Max Comparetto, Co-founder, Web3 Studios, Salesforce

Transcript

Nick Abrahams:

Okay, so we are recording. Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to have with me today Max Comparetto, who is the co-founder of Web3 Studios at Salesforce. So Max, welcome to the show.

Max Comparetto:

Cool. Thank you, Nick. It’s good to be here, man.

Nick Abrahams:

And well, thanks very much for making the time. Could you just give us a little bit of a sense of your background and also how you came to be co-founder of the Web3 Studios?

Max Comparetto:

Sure. So let’s see. Quick intro overview, Max Comparetto, I’ve been with Salesforce for almost five years now. I’m based in New York, but started with the company in Atlanta. Originally, I come from a professional services company and I had sold professional services projects, not even really Salesforce related projects. I actually, ironically was somebody at my last company who complained about the transition from Salesforce classic to Lightning, the new UI, back in the day, so it’s funny that I wound up here. But I was a part of a AWS professional services practice prior to comping to Salesforce. And I sold those projects through. I wanted to get closer to the tech all the time, and couldn’t, and eventually saw software as an opportunity to take one step closer to the tech. And I started out in a low level sales job, actually as low as it gets selling to-

Nick Abrahams:

What were you doing, door to door? Salesforce, door to door?

Max Comparetto:

Yeah. It was not far-

Nick Abrahams:

“I’m Max. Have I got a [inaudible 00:02:01] for you?”

Max Comparetto:

It was not far off and I do joke about it. But seriously, in all seriousness, it was like there’s segments at Salesforce, the way they’re structured, is anywhere you sell to companies that have employee headcounts between this number and this number, this number. And when I got there, we had this 1 to 50 segment, and six months in, they decided that they were going to split that segment in half and take everyone that was six months or less and have them focus on the smaller one. And I got put on the smaller one. I was just like-

Nick Abrahams:

That’s hand-to-hand combat.

Max Comparetto:

Yeah, ultimately humbled.

Nick Abrahams:

“Welcome Max. Thanks for coming here from Atlanta and here you go.”

Max Comparetto:

Yeah, I left selling professional services to come sell software and then almost got demoted six months into some software.

Nick Abrahams:

Resilience though. [inaudible 00:03:03] great feeling?

Max Comparetto:

No, truthfully, I know I joke around about it, but it was truly the catalyst for everything else. And I’m being serious when I say that, and genuine when I say that, because it led to me having to solve some customer support tickets quite often. And then I got more technical so I could solve these problems and then have sales opportunities on the back end. Solving customer challenges, because that’s the job. If you can’t overcome these initial roadblocks with solving the tickets and the issues that they have, you’re never going to be able to sell. So you become a sales machine in this job because you’re solving problems and then seeking to upsell and cross-sell beyond the solution.

So I ended up getting my Salesforce certifications. I was one of the more technical AEs, I think probably, generally speaking, but definitely in my group. I started running all my own demos. I started building all my own demos for my customers sales cycles. Then I started having fun and implementing Salesforce for nonprofits. So we have this program inside of Salesforce that you can find nonprofit projects that Salesforce has donated licenses to, and they need help setting it up. So you can volunteer your skills to help them set it up so that they can run their nonprofit on Salesforce.

And so I learned, through implementing in that environment, and I recruited teams of resources to help me with the implementations. Even from LinkedIn, I was sourcing people from LinkedIn, and then I met a whole lot of people in the Salesforce professional services world. And I had come from AWS pro service world, so I knew how to speak their language. And I learned a lot in that process that made me a very efficient seller, and then later gave me an opportunity to be in the right room, with the right person, to sponsor a idea that was crazy enough and delivered at the right time to get sponsorship and go somewhere that honestly, it’s hard to believe even became real.

Nick Abrahams:

That’s a fantastic journey. And particularly becoming technical through that, because I think often even with sales, you have your sales engineers obviously, it sounds like, you were a combination of those two capabilities, actual [inaudible 00:05:46] sales as well as a sales engineering capability. So brilliant.

Max Comparetto:

Yeah. No, I honestly think every AE should be able to do the job of an SE, if an SE is not that [inaudible 00:05:57]. And that was just the resourcing issue that forced it. We had 75 AEs and four SEs for that new segment after, and so there was no one there to help. And you’re just losing deal after deal, because of timing. And that’s just, you either live with it or you don’t.

