The Road to Web3: Mercedes-Benz's Web3 Journey with Max Orgeldinger

[upbeat music] Welcome to another episode of the Dematerialized podcast. I'm very happy to have Max Orgeldinger with me today.

He's the founder of 0xnext, the creative studio for Mercedes-Benz Web3 presence. He's also a managing director at TLG. Welcome, Max. Very happy to have you on the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Let's jump right in.

Today, we're gonna talk about Mercedes-Benz and, and about, uh, what they did with Web3 and blockchain, and what that could mean for other car manufacturers and car brands.

So I'm very much looking forward to that discussion. Before we talk about that though, I wanted to ask you, who are you and what brought you to Web3? Who is anyone really?

But I've spent the last 12 to 13 years helping large brands figure out how changing technology is affecting them.

So everything from changing communication, I've been working in social media for 12 years, to changing business models.

What did the platform economy, GAFA, all of that stuff, the big tech startups, what did they do to traditional corporates? And then also new and upcoming technologies like crypto, AI, XR, that kind of stuff.

And when it comes to crypto, we looked into that a lot in 2017 and 2018. Actually helped a couple of brands explore that space, and I got engaged a little bit.

I actually, back then, I got some NFTs and decided between CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, even gifted some to some friends. Unfortunately, I went with CryptoKitties because I liked the breeding mechanism back then.

And then to be honest, I forgot about the space because the ICO mania wasn't really my vibe, and it was too financialized for me.

But I kept following some people on Twitter, and then beginning of '21, I read about Hashmask, and I was intrigued, and I still had a couple of Eth lying around.

And then jumped straight into that bonding curve and dove deep into the Discord, and all of a sudden, I was hooked.

And, and then from there, I got into CryptoPunks, I got into art blocks, and, and ever since, I've invested an unreasonable amount of money and time into everything NFT, and then from there, of course, also a little bit of DeFi, DAOs and, and all the other fun stuff.

That's cool. So people who know the space and what you just told me would call you a classical degen, so- My wallet would tend to agree. [chuckles] Yeah. All right.

So you've been in this space for many years, and you followed all those projects, and then you got involved with 0xnext. Again, the creative studio for Mercedes-Benz Web3 presence.

How did that come about, and how did Mercedes-Benz reach out to you? What was the idea behind that?

As TLGG, we've been working with Mercedes for many years on different kinds of topics and, and always working alongside them and exploring new technologies.

And I think I initially actually reached out to a couple of contacts of mine and just shared this new interesting topic that I came across, and then there were quite a few different exploratory meetings figuring out, what is this?

This is interesting. Should we do something about that?

And Mercedes had actually been, uh, following, uh, the crypto space for a couple of years in, in different teams as well, and, and looking into it and, and figuring out whether that's something that they wanted to get into.

And then in, I think early summer of '21 is when I think a lot of attention came into the space with people and really the big run in NFTs, and all of a sudden, media was talking about it.

Everybody was becoming interested. And I think Mercedes-Benz took a very conscious approach in saying, "Okay, let, let's figure out what the right way to do this is first and talk to different partners."

And in the end, they decided to work with us in figuring out what a right approach might be for them, and we came up or worked on a larger strategy together to figure out what the right approach is for Mercedes-Benz and, and figured, uh, different things out.

And part of that was what is the right vehicle, the right entity to do that, and founded 0xnext at the dedicated entity, dedicated studio, and accompanying brand, Mercedes-Benz Next.

And yeah, that was pretty much how everything, uh, got started, and ever since, there's a large team of some full-time and many more people in different capacities working on the different activities, and it's been a quite a exciting ride, I would say.

The Web3 program of Mercedes-Benz is called Mercedes-Benz Next. For the ones listening and unfam-familiar with that, how does that work, and what is Mercedes-Benz Next?

Yeah, so the first question we asked ourselves is, of all of the sort of technical possibilities and use cases that are out there in the crypto space, what makes sense as a first step?

Because I think everybody that's excited about this technology can agree that long-term, there's so many different possibilities, but you gotta start somewhere.

And we explored, I think, pretty much every use case that you could think of, and we came to the conclusion that for that moment, and, and particularly in '21, collectibles, NFTs as collectibles, were the most sensible first step.

And I've written some of your newsletters. You're very excited about loyalty, for example. I'm also very excited about loyalty, but I think a bit like mid to long term.

