From a small town in Bihar to the buzzing tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Ankita Verma's story is nothing short of cinematic. As the co-founder and CEO of Persona, Ankita sheds light on her incredible journey through academia and the corporate world, culminating in her venture into the groundbreaking realm of Web 3.
This episode is a goldmine for anyone intrigued by the evolution of digital advertising. It's not every day you get a front-row seat to the thought process behind pioneering Web3 advertising strategies. Ankita walks us through the shift from Web2's opaque practices to a new paradigm where privacy and user empowerment are at the forefront. Imagine a world where gas-less ads are the norm, rewarding user engagement is the standard, and transparency is not just a buzzword but a built-in feature of the very ecosystem we interact with.
From a small town in Bihar to the buzzing tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Ankita Verma's story is nothing short of cinematic. As the co-founder and CEO of Persona, Ankita sheds light on her incredible journey through academia and the corporate world, culminating in her venture into the groundbreaking realm of Web 3.
This episode is a goldmine for anyone intrigued by the evolution of digital advertising. It's not every day you get a front-row seat to the thought process behind pioneering Web3 advertising strategies. Ankita walks us through the shift from Web2's opaque practices to a new paradigm where privacy and user empowerment are at the forefront. Imagine a world where gas-less ads are the norm, rewarding user engagement is the standard, and transparency is not just a buzzword but a built-in feature of the very ecosystem we interact with.
I was a very I was a very starry-eyed kid. I always had like big dreams in my eyes. I became the first girl in my town to get into an IIT. If done right, if blockchain-based technology can, like, truly change the way certain things operate, Hello everyone, today we are at Biddle Crypto Biddle Space with Ankita Verma.
Host:Ankita, welcome to the show.
Ankita Verma:Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Host:Before I go into all your achievements, I wanted to just ask you tell me a little bit about yourself and your life journey so far.
Ankita Verma:Sure, that's usually the first question that I get. Hello everyone, I am Ankita. Ankita Verma. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Persona.
Ankita Verma:I come from India. I was born, I grew up there. I come from a very small town in Bihar called Mahagalpur. I was a very I was a very starry-eyed kid. I always had like big dreams in my eyes. I became the first girl in my town to get into an IIT. It was always my dream to get into an IIT, spent amazing few years there and then after that, spent a little over four years in India, mostly moving from one job to another, trying to figure out what I want to do in my life, because I had no idea.
Ankita Verma:Started as a developer, software engineer, and then soon realized that I want to be more on the business side of things, so moved to consulting and then to VC, and while I was working at the VC fund, I got a chance to launch their incubator accelerator, which is when I got a chance to meet multiple amazing founders and I realized that probably that's my true calling, that I want to be on the other side of the table and around the same time, I was also very inspired by the innovation that was happening in Silicon Valley. I was reading up a lot on Mark Zuckerberg and Google and Tesla and I thought to myself that if I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to be one in Silicon Valley. So I had no idea how to get to the US at that point of time and the only most viable way that I could think of was coming here for my MBA. So luckily I applied and I got into Wharton. I came here, spent two amazing years at Wharton and it was kind of like a really life-changing experience, because you come from India, you have this tech background and you think that tech and engineering is everything and they are the smartest people. But then here you get exposed to all sorts of people from different walks of life, so people from social sciences and from military and people from economics. So it's just like really broadens your horizon quite a lot.
Ankita Verma:And then after that, because I had never worked in the US, I decided to spend some time working here just to understand how businesses operate here, how it is like to build in the US market. So I joined Amazon. I got an amazing role as a product manager. I grew very quickly, became head of product at AWS AI and got a chance to build and launch multiple products. I learned how to build products, how to sell products, how to work with engineers. I learned all of it. It was kind of a training ground for me for what I do today. And then, after that, I got my green card and then I was like Ankit, you don't have any more excuses left now. So the day I got my green card, I quit my job and then that's how, and that point of time started building persona.
