Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3

How to Break Into Web3 as a Non-Coder with Microsoft Global Lead Web3 Strategy & Business Development, Vassilis Tziokas

December 17, 2022 Work in Fintech Season 1 Episode 40
Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3
How to Break Into Web3 as a Non-Coder with Microsoft Global Lead Web3 Strategy & Business Development, Vassilis Tziokas
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Vassilis Tziokas, the Global Lead for Web3 Business Development and Strategy at Microsoft joins Work in Fintech co-founder Matthew Cheung to talk about:

-Opportunities in web3 for sales and marketing
-GTM and sales enablement
-Generative AI and how ChatGPT can enhance work
-Insights for people looking to get into the industry

Highlights:

7:23 Getting ahead in web3 as a non-coder

11:15 What is the web3 on-ramp for enterprise companies (tokenisation, NFTs, data and analytics)

16:26 Web 2.5, the bridge

18:33 Vassilis talks about sales and marketing and what is GTM and sales enablement

20:52 How to build a solid foundation in your career before moving into GTM

25:34 How can generative AI, like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, help sales and marketing

31:32 Insights and advice for people who want to get into web3

Vassilis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasileiostziokas/
Vassilis Twitter: https://twitter.com/TziokasV

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Welcome. This is the interviews with leaders in FinTech and Web3 podcast. And I'm your host, Matthew Cheung, from Work in Fintech and we're delighted to have on our show today a Vassilis Tziokas who is the global lead for Web3 business development and strategy at Microsoft. Thank you very much, Matthew, and thank you for the invitation. Very happy to be here. Can you kind of introduce yourself and what you what you actually do at Microsoft at the moment? Sure. I'm Vassilis and ive been working at Microsoft for the last almost 7 years now and the past six months, I'm working in a brand new and small team. My team are doing the business development strategy, what actually that means is that we are building designing a go to market strategy of Microsoft in the web3 space. So we work with engineering, sales, marketing and of course we try to execute our high impact partnerships with strategic players and with three other one to bring this go to market to life. So that's the business development part of the partnership. So it's many things together, but actually we're designing how Microsoft is, is what is the role of Microsoft in this new evolving with this space. So can you talk to me and talk to listeners about how you got to this role and some of your background and where you kind of started off? Because a lot of people that we've spoken to on this show, there's never a straight path from A to B. There's a lot of kind of, you know, pivoting around through that journey. You learn a lot of skills as well. You talk about your story. Sure. Sure. It's a great question. So if I go a few years back, I mean, what I have studied is business strategy and marketing. That's my academic background. I'm as I said, I have been working in Microsoft 70 years and my previous roles were always in sales strategy and go to market. And that's how I define myself as a professional. Then the way I got into Web three, as I think most of the people will think exactly because it's information space is by deep diving out of personal interest. I just identified a few months ago that I spend all my personal time outside Microsoft reading, contributing and learning about Web three, but with my passion and this space still excites me amazingly. So I ended up here because there are some like minded people at Microsoft, and we made a case. And of course, we believe that Microsoft has has a role to play. And how would you describe that nature in Web three? So we somehow formed that team as a leadership team. So just to summarize, my answer is it started out with person I endorsed, and that's still the case. I think the people, everyone within Web three, regardless of whether it's a big enterprise like Microsoft or a small startup or even a developer, it comes out of their passion for this new emerging technology, right? It's a it's a it's a real philosophical passion for a lot of the people. So and that's one of the most exciting things in the space. But yeah, that's in a few words, my professional journey and how I ended up in what, three. And can you talk about your early part of your career in marketing? Sure. And how how did you get interested and involved in that? Sure. Sure. And it's a good question in the way that marketing, in my humble opinion, is is a convoluted term, right? People use it in this. It's this chameleon phrase, right? And you can take different meanings according to the context that you're using. It. So I started in marketing my first job out of my master's degree in UK, was in marketing in a in a in a mobile technology company called Upstream, which is still one of the biggest mobile technology companies. And it was pure marketing in the sense that it was about how you set up a lead generation mechanism, working with PR, working with the advertising agency, so that the typical pillars of marketing right, how you build an engine about brand awareness and sales, I would say generation, that was it back then. I do believe that I learned a ton, right, because it was a start up. But also it was it was