GRTiQ Podcast: 197 Rebecca Liao

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Rebecca Liao (00:00:19):

It always starts with gaming, and that is true for any emerging technology. It’s always some sort of game, and it is technology or infrastructure that enables gaming that ultimately gets adopted.

Nick (00:01:05):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Rebecca Liao, CEO and co-founder at Saga, a Stanford economics graduate and Harvard law alum. Rebecca’s remarkable journey spans corporate law to public policy, having once served as a policy advisor for both the Biden and Clinton campaigns. Her entrepreneurial path includes co-founding Skuchain, which grew to 5 billion in annual volume and early leadership at Globality, where she helped drive the company to unicorn status through AI and international procurement solutions. At Saga, Rebecca and the team are revolutionizing blockchain infrastructure for gaming and entertainment, creating automated solutions for developers while maintaining a steadfast focus on community. A lifelong performer who began ballet at the age of three, Rebecca also brings an artist’s sensibility to technology leadership. I started the conversation with Rebecca by exploring her early years as a young performer and have growing up in the Bay Area shaped her perspective on technology and entrepreneurship.

Rebecca Liao (00:02:09):

Well, Nick, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be with you and listening to some of the podcasts that you’ve done previously. I really enjoyed hearing the conversations, and so being on here is fabulous. My background all the way back to being a young person, wow, we’re going very pro back here. I’ll start with things that probably interest people a little bit more as to my professional background, and then I’ll talk about what I was like as a kid. So Saga is actually my second crypto startup. My first one was more in the DeFi space. It’s called Skuchain, and it focused on providing short-term liquidity to small, medium-sized businesses. So definitely more in the RWA space. And I was co-founder and COO there for four years, grew the platform to about 5 billion in annual volume before leaving in early 2021. I left because I was part of the Biden campaign in 2020.

(00:02:59):

I’ve always been involved in politics, but I was a policy advisor both for the Biden campaign and then the Clinton campaign in 2016. So in 2016 we lost, unfortunately. 2020, we won. And so I had every expectation that I would go into government. So I packed my bags, moved to D.C. and hung out there in 2021 going through the nomination confirmation process for a role in the administration. But you figure out very quickly that after you’ve done early stage startups for most of your career, federal bureaucracy is not really a great culture fit anymore. And so I called up my co-founders from Skuchain and said, “Hey, I think I’d like to stay in crypto.” And they said, “Well, you’ve always been interested in the developer journey in crypto and the lack of great infrastructure choices for developers. So we know this other team that is thinking about the same things. Maybe you should talk.” And that’s how Saga was birthed.

(00:03:54):

First startup ever was an AI. It’s called Globality and did AI-based procurement of international services. I headed up all BD there. I was a very early employee for them, and I founded and ran their Asia operations as well. I was there for about a year and a half. We got backed by SoftBank in that time, so got us to unicorn status very quickly. And then we went through the hyper scaling period. So that’s where I learned to go from 20 employees to 120 employees and beyond. It was a very valuable learning exercise. So by then I had already heard about crypto and Bitcoin, Ethereum, all the cool things that people were starting to do with the infrastructure. And so I decided to stop out and do my own thing. Started my career as a lawyer. However, I was a corporate lawyer for about five years, but I always knew that I wanted to be a startup entrepreneur. I was just looking for the right opportunity to make the jump. And when I met the founding team of Globality, I knew that this was it.

(00:04:51):

What it was I like as a young person? So you can probably tell from my professional background that I was always a bit of a go-getter. But having said that, you’re taking me down memory lane, Nick. So I didn’t start school until I was five. So my parents did not believe in the whole daycare, preschool, let’s get her really proficient in finger painting type thing. They just thought, okay, kindergarten is when normal children start school, and so that’s when we’re going to push her in there. So I had no conception of achievement or grades or anything like that until I really got into school. But I think how this whole drive manifested early on was I was always a bit of a performer. I’ve been dancing ballet ever since I was three years old.

(00:05:36):

It started off as just my mother who stayed home with me, she saw that I was watching a great deal of TV. She’s like, the rounds, like Sesame Street, et cetera. And she was like, “You know what? I think we can do better than that.” So she started popping in these videotapes, dates me, but she started popping in these videotapes of ballet performances because she was a big ballet nut and I would watch and be fascinated and totally in love with the world. And then eventually I would get up, I would push all the furniture in the living room out of the way and dance along. And that’s when she knew, oh, okay, she’s definitely got the performer gene. Maybe we should put her in school. And that’s how the whole bug began. So it’s what I was like as a young person. And for people at Saga who know me and who see my update videos every week or see me on stage or whatnot, I think they see the through line there. I wasn’t that different as a kid, in other words.

Nick (00:06:35):

Before we pressed record, we were just getting acquainted. And you said you still do ballet. So as an early passion and something you gravitated towards at age three, you still do it, and yet you balance this entrepreneurial startup drive and all the work you’re doing. So how have you found that balance and why has that been important to you?

Rebecca Liao (00:06:54):

So I started at three and then I danced all the way until I was 15. So by then in ballet life, you’re actually pretty advanced. Most professional dancers get their course contracts when they’re 18, 19, and then they stop dancing when they’re 45. So it’s a short career. And for me, you’re stopping at 15, basically meant that I had learned everything, but I was not going to become a professional dancer. So I stopped for a long time. It was actually during pandemic that I picked it up again because I really hate the gym. All those years that I was going to the gym, I really resented it because I understood it was important for health, but I don’t like repetitive motion. I’m very easily bored. So when I got the chance to cancel the gym membership guilt free, I was like, I’m going to do it.

(00:07:41):

So no longer went to the gym, but I was like, what else am I going to do? And I thought, I’ve always loved ballet. Even when I stopped dancing, I always kept attending and watching performances. So I thought, okay, there are a lot of studios nearby, so I’m going to try this again. And I think for me it is about balance in that when we work so much in the crypto space and certainly devote pretty much 24/7 to our jobs. At the same time, because saga is so focused on gaming and entertainment, I think it’s very important for me to continue to develop my creative side because probably the core strength of Saga is that we really connect with our developers. No one is here because we write them the biggest check. We actually don’t write checks at all. We don’t give grants except for publishing grants.

(00:08:29):

So people are here because they love the product. It’s a really great chain to build on top of. They get really great supports. Obviously all of our marketing resources are very dedicated to doing a good job for these projects and giving them a good go-to market. But in the end, it really is the emotional connection and it is that creative alignment, these game developers, these NFT artists, anyone else doing entertainment on chain, they really want to with someone who is more creative-minded. And so it’s important for me to be able to connect with them to keep up being a creative myself.