Host:That's an amazing story, especially on the part of when you got your green card. You had it all planned out, that just you know. This is it Because I remember when it was my time a while back and I didn't think much of it, and so now I think I didn't plan as such fantastic journey, that you have a very short amount of time that is very suitable for the type of person that you are. That I know when I met you in the conference, the star eyed person, and so it very perfectly matches what I've imagined. So you mentioned your inspiration, and I know there are a lot of.
Host:If you indulge me, I might go in a little bit in that tangent is the Zuckerberg and the Teslas, and you know, when you come to Silicon Valley, those are the first things you look at, and those are not just in this decade. It started way back when, right with the semiconductor industry, and I got exposed to it a little later. That feeling that you had I kind of have a mutual kind of respect for that that that's, somebody who comes to this mecca for software, for IT, has Any other thing that inspired you besides that, besides those iconic figures, say, I would say specifically led you to a Web 3 space.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, so I actually started investing in Bitcoin in 2015 when I came to the US, when I came to Wharton, and you know I was a small time investor. I have been investing in this space for quite some time since then. But I was watching this space mostly from the side for several years as a Bitcoin investor and then, you know, bought couple of NFTs and then Ethereum and couple of all coins. So I was watching this space from the side and investments that I was doing, but at the same time, I was really very closely following the technology. So they were evolution of blockchain, and then NFTs and then and then ZK. So I was following the technology quite a bit.
Ankita Verma:So, very honestly, what led me to Web 3 was the fact that it's such a green field space, it's such an open space where there is this potential to build something that can truly change the game for how things operate in this world. And I always compare it it's kind of cliched, but I compare it to the early 2000s of the dot com era where there were so many like the yahoo's and the Googles of the world were being formed, and I compare it to that time because I truly believe that, if done right. A blockchain based technology can, like I said, truly change the way certain things operate, be it fintech, be it ads, be it attribution. So the biggest draw was, of course, like the ability to do something in such a native manner in a green field space.
Host:Yeah, that is a very interesting point. In fact that's partly why I got into the space, because it's so green field and you know that feeling of starting fresh or starting it's so true. I was thinking initially to go web 2 with podcasting and on, but then I thought why not start from scratch if I want to do this? And so I do kind of resonate with what you said there, that it's an open field and the technology is there, it's real, it's not going anywhere.
Ankita Verma:Totally yeah.
Host:You're a startup persona. It's a very interesting piece of technology, interesting solution to a problem that us in the industry know exists, and so I would love to hear from you how are you approaching this?
Ankita Verma:The way. When, in 2022, I was, you know, very, very deep trying to figure out what's the right business and the solution to build. I was talking to a lot of builders, a lot of investors, a lot of people in this web 3 space in general and the web, and the one thing that stood out to me was how the user experience, the user acquisition funnel, is so broken. So if you look at web 3 today, marketing, user acquisition all of it happens in a very native form in the form of, like, discord messages and Twitter messages and conferences. So it's all, like I said, the early 2000s of the internet. So what used to happen then in the regular web 2 world, the same things are happening in the web 3 world right now. So I started thinking about, like, how do we bring that data driven approach to make marketing growth, user acquisition, very, very seamless and easy for web 3. And in parallel, I was also very, very fascinated by the on chain data. So if you are, if you have ever used transacted crypto, you know that there is this wallet and whatever transactions you make using those wallet whether it is purchasing an NFT or a token or a coin all of these transactions, they go on this public ledger, which is the blockchain right, and all of this data is public and if you think about it, it is not. It is not like a browsing data, it is not like an intent data, it is not a third party data. It's an actual, immutable data about you making a real purchase. So I was very fascinated about how this data could be used for user acquisition, growth, targeted campaigns, and that's what led to persona.
Ankita Verma:So, coming to persona, a very simple way to understand it is it is Google Adsense, but it is built natively for web 3. I'll explain how it works. There are two sites, there are two network, so there are two sites to the network. First site is the advertising site, so anybody in web 3 looking to get in front of real web 3 audience. So that's site number one. Site number two is the publishing site. So this is where the ads go. This is where the ads are displayed.