And we said, I think collectibles to us were the most proven use case, one where we had quite a few different projects that had paved that way already and that we wanted to follow.

And I think Mercedes-Benz is one of the most interesting brands, IPs out there. It has a history going back to 1886. It, it is one of the most loved car brands.

There, there's so much heritage, and we really wanted to explore, and people collect Mercedes-Benz in the physical space in so many different versions, right?

So we wanted to figure out, is there a way to port that into the digital and into the crypto space? And that's what we are exploring.

We're saying we, we wanna create collectibles that stand the test of time, and that's how we set up Mercedes-Benz Next, and- We came up with different collections and have launched really four major ones so far and have a bunch of other things that we're considering and a couple of things that are coming up.

As you just said, Max, it means you create a different collections of collectibles that build on Mercedes-Benz heritage. What can users do with those collectibles? Why is that interesting for Mercedes-Benz fans?

I think that's an interesting question really for any collectible, and I think that's the, one of the biggest tensions in NFTs and, and collectibles. Like, do you really need to do anything with a collectible?

And I think if you go into the physical collectible space, I think the answer in, in most cases is no, you collect because you want to own, because you have an e- emotional connection to it.

And to me, that was one of the most exciting discoveries when I ventured into NFT, that I saw that there were some projects where people had irrational passion, if you like.

I think one of the projects that to me is still the benchmark for all collectible NFTs is, is CryptoPunks because they started as an experiment and because people hold them not really expecting anything.

They hold them because they have a passion for them. There's a couple of things that we did to connect with the community of our collectors. We hosted some events in, in Berlin with Bright Moments.

We got some collectors to an IAA event in Munich, for example.

We have some other ideas coming up, but I think in contrast to some other projects that are very utility-focused, w- we think that collectability and wanting to own something, a piece of a brand, a memorabilia of sort, is the most long-term sustainable a- approach.

And like my personal perspective, there have been very, very little utility plays that really continued sustainably.

O- of course, you had some NFTs that rose to extreme heights on the back of utility, but I don't think I've seen any that, that were able to sustain that over one, two, maybe even three years. I agree with that.

That's, I think, one of the, I would say, defining things at the moment of how the state of where we're at with Web3 and NFTs.

I think we haven't seen a lot of NFT projects by brands that really create and sustain engagement. So it's interesting to see how you approach that, that you're really focused on that collectability aspect.

You talked about certain things now that you did for activations. I would like to take a step back and look a little bit at your go-to-market strategy.

How did that play out amidst all that hype where you, uh, launched that project, you first had to figure out, what do we even do? You just said you decided to focus on really a narrow use case.

It's about collectability of certain brand pieces, memorabilites.

And how did you structure that go-to-market process, and what are the different things that you did to mobilize the community, and maybe even who was the target group for those collectibles?

So first of all, we studied everything that had come before us, both from Web3 native brands, uh, NFT native brands, and more traditional companies, and really tried to draw our conclusions from that.

And I think we're very motivated by the fact that all of the team members, we're NFT collectors ourselves, and we always thought about what w- we want from a traditional brands in terms of their NFT project.

And I think during the hype, a lot of projects in, in many different directions were launched that got a lot of hype, but then also created a lot of expectations that were very difficult to fulfill for anyone, and we always felt a lot of responsibility to not create the same kind of hype.

Because I think if you are an NFT-native project, there's a sort of playfulness, and I aped into enough funny-looking, funny-sounding tokens, and I always knew what I was doing, right?

Like, if you pay to ETH for some comic-looking project that started yesterday, you know what you're doing. This is not a conservative investment, right?

But I think when you're looking at more traditional brands, you have a different expectation.

And traditional brands also onboarding people that might not be familiar, so we always wanted to have a very non-FOMO approach in many different ways.

Our worst-case scenario was our token running up five ETH and then crashing down because there's real people investing real money, and especially with larger brands, some people, that might be their life savings.

So we took a very, very careful, slow, and deliberate approach. We didn't do any influencers. We didn't do the whole hyped, probably nothing. We're not telling anything. You have to find out yourself.

But rather, we started with a bunch of information and left very little up to the imagination because we wanted informed buyers.

We're very clear about the fact that this is a collectible, first and foremost, and we went in stages.

So the, the first project that we did, we targeted specifically towards NFT natives, people that are familiar with the space that we felt had seen a couple of cycles, that kind of knew what they were doing.

