Welcome listeners. I'm Seb Wichmann, your host of the DoGood Insider, where we dive deep into raw and meaningful conversations with visionary founders and CEOs who see beyond profits elevating the lives of employees and vendors and the planet we call home. At DoGood, we combine business growth and goodness, assisting our clients in optimizing their processes and nurturing high-performing teams. As for me, I love a good vegan diet. I'm an avid triathlon Ironman competitor. However, my life's work orbits around the principles of business excellence and the nurturing of profound relationships along the way. And who better to share this journey with than inspiring leaders who live these values also. As today's guest, I'm super excited to have Boris Pikalov, a leader in blockchain tokenization and decentralized finance. As the co-founder of Stowbox, Boris has spent over five years leading business strategy, operations and analytics, leading the mass adoption of tokenization and fostering inclusive financial ecosystems. In his role, He led over 70 asset tokenization projects involving over $1 billion worth of assets. He has been a featured speaker at events like the Blockchain Real Estate Summit and a thought leader in publications like Beln Crypto, where his expertise in real-world asset tokenization has shaped industry conversations all around. So get ready to dive deep into the future of blockchain technology with one of the brightest minds in the space that I at least know, so welcome Boris. Borys Pikalov (03:13.81) Thank you, Seb, for an amazing introduction and it's a pleasure to be here and discuss culture and business with you. Seb Wichmann (03:19.987) Amazing, So Boris, when we first talked, I remember vividly the way you expressed yourself, that it is so tough sometimes, and I can relate for sure, to run this balance between being customer centric and solving things in the moment when stuff just hits the roads versus, you know, looking after our staff. in regards to wellbeing and making sure we're in it for the long time, for the long haul, so to speak. Talk us through, how do you navigate this balance within StorBox? Borys Pikalov (03:58.573) That's a great question and I love that we are diving right in. So first of all, let me highlight the specific types of problems when this balancing act emerges. I can think of two primary situations. One is a situation where clients are challenging, they're hard to work with or they highly demanding and therefore teams, even if they don't need to after hours or do more work than usual, they are still more emotionally exhausted when working with these kinds of clients. So this is one type of issues where, and they would rather prefer not to work with these kinds of clients. So this is one issue where we face this trade off. Another situation where we face this trade off is when stuff just happens and has to be solved urgently, even if it happens after hours and even if sometimes you have many products coming at the same time, you something need to stay after hours for... multiple days in a row, for example, for an entire week. So this is a second type of situation where this trade-off happens. And thirdly, in general, we are trying to foster a high-performance culture. And high-performance culture sometimes means that, not even in terms of number of hours, but in terms of how you spend these hours, the work is more intense. There is more overall cognitive load. You have more projects that are for your projects context switching. Seb Wichmann (05:01.372) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (05:23.497) has to happen more frequently, which therefore generally leads to the feeling of higher fatigue. So this is how this trade-off emerges. Now, in terms of what do we do with solving it to the extent possible? One, we hire a talent, or we at least try to hire a talent that loves high-paced, high-performance environment, because it is challenging to transform individuals. It is... possible, especially if someone is early in their careers to unlock the strength they didn't know they have. But I would say this is rather an exception than the rule. And typically people are generally set in their ways in terms of which kind of environment they prefer. And therefore we are trying to locate the, find the people who would thrive in this kind of environment, people who care, people who love intensity, people who love to be continuously engaged and therefore who would actually benefit from being part of this team. And we can speak about hiring practices later. So this is one. Second is we provide our team members agency to decide how and when they prioritize their well-being versus customer centricity. this was, at some points, it's not an easy choice because some things you can disagree with, they place priorities obviously, and it can be challenging to want to provide this respect. And secondly, it can be challenging to shift from a culture when you use targets and specific bureaucratized rules in order to manage this culture of trust. But this is what you need in order to achieve high performance. Because high performance happens and high performance that is sustainable and protected from burnout happens when people are operating based on intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation, this is about research topics, has three requirements. Autonomy, competence, and the relatedness. There three needs that have to be satisfied in the work environment for intrinsic