CMO at Hedera Hashgraph
As part of growing this news site, one particular thing I am very interested in carrying out and growing is the inclusion of interviews which may be of interest to both the community and newcomers to Hedera Hashgraph and hbar.
I thought the easiest and most convenient way to carry this out for the time being would be to keep it short and simple and also provide my interviewee the questions via email. In this way they can answer when they have the time; as a lot of individuals in this space are extremely busy.
For my first interview, I reached out to Christian Hasker the current CMO at Hedera. I have known Christian from the community and also from my being a former founder of GoMint. I always found Christian to be very responsive and eager to help the community whenever he can. Of course, he agreed to answer my questions and I present you with his responses below.
I hope you enjoy this interview and maybe you can get something out of it. I present the answers unedited as I do not like editing others people’s words. So here is Christians unedited interview below (minus the addition of hyperlinks) with the questions in bold:
How did you start working with Hedera Hashgraph?
After I left the last startup I was at after 4 1/2 years I set up a product marketing consulting agency. Zenobia was doing work for Mance and Leemon with PR at Swirlds, and they were starting to plan for a public ledger built on Hedera.
They needed someone to come in and do messaging/positioning and plan the launch. I intended to help with the launch in March 2018 and then just keep going with the consulting company, but they convinced me to come on board as the full-time CMO.
What was your biggest challenge in being the CMO for Hedera Hashgraph?
A public ledger, or blockchain is infrastructure as a service – the core audience for such technologies are architects and engineers who are going to build on top of it. But the fact that public blockchains have cryptocurrencies bring in a whole new audience of passionate retail investors.
Leveraging the power of our amazing community, while still staying laser focused on those technical audiences is much more complex than marketing traditional infrastructure software, but it is a lot more satisfying.
How do you feel about both the open source news and moving your talents over to Swirlds?
I come from a deep open source background, and have seen firsthand the power of open source to build technical communities. While it may be slightly more challenging for us given that hashgraph did not start out open source, we are so excited for the opportunity this now brings.
While I think we have done a fairly good job overcoming the objection to hashgraph not being open source this should remove one of the remaining objections that we encounter.
I should note that the services code has been open source for months and months, and now 100% of the code will be available under Apache 2 license, which is the most permissive of open source licenses.
Other blockchains may claim open source but may employ a more restrictive license, so the choice of license is really important. Open source developers understand this.
Please tell the readers something that they may not know about you?
I feel like the community knows me pretty well by now, but I am a classically trained trumpeter, and could have been a professional musician in another life if I had so chosen. I’m glad I didn’t.
Do you have any funny stories about Mance or Leemon or about working at Hedera?
I love working with Mance and Leemon. What you see is really what you get with them; they are both really down to earth. They have a great sense of humor, so we laugh a lot together.
It’s too hard to pick just one story that sticks out. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with them, and I think their relationship is very rare and special.
If you had to choose one use case to showcase to the world to show the possibilities with Hedera, who would you choose and why?
Gosh, this is such a hard question as there are simply so many use cases that are game-changers for their respective industries. One project that I really love, if I had to pick just one is the StarlingLab project from USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University.
It is the brainchild of Jonathan Dotan from Stanford, and tackles the technical and ethical challenges of establishing trust around the most sensitive digital records of our human history, using the latest advances in cryptography and decentralized web protocols, including using Hedera Consensus Service as an integral part of what they are doing.
I think restoring trust in what we read, watch, hear, is essential, and a very big bold application for decentralized technologies.
If you had the ears of all Hbarbarians and the whole community, what would you tell them?
I would say to read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and to realize that you are all on the left side of the chasm, as visionaries and early adopters. That’s a great place to be, because when we leap across the chasm the vast majority of the market is waiting on the other side.
Notes: Interview conducted via email. Picture credit: Christian Hasker Twitter.
Interview conducted by Peter G. Uliano
Hedera ID: 0.0.9090
