theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Marketing Leaders | Nick Payton, BitGo

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John Furrier

Co-Founder & Co-CEO

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

Nick Payton

VP of Marketing

BitGo

play_circle_outline AI-Powered Martech Stack: Integrated Ops & Product, Funnel Optimization, Synthetic-Host Video Production, and Lead Valuation

play_circle_outline Forward-deployed marketing: closer sales-marketing collaboration and field enablement

play_circle_outline Tokenization and stablecoins as major growth areas in digital assets

play_circle_outline Crypto-as-a-service and white-label APIs enabling fintechs to launch exchanges

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Transcript

Nick Payton, BitGo

John Furrier

Co-Founder & Co-CEO SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

Nick Payton

VP of Marketing BitGo

Nick Payton, BitGo | theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Marketing Leaders

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How is AI affecting your marketing efforts—including your martech stack, content production, and funnel operations—and what guiding principle or "north star" do you use when integrating AI and intelligent technologies into marketing? add

Has there been a tighter coupling between marketing and field personnel, and if so, what does forward-deployed (or front-line) marketing look like? add

What are the main trends or areas in digital assets/crypto that you’re currently focused on or most excited about? add

What is BitGo's role in the crypto financial ecosystem, and what products and services does it offer to businesses? add

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Nick Payton, BitGo

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(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> Hi, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Marketing Leaders Series, part of the NYSE Wired program and community. Nick Payton, Vice President of Marketing at BitGo is here. Leading marketing these days is hard. Nick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Good to see you again.

Nick Payton

>> Thanks for having me.

John Furrier

>> Post-IPO, you guys are starting to build out that business now that you're a public company. Well, congratulations. We covered you guys on the floor.

Nick Payton

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Big event. How's it going?

Nick Payton

>> Great.We were just reminiscing over on the balcony about Jersey Mike's doing their IPO today, but we were reminiscing about six months ago. I can't believe it's been six months, but it's a great time.

John Furrier

>> Now you got to get back, keep grinding away. IPOs are fun because it's like such a great accomplishment, but it's really just the mile marker of another journey. How's that been for you guys? How's it going?

Nick Payton

>> Great. Obviously, Bitcoin is in its bear market right now, but overall, more clients have come to us since we went public, and we're really excited about that. I think it's the combination of the public accountability quarter to quarter, and so it's been great. Big, big clients coming through the door ever since then, so we appreciate that.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, our Marketing Leaders series really is about the modernization of marketing. So much is going on. And at the end of the day, you got to do business.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> How are things going on your end on the marketing side? Are there things that you're doing? Is AI now in the mix? Take us through some of the things you're thinking about because AI is actually a perfect storm opportunity for innovation in marketing.

Nick Payton

>> It is.

John Furrier

>> Everything's teed up, certainly content-wise, workflows. The MarTech stack about a decade ago It was like the monster slide with all the vendors that serve marketers. If you remember those MarTech stacks?

John Furrier

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Build these systems, inbound marketing.

Nick Payton

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> So much.

John Furrier

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Now AI kind of takes that to another level. So you almost can rethink everything.

Nick Payton

>> It's great from a MarTech perspective. It's great from a content production perspective. We're using it in our building of products now. We were just talking before we started shooting about how we can build our own software now, which is really, really exciting. And you see a lot of these companies putting AI in the headlines, and maybe it's just for the headlines. But at BitGo, we're actually weaving it into our operations. So it's really exciting. I had a call yesterday with our content team, and I was like, hey, we need to start producing AI videos every week. The technology has just advanced so quickly. It's very exciting.

John Furrier

>> I just saw HeyGen had a thing where you can actually do a podcast without even showing up.

Nick Payton

>> Okay, I didn't know that.

John Furrier

>> So they got the animated hosts. So I literally could create a replica of myself and feed it a script, and it does a pod. And you can't tell the difference. That's so cool. So content is huge. Talk about the operational piece because we're starting to see agentic come in.

Nick Payton

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And a lot of people are thinking differently. Is there a North Star for you guys? Is there a first principle on how you think about the opportunity of injecting intelligence and technology into the marketing?

