An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Don’t start selling a wide range of services but just focus your attention on what you are uniquely great at. The times of all-encompassing brands, like Toyota and Sony, have come to an end.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Eloisa Marchesoni.
Eloisa is a Tokenomics Engineer focusing on token model architecture, token macro-/micro-economics structure, crypto market simulations and gamification strategies for Web3 businesses. She is currently a partner to VCs and accelerators, while also working as an advisor to self-funded crypto startups, which she has been doing since 2016.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
My name is Eloisa Marchesoni. I’m a 24-year-old Italian-American born in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
I am a crypto-entrepreneur and modern digital nomad, tokenomics expert, tech business angel, fixed passive income crypto investor, and freelance consultant. I’m also a member of numerous blockchain associations, including the newly-formed Scaramucci-backed GMI Super PAC.
When I was a student at Bocconi University in Milan, I did well but got tired of being the typical valedictorian and felt like it wasn’t what I wanted. At the time, ICOs were starting to become a thing. I had already purchased some cryptocurrencies, then waited for the ICO bubble to pop to officially start in crypto as a token model artist. It was a big pivot — I had planned on a career in management consulting with McKinsey.
Later on, I met Giacomo Arcaro and his growth hacker team. After building our skills together, we started to work on innovative management consulting following the crypto trends. I still work with him, but now I’m focusing my attention on DeFi, NFTs, and especially on projects aimed at aiding the mass adoption of blockchain technology and its applications.
The crypto world has interested me for a long time, mainly because of its potential to make our world a better place to live. I also enjoy seeing the constant growth behind a new continuous chain of innovation and efficiency backed by wonderful and diverse projects.
I was shy in the beginning. As I started gaining experience in the crypto industry around the world, I felt like the crypto world was an important part of me and my role as a young woman was overall accepted. People have always been welcoming and nobody ever took advantage of me. With crypto, I felt truly valued for my skills and ability.
That led me to public speaking. People kindly appreciated what I had to say, like specific insight into certain sectors, which I could adapt to the various geographic areas I went to and the people I spoke to. It makes me feel grateful to everything and everyone that I have credibility and growing opportunities through those public interactions.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
Reached out to Giacomo’s team and followed them around the world, while forming my own Web3 identity. This was a great catalyst for a lot of the wonderful things happening now.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
R&D in the Tokenomics field, uniting otherwise-isolated figures in the space.
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?
Burn-out from attending too many conferences in 2019/20, and being so overwhelmed that the networking only resulted in hundreds of business cards that are still sitting somewhere in a drawer.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
I’ve received guidance at points in my career from Tokenomics pioneers, like Lisa JY Tan and the Outlier Ventures team. I’ve also given my fair share so far to my current junior collaborators. It’s a lifelong give and take, the exchange of knowledge and skills.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
My own style, but theories are backed by the lessons learned when studying the very ancient Bocconi management tradition. Who said tradition must be completely supplanted by Web3?
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
1. Outsource
The most successful DAO has likely 0 employees and hundreds of freelancers with high competences in their vertical.
2. Focus only on your strengths
Don’t start selling a wide range of services but just focus your attention on what you are uniquely great at. The times of all-encompassing brands, like Toyota and Sony, have come to an end.
3. Build a loyal team rather than a team of geniuses
We are witnessing an era with the highest number of resignations due to the decentralization and competitiveness within the job market. The ticket you are going to pay by having a genius team member quit at a random time (because a genius never notifies anyone!) is much higher than the profit you could ever make through their inconsistent value addition to the company.
4. Build a trusted sales network rather than hiring sneaky sellers
You never buy a product. You buy into the feeling of being able to trust the company selling the product, and nothing sells more than word of mouth. Which restaurant will you choose tonight? The 5-starred one on TripAdvisor or the one your Italian friend suggested you on WhatsApp? The second, most likely.