Nick (00:09:05):

Is there some correlation, and I’ve asked this to other guests over the years, but is there some correlation between that passion you had in this case for ballet and the way you run and work as an entrepreneur, meaning that there’s some skills or some skill that is derived from the perfection and expertise you reached in ballet in terms of what you do in business?

Rebecca Liao (00:09:28):

Nick, that’s a great question. So I would say yes, there are definitely things that I learned from ballet that I continue to learn day in day out. The list is very long, but I’ll name some of the key things. So one is definitely discipline. So no matter how beautiful a ballerina is, no matter how genetically blessed she is, she has to work hard in order to actually become a good dancer. And a lot of people are very surprised when they hear professional dancers or when they hear me talk about class, like still going to class, they’re like, “Haven’t you learned everything already?” And the thing is, class is about conditioning, and if you don’t keep up that conditioning almost on a daily basis, you will lose the movement that you need in order to be a good dancer. So discipline, first and foremost, definitely. You hear about the precision, the artistry from your connection to the music, all of that is there.

(00:10:18):

One of the things I’ve learned about being part of a company and live performance is it’s completely unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen and you do have to improvise on the spot and all the training that you learned will come in handy because you’ll be prepared to deal with any situation, but you really do have to improvise every single time you’re on that stage. So that is definitely something else that we’ve learned is at Saga, we are known for execution. We are incredibly precise and thorough, very professional, but at the same time we’re incredibly agile. So that’s another lesson.

(00:10:52):

The third thing which I think is so important for any founder, CEO out there is the ballet studio is one of the few places in the world where I consistently get yelled at. None of the girls at my company know what I do, and we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about any work outside of ballet. The ballet teacher has no idea what I do, and I would like to keep it that way because she will scream at me. If I’m doing something wrong, she will be very open about it in front of everyone. It’s a great reminder that you need to stay humble. There are always things that you can improve and everyone has something to teach you. I think that has been incredibly beneficial for this role as well.

Nick (00:12:02):

As you mentioned a moment ago, and I did a ton of research to be ready for this interview, you clearly are a go-getter and to set context for listeners who may not be as familiar, you attended Stanford and got a degree in economics and then went on to get a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2009. When you think back to those university years, and you talked about this a moment ago, but how were you envisioning your career and what you’re wanted to accomplish by virtue of getting this really outstanding education?

Rebecca Liao (00:13:05):

Thanks, Nick. Honestly, my career right now is it’s in so many ways a complete departure for my education and another way it’s a continuation of it. So Stanford, no surprise, even when I was there was already very tech-obsessed. And I was there during the years when Google was starting to become very successful search engine. And honestly, more and more of my classmates were looking to found startups even while they were still in undergrad. Chief among them being Sam Altman. He was in, my freshman what we call I-Home course Introduction to Humanities. And yeah, very different guy back then, but he is awesome. So we were all thinking, okay, we’re going to have careers in tech to some extent, but I’ve always been very civic minded and I was interested primarily in public policy. And so where do you go if you are interested in public policy? You go to law school.

(00:13:56):

So my goal in undergrad was to go to law school. And I finished undergrad in three years because I was done, I was done with my degree at that point, and I didn’t see a need to pay Stanford an additional at the time, $80,000 in order to stick around for just an extra year. And I knew I wanted to go to law school, so I went ahead and applied, got into to the ones I wanted to get into, and I spent an additional three years trained to become a lawyer. I am no longer a full-time practicing lawyer. Get my license because why wouldn’t you? But I no longer do what I’ve been trained to do. And so I’m incredibly grateful for my education, but at the same time, I think when I look back on it now, would I have done anything differently? Because I am doing things that are so much of a departure from what I actually studied. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s just me not wanting to regret anything.

(00:14:51):

I think at the end of the day, everything that Saga is, everything that I’m able to bring to the table as a founder here is due to the very diverse background. I do know what’s going on on the legal side, and so I usually don’t have to consult outside counsel to know exactly what the parameters are for anything crypto related. Obviously I’ve kept up in politics, so definitely use my connections there. I am able to understand most concepts in DeFi and help out with the Tokenomics team just because of the economic training. So all of that is there. And being in the Stanford environment, learned a great deal about tech and startups early on. So the diversity of it has really helped. But it’s interesting because people when they do look at my bio and they look at where I was and what I’ve become, they’re like, okay, walk me through the three line here because it’s not a straight line. But I always encourage people, your career is very rarely a straight line. So be open to things, discover yourself, all of that good stuff.

Nick (00:15:52):

You said you are civic minded and clearly that’s something important to you because you dedicate a lot of your time working with, as you mentioned, the Clinton campaign in 2016 and the Biden campaign in 2020. Where does that drive come from? Why is it important to you at that stage in your life? And I presume that continues to be civic minded and make that a pillar in your life.

Rebecca Liao (00:16:16):

Yeah, it’s super interesting. I don’t know quite when it started. In so many ways, I would say it’s so strong within me that urge that I don’t quite know where it began. For ballet, I can pinpoint, yes, when I was two and a half I started dancing along. That’s when it began. Or even becoming an entrepreneur. I grew up in the California Bay Area and I went to Stanford undergrad. Stanford undergrad is where it began, where I learned what a startup is and how to build one, et cetera. But with being civic minded, I honestly don’t know, it’s just always been within me. As soon as I became conscious of wider society, politics, people’s place within it, I was very, very passionate about it. And I can count that going all the way back to maybe when I was in the third grade or so, because I think that’s the earliest memory that I have of having some sort of civic debate.

(00:17:14):

So I must have had some consciousness before then, but I very clearly remember that being a point at which actually my parents took a look at me. They were like, okay, we tried to get her early on into medicine, if you can’t tell by now, yes, I did have Tiger parents, but they got me a copy of Grey’s Anatomy and I completely rejected that just because I was so scared by the pictures and they’re like, hey, doctor thing might not work out. But they realized that I loved to debate, that I was watching all the political news shows with them and keeping up and just really in love with it. And they’re like, okay, she’s going to be a lawyer. That set me on that path for a very long time. But yeah, I mean the honest answer is Nick, I honestly don’t know, but it’s just always been within me somehow.

Nick (00:17:56):

For listeners benefits, they won’t know that we’re recording this at a time shortly after the recent presidential election was decided and President Trump was announced as the next president. And my question for you in that context is you mentioned that you fell out of interest in policy as a profession in 2021 when you went back to Washington, you saw all the federal bureaucracy. Does web3, blockchain, crypto, whatever you want to tag it as, is that going to be something that resolves some of that bureaucracy maybe into the future where we might actually see improvements in some of these types of things by virtue of this new industry?