And to target them and also to pay sort of homage and respect what came before us, we started the first collection as a collaboration with a DAO, a collector's DAO, Fingerprints, and an artist, Han van der Dorpel.

And both of them, I think, really r- represent a long blockchain heritage and really know-how.

So I think what really attracted us to Fingerprints, for example, is that they're one of the largest holders of Autoglyphs, which is, they're also by Larva Labs.

They are a fairly simple, fairly technical NFT that people, again, they don't collect it for its utility, but because of a love of technology and innovation and what it stands for.

And Fingerprints has always been a very conceptual DAO. And then Harm, with projects like M- Mutengarten, Sida, is also a, a technical pioneer. He's been in digital arts for a long, long time.

That's also the signaling that we wanted to provide to the space.

We're not just here to come in as a brand and do our own thing, but rather we wanna reach out and do something that fits sort of into the ethos of the space.

And, and that started with a collaboration between the Mercedes design team and Harm, and we're very proud of what we did with Maschine, and we could talk about, uh, just that for 30 minutes, but I- I'll stop at that for a moment.

That's very interesting because you took a conscious decision to work with existing, like, crypto-native artists and targeting crypto and more crypto-native community.

Why did you decide to do that and not go for a more traditional Mercedes-Benz brand, affectionate brand fan?

A couple of reasons, and I think, first of all, we always had the ambition to eventually scale that to a larger, broader audience. I think it was mainly two reasons.

The first one, in the moment where we came up with all of this, there was a lot of hype and crazy, and we really felt that bringing in too much of a traditional audience that didn't understand what they were doing, there was a lot of danger.

Like, there was scams going around. There was people spending money they didn't have, and we didn't wanna be responsible for those kind of things.

So we thought it was a good idea to have a foundation of people that were already a little bit more familiar with the space.

And the other one is that I think the, the technology and the user experience simply wasn't there for the mainstream. On a lot of things, like Ethereum Mainnet L1 was really the dominant chain at that time.

MetaMask still had a bunch of kinks. Gas was very difficult to understand. You hardly had any credit card payment infrastructure, that sort of thing, and people get very confused about things like seed phrases.

And we are not that large of a team. We didn't feel like we had the resources to, at scale, with all of that attention, really educate a broader target group already.

That was always on the horizon for the, on the timeline, but we didn't feel ready for that.

And, and actually, the second collection that we launched is called Eternities, and that's one where we hand-onboard some of Mercedes-Benz most loyal and, and best customers. But we do that in person.

We do that at top customer events where some of the people that literally own dozens of cars, where they come together and, and they engage with the brand.

And because it's an exclusive environment, we really can onboard people one by one there. We can explain how things work. We have some dedicated technologies where we, we partner with Yuba.

We have little cards that you get. Then you have an onboarding process where you connect that via NFC with your iPhone, and you can set up an account. But that's something that doesn't scale yet.

And so that was the, the second, uh, collection, and that was a, a free claim for Mercedes-Benz top customers at selected events, and that's still ongoing. We're doing that sort of event by event.

And then the, the third one is Mercedes-Benz Next Icons, which is one that is targeted at, at a somewhat broader audience, and we're doing this in seven different eras. So we have a plan that's fairly long-term.

And era for era, we're also trying to reach out more towards a broader target group. For the next one, era two, that we'll be doing, there will be credit card payments, for example.

We're looking into things like no-wallet solutions. We're very carefully monitoring all of the L2 developments.

So as the user experience improves and as also as we seeing we have a good foundation, we're trying to engage a broader target groups and experiment with different go-to markets.

A shift that's going on in the industry at the moment, at least i- in my view, is that a lot of brands who entered the space two years ago, and I looked at this, it was about 50% of Interbrand's top 100 global brands started Web3 activations.

Many of them stopped doing that. The ones who are left are re-shifting their focus. They are now noticing we wanna solve actual business problems. We wanna create real value for users. We need to generate an ROI on that.

And given that context, with what kind of objectives, is it a specific business problems that you wanted to solve? Is it a value that you wanna create for users? Is it ROI?

What objectives did you start that project, and how did you measure success? I think we need to differentiate between the long-term vision and the more short-term KPIs.

So long-term, as I said, we see a lot of different crypto use cases.

So one of the goals is really establishing a foothold to be able to experiment and be close to this emerging technology and have a platform on which to experiment.