Ankita Verma:So what we do at persona is we partner with web 3 applications. So this could be different. Web 3 decks is these could be web 3 gaming platform, these could be web 3 data aggregators, and what we do is we show our ads on these web 3 native platforms. The goal is to fold one is that only real web 3 users they see this ad. And the second is because these platforms they allow users to connect their wallet. We are able to target users on the basis of what's in their wallet.
Ankita Verma:So I'll break it down a little bit. So, like I was talking about the on chain data, right, so it's all associated to your wallet. What we did at persona was we indexed these different wallets about 200 million at this point of time and we know all of their transaction history. We know what kind of NFTs they purchase whether it was music NFT or sports NFT or gaming NFT. We know what kind of tokens they transact and we know how much they hold. So, based on all of this, we created persona, hence the name persona.
Ankita Verma:And now on these platform, our partner platform, we are able to show them like really targeted ads based on their wallet persona. So that does two things One, that it is so relevant the ads that we get much higher performance on these ads, and second is that we're able to exclude any wallets that we don't want to show these ads to. So it's a win-win for everybody. We are not using cookies or any kind of PII data. It's all public data which is associated to your wallet. So we don't know if you're a male, female, or you have a dog or a cat, but what we do have is, like these, actual purchase data from the chain. So this is essentially what we are doing at persona.
Ankita Verma:We launched in August of 2023. And then, you know, since then, we have grown at a crazy pace. Today we work with some of the biggest web three names, including MetaMask, immutable Engine, hash Flow. We have run campaigns for all of these, and then, on the publishing side, our ads go on some of the biggest dApps in web three today. So we are very excited about what it holds for us and the future holds for us.
Host:Yeah, it's very exciting to see that that you know this. This problem has persisted in the space where you know you really don't know what to do with all that data that's generated on chain, right? How do you, how do you make sense of that data? Just give insights with and, at the same time, balance out the privacy concerns one one might have, and there's a very delicate balance which which seems like you've you've kind of cracked that code in some way, and it's a super, super interesting. On that topic, I wanted to ask you, like when you mentioned Google AdSense for Web3, right. Now, web3 enables, you know, as we all know, it enables some other, these new primitives, enable some other new features that you cannot do on Web2, right, and I would love to hear from you, ankita, what those kind of capabilities are or will be in the future.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, that's a very good question. So if you think about Web3, some of the core tenets of Web3 are privacy there and transparency. Right, Building a Web3 native ad network meant that we have we we were able, because we were building for the blockchain, we were able to bring in some of these tenets by default. For example, like I said, right you know, coming to privacy, we are able to target on the basis of on-chain data. Today, no Web2 company can do that. No Web2 company has that kind of data about, like, who their users are and what are they purchasing and if they're, you know, purchasing from a competitor or if they're like, what are the other local like products they're purchasing, and all of that.
Ankita Verma:So Web3, first of all, I think blockchain enables that and is, if you look at the ad funnel right in Web2, it's, it's broken. You don't know if it's a bot that's engaging with your ad. You don't know what happens after they click on an ad. The attribution is such a tricky problem in Web2. But with Web3, given all of these transactions happen on the chain, which is an immutable record of these transactions, it becomes multiple times easier to actually get the entire life cycle of an ad right from a person seeing the ad to a person clicking on the ad and then after that you know, completing the purchase or minting or whatever. All of that is on chain. So it's very, it becomes very straightforward problem to actually solve that attribution issue with that persistence in Web2. That is point number two.
Ankita Verma:There are other ad types that Web2 does not, will not be able to support which Web3 does. Which brings me to actually the third tenant, which is ownership. So Web3 is a lot about ownership. If you are giving your time, if you are giving your attention, you should be rewarded in some way. You should own a piece of the pie, which is what we can do with persona and Web3 ads in general, which is if the user is engaging with the ad, they get rewarded for their time and engagement.
Ankita Verma:So one of an examples of this, very clear examples of this, is something like a gasless ad. For example, the user makes a transaction on the chain. They have to pay a transaction fee, which is called the gas fee. Now, coming up with new ad types which can enable these kind of rewards where you know the gas fee gets taken care of by the advertiser, this is something which is very unique and which can happen in a Web3 like system, and it's not something which can very easily happen in Web2. So I think, coming back, I always think about the tenants that Web3 stands for, and how can we make our product 10x more effective than a Web2 equivalent by just like sticking to those tenants?