Rebecca Liao (00:18:37):

If you’re asking, is blockchain going to improve government? Sadly, I think the answer is no. However, do I think that the regulatory landscape has gone a lot easier because of this election? Probably. Probably, which is a good thing. At the end of the day, I think the US was just woefully lagging in this space, and it wasn’t the case that the whole world was against crypto. It was the US in particular, and definitely a very asymmetric situation because usually we lead in technology. In this particular case, we were just stubbornly lagging behind. So I do think that crypto will see a lot of upside in the next few years. I think that’s being reflected in the market action right now. But in terms of utilizing this technology to actually improve the operations of government, I mean the US government prints money. It prints money. Literally that is 95% of its job.

(00:19:34):

Everything else is keeping the lights on for key infrastructure and maybe providing some key services, but it really is to print money to keep the dollar, the reserve currency of the world. And when you have that kind of economic power, I just don’t think you’re going to see the kind of upheaval and disruption and change that some people dream about. Do I agree with all those hopes and dreams, by the way? Not really. I tend to think that some things that we have, some institutions that we have in particular are very important for global stability, but I also see the flip side of it, which is that the government has virtually unlimited resources. Adopting technology has been very, very slow. And you go into any government office that has digitized itself, it basically means that they have moved from Cobalt to Microsoft 2000, something like that. So cutting edge, bleeding edge tech is very, very hard to come by.

Nick (00:20:31):

So let’s do a little time traveling here, and I presume we will have to go back in time by virtue of where we are in your story here. And can you remember when you first became aware of crypto and blockchain and what those first impressions were?

Rebecca Liao (00:20:46):

Yeah, so I was a Globality at the time and AI, I mean, this is how technology cycles work. AI back then was incredibly early and a lot of Globality’s product relied on natural language processing, which our engineers were having an incredibly difficult time figuring out. We laugh at that now because we take things like ChatGPT for granted. In fact, that’s like last generation. We’re trying to do fancier things with AI now. So I was there struggling to get this tech product to work and to sell it to people, and I had faith that we would get there someday, but it was early, very, very clear that it was early. And in the meantime, just by virtue of being here in the Bay Area, and by virtue of my friend circles, I was starting to hear more and more about Bitcoin in particular. And at first I thought, this is a digital joke.

(00:21:37):

I mean, this is all true. This is some cyberpunk coming up with this elaborate idea. Some people caught onto it, has become this thing. But it was when Ethereum came along and Ethereum wasn’t the only one back then that was dabbling in smart contracts. There were several protocols that are by and large now defunct, so kudos to Ethereum for lasting this whole time. But we were starting to talk about decentralized automated computing, and that was very exciting to me. Very, very exciting. The through line in so much of my career, despite opting between jobs and different sectors, different technologies, is I do firmly believe in being able to improve people’s lives through economic development and the way that this technology could democratize financial services. I saw the potential immediately.

(00:22:25):

I was originally thinking that this would be a nice to have, this would be a great technology for fully developed economic systems like the US and Western Europe, but honestly for developing market economies, this would be a huge game changer. And I just became fascinated by him. Kept doing research, kept talking more people in the space. So this was around 2014, 2015 timeframe. That’s when the bug began. Once I met my co-founders at Skuchain, that’s when we thought, okay, we’re going to do a business that’s focused on assets. It’s going to have an international scope and well, we’re going to do our best.

Nick (00:23:03):

When you think back to those days when you were working on AI, and for people like me that are new on the scene of AI, I just started using ChatGPT and I became very interested and all of suddenly it’s in the news. But you were there long ago when it was emerging tech and emerging industry. When you think about, and you use the word tech cycle, when you think about how AI started and where we are now, and you think in parallel to blockchain and crypto, what are the lessons here? Where are we headed? What do you know about the future and some of the friction that we’ve got to keep pushing through for this industry to emerge successfully like AI?

Rebecca Liao (00:23:40):

Well, very different dynamics in the two industries. I mean, AI is about scale, and that’s why larger companies like the Googles, the Metas, the Alibabas and Tencents of the world, they have these massive data sets. And so a lot of the best technology, a lot of the best ideas and research will come from these places that have the enormous data sets. And so it really rewards scale. And we knew that because these institutions, these companies were keeping up with the research and they were for the long term, invested in newer technology for AI in realizing some of the dreams that we had talked about early on in the AI industry, that it would come to fruition one day. The form it would take, we were unsure about. I mean, like in crypto now, people were talking about any and all use cases. You could have AI in your toaster oven, you could have AI teaching your children instead of schools, et cetera. Every single use case was somehow affected by AI. In the end, I think the fact that ChatGPT was what broke through is a really great lesson for crypto.

(00:24:46):

Put it this way, I firmly believe that when disruptive change happens, it’s not because anybody willed it, it just happens and you just have to be in a position to meet the moment. And so when I bring forth ChatGPT as an example, I’m not saying we should drive towards it necessarily because that’s just how life works sometimes is the more you want something, but the less likely you’re going to achieve it. But it’s more to say, I think when the breakthrough does happen, it’s going to be a ChatGPT-like app. So first and foremost, consumer oriented, anyone can use it. Anyone can use it. Very intuitive, very simple from the outside. So ChatGPT is obviously an enormously complex product, but from the user experience, it’s very, very simple. Also, there is an entertainment value to it. I think a lot of people when ChatGPT first came out thought, oh, this is really great for information, this is really great for information, for productivity. All of that’s true. But at the end of the day, why is it so addictive? Because it’s a toy.

(00:25:46):

You can ask it anything you like. You can ask it about the weather. You can ask, “Hey, I need to summarize these 10 different papers into a new thesis. Can you help me with that exercise?” “I can do that.” You can ask it about your love life. You can ask it anything. And so because of the toy nature of it, I think consumers understood it from the beginning really. And I think for crypto, the product that breaks through the application that breaks through is going to have the same nature. It’s going to be consumer oriented, it’s going to be very simple to use. It’s going to have an entertainment toy-like nature to it. And I do think that when you have a great product, it doesn’t matter what the original intent of the functionality was for that product. Resourceful people will use it to further their own ends. And so that’s what we need to have in crypto. We need to have a really great product that people use far and outside the intentions of the original builders.

Nick (00:26:44):

You’ve said some things that triggered this question in my mind. You’ve said things like tech cycle, industry dynamics, and obviously you take this for granted because of how accomplished you are and the types of things you’ve worked on. But for listeners that want to learn how you approach industry and making these types of observations, do you have mental models or lenses that you pull off the shelf and use when you make these types of observations about something like AI or crypto even relating back to your work in law or maybe in public policy, but yeah, any mental models that you use throughout your life that have helped you make sense of these types of things?