a big enterprise for for the industry. I think it was operating within. So I learned a ton. And I think that one thing that I was always missing is how you can connect more effectively The marketing engine with sales, right? I think all the reason that I listen to your podcast know about this never ending chasm between sales and marketing there there are millions of articles of marketing and sales and friends that do not work well together because marketing cannot understand why sales do not sell and sales can't understand why marketing cannot operate with a sales mindset. So they see the world in two different ways. I think that's a very archaic I think I think that we have, through technology, through startups and through new professionals, this chasm has started becoming smaller and smaller. So just to come back to your question, that's that's found it. That was a foundation of my knowledge out of my first professional experience. And when I understood that I want to be that person that will understand both worlds, I did a two year, I would say, role in consumer goods, which was not about technology, to be honest with you. That was a huge learning experience for me because consumer goods is still a very big industry. We are only using consumer goods in our everyday life, and it brought me this experience of how the real world operates Outside technology. You have to talk with grocery stores, have sales and actually move physical goods from one place. So it has it has a different component of marketing. Again, it's a very marketing driven world because there's a huge competition with other consumer brands. And the last 70 years I've been with Microsoft and as I was saying before, all my roles were all about sales go to marketing enablement. I happy to discuss that over, but I would say that this is a journey, right? I started with the foundation of marketing. I understood that there is something that needs to be connected, but very few people understand and hopefully I'm one of those leaders that can do that. But let's say to you. It's interesting that you have gone from a marketing and then now moved into Web three because it's something that you found very interesting and very much there's this tribe of like minded individuals with Web three, and you found that within within Microsoft's going to that point there. There's a there's a kind of a misconception among a lot of people that you need to be a developer to work in web3 and fintech and kind of these kind of very technology heavy industries. But that's not your background and that's not what you're doing either. So can you talk about some of the opportunities that you see in Web3? And we'll talk about what is Web3 in the second book. Can you talk about the opportunities that you see in Web3 outside of just coders and developers? No, I think it's a spot on comment and people need to understand with especially young professionals who may be discouraged 2012 three because they don't have an engineering background. I don't think that's the case, right. I think what three will become very soon, what we call now the Internet. The Internet needs all kinds of professionals. Of course, in those early days, having an engineering background or engineering knowledge would help, right? Because it's a very development driven world. However, as it becomes more mature, I think we will see the emergence and the need for more business people of what we call business salespeople go to market people, strategic people, marketing people, right? And we need that because that's the only way that Web3 can mature. If it was only developer think it will be a very it will be a very siloed, very narrow minded think. And even the developers themselves, they're asking for business people like and again, I want to be very firm in my mind. It's not a it's not a black or white. A developer can have a huge business acumen and a business person can understand technology. I consider myself a business person, but I have spent a lot, a lot of time at nights reading about solidity web3 development. Right? Because I love I consider that part of my job. I need to understand what needs to be done under the hood as I see for the web application come into life. And there are many developers who are spending a lot of their time about sales, finance and go to market. So it's not it's not a black and white. I think we see I see in my game experience a new hybrid type of professional with a very well rounded professional, only kind of sun, everything. So if there is one advice I would say to young professionals who do not have an engineering background and wonder what things that they are all welcome. They are welcome, but it will take them time, effort and energy and invest those resources in order to understand what we want from a business, but also from a different point. There's been a lot of focus, like you say, on the engineering piece of it, and that's come a lot from the state of the maturity of the technology and where we are still very tech heavy. But what we've seen obviously in the last 48 months or so is the rise of gaming's. Always been there for a long time, but that starts becoming massive and bigger than film and all the other media out there. You've got, and there's been a lot of metaverse kind of plays going on in the last year and people are talking about a lot more of an NFT has become this kind of bridge product connecting some of those things. So it's become a bit of an onramp for retail and consumers to be able