motivation to emerge. And therefore, we need to respect individual autonomy in order to protect their intrinsic motivation for them to feel that when they decide to engage with this current Borys Pikalov (07:47.619) client, they do this based on their internal choice, they kind of take on, accept this challenge as their own. So this is probably the key aspect. Thirdly is, I would say, having conversation and fostering a culture of customer centricity in terms of leading by example. So the way I personally do it is by myself jumping into difficult cases. and the ones which are especially difficult and supporting the team myself. First of all, to model what kind of, how does the customer centricity look like? What kind of replies do you do? Where do you set the boundaries? Where do you budge? And generally, what kind of vibe do you have in conversation with your customers? And I see this kind of work. I see team members saying to me, I strive to emulate the... than like colonists that you exhibit when speaking with angry clients. And they try to do so. So this modeling works in terms of setting a standard to which the members want to reach. So you say this is the third aspect that helps us navigate this balance and create another intrinsic drive to achieve high performance. Seb Wichmann (08:59.98) Wow. I think you have really missed your profession. Certainly well prepared. You could have been like a training and development expert like myself hearing you talk. That is amazing. Maybe in some other life. And I would love to dive deeper into kind of like you speak about, know, intrinsic motivation, which is such an interesting piece around how do we get the most out of people? Borys Pikalov (09:08.537) Maybe in some other life. Seb Wichmann (09:27.929) We dive into this in a second, but talk us through StorBox, talk us through tokenization, talk us through decentralized finance. The way I understand it, and you help hopefully us to do to understand this better, in particular audiences that is not familiar with blockchain per se, but it's about real assets, like real estate, for example, and using blockchain to prove Ownership, would that be fair to say? Borys Pikalov (10:01.948) This is one of the examples. let's start. There will be two useful mental models to have in order to understand tokenization. The first mental model is imagine a cryptocurrency. You're probably familiar with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum or any others, as well as most viewers. So imagine that the cryptocurrency you hold provides you an income from a piece of property every quarter. Or let's say that the cryptocurrency you hold is actually a share of Tesla. Seb Wichmann (10:04.11) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (10:10.136) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (10:31.901) or is at least backed by a share of Tesla. Or a share of SpaceX, it might be a share of an unlisted company as well. Or let's say that you have funded a manufacturing facility in Ghana, which is one of the deals we are currently working on. And in exchange for your funding, you have received this token, which entitles you to receive the proceeds from the sale of this glass to a private equity buyer of this plant. to a private equity buyer after the business conducts an exit. And you can either hold this token yourself and receive this exit proceeds, or you can resell this token to someone either privately or on the market and receive your money from the sale right now. So basically what we do is issue cryptocurrencies backed by real world assets and the real world cash flows. Most of our two biggest asset classes are real estate, as you mentioned initially, and the commodities such as gold, such as... oil such as timber and such as gemstones and similar assets. So this is one mental model to understand tokenization. Now second mental model which is useful to understand why tokenization is valuable is to think of often internet and all the systems of record. Currently if you own and a share in a private company which is not listed in a stock exchange then the record that you own this company is maintained either by the government business register or by the company themselves. and a different company would have a different register of their shareholders. Therefore, for example, if you want to, let's say, swap one share for another, you have these two separate registers that have to be updated, plus a register of a certain space in which the transaction happens, plus a... If the transaction happens via bank transfer, you also have two banks which need to update their registers. So you have one, two, three, four, five, five different registers, five different databases that need to be updated in order to conduct these transfers. And these databases need to synchronize and provide access to each other in order to confirm that the transaction has happened. Or you need to have certain individuals that look into them and make a decision that the transaction has happened. Borys Pikalov (12:56.797) And this is not easier if you speak, for example, about interaction of your security with the bank. When you want to, for example, you have a share in your company or in some other company, in Tesla, and you want to take along again this share as a collateral. Again, there is, on one hand, is one place where you have a record about your ownership of this share, and then a different record, which signifies how much do you owe to the bank. and