you went to Amsterdam University and you got your first break in internal communications and marketing with the very well-known Dutch company TomTom. So talk us through that period in your life. Why did you go in that direction, internal comms and marketing?

6:57What pushed you on that path? I think that's a good question. And I ask myself that's quite frequently actually as well. I come from a really nice and wholesale family background. My parents both worked in the non-profit sector and I guess growing up and in my youth there wasn't a lot of pressure of being successful in the traditional sense I had no one pushing me like you should study law or you need to study medicine you should become a doctor like my parents very much raised me with this idea of the importance of the greater good and personal happiness so I was let completely free in in making decisions of what it was that I wanted to explore from a very early age I actually started working.

7:36I think at the age of 12, 13, I started serving in restaurants. I'm not sure that was even legal at the time. But to me, having a job and working and making my own money really gave me a sense of freedom. But alongside my studies, I did take it seriously, but I intentionally chose a topic that was very, very broad. Unlike the UK, in the Netherlands, people tend to choose a certain direction because that is what they foresee themselves working in. So I figured that economics was broad enough to buy me a little bit more time to really figure out what it is that I wanted to do. But as I sort of went through my years, I did always work.

8:14So I actually got my first job at TomTom when I was still in university. For those of you that are not that familiar with TomTom, a portable navigation provider. Yeah, they were revolutionary, weren't they? Absolutely revolutionary. They took the sat-nav world ahead like two or three levels, didn't they, within a short period of time. I remember they were a real big deal back in the day before Google Maps, pre-Google Maps. They were the biggest one, weren't they? They were. And I actually, I joined when they hadn't launched their TomTom Go yet. So the TomTom Go was that standalone device that you could plug in your car and it basically like told you where to go.

8:48Like I joined pre that. You were able back then to pair a wireless GPS receiver with a PDA, which was, I guess, like a personal assistant device back in the day. and then we launched the TomTom Go and it was truly revolutionized with the way people navigate and we had a CMO at the time that was really, really big and bold on getting this as far as we could. So I really joined in sort of those heydays. It must have been a really exciting place to be there though you must have learned a lot from that experience, Elke, yeah? Totally learned a lot. I quickly moved out of customer support and I took on an internal comms role there.

9:24They offered for me to go to the UK where I ended up leading on our trade marketing. And that sounds a bit more glamorous than what it really was. Back then, we relied on retailers, mainstream retailers like Halfords, for example, and Curry's who were selling these devices. So I was responsible for basically schlepping across the UK and educating these sales teams and training them really on what these devices were competent of. So yeah, it was a fantastic learning school, especially as I was still in university as well at the time. So you obviously left TomTom. And a couple of years later, you ended up in London, I think, didn't you?

9:58It's been Skype. I did. Who were another game-changing company that we've kind of forgotten about. Skype video calls or what we're doing now. They kind of invented the genre, didn't they? So tell us a little bit of your time on Skype. And what did you learn from that experience? Absolutely. I joined Skype and actually wrote my thesis at Skype about instant messaging. And that's, again, like it feels so weird even saying that now because messaging is such a part of our everyday life. But yeah, when I joined Skype, like they were very much one of those companies and brands that had products. Again, they fundamentally changed something for humanity in a way.

10:33Like it was a game changer around communication. When you would tell your neighbor that you worked at Skype, everybody would have a story like, oh my God, I have a sister who lives in Australia and I get to see my nieces. It basically brought people much, much closer together. And being part of that journey was absolutely fascinating. When I joined the company, it was relatively big as well, but I want to say I was part of that truly scale-up phase. Part of the teams that very much was able to bring Skype to different type of devices. So I did a lot of work around, back then, connected TVs also weren't a thing, but we had that first generation of connected TVs come to market and like embedding Skype onto basically any surface that would allow for video calling and really enabling that.

11:16In addition to that, this was also in the time when making calls abroad was very, very expensive. You would, if you had family members or friends living overseas, you would likely call them once a week. You would not be spending an enormous amount of money and be very thoughtful about like who you would be speaking to again because of the cost associated with it. And Skype removed all of that. So we also started introducing features around low cost calling. So we really solved a lot of problems, not just like bringing people close together because of the video calling functionality and feature.

11:48but also by offering low-cost calling solutions to people. Being part of that was incredibly fascinating. Learned a lot. I think this is another company where there was a very strong culture of, again, like trust and safety. There was people were empowered to build, to think outside of the box, to run with big ideas. There were more opportunities and ideas that the business could really service at the time. I learned a lot there as well. It was also for the first time I was really thrown into the deep end. And when you work in a non-technical role within a technology company, it can be quite daunting at times.

