Decentralizing Success: Andrew Hyde on the Power of Community in Web3 Marketing

Ty Smith0:05

What is up, everyone? Welcome back. Today we have another interview podcast. Today we have Andrew Hyde, the Head of Communications at Render Foundation. Andrew Hyde has had a long history as a marketer in the tech and, more recently, Web3 space. So we're going to go through some of that stuff. What's up, Andrew?

Andrew Hyde0:17

Thanks for having me on. Very excited to be here.

Ty Smith0:18

All right. So let's start with obviously what Render Foundation is. Like, what are you guys working on and what is your role like?

Andrew Hyde0:23

Yeah, we do the governance for the project. So we listen to the community and try to build the best team around what we want to do as a community for the project. The project is based around rendering, obviously. But we really have roots in kind of the 3D animation space. So right now, we are switching to Solana from Ethereum. So we don't have live dashboards and such, but a little bit of the metrics of, millions of frames going to be rendered every year on Render.

Andrew Hyde1:08

And we're switching right now based on our community's input to be able to provide GPUs, kind of like Airbnb for GPUs on demand for startups and people doing machine learning and kind of large language models. So we do GPUs. If you if your startup or project needs a lot of power, we've kind of got that, and we're able to do that internationally and kind of powered by crypto.

Ty Smith1:22

Nice. What is the kind of like Web3 crypto tie? Like, is it all blockchain-related model?

Andrew Hyde1:24

Yeah, we're able to kind of have our artists who have these souped-up, 3D animation machines, they're able to leave them on and be on the network for other people to use. So we're able to pay them and kind of facilitate that transaction end-to-end encrypted. So that's kind of the use case of why it's blockchain and not something else.

Ty Smith1:38

Got it. So is there like an incentive model for the people that are keeping those running?

Andrew Hyde1:41

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have a lot of, you get paid per job. That's one incentive. The other is a lot of our artists, so they're they've got machines running in the background, and so they're just kind of leaving them on online. They're able to use the product and then also provide the product to others, which is. Foundation as itself, we have just over 2.4 million Render that we're giving out right now for early adopters to API access for our new RMP process around general compute or compute clients. So if you're if you've got a GPU farm and you're looking for a place to go, we have a place that wants to pay you for that time and kind of let jobs run through it.

Ty Smith2:35

So as far as communications go, what does your role look like? Like, what is your day-to-day? What have you been working on? Because you've been there for about a year, I think. What does that look like?

Andrew Hyde2:40

It's really listening to the community. It's an interesting community because you have people that are 3D animators, you have people that are really into GPU processing, you've got really, the cryptography crowd. So it's it's generally like 10 crowds in one. It's not New Year's Eve one specific market that you can go to. Day-to-day, it's listening to the community. The community comes up with our governance, and we facilitate the votes, and then we try to get people to vote on it and really be on the same team. So a lot of it is technical writing, and a lot of it is hanging out in the forums and talking to our users.

Ty Smith3:30

Yeah, I saw you have a whole lot of knowledge base type content produced. Are you the one behind that?

Andrew Hyde3:32

Yeah, I do a lot of that, and then a lot of the just direct channel communications. So whenever we have big announcements go out, I think there's a, best practices as far as being on Discord and Telegram and Reddit and email, and we try to cover all the bases. I think over time, X has been or Twitter has been huge in the past for crypto. I think that's kind of shifting right now. I feel it as far as energy and kind of where a lot of the people that I really value in the space are going. So we're kind of listening, see where the community goes, but that's a wild ride on that one.

Ty Smith3:54

Where do you think the community is going if it's not Twitter?

Andrew Hyde3:56

I mean, I hate to be the old guy, but I think email. I think it's one-on-one relationships. I think people are really kind of they want to have buy-in, they want to know people that work on the project, they want to have that connection.

Ty Smith4:32

The obviously there's also so much you can do as far as communications for something like that. What does your team look like? Are you kind of like running this the whole communications piece solo? Do you have a people below you? What does that look like?

