Getting to know the Keep team — Laura
An Interview with our Growth Lead — Laura Wallendal
Today we bring to your attention the story of Laura Wallendal — as a part of our Team series. Laura is the person who puts all of her efforts into Keep’s go-to-market strategy and she has been with Keep from the very beginning.
Elizabeth: Hi, Laura! Great to have an opportunity to get to know you a bit better! Let’s start with the very beginning — where are you from and what is your background?
Laura: I am from a small town in central Wisconsin called Friendship. I grew up on an irrigated vegetable farm that my grandfather started in the 1950’s. We grew peas, beans, corn, and potatoes. It’s still a working farm and has been passed on to the third generation now. The crops are a little more diverse today with more organics and specialty crops like pumpkins and watermelon. I was a board member for a few years as my cousins and their spouses were getting into the business, but I’ve since stepped away to focus more on my work at Keep.
From Friendship I moved to Boston, Minneapolis, Providence, and Los Angeles before settling in Denver a couple years ago with my husband Larry and our border collie Tucker. I have a degree in Art History (which I never use, but really love) and I’ve studied a few languages — sign language, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese (which I also rarely use, but really love).
My first job out of school was copy cataloging books in romance languages at a university library — which was fantastic and meditative, but wasn’t really a good fit. I was just a little too competitive (and talkative) for the library environment. Luckily, I soon got a job in sales at an educational travel company, which (unbeknownst to me at the time) was the start to an incredible journey of sales, marketing, consulting and building teams, and businesses.
E: Tell us more about your professional career!
L: The biggest thing I learned in educational travel sales was ‘needs-based’ selling, which helped me listen really well and ask great questions. I also learned to be brave and cold call people in the middle of their workday — to turn conversations where people wanted to yell at me and hang up into relationships and then into a sale. Then, how to work a pipeline and understand that sometimes it can be just a numbers game until you get the right people on the phone. Lastly, how to capture information about people and conversations clearly so that multiple other people on my team could effectively work with them after I made the sale.
These are lessons that I still carry with me and the skills I use in my job today.
While at this company, I met several incredible people — salespeople, mentors, and friends. One of those salespeople had an idea of starting a consulting business to help some international educational travel companies with their US sales.
I took the leap! My co-founder and I started working with travel companies based in Spain, China, Rwanda, and the UK on their go-to-market strategies with students in the US. About a year in, we set to scale our business by helping automate a lot of the pre-travel logistics. This led us to get investment and start to build a product for our customers.
Whooooeeey this is where things got crazy.
Suddenly we were in the world of tech startups as well as the world of educational travel. We had friends and family money to build our first prototype (which let me tell you — two non-technical first-time founders trying to build a product was…special.)
Somehow, we got financing and a few customers. Then got into an accelerator program in Providence for 3 months (along with a certain company named Scholrly). I learned to work with investors, to hold board meetings, to build a customer base, to work with engineers, product people, designers, as well as run payroll and work with accounting firms and lawyers.
I decided to step away in the summer of 2015. To make money while I plotted my next move, I worked with other startups and growth-stage companies to do contracting and consulting, applying all of the things I learned to help other companies grow. I’m proud to say I worked with over 20 companies in a 2-year span in lots of different capacities — whether it was to identify their customers, tell a better story, build out a sales team, hit their next inflection point, or run marketing campaigns.
One of the ways I was able to work with so many companies was my drive to stay in touch with all the people who I met along the way who were also building companies as well as my advisor and investor network. There’s an incredible power to these startup communities. It’s so hard to build and launch a business, so you take all the help and support you can get!
E: And how did you find Keep + other stuff you’ve been involved in with the team?
L: In 2014, Matt Luongo and Corbin Pon both approached me about leaving my tech startup and joining them at this great new Bitcoin startup they were working on. At the time I wasn’t ready to take the leap, but kept in touch with them along the way as they were building their business. After I left my company, Corbin reached out to me in need of some help running some marketing campaigns and sales efforts. Still skeptical about the whole cryptocurrency thing, I was down to work with these two incredibly smart people and have some fun while I helped them grow their business.
After I started working on marketing campaigns for Fold — I was hooked. I was less and less interested in the other client work I was doing, was finding myself talking about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies all the time to my friends and family, and was a voracious reader of everything I could get my hands on to understand more about how it worked.
Soon after I was talking to Matt almost every day about their fundraising efforts, growing their business, and the other projects they were working on. Around the announcement of Keep, I found myself thinking about what it might be like to work on this project full-time. So that’s just what I did.
E: Can you tell us about your role here and your primary duties?
L: My role is Head of Growth at Thesis and Growth Lead at Keep. “Growth” for me is heading up marketing, sales, business development, PR, and all things go-to-market. I focus on the top of the funnel — getting the right people to notice and care about our project at the right time.