12:22And the sense of imposter syndrome can be very real. The jargon that is being used and the complexity of the technology can be quite overwhelming, to say the least. And I remember vividly at Skype being asked to lead on the go-to-market for a new set of SDKs. And I remember Googling, what is an SDK? As I was having some of the meetings with the product teams. like fundamentally trying to understand how apis worked at citra that was like an incredible experience in the sense of like learning that you can understand you can learn anything as long as you put your mind to it and it's okay to ask questions and not be familiar with everything because i add value and have an understanding of certain parts of the business and for example an engineer or a product manager doesn't have and in order for a business to run successful all, it's like a village, right?

13:14You can't only have bakers or butchers, right? You need all of these functions to come together and able to move forward. So as long as people are smart and competent, they can do most things. By 2019, right? 4 billion people had a Skype address. 4 billion. That's half the human population of the planet. That's how omnipresent Skype was. That's incredible, isn't it? That is incredible. I mean, it was people who signed up for Skype accounts, obviously, and there may be some double subscribers, you know, we made a little bit of crossover, but ultimately 4 billion is astonishing. It must have been a big decision for you to leave such an impactful organization like that.

13:51Yeah, it was a big decision. It was a big decision to move, obviously consulted the mentors I had back then. Is this the right thing? Is it not? And I accepted and it's the best decision that I ever made. My time at Facebook has been truly defining for me at the most personal level, but obviously also professionally. So it was a big decision back then, but yeah, the right one, especially in hindsight. Well, you ended up staying there for 12 and a half years. So obviously it was the right decision. It was the right decision. Yeah. So looking back now then, obviously you've moved on since the bulk of your career, I suppose, as Facebook so far.

14:27Looking back on your career so far, what were the big milestones then? Obviously you talked about joining Facebook and obviously a bit of time at TomTom and Skype. But there must have been moments in your career which really impacted the direction and journey and progression you've achieved. I think the thing with milestones is like very often in the moment, milestones, you feel like you're achieving a milestone when you either deliver a big project or your team is very successful in a certain campaign or you are being given a bigger scope. But I think when you look back and you reflect on what truly were milestones and sort of like career defining moments, like I think first and foremost for me is obviously like having been hired and joining these companies that ended up being stepping stones to the next phase.

15:17But I think a real milestone for me was when I was given a much, much larger scope than I had at the time. So I joined Facebook in a marketing functions. I looked after platform marketing, very much bringing like the developer ecosystem onto the platform at scale. We had partnership functions as well. And I ended up moving to California. I remained within marketing roles, a mix of product marketing, influencer marketing, and not in the sense of like the Kim Kardashian's of this world, but people that are meaningful within the tech ecosystem and community and ensuring that their perception of us was a certain way.

15:52A lot of product marketing as well. And there was a really clear moment where I was leading a relatively large team back then as well. A team of like 20 or I don't know, 30 people of program managers, marketing managers, people around the world. And one of my managers left. And the CMO at the time had enough confidence in me or saw enough potential in me to give me a much, much larger scope. And basically asked me to lead international marketing across our software brands. So you went from regional to international, essentially, then, yeah? And also, my responsibility started spanning across brand marketing as well, which it was something I had never really done before.

16:33And this was also around the time that Cambridge Analytica happened. Oh, yes, sure. Yeah, so we can definitely go back to that old memory as well. But really being trusted with such a bigger responsibility was a real, I guess, milestone, because all of a sudden I had to engage with leaders at a different altitude. But being given that trust and that responsibility, but also the right level of guidance to get me to the point where I ended up really thriving in that role was definitely like a milestone and career defining. So can I dig into this time then? Because it was quite an impactful period for you personally and for Facebook around the Cambridge Analytica stuff.

17:16You mentioned that. Now, I mean, Facebook come in for a lot of criticism around that time because quite literally on your platform, people's opinions would be informed of and it was swinging elections, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera. Did that take its toll on you personally? Did you come in for a lot of scrutiny for that period or was it sort of something which was you just you ignored and you just got on with your job? Well, what was that? Can you talk us through that period for you yourself personally and for Facebook? Yeah, I think that like, yeah, that was obviously like a true pivotal moment for the company.

17:52And also one that we sort of moved from being a brand and a suite of products, because by then we had already acquired Instagram as well. And that we're deeply, deeply loved by people to a set of products and brands that there was a lot of questions around that from friends and family, like, hmm, are you sure? Like, working at Facebook is the right thing? You know, everything that's happening? Like, do you want to be part of that? And it fundamentally also changed the job that had to be done for us in the business. We sort of moved from the disco years where it was just growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, to really being in a situation where we had to manage some of the most challenging reputational issues that we've never really encountered before.

18:36And I think also at the most personal level, we always talked about we make money in order to build products instead of making products to make money. And there is at Facebook, I don't know, again, I'm not there anymore, but there was a big, big sense of optimism. We fundamentally believed in what it is that we were trying to do. And that is what, I guess, caught us off guard as well, that there were bad actors that had taken advantage of something that we truly believed to be doing good for the world instead of bad. So that was a really, really hard pivot for the business. But I think personally as well, like I at that time ended up also being tasked with trying to address some of these reputational challenges for the business, especially like in the US.

