E29: Blockchain Branding Leader: From zero to branding hero, making crypto adoption as easy as ABC

0:00It gets to the point where 1am every night and I'm sat there with my head in my hands going It doesn't matter if I get 20 more clients in the next three months. We're so behind at this stage now that all I'm doing is trying to pay off debt. Anthony, the CEO of one of the most successful branding companies in the blockchain space and living the dream today in Dubai. Anthony, you're also a co-investor at Rarestone Capital and an advisor in various crypto and webbq companies. We've won all these awards. People are saying congratulations to me. And then I'm looking at the books going like, we're fucked.

0:31We made some terrible mistakes. I remember we had this ginormous VAT bill. The clients weren't paying on time. How do we recover from this? The high at the bull market, we were getting 30, 40 inquiries a day. It was ridiculous. We still filter through. Is this a company that we believe in? Do they share similar values to us? Are the team going to be excited? My team were a bunch of creatives. If they're going to find this boring, they're not going to do amazing work. I'd say the biggest problem in Web3 is branding. It's trust and communication. Most people don't understand crypto. It's like a secret club that only crypto natives understand.

1:03And that doesn't work when we're trying to achieve this mass adoption. It cannot grow that way. We had some huge winners. Projects that we put everything. We put way more than the value initially scoped out. Because we truly believed in what they were doing. And they did crazy multiples. And it paid off like you could never imagine. You don't drink alcohol anymore. Why? I'm 35 years old. I've got amazing friends around me. And then I've also got an amazing family around me. Why do I still need to get drunk? remembering those moments and enjoying that that was part of what i had to get through to get to where i am today to remind me to be so grateful for the life that i'm living right now and the people that i have around me everyone needs to really take their time with everything they're doing and really appreciate that they are just alive and here and enjoying you know this beautiful life anthony welcome to the podcast hello how you doing i'm doing great man Why don't we start with a bit of your background?

2:02So can you tell us about the few key turning points in your life that made this young, handsome British boy go from growing up in a village in the UK to becoming the CEO of one of the most successful branding companies in the blockchain space and living the dream today in Dubai? thank you very much quite an introduction um yeah that's a difficult question i'd say it goes back to design more than anything so i started off as a graphic designer i was making flyers and posters and menus and signs for pretty much everyone in the music industry so i was throwing parties and i was working with a lot of djs and everyone i met they'd all be saying you know like you guys have like the best flyers the best artwork who's doing it and I just fell in love with design at that point so I was completely self-taught went to school did not work for me I came out with like two GCSEs so I decided that wasn't for me I attempted to go to art school to do an arts degree quit after one day when I realized the teacher had never like worked at an agency or actually worked on any client briefs I just thought this is not the guy that I want to learn from so I quit that day much to my mother's dismay after that so I'd moved to Manchester at this point from a little tiny village in Lincolnshire called Kielby and yeah Manchester was like the big new shiny city all the buildings were huge I'd never seen anything like it before and yeah I started off there through a few parties started doing more design work for people and this is kind of when I sort of fell into branding at that stage so a lot of people were asking me you know can you help me build a brand not just like create a logo And I was like, yes, I had no idea what they were talking about, really.

3:49So I was like going back, reading books, figuring out like what to how to build like a brand essence. What is it that actually makes a brand powerful? Really like fell down that rabbit hole and like got so into learning about branding and creative design. So I started creating brands for a lot of startups from fashion startups to tech companies to property companies. It was super varied at the time. um and then after that I decided to start a fashion magazine had absolutely no experience but a few friends of mine um we were talking about how in like Manchester in Liverpool and local cities there was no like good like lifestyle magazines and um there wasn't really much premium design happening at this point this is like what would this be like 2005 2006 you're talking about magazines so it's uh yeah there was no like online magazines like i think like lad bible was just starting and a few of these like online publications but you really only had like traditional publication like magazines like vogue and gq and things like that and there wasn't anything that was like like more local and you know uh about what was actually happening in the cities around us and what was actually quite relevant to young people because you'd look in like GQ and Vogue and things like that.

5:07It was all fashion shows. And you're like, this is cool, but this is not really our life. We're not going to these A-list parties. Um, so yeah, uh, put together, it was called La Vida magazine. Uh, I did that for about two and a half years. Um, full time, were you still doing branding on the side? I was, yeah, a little bit of both. So, uh, I think at the time my agency, I call it an agency, but there was only me in it. Um, and I used to make another name to reply to emails. So it looked like we had more than one person in the company. And that was called Branded Agency. And then we had La Vida magazine.

5:38And I'd kind of jump between the two. So I'd be planning out and interviewing people and organizing photo shoots and creating and designing all of the magazine. And I was quite lucky that I ran into someone who really loved the brand and loved everything we were doing. And he wanted to buy my stake in the business off me. So I exited that. And then, yeah, I was pretty confused what to do at that point. and then I got an offer to join a new startup which you probably have heard of now it's called pretty little thing so it became like a ginormous fashion brand that was amazing I was there for a couple of years just anything in design so really just helping them lead in the graphic design and the website and just like developing the brand and really helping them position themselves correctly I learned loads because I'd never worked in like a big company before and obviously no like experience or qualifications in what I was doing so I was really learning on the job how early was this for the startup they just started yeah I think they were like five maybe six months old um so yeah after again around two years I realized like girls fashion is not really what I'm interested in I would just like the challenge and it was like my first real job um so I left that and realized you know what I really want to just go and consult for people and I need to create like a bit of an alias for myself.