how this share is stored, then the third register, which signifies that you actually receive this money, how do you spend this money? What this leads is that these kinds of financing transactions are complex. What happens in blockchain is that you have a single register, a single ledger, where all of these records are stored. For example, if the transaction happens on Ethereum blockchain, you have one token, share of company one on the Ethereum blockchain, share of company two on the Ethereum blockchain, Seb Wichmann (13:29.651) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (13:49.087) and use the same currency, let's say tokenized dollar USDT, which is also on the same blockchain. And therefore, when everything happens on one chain, it's much easier to conduct these transactions because these registers and these assets can talk to each other directly and different applications. For example, a financing, like loan application, or a trading application also exists on this blockchain or on other blockchain that is connected to this one and can talk to it. For example, Polygon or Solana, et cetera. And what happens is that when you bring your asset on chain and it becomes tokenized, it now can talk to, besides being programmable itself, it can now talk to all these other assets and all these other applications without the need to request access directly, without the need for a bank employee to review them and give you this access and approve the interaction. Instead, this can happen via automatic cryptographic rules. And therefore, everything that comes onto blockchain becomes part of the interoperable financial internet. And this leads to the possibility of easier investment, like it's easier for myself to buy this asset, to invest in this glass manufacturing plant or real estate facility or whatever. It becomes easier to trade this asset because they can now interact with different kinds of trading protocols. It's easier to monetize it in some other ways, like for example, input it, again, use it as a collateral against the blockchain loan or any other CEO of applications. Seb Wichmann (15:13.268) Wow. So now you are training and developing expert and a genius. That sounds incredible. Wow. So, know, like it's really interesting. No, I know, but it sounds, it sounds super complex. You know, if I, mean, you know, you know, we kind of still, we grew up with paper exchanging value as in dollar notes. And suddenly there is this, what sounds to be a mega complex topic that's Borys Pikalov (15:20.627) Like this is not my idea, I'm just actually making this happen. Seb Wichmann (15:42.611) sitting here right now is really hard to fathom because it's intangible, right? Unless you really understand the intricate detail of how the technology works. It's like, wow, it sounds very difficult or it sounds very complex, but all boils down to the fundamental law of ledgers and blockchain and certifications, I guess, and having proof points who owns what to some degree. I'm not sure if I summarized that correctly, but That is awesome. Borys Pikalov (16:13.348) I would say yes, this is a correct summary and I like how you quickly grasp the essence of what is different and you are right that one of the primary challenges we are facing is complexity both internally in terms of new team members getting up to speed with everything that is happening on the other hand with our customers and with our customer there is a twofold challenge on one hand obstructing this complexity away so that they don't have to think about light years and settlement and whatever Seb Wichmann (16:29.846) Right. Seb Wichmann (16:40.085) Mm-hmm. Right, right. Right. Borys Pikalov (16:41.346) because otherwise we would have very few customers. So this is one. And second, customers getting used to tokens and to the kind of thing they can do with them, like creating not just suggestions, the learning curve for getting more and more proficient with capital currency. Really creating this experience of mastery when interacting with digital assets. And this is both true about the investors who will be interacting with this asset, but also the issuers who are Seb Wichmann (17:04.022) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (17:09.249) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (17:10.479) Creating the assets or also the country and say I want to raise fund in my organization I've heard this is cool stuff But I have no idea what it is how to work with it and you also want to not just tell okay do XYZ But you want to create a collaborative process within which the customer grow themselves and therefore can make more informed decision about their issues because at the end of the day No one knows their business better than themselves Seb Wichmann (17:13.271) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (17:17.653) No idea about it. Tell me, yeah. Seb Wichmann (17:26.145) Yeah. Seb Wichmann (17:31.65) Yeah. Seb Wichmann (17:35.853) Yeah. Wow. You know, I'm going to go off topic a little bit here, to be honest, because like it is so interesting sitting here on the receiving end, if you allow, and listening to the topics, the technical knowledge and language you're using that is so foreign to me and possibly also to other founders. Unless you are in the blockchain, you know, kind of space, if you will, you know, all of that sounds kind of... Kind of little complex, right? Let's be honest. Talk me through what's in my head right now is this. You as a