Rebecca Liao (00:27:22):

I learn a little differently, I would say compared to a lot of other entrepreneurs. So I know that for instance, it’s very popular to ask founders what books do you read? Or which professors are really influential? Which papers are really influential? And there are some things that I have in mind, but I also, I am not a huge fan, I have to say of the business school type, okay, here is the triangle of value and here’s how you approach it. Yeah, not so much into that. I really learned my experience and then extrapolating some bigger insights from that experience. So the way that Saga operates and certainly the way that I look at industries writ large, especially in tech, it is a product of all those experiences over time.

(00:28:06):

I will say there is one instinct that I have that I really, really hew to, which is at the end of the day, execution details matter a lot, but what determines the success of something is going to be first principles, somehow everything, every endeavor, every person, every talent, we all have an essence and it’s very hard to get away from that, which is why when you do get away from it first and foremost, people can pick up on it and then you are labeled inauthentic because people think you’ve gotten away from what you really are. But also we’ve seen with some projects, especially in crypto, when you start to reach for something beyond what is meant to be your potential, that’s when a lot of people fall on just really disappointed expectations. So I think first principles are incredibly important and especially when it comes to building products or go to market and getting traction, one of the things that Saga really lives by is that people are people at the end of the day.

(00:29:09):

And I think one of the most frustrating things about crypto for anyone in this space actually, regardless of how you earn your keep here, one of the more frustrating aspects is that it seems to be so insular and there’s a vocabulary that belongs only to crypto and people are always trying to figure out what exactly is going to stick, what’s the narrative or the meta or the story that’s going to stick and really help your project get some traction and get some attention for speculation, all of that. It’s an incredibly difficult game to play. And honestly, nobody really plays it well because meant to play it well. It’s very haphazard.

(00:29:44):

What we have always believed as the right path is you go after people first, and that means having a strong community. It also means that your product needs to be built again for that end consumer or for the developer who is building for that end consumer. You have to focus on people. And what people are motivated by is actually no great mystery. Just because we’re in crypto doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same hopes and desires and fears and insecurities as people. By keeping it very first principle centric like that, I think it’s allowed us to have a very solid compass both for the product roadmap and the way that we build community, the way that we have built our brand. And certainly I think especially for 2025 as we break into mainstream how we present ourselves to the outside world.

Nick (00:30:32):

Rebecca, I want to pause here for a moment and ask a question that I’ll occasionally ask a guest that’s like you. And the question is this. So you’re an accomplished and a very serious person. That’s the word I’m going to use. You’ve got a degree in economics from Stanford, you’ve got a law school degree from Harvard. You worked in public policy and worked on two presidential campaigns. I mean, you can go and do, I would imagine whatever you want. And yet, here you are working in the crypto industry. How would you explain to someone outside the industry why someone like you has interest in pursuing career and opportunity in an industry like crypto that’s so new and is shrouded, I guess, in technical mystery as well as a lot of scam and other things that have happened in the periphery. So how would you explain that?

Rebecca Liao (00:31:23):

I definitely get this question a lot from my colleagues in D.C. They’re like, “Why? Is everything okay, honey?” I get this question a lot, but no, in all seriousness. So I would say this, crypto has had very visible public failures, whether that’s FTX or the collapse of Terra-Luna, 3AC, those are just the ones from last cycle that we remember. But there are also, memecoins that are very clearly pump and dump schemes and retail gets hurt by it. Sometimes the story leaks out to some very, very public failures for sure. And then in gaining in particular, so much of web3 gaming had been written off because it felt very much like an NFT pump or dump scheme, pump and dump or a token pump and dump scheme. So basically a way to fleece your gamers without actually developing great value in a game.

(00:32:16):

So definitely a lot of negative things here and I’m hyper aware of them. I do think that better regulation will be great for this space, not more regulation necessarily, but better regulations, smarter regulation, because I think for all the actors who are actually trying to build serious things here, it will be incredibly helpful. Having said all of that, I think that there is some amount of mal activity or socially embarrassing activity that you have to not necessarily tolerate, but that you have to prepare yourself for when you go into a space that is so bleeding edge. And the example that I always go back to is Meta, formerly Facebook, started off as a hot or not app.

(00:33:02):

In this day and age, that would’ve gotten Mark Zuckerberg canceled in a heartbeat. And I’m not saying that that app was a great app to have. I’m glad they moved on and matured from that, but it started off as hot or not, and it was because of that vehicle that I think that particular founding team learned a lot about human behavior. They learned a lot about what it is consumers want. They also learned a lot about scaling on the back end and some wonderful technology has come out of that. So sometimes the best, most life-changing, world-changing, reality-changing technology in the world comes from the worst of human impulses. That is just the nature of it. And so in crypto, I don’t think that means that we have carte blanche to be terrible people, but I think that for all of our faults, there is very serious building happening here.

(00:33:54):

And I think for the people who keep at it 24/7 to deliver on those products and to really deliver for their communities, they are really hoping to bring about that world-changing technology. That’s certainly why I’m in the game. We don’t talk about it as much in the states, but the truth of the matter is when you travel internationally for crypto conferences, the reason why you see so much enthusiasm, whether it’s in the Middle East or whether it’s in East Asia, Southeast Asia, LATAM, Africa, et cetera, again, going back to why I got into the space to begin with, these areas that don’t have the hardened financial infrastructures, they are the ones who benefit the most from this technology. And for them, stable coins or having better payment rails, even having better infrastructure for gaming and entertainment, which their populations do partake in through their various mediums, this is all not a nice to have. This is a must have. And so there’s a lot to believe in when you’re in crypto. There’s still a lot to build.

(00:34:54):

And what I hope for for this industry is that the people who are building serious products will survive long enough to break through because it is very hard to keep focus and to keep motivation. When you see the memecoins just overnight getting half a billion in market cap, you’re like, what the hell is this? It is just gambling. It is just gambling, but it is real money. And so keeping the industry focused I think is the challenge for all of us who are doing big projects in this space. But when anyone asks me, “Why the hell are you here when you could be in a respectable job with a really fancy title and living a really cushy life?” I tell them, “This is a chance to actually change the world.” As hokey as that sounds, this is an actual chance to do that. And if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. It’s not easy. And you go into a clear-eyed that it’ll be a difficult journey, but you’ve also made the choice that it’ll be worth it.

Nick (00:35:49):

When you think about the emergence of this industry, where did this thing come from? Do you frame it as a revolution against the sins of web2? Do you see it as an economic movement where equality and emerging markets can be helped and supported? Do you see it as something about data and privacy? How do you frame the emergence of where this all came from?