19:19Sure. No, absolutely. I can imagine it was probably something you learned a lot from as well. Let's talk about Coinbase. Where did that opportunity come from? OK, and where did you take your career towards cryptocurrency? What started that? Where did it come from? I think it's a it's a yeah, it's a good question. I think the red line throughout my career has always been part of being part of companies that are building truly groundbreaking technologies. Yeah. And I've always been at scale of phase. There's a bit of a pattern emerging here, isn't there? There's definitely a pattern emerging. What excites me, it is sort of the unknown, the challenges, the potential of it as well.

19:54Like we talked about it, like TomTom was fundamentally changed the way in how people got around Skype, around communication, Facebook brought the world closer together. And after having been at Facebook for about 11 years, I had my third kid. So I went back to work with my first two kids after three months. But with my third kid, I decided to take a little bit more time. And that was the first time ever in my career that I had a bit more distance from my job and Facebook. Facebook was all encompassing. Like I bleed blue to this day still. And it's very, very hard to sort of figure out what the right next thing is when you are in such an environment that is giving you so much.

20:31so this was really the first so that I had a little bit more distance and was able to figure out what's what I wanted to do next you start asking yourself the questions you've been here for 10 well 11 years back then like how long am I going to stay or is this still the right environment for me the company by then had got much much much larger than obviously when I initially started and we were 70 people in based in the UK and because I had that space I also I started to do just a little bit more research and learning and i think that's when i started seeing a trend of people going into the web3 space and that was again like that same feeling that i described earlier when i worked at skype a very daunting space like the more you start reading about blockchain technology the less you understand and i remember yeah of course speaking to a friend of mine who actually brought me into the world of doing some angel investing who is very much a trailblazer when it comes to changing the game for women and female empowerment in general.

21:30And she connected me to this group of women in blockchain that's sort of like our small group. And it was a super safe and trusted environment where we brought in people that were experts within this space to just explain the bare basics to us. What is a protocol? How does a blockchain work? What is crypto? What is it better? And it was being in an environment like where we were all collectively sort of figuring out the same thing. my interest got triggered more and more and more. And as I started learning more about crypto and the real world problems that it could potentially solve, I constantly, I think, made a decision that I wanted to pursue a career within this space.

22:07And then when it turned out that one of my old leads, our current CMO, Kate Rao, joined Coinbase, that was like, okay, I think this is the company where I want to go. Like when they are hiring people like her, they are very, very serious about what it is that they're trying to achieve. So I started doing a lot of reading about the mission, obviously the leadership team. That's how I ended up eventually in Coinbase. Yeah. Well, I always said, you know, obviously I pay a lot of attention to this space myself. And when people say, why are you so bullish on the cryptocurrency space and specifically Bitcoin, it's because one of the main reasons to be bullish is the amount of talent that's going into the space.

22:44I mean, top-notch graduates from MIT and Stanford used to join J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. They're actually joining startups in Brooklyn now to work on building this new banking system, which aligns with the values of the next generation. Do you know what I mean? And that's just one example, but there's loads of other reasons as well. But I think that was one that really stood out for me as a compelling reason to be bullish. What other reasons are there, Alka, to be optimistic about further adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to impact other areas of our lives? No, I think that's a very interesting question.

23:24I think maybe we sort of need to go back first and foremost what it is that a company like Coinbase is trying to do. I think fundamentally we're trying to work on updating. What problem are you trying to solve? Yeah, we're working really on updating the financial system that was built over 100 years ago. And our mission is really to create economic freedom and opportunities for everyone. And when you think about traditional finance, which is very much sort of the system that governs all of the financial services in which a user's fund is being held by a centralized institution like a bank. In this space, every single transaction passes through a really long chain of institutional intermediaries and users are paying the small fees within this process.

24:13Because each of these entities, they receive a payment as part of their contribution to this transaction. And I think we've all experienced that, right? I was, even a couple of days ago, I was trying to wire some money from the US back to the UK and you're being slammed with very, very high transaction fees for international wire transfer. You don't have access to the money in a timely manner. And that is for people obviously like myself being in such a forged position that we even have access to traditional finance. There are billions of people around the world that are debanked that don't have access to the most basic financial instruments that gives them the financial opportunities to ultimately grow.

24:57And sort of this lack of inclusion in centralized finance is problematic because it does make those tools around like saving, insurance, payments, credit, it really makes it inaccessible for the people that need it most. And again, at the most fundamental level, like that is what it is that we're trying to solve. Which actually then brings me perhaps to like the things that I'm like excited about and like what the future of, yeah, the future use cases of crypto really are. And if we talk about traditional finance stratify in one sense, it very much is DeFi. So decentralized finance, which is that umbrella term that is used for financial services on the blockchain, primarily Ethereum.