I've joined Ostium to lead marketing! There is a massive market opportunity ahead using blockchain rails to build better financial platforms for traders and investors globally I first met @kaledora in 2024 at Bangkok Devcon. In 2025, I visited the @ostium office where she looked me dead in the eyes and said she wanted to build a $10B company; I asked where can I send my (small) check. After a few months of learning more about the team and vision, I joined full time in March. Angel investor to employee arc activated What excited me most came down to the people, product, and vision: - The infrastructure was intentionally built to disrupt the opaque broker space and better serve digitally native traders around the world - Over 19m people trade CFDs, companies like IBKR are valued at $150B - market size is bigger than this channel - Passionate, intense co-founders that care a lot. War time mode CEO and CTO doesn't turn off. Yes, @contrarianmarco showed up in a suit in our first call - Getting to work with a cracked team of engineers, product developers, quants, and traders - supported by some of the best on the cap table - Top 20 revenue generating protocol in the whole industry - White glove customer service, a team focused on retention and users - @FlowTraderTM honestly needs to sleep more - Some more major product and partnership announcements in the works In the last two months I've been here, we've started running growth experiments across 8 channels, brought on two more senior growth marketers, listed sixteen new assets, revamped the liquidity engine, and announced a data partnership with a major exchange. I'm having fun and there's a lot more work to do. Looking forward to this next chapter. If you're a user, trader, or growth marketer - dms are open

Just like how i don’t necessarily find Myers-Briggs accurate, i was having a hard time aligning with the alignment chart

This Mango x Eckhaus Latta collab is probably how the watch world felt with AP x Swatch

Thank you to all who joined us at Sotheby’s last evening. More curated experiences for VIPs and friends to come.

What’s the blockers from crypto cards giving out airline miles and lounge access? Seems like that’s like the last boss in incentives to have parity with trad credit cards

“Distribution is everything” comes down to: - onboarding the right influencers/creators - nailing affiliate marketing - effective media buying - building owned media channels - having referral growth loops …and doing this all with strong and sustainable unit of economics Consumer crypto marketing is just consumer marketing now.

akin to saying get 20% risk-free yield

Just finished a hiring round for our growth team. A ton of dms and resumes flooded in from this post I know there’s a lot of people looking for their next career chapter. I was reflecting on what I signals I use to filter applications and invite to first round interviews: Bucket A: Specialist in a specific channel that is hands on (e.g. performance marketing, lifecycle marketing) - Firstly requires a clear view of OKRs and how to achieve them to know what roles to build around - Some knowledge in how time intensive each speciality is and if it requires dedicated talent doing it full time, or a generalist type (this is changing with AI) - Should be visible in a candidates resume with quantifiable results - As a candidate, you should also reflect knowledge of the skill with the exact tool stacks you’ve used in your cv Bucket B: Generalist with domain expertise - For example, a marketing lead or growth marketer who wore multiple hats but worked at a competitor, breakout app, or company in similar category - Requires awareness of and identifying breakout companies, competitors, similar cos in your category (some carry more weight) - Ideally comes with some edge based on that exact vertical (existing relationships, knowledge in best converting channels, angles, geos etc) - When applying as a candidate, highlight companies you’ve worked at that are most similar to the job with call outs on how you helped them grow Other signals I look for: - Ability to position themselves concisely in cold dms - How metrics and responsibilities are framed in cv - Existing owned distribution: do they have any social channels or media they’ve built up themselves - Proactivity and grit signaled by any entrepreneurial experience - AI-native (usually more deeply sourced in interview) Reference checks are also important in key hiring decisions, if you’re an applicant, expect this to happen This means dream hires are someone who has a combination of both buckets and some of the bonus signals too. They have channel or tactic specialties they’ve built up over the years, have executed them in a company in a similar vertical that has proven breakout growth, and come with existing distribution and relationships

Cold brew in a wine glass. Russian analog cognitive peptides. Ready for The Great Lock In.