Rebecca Liao (00:36:18):

So I may look at it a little differently just because of my background, once again. I think that all those adjacent tech stories, if you will, so is it a really great place for AI agents to make their attestations and be payment rails for AI? Sure. Is there a privacy/data play here where blockchain and the technology, whether it’s ZK or some other technology that preserves privacy is going to be really important for people going forward because of just how much access to data these powerful institutions have, et cetera, et cetera. So I don’t really see crypto as an agitation against all of that fundamentally. It may be what we call in law the proximate cause. So it’s the last thing that you see before the actual event happens. Therefore, the mind tricks you sometimes into thinking, well, that must be causation, direct causation, and I’m sure there’s some causation there.

(00:37:16):

But really again, returning to first principles, I think what crypto is, it’s an agitation against hegemony. And one of the things that we have observed in the national security community, which the foreign policy community, so the diplomats, which they’re finally acknowledging, but national security saw this very early on, was that the world is really breaking up into what we call network states. The chief organizing principle for humanity for the last God, maybe millennia or so, really is the nation state. So what country are you a part of? Which country are you a citizen of? And so much of your identity is wrapped up in that citizenship. But what we’ve seen, this has been fueled by technology in many ways is the migration into network states. So you may feel more kinship with people who are in crypto in other countries, for instance, or you may feel more kinship with people of the same religion, but in different countries. People are, in other words, finding their communities.

(00:38:19):

They’re finding their communities, and these communities need a way to organize themselves. And so far doing it through a web2 route is fine, but there is nothing like crypto for organizing a community. And honestly, even biggest detractors of web3 have recognized our ability to organize communities. I think that’s actually the reason why I think this space has a future is that this trend of wanting to be with like-minded people regardless of order, situation, physical circumstance, et cetera, is going to necessitate this technology getting more and more sophisticated in order to support those urges. So that’s what I see it as. It’s really for communities, it’s for network states.

Nick (00:39:06):

It’s an amazing answer and I’m glad I asked that question. Thank you for sharing that. So up to this point, we’ve dropped some nuggets along the way of what you’re working on now at Saga, and I’m sure listeners that are paying attention can infer what exactly that project is and how it’s creating value. But to reset the table, do you mind just telling us the origin story where Saga, the idea for Saga came up and how you got activated on that vision?

Rebecca Liao (00:39:32):

Yeah, so it was late 2021, so there are four co-founders at Saga. So myself, then there’s Jin Kwon who is our chief strategy officer, there’s Jake McDorman who is our CTO, and then Bogdan Alexandrescu is our VP of engineering. So it is a very balanced team. Two on the engineering side of the house and then two on the business side of the house. And we all started talking in late 2021 because some of us were deep into the Cosmos ecosystem. There was a lot of frustration around the fact that Cosmos had really great technology and no go-to-market plan, no desire for a go-to-market plan. And in terms of where crypto was headed writ large, I think all of us felt frustrated that there wasn’t true scalable technology to offer to developers. And so we got to talking and that’s when we decided an automated way to launch a chain of chains is the answer.

(00:40:24):

Because you think about how web2 apps scale, it is through cloud. And at this point, the cloud deployment process is very well understood, pretty simple for developers, and we needed to give that same experience to developers in the crypto space. So we became a Layer 1 ourselves to launch Layer 1s. That’s the best way to do it as you have your own security layer and then you can replicate that security automatically for anyone who wants to have their own chain. This is the most scalable way in which to develop, particularly because all of our chains, which we call chainlets, they all speak to one another. So you can have as many of these as you want supporting your app, so as many L1s as you want, in other words, supporting your particular application. We also wanted to do away with gas because we felt that that was a huge friction point for end users using crypto products. And honestly, it was also hampering developers in their ability to ship new products, to experiment with things before shipping, et cetera.

It also was not the best way for a chain to make money. And so we’ve done away with gas. We have something that’s called a liquidity integration layer instead or what we call LIL. The point of it is to take a rake of the liquidity that flows through the system. So very much more like a platform or an app store model. It’s not based on gas, but in this way you eat when the developers eat and everyone shares in the upside. So we had some product fundamentals down and then we had to think about the go-to-market because at the time, while I think we were farther ahead in terms of the technology of a chain to launch chains, there were other protocols looking at the same thing. And we asked ourselves, okay, how do we design a go-to-market around this? It’s going to differentiate us, but we’ll also actually really make a difference. As a startup, you look to the users that badly need this, not the ones who would potentially benefit from it, but who badly need it, and that became gaming and entertainment.

(00:42:22):

So a game cannot do well on a chain that doesn’t scale, and same with large entertainment apps. And so we decided to focus on the gaming and entertainment space and you see that brought forward all the way to present day. Now, we actually have a publishing house that is dedicated to gaming, we are the only chain to have our own publisher. And we felt this was necessary because the games, especially the flagship titles that are much bigger that they actually need while publishing services in order to have a good go-to-market. But that’s how Saga began. That was a motivation for it. One of the things that I really love is that we have kept that vision consistent for two years. So we have not been swayed by narratives at all. We know that this product has value. We have kept at it this entire time. The growth that you see now is really owing to the fact that we have kept at it. So our resources were always focused. There were never any distractions and we’re just needing the moment.

Nick (00:43:21):

You mentioned earlier that one of the first principles that you operate by at Saga is people first. And what can you tell us then about the people that comprise the Saga community, from the users and devs building on the product to the team and how it’s grown?

Rebecca Liao (00:43:37):

Our tagline at Saga, the thing that I like to say to our community all the time is this is a space where the crazies dare to dream their craziest dreams. So we are the craziest, we think outside the box and we yearn for freedom at every turn. In most cases here at Saga in particular, it’s creative freedom. For Saga Origins, our criterium for picking games is threefold. We look for things that are provocative, expansive, uncompromising. And so what emerges is you see a project, but also any person who is associated with Saga embodies these values. We are very big in our thinking for sure, very ambitious, certainly looking to provoke, to change things, to do things that are different, but at the same time we are incredibly disciplined about it. Execution is everything for a startup. A lot of good ideas out there, but if you can’t execute, doesn’t really matter.

(00:44:30):

So definitely very execution minded. I think what’s emerged in our community as well is that people really do form genuine connections with one another, and we do take care of each other, and I’ve always felt that that is important for a true community. The word community is thrown around a lot. I’ve certainly used it a lot in this podcast today, but I think oftentimes, especially in crypto, the word is a little bit misused because there’s actually no human element to it. Anything that convenes around a project is community. Even if everybody is just there for token go up, it’s called a community. It’s not really a community because the people are not actually connected to each other. I think one of the things that we have been able to foster here is a real sense of loyalty, and that is due to a few things.

(00:45:15):

I do think that we have a very welcoming open-minded nature. Certainly the core team itself is very service oriented, and so we’re always looking to make our community happy to improve their experiences here, but we also elevate those within the group that we know have those leadership qualities, that they are able to take care of other people, that they are able to think of others before themselves, that they are able to bring people along with them, whatever is they’re working on. And so you’ve seen our community grow by leaps and bounds based on those values, but it all goes back to the fact that we’re all crazies and we’ve band together.