In the short-term, there are both brand objectives, and then there are, of course, also financial objectives because I think if you wanna do this right with everything from regulatory compliance to quality design to technology and marketing, it's not a cheap endeavor, right?

Yes, you were able to do a Fiverr project with a lone dev maybe in mid '21 fairly cheaply, but if you wanna do it right, it takes resources.

So we, of course, also have financial KPIs to make sure that we can keep this running sustainable and that we can continue to provide experiences, right?

That we can work on the technology, that c- we can provide real-life experiences, these sort of things.

But after all, I think the most important KPI for us, or the most important goal, what was that we did right by the brand. That's why I said we wanna do collectibles that stand the test of time.

It's a brand, again, roots go back to 1886. So much iconic cars, so much iconic marketing material.

So we really wanted to make sure that- Whatever happens, if someone looks back 10 years from now, 20 years o- of time, they don't cringe. They don't think, like, "What happened here? How could they do that?"

So that's even more important than any type of financial success, and that's why we took our time. That's why we didn't just launch something quickly. I think we could have done a lot more revenue if we launched quicker.

We, we started that discussion in '21. There were a lot of project that did millions with things that I think were launched fairly quickly. We took our time.

We very consciously didn't launch into that hype because as a brand safety, delivering something that lives up to the brand name really is the highest goal at the end.

Looking back at the process now since you launched that project, what are some of the biggest challenges that you came along, and how did you overcome that?

So I think the first challenge that we've ran into is, again, as a large brand, we wanna do things right.

We wanna do them by the book, and the regulatory landscape, especially s- speaking internationally, is quite complex.

So it took us a long time to figure out everything from gambling laws to taxation, to all of those things i- in different countries.

So to this day, unfortunately, we're not able to offer what we're doing in every single country because the regulatory landscape is different everywhere, and it, it always costs money to figure out what is the specific regulatory landscape, and that's something that we spend a, a lot of time and, and, and effort on, and it's, it's not trivial.

I, I can tell you that. The next one that was tough to learn for us is, and we knew this as collectors, but still it, it took us a little bit by surprise, how quickly the space moves, how quickly the metas move.

That's a challenge for a brand that thinks in decades, right? We wanna do something that has a long-term plan.

We said we wanna give collectors an outlook into our plans, what we wanna do, so they can make conscious decisions, but the tough part is what works in NFTs changes every week, and we have to find a balance between that.

We don't wanna be that project that keeps changing direction every week. We don't wanna go from one chain to another, and back and forth, and back and forth.

But we also wanna adapt to what's currently happening, and we are still working on finding that balance.

And I think part of that has also been that what is the right level of communication and marketing very much changed over time.

So the first couple of big brand projects that launched, I would say that they were under the microscope.

So people researched every little detail, and they would take a hint, then there was like a 14-tweet storm where people went into the details.

So we didn't do a lot of marketing in the beginning because we didn't wanna drive that hype machine even further, right? Because we saw some of them really taking off to what I think were unhealthy levels.

And so we provided a bunch of information, but we didn't really push it. By the time where we really launched a couple of our projects, we were in the middle of a bear, and people didn't research anything anymore.

They just glimpsed some information, and they didn't even read the details, and then you had people reporting without doing their homework, I would say.

And, and we got taken by surprise by that a little bit, so we need to learn that, yeah, you, you need to adapt your communication to the current, uh, face of the market in a way.

Very interesting, especially when you mentioned the changes- changing landscape of brands and how that evolves with- together with the space.

I wanna talk about this a little bit later as well, where you see the bigger picture of, of what's happening with NFTs, Web3, and how that connects to branding in general.

Before we jump into that, a last question specifically to the project is how did that work go together with Mercedes-Benz, and how did you win people inside of Mercedes-Benz who may not be familiar with that technology- Yeah...

who may not understand it? How did you go about that? How did you educate them? How did that process look like? First of all, that wasn't just me. It wasn't just us.

There's a lot of different people at Mercedes that have been looking into the potential of the technology for a long time, and there have been different discussions going on, and there's always been a lot of curiosity at Mercedes.

It's an engineering-driven culture, so people wanted to understand.

And when there was more mainstream attention and, and media coverage, people wanted to understand how things work, and we did a, a lot of different sessions and hand-on se- hands-on sessions where we showed how does MetaMask work, how does OpenSea work.