to start just playing around with those technologies. So two questions. One is what would be the on ramp for enterprise? Because Enterprises is is has been looking at blockchain for a long time but has not really been adopted in earnest until probably in the last six months or so. There's some big names looking at big projects. What's going to be that on ramps for enterprises to really embrace it? And then outside of that, you know, where where do we see the future of enterprise technology embracing web3 and decentralized kind of ways of doing things? And, you know, for example, we saw there was a big deal that was announced from Microsoft taking a stake in Altech, which is, you know, formerly London Stock Exchange, but now a data and analytics company. So be interesting if you just talk about that kind of trend from the onramp for enterprises is really embracing it through to where it where the direction of travel is in the next few years. You asked two very interesting questions. One, the first one was what will be the long run? Right? And I don't think there's one answer. I think there are multiple answers. At the end of the day, any enterprise, any commercial enterprise company, what they are looking for is to generate value either for the shareholders or for their employees or for the consumers as customers. What about that is that let's take the example of Starbucks. For those who do not know, Starbucks recently launched Odyssey. Right. Which is I would call it an NFT based loyalty program. Let's call it this way. Right? So Starbucks being a very consumer driven business, going back to consumer goods, to the point I made before, what you really want to do is to unlock and generate new experiences for the consumers so that they make them stick to Starbucks and not move to another coffee company. Right. So and if these nonfungible tokens have this innate capability, they have the capability that you can own something which is a on blockchain and that something can unlock further value benefits for you. We were coming from many years of loyalty programs in and airline miles. For me, this is the evolution of Detroit. Our now I'm flying tomorrow to London, for example, and I was checking my mind. If you think about it, the miles belonged to me, right? It's it's it's a token in a way, from an airline to me. Right. But it's a very static one. It could be translated into some side benefits. If I had my if I could buy an extra seat or whatever. But it's not really, you know, liquid from a cold this way. And by liquid, I don't mean necessarily liquid in real money, but liquid information, other experiences. So that's an example of how an enterprise, a very big one like Starbucks, is using a dynamic concept that kind of to provide value to the consumers and of course, finally to the bottom line in the PNL. So just to summarize my answer, there's not one thing I think every company, according to their industry they operate in that will find different value in web3 and blockchain. For some it may be an excuse. For some it may be blockchains and immutability. For other may be this openness and possibility for others may be daos decentralized terms, organization and how they can create consortia with other companies. Again, Web3 the way I see it will be something that we call the internet, right? So who knows what ideas will come up? Any use cases. Another thing I'll say before comes to the second part of the question, Matthew, is that we're also seeing some very interesting examples of of real life web3. What I mean by that is we do see, for example, helium, which is a startup which is using actual devices that people can buy for 5G connectivity. So it's actually a web3 wireless network, right? They recently made a partnership in mobile and through tokens, which again is another innate capability for free, they're coordinating, they incentivize people to do stuff. So I think more use cases will be more the next months as people, as business people and technology people will work together and who knows what emerging business model will see. But an individual, all it was always was and it would always be about by now. The second part of the question, can you remind me was about how I went about the. Yeah. And I kind of the I suppose the the trend over the next few years for Enterprise and you probably touched on it already in some of those questions but where's where's the convergence of these different there's these different kind of pioneering use cases we're seeing at the moment. Do you have a vision of where do you think it's going to head? Should I do what I see in my daily life? And for many customers and partners I'm talking to every day is what I call live Web 2.5. And it's a very of course, it's a euphemism, but it's this idea of symbiosis, right? It's how you're going to use existing web platforms to onboard people to web3. These platforms may be enterprise platforms for example, things. And I'm biased because I'm for Microsoft Teams is a platform that people are using. Millions of people are using daily to interact, to communicate, right to exchange information potentially in the future, having teams with automated workflows and web capabilities and with tokenized portals, for example, could be an amazing use case for Enterprise to move to Web three. So I do see this trend of symbiosis. I do see companies mostly because I space right now in the financial services industry, understanding the value of blockchain, but at the same time wanting to