founder, or us as founders or as CEOs, our responsibility, and I would love to have a wider conversation if that's okay, away from blockchain and more into our... responsibilities to clearly and simply articulate and communicate the value proposition of our services, of our products. So somebody that is not yet aware about that they have a problem and it's not yet aware about the industry that they understand the value of what we offer. Like in your, in your specific case, like, do you usually see people kind of quickly understanding what you're talking about? Do you find that you had to also come up with analogies or stories or depictions of explaining in simple, maybe even visual terms of how it works and the value behind it? Or are you only talking to investors and clients and know the industry already? Talk us through kind of, guess, how do we simplify as founders in general by communicating value of what we do like really quickly. Borys Pikalov (19:19.912) So there are different levels at which this is applied. So one is general observation. Founders, especially tech founders, are often people who are tech nerds, who love the technology, who understand the technology, who often have technical background. And this fascination with technology often comes to handicap us when we come to speak to customers or create the customer copy because... Seb Wichmann (19:28.154) Hehe. Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (19:43.868) things we care about when we think about technology and the underlying benefits are sometimes different than the ones customers care about. So it's useful to have different hats. On one hand, you have a hat of a builder who makes things happen and who understands all the intricate details and the hat of a seller who communicates it in a way that is useful to customers. And when I, my marketer and seller hat, Seb Wichmann (19:50.212) That's yeah, I hear that. Borys Pikalov (20:11.099) what I find the most useful is to try to almost transition myself into the customer's persona and see the world from their perspective. Like, I'm coming into this website, or I'm speaking to this person, and here is what I want to get, here is my background. What kind of language would I find clear and compelling? And in my practice, what I typically do is I... Seb Wichmann (20:20.037) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (20:38.213) Now I rarely do this, but when we started, obviously I was even writing marketing copy and whatever because we have limited resources as we all do. And when I'm writing marketing copy, I'm typically looking at two things I want to communicate. One, say in simple words, what is the actual value that people get? For example, one of our first marketing copies has been raised capital by issuing a cryptocurrency or crypto token, something in that range. So this one is similar. A, raise capital and B, Seb Wichmann (21:03.398) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (21:07.21) use the cryptocurrencies for this because we were looking for people who have at least some degree of familiarity. So this was a relatively clear value proposition. And we had different experiments. For example, we have been experimenting with copy that emphasizes how this is different from anything else. We were using something like conduct IPO 10 times cheaper because using tokenization as a way from fundraising is similar to IPO but significantly faster and cheaper. So we're this kind of copy. Seb Wichmann (21:29.441) huh. Ahem. Borys Pikalov (21:34.987) One way in which you do this is to communicate clear benefit in the language of your customer. And notice what they also did in the last one. I used the term IPO as something they're already familiar with in order to exhibit the existing concept and then build on top of this. And this is relatively standard stuff like Uber for X. So this also definitely helps. Second thing which is useful but which probably shouldn't overdo is to try to communicate your vibe and what you are about. Seb Wichmann (21:44.487) Yeah, love that. Right. Yeah. Seb Wichmann (21:55.514) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (22:04.451) with your language. So for example, when you as a company from a customer perspective, are you caring and are you wrapping them in a blanket and using this blanket as a safe space to get them in the tokenization space? So is this how you position yourself or are you kind of want to position yourself as aggressive salesman who will get the money on their behalf? No bullshit in your fast talking in Europe. Yeah, let's get this done. So this is a different copy that you would use in your marketing. this is another thing that you communicate partially by specifically naming your values, partially by just the choice of words, even the tempo of your copy when it is being read. So part of that is, so this is the second thing you want to communicate. So this is in terms of the copy. Then there is a topic of communicating with clients when they come to you and you participate in sales conversations. Seb Wichmann (22:37.15) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (22:43.228) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (22:50.066) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (23:00.915) and in consulting conversations when you prepare them for the issuance. On this front, you have more time to communicate complexity, but you still want to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant complexity. So