7:01So that's when the idea of Noir was born. So that was the, I call it the one, version one of Noir. So there was only me again. And I started really thinking about how we can create brands that stand out from everyone else. And I've always had this like huge love for minimal brands. It seemed like Nike, Adidas, McDonald's, just like super, super minimal, not over complicated, minimal color palette. lots of like negative space and just like a certain style that I was really drawn to. And as I found out, a lot of tech companies are really drawn into that too, right? Because they're super complex.

7:40They don't really want to look like another computer company. So I started getting a lot of clients in tech. And this, what stage would I be now? Probably around 28 years old at this stage. So I decided to set up Noir properly and build it into an agency. How did you even start about that? You know, like what made you take the leap and say, okay, now I'm going to start this company and become really serious about that. And how did you get your first clients? Yeah, I mean, you know, the good thing about being right at the bottom is you have absolutely nothing to lose. So I guess I just had blind faith that this is something I want to do.

8:15I'd never really had like any real money. So I was like, you know what, I'm just going to throw absolutely everything at this and see what happens. and what I did is I just started creating brands that didn't exist and creating like made up case studies of like what tech brands could be and then I started pushing out my work as my portfolio and pretending that they were actual real clients that I'd worked for and pitching it to people and I remember I would like go out in the day like meet lots of different clients like literally knocking on their door like hey would you like to see some of my work with my laptop in my hand showing them the branding that we'd done and then having a conversation with them selling them this like full branding package because I started to realize then like you know branding is not really just about how it looks visually it's about how it sounds its personality its positioning building more of a brand strategy so I started to build out like more of a package of how we can really develop a brand that's not just going to be like a logo off 99 designs that was everything else but it's like truly unique to them and the core of who they are but also they had like messaging guides and they had a full like um like 20 30 page brand strategy of like who they are and how they speak and what's different about them so yeah I really fell in love with it at that stage I was working with like loads of different clients and within six months we had like seven people on the team and we'd got like this tiny little office 800 square foot in Manchester and I was like holy shit this is a business you know I think we'd made 300k 400k that year um or in within the first like seven or eight months so I was like yeah this I'm definitely on to something here so you go from you go from I mean I think everyone who starts their first business they go at some point from like oh this is fun and I don't really know where I'm going but like let's see what happens and at some point you realize actually this is not fun anymore but this is getting serious and I need to generate a certain amount of revenue you know just in order to pay people so one thing that's really interesting about that is how did you think about the setup of the company you know one of the things that a lot of people do especially when they start their first company i did the same is i want to hire full-time employees because a lot of you know one of the key questions that people ask you when you when you talk about your company is how many people do you have yeah it's such a silly question as well because obviously you know you could have too many or you could not have enough so it's like it's not really a measure of success at all how big is your office how many people on your team i i always think that a lot of times when people say like crazy numbers i think like your business is not very efficient because you've clearly just hired too many people and and yeah but it's like such a wrong metric to look at i always just look at what's people's works like what is their portfolio like who are they working with how efficient are they how long does it take for them to do a project did you think that way no i had absolutely no idea can you tell us can you tell us how you were thinking how you built your company and maybe how it evolved through time and how the changes you made and what what changes it made to your life yeah i think i mean we know we know already i think it actually made a big difference yeah i mean i had absolutely no idea and i was really just learning on the job And the thing is, I just, I love branding like inside and out.

11:34It's, it's what I've always loved. I used to drive down the street and like, I used to live in this absolute shithole called Grimsby and like, there's no money in that town. Like it's doing really, it's doing a lot better now. But like when I was there, there was no real good jobs. There was no real money. And I'd be driving down the street and every single building had like terrible branding. And I used to think to myself, like, I can make this whole street look better. and then like I remember going into cities and thinking it doesn't look that good here either and then I really just started to look at every single brand and be like what font are they using how how could they make it better and I just I constantly be recreating brands in my head of every single thing that I saw from like a Kit Kat to a packet of crisps to anything I was looking at so when when the business started to take off I really was just focused on doing great work That's all I ever cared about.