be a little bit, I wouldn't say careful, but wanting to be a little bit on an experimental mode, right? Web two is great. I don't see again, I don't see the world as a as a black or black and white, but there are some things that Web two cannot do right then, because how it's built in terms of technology. So how you can bring in a bunch of web3 into web and vice versa. This is what I think the magic happens. And actually then the case that is the customer stories I've seen from Microsoft and other companies, this is exactly what it is, how you can combine things and make this what you want. Make this a holy grail of one plus one, Make three. How you can make it a reality. Yep, that's what it. Was like we saw the other week type. You can now do crypto payments through Stripe. So again, it's this kind of on ramp and things like the benefits. Of Stablecoins Stablecoins. For me too. It's a web 2.5 thing, right? Yeah, they made capabilities of a blockchain, right? But it's pegged to U.S. dollar, right? Yeah. So for me it's a web 2.5 and it's great by the way it works. And what you see is a very stable stablecoin, right? I do. I do think that circle as a company is doing very well and again, with insuperable status. So for me, Stablecoins is a great example of 2.5 because it combines the, the good things of both worlds. So let's look at sales and marketing. You're your where you spent your your career. You mentioned earlier about different web3 projects and so on. The end of the day you need to create value and if you create value, then you're going to be able to sell what you're doing and having web3 approaches. There are some new ways of doing marketing, and so I would like tokenization to generate communities and local Starbucks is doing incentivizing users, but not just about web3 more generally with sales and marketing. Can you talk about four maybe four, some of the kind of listeners who are still studying what is going to market and what is sales enablement as well? TO It's a great question because and I'm smiling because that's a question I have been asking myself for many years. I think that's a necessary part and necessary part of the journey of every strategy professional. I do believe that every company with a different definition would create that. So the the dynamism of the sector. But I will tell you what, I have come up as an option. Right. And maybe other people will disagree. And let me start with what they are not sometimes defining what you are not is more important, not defining what you are. So go to market is not marketing. I think that's a mistake that many even seasoned professionals are doing. And to be honest, it really bugs me because that's definitely not the case. The way I describe go to market is how an organization engages with customers to convince them to buy the product or the service. I know it's a very simplistic term, but if I could stick to that, I would stick, of course, by how an organization engages the world, how many things and marketing is one of them. So I see marketing as a pillar of good market. And before I go and deep dive on that, you're also talking about sales enablement. For me, that's another very exciting part, which is also misunderstood and sometimes even underrated, I would say. So sales enablement again, if you want a definition, the way I use it is the strategic use of people, processes and technology to improve sales productivity and increase revenue. Right? Again, if you put them next to each other, you will see many similarities. That's why sales enablement and go to market. Usually teams in bigger division work closely together or even at the same team. So you have to go to marketing your sales enablement leader. But they all report to the same, I would say senior person. So that's how we define them. They're not marketing differently. These are different animals, but they live in the same forest, if I may call it this way. But equally important. And for someone starting out in their career or opportunities, all their own kind of go to market and sales enablement, is that something you would start in or something you kind of worked towards when you when you gain some other skills and you find a specific niche area that you really like? It's a good question. I don't think you can start as a go to market professional because you need to, as I said before, you need to have a solid foundation of knowledge of how sales works and how marketing works and how strategy works. So if go to market and sales enablement is the end product of the recipe, the ingredients, marketing strategy, sales, right. So you need to have an understanding of how this thing, if you're going to be an expert in sales and an expert in marketing to be a go to market person, but you need to understand how those things work and how actually before they are coordinated and they are combined, right? So I don't know if there is any degree in go to market. I don't think there is, But there are many degrees of strategy, of course, and there are many degrees in sales, even in business development and even in marketing. So do not What I would say to young professionals is that do not try to narrow yourself and say, Hey, I'm a marketing person, right? Because in especially in big enterprises and even in startups, nobody is just marketing, right? You will need to be or actually me looking for is differently. If you are just marketing, you will never be able to provide value to sales. And if you are just sales, you'll never be able