We explore things in a playful way, checked out how different communicatees behaved in Discord, on Twitter, and just had a bunch of exploration and discussion really.

And I think that helps to this day, and there's different parts of the organization that are in- involved in different capacities. All right.

So let's zoom out a bit and look where we're at with NFTs, Web3, and I wanna, like, work through a very specific scenario.

You're at a, a dinner party, sitting, sitting next to the CEO of a big automotive company, and you need to explain hi- him or her what is Web3 and why is it relevant for brands, and is it still relevant for brands.

What would you tell them? Well, of course, in reality, we're already in discussions with Mercedes-Benz.

I wouldn't be talking to any other automotive CEOs but, you know, theoretically speaking, I think Web3 is a very broad term, so there, there's some potential for confusion.

I think I would really focus on the crypto part, and I, I would explain the benefits of, uh, crypto technology, of on-chain technology.

I think decentralization, permissionless, distributed, all of, of those kind of things is really what I would focus on.

And to me, what resonated with a lot of the people that we talked with in the past is really we very much live in a digital era where we spend a majority of our lives online and, and digital devices, but we don't really have a good way of owning things that are digital, right?

Like in the end, it's all stuck on these platforms. If I buy a movie on Amazon, I don't really own it very differently to, like, a DVD in the past, for example. And, um, that is something that, that crypto fixes.

And I really think that this owning digital objects is one of the first things that are very interesting.

And then the next one is more general, getting out of the grasp of the big platforms, and that's also true for social media, which I think is why, and for the financial industry, which is why I think DeFi is interesting, but also decentralized social.

I think Warpcaster, for anyone, Farcaster and Warpcast and stuff like that is very exciting for anyone that is a little bit familiar with social media and its history, stuff like Twitter shutting down its API, for example, companies being very dependent on the large, uh, social media platforms.

I think those are also depending on how much time I have with the CEO, are also interesting examples to understand in general what the potential is. And then I think you gotta go into different use cases.

You can talk about traceability of parts, for example, or certificates for whether a physical object is real. I think if you're talking long-term, loyalty is obviously a very interesting direction.

It depends sort of where, uh, the discussion is going. And if, if you look now at what happened in the last two years, so we had a lot of hype beginning of 2021. There was the, the whole NFT craze.

As I said before, many, many consumer brands jumped on the hype, started their Web3 activations. Not a lot of them are left. Yeah.

And how do you see that progression, and how do you currently see the state of Web3 f- for consumer brands, and where do you see the potential?

I think generally speaking, there's a lot of truth to the Gartner hype cycle, although it's obviously a gross simplification. And I think very few areas, the ups and down is extreme as in crypto, right?

Like, when there's hype in crypto, there's real hype, and, and when there's FUD in crypto, there's real FUD.

And I think with new technology, you can never say with certainty how they will develop and, and how long it takes.

Personally, I couldn't be more excited about the potential, uh, of crypto, so I'm fairly confident that mid to long term it will play a massive role.

Will that take one year, will it take three years, will it take seven years? I think nobody can say with c-certainty.

I think for more traditional brands, it's about figuring out what role wanna play, wanna, do I want to play in this and, and how much patience do I have, and how do I look at the program for now?

I think what hasn't gone away is that there's a very exciting target group in that space of people that live very digital online lives, that are interested in technology, that are interested and curious about innovation, that at times are fairly wealthy, and that's a sort of tough target group to find as concentrated anyplace else.

And I think, like, engaging with them and, and building your brand in that direction, I, I think that continues to be very interesting and, and very exciting.

I think when it comes to a business model and use cases, we're all still experimenting and, and figuring it out, and I think that's true for traditional brands, but it's even true for the crypto native project.

Apart from some very, like, infrastructure DeFi projects, there aren't that many projects that have continuous stable revenues over two or three years, right?

Like even the, the most successful 21 projects, it's not they're launching a new project every three months. No, they had a couple of big sales, and now everybody's expecting more of them.

That's not a long-term business model, right? You can't have one cash event and then continue to provide value over years.

So I think the, the space still needs to develop and evolve, and the only way to do it is to be part of it and try new stuff every day.

If we look in a couple of years into the future and see that space evolve, where do you see the big- biggest hurdles of adoption? What's still missing?

What needs to be here to bring that technology to the mass consumer, create real value, but also solve real problems? What's still missing?

Well, I think the, the big one is, is obviously UX in, in all its form, whether it's security, it's speed, it's cost, all of those things.