12:25And I didn't really look at profitability. I didn't look at how many people were hiring, how quick we had to get things out the door. I was just going out there being really, really passionate, being like, look, we're brand new. I'm going to work harder than anyone else will. I'll do it cheaper than what anyone else will. I just want to work with you guys because I like what you're doing. And that was good for the first six months. But then obviously things started to come undone after that because we weren't doing things in the right timeframe. we weren't looking at how many resources we brought on board we weren't making we'd look at the end of the year and i remember getting to the first year i had this business partner called alex at the time um and i was looking and i'm like we've hardly made any money like i i was probably paying myself like 25k like sterling per year and like the team were getting more than me and i i was like i had this false sense of success you know i was like oh we're smashing it we got all these great clients every pitch i was going in for against all these other agencies we just kept beating them i was like this is so strange but obviously we were doing it a lot cheaper and we were having too many people like that were working on it and we weren't hitting the deadlines and it just it very quickly wasn't very profitable so we get to about a year and a half in and i'm really starting to look now like how can we turn this into a proper business like not a lifestyle business um at this point my business partner at the time alex i think we'd got to like nine or ten people on the team and it was just too much for him he didn't want to be in the business anymore he'd fallen out of love with it he didn't really love design in the same way that i did he wanted to grow a successful business and neither of us were that business minded so i think we realized that it just didn't match up very well successful business meaning lots of people lots of raising or it's difficult metric really isn't it i guess coming into work every day and loving what you're doing and not having like shit happening you know and things going smoothly and the problem is is that's very difficult to achieve especially for the first few years because you haven't built like a robust system because you've got no knowledge of how to do so i think one of my biggest regrets was just not like going and sitting down with other agency owners and going please just tell me the mistakes you made in the first two years so i don't make these same mistakes um but yeah it's it's it's one of those where in some ways you really have to go and learn a lot of this stuff for yourself and we made some terrible mistakes i remember we had this ginormous almost VAT bill, we had all these bills coming in, and we'd not paid stuff on time, because the clients weren't paying on time, and these are like the fundamentals that no one ever prepares you for, you know, you have one client that, I remember one client, they owed us something like 80k, and they just went bust, and we were like, how do we recover from this, we need that money, we've already paid everyone, I've paid people out my own money at this point and i'm like oh and now that money's not coming so then you've just lost 80k and there's nothing you can do about it um and that happened a few times you know so then we're like right there needs to be a better due diligence process to make sure that we can see people uh that aren't gonna you know go bust within three months and also like how are we splitting our invoices so that we can get paid quicker to make sure that if anything does happen we're we're not you know were risk adverse at the time.

15:41So you have that on one side, which is, as you say, the due diligence of the clients, but then on the other side, you can kind of reframe the entire way you were working with employees or contractors or companies to try to have as few fixed costs as possible and basically shift most of the business into variable costs, which is also, it's all about how do I reduce my risk at the end of the day and lower my stress levels and become better at what I'm doing and become more profitable. And I think it's something that you've done really successfully in the last couple of years, basically. Yeah, so there was sort of a tipping point.

16:21So my business partner, Alex, leaves and he took like a chunk of money out of the bank as well, which we'd not agreed on. And we had a lot of wages to be paid and a lot of other things going on at the time. and what made it worse is we'd won all these awards so on the outside we were winning all these awards and then awards so yeah so we won like best agency best you know all these stuff's going on right so people are saying congratulations to me and then i'm looking at the books going like we're fucked like that's an amazing and i'm like there's only me left in the business now so it gets to the point where like it's like 12 o 'clock at like 1 a.m every night and i'm sat there with my head in my hands going like it doesn't matter if i get 20 more clients in the next three months like we're so behind at this stage now that all i'm doing is just like trying to pay off debt and then spending my own money you know and that's when it it gets quite painful because you're working really hard and then you're seeing your only savings that you have which wasn't much just continues to go down and you just think why am i doing this you know it's not really it's not really entrepreneurial dream that we're being sold when we're younger saying oh you're just going to build this business and you're going to make hundreds of millions within two years and sell your Instagram.

17:35We had all this kind of like tech wave where we had a few really successful companies and that's what people kind of base their benchmark on. And the actual truth of most companies, it's very hard to be profitable. And a lot of companies that are profitable are kind of like barely profitable. And the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurs are screwing themselves in the process because you're not realizing, oh, as you said, I'm paying myself much less. I'm paying people to attract them. I have to pay them more. I'm barely profitable because I have a lot of fixed costs. I have all these issues of cash flow, of clients that, I mean, we don't charge enough and so on and so forth.

18:18And then you start to think, actually, well, I'm kind of screwing myself and I'm not building actual equity value in the company because, oh, I just realized that this is not a tech company or a crypto company that has like potential huge equity, but it's more of a kind of consulting business then you realize am i even working on my you know future retirement on the side am i no chance am i am i am i am i investing some money every month into like a retirement fund or whatever you don't even do it and then you realize actually nothing makes sense except for me to tell people i'm actually proud because i have my own company people say oh it's amazing you have your own company yeah so i was in a bit of a situation because i wanted to hold face because everyone's saying congratulations for winning these awards and also you can't win clients if people think your business is falling apart you know so you kind of have to play the game a little bit here and that's you know there's everyone always says like you know when you start a business you have to fake it till you make it but the point is if you're living a lie it's it doesn't really work and it doesn't make you very happy and i realized i wasn't very happy and um so yeah i i took a you know a few weeks to really think about what i was doing i slowed things down i i trimmed the team down and then i i actually closed the company down and i started a new one and i decided to partner up with someone so one of the biggest mistakes i made and i think a lot of people do this is everyone thinks they need a business partner now it's good to have a business partner especially when you're in the trenches and you're getting shit thrown at you every day and you're not making any money and you're actually getting poorer and you're still trying to convince yourself every day this is the day i need to go to work and work my ass off and i'm going to make it one day it's good to have people then but you don't need a business partner and i think what a lot of people and what i fell into the trap with doing is just finding a business partner who was there and willing to go all in with me but he didn't actually have an incredible amount of value to bring he was he was great he was very loyal worked really hard he always had my back but he wasn't bringing any money to the table so um I'd actually been working with this paid social agency and I met this guy Jamie and I was just like this guy is like a really nice guy and I was just like helping him out I was just giving him a bit of advice and telling him mistakes I'd made and he had this really cool paid social agency and they were doing like 30k 40k revenue a month um and he was like yeah my business is going really well um we've got this reoccurring revenue coming in but we don't have any like big projects it's really hard to scale and i'm not sure like it's going to take us years and years and years to scale and i'm like that's really interesting because i get big ticket projects that come in but i struggle to retain the clients because i don't have like a monthly service that i can offer them as such because i'm building their brand i can kind of help them grow it but i don't have that marketing angle so then we're looking at both our businesses and we're like right well you have that stable income that can pay everyone's salaries and I have the big ticket stuff where we're going to make some some profitability on it and make a name for ourself because you know retainers aren't always the sexy stuff you know because some especially like in paid social I remember at the time he was working with all sorts of brands you know from like dog breeding companies to pet companies to like everything you can think of you know and he was just running Facebook ads and they were doing really well but it like wasn't cool it was hard to kind of like push that out as like we have really cool clients when his logos were just like everything you could think of we work with anyone so anyway i had a conversation with jamie and i realized this guy's the perfect business partner and we both bring immense value uh you know to the stage and what's great about jamie as well is he does not want to be in the limelight whatsoever he loves being operations he loves working behind the scenes he's not even that interested in in like meeting clients he's great with them but he's just quite happy making sure that everything behind the scenes is running perfectly and that's great it's a perfect compliment yeah i'm i'm an extrovert and he's more of an introvert so it's just like a great match and i think that's really hard to find and i think that's where you need it when you're looking for a business partner you need to ask yourself like what is if you wrote down like all of the value that they're bringing to the table and then you write down all the value you are do they complement each other is it going to make a solid business or do you both have the same skills because if you both got the same skills you shouldn't be working together because that's not the right partner for you yeah that's absolutely true and obviously you're going to be more drawn towards someone who is similar to you because they're more likely to be in your group of friends and you're like this dude and like we're kind of similar and he's a good dude or a nice a nice gal and we just do that together and then you end up in these co-founder issues which it's actually documented but no one talks about it co-founder's issue is one of the main reasons why business is fake it's not the revenue or whatever it's you basically lose the motivation because you just you are you are rowing in different direction when you're already rowing against the the the river what's the definition of a great brand that's yes very difficult question i guess one that can communicate very clearly that people feel like they just understand and trust straight away.