Nick Payton

>> Yes. Yes, I'm glad you said that because marketing is interesting where you have brand marketers and then you kind of have revenue funnel marketers and then there's some that do both. And our team really focuses on both of those things. And so operationally, we're able to, like I said, spin up our own software, but we're able to analyze our funnel in such detail. It's very exciting. I'll give you an example. we know down to the degree of as we get leads coming in or opportunities, et cetera, we know just from AI analyzing our data exactly the value of each lead, the value of each opportunity, and we can track that journey so closely now and meet the user where they are with the AI content too. But I feel like the biggest win is on the MarTech side, honestly, and the funnel analysis, which is really exciting.

John Furrier

>> What jumps out at you? What are some observations around? Is it better leads? Is it better qualifications? Is it better funnel movement or the bullseye?

Nick Payton

>> I think it's the funnel movement. I think it's the most important because you see this in companies a lot. And this is where I was referencing about how marketers sometimes get trapped in the brand and ignore the funnel. And it's because you're basically spewing the same message to everyone, but you're not meeting the user where they are in the journey. And that's what we really pride ourselves on is if someone comes to us and they're a bank and they want to talk specifically about our OTC trading desk, well, why would we feed them ads about wallets and custody? Do you know what I mean? And so naturally, when you use AI to construct that and meet them where they are, you naturally get better results at the end of the funnel on the revenue side. And then you're just helping the client too. And so that's the best part.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, Nick, I was riffing with a friend the other day. We were having a couple cocktails and we were talking about forward deployed engineers, which is what everyone's talking about. That's a big trend. Palantir started it. Netflix did it. Everyone, you know, companies, but the engineer comes from the back office to the front line, sits next to the business person, helps solve problems. And I'm like, actually, that's more of a back office, front office AI opportunity, because why not have marketing forward deployed people? Because you're starting to see the back office resources go to the front lines. In this case, who's the major recipient of marketing? Sales, because they talk to the customer.

Nick Payton

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> So you get the brand, of course, get the customer branding. But when you start getting into the operations of marketing, the end game is, do we have opportunities? How does it get to the salespeople? And how do they close?

Nick Payton

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> There's always been that relationship between sales and marketing.

John Furrier

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And the leads are bad. The Glengarry Glen Ross, you know.

Nick Payton

>> We have a script titled that just as a joke. The leads are shit. You're shit.

John Furrier

>> No, but I've seen companies where, like, they focus so much on getting leads that they didn't understand that they were just delivering a quota, in their mind, delivering a quota of leads over the fence to sales. Have you seen a tighter coupling between marketing and the field personnel? And if so, what does that forward -deployed marketing look like? Because that's what we're seeing. We're seeing, like, wow, self -service, the short videos. Let's get some content to enable. Here's 10 ,000 videos. not one. So there's a lot more training going on on the front lines, awareness, enthusiasm, get people confident to buy. That's emotion.

Nick Payton

>> Yes.Yes. And you have to hit them when they're feeling emotional too. You have to get in front of them at that exact moment.

Nick Payton

>> Yeah.

Nick Payton

>> You kind of hinted at it, which is sometimes in a lot of just industry -wide, there can be a little bit of interesting relationship between sales and marketing. At BitGo, it's one and the same. We're all part of the commercial org. And so we have a great relationship. I always say marketing is in service to sales. That's how I look at it. And so, to our clients, of course, that's like the big one, but we work really well with the sales team. We always have these syncs where we understand what are their goals because the tide shifts a lot in this industry, AI industry and digital assets and just general finance, it's shifting fast. So when we meet with them, we understand what their goals are. We present options and then we go hard and they love it.

John Furrier

>> So yeah, I was talking to a friend, we were talking about the challenges of living in this high velocity market as a marketer. And the comment was from a founder, we're adding more capabilities faster than we can explain them. And the point of that comment was the marketing and the brand architecture, all that stuff that goes into marketing, you constantly want to have the best foot forward. And that's actually a feature of the market, but it can become structural interference inside an organization. Well, we're not positioning it right. Sales should be selling this versus that. So when you have new things happening all the time, when you're growing and changing and evolving faster than you can explain it, your position yesterday is now plus one or two more things. You guys live that because you have a very sophisticated customer, but your market's evolving. You just mentioned a little bit of a bear market, but in general, it's got a lot of headroom. It is obviously a future market. So you're constantly having to think about that. How do you look at that? How do you handle or think through that problem of how do we keep that refreshed?