5. Be patient and wait for your moment
Every new day is a chance to make a new bet and your life is a beautiful casino (by the way, in Italian, a “casino” is literally a “mess,” which Web3 really got me into, since day 1 — hahah!). Every day, life airdrops you new tokens to be gambled, and all you have to do is place a bet wisely and wait for the odds to play out.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
The first reason for failure is the Round A investment. The main reason is that the CEO is more focused on raising funds rather than expanding the business, and the other reason is that, after having secured enough funds, the adrenaline may drop and the dopamine may relax them to the point where they forget that the goal is running a successful business with the funds raised, and not going for more funds to get another adrenaline rush while screwing up the business itself.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
Screen new hires very carefully before you choose them, through a good amount of social media background checks and, instead of an official interview, rather have a friendly chat with them, discussing more or less indirectly about their own culture and ethos. Plus, give them examples of how your team and you work and ask the prospect hires how they would have acted in times where your team was struggling with certain clients.
Do not impose culture and ethos on new hires, after you have done a poor job at screening them and they are already hired. It will not work!
In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
Corporate communication is crucial. The communications model changes every three to four months. There’s media convergence, new technology, and new analytics, which affect how you need to communicate internally and externally in the company, and how people inside and outside of it will get their information.
Communicating your company’s top-level goals with the entire organization helps employees connect their everyday tasks to the bigger picture. This fosters a valuable sense of meaning in their jobs — which encourages them to contribute more.
Encourage your team members to voice their ideas, opinions, and concerns on a team communication platform of your choice, which may be the result of the combination of two or more platforms. This leads to stimulating and rich conversations which spark productivity, collaboration and innovation.
Encourage people to build their personal brands on social media by sharing the company’s thought leadership content, appearing on podcasts, and speaking at events. When you give your employees such opportunities, they feel more involved with the company and are ready to contribute more to your business success.
Before team members can innovate, they need to be informed about both internal company updates and external industry dynamics and economic developments. Using a team communications platform, as simple as a combination of Slack and Telegram, allows you to encourage your team to share articles and updates about your industry, competitors, and the economy with their colleagues. Similarly, they can share internal updates about customer challenges, successes, and so on. This knowledge will help your teammates come up with ideas and initiatives that truly reflect the needs of customers and the market.
Corporate communication is important for improving cross-departmental communication in the workplace. Innovation never happens solely within the confines of a lab. Truly profitable ideas and execution require inputs from across departments like tech, support, marketing, and sales.
When members of the organization have the means to communicate with people across departments effortlessly, they will be able to easily collaborate to discuss and refine innovation initiatives that become genuinely profitable. Productivity is all about getting more done in less time. The more productive your people are, the higher your revenue generated/employee and the lower the cost/employee.
Many collaborators will waste tons of time searching for the required information to execute specific tasks. This isn’t just the case with new hires. Anyone who’s trying to execute a process they are unfamiliar with would face this issue. However, an internal communications platform largely eliminates this problem. People can just ask their colleagues for help over the platform — in specific departmental/ topic-based ‘channels.’ Anyone who has experienced that situation before will be able to help out by providing an immediate solution.
Corporate communication encourages the practice of sharing knowledge and experiences. For example, a support or sales team member can share their unique experience with a customer. Everyone else can use that knowledge to help other customers more successfully in the future. Communication leads to better collaboration. And when people collaborate more efficiently, they get more done in less time with less friction.
Finally, companies are only as successful as the people who work there, but attracting top talent is an expensive and time-consuming process. With an employee advocacy program in place, your existing employees will be able to talk about open positions on their social networks. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on job ads, you can acquire suitable candidates through corporate communication on social media.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out, and then Telegram and Slack to onboard them into the internal corporate communications system.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
Bring even more experts together, from directly/indirectly-related fields of Web3 and Data Science, in order to set up a one-stop not-for-profit community that offers 360-degrees due diligence on any Web3 project that is submitted by anyone, even anonymously.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://linktr.ee/eloisamarchesoni
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
Eloisa Marchesoni On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