23:39I think it's kind of like a personality. You know, if you meet someone and, you know, they kind of talk in riddles or they feel like they're not genuine or authentic in what they're saying, which, you know, there's a lot of people in the world like that. Straight away, you have a very strange feeling towards them. You're like, I don't really understand them. They don't really talk straight sentences. And it doesn't feel authentic what they are saying when they do say things. It feels like they're just rolling things off and brands fall into this trap all the time because you know you think back to um years and years ago you know brands were super cheesy all the marketing messages they're still pretty cheesy now but there wasn't much personality driven into them there were these like ghostless brands with like no personality and they'd only put out very minimal information there was no community being built into it it was just like here's a billboard here's an advertising campaign buy our brand it's great you know someone said so um and i think that you know nowadays we're we're super super savvy to it so if we walk in somewhere and it doesn't feel authentic and the messaging's off and it feels like a copy and paste brand then straight away we're like this this is not a great brand there's no affinity drawn to it i don't want to be part of that community i wouldn't be proud to say that i shop there or i buy from that brand um and there's no like rich history or heritage behind it but if you can if you can build a great story into your brand then it's not really about the visual identity it tends to be this sort of like overall feeling you have towards a brand this connection you have like apple for instance right look at you know any any sort of laptops the design of them the packaging the way it's positioned you want to be as especially as a creative you're proud to say i have like apple products so you've built like this affinity and connection to it and that's all branding that that is literally what a brand is it's it's what someone says about you when you're not in the room if you have to choose one of the following only so one of both what's more important for an entrepreneur today focusing on your personal brand or your company's brand that is very difficult i'd say they're equally as important but a lot of people are trying to push a personal brand when their company doesn't have a brand and i don't necessarily think that always works but it does depend on the industry so let's say for instance you're a ginormous influencer and then you launch a product um it can sometimes be a pretty crappy product and do quite well because you have a ginormous audience but i think that not all industries need to do that and i think there's no point creating a ginormous marketing funnel if at the end of it is a very terrible product that's not been thought out properly.

26:28How did this, I mean, so basically, Noir is focused purely on crypto now, blockchain, Web3, crypto, metaverse. How did this crypto journey come along for you? Yeah, so after I'd set up with Jamie, we started working together and we built like a very, very robust system for how a job comes in, who works on it, how we keep our clients happy, how can we add more value than all of our competitors do. And everything's going really smoothly. But we still haven't really figured out what is special about us, which is ironic because obviously we're selling branding to people and we're struggling to communicate ourself how we're really unique.

27:10I think one thing that was unique about us is the way we positioned ourself and our own visual branding and even the name Noir. we were always this very premium exclusive brand agency that you know created very premium minimal exclusive brands and that kind of drew a lot of people in that would only come to us so if you wanted like some crazy vibrant branding with loads of like animations and mad stuff going on like you wouldn't come to us because that's just not our style but it still wasn't niched down enough and when you don't niche down sometimes i think people believe that when you niche that it's uh it's dangerous and you can end up with no customer base but actually it's uh it's it's about being passionate in one area and one skill set and once you do that you can really understand your customers so in 2000 we also understand that you're like niche and you're specific into that and therefore you're gonna be better but it's very counterintuitive when you start you understand how to speak to them because you understand them and you can't understand everyone so the problem goes back to what i was talking about before being authentic within a brand and you can't be authentic to every single customer you can't pretend that you serve everyone because it's impossible everyone's so different and their needs and wants are so or you do it or you do it but then you end up being in kind of the commodity business where you're never going to be able to charge more than a certain amount because you didn't build your brand exactly that yeah like wallpaper companies you You know, that's how I always see it.