to work with others. So try to see your those skills as as Lego blocks and when you put them together, something comes up, right? Yeah, that's how I see it. And similarly on the on the strategy piece, like you said, there might not be any degrees and go to market and all that we're aware of, but there is in strategy or do you think strategy something you can start off on day one or similarly you need to have a kind of, you know, dip your toes in some of the other areas of a business before you move into that. Yeah, I have a it's a good it's a good question, but I think strategy is different than the others. In which way? I think strategy is also a philosophical thing, right, in the sense that nobody can really define what strategies. I can try to come up with a definition, but the way I see it is that strategy is embedded in everything. Strategy is embedded in in this podcast as we speak, you have a strategy that you would like this podcast to come up in your mind as Xe. You have an embedded strategy stock. So for me, something innate is something philosophical. It's something which is like an umbrella thing, right? Of course, because that study strategy, I think strategy is one of the key courses in all MBA degrees and you know, and business degrees. I if there is one industry that is coordinating strategy is the consulting industry. So if you are working for the McKinsey, Accenture there, so you actually must be able to define themselves as strategy professionals. My recommendation would be that going back to one of the probably your listeners know Nicholas Nassim Taleb, right? Try to try to have skin in the game. What I have seen in my experience, there are many strategy people who have never done what they are strategizing about. So you will find in your career many people who are strategy experts in sales. But if you ask them when they did, when they sold something they never have done, so it's rank and file or an expert, a strategy person and go to market. And when you ask them why they go to market, they have done they have never done one. So for me, strategy something which comes also through experience and through leave, I would say experience. So that's my bit on strategy. Let's move on to generative AI because it's been a hot topic in the last few months and particularly in the last few weeks where we've seen GPT gain like over a million users in less than a week, the fastest adoption of software or technology you've ever seen. And that's, you know, and then that's running on Azure, right? And Microsoft is, you know, a contributor to open AI, which also has produced only to where you can you can ask Dali to, to create images and so on. So we're seeing really the color version 1.0 of generative AI and you can already see its benefits. You know, we've started to look at what I say. We, I mean I push Paul where I'm also CEO of we've started to use chatbots for doing unit testing on some code just playing around in the last week we can already see benefits to enhancing you know it development saying it's a that's in the world of kind of development and coding in the world of sales and marketing. How do you see generative AI being able to augment or help or even replace some sales and marketing functions which historically have been very kind of people facing and something where there's a creative elements of what a human can do? Where do you see these technologies helping sales and marketing? It's a great question. I was doing. I spend the weekend talking with some friends about generative, and these are the things we were contemplating with, I think in the following way. What I have learned in my in my experience is not try to make very long term predictions because those are right. There are many black swans, but I would say the following, especially in those sectors discipline that you mentioned, sales and marketing. I do. I'm a techno optimist by definition, so I do see that as an enhancement and rather as a replacement. Right. So I do believe that it will increase the productivity of strong marketing and sales professional because you can easily do some stuff which are boring, to be honest. For example, like, I don't know, write a very convincing email about X, but then one from what I have used and have been using Strategy B three pretty much every day just to test it myself. The results are good enough, but they always require some human skill, talent, knowledge, context to make them perfect. Right? Of course. So I will say the following If you are a a good, ambitious professional in the marketing and sales charge, you can really scale up your capacity and your productivity and you can see it as something that can allow you to invest time in most creative and contextual tasks, right? If you are just a person who just wants to send random emails in, you know, sales prospect, take it, don't care about the context. Yeah. So it could replace in the future. Right? But I do see that. I do see just do typically as I say later that would unlock further unlock productivity equity with for professionals. Right. That's how I see who knows what will happen. Right. We of course will become better. It's a it's a large language model by definition becomes better. Right. That's the nature of it, to be honest. I would go ahead with more if I were a developer that for me, that's the magic. The magic is not about creating a marketing copy or a sales pitch, right? You could easily do that through Google as well. It would Google it and you could take