typically, technical details of the issuance are an irrelevant complexity. What is a relevant complexity is legal and financial complexity of the asset they are trying to issue. Because if they issue a fixed income asset or a variable income asset, This is something that is highly important for our client to understand because this would impact their liability and their business model. And therefore, or when, for example, they cannot raise more than certain amount from this jurisdiction, they need to be aware of that because they would be controlling this on their site when they are conducting the issues, at least until we automate it. So this is the kind of complexity we communicate, the kind of selectively decide which has to be communicated. Seb Wichmann (23:33.585) You Borys Pikalov (23:54.795) And thirdly, you mentioned the topic of visual metaphors and analogies. We rarely use them, but there are a few cases when we do. One particular when we explain what is a decentralized exchange or automated market making protocol. Because the analogy I use is an analogy of two jars. Because what a liquidity pool is, is you can imagine this as two jars. One jar is your security tokens. Another jar is certain cryptocurrencies like USDT, a stablecoin. Stablecoin is a crypto token which is backed 1 to 1 to $1. So this is like a crypto dollar. And you can imagine these two jars. And when someone wants to trade, they can either take tokens from one jar and put stablecoins, crypto dollars in the second jar, or they can take crypto dollars from a jar and put your security tokens into a second jar. And in this way, they either buy or sell from the pool. And depending on how the ratio of this asset changes, the price gets adjusted. So if you have 100,000 tokens, $100,000, the price is 1 to 1, then you take away 10,000 tokens and put in $10,000 if you bought a $10,000 chunk and the price rises to $122 because of the change in the ratio. So this is a metaphor that I found useful for myself first time I learned about it. Seb Wichmann (24:49.512) huh. Seb Wichmann (25:12.502) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (25:16.971) and we're using this in our client communication as well, instead of speaking about bonding curves and mathematical stuff as to how this is calculated. So when you need clients to understand something technical, this is it. This is when metaphors help. Seb Wichmann (25:24.597) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (25:30.019) You know what I find amazing as I get to know you, Boris, is that you have been, you have clearly learned to wear so many hats, right? Like, I mean, it's incredible. You're obviously an expert in tokenization and blockchain, but then you had to also learn how to, you know, how to intrinsically motivate people and how to bring on the right team, right? Which is a totally different skill set, right? And then the marketing angle in terms of communication. Let's dive a little bit into kind of, you know, I guess into my strong suit, which is kind of emotional intelligence, leadership, intrinsic motivation is a word that you just, use just a couple of minutes ago when we introduced you talk us through getting the most out of people, right? Motivating them, getting them to work long hours, but also Borys Pikalov (26:05.39) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (26:29.358) helping, supporting them in moments when they are burnt out, to finding this balance we talked about. What to you is intrinsic motivation? How do you figure it out? What is somebody motivated by? And how do you get kind of them to perform the best? Talk us through that a little bit. Borys Pikalov (26:48.707) This is a billion dollar question, isn't it? Well, one point I'll briefly answer your previous point on wearing many hats. This is one of things I like the most about being the founder, that I get to learn a lot about different topics and there is a high degree of variety and growth in each area I have to touch. So I have high growth motivation and learning motivation and this is kind of what I get from being a founder. Seb Wichmann (26:52.451) Mmm. Borys Pikalov (27:16.946) Now getting back to your main question, which is about creating intrinsic motivation. So firstly, obviously there isn't a silver bullet or a single thing that creates an intrinsic motivated team. This is about a broad set of measures within the company. we can think about intrinsic motivation from two angles. One angle I mentioned previously is satisfaction of intrinsic needs that lead to the emergence of intrinsic motivation. Secondly, you want to avoid crowding out intrinsic motivation by an extrinsic one, because there is also well-documented effect called crowding out, which is when you rely too much on extrinsic motivation, then intrinsic motivation goes down. For example, if you primarily use KPIs and monetary rewards in order to motivate people to achieve certain goals, then you... Then people focus on that to a larger extent than on their intrinsic motivators. So these are the two things we are trying to balance. I'll start with the second one, with avoiding crowding out. What is needed to achieve that? One is the feeling of fairness. Typically people lose intrinsic motivation when they feel that the environment is unfair. or they aren't being valued, they aren't being properly compensated, or their incentive structure isn't aligned with what is a good work for them. So what we are trying to do correspondingly