Host:no-transcript. You mentioned Web 3, interesting use case that you just mentioned about gasless transactions, gasless ads, taking care of that. I mean that is something that is truly unique to Web 3. If you try to mimic that in Web 2, it's just you're running into centralized systems and that sort of a thing. I mean that in itself. Could you like expand on it a little? My brain is getting fired in all different directions and all sort of possibilities that you can even layer this in the real world sort of scenarios, right, and I don't know, like going my car pass, like fast track pass or something like get paid off or something and then you can crash order or like your Netflix subscription or like yeah, there are so many use cases.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, endless possibilities like that. It's true, yeah, but I guess the idea is ownership, rewarding users for their time and attention, which does not happen in Web 2 today. So Facebook and Google they have all of your sorry, meta and Google, they have all of your data. They build billion dollars at the top of your data and you end up giving your attention. So it's a very simple idea. But, like you said, the application gasless is just like one simple use case of such an application. There are several other use cases like we were talking about. Right, you know your dash pass, or like your Uber order, or like Netflix subscription. There's just so much out there that can be done.
Host:Is Brave, considered a co-partner or like are they something that you would consider them like in the system that you see them integrating with? Because I remember they had some sort of inbuilt browser kind of feature reward system, but I wasn't sure if it was pertaining to like ads, specific to ads, the way you are trying to do, because I think you're trying to do more dynamically. When, say, somebody's paying for coffee or something, some other transaction in the real world, I mean, that's a totally another world out there, the transactional world, and then I think they were trying to do that in the in browser.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, yeah. So that's the difference. Brave also does the bad rewards bad tokens as rewards, but it is for the ads that come on the browser. So you opt in to watch certain number of ads on the browser and then you get rewarded according to how many ads you engage with. But ours is a different model in the sense that you know it's more like the other side, where the ads can be, the way it can appear in front of you. That's like very like limitless right. There can be different ways in which it could appear. It could appear on a website, it could appear in your wallet, it could appear in some other way. So essentially, the scope of the ads, the modalities of ads, it's actually much broader in our case.
Host:Because you're not chain agnostic. I mean you're chain agnostic.
Ankita Verma:And at the same time, we are not limited to one platform to show ads. For example, Brave ads, they go on Brave browser. We can partner with a lot of publishers and go in different places.
Host:Great segue into my next sort of question that I've been thinking about after looking at Persona is just trying to map it out with. You know, for folks who are new to the space, like traditionally, you know, in web 2 space we have CPC. You know all of that cost for acquisition, all the you know AdSense folks know what I'm talking about. How does that map into web 3 and into Persona specifically?
Ankita Verma:Yeah, so the way it maps is that it's actually so.
Ankita Verma:Right now what we do is a CPM model, which is cost per thousand impressions and ad folks will be very familiar with this term. But again, coming back to attribution, because the attribution funnel in web 3 is so transparent, because all of it happens on chain. We are also very excited about CPA, or cost per action model, where you actually pay whenever there is an action that is taken. So if you want a swap to happen as a result of an ad, you pay only when the user performs that actual swap, right. So, and it, like I said, it becomes easier for web 3 because the swap happens on the chain and we get immutable data about the user actually going and performing that swap. So we are actually web 3 enables like a host of options, which is like starting right from CPM to like CPC, which is cost per click, and then, like I said, cpa, which is cost per action, and we want to be able to offer the optionality to the advertiser to choose which one works for them based on their use case.
Host:Got it. So if I'm an advertiser and so all these different I would say funnels in the that I want to target and I can go in persona platform and select that and I will be presented with all different sort of options that I can, I can play with in and where I want to target my users right.
Ankita Verma:Exactly. Yeah, so you have. You can choose what type of payment model you want CPM, cpc, cpc, pa. You can also choose different kind of targeting. We can target on the basis of some web two criteria, which is delay, geo devices, and also Web three criteria, which is what's in your wallet.
Host:So how does that like, what is the range of that like typically cost for for your customer looks like for for people doing the trans transitioning from web two and also who are in the space?