Nick Payton

>> Honestly, you just have to live in this industry. I'm married to this game. I'm a Bitcoiner, hardcore. I love digital assets. I truly believe that the entire finance sector is going to become digital assets. It's just going to be interchangeable with general finance because that's where we're going. But I just have to stay plugged in. I watch this show. This is helpful.

John Furrier

>> Thank you.

Nick Payton

>> But Twitter's where I get a lot of my news just because it's unbiased, in my opinion. And so just staying plugged in, going to a lot of industry events, talking to our sales team, leveraging AI, and just making sure that we're managing our clients' needs effectively, really.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the market you're in. You mentioned meeting the customers of the future. What's changed since the IPO and the positioning? Clearly, the growth of real-world assets on-chain is happening. We're seeing a lot more. I just saw a great use case where carbon credits are going out for data center build-out from effectively instrumenting real-world assets. And so that was kind of a little bit more of a rainforest kind of thing. But that's something they wouldn't have thought about. So you're seeing a lot more. What's going on in your customer base? Are they moving the needle? Is there a change in sentiment?

Nick Payton

>> Very excited on the tokenization front. I know you guys are working on that as well here, too.

Nick Payton

>> Yeah.

Nick Payton

>> Tokenization is a big one. To bring all those equities on chain like that is going to be a game changer. And this is what I mean by that transition. It's just going to be financial services. It's just going to be digital assets woven in. So there's that. Obviously, stable coins have been in the news heavy for the last couple of years. But even more, that's continuing to scale. We just helped launch SoFi's stable coin. Obviously, we worked with World Liberty Financial. We have many other customers that we're building for. So I'd say between those two. And then funny enough, the third one is quantum has been a major discussion point right now. A lot of it is just a lack of understanding. And so I'll give you an example of why we're trying to keep our finger on the pulse with that. BitGo is soon going to be launching a public-facing page where someone can just enter their Bitcoin address and you're going to get a quantum risk score and then the tips that you need to do to become quantum resistant. A lot of people are not aware that you can be quantum resistant now if you just do certain things to your wallet, such as not sending payments from one or making your pub key accessible publicly. So anyway.

John Furrier

>> So is that a readiness issue or more of preparedness? Where in the spectrum are we to provide the solution to be resilient? And where do people think they are? Or are they two different things? This is a great point, because you can do things now that aren't disruptive. This is what we're seeing in the big infrastructure providers in the hyperscale level. They've been working on quantum readiness now for two years.

Nick Payton

>> They have been, yes. And there's a lot of consortiums being announced. But BitGo has been working on this for a while. And I feel we were the innovators of 2-of-3 multisig, which is now the industry standard in qualified custody. We have a patent pending for our quantum risk score that I just talked about. So we're really excited to continue to lead the industry in that realm. and to anyone that's watching this, quantum is something we have to take seriously. We have a whole panel we did with Adam Back from Blockstream on this topic. So we can't wait.

John Furrier

>> Why should they be ready? Give them the quick, it's not a scare tactic, it's more of an information.

Nick Payton

>> Sure. Well, essentially the thought is one day quantum computers could be able to hack certain public keys. But there's things that you can put in place that would not allow that to happen. I hinted at the fact that you essentially just never make your pub key public. When you clean up your UTXOs, there's a lot of things that you can do. And so we're excited to be leading the industry on that one.

John Furrier

>> All right. So what's going on in your world? What are you focused on now? What are you optimizing for? What are some of the things you're working on?

Nick Payton

>> Well, obviously, our bread and butter has always been trading, OTC desk, wallet infrastructure, qualified custody. As institutions are coming into this space, they need someone they can trust long term over a 10, 20 -year time frame. So that's always our core focus. But then these additional wrinkles like stable coins, which we launched a couple years ago, tokenization, which we're working with Figure and several others on, that is really the next wave of innovation, which is exciting.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, you guys got some innovative things going on. Now I'm back to the Marketing Leader Series. Advice for other marketers or observations. What's changed? The old playbook of hire an agency, do the programmatic media buys. Obviously, content's been popular. But we live in a world now that's changed. What's your biggest observation around the future of marketing?