Nick (00:45:48):

When I think about the growth of the industry and the storylines about what’s the next big thing or what’s going to be the catalyst for the next move forward, and there’s these verticals that always of come up, NFTs, DeFi, and of course gaming is always part of this. You have a front row seat to that. You’re building infra to empower and to fuel the next generation of gaming and web3. What are you seeing in terms of that vertical and what’s your argument that that probably will be the unlock for the next adoption milepost of this industry?

Rebecca Liao (00:46:33):

… and it is technology or infrastructure that enables gaming that ultimately gets adopted. A, because gaming is usually the hardest use case. It’s very demanding. Not only do you have to have a really sleek, smooth user experience that doesn’t interfere with gameplay, but you also need the scaling on the back end. And so it’s always a very hard technology problem to solve. It solve them for gaming. It solve them for everyone else. But the other aspect of it is we see throughout history that things like Slack for instance, or Discord, these are all gaming technologies. They have much broader adoption now, but they started off as gaming technologies, and so we think that gaming usually leads the way. Now, does that mean that you are going to be technology that’s just adopted into the current crop of games and it improves that gaming experience and therefore you find product market fit that way?

(00:47:25):

I don’t think it’s that simple, actually. For something that is as bleeding edge as crypto, it’s probably going to be an entirely new form of entertainment. We started to see hints of it here at Saga. Again, it all goes back to people. And I would say that one of the things that we’ve really cultivated among the core teams, you really have to listen to the community even when you don’t like what they’re saying, you really have to listen hard. And when developers deliver hard truths to you that this is crap, you really have to listen hard to that maybe even harder. Early on, we had a great infrastructure product, [inaudible 00:47:57] promised was a gaseous experience, but when we launched the developers who were building on us, they said, “This is great, but our tokens are trapped. Our tokens and our NFTs are trapped.” This is a problem with any roll-up solution, any side chains, app chains, certainly for someone like us that’s natively multichain. It’s a problem.

(00:48:16):

You probably hear it as liquidity fragmentation, but it is the issue that because it’s not all one monolithic L1, you are splitting liquidity and that is both tech and economic consequences for anyone building on you. So our developers told us, you have to solve this problem, liquidity. Otherwise, it’s not sustainable to be on here. It doesn’t matter the quality of the infra. And that’s where the liquidity integration layer came about is we needed a DeFi layer that would be natively multichain, and we are the first chain to do it. So why do I bring that up in the context of gaming? Because very recently we saw a huge success of Off The Grid. Off The Grid is a shooter title, very competitive category. It’s a good-looking game and a lot of people had a lot of fun playing it, huge opening weekend.

(00:49:03):

They invested heavily in streamers, which is the right strategy, got the game to number one on the Epic store for a few days. It was awesome, but there was no DeFi component to it. There was no marketplace component to it. And so by not having what we think are really the core web3 elements, it became any other game. It just happened to be on decentralized servers. What we’re finding therefore is gaming is going to lead the way just because it’s your wedge into consumers, but there is no web3 gaming without the DeFi aspect. And so we anticipate that that is how it’s going to play out.

(00:49:43):

Now, fortunately, we are built for that. But when I think about the next generation of gaming, what will Gen Z, Millennial or Alpha really find entertaining? It is going to be a mixture of the fact that they have really great game experiences, but there is that economic element, whether it’s in a really fast-paced marketplace, whether it’s in some highly speculative elements around a game, what we call the meta game. This is where people will spend a lot of their lives. When I look at all the different verticals and their potential for penetrating into wider mainstream, once again, going back to the ChatGPT success story, it is consumer oriented. It is easy to use and there has to be entertainment, almost toy-like value to it, gaming checks all the boxes.

Nick (00:50:32):

So for any listeners that are interested in learning more about Saga, maybe getting active in that community, what can you tell us about the best pathway to do that and maybe some exciting news or next big things that are coming out of that ecosystem?

Rebecca Liao (00:50:46):

Absolutely. So the best place to get in touch with us and always keep up on the latest all things Saga is our Twitter. So that is just Sagaxyz with a double underscore at the end. From there, you’re able to go to our Discord. Our website itself is just saga.xyz. Through that, you can also get in touch with the team. For me personally, anyone can find me @beccaliao. That’s my Twitter handle. I respond to all messages I promise. So look forward to hearing from all of you. But in terms of exciting news coming up, so we’re in the thick of Indie Autumn right now. Indie Autumn is our celebration of innovator games that are by indie studios, and so these are smaller hyper-casual games. The reason why we are doing an Indie Autumn campaign right now is a lot of these games took all year, if not two years to build.

(00:51:38):

And so they’re just getting into the market now, and we wanted to make sure that they had a really great opening to celebrate the hard work. At the same time, we are going to announce our Spring Slate. This is going to be our Spring 2025 Slate of flagship titles. We announced our first three flagship titles at Gamescom this year. So that was Angelic: The Chaos Theater, narrative strategy RPG. Lussa: The Final Frontier, which is a shooter game, really awesome. And God’s legacy, which is definitely squarely a fantasy RPG game. Heading into spring this coming year, definitely keeping all the same themes of, again, provocative, expansive, uncompromising. The game titles, however, are even bigger and I would say the maps are bigger. The role-playing elements are much more extensive and sophisticated. The in-game assets are much richer in their functionality and in terms of the complexity of the marketplaces, you’re going to see that improve as well. And so the Spring Slate is going to get announced in anticipation of some spring launches next year, and I think audiences will really love those.

(00:52:47):

On top of that, liquid integration layer is going to go live, and that is our DeFi layer. So we have quite a number of projects already lined up for that who are more DeFi-specific, so nothing to do with gaming actually, but they are more in the DeFi space. And what we recognize is that when you set up your economic system, if you will, in your DeFi layer, you need certain primitives in order for the whole thing to be complete. That includes a decks, first and foremost, that it also includes your platforms for launching meme coins, it includes predictions markets, it includes marketplaces for NFTs, it includes borrowing and lending products, any sort of yield-bearing products. And so all of that is coming together. Once again, the emphasis at SAGA is still gaming and entertainment, and therefore the assets that are going to be traded are much more social gaming, NFT related, but the primitives remain the same. So I think we’re going to get some pretty magical results out of that heading into 2025. That’s what people have to look forward to.

