His product team are people who want to create, who want to change the world, to create new value, new products. “As a leader you must be able to step back and let that innovation happen, even if sometimes it takes more time. Otherwise, you are just killing that spirit of innovation.” For Vincendon, this is the tricky and interesting bit. “At the end of the day, if you don't have a team that works well together, that is self-confident enough to stand for what they think is right, to have constructive conversations, healthy conflict resolution and so on, then you're not going to be able to build the right product.” Conquering the corporate peaks Getting the internal team and culture right is fundamental for Vincendon, but its purpose is outward looking to deliver the products and grow the business. The opportunities for growth in digital assets are vast, with certain prospects offering the chance to change the game at scale. In specific product and capability terms, Vincendon identifies stablecoin applications and the market for yield-bearing assets. These, he argues, will be the key to unlocking the huge potential of the corporate market. “Retail adoption was first, and you can build products that are nice, more intuitive and better to interact with. Then you can look at the financial institutions, and that was the last cycle where a lot of the companies, a lot of the large startups and scaleups, really went for innovation to build use cases for finance.” This cycle included BCB most of whose clients are financial institutions. “That is still very important and there is still a lot to build,” he says. “But the next stage is going to be corporates and corporate use-cases. There is a huge market there and corporate balance sheets are insanely big.” Key to opening up the corporate market is the task of ‘category creation’, Vincendon says, building a market with a new product that clients and potential clients may not even be aware are possible. “Henry Ford is supposed to have said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’ and of course you could breed a faster horse. People did not realise that what they wanted was a car, because the category ‘car’ did not exist. →
Valentin on Chimborazo
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