I N T E R V I E W
Interview with Flipside Crypto’s new Head of Product, Alex Chopan
From developing emerging technologies and setting up venture arms for the US Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to leading product and strategy at Bridgewater Associates and Dash Core Group, Alex is uniquely positioned to drive business intelligence and growth in the blockchain world. We caught up with Alex to learn more about his intriguing story:
1. Everyone has a unique path into product management and yours is no exception having spent time at larger organizations like Bridgewater Associates, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s innovation arm), and Dash Core Group (creators of the Dash cryptocurrency protocol). Can you tell us a little about your background and how you got into product?
Alex Chopan: Most of my jobs have been creating some new office / organization / company, with new products and services. I started as an analyst looking at how competitors make decisions, and moved into analyzing what competitors were producing. In these roles, we worked with people to find new ways to collect information, new ways to process and analyze it, and then new formats and feeds to provide it to customers as products or services. We worked with a lot of marketing companies, academics, and even some design firms. It was at this stage I got interested in “design thinking”.
I later moved into roles where we rapidly developed technology products for clients. I led product and program managers we embedded with clients for engagements. We worked with teams to understand users and problems, brainstorm solutions, put the ideas together, define requirements, pitch for money, find labs, vendors, and others to help build the products, and rapidly prototype a product. We’d do proofs of concept in 3 months, field it in a year, and scale it for 3 total years. These products were in many flavors (software, hardware, and services), and products quickly turned into product lines and larger programs. This could be anything from mobile apps, software programs, sensors, communication devices, data services, hardware components, etc. At Dash, we built a product management function from scratch, and worked on consumer mobile and web apps, while also working on a platform Dash will launch soon that allows developers to build applications on Dash.
I really like the process of working with a user to understand problems, define goals, and create something. So, I transitioned out of analysis once I got my hands on experience managing products.
The interesting thing about working at large places and startups is seeing the many different ways people build and manage products, everyone has a different method, and there is no one set best way. But the ideation and creative process, with rapid learning and feature development is exciting to me.
2. What made you choose Flipside Crypto and what is the opportunity you see for this business?
AC: First, the team is ultimately what sold me on Flipside Crypto. I really liked the founders — their backgrounds building previous businesses, their vision for what they are currently doing, and their open mindedness about future opportunities. You can have the coolest tech or products, but if you team has high ego, low experience, or unwillingness to learn and grow, it won’t be a fun environment.
Second, the technology was a driving factor. Flipside has a strong back end and data science team, that they use to run behavioral modeling on blockchains. This is unique in the crypto industry, much of existing market is just simple querying tools or block explorers.
Third, the product intrigues me. Flipside is focused on understanding user behaviors, and helping blockchain organizations examine their ecosystems in the ways businesses do — focusing on user behavior to drive growth, and also ways unique to cryptocurrency ecosystems, like mapping money flows and staking behaviors.
In terms of the future, we will continue to iterate on FCAS and our ratings, expand Flipside Analytics to provide teams a systematic view into growth, and refine our development of custom insights. With more than 30 blockchains chainwalked, we can now compare data across blockchains which unlocks new opportunities. Our intent is to really enable teams to be able to understand users and drive growth in a simple way, like Shopify does for e-commerce, and Stripe does for payments. In traditional, established businesses, growth teams are starting to pop up everywhere — but in the cryptocurrency community, where many teams are developer-led or resource constrained, this data becomes a competitive weapon for making strategic decisions.
3. Do you think crypto needs a killer app to reach mass adoption? Where do you see the space in 5 years?
AC: A killer app would help, but crypto needs more time. Bitcoin aggregated older technologies in new ways, and created something new. Ethereum and other smart contract platforms are also creating something new. By and large, the projects are experimental advancing the art of the technology, and the product features are more about technical specifications than how they can improve a users day to day. In time, more projects will be focusing on strategically aligned businesses, building with growth teams, and designing elegant user experiences. Also, the industry is nascent, the market and regulators haven’t had time to adapt.
I see blockchains as next generation infrastructure and enabling platforms — tomorrow’s version of Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes, Docker, TensorFlow, etc. I see cryptocurrencies as next generation data types. I see the tech sector, especially payments, already abstracting away from personal data under the hood, tokenizing information, and moving it in different ways, with more happening towards the edge, devices, and users. In five years, computing, storage, memory, will be faster. I don’t see the projects as much as competitors, as they are each trying to create their own product market fit.
I think users will pick up blockchains like we do Wi-Fi, cryptocurrencies will move under the hood like tokenized ID happens in the payment world today, and the focus will be more on what the product does than whether things are a blockchain or cryptocurrency.
3. What would you say is unique about building and scaling product in crypto vs more traditional industries?
AC: It’s new, which has limitations. Less mature industry without regulatory frameworks in place, leads to unclear market behaviors, unsure companies and users, and prevents people from adopting or building with crypto.
It’s fast, which creates difficulties. Technology is developing at such a rapid pace, there aren’t standards, there isn’t a lot of tooling, etc. This makes it harder for user experience to catch up and keep pace.
It’s user-centric and privacy-protecting, which makes learning challenging. In crypto, addresses are not the same as users, so it’s hard to understand growth in the same way as a traditional industry. Also, crypto projects by and large aren’t collecting user data, so you don’t have the same mechanisms to understand users and collect feedback to loop on your products.
4. What is your favorite cryptocurrency and why?
AC: I don’t have favorites. I do like projects that abstract away from the nerdiness of the technology, and focus on solving a specific problem or making products accessible — via interoperability, easy to read documentation, and positive user experiences.
In that regard, I think Near Protocol is very cool. They are a sharding blockchain for smart contracts, with a focus on developer experience. They are using familiar and simple programming languages, such as TypeScript and WebAssembly that make it easier for more people to build on their platform. They have a very clean online developer environment that allows you to create an app in a few minutes.
I think what Aragon is doing is very cool, too, helping anyone stand up a decentralized autonomous organization, and they have nice designs for their product, too. I’d like to see them become the Shopify of Web3.
I’m curious to see how Coda Protocol productizes its technology, how Cosmos develops, and what impact Polkadot ends up having in the market. Those are all great teams with great products doing new and novel things.
Zcash is fun to watch because they are committed to privacy and I think will also advance the industry and market. Their team is top notch and they are the source of many breakthroughs.
5. Do you have a professional or personal life philosophy, side of the mug quote that tells us a little bit about how you like to operate in the world? Either at work or at home, or both?
AC: I’ve been into Zen Buddhism since was about 12. I try to stay humble, balanced, and open-minded to alternative viewpoints. But I also get excited easily, jump into frameworks, and can become a whirling dervish in my brain. To that end, there are two quotes I try to remind myself often:
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts there are few,” by Shunryu Suzuki
“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen you may learn something new,” by the Dalai Lama.
About Flipside Crypto
Flipside Crypto provides business intelligence to crypto organizations. Their suite of analytics tools provides insights into user behaviors, developer activities, and financial health. Flipside also rates cryptocurrencies utilizing, FCAS, a relative value for measuring the fundamental health of cryptocurrency ecosystems.
Flipside provides business intelligence to more than 75 cryptocurrency organizations and distributes FCAS via partners such as CoinMarketCap, Messari, MarketWatch and TheStreet. Flipside Crypto is backed by Galaxy Digital Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Avon Ventures (a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments) and other investors.