But I think a lot of people often said, "Okay, we need to abstract the blockchain away from people so that they don't even know that they're interacting with the blockchain."

I'm not so sure about that because a lot of the things that just had the, the blockchain running as infrastructure without the people even knowing that they're using it, I'm not sure you're really experiencing the benefits of the blockchain then, right?

I think you always need to ask yourself, why is this on chain?

And stuff like Starbucks or Reddit, I'm not sure a lot of the users saw any of the benefit of the blockchain, and then you can just do it in a centralized Web2 infrastructure.

Personally, I'm quite excited about everything that's happening on L2s, in particular with Base and, and Coinbase, also the different wallet experiments, because they seem to be at the sweet spot between being blockchain native and calling things by their proper name, making sure people understand that they're using blockchain infrastructure, but also making the user experience easier.

I think, as I said, things like Farcaster are a great way where you're seeing some of the advantages, but you're still realizing I am using a blockchain, and I hope we're seeing more innovation in that direction.

And then we get to 100 million and then a billion different users in a sort of rich ecosystem of different applications.

Where would you see this going now in the next years when you look specifically at automotive brands and things like, uh, Fiat Pass or what Porsche did, where do you see the biggest potential or applications that may go beyond collectibles?

I'm never gonna comment on other people's projects, but I think, of course, the combination between physical and, and digital is interesting, whether that's attesting who owns something, but maybe even making physical objects tradable.

I think stuff like a lot of different cars, you're waiting a long time for them to be delivered.

Could you do something in the waiting phase, maybe even a car that you ordered, could that be, uh, tradable, the right to get that car once it's ordered, for example? I do think loyalty is interesting.

I, I think we could probably just talk 30 minutes about the potential and the challenges just of that, but that takes, I think, an entire ecosystem, and I think that starts with a blockchain native project first, and once that ecosystem is alive, then the more traditional brands can tap into that.

I think certifying stuff like is that a real part, a real engine, stuff like that is... has a lot of interesting potential.

And then I don't know if you really wanna call it collectibles, but also taking digital objects in a more immersive spatial environment, right?

Like, if you take things like the Apple Vision Pro digital worlds, obviously the whole metaverse isn't where it was supposed to be, but I think we'll get there in the future.

And, like, if I look at some of the, for example, interior designs that, that a Gordon Wagener is doing for Maybach, I wanna be in a virtual world that looks like that, but a brand like Maybach, that, that's exclusive, right?

Not everybody can have that. That's not like a Windows screensaver. Maybe there's potential, again, for, uh, NFTs, for blockchain technology. And then also things like who did...

stuff like poor app technology, what events did I go to, building experiences on top of that. I think there's a bunch of different direction you could take it. How do you see...

Now you just talked about metaverse and, and virtual immersive experiences, immersive commerce, as I call it. For me, that's one of the, the big emerging verticals in the Web3 consumer space.

There have been brands who experimented with that, uh, like Lamborghini, who- Yep... did a Roblox activation.

Other luxury brands like Gucci or even, like, fashion brands, Nike, who entered Roblox in a big way with, with virtual worlds and- Yeah... brand activations and all that.

How do you see that part of the Web3 space playing together with the more traditional blockchain-based things like NFT? I, I think there's a future where all of these things collide.

Right now it feels like especially gaming and crypto are very far apart from each other, and there's a lot of skepticism from the gaming community, and I understand historically where that's coming from.

Obviously there's some crypto games as well, but I think it's still a tiny fraction of world gaming. I think also a lot of the XR, whatever you wanna call it, experiences are, are also their own can of worms.

Like, the majority of Roblox has nothing to do with VR or any of those things. It's kids playing on fairly simple devices.

So I think for now it, it makes sense to look at all of these experiences, all of these developments on their own, but have plans for how they could come together in the future.

And I think experiment with all of these communities, with all of these technologies, take the different cultures into account and respect them, and then keep doing experiments where you, you're trying to combine them.

And I think no one can really say when the time has come where all of the different pieces fit together. I think you just gotta be active in them. You gotta experiment.

You gotta keep watching the different technologies and, and communities, and then you'll be there when it really takes off.

That's a, a good segue now into the lightning round, but before we start that, you just mentioned how you would approach that.

Are there any other tips that you have for brand leaders, marketers, CEOs thinking about Web3 and all those emerging technologies? How should they approach that space? What are some things you would recommend them to do?