Nick (00:53:43):

And I’ll put links in the show notes for any listeners that want to get involved and stay up to date on all the things that you just mentioned there. Rebecca, I only have a few more questions for you before I ask you The GRTiQ-10, these are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. They’re a lot of fun. They give us a chance to get to know you a little bit better, and I always think listeners learn a little bit more about things that they should do or can do to improve their own life. Before we get to those GRTiQ-Ten, a couple wrap up questions. The first one is, what have you learned about the nature of entrepreneurship and the one or two skills that anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur must possess?

Rebecca Liao (00:54:21):

What I’ve learned about being an entrepreneur is that oftentimes people talk about experience in founders, oh, they’ve done it before, therefore they know how to do it, therefore, they’re a safe bed. So people talk about experience in that respect. They know what they’re doing. I actually don’t think that that’s the right framing for it. I think that a better way to look at it is that when you have this kind of experience, when you have, in my case, worked in politics for a long time, or when you’ve done other early stage startups, when you travel around the world and you see that there are problems and you understand why those problems are there. So you’ve learned a little something right about how the world works and how systems work. It’s almost your responsibility to do something about it because inevitably, if you do your job right, you keep your eyes open, you will notice that there are issues that need to be solved, and oftentimes technology is the best answer.

(00:55:21):

So I would look at experience, not if I were evaluating a founder, for instance, I would look at experience not so much as, oh, you’ve done this for 20 plus years, so you know what you’re doing, but you’ve done this for 20 plus years. What are the problems you’re motivated to solve? Why are you here starting something brand new in order to attack these problems? And that’s where the sense of innovation comes through, the sense of responsibility, of open mindedness, being able to think creatively outside the box. I would say that that’s what I’ve learned about my particular journey into entrepreneurship is when you have not spent your entire life in startups, when you have done other things in addition to startups, going into a startup role, being a founder, CEO, what is the mindset that you should have? It should be that, hey, you’ve observed a lot in the world and there’s a lot that is really messed up. So what can you do to fix that?

(00:56:18):

That’s probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned. In terms of qualities I look for, I mentioned some of them already. I would say this, I am not an investor. I am not a VC, but certainly in our capacity as a publishing house, we do choose games to back. And one of the most important things when you’re choosing a game is the team. So you spend a lot of time with the lead game developers, the creative directors, the head writers, just seeing, okay, do we think that these guys can take the game from college prototype or early alpha all the way to general availability? First thing I look for is guts, at the end of the day. You can have someone who’s super brilliant with really great ideas who doesn’t have the drive, and it’s not going to happen.

(00:57:02):

I would take someone who may not have the most sparkling brilliant idea, but who will not sleep in order to make something happen. I would take that person any day. So guts. Guts is super important. The will to survive, the instinct to survive, that is something that I look for because there’s so much that happens on the journey to a successful startup, and you have to be able to not only weather those storms, but be able to really thrive in that kind of environment. So guts is the first thing I look for. The second thing actually is open-mindedness. And one of the things that I don’t really favor, and not everyone shares this opinion, but I don’t love it when people are stubborn. I like it when founders have conviction. I like it when they have a very clear vision. I like when they have leadership skills and they’re able to assert themselves.

(00:57:59):

But if you’re not able to absorb feedback really at all, that’s a problem. That’s a problem. And so I do look for that open-mindedness because the likelihood is that you can remain consistent in your vision the way that Saga has. But we have definitely added things, edited things out along the way, sometimes multiple times in a day. So you have to have that agility. I tell every entrepreneur, when you start off, you got to be crazy enough to want to do this. Absolutely. What you end up with if you are successful is probably going to look very different from what you intended at the beginning. And that is how it should work. It’s not a, oh, that’s fine, that’s okay. It all worked out thing. No, no, no. That’s how it should work. So yeah, some thoughts there.

Nick (00:58:50):

So the next question, Rebecca I want to ask you is about insights into, it’s a broad question, so I’ll let you pick and choose what you think you want to talk most about, but this idea of strategy and scaling an idea. I’m sure they’re intertwined, but I’ve been impressed by the way you’ve talked about Saga and the things you’re working on, the discipline and the strategy behind it. But I also see what you did in prior ventures and scaling them. So what’s the unlock when it comes to growing an idea into something big when it comes to strategy and scaling that you’ve learned over your career?

Rebecca Liao (00:59:27):

I mean, there’s so million different things that you have to keep in mind when you actually begin the exercise of scaling. But if I can boil it down to one rule of thumb, it is stay lean for as long as you can. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve raised, it doesn’t matter what the state of the job market is, maybe talent is really plentiful. It’s easier to make hires. Doesn’t matter. Stay lean for as long as you can. Because the truth of the matter is it’s not the right time to scale until you feel like you have way too much work. And the mistake that I see some startups making is maybe it’s a frothy market and they’re able to raise a lot of money for a great idea in a very hot technology sector. Then all of a sudden the infrastructure starts to get built out.

(01:00:14):

Their marketing team has 10 people. Their BD team has seven people. Their legal team, fresh, brand new has five people. Their HR team has four people. Before you know it, your headcount is massive. You maybe don’t even have the processes in place to absorb all this headcount. Now, here’s the secret is if you stay lean, and so you have people who are probably pretty tired and work very hard on multiple functions, then what happens when you hit that inflection point and you found product market fit and you’re ready to scale is you have talent that is first and foremost multi talented. And so they’re able to take on multiple different skill sets. B, they have probably formed very close relationships with one another because it’s a smaller team and they spend a great deal of time with each other. Those relationships are going to be critical as you scale.

(01:01:05):

And inevitably there are going to be drops in communication, miscommunications, gaps in processes. It is going to be those relationships that smooth those things over. And see, you’re going to have people who truly are keepers of the flame. So they understand the heart and soul of this project because they have lived and breathed it for so long. And it is through that early core team that you will be able to scale in a successful way. Because if you add a bunch of people who don’t share the same values, who don’t work in the same way, then the original magic, if you will, that brought you to the point of product market fit, you’re just not going to be able to sustain it. And we’ve seen that many times as well. That’s my advice to people generally speaking, is to keep your team as lean as possible for as long as possible.

Nick (01:01:55):

And I saved this question last because I wanted listeners to get a sense of all the things you’re working on, all the things that you’ve done, and end with this question about the fact that you have co-founded and you chair the action project, which is a really important thing. And gets back to the roots of so many things you’ve said about community and about people. What can you tell us about your work at Action Project and why that’s important to you, given all the other things you’re working on?

Rebecca Liao (01:02:24):

Well, the Action Project, I would say that it was born in 2021 when we were still in the thick of COVID. And we noticed that there was just such an intolerable rise in anti-Asian hate. I had already built up a pretty large group of friends. It was really just a group of friends chatting, hanging out with each other down in L.A. in the Hollywood community. And we were talking about the importance of culture and entertainment in changing hearts and minds. And to the extent that we could combat anti-Asian hate using that means we wanted to. And so the Action Project was born, and it is a collective of, I mean, really anyone and everyone in the Asian community and our allies in Hollywood, the work that we’ve done over the last two years to really popularize Asian entertainment, to move more Asian talent into mainstream shows that are maybe not necessarily Asian-focused has been incredible.