28:41There's nothing that different that separates you from other people. So you just become one of many options for someone to choose from. So actually, Crypto Journey started in 2018. I took a trip over to see one of my good friends, Sonny, and he introduced me to this guy called Evan, who actually lives in Dubai now. And he was like just this mad German dude with like super spiky hair. And he was just kept talking about crypto all the time. and he was like you guys need to change your entire business and only work with crypto brands and i remember thinking this guy is absolutely mental but he said he's put like millions and millions of his net worth into crypto and i was like okay you know maybe he's on to something and i remember going away after having this trip in switzerland and going home and being like maybe we go down the crypto route i started looking at it and reaching out to people and I think there was like a few, I think at this point it wasn't, was it ICOs at that time?

29:40ICOs. That was like the start, yeah. I mean, 18 is basically when the bubble popped and everybody... So it was just before the bubble popped and he actually said to me, if you can transition into being a crypto company, into being like a crypto brand agency, I'll invest a million dollars into what you're doing. Again, I thought this guy is mental because like we were probably only doing like 500K a year at this point. So I'm like, why would he want to invest a million into it? Like, you know, this is mad. But he had loads of projects he was involved in. And he said they all look terrible. And they needed someone like us to come and help them communicate.

30:14So I remember like sort of flirting with the idea. And, you know, I remember going back and like buying like Bitcoin and ETH and just being like, yeah, I'm in crypto now. Had no idea. You know, started reading like very basic things. I read like the Bitcoin white paper. But I didn't really understand it properly. And then everything crashed. and that was just before he said he would invest in noir so obviously he wasn't going to invest in noir because all of his money was in crypto so i think he went from being like a millionaire to completely broke i'm not completely sure but i think it happened to a lot of people right and uh and i remember that scared me you know because i was like we're we've we've relaunched noir we're doing really well now we've got great systems in place we're doing great work everyone's happy with what we're doing and this seems like a very dangerous thing to do and i really wanted to but obviously when a crash happens everyone's like get out of crypto this is the end and you know that's what was happening in that cycle people were literally saying like this is the end it's going to go to zero pull out every last penny and i remember like i probably had like a few hundred dollars left in crypto and i remember pulling it out and i'm like to this day i'm like why would you pull it out i didn't need that couple of hundred dollars but in my head i was just like oh well if it's going to zero i may as well get something out of it you know if i'd have held that now it would have been worth a lot of money um but that's a great thing about hindsight so uh anyway i think maybe like another year or so passes and we're we've really kind of started to niche down so we're only working with tech companies at this stage because i realized tech companies super complex we build very minimal brands we can create things that really separate from the other ones we can make them look more premium and not as like tech and nerdy um and we were building a good name for ourselves so we landed a job with sky scanner and we were rebuilding part of their website for them and working on their branding and we're getting these great great clients come through and working with really cool people and then covid happened right uh you know the day that shook the world i remember i was in thailand at the time on holiday with one of my friends who you know and uh i came back and i was like holy shit all our clients were cancelling every retainer cancelled we had maybe like free clients that like held on and we had projects that were ongoing with them and we were like I guess we'll just trim down the team a little bit and we'll just rethink the business model they're cancelling or they're freezing budgets I mean at that point they were just cancelling you know they were like we don't know what's going to happen so we just have to stop everything so you know it was like all our revenue just overnight just disappeared and I remember thinking like this is this is crazy and I remember like reading about it online and like what could happen with a pandemic and it could go on for years and it was just this wake-up call that I needed I was in Manchester at the time I looked out the window it was like raining I hate being inside I've got like claustrophobia and I just I just hate sitting inside for like prolonged periods of time I love being outside in the sun and we had maybe what four days of sun a year in England so it wasn't very much and and I just made a decision I spoke to my business partner I said look what's important to you and he said I really want to buy a house I said well I want to go and travel the world so I never wanted to be in Manchester and if we don't need to be here anymore if we can work remotely like this and we can keep our business going then why are we here I said because I don't even enjoy it being here anymore been in Manchester for 10 years I didn't really feel like I didn't really feel like it was a great city I felt like I had amazing memories and made amazing friendships but I didn't feel like it was serving me anymore I didn't feel like the people in business were like too kind you know they kind of want to slam you when you're down it's very much that kind of feeling I didn't feel like there was much support there for like young businesses and people who wanted to do something with their life so so I left uh quite controversially um got on a on a flight to Portugal um and I don't even think you're allowed to travel at that point I have no idea I just got on this plane and I think it was like four other people on it who are all Portuguese and I went to Lisbon and I stayed there for maybe five or six weeks and I spent the rest of the summer just traveling around anyway I got tagged in a tweet can someone help me build one of the the biggest web free funds in the industry and I was like this is interesting why have I been tagged in it and it was Rarestone Capital and they were looking for a really cool agency that would understand what they were trying to do and be able to create a VC that stood out from all the other ones that were in the industry so yeah after that initial conversation I read everything you could possibly read on crypto in 2020 and just went right down the rabbit hole I bought loads of ETH loads of BTC and you know quite a few altcoins that I was getting into as well and we just like playing around with it to understand it because I think like buying tokens is one thing but uh getting rug pulled on a bunch of dexes is really the future isn't it and i think once you officially are degenerates and then you're in um so yeah that it really changed our perspective we helped as part of our research process working with rare stone we really spent a lot of time getting to know all of the guys and they have so much knowledge between them they introduced us to tons of people um i'm sure for you as well and they really just changed my perception on it I started to understand money a lot more and how it actually works.