Nick Payton

>> I think I got to go back to you have to realize that marketing is both a brand and a funnel architecture problem to solve. You have to realize on brand, then when your CEO comes to you and asks, how's our marketing efforts? What's our ROI? And all you can really quote is earned media and, you know, impressions. I feel like you have to go much deeper than that. On the flip side, if all you're doing is worrying about the funnel and then you're not actually caring about the vision and the brand of the company, well, then you're not capturing the emotion, to your point earlier, that the client is experiencing. So it's the way that the two work together. And then I would advise that every marketer really gets in lockstep with their CRO, their CEO, and the sales team.

John Furrier

>> How's your brand architecture going now at BitGo? How would you rank that, rate it, or describe it?

Nick Payton

>> I'm biased. I could rate mine, right, but maybe I'll give it a 9 out of 10 because there's always a little more to do.

John Furrier

>> You've got to give yourself an A+. Right, right, right. You guys have a great brand. We've been covering that. But as you look forward, there's evolution. The market is just changing a little bit now, a little bit bearish. I think it's going to be bullish soon. But how would you describe your brand promise?

Nick Payton

>> Well, our brand promise is essentially we're here to help you transition to a digital asset economy. At the end of the day, we are the digital asset infrastructure layer of this entire industry. We've been here since 2013. I mentioned the multi -sig innovation, the quantum innovation. BitGo is not just a bastion or a custodian for digital assets. We are leading the pack and helping to usher in the new age.

John Furrier

>> It's interesting. I was talking to someone at NVIDIA, and we were talking about theCUBE and SiliconANGLE, and then we see where we have a lot of things that we could be called. NVIDIA's number one pet peeve is they don't want to be viewed as the GPU company. But they make the best GPUs.

John Furrier

>> Right.

John Furrier

>> But they're an AI infrastructure company.

John Furrier

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And they have a lot of other things. They got CPUs. They got networking. InfiniBand, KVCache, Spectrum-X. They got Omniverse. They got NIMs. So they have a portfolio of capabilities under one brand of AI infrastructure.

John Furrier

>> Sure.

John Furrier

>> You guys are an infrastructure player. So if you look at your capabilities, you would agree that would be a clean way to describe BitGo.

Nick Payton

>> Yes, 100%. And you don't want to lose track of what you've always done well, but that doesn't mean that we're not excited and putting a lot of R&D into these future waves of innovation that are coming. So, yeah, and NVIDIA probably is in a similar situation like you just said where, hey, yes, we have great GPUs, but we also have these other great things. That's BitGo as well.

John Furrier

>> Well, I brought up NVIDIA because you guys are very similar because my comment about my friend saying they weren't really paying attention to a brand architecture. They had that problem. They were growing faster than they could explain it. So people knew them for what they were, not what they are.

Nick Payton

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> And no one questions what NVIDIA is doing when they come out with something new. DGX, okay, that's part of the AI infrastructure. They're enabling value, intelligence. You guys enable. So if you do it right, you can have a brand architecture that lets you innovate without having to re-explain.

Nick Payton

>> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> All right. Great to see you. Events you guys are doing, any kind of activations you want to put a plug in for?

Nick Payton

>> Oh, geez. Well, tokenization and stable coins are obviously key, but just highlighting again that BitGo is the infrastructure layer for the future financial economy, essentially. And so it starts with qualified custody underneath, but then out of cold storage where you can also trade, you can stake, you can build out wallet infrastructure. We also have this great crypto as a service offering, which is seeing robust growth even in this market right now, because essentially people can just come to BitGo and white label our APIs and build the next Coinbase app or name your big brand. And so we're seeing a ton of fintech companies come to us and just basically building, skinning our technology to launch their own exchanges.

John Furrier

>> That's a long game play. That's an accelerated enablement.

Nick Payton

>> Yeah, B2B2C. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Furrier

>> Nick, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

John Furrier

>> Great to see you, John.

John Furrier

>> All right, the Marketing Leader Series. We talk to the leaders and explore the future of marketing, find out what they're working on. As the world changes, the stack of marketing, just like in tech, the infrastructure is enabling marketing to be an infrastructure opportunity, as well as allowing brand amplification with content, a variety of great new things coming. We're doing our part here in theCUBE. Explain that to you. Thanks for watching. Thank you.