(01:03:23):

We’ve made significant progress over the last couple of years. We’re also starting to bring in a lot of talent from Asia, so starting bringing in a lot of content as well as actors, actresses, singers, producers, et cetera. And it’s really changed the landscape in the US entertainment industry for sure. But I think that our work will never be quite done because what we’ve become is really a pipeline for talent. So a lot of people in the original Action Project were very established in the industry already. You count among them. My co-founders, Freida Mock, who was the first Asian-American to win an Academy Award for directing, and that was for her documentary, her feature documentary on Maya Lin.

(01:04:07):

You have Janet Yang, who is the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So president of the Oscars. You have Wenda Fong, who was a longtime producer at Fox and also originated American Idol and their entire reality portfolio. So you have very established talent, and we’re bringing in new talent now. You have people who are coming into town, it’s like that movie La La Land. They’re there with their suitcase, they have dreams and they want to make it in the entertainment industry, but it’s not easy. So to the extent that we can help them, we definitely try to. And it’s become a really thriving community. I’m quite proud of our work there.

Nick (01:04:44):

Amazing. And like I said earlier, I’ll put links in the show notes for anybody that wants to learn more and see how they can contribute and get involved. And so Rebecca, as I said and teased just moments ago, it’s now time for the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask. Each week I do it because sheds a little more light on you. But also, I hope listeners will learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. So Rebecca, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Rebecca Liao (01:04:44):

Let’s do it.

Nick (01:05:21):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Rebecca Liao (01:05:26):

I would say William Manchester’s Biography of Winston Churchill. It’s a three-parter, so it’s very long, but I keep going back to that. It’s heavily annotated and underlined. Its masterpiece.

Nick (01:05:39):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody’s going to watch?

Rebecca Liao (01:05:43):

You should watch Schindler’s List, for sure.

Nick (01:05:47):

If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Rebecca Liao (01:05:53):

Oh my God, that’s a tough one because I love music. You know what? Listen to all of the Beatles [inaudible 01:06:02]. All of it. I can’t pick a single album. They’re the masters.

Nick (01:06:08):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Rebecca Liao (01:06:13):

It was actually a teacher in the seventh grade. I remember this very vividly. By then, I was a pretty inveterate, and I remember arguing with this teacher because she gave me 97% on this essay when I felt I deserved 100%. She said to me, she was like, “Becca, you’re very driven. You’re very smart and ambitious, and that’s all great, but you have to remember that people really matter in the end.” And at the time, I was not mature enough to understand what she was trying to tell me. But definitely now I look back on that, it’s probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

Nick (01:06:43):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Rebecca Liao (01:06:47):

Well, Nick, you are making me think with this one. So it’s something that, it’s an insight that I have that I think other people may not necessarily share. I would not pretend that other people don’t know it at all. I think it’s probably something that people actually do need to be made aware of in their careers. And that is, as you rise to a position of leadership or power, authority or what have you, you affect people more than you know. If, for instance, you show up to a call and you’ve had a bad day. If you are in a bad mood during that call, the person just feels awful because they assume it’s them.

(01:07:25):

Probably nothing to do with them, but you just had a bad day. But because you’re now in that position, they feel awful about themselves and you don’t intend it. It’s just all a series of miscommunications. But I think it’s helpful for people to keep that in mind as they progress in their careers, that once you’re in a certain position, you matter to people a lot more than you think. And one, do not abuse that. But two, just be mindful of that, that you can really make or break someone’s day.

Nick (01:07:56):

And how about this one, Rebecca. What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Rebecca Liao (01:08:01):

This is something that a ballet teacher told me early on when I had a tendency to fall on my butt, smile and move. Smile and move. Just get on with it.

Nick (01:08:13):

And we talked a little bit about this earlier, but going to ask it again. Based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how or why people find success in life?

Rebecca Liao (01:08:25):

It’s a small thing, but it makes such a big difference. If someone has asked you just at the beginning of a conversation, how are you? First of all, answer. Secondly, bounce it back. Always bounce it back. It doesn’t matter if you’re just trying to be polite or if you’re taught, that’s the right thing to do. But I do think it’s important to ask because in the end, it’s not what you take, it’s what you give. And I think the leaders who are most admired and most effective are the ones who give people the feeling that they are more important in any conversation, in any setting, in any stage performance, et cetera. The other person matters more. I mean, so often I think when people think about power or when they think about progression in their careers, they think about amassing authority and influence for themselves. And the truth of the matter is that any sort of ability you might have, any sort of influence you might have is owing to the fact that other people put you there. And they are the ones who matter most at the end of the day.

Nick (01:09:35):

And then the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. I’m going to modify this first one a little bit from how I typically ask it, but I think it’s perfect for you. Complete the sentence. The thing that most excites me about the future of gaming is?

Rebecca Liao (01:09:47):

The thing that most excites me about the future of gaming is indie creator freedom.

Nick (01:09:54):

And how about this one? If you’re on Twitter or X, whatever people decide to call it, then you should be following?

Rebecca Liao (01:10:00):

If I were to pick someone from the crypto industry, I would pick Toly from Solana. Very sober, does not get into drama, and doesn’t speak on issues, not related to Solana unless he has to.

Nick (01:10:16):

And then Rebecca, the final question of the GRTiQ-10 is, I’m happiest when?

Rebecca Liao (01:10:22):

I am happiest when I’m on a call with a game dev and I can tell that he or she is unloading for the first time in a long time, if not ever, because someone, whether it’s me or someone else on the team who’s with me on this call, finally understands what they’re trying to achieve. And that is an incredible feeling that you’re able to give this opportunity to someone who so clearly is talented, passionate, has something to offer the world, and they had not yet found their partner. But when that happens, it’s nothing like it.

Nick (01:11:13):

Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on to the GRTiQ Podcast. What a thrill to meet you. You have an amazing pedigree and life story, but I really treasured and valued hearing your life perspective and sharing some insights from the experiences you’ve had and all the great things you’re working on at Saga. If listeners, and you already provided this earlier, but if listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow the things you are working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Rebecca Liao (01:11:38):

Well, Nick, thanks so much for having me. It’s been a really, really enjoyable conversation. You got me to open up about a lot of things that I have not revealed on any other podcast. To thank you so much for this opportunity. If you want to find me, Twitter is probably the best way. I’m just @beccaliao. That is also my Telegram handle, and my Telegrams are open. So feel free to reach out anytime.