35:41And I felt like it was the first time that I'd seen the world in this way. And then I realized that we had to just work with web-free companies. I didn't want to work with anyone else. And I truly was 100 % sold on what the future of blockchain technology could be. It just makes so much sense. So you went all in with your business. How about your personal investment? because when you're in crypto, I mean, there's different ways to play the game. You can say, oh, I'm building this business in crypto, therefore I'm spending my entire day and all my revenue of my company is based around that. But then you also accumulate some cash through a company and at some point, if you understand Bitcoin and you understand inflation and all that stuff, you understand that you need to invest your money too because the cash is not a great place to store wealth.

36:33So how do you think about your personal investments when it comes to crypto? Are you also all into crypto or are you much more risk averse? Because you're saying, actually, I already have my company that is fully exposed to this industry. A bit of both. So just at the start of the pandemic, I saw that there was a bit of life being brought back into crypto. And I also saw all the stocks had crashed majorly. and one of my close friends Steve said to me uh just like time if you uh if you don't plan what you're going to do with money it just gets spent so you should invest every penny that you have instead of just letting it sit there in a bank account I remember I had maybe 20k sterling to my name in uh in savings and um and yeah I just I bought loads of stocks to begin with and then the more and more I got into crypto I sold all those stocks and I just kept buying Ethereum I think I got into Ethereum at like it was like$200 and I just kept buying it every single week and kept buying Bitcoin and yeah I mean it just made sense it was it was really exciting then obviously as well because it was the start of the bull market right so there's a very euphoric feeling about refreshing your your wallet or your bank account and seeing it go up in crazy multiples every single day and yeah i i didn't invest like any of our company funds like the treasury or anything like that but my personal money i decided i was going to go all in and i after traveling around uh for i think it was like four months i came to dubai in october 2020 and i i think i had 26k then or 27k uh that was actually in the bank um and then obviously i had different investments and stuff and i remember thinking the rest of this money just needs to go in crypto too and it was a very risky move right because i didn't really have much money and we were just picking up crypto clients so we were just starting to get them because once we'd done rarestone obviously you know it had a big domino effect and all of these other web free brands were going hey these guys are different and they seem to get crypto let's talk to them and we just started getting clients one by one by one and i think that's really when we realized that we needed to change the model of the business from just being like noir agency to being noir ventures and being more like a brand venture studio because what we essentially needed to do these new business ideas that were being born no one had ever done them before in industries that have just been born in the last few months you know like defy companies and stuff and there was these new protocols coming out and new social decentralized social media networks and we were totally on board with what they were doing but trying to explain that to the masses and not just other crypto natives is a very very difficult task and it's one that is a branding task I'd say the biggest problem in Web3 is branding it's trust and communication most people don't understand crypto or Web3 or how DeFi or you know farming or any of these protocols work.

39:46They just don't understand it. It doesn't make sense to them. And it's like a secret club that only crypto natives understand. The crypto-buzz. This is it. And that doesn't work when we're trying to achieve this mass adoption. It cannot grow that way. So we actually have to remove all of the jargon and bring them back like tech companies would and just make them super simple. You know, like my dad's 73 and he can open up Uber and order something. You know, he can order his taxi. He can go and deliver and order his food. He didn't used to get that, but the user experience, the branding, the messaging, everything is super, super clear that it's so easy for him to use.

40:19And Web3 needs to be exactly the same. My dad needs to be able to interact with crypto. But at the moment, he can't because he doesn't understand it. So I have to like relay it to him. And I'm like, that is a Web3 communication problem. So it really helped with all the brands. And what we realized is, you know, in crypto and a lot of these companies, they are essentially launching on a stock market within three months of conception of the product. So we were helping build the brand and we were getting paid in their token before it launched. And also we were taking all of our payments in stable coins.

40:53The great thing about that is obviously all of the projects we were working with had raised all of their capital from VCs and they were holding it in stable coins. And they were obviously farming them as well and getting their APY on it. So it made complete sense for us to get paid in it. And it removed a real barrier because I don't think any other agency out there was accepting crypto. What's the pros and cons of being paid in tokens? Well, I mean, it's very risky, right? Because, and you know, we had some huge winners, right? We had some projects that we totally believed in and we put everything.