Andrew Hyde4:40

Yeah, we have a bunch of freelancers on the the project that are from previous companies or have been involved in the companies. I mean, this was a 2017 project. So it's been going forever. So there's people that have been there day one that are still in, in our community. We've had people day one, on the Telegram that are still there every day. So it's it's a long history, and I don't I haven't seen that with a lot of projects. We have, a copywriter, somebody who's just, a lot of people are if you we have a company that it spun out of, like it was a Web2 company that created the Web3 project.

Andrew Hyde5:07

And then the Web3 project didn't have a foundation, and that's where I came on a year ago, and we have the foundation. So I'm with the newer part of the project, but there's generally kind of a legacy of of who's been working on it and a lot of knowledge from those guys. So really love the team and kind of just really brilliant. They're both working either a little bit in Web3, but a lot in Web2 and what they've done.

Ty Smith5:45

Yeah, you before we started recording, you were telling me pretty interesting history about like what you were doing before Render. Like, walk us through that a little bit.

Andrew Hyde5:49

Yeah, I was working for a Web3 startup that was totally, going for the moon, it was retail investor type, focused. And I ran a coworking space in Boulder based on that. So it was just a bunch of Web3 projects, and we had Zooko of Zcash and, a bunch of random random people would stop in. It was just kind of an open office, and you could come in if you worked in the space.

Andrew Hyde6:06

And Greg, who was the CTO, he was like, 'I think we think we got this big thing,' and nobody knew who he was talking about. Like, he was so technical and so smart, and all the Qualcomm engineers were equally as cryptic and smart, and nobody knew what they were actually doing. But he came back six months later, and he was like, 'We it worked. Like, we we tested it out, and like, it actually works. So we need to build the team. Are you interested in joining?' as like freelance or part-time or whatever. So so I joined with them, really got along with them, worked with them for a bit, and had a blast. But that was the early, early days of Solana. I think I was employee 10.

Andrew Hyde6:55

And then, hired on a bunch of people, and, it's really fun. I was just out at Breakpoint in Amsterdam, and getting to see all my old old friends from kind of the coworking space days of that project. And now it's what, a $22 billion market cap, just absolutely insane company. But the early, early days pre-launch, it was it was very frustrating, as far as talking to press and talking to anybody about the project. I still have that problem. I'm going to have to figure that one out. I don't know if anybody has.

Andrew Hyde7:16

But, we had this launch last week in Amsterdam for for my current project, which is the Render Foundation, and we couldn't get anyone to cover it. We had a couple bites here, couple bites there, but really, it was this isn't a story. And that's exactly I found recently found the press release that we sent out when we launched Solana. Like, when we have the, 'Here, we raised money from this.' We had a $20 million $22 million raise, and I've got a note from every tech piece of tech press, TechCrunch, Recode, all the big players back in the day, that it wasn't newsworthy. And now it's this massive thing.

Ty Smith8:03

Really? A $20 million raise wasn't newsworthy?

Andrew Hyde8:06

Yeah. Because it was crypto, right? It was weird. People have some assumptions about the industry, and I think there's a lot of weird projects, and I agree with them on that. But there's also some real tech being built. Like, we have, thousands of people making their living using this product. If you, watch TV or or trade NFTs or the Sphere in Vegas, like, we touch a lot of things in a very commercial, public way.

Andrew Hyde8:24

Now, it's end-to-end encrypted, so we don't get to really see what's on our network. We just have to rely on our our community kind of reaching out and saying, 'We did this, and it's really cool, and I'm proud of it.' So we don't know a lot of the stuff that we've done, but generally, any like 3D intro to a TV show or movie, chances are it's Render's played a role in that. I might say that very broadly. I think it's probably, like 20, 30%, but I've seen, I've met the artists that are under NDA, so they can't even say what they are, but like, lot of shows. So it's I mean, it's real tech, right? And I think that's what the industry needs more and more of. But back in the day, Solana, what is it? Brand new blockchain. Okay, what why why? Who? It was a hard story to pitch.