The OrangeBox™ shoot was one of my early exposures to Fok’s creative direction Two months ago we had these big orange boxes in the office. I was taking shots of them on the carpet thinking it’d be a good idea to tease on socials Foks came in and was like “wait what if we do something fun, like take photos of them at a bodega or something?” In the next 45 minutes we bought a stack of newspapers, staged a setup at a bodega, and got these tasteful street shots. I downloaded some genz photo editing app to color grade it lol and boom Beyond insane taste and style Foks also comes with deep trading knowledge, is a prolific writer (he’s a huge part of our macro newsletter we send weekly), and helps sanity check copy, details, and narrative all with the utmost calm, bless

Thinking about how crypto incentives on retail apps skew user behavior. This makes traditional metrics like LTV more difficult to measure and affects user acquisition marketing downstream When targeting new users on CT, there’s two distinct user types: 1. Those who actively use your product for its main use-case (e.g. want to trade gold and think you’re the best venue to do it, so continually trade on your platform) 2. Those who only use your product to farm it for a potential airdrop (may drive revenue but out of speculation) LTV and payback period are common metrics used in traditional marketing. If you know the average revenue a user drives, you have a cost you’re willing to pay to get a new one - this helps give you a benchmark for CPA targets To get “real” LTV in crypto retail products when incentives are involved though, you have to cohort “top” users based on retention and revenue, and measure it there Even that doesn’t feel fully accurate though; I find LTV in crypto a lot more elastic as the audience size is small whilst new competitors pop up and vampire attack each other through incentives - it makes metrics like LTV less durable Downstream from all this as well, LTV from a high-revenue-over-time type quality user captured from CT also may not be comparable to non-crypto native users you capture on other channels, so you a margin is needed to have a target CPA when running growth experiments What does this mean for crypto apps? For one, I particularly would want to build or work somewhere with a mission bigger than CT. To get there most quickly means: 1. Focus on retention and lifecycle, crypto-native TAM is small, maintain easiest targetable revenue 2. Product teams should focus on new features and baseline being competitive to crypto apps (helps with retention and UA) 3. Onboarding and onramp flows optimizing for conversion rate for non CT users, can even segment these based on different channels 4. Measurable experiments that growth teams can quickly scale, cut, and optimize

How i look DJing is exactly how i look working and prompting claude, in poor-posture and all

A friend who has no digital marketing, ecom, or paid ads experience used AI to build a “how to win your ex back” $29 sales funnel zero to one Claude for landing page Claude for the digital pdf Stripe for payment processing Zapier for digital pdf delivery AI to inform how to run paid ads The playing field is leveled for everyone lol

There’s a technological class gap that is emerging from workplaces that encourage ai and freely permit token usage vs. ones that don’t

Kraken is on an acquisition spree right now. 2026: Reap today: $ 600M, stablecoin payments and card issuance Magma: token lifecycle and management Bitnomial: ~$550M CFTC licensed derivates exchange 2025: NinjaTrader: $1.5B, retail futures trading platform Capitalise ai: no code trading automation Breakout: funded accounts, prop trading platform Small Exchange: $ 100M, CFTC licensed derivatives exchange 2024: BCM/Coin Meester: Europe-based crypto broker From 2016-2023: Multiple exchanges across US, Canada, UK, Europe. Trading ux and staking infra Key call outs are m&as across different geos to capture new licenses and markets, as well as full-stack infrastructure for banking, payments, trading both for retail and institutions

Update: took a blood panel last week and now my phenotypic age is ~18 Starting to think this calculation is as accurate as doing aura photography lol

If you were affected by the Coinbase layoffs and/or seeking your next growth role, i’m actively building a GTM team Looking for domain expertise in: - neodistribution: clipping, ugc, ai creative at scale - media buying (specify which channels and split between quantitative v creative) - seo/aeo - email marketing and lifecycle - affiliate marketing Must be actively using AI to scale work, yet have discernment in output that comes from experience Bonus if you’re a trader and/or have grown consumer fintechs and neobanks. You’d work with other high-agency growth generalists who like winning and feeling proud about the work they do. Comment if this is you or feel free to share - can send a jd.

saw these in a nike store today and immediately thought “arbitrage opportunity?” only to find out either there’s way too many in the market already and/or nature is healing

Pre-seed Seed Series seed Series A Series A extension Series seed A extension Then it finally goes to Series B

When building lean go-to-market teams today, there is now contention points between tenure and skill, technical and creative due to AI The gap is now widening between: 1. Someone who is young, has grit, doesn’t yet have domain expertise but can ship quickly using AI 2. Someone who has domain expertise but moves slower, not as savvy with the latest workflows and tools Person in bucket one will make a lot of mistakes (at high frequency too if operating at speed with AI) and needs to work under someone more senior to develop expertise. Person in bucket two either needs to be able to lead a team well (which includes knowing the latest in AI), and/or willing to get back in the trenches to ship, or will be replaced The gap is also compressing for talent that have strengths in both their “left and right brain” - it’s a golden age for those who use both: - Developer engineer types that are also creative, social, have some niche taste in art/music/culture - The marketer and creative director type that knows how to use AI tools to ship, write code, automate