Ankita Verma:Yeah. So it's actually a range, right. Like anything, it depends on what kind of users you're looking to target. So I'll give you some baseline numbers for our CPM based ads, which is cost per thousand impressions based ads. They vary a lot on the basis of number one, geography, like who are you targeting, where are they, and number two, like what kind of users they are. Are they like you know regions, or are they like transacting users or are they gamers? So there is a cost associated with them.
Ankita Verma:So, for example, like I said, coming back to like geo, if you target users from, say, north America, united States, canada, specifically, those are expensive, more expensive than, say, like if you're targeting user from, say, like a Thailand or Vietnam, and it's just a function of, like, the lifetime value of the user that you're looking to target and how much they can potentially spend on your platform, similarly.
Ankita Verma:So that's the, that's a geo based way of looking at it. Similarly, if you're looking to, for example, looking for users who actually transact, make big transactions on on chain, if you're a metamask, you're looking for users who can come swap on your platform, those users are, again, like, more expensive than, say, like somebody who can come and download your game. So those are like two different types of actions and there are different values associated with these two actions. So, coming back to actual number, it depends a lot, but it can go like the CPM can go anywhere between, I would say, like a dollar to, in some cases, like 10, $12 as well, and the model that we have built is, like, very adaptive, so it learns quite a bit as to like which user is more high value than, say, like another type of user. But that's the range. I know it's a very broad range, but that's how it rolls.
Host:And I think I mentioned it in the start and you very eloquently described how you guys do it, but maybe I'll touch it. Touch a little bit on it again the duality of, in this space, having some sort of analytics but, at the same time, keeping that anonymization of the data points that we have for users right. What are some of the challenges that you like? Are there challenges, first of all, and if they are, how do you sort of approach them in terms of you know, you know, zk seems very compelling and I've heard you mention it, so I would love to know a little bit more about it.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, I mean it's like it's a fine balance that we have to strike. So there is one side of the spectrum where you have no data on the user except for their on-chain data which is associated to a wallet right. That is one side of the spectrum, and the other side of the other end of the spectrum is that you have all of that data about them, including their wallet data, right. Of course, the more data you have, the better ads you're able to show. So we try to strike a balance between these two ends, where we have on-chain data as well as some off-chain data, which is their geo and their device type and a couple of other data points. What we still clear off is cookies. We don't use cookies, so we don't, you know, get any kind of PII about the users and we don't store any of such data. And again, like it becomes like a little bit of challenge to balance that, because for some Web3 users, even that's a lot and that's the data that we shouldn't be looking at. And then, but most of them they understand that you know, the better, the better data you have, the better ads you're able to show, which is why we constantly are working towards rewarding the users more and more for sharing any data which is not public. So then they become a part of the ecosystem and they get rewarded for them giving us permission to use the data, which is the future which we are moving towards, and that's when it all balance out and it'll become fair. So that's point number one.
Ankita Verma:The point about ZK is again like you know it. So ZK is the future, where we're going to see this can happen through ZK technology, where users choose to share what they want to share, even the public on chain data that might not remain public forever, and they can choose to share what part of on chain data they want to share for any kind of targeting right. So that's like an extreme form of like public owning their own data. So in the future, where ZK becomes mainstream, this rewarded ad ecosystem comes to like a full fruition, where not just the on chain off chain data, but also the on chain data becomes permission and the user gets paid for whatever they want to share. So that's essentially a future that we are looking forward to, and until then, like I said, we'll be trading this fine line between the two extremes that I spoke about.
Host:Yeah, that's a. That's a. That's a good way to put it, ankita, that you want to be there when it as, as it happens, right, and these primitives are coming and they are useful. You know, they still have some trade offs performance, whatnot but these, these primitives, are here and it's almost like encryption in the 70s, right, you cannot the genies out of the bottle. It's great. Yeah, I was gonna actually. Let's see.
Ankita Verma:I think for developers, there are two value propositions. One is, of course, they can like run their ads and acquire users. The other is that it is their, their, platform, right by showing our ads.