is A, to continuously speak to people as to what their needs are and how do they feel themselves. And secondly, when we discuss their incentive structures, and with most people we do have incentive structures, we discuss A, we discuss what kind of incentive structure would would lead to the best alignment between their feeling of fairness and what we want to get from them. For example, with one of our technical experts who is working on custom development for clients, which we rarely do, the incentive is that he gets bonuses only after the client is successfully released in the better environment and only after... Borys Pikalov (29:40.239) and only if the client has certain level of satisfaction. And this is something we collectively agreed on. The requirement that the bonus is paid only after client successful release rather than for every month of successful work has been my requirement that the employee has agreed with. Why? Why did they want this requirement? Because my business goal isn't so that clients work indefinitely. but the clients actually get released and get successful. So I wanted the bonus to be tied to an achievable outcome rather than just indefinite amount of work on one hand. On the other hand, when it comes to satisfaction, my initial view was given just some kind of generic satisfaction questionnaire while the team member wanted to have it much more specific so that he gets to control the actual satisfaction triggers. and we agreed to offer this more specific satisfaction questionnaire so that he gets satisfied. So we had a negotiation process so that the guy would feel we have a fair environment. And note that this metric can still be gained. Because the bonus, even if it's paid at the end, it is still paid for each month of work on this client. And therefore, there is still an internal incentive to work. longer and delay the client delivery. But I trust the team members that they won't go with this perverse incentive, especially since we are continuously in the interaction and I would notice if the work is being delayed. So part of the extrinsic motivation of avoiding crowding out isn't just to have aligned the incentive structure, but also to not overdo it and not get it too invasive. into someone's work. So this is one hand. Basically, what you want is so that the incentive isn't salient, it isn't dominating someone's day-to-day thoughts about work. Then the second part about intrinsic motivation. On the intrinsic motivation part, as I mentioned previously, there is a useful framework of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. On the autonomy, this is achieved by offering individuals broad autonomy about the content of their work. Borys Pikalov (32:00.586) and broad autonomy about the selection of goals, which is negotiated with yourself. And one of the ways in which you achieve this autonomy is by being very clear regarding your vision and strategy. If your vision and strategy isn't clear, but you offer high autonomy, then the risk you run into is that this autonomy would lead company in the direction that is misaligned with other team members. Therefore, if you're clear on what are your current goals, what you want to achieve, then it's much easier for individuals to come up with goals that are aligned with the strategy and still get them negotiated with you according to your suggestions. So this is one aspect of autonomy. On the micromanagement, this one is actually not as obvious as it seems. Why? Because in some cases you just have to dive into someone's work because objectively they either don't have enough context or they did something that is of objectively insufficient quality and part of your job as a founder is to consistently increase the excellence bar. If you want to win in any market, but especially in this market, you need to have an excellent work and you need to raise this excellence bar. But you have different ways to intervene in someone's work and raise the excellence bar. You can do this by saying, like, in a very blunt way, you want to say, this is really, really bad, I dislike it, please remake everything. This is obviously something that leads to a decrease in intrinsic motivation and decrease in the feeling of competence. Or you can say, you can be more specific in terms of A, what specifically do you believe needs to change in order to achieve higher excellence bar? That is, you provide a clear pathway toward improvement, and therefore you create a feeling of at least potential for mastery by creating this clear pathway to excellence. This is one. Secondly, you frame it from the perspective of accountability for the team and common goals. Like you don't say you remind them about their own capability and their growth. Like this isn't your best work. I know from this project or that project that this can be significantly better and I would like you to achieve that level of quality that you have achieved in these other instances of work that I have had with you because Borys Pikalov (34:26.156) As we discussed with you previously, if we don't get that we don't get to win. And in as far as you care about the team winning, which I know you do, then you probably care about this work being up to par and up to the standard. This kind of language helps people to maintain the sense of autonomy and competence even if you dive into their work and even if you criticize their work. And another important rule here is to not sugarcoat. and not try to play games like... play