41:33thing we put way more than the value that we initially scoped out for the proposal way more for some of our clients because we truly believed in what they were doing and they did crazy multiples and it paid off like you could never imagine but we also invested just like i know you did yourself in a lot of projects that just went to absolute shit and the tokens came away and they were worth like ten dollars you know and we probably done like 70 80 000 worth of work and they were worth nothing these tokens so there's huge risk huge downside but huge upside and i do believe in life you have to balance risk and i think it really depends on your circumstances you know i don't i'm not married i don't have any children so i can take big risks in my life and with the business as well i think you know we have our stable clients that pay us all the time and then we've got some of our unstable clients that you know can do really really well or they can go to nothing and also it was a new experience right so we didn't really understand how to do great amount of due diligence on people we've never had to do that before you just are they a registered company have they done some work before do i know anyone that knows them we did our usual things but we didn't know whether this ceo was going to close the project straight away or run away with the funds yeah the only way to learn is to do it and to get to get screwed that's how that's how you learn at the end of the day whether in business or in crypto where it's the same but kind of on steroids and everything happens much faster and at much bigger scales what are your key learnings as a crypto investor in the last two years what am i what sorry key learnings key learnings uh yeah so due diligence really making sure that we're aligned with the team and the project and really looking at it from a long-term perspective do we like these people like is this actually a good project would we want to put our name to it would we want to be part of their team could could we become advisors for the team is it something we'd be proud to tell people about the answers are no it's the wrong client and we don't need to work with them there's enough great projects out there for us to say no to the shitty ones no matter how much money they're offering us um obviously at the height of the bull market we were getting like 30 40 inquiries a day it was ridiculous that calmed down a lot you know once we went into the bear market but now you know i'd say things have really picked up again and we still filter through is this a company that we believe in do they share similar values to us and the team are the team going to be excited about it too like my team are a bunch of creatives if they're going to find this boring they're not going to do amazing work so i need to find like projects that were you know like we had one project for instance where we worked with blue origin jeff bezos's rocket company and moon pay which is you know one of the biggest on off ramps companies in the world worth billions now um and we sent someone to space for an nft like you know that was absolutely insane so when i told the team about that they were like what in what world would we get to work on a project like this and it obviously not all of the projects are as crazy as that um but i want them to be exciting projects that the team are going to enjoy and that's one of the key thing in crypto it's you have access to even people you can talk to celebrities or because everybody's so interested into this industry, but no one will understand it.

44:49It's still very neat that if you have some good knowledge, you can do things that you never thought would be possible if you were working in another industry. What are you doing today on the 16th of April, 2023 with your crypto investments? In other words, where do you think we're at in this cycle? That's, again, a very difficult question. I would like to believe, and from a lot of research that I've done and a lot of close friends that I've spoken to in the industry that we are definitely out of the bear market now. And I don't think we're going to have crazy, crazy highs over the next few months, but I do think we're going to see some rallying happening.

45:32And maybe, you know, we get another fall down again. But everything, I mean, so I really try to separate myself from what's actually going on with the market because I don't work in the market. That's not actually what I'm interested in. I'm interested in Web3 and the industry. Now, that has not slowed down or changed direction since I started working in the industry at the beginning of 2020. It has only increased. So everything that was happening with Luna and UST and FTX and all of these other crashes, I then speak to people in the industry and the big, big companies who've made incredible bets on this industry.

46:16And it's not slowing down. You know, obviously there's a lot of headlines now that like these metaverse departments have been closed and all the rest of it. There's still people working in this industry. There's still people building these products. There's still going to be a metaverse. NFTs are going to be bigger than they ever was. They're just not going to be limited to art only. That's the poster boy of NFTs. There's so many use cases for it. And the web-free industry is just getting started. So I actually don't care what's happening because I know that all of my investments that I hold over the next 10 years are going to bring incredible returns.

46:50But even then, even if Ethereum hits$100 ,000 and Bitcoin hits a million, I don't need to sell this. You know, this is an investment for life. And I truly believe that. And I have not been buying and selling crypto. You know, I have been buying and holding crypto and it's been one of the best things that I ever did. I got stung with UST and, you know, I made a couple of mistakes where I lost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. But I'm not trading and that's not really what I'm interested in at all. I'm just interested in working and developing this industry and working with the incredible people that are in this industry.

47:27Because you're spending most of your time in there, basically you build the conviction, which most people don't have now because you just have these psychological cycles and it's so interesting to see how people, psychology is linked to the price of the market. Yeah, it's insane. That you need to build your own conviction and it only comes with a lot of work. And in addition for you, there's a lot of people in crypto who are tied to their, I mean, their investment is their main job, whereas you are building actual value outside of investing, which also makes the journey probably a bit smoother on that side.

48:09I do think that you really have to zoom out. Like, perfect example, right? If Apple stocks dropped by 30 % today, we wouldn't believe that technology has died, would we? We'd just think that, oh, there's something happening at Apple at the moment. Maybe something controversial or there's something in the macro environment that's happening. but we wouldn't go oh everyone sell all our apple products that's the end apple is done you know but in web3 for some reason every time bitcoin crashes down a little bit everyone goes that's it everything's over close the books you know and it's just not true it's just not true so yeah working in the industry has allowed me like a completely different perspective you're on the field and you just realize like there is a lot of stuff happening in there and price is a distraction to the adoption of the the whole technology you don't drink alcohol anymore why yeah i made a decision at the start this year um for quite a few reasons so uh growing up in england there's a real culture around drinking so i don't know if it was the same for you uh growing up in switzerland but for us it's kind of like if you're going to have fun you get drunk if you've got nothing to do you get drunk if you go on a date you get drunk you go out for dinner you get drunk everything revolves around drinking and if you don't get drunk you're lame or you're boring boring yeah or i mean one of the major things is not even just what other people think but what you think of yourself so it would kind of be drilled into you that you couldn't be your true self you couldn't relax you couldn't have fun you can't get up and dance because you'd be very conscious of what other people think about you so you'd have to have a few drinks to essentially loosen up anyway i've been playing around with this idea in my head and i'm like I'm 35 years old.