Andrew Hyde9:20

And we tried so many things, and the thing that ended up working really well was we built this thing called Break, and it was me challenging whoever I was talking to, journalist or whatever, to break the network. So I let your spacebar be a transaction. So you could mash your spacebar as many times in 15 seconds, and we would just print out the transaction IDs on-chain live. And so this idea of, transactions per second, that was the big differentiator for Solana that could do, we were coming out out of the gate out of launch saying 60,000. Now, Ethereum was 15.

Andrew Hyde10:07

All right. Bitcoin was six. Right? And so it's like people saw 60,000 and instantly thought you were a scam. And so we were, we built something to show everybody that was just, 'No, this is real. This is on-chain. This is live. This is working. This is super fast.' And it's going to enable project like Render down the line to be able to do things with their broad mission. The Render mission is really about spatial computing and and and visualization.

Andrew Hyde10:22

Apple Vision Pro, we're powering a lot of of that. I mean, those those scenes are going to take massive power. And Trevor talked about this at the Breakpoint launch last week, and the video's on our Twitter, where it's just like the scale of an HD video versus spatial is, sometimes 10,000x as far as the time it needs to render and the complexity. The Roddenberry Archive has been fully rendered now, which is really interesting. So all the Star Trek ships. And so theoretically,

Andrew Hyde10:43

you're going to be able to pop on the goggles and walk through those and see them and be extremely lifelike. If you're talking about OTOY and what they've done, I mean, light fields is one of the most interesting technical innovations I've ever seen as far as being able to render real-time what actors look like. The last Star Trek, I keep on talking about that, probably a bad example at this point, but how much just our lives are going to change via GPUs. Like, what you see language models, AI, like, it's all running on that crux of GPUs. So that's what we're doing at the foundation.

Andrew Hyde11:31

And it's both this like perfect story, like we work on Star Trek and Star Wars, right? And it's this impossible story, which, as far as in the marketing world, it's it's really nerdy tech, right? So we're we're in between those two, and it's it's fun, but it's also super challenging.

Ty Smith11:51

You were saying before that you were trying, you know, pushing through the organic channels to get coverage and and didn't get a whole lot back, and then price went up and the situation changed.

Andrew Hyde12:26

Yeah, if you Google our project today, you'll see probably 40 articles written in the last 24 hours. we did our big Ethereum to Solana upgrade push, and we had three, four articles. So it's just it's it's a very frustrating experience to like try to work on real tech and then still have an industry that's kind of just trying to talk token price, which the foundation, we don't ever acknowledge, right? Like, we don't do that. We build we build technology, and we build a great governance process for our community to use to build amazing things using this technology. So that's that's frustrating. I think everybody kind of feels that.

Ty Smith12:56

Why do you think it was so difficult to get coverage for the Like, I, you know, switching chains is a pretty big deal. Why do you think it was difficult to get coverage there?

Andrew Hyde13:02

Yeah, I mean, it's it's a what what do we have, a 1.4 billion dollar market cap? Right? Like, you'd think it'd be a story. I think Solana has a history of of people not liking it based on, that was day one. My goodness, we had so many challenges with people, 'Hey, we're doing this new thing. It's kind of built like how your cell phone works.' And people were angry. Just day one, anger. It was like, what? Tribalism and and kind of community. I don't know. I can't really tell you because you're just left on read. You're not you're not getting no's per se, but you're just not getting responses.

Andrew Hyde13:58

So why didn't we get coverage? Or, you know, why has coverage been so hard? I don't know. The beauty of it, we have a huge online following, our community's amazing, energized, amazing, they get the message out. So we haven't had a problem communicating it. We did the upgrade, and we have had 16 million RNDR kind of burn and turn into Render, and that's in the first two weeks, which is much, much further along than I thought we'd ever be. So the community is the megaphone at this point. I don't think there's a lot of people that just kind of check in and reload news, especially crypto news right now. They're not reloading those. I'm not sure if you found that, but I think that the people that are really working on big projects and such, they're in forums, they're in Discords and Telegrams, and they've got 20 sources of information, and you might get into two of them. But we're finding just a very disparate attention span and motivation to really be on all channels.