games when you are not direct about the fact that you dislike something because a trap that I have fallen into in my early years is that I was really afraid to criticize people so that to avoid demotivating them and I wasn't sufficiently clear that I dislike something and I have found this to be unproductive because I myself feel that I cannot pro... express myself and people don't know where they really stand and therefore it's better for me to be direct and treat others as adults because when you treat people as adults they tend to behave as adults so this is attack control. Then there is a topic of relatedness. On the relatedness there are two types of relatedness that matter. One relatedness in the sense of feeling that we are a team fearing internal team cohesion and secondly there is relatedness in terms of feeling that you have some kind of higher purpose that we are working for. Seb Wichmann (35:34.338) Mm-hmm. Borys Pikalov (35:51.513) and higher purpose that makes you feel related to the industry in general and kind of the humanity to which we are contributing. And on the kind of internal team relatedness, this turned out to be surprisingly easy. Like we hired people who kind of get along and tend to bond into strong teams. So we never really felt. strong problems with internal team relatedness and so I have and therefore I have limited insight to provide here but probably the rules are that you want to not create incentives or other things that pit people against each other you want to have people to you want to have team where all people are high performance and therefore they get to respect each other and enjoy to work with each other and this instantly to high degree of cohesion And we have found that we don't really need some kind of team building exercises or other work in order for people to get to respect each other and feel like part of the team. So this is one. Second part of feeling part of a broader movement has been more complex. Why? Because as you have seen, the industry is complex and sometimes explaining the benefits, the benefits we explain can get quite abstract. For example, the way I think about the benefits we are creating is accelerating economic growth. by increasing the efficiency of capital allocation by creating efficient capital markets for illiquid and private assets. So this doesn't sound really motivating for most individuals. And therefore, if you use this kind of language, even though I find this to be more accurate than to describe what value we create for the world, it's hard to convert this into a mission, especially for people who do not come into the team as economists. So what I try to do instead... is to say, and what we have found to be effective, is to speak about transformation. To say that the world is coming from the Web2 world into Web3 world, the world which is more transparent, more decentralized, more digital, more effective, which is just better. There is this grand, broad transformation that is happening, and we are part of making this transformation happen. We are missionaries of the future semi-utopian world of blocking and Web3. Borys Pikalov (38:05.016) And this kind of language, simpler vision of transition and progress is something that we find people do find motivating. They do like being part of this movement towards the future of tokenized finance. And this is the way you make them feel related to being part of a bigger picture and bigger purpose. So yeah, motivation is a hard puzzle with many moving pieces. Seb Wichmann (38:27.875) Amazing. There's a lot there. Yeah. Thank you so much, Brian. That is incredible. Like, I mean, we could just have, I think, for days and weeks, continued conversations, probably about a million of other topics that we all realize you're probably a genius at. So amazing. Thank you so much for all the insights. I mean, what I grabbed just as one little token, which, you know, is certainly something that Borys Pikalov (38:40.476) Mm-hmm. Seb Wichmann (38:58.161) I deal with in my business on a day-to-day basis and I would assume also many other CEOs and founders, which is the point around having adult conversations, which you just raised, right? To actually not sugarcoat and we don't have to be outright, you know, kind of coming through with a sledgehammer, but it's really about in my point of view and you tell me as well, but having a honest, direct conversation and expressing one's own dissatisfaction and frustration. in a way that is communicates clearly, right? Where the other part just understands what the problem is, gets to hear the context of why that is a problem. And hopefully in collaboration, we can solve this as a team, right? So that is something I will take away. Boris, thank you so much for this amazing master class. I would call it almost. I really appreciate you. You're clearly up to amazing things. You know, love your smile. love you, just you're clearly passionate about entrepreneurship, right? So I really appreciate that. I'm sure that all our fellow SEOs and founders appreciate that. So in short, thank you so much. You were an absolute treat to have you and yeah, thank you. Borys Pikalov (40:16.96) Thank you too, this was a fascinating conversation. I loved your questions, your deep dive questions about the topic that aren't too commonly asked on podcasts and it's good to have someone to discuss this with. Seb Wichmann (40:28.807) Amazing. For us, thank you so much. Borys Pikalov (40:32.33) Thank you too.