We’ve been a little quiet on the marketing and PR front at Keep so far as our team has been working hard to be heads down and build. However, that hasn’t stopped our community from growing to over 6,500 members on Telegram and over 9,000 members on Slack. We’ve also had an incredible focus on content — making sure we’re talking about who we are, what we’re building, and why.
The choices we make with the technology we build is so critical to the security of our network and the people we attract to our project. We focus on two groups of people — “Makers” & “Stakers”, and all of our content is driven towards these groups.
Makers = Projects & Developers to use our privacy protocol as we launch it from Random Number Generator to t-ECDSA keeps and beyond.
Stakers = People interested in the project who will add security to the network by staking the token.
(Note: We have not announced any public distribution, but please stay tuned in our Slack channel about how to best get involved in the project).
You’ll see in the coming months that we’re going to be a lot more present with partnership announcements and more, especially as we’re coming up over the last hill on the road to mainnet.
E: Is this your first time working in the cryptocurrency space? What has been the most challenging obstacle to overcome?
L: Yes! When I started working with Matt and Corbin in late 2016 it was my first time working in the cryptocurrency space. They tried to get me to take the leap in 2014 (and still kinda tease me about not joining earlier and…yeah…they were right).
There have been a number of challenging obstacles. First, I had to get comfortable with being the most inexperienced person in the room and not being afraid to ask questions.
Still today I write down words people use that I don’t know or have never heard before. I often have to ask people to slow down or draw things out for me. When I first started, sometimes I would look up words that Matt misspelled on accident — thinking it was a crypto term I didn’t know about yet.
The other thing that is a challenge is the way we tell stories — there’s insider terminology that doesn’t make sense to people new to this space. It often feels as if we’re pulling up ladders behind us instead of making the technology more approachable.
E: Have you worked remotely before? How do you find this experience?
L: I worked remotely the majority of the time when I was contracting and consulting. I did meet with clients in-person if possible, but it was mostly over video calls and through written communication.
There are amazing things about being remote. For instance, I was able to follow my husband around the country for his job without having to skip a beat. Setting my own work hours has been great as well, especially with the async communication of contracting, consulting, and now fully remote work.
This is, however, the first time I’ve worked full-time at a remote-first company. It does come with a different set of challenges like figuring out how to schedule meetings across 5 different time zones. “What time is it in ____?”
As I’m the only team member who is based in Denver, it can get a little bit lonely. I’m super social and love spending time with my amazing co-workers inside and outside of work — but I need to wait for onsites now to hang with these incredible people.
E: How do you like expanding your knowledge working on Keep, being surrounded by math and latest tech?
L: So.much.math. Just kidding! Despite my love for math, they don’t let me touch the mathy things, just the growthy things — and we’re all better off for it to be honest.
What I enjoy the most is talking to incredibly rad, passionate people who are building cool things and have it way more figured out than I do. I use the skills I learned way back at the beginning of this post and listen well then ask good questions. Also I try and keep it light and fun. We’re all smart in different ways and we don’t need to be so serious all the time. Life is just too serious to be taken so seriously. Stuff flies wayyyy over my head sometimes, and that’s okay.
E: What is the most needed use case for Keep, in your opinion?
L: Dead Man’s Switch. I don’t know if it’s the most needed today but it’s certainly interesting to me. Especially as we go beyond financial use cases and look at storing private data — the idea of being able to automatically handle an estate or will planning through a smart contract is incredible.
When my grandfather passed away, my dad spent over a year trying to figure out his estate. He was incredibly entrepreneurial and in addition to starting a farm he nearly had a PhD in Soils (yeah, that’s a thing) and owned stake in several companies that nobody knew about — including an orange grove in Texas and a plastics company that made toys. We didn’t find out about most of his holdings until after he passed (we got a box of oranges and a foosball table sent to the house with condolences and had to do some investigating…)
Being able to store your data and program your wishes into a smart contract to automatically execute for you under specified conditions seems excellent. As morbid as it may be, I’d absolutely use that today.
E: What news can we expect from Keep project in the near future?
L: MAINNET COMING SOON!!!!!! WAHOOO!!!
We are soon launching our random beacon on the Ethereum mainnet. And you can expect a bunch of other super-secret, not-so-secret-soon news about partnerships, use cases, public distribution, and hackathons. Shhh. I promise we’ve been working hard diligently in the background in addition to all the amazing content.
E: Do you have any personal plans or dreams that you’d like to share?
L: To one day beat Sam Gurdus at ping pong.
E: Great use of your competitive nature! Good luck and thanks a lot for your time, was a great pleasure!
If you are an organization, project or a dApp developer interested in building with the Keep Random Beacon or the broader Keep Network, be sure to get in touch to discuss ways we could collaborate; we look forward to hearing from you!
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