Nick Abrahams:

And so how did that lead to then Web3 Studios and what does Web3 Studios do?

Max Comparetto:

So ultimately what that did was, somebody met a guy on the other side of the business, in product, that was one of the leaders of my sales org that I was in. And he was thinking about this new business idea, and he was maybe going to build an outside of Salesforce. It was a restaurant culinary concept for a business, but it involved blockchain. And so that person was talking to the sales leader in my org, and I had become known as a couple of things. One was just a loud guy. Two was the guy who-

Nick Abrahams:

That could be helpful.

Max Comparetto:

Knew sometimes too much for his own good in the sense of the AE ,SE hybrid knowledge, because I would paint myself into corners where I would get into really, really hard conversations and highly technical conversations that I wasn’t quite ready for, because of the way I learned. And anyways, so SEs bailed me out when I needed them to, is the long story short. And I have some close friends now. The other thing that I became known for was I’d learned a lot about crypto and blockchain, and I had actually gotten a lead at Salesforce, while I was in this role, for this blockchain aviation startup.

And I had started consulting them and I helped them set up their Salesforce org and became super close with the founders and learned a lot about their decisions that they made relative to their TechSec, in the process, in blockchain. And so I knew about crypto as an investor, I knew about Defi as a participant, in DeFi and lending, and yield farming. And then I knew about all this business of blockchain through this outside consulting engagement I had done with this leap I got through Salesforce. Then I finally had the other recipe of the people meeting and them recommending that he connects with me. And so it was like that cocktail of two realities that led to the moment where I connected with Adam and Prithvi. So Adam is the SVP, Adam Kaplan, of emerging tech. And Prithvi Padmanabhan is our principal architect. And now both of them are emerging technologists who are leading Salesforce’s development of a LLM gateway to connect to all of these LLMs and make it safe for our customers to interact with these LLMs through a gateway.

And so these guys are brilliant people. I got to meet them, they were thinking about leaving and building this concept, this other business, Adam was, or at least building it and in parallel. And we came up with this other idea for NFT Cloud. That was ultimately what got iterated on and developed further to become Salesforce Web3. And in the process, and it previously been called NFT Cloud that’s out there publicly in a lot of places from a previous announcement before a name change. But the studio formed, because we had this issue to solve, which was we were starting to develop product MVP, trying to communicate what it is both internally and externally. And we struggled with communicating exactly what it was, and how it fit into Salesforce, and how Salesforce fit into the world of Web3.

Nick Abrahams:

I can imagine.

Max Comparetto:

I became and the studio, by proxy at the time, which formed in late 2021, early 2022, officially, it became a translation layer for everything product was doing to the company and to our customers. And a translation layer back, just because of the domain expertise that I had of, “We’re hearing this in the market, I’m hearing this through my customer conversations, partner conversations.” This is how to translate back to what we’re developing and the Salesforce platform we’re generally speaking.

Nick Abrahams:

Okay. Well, we’ll like to drop into a little bit more detail on that in a tick, but maybe can you give us a sense of, so when we talk about Web3, I guess when Salesforce talks about Web3, and you’ve mentioned LLMs as well, where do you see the bright line around Web3. Are there any bright lines?

Max Comparetto:

Yeah, if you mean silver lining of what we learned in Web3-

Nick Abrahams:

But more around what is Web3? So web-

Max Comparetto:

So couple definitions I think are prevalent within Salesforce. So even inside of our company, I don’t know that there’s one prevailing, but one is just anything that’s founded or rooted in blockchain, or blockchain connected. So wallet connected apps fall into a Web3 bucket and experiences, sites that are wallet enabled. I would say also there’s for me a little bit of a focus on identity and payments that I would categorize as Web3. And I distinguish between typically personally like gaming and Web3, or having a category for gaming, that is Web2 and Web3, because some are blockchain based and some are not. And I think that’s the easiest way to distinguish. But then there’s also generalists who definitely Salesforce and outside of Salesforce who are just like, “No, it’s all the future of the internet. And if you’re working on AI, that’s a part of the future of the internet. And if you’re working on blockchain, that’s part of the future of the internet.” So everyone’s just working on Web3.