49:51I shouldn't need something to loosen up. It doesn't feel right. I'm very confident in myself. I've got amazing friends around me who are family. And then I've also got an amazing family around me and an amazing team that I work with. I love my business. I love my life here in Dubai. Why do I still need to get drunk? What is it? And then obviously there's the health factor, right? So I'm like every, I've got this whoop. I'm not wearing it today. I've got this whoop watch and constantly tells me my HRV. So that's your heart rate variability. and it can really predict. So when that sinks down, that's normally when you're quite, you're not rested well, you've slept really badly and you're normally going to get sick.

50:27Your immune system's quite low. And I would see it tank every single time I had one drink. My sleep would be affected. And once my sleep was affected, my eating would be affected. The energy I would have to go to the gym would be affected. The motivation to do hard tasks at work would be affected. So it had such a huge ripple effect on my life that I was like, so essentially I'm just going to be always floating around 50%. And how can I get past 50 % if I'm always just going to keep, every time I peak slightly, I drink and I come straight back down again. So yeah, I really had a long think about it.

51:04And I thought, you know what, let's just do 50 days without alcohol and see how I feel. Did 50 days, it's relatively easy. Now, obviously there's always a difficulty when you then go to hang out with your friends and it's past 12 o 'clock and everyone's having a drink and you're the only one that's not having a drink and i just start drinking tea a bit weird but i really like chamomile tea and love it too um with honey on the side love it so nice so nice and obviously in dubai as well like you've got a lot of access to amazing like moroccan teas and turkish coffees and you know all different types so because i don't really like a lot of the uh the mocktails because they're just basically like a you know sugar yeah absolutely yeah and I don't want to drink Red Bull I don't really like like coke or lemonade that much so I just started drinking a lot of tea and I feel great you know and I found myself just knowing that I felt more confident because I'd be in these situations where I'd normally think I needed a drink and then I'd just be myself and I'd be like that actually wasn't so bad and I got past the point and I realized I never needed the alcohol.

52:09I was always quite a fun and happy person without the alcohol. I just convinced myself that I needed it. And that was enough conviction for me to realize I don't need this thing in my life anymore. I've had so much fun drinking over the years. I have partied in every country in the world. I've got drunk beyond belief and blacked out more times than I can remember. I didn't have an alcohol problem. I didn't even drink that much. I just don't need it anymore. So I made the decision, you know like i did when i was 30 years old i used to smoke 20 cigarettes a day from 15 years old to 30 and i remember when i turned 30 i thought this is pathetic why are you addicted to this like tiny little stick that you have to go and stand out in the cold to smoke and it makes you stink and all your friends don't smoke so i was like right i quit and then obviously this next thing now is like alcohol i'm like i do not need it i'm very happy about it so i've quit so i'm 105 days 106 days in and I genuinely don't think I'll ever drink again I don't see the point of it for me personally yeah and as you said you are not at this 50 percent benchmark anymore you are higher therefore you feel much greater you have higher testosterone you have more just naturally in the biochemical level you feel much better and so you everything is going to compound in your life from there yeah it's a life hack that's the way I look at it it's everybody is playing the same game with the same set of rules and they're living around the 50 60 percent mark maybe you've got some freaks of nature that managed to go past that but for me i was always just staying around that same part it's kind of like going to the gym uh for a week and then taking a week off and then going for a week and taking a week off your body pretty much stays the same i tend to do that a lot um and you never see progress and you know drinking for me was doing the same with my career i was making incremental positive changes in my career but nothing that was like so essential that it was like really moving the needle and now every week on week I'm like sharper my recall is quicker I just feel so much healthier and happier in myself absolutely absolutely no-brainer the gym the the no drinking or low drinking absolutely what about you just are you still drinking I do but not much and the truth is I've already not I always I never like drinking I don't like the taste and at some point you start to realize that you can't afford it anymore because you're gonna lose one like let's say you go you you get really drunk one evening then you're gonna need two three four days let's say two two to three days but I mean it's kind of a cliche but time is money and it's more like my decision making power that's so impacted that I'm I'm kind of floating around as you say and like I'm just like I wasted a day I wasted two days and not only I wasted a day or two in terms of business and decision but also like in terms of feeling present with people you're more anxious you're more you know get angry more easily and like you're a dude do I really want that and no and so I barely drink to be honest but that's been a long time already because I've been into all this health stuff, these biohacking things for many years and I realized the big difference and it's an edge in life that people don't really realize or don't realize enough.

55:25What's the best advice you've ever been given? So much, man. I feel like I'm surrounded by like really inspirational people. I've been super lucky with the people around me. I think what I went back to earlier about like, you know, unplanned time just gets spent. If you don't plan out your day, you'll generally achieve nothing and unplanned money. I think it's really essential. We don't get taught about money when we're younger and how important like investing it is. You know, we just kind of keep it in the bank and the goal is to make that number higher, but it's really not. And I think that there's a real satisfaction and happiness that comes from not having to work like a dog, you know, having to work really, really hard forever.

56:10Like it should be getting easier as you're getting older. And I think if you're investing in the right places, not only do you learn about these companies and educate yourself, but you also allow yourself a little bit more freedom. And then my granddad gave me really good advice when I was younger. So he's passed away now, but I'm named after him. I've always looked up to him a lot. And he just said to me, you really need to take your time with everything that you do. I think we, as young people, We're always like striving to be better than we are without appreciating where we are right now. We're always comparing other people's lives to our own.