Ty Smith15:01

Yeah, I saw your community is quite large. You have, I think, 120,000 Twitter followers, almost 14,000 Telegram, I think 7,000 Discord when I checked. How did that like ramp up? And how has that number kind of changed over like the course of the different markets that we've seen since Render has been around?

Andrew Hyde15:12

Yeah, I mean, it's it's fun being in the industry. I've been in the Web3 space since 2017. So, two major cycles. So I've seen the just absolute despair where you can't get five people to a meetup to the absolute, like, I think we had 10,000 followers yesterday. you know, it's like we didn't really put out anything interesting yesterday. That's across that's across all of our channels, not just Twitter. It's I don't know how to answer your question. It's just like you have to be there through the glass-chewing days, and you have to be there and not be emotional when things, your community's super happy and really celebrating. You just have to have this very clear focus on we build a great product, and we want more people to use that product to make their lives better. Like, everything has to go down to that. And I think Render does that really well. We'll see how our AI compute does. That's rolling out the next couple months, and that could be absolutely, absolutely massive.

Ty Smith16:17

What like marketing strategies have you found to be most effective through your career there?

Andrew Hyde16:20

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm the old-school marketer of do things that don't scale. I mean, my my favorite thing I ever did was screen print notebooks and hand them out one-on-one. I remember Gary Vaynerchuk was at South by Southwest, and he had his little wristbands for Wine Library TV, and there was a lot of like Disney pin trading, like old-school on-the-ground, meet people. So a lot of our community is friends of friends, right? Like, 'I've worked with them before. I've seen them before online,' like that's the hard hard part about the space is that, you've seen them at highs and you've seen them at lows. So I think long-term relationships is probably the best thing that I can coach people on is like you're going to be here for a couple cycles, so like make friends, and like people remember things. And just like

Andrew Hyde17:20

no hype. I'm of a very, old-school. There's a writer named Kathy Sierra. I don't know if you know Kathy.

Ty Smith18:14

No, I don't think so.

Andrew Hyde18:15

She wrote the Head First Head First series on O'Reilly books. so like how to learn Java. It was it was just kind of called Head First. And she wrote a blog back in the day called Creating Passionate Users, which I think is still the best marketing blog that's ever been created. Kathy's an amazing, amazing person. She's doing something completely different now. She's doing Icelandic horse training in Washington State. So I love Kathy, and I love her way. But it's it's your job as a marketer is not to get your user to say, 'I kick ass.' Your job is to not get them to say, 'You kick ass.' Your job is to get them to say, 'I kick ass.' So, 'I found this great podcast, and I'm sharing it with you because I learned a lot, and I'm going to be a better marketer from that.' That's your goal as a podcast, not, 'I found this awesome guy, and Ty's the best guy I've ever met,' That's not your goal. That comes off like the community can feel that. They can smell that. That's hype. And there's a lot of hype that works, right? Like, you look at Snoop Dogg's, 'I quit smoking today' hype. Like, you can see through it pretty quickly. But, how do you actually say, 'I want my users to do better at their jobs. I want my users to have better lives. I want my users to,' say, 'I kick ass' when sharing my project with other people.

Ty Smith19:14

Yeah, it's it's such a under, I feel like, utilized strategy of like this like under-promise, over-deliver thing in the Web3 world. But I do also feel that there's like two groups of people that as marketers we're always going after, and projects will kind of pick one in my experience. It's like we're going to go after like the really like OG's who will respond positively to under-hype and just like real substance and kind of like head down building, and that's one style. It kind of sounds like your style. And then there's like this like, 'We're the best project. We're going to take over the world.' We're hyping up everything, and I think maybe retail goes for that better. But in my opinion, it's not like it's not the style that that long-term projects should be using, and it sounds like you agree.