copy paste and it would a similar type of but would never hurt and not the feel kind of coding platform. Right. And and by the way, as Microsoft, we have the copilot and GitHub, I would say an enterprise version of chat typically. And it's it works amazingly well. I do see that as a as a further unlock tool for productivity. Maybe that's the positive side of me, but I truly believe that there are some great days ahead of us as human species. If we if we manage it smartly and efficiently. Well, that's what technology is about. You know, it's about unlocking productivity and automating mundane manual tasks and then enhancing what you're doing, freeing up your time to do more creative and value tasks. There's another element which connects generative A.I. and blockchain, and this is Web3 podcast. So maybe that's that's of interest. I want to make a specific mention of that because there are many people, for all the good reasons, who are very skeptical with web3 in terms of like which are they really use cases, right? And the way I see it is that actually the generic to AI is great news for all three in the sense that through blockchain in the future we will be able to identify what is someone with a real person gold rather than a machine group, right? There's this idea of, of, of proof of personhood. But what three. Right. You can prove that you are a person, you're a real human being and you can create input on a blockchain, right? So that feature how blockchains can distinguish what something was created generated by a human being. A virtual machine could be an amazing use case, which like one a year ago nobody would have ever thought. That goes back to my point, right of symbiosis, right? A.I. in Web three, If you ask me, like two years ago, Hey, blockchain will be the verification layer. I was like, I see that. But sometimes life surprises, right? So I just wanted to make that asterisk because it's important for me. It isn't Microsoft working on like a digital ID service. To have people can actually visit the website. The website will have something called Decentralized Identity, which is part of our intra offering enterprise, the name of all of security and identity offerings. Yes, we're working on on this direction. But again, I do see that as something that will be of like general use in the near future. I wouldn't be able to submit to a blockchain what we have something what we have created and then it will be distinctive. But what typically or another large language model will have? Great. So so it's around off. What words of advice would you give our listeners who are anything from young people who are studying or just tossing their career through to people have been in traditional finance and traditional industries who are very interested in web3 and also fintech? What words of advice would you give to two people looking into this area? Because you already sent in the last few years you went down, they call it going down the rabbit hole, but you've spent time doing that as have I as well. I'm learning about these new technologies and how the web two worlds can make that evolution wrong. It's not a revolution, it's an evolution. And it's this kind of incremental steps towards a vision of something in the future. Well, what what words of advice would you give to people looking to get into Web3? I'm a person who does believe a lot in the in the concept of advice. I will share some of my insights and hopefully that will be of of value to those people. I won't say the same things for young professionals and seasoned ones, but for graduate students of what we want to enter Web3 is that they're all welcome, right? What I have seen in my daily experience is that actually the people who are reading it distanced from that core tech of word three are the ones who can connect the dots, so can see a vision that other people cannot see. Sometimes when you take the bird's eye view, you can see more things, right? So I would say you're all welcome. The future is not written like three years ago, blockchain or something which actually correlated with bitcoin in a few nerds in a good way at work. So. And now. Now it's a bigger thing. The future is not within. The future will be written by you, right? And you will define it right. So we'll get all welcome. Try to bring ideas, innovation, knowledge and something else, and then I will make the segue way to them to their finance profession. Professional afraid. Try also to bring values, ethics, transparency, responsibility, accountability, even compliance. That's a segway to the finance, right? I do believe that this is a space that unfortunately there are many malicious actors, but behaviors we all know them, supporting them and they use actually the awesome news a few hours ago about someone being arrested, What I would say is that these are things that are, regardless of web web one whip to Web three, web web 25. They make us as human species distinct. Right. And they are innate characteristics of a well functioning society. So only we operate with ethics, transparency, accountability, with responsibility. We will be able to to advance forward. And web3 really means that. And the reason that we went through really means that is because delivery is an industry right now very much tied to finance. And our moving to your second part of the question, right? So especially finance when we have to deal with people's money, we need to be extra careful, extra compliant experts. Right. So again, that's not that's