Nick Abrahams:

So it’s a reasonably flexible approach then. So you talked there about a translation layer, and I’m probably way off the mark here, but one of the things that I’ve seen is obviously, particularly with some of the Web3 rollouts, particularly in loyalty and those spaces, there’s work done particularly coming out of the marketing teams of big B2C organizations and they’re generating a lot of data on the customer, and that data isn’t necessarily finding its way to the CRM in a efficient way. So is that what you’re talking about when you talk about a translation layer, or are there some other thing?

Max Comparetto:

So it’s funny, when I say translation layer, I was talking about the function actually of the studio itself. The studio itself is actually a group of people. So the studio is a small group of people that serve as an extension of our product and engineering team, and they serve as a translation layer between what the product and engineering team is working on and what our customers hear that we’re working, I see. And what our company understands that we’re developing. And then we also translate feedback back, which is, “Hey, we presented our concept for our product to our customers. Let’s snag that feedback, let’s incorporate that.” And then also just generally think about how we better the platform in this process through this feedback exploration phase. The product itself is a translator too, in the sense that it makes what you’re doing in Web2 more easily translated, or augmenting what you’re doing in Web2 with Web3 activity, easily interacting with a familiar Web2 interface, which is Salesforce. And that can enable your Web3 activity.

The brands that are deploying loyalty schemes, they just think it’s easy to potentially have all of this program and project management conducted in Salesforce, because it’s where you store all of your contact information. You can run a CDP that references Salesforce very easily, build your segments that include references to Web3 data. So now I can say Salesforce, and since we were talking about AI, you could potentially just interact with a text interface that interacts with Salesforce in a more dextrous way, but allows you to essentially say Salesforce build a segment that consists of consumers who own this physical product and this digital product and add them to this ongoing campaign, which is seize touch in these six channels. Boom, there you go. They’re deployed directly to that segment.

Nick Abrahams:

Okay, because I was just on the Salesforce website, it says Build customer loyalty in Web3 on a trusted platform. So you are solving that problem, which is if you’re a significant sized organization with Web3 properties, then you could basically ingest the data and have it actually surfaced within Salesforce along with all the Web2 data as well.

Max Comparetto:

Correct. Yeah, exactly. So all of our sites are enabled with a button now that says Connect Wallet, and it’s the customer’s choice or the brand’s choice whether or not to put that button on your site, but it’s available. So the connection between a wallet and a website is what, it starts the process, or triggers the process, of building a profile around that consumer’s wallet. And now you associate records in Salesforce, because it’s a relational database in some sense, and you relate the wallet record to a contact record and you start developing that contacts profile.

Nick Abrahams:

And so other folks I’ve spoken to on the podcast have talked about the wallet, and right at the moment, the wallets aren’t particularly invisible. And so I know there was the Meta had suggested they were going to connect people’s wallets to Facebook and Instagram and so forth, so they’d be easier to surface what’s in there. I don’t think that’s going ahead necessarily, or at least not at the pace people were expecting. But where, what do you see as the future of the wallet? Will that become more public facing and as curated as your Instagram feed and so forth?

Max Comparetto:

It’s really tough to say. I think at some point, one, we have to have consolidation in the wallet space. There’s too many wallets. There has to be an aggregator that wins, that enables this WalletConnect is a hack to having an aggregator, because it enables brands to say, “Here’s one little bit of code that we put on our site that allows a consumer to connect these 50 wallets or whatever to our site.” So it’s like a dev hack, but at some point there’s got to be a wallet that wins, and that wallet has to be secure enough and dynamic enough to likely hold more than just value in a currency sense, or even a utility sense. But it has to be able to interact with ZK proofs to verify certain data without exchanging, or transferring that data, or sending a copy of it anywhere. And have identity and data wallet capabilities baked into the same wallet. They’re transfers of value, or initiated, or conducted.

Nick Abrahams:

And maybe just in terms of with the organizations so that you are working with and so forth, so they’re more mainstream organizations, I imagine, it’s an enterprise software solution, largely Salesforce. And just when we talk about the Web3 platforms, are there any specific opportunities that you see that bigger mainstream organizations are working on and having some success with in Web3? Because obviously Web3’s taken a bit of a back seat, particularly to AI and the LLMs recently and so forth. But is where are people getting value out of Web3, do you think?