Well, I think the, the first one is you have to have your own understanding. I think you have to be active on it. That means get a wallet, play around with it.

If you don't understand why people are active there and what exactly they're doing, I think you will have a very hard time being successful.

It's hard enough if you are part of the culture and, and know how everything works technically, but if you aren't, I think it's... You, you have almost zero chance.

And, and I think that also goes for the partners that you're working with. So I think, like, the, the best question that you should ask any partner is, "Show me your wallet." Like, what did you collect?

If, if you're not collecting anything, why should I buy anything from you? Like, if you don't believe in it, why should I believe in it? I think that's the start, and then I think it's about realistic expectations.

It's about finding your own role. Who am I as a brand? It matters whether you're a luxury brand or you're a consumer brand.

It matters what you're doing in the Web2 space and finding your own voice and not trying to copy and jump on the next hype, and also setting a, a realistic time horizon and expectations, uh, and, and committing to that.

Because if you're just gonna do one drop, and if that doesn't work, you're out, then don't do it at all.

I think anything is an experiment and, and you always have to see how that works, but I think you need a bit of time to really see whether things work out or not. That's very helpful, Marc, getting to the weeds.

Show me your wallet with partners. That's a very good one. Set realistic expectations, finding your own role as a brand.

I think that's especially important for luxury brand or, or brands like Mercedes-Benz who have such a rich heritage, that you stay true to your brand and trying to figure out where is your place within that technology without just jumping on hypes.

And just be patient. So that very, very helpful, and a good segue now to the last section. We're now 44 minutes in, and that will be a short lightning round with you.

Very short and quick questions with quick answers, and I would just start right off with the first one. Electric or hybrid for your next car purchase? Electric. Road trip or track day? Road trip for me.

Podcasts or playlists while driving? If I'm being honest, playlists. [laughs] Best way to beat the traffic: early departure or late night drive? It depends on the circumstances, but late night drive.

Favorite Web3 project in the automotive industry? I gotta say Mercedes-Benz NXT. If I'm not saying that, what am I even doing? Bitcoin or Ethereum? Ethereum for me, although I have respect for Bitcoin.

If you could race any car, which one would it be? I'm sitting in the car racing? Yes. It's gotta be Mercedes Formula 1 car. If I can pick any, that would be the most exciting, I think.

What's one book everyone in or outside of Web3 should read to understand Web3 better? Gotta be honest, I haven't read it yet, but everything Dixon does is amazing. So is it Read Write Own, I think, his latest one.

I'm sure that really covers a lot of, um, important- Exactly. That's Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. You're the fir- person that mentions that. It's a really good book, and I can recommend it as well.

Next question, first app you check in the morning. Right now it's Warpcast. That has become a big part of my habit. The biggest myth about Web3 and blockchain. Ooh, the biggest myth.

Uh, for me, it's the whole utility stuff. I think, like, there, there is utility, but it's 1% of the things that call themselves utility, and it's worth really digging into what is utility and what isn't.

And last question, the biggest potential for Web3 for consumer brands.

It's changing the relationship with fans i- in a, towards a more eye-to-eye level relationship, and I think w- we'll see some amazing new brands being built right now.

As I said, I love a lot of the things that are happening on Base and, and Farcast.

Hire is a great example that I find very interesting right now, where, you know, like, even when it comes to brand material, the, the consumers are also becoming the creators.

I think we gotta let the upcoming blockchain-native, uh, brands experiment first, but in the midterm future, I also see some of the more traditional brands embracing that and finding a whole new relationship with the people out there.

We're at the end of the show. It's been very, very interesting to talk to you, Max. Thanks a lot for joining. Uh, if you like this, uh, please like it, please share it with your friends. That helps us keep this going.

But before we close, Max, where can people find you, learn more about Mercedes-Benz NXT, learn more about what you do? So I, I think, uh, for Mercedes-Benz NXT, our

X/Twitter account is, is always the best start- Mm-hmm... and then you'll get to the website from there. Just, uh, look for Mercedes-Benz NXT, and you'll have all the information there. I'm...

You could find me on pretty much any channels, and so I'm, I'm fairly reachable. Just Google me or, or look me up on the different channels.

And as we learned, you're now also on Farcaster, so people can find you there as well. Exactly. All right. Then we're at the end of the show. Max, thanks again for your time and joining. This has been a pleasure.

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