People of OST: Wouter Verhoog, Director of Communications
Wouter is OST’s Director of Communications, managing contacts with the press and OST’s online channels. Wouter started his own publishing house in Amsterdam at the age of 18, kicking off his career in entrepreneurship, marketing, and communications. He co-founded BuddyGuard in 2015, a Berlin startup in clever home security. Wouter enjoys hiking in Switzerland, whiskey from Scotland and weekend trips in his adopted homeland of Germany.
Tell us about yourself!
I’m Dutch, as the name may portray. After having spent most of my life in Amsterdam, I moved to Berlin about six years ago, where I started my career in various startups. One of the first that I worked in was a digital publishing solution, which allowed mainstream print magazines publishers to get their publication on the iPad, making it interactive, enriched with various touch functionalities, and allowing for direct call options. It seemed like a very logical step in my career to take my publishing adventure digital for another company. A few years later I co-founded BuddyGuard, an experience that taught me a ton about entrepreneurship, navigating the infamous German bureaucracy and Artificial Intelligence. I joined the OST team in March of this year.
What led to your interest in blockchain technology?
My blockchain adventures started last year in May. I first read about Bitcoin a couple of years ago, but it was really hard for me to wrap my head around the technology. I didn’t really get interested until the big ICO boom. In May 2017 I took a leap of faith by participating a couple of projects that looked very promising. After doing my own due diligence and reading as much as I could about the projects involved, I started buying either directly into ICO’s or by buying coins through exchanges. The more I purchased, the more curious I got about Blockchain technology and the promises it holds. This led me to OST’s token sale, back then called Simple Token. In November, I keenly followed the Simple Token ICO and what they were promising was really enticing. I didn’t see anyone else doing that in this space. When the position for Director of Communications was posted, I applied and this is where my own blockchain involvement started.
What does your role as Director Communications at OST entail?
I am responsible for everything press-related in terms of outreach, pitching to journalists, and in terms of getting the project and the company in front of the right eyeballs. At the same time, I play a role in informing the OST community. One of the hardest things is creating clarity. There’s a lot of noise in the space, there are a lot of big promises, with even bigger events, and there’s a lot of fundraising going on where you may ask yourself twice what the end goal is. At OST, one of the mantras that we operate under is to keep our heads down, underpromise, overdeliver, and don’t shout anything until you actually have something. This kind of restricts your role at first, you have to teach yourself different ways to engage journalists and the developer community. This required me to rethink my strategy. Now that we have the OpenST Mosaic paper out there, we want community feedback, but how do I go about that? This isn’t something that I just pitch to a journalist and say that this is the best thing ever. This has to be a community effort and I have to emphasize that this is part of a bigger ecosystem. It’s very challenging to get a message out that it is concise and clear. This is all about the community effort.
What type of communication will it take for mainstream blockchain adoption?
Apart from being easy to use, it has to be a very fluid and intuitive thing for end-users. I think most end-users at this point are not even interested whether something is on blockchain or not, they just want to reap the benefits, For any company going in a commercial direction with blockchain, like many of our partners, it is key that whatever they implement on the chain is intuitive, solid, reliable and most of all smooth to its end-users.
If you want to stand out from the blockchain crowd, it’s by not trying to stand out. The honest way of communicating and full transparency is what will drive mainstream. You have to be transparent, you have to be upfront. You must want to be a part of the bigger community. You cannot disguise yourself as a transparent project. In my opinion, it is only then that you will be one of the projects out there that can achieve mainstream adoption.
What’s your favorite hobby?
I’m an enormous geek when it comes to building cities, theme parks, and painting. I think this is a Dutch trait: Whenever I spot a stream of water, I have the urge to redirect its flow by building dykes and channels! I design skyscrapers and transportation systems in AutoCAD, then I get them into a game called Cities Skylines. Then, the city really comes to life, avenue by avenue, street by street, square by square. It’s just like with blockchain, you actually have a whole functioning ecosystem that works together, that has grown together, and that cannot exist without each other.
Be sure to check out last week’s interview with Paul J du Plessis, OST’s Business Development Director of the EMEA. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format on anywhere you listen to podcasts, including on iTunes, TuneIn, and Spotify. We’re also now available on Alexa! Simply add “OST LIVE” to your flash briefing.
About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, 500 Startups.