Max Comparetto:

I think hype cycle, you got value in the form of revenue and earned media previously, as you etched up, then you hit a threshold where it was just ridiculous and everyone knew it was ridiculous. And we came down, we’re down. And now people are looking at other KPIs and measures of success, like engagement, and trying to assess the impact on true genuine loyalty data and KPIs when Web3 elements are introduced to a customer journey. And I think the real research is being done now on some of this in scaled brand environments, like Adidas, and Starbucks, and Nike, with .SWOOSH. But now I think we will better understand the impact of all this. And if there’s more for brand and consumer engagement, that’s genuine connection, not just a financially motivated connection.

And I think the successful brands, we’ll see, and those that I deal with that I think of as the most forward-thinking are those that are thinking about what I was talking about with wallets need to consolidate. There needs to be identity base, or based elements of capabilities for these wallets. And I think ultimately brands that are successful in this space will use it to solve a problem, which I think might be created in the vacuum of the third party cookie. So that is gone, maybe now this becomes one of these staple means of engaging with a consumer directly, because blockchain value is disintermediation, or one of the values, or opportunities that it presents for certain brands that have had to go through platforms and now they don’t. And so I think that’s the long play. It’s a data acquisition, customer acquisition, problem solving tool.

And then also AI, I think might ironically be a booster or accelerator for Web3, in the long term. Near term, sure. It’s attention grabber away from Web3 in some sense. And in the long term, I think AI creates so many forms or variations of identity and enables those forms of identity or parties to ultimately act in ways that create blockchain transactions. And it’s going to be hard to differentiate or distinguish AI acting on a blockchain versus humans. And it might be a Web3 identity solution that resolves some of these challenges that it creates.

Nick Abrahams:

And I think maybe just to finish off then, do you have any ad advice for mainstream organizations, say Web2 organizations, that are maybe thinking about Web3 and how to get involved in it, would you say loyalty tokens or advertising in Fortnite? Or what thoughts do you have around where is the pathway there to try to prove out the opportunity of Web3?

Max Comparetto:

I think what I would want to know is most brands go into these exercises of thinking about campaigns and programs, and they haven’t even really done a self-assessment or an audit of what of value do we really have to offer. It’s crazy that you have to tell someone think that way, but that’s one. Two is how comfortable are we from a legal perspective, asserting that this thing is going to be represented and distributed on blockchain and it has some perceivable value. And so how do we feel about that and how can we approach that? And I’m sure you’ve had a lot of conversations about that.

Nick Abrahams:

Oh, yes. And how that fits into the regulatory regime and all sorts of issues.

Max Comparetto:

And then it’s how can we make it easy to engage with this? And I think that’s what the Reddit’s have done well, and maybe the Starbucks and Nike more, as they integrate with Nike virtual studios, Artifact does, and things become more official and Web2. On the surface, I would say don’t rebuild your entire tech stack or think that you have to do that. Think about what you have to offer and how legally it would fall when you wanted to distribute the value that way and have good mentors and advisor around you, because it’s not over once you distribute them. Also, there’s a lot of work to be had after the fact, and that’s where we feel like at Salesforce we can offer unique value, ongoing engagement.

Nick Abrahams:

Fantastic. Although, and it certainly sounds like I couldn’t agree more with that, surrounding yourself with people who’ve done it before and experts and so forth, because it’s not something that you can read into overnight. There’s a lot of complexity to this world. So I think that’s excellent advice. So it looks like it’s a lovely day there in New York by the looks of things, so-

Max Comparetto:

Yes. Yeah, I’m excited. I might do some work from the patio.

Nick Abrahams:

That does look nice. A patio in New York now you’re just showing off. Well, Max, thank you very much for making the time. It’s very exciting to hear what Salesforce is up to. We wish you the best of luck. And also people please do reach out to Salesforce if you’re endeavoring on in the Web3 space. So thanks for that, Max. Really appreciate it.

Max Comparetto:

Thank you, Nick. Talk soon. Bye.