Andrew Hyde19:40

Yeah, I mean, we're getting absolutely walked on, with the new generation of marketers though, right? Like, we're all I feel like I'm a very old-school guy being in, marketer for 15, 20 years now. And I just like I see some things come out, and I'm just like, 'This is so interesting and so far beyond what what I know or what I think about.' Is it wrong? No. Is it my style? Absolutely not. So I think it's a lot about style as well.

Andrew Hyde20:26

One thing I love about Render, and I'll say this with just absolute joy, everybody is super kind. Everybody I work with there is just like ethical, honest, awesome, want to hang out with them more. And in the space, you have a lot of people that are just trying to, hype things, do things quick, they hope you don't have a long attention span. And man, when you find your core team that's like that, that has that drive that you can mutually feed off of, you never want to leave, right? You just want to be there for a while, and you want to find that community. And then you have to train the community, right? How do you get your community to show up that way? Especially when you have some retail folks that are used to saying, screaming from the rooftops,

Andrew Hyde20:49

My first job in PR was with like outdoor industry. And I remember every time, every cycle, every every year, it was, 'Forget last year's jacket. This year's jacket is the one you need to buy because of these reasons. Last year's jacket was terrible. This year's jacket was amazing.' And that was like 20 years of that, if you've worked as a marketer in. So it's tough to be on a cycle, and it's tough to be, have a bad product. I think a lot of crypto has bad product, right? Like, it's too hard to explain to general people. They really don't have users. I think that's the biggest thing. It's like, 'Hey, I'm saying make your users' life better.' And most projects don't have customers. And like, that's impossible to use that strategy.

Ty Smith21:54

How does the grant program like play into that? Because I imagine there's a whole lot of community building that's kind of done in that style that you're mentioning of like person-to-person relationships and helping each other grow. How does that work?

Andrew Hyde21:59

Yeah, it's too long. So I'm excited we're sending out those payments this week. And my dream is that we find these amazing 3D artists. Like, that's an also superpower that the Render Network has is that we get to show off amazing 3D art, like objectively amazing art. And like, that's fun to show off on Twitter and, like our showreel during the Breakpoint talk is so stunning and so much fun to see how people use the same technology to create drastically different mediums and tell different stories.

Andrew Hyde22:49

So we just announced six artists that we gave grants to. And in the grant process, I said, 'What other artists do you find interesting? What other artists do you think are really doing cool things in the space?' And so we're just giving them a lot of Render credit and saying, 'Hey, like, you have now more time to dream,' right? Like, if you if you're doing a huge job, a very complex job, a lot of times the, joke of 3D animators is like you hit render and you come back, overnight and hope it works. Right? But every night, you need to have a job, and it's not often that you have a job to render every night, where we can cut that down to 15 minutes. You can try out some really crazy things, really big things. One of our artists just did the Sphere in Vegas last weekend. So that was super cool to see just like this new medium, this new file format as well. Like, you think about it, like, it's different than anything that's ever been created as far as the requirements of artists. And if you're exporting for the first time using spatial 3D on a globe, you're going to have some problems. You're going to have some issues. So it's nice that you can make a mistake and then quickly fix it. So yeah, the grants program's kind of my favorite thing to dig into and to talk about. I really want to give give a lot out. We've got 1.1 or 1.14 million Render that we're giving out to people with GPUs that sign up on our waitlist to get involved in general AI compute. So we have three, two officially about to be three compute clients or startups that offer GPUs in a different way. They've got pros and cons of using each one of them. So we have that, which is a lot of Render. And then we have a lot of Render going into liquidity providers, and then a lot. So we're as a foundation kind of really kicking into high gear right now. Our burn-mint model is about to go live. It's just going through some audits. I think the official time frame on that is weeks. So when that goes live, we're on Solana, we're working with compute clients, and we've got every single major 3D modeling software supported so that the artist can use whatever they want to use, Blender is the largest open-source one. So we're really kind of kicking into high gear and trying to tell those stories, but also just kind of focusing on our users, right? Like, it's we've tried doing marketing. We've tried kind of saying like, not hypey stuff, but we tried contacting the press and saying, 'Look at all this amazing stuff,' and they've kind of passed on it. So we're just go back to users, go back to the core of what you love and why you're in the space in the first place, and we love seeing them thrive, and if you hop hop on our forums, you can see they're pretty happy. It's pretty fun to deal with them. A lot of times, been on projects where you have not happy users, and that's a drag. This is a totally different story about how do you show up and how do you be in work. So

