Transcript
Podcast Host / Announcer (0:00)
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
Crypto 101 Host (0:14)
All right, everybody, welcome back, all of you good, wonderful citizens of Crypt Nation. I hope you're having a fantastic morning, noon or night, wherever you are in the world, you are certainly in the right place because today I've got an incredible guest president of Jupiter, Xiao Xiaoju. Xiao Xiao, thank you for joining us here at the Crypto 101 podcast. And how are you doing today?
Xiao Xiaoju (0:38)
I'm great. Pleasure to be here. Look forward to the conversation.
Crypto 101 Host (0:43)
Yeah, I'm greatly looking forward to it. Jupiter, something that I've used plenty and very, you know, it's just a seamless experience. I like to, you know, connect it to the phantom wallet and there's a lot of great stuff going on. And so for our listeners, I hope that you guys are using Jupiter to some extent or have at least looked into it because this thing is awesome. It helps you get the best pricing across all of your Solana trades and so much more. But before we dive too much deeper into Jupiter and all the amazing things that you guys are working on across the entire crypto sphere, let's get you acquainted a little bit with our audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Xiao Xiao, how you kind of got into crypto, what your background was before.
Xiao Xiaoju (1:30)
Yeah, of course. So I've been in this role I think over the last one or two months, so relatively new. But the journey into crypto and to Jupyter has been a long way coming. It has been sort of a blend of high level strategy as well as creative performance, I would say. I try to always bridge different worlds. And so over the last five years I was at kkr, one of the leading private investment firms in the world with about $700 billion assets under management. One of the pioneers of the private equity space. You know, I've been leading the global digital asset strategy while at KKR as well as, you know, working in the iconic TMT private equity team, working on some landmark deals, all like billion dollar revenue companies. And before that I, I worked for about a close to a decade at the Boston Consulting Group, one of the leading management consulting companies, essentially advising Fortune 500 companies on, on company strategy and, and challenging topics. But also on blockchain because back in 2016 I led some of the first blockchain projects that BCG did at the time. And so I had the pleasure to at the time worked together with De Beers, the leading diamond producer in the world, on actually building up a blockchain based asset tracking platform for natural diamonds to prove end to end provenance. And that was at a time when Ethereum wasn't even properly operational. And so we had to actually build a permission version, a private blockchain at the time, which they apparently still until today use to track their natural diamonds, which I think was probably one of the first use cases of blockchain. And through that I sort of fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Although majority of my work was focused on essentially building out new digital companies or scaling very large companies while at BCG and kkr in my sort of personal side, I've always stayed very much involved in the crypto side. Been an angel investor into many projects and funds and yeah, so that's how I got into sort of the blockchain space and, and then maybe like just one note also in a previous life I was actually a professional concert pianist. So be on stage. I played for George Bush Sr. And Gorbachev for the I think 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall when I was a teenager and played around the world on stages, et cetera. So I'm used to kind of switch context and challenge myself every couple of years into something completely different. And then now, yeah, I think it's a very big, very big jump as well from kkr, you know, one of the most prestigious sort of blue chip financial institutions on Wall street to kind of Jupiter, which you know, I essentially joined in one world to build out as the, as the leader in, on chain finance and so we can talk a little bit more about that.