real advice. Everyone knows that. But when you are trying to form partnerships, create new products, try to embed those things, those values in what you do, because that's the right thing to do. What's the ethical thing to do? And that's, I think, something that will make Crypto's clash with blockchain more easily accepted by work to folks, right? So that's my advice. If I, if I make all it advice. Just one last question, because you mentioned someone who might have been arrested in terms of what you're referring to them and FCX was, even though they're saying they're a crypto exchange there, a centralized exchange, and now you kind of have this people looking at, okay, one of the reasons they didn't work is because it was centralized and now you have more decentralized exchanges kind of in focus going to what we're talking about with Chachi T and I'm more open I he's doing what's your thoughts on open I in a way is a centralized holder of all of these large language models and people are Elon Musk and Sam Altman and that that group of people are driving the direction of that whole of, you know, good intent in the right direction. But actually that's centralized as well. What what do you think about the way that can evolve and the way that can be shared? So it's more decentralized? Yeah. I don't believe and that's facilities have been right, but I don't believe that centralization is evil, right? There are forms and forms of centralization, and I don't believe that. FDX Because it was centralized, I think FDX failed because it's a direct commentary term, but I'm service and what we know, but I don't think FDX failed because it was centralized. FDX failed because they were not ethical business people and they were doing all kinds of shady things right. I do believe that there is a future of both DEX decentralized exchanges and centralized exchanges, and the same about large language models. Actually, I think there are I've seen some examples of decentralized language models. I think everything is welcome. I don't believe centralization is evil, but I do believe that centralization, extreme centralization, can lead to bad outcomes. So what I would say is that we need more innovation, we need more openness, right? We need healthy we need healthy competition. And if something can work in a truly decentralized manner, perfect, it will be another option. There are people who are investing money in Coinbase, which is a centralized company using crypto. There people who are investing money in Uniswap, which is completely decentralized, right? So one of the two is not more evil or more good than the other. They're just different options, right? And I can say and I'm very confident what I'm saying, that there are many decentralized things which are completely decentralized, and because of them being completely disorganized, they do not work. Right? Yeah. Going on an anthropological discussion. Humans need a form of centralization. That's how societies work quite by definition. So as a philosophical concept, I don't think that organization is. But I do think that extreme concentration of power is bad, unethical behavior is bad. So I can keep going on and on. But that's that's how I feel. I got to go. I know you need to drop off, but maybe for another question. It was a great question and. There was a good answer. So I do know you need to drop. So facilities, thank you so much for your time today. How can people follow you or kind of hear from you? Sure. I mean, my name you can just put my name on LinkedIn and I think you'll find me not happy, too happy to be connected with everyone who is interested. And I am on Twitter as well. Pretty active. It is my surname Joker's V, which is the first letter of my first name. So it's special to the young professionals and their graduate students. If I have a dime, I will be more than happy to help share my insights on my journey. I have been there a few years ago and I know how it is and any voice up. So I'm here for you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this podcast and for more interviews, please go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts and just search for work in fintech and you'll hear interviews from Blockchain.com and Google through to JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, where we talk to leaders in the FinTech universe and also sign up to our mailing list. Their work in fintech income will keep you up to date with the FinTech and crypto courses, cohorts and coaching we will be launching and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Thank you very much for listening.

Vassilis talks about his role as Global Lead Web3 Strategy & Business Development at Microsoft
How Vassilis got into web3
A career that started in marketing
Getting ahead in web3 as a non-coder
What is the web3 on-ramp for enterprise companies (tokenisation, NFTs, data and analytics)
What is the direction of travel for web3 in big enterprise companies
How platforms like Microsoft Teams could embrace web3 with automated workflows, web3 capabilities, tokenised calls
Web 2.5, the bridge
Vassilis talks about sales and marketing and what is GTM and sales enablement
How to build a solid foundation in your career before moving into GTM
How can generative AI, like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, help sales and marketing
Insights and advice for people who want to get into web3
Discussion on decentralised vs centralised exchanges and AI
How to get in touch and follow Vassilis