Host:Yes, yeah, that's a community connected. I think what I was actually. That's a good point. That when you mentioned about the community right coming back like some kind of DAO that connects to an ad network, I mean that would be like that, would I mean this is just blue sky thinking right? I'm not. There are some interesting ideas definitely there, which maybe a lot have to think more about, since this podcast is highly focused towards builders, right, people who built the code and you know the whole team is around that designers, be it even campaign managers or anybody what is your viewpoint on folks who are, say, developers, who have application development and they want to use your platform persona like? How could they benefit in a new and interesting ways?
Ankita Verma:Yeah. So they have two different ways of working with us. The first way is user acquisition and growth, which is very straightforward. They come to persona. They want to acquire new users. They create a campaign.
Ankita Verma:It's a self-serve platform takes like five minutes to set up a campaign.
Ankita Verma:They set up their targeting criteria who are they trying to reach out to, which geos, what kind of users and then they upload their creatives and then you know, within five minutes they click Summit and we approve it and their ads will start displaying on some of the biggest web three websites and they can track their entire user acquisition funnel using our dashboard who all are clicking, how many are converting, how many are actually ending up to buy their product or like, sign up or like, whatever their conversion goal is.
Ankita Verma:So that's first way of working with us. The second way of working with us is monetizing their dApps. So if they already have applications that has users, they can actually work with us to integrate with our SDK and show ads show persona ads on their platform. So whenever there are advertisers who want to run ads on our platform, we'll be directing those ads to their platform and they will earn for every view or every impression on the ad. So some of our publishers they earn upwards of 10K, 15k, 20k depending on their traffic monthly just by showing ads on their platform. So these are the two different ways of working with us.
Host:Yeah, that is fantastic, I think, especially for developers finding that new ways for revenue generation seems a very plausible way to go actually and developers are going to be developing anyways for this ecosystem.
Host:They'll be around for a while. To giving them those tools as well and making their life easier and helping them would be fantastic. And this is, as you know I kind of overindulge in the futuristic sort of ideas. I was wondering perhaps if there would be some data models in the future which kind of give sort of like flow of where the data is going across chain, and that sort of a thing would also be valuable even for developers building in multi-chain ecosystem.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, definitely, docchain makes all of that possible.
Host:Yes, definitely. Okay, this is kind of a tradition that I'm kind of starting, like you know what. Before I go to my final question, I wanted to ask you do you have any piece of advice for people who are, I would consider, not just in Southeast Asia, but all over the world, who are global crypto entrepreneurs? Anything you would like to say to them? And also my next guest, who's unknown at the moment what would you say to them? Passing the baton, sort of a thing?
Ankita Verma:I think one thing which I feel very strongly about in Web 3 is that in a lot of builders, they build for FAD and they build for the really short-term returns and rewards and they spend less time thinking about what is the problem statement they are solving for, why are they doing it? Who are the potential actual users? What are their pain points? So the basics right. So I would just urge everybody who is looking to build in Web 3 to build for the actual problem and not a FAD, and really think deeply about the use cases, your users, and build for the long-term, because that is what is missing in Web 3 and blockchain ecosystem quite a bit in today's time. So that would be my advice.
Host:That is a fantastic advice and you don't hear that often in the space actually.
Ankita Verma:Yeah, which is why I feel very strongly about this, and this is the advice that I give to everybody who wants to become a Web 3 entrepreneur.
Host:There's definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
Ankita Verma:Yeah.
Host:And where can builders find you and your team?
Ankita Verma:Yes, so we are our website, wwwpersona3.io. That's our website. That will give you a very high level overview of what we do for publishers, what we do for advertisers. It also has a link to sign up for our demo. So please go sign up for our demo. Somebody from the team will reach out. We'll be very happy to walk you through the product and the use cases.
Host:It was a pleasure talking to you, ankita. I personally learned a lot about the analytics side of things in blockchain, which personally, I was, to be honest, not that knowledgeable, and so this was a pleasure. I would love to have you on the show sometime in the future.
Ankita Verma:Awesome. Thank you so much. I really had a lot of fun chatting with you.
Host:Thank you.