Ty Smith23:48

Is there anything that you feel beyond the I mean, you were talking about the Solana thing before, but is there any campaigns or initiatives or anything that you've accomplished at Render that you are particularly proud of?

Andrew Hyde23:52

I think just the I mean, our governance process, to be very nerdy. I'll hop on the forums and kind of, tout how excited everybody is for our exciting governance process. But really, providing transparency to a community, I think that's a huge one, right? Like, having our, all of our wallets out there in public and warning our users if we're doing any sort of big changes. It's just like the that's the fundamental communication that builds that trust of a project with the community. And then, we're trying to roll out some stuff, but we're really waiting for BME to go live and kind of our Solana integration to go live, and then we get to really play around with what we can do with artists and hopefully get a lot of very creative, very ambitious art that's at Art Basel or kind of bigger, traditional art art fields. It's fun to kind of democratize the. If you are a small studio, you can't afford a GPU farm to render your movie. Right? Like, our one of our first jobs I did 3D animation crashed a Amazon web services data center. Right? Like, these jobs are not built for typical use case. And so a lot of the big studios, they have their own server farms, right? Like, they have massive, massive, massive abilities. But if you're just a normal filmmaker, local person, suddenly you have access. Suddenly, you can fight with the big boys as far as quality and not have to invest millions of dollars into getting that. So I think that's what I'm most excited is showing off what our artists can do and what they can do because of our tech. I think we've done we've done most of our work on governance and kind of connecting with the community so far in this year, and now that we're launching, we're kind of rolling out some other cool stuff. But if you look at our Twitter, Twitter's been fun, lot of lot of just beautiful art connection to community, connection to creators.

Ty Smith24:56

If there was one thing from a marketing perspective that you could add that you're not currently doing and you haven't tried yet, what intrigues you?

Andrew Hyde25:01

I would love to have some sort of voting mechanism for a grant process. Like, I think it'd be fascinating to say like nominate artists that you want to see on Render or nominate an artist or, like, 'I want to do let's say I want to do a podcast with you, but I need rendering power,' right? Like, we should be able to say, be in chat on Twitter and be, get a grant that way. I think that would be the coolest thing to do is just like how do we empower our users live and in public because so many grant processes are like apply, wait three months, have an interview, wait three months, like how do we actually connect with the community and just empower them, and then also it's cool for our marketing because it shows off exactly what we do, and it shows off how we love the space. So I think that'd be fun.

Ty Smith25:57

You love these like hands-on marketing, which is which is great. I mean, in the business that you're in, the Render Foundation business, that's like, in my opinion, smart. Before I let you go though, I want to I want to just make sure that people that are listening can follow along in your journey. Social media-wise, website-wise, like, where can people follow along?

Andrew Hyde26:03

Yeah, I mean, Render Foundation, that's our handle on most things. Twitter, it's Render Oh, sorry. Render Network. renderfoundation.com. If you want to follow me personally on Twitter, I'm Unicorn. One of those old-school guys that got in Unicorn is your Twitter handle? That was somehow Yeah. Wow, that's the real story here. Back in the day of Twitter when it Super fun. Yeah. That was that was honestly yeah, that's that's another that's another podcast. But the the foundation, we have Discord and Telegram and, the usual usual Web3 marketing stuff. The grants process is at renderfoundation.com/grants. And that's probably where I'd send most people. So

Ty Smith27:14

Cool. Well, thanks for joining us. It's been fun.

Andrew Hyde27:16

Hey, so lovely. Great chat.