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We are excited to announce that Scott Barker, partner and co-founder of GTMfund, has recently been inaugurated to the Kadena family as one of Kadena’s new strategic advisors. Scott brings with him a diverse background in sales, go-to-marketing and an extensive network of relationships that can support Kadena’s rapid hypergrowth and mass adoption plans.

Today, we’ll be engaging in an insightful Q&A with Scott regarding his past and present experiences, his thoughts and strategies on driving adoption to the Kadena ecosystem, and what assets and value he will be bringing to the table for Kadena.

After trying my hands at entrepreneurship, I’ve spent the majority of my professional life as a go-to-market operator in B2B SaaS. I started in Fintech, moved to the digital asset management space before jumping into a media company, a start-up called Sales Hacker. In all my roles I’ve been tasked with generating the GTM (go-to-market) strategy and executing that strategy to increase revenue, pipeline and partnerships.

At Sales Hacker, we built the largest community for B2B revenue professionals in the world. We built a community of 165,000 B2B sales and marketing professionals that would come to us for advice on how to generate more revenue using modern best practices and new technology. We were able to host large-scale conferences in SF, London and New York before doubling down on our digital network of blogs, webinars, podcasts and community platforms. We partnered with some of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the planet like Salesforce, Adobe and Hubspot before ultimately getting acquired in 2018 by Outreach, the leader in the Sales Execution category.

I spent the last four years helping Outreach scale its brand and revenue. In that time period, went from ~250 employees to ~1500 globally and became the undisputed leader in the space. Along the way, I was able to build a network of CROs, CMOs, and VPs of Sales/Marketing/Success at some of the largest technology companies on the planet and join the advisory boards for a handful of incredible companies like Postal.io, Pavilion, Esellas, Replayz, Ultrarev and now…Kadena Eco.

In January of 2021, I leveraged that network to co-found a venture capital fund along with my partner, Max Altschuler, called GTMfund. GTMfund is made up of 250 tech executives who have been there, done that from zero to IPO. We invest in early-stage technology companies and use our combined GTM knowledge to help them scale.

I started to be aware of (what is now known as) Web3 back in 2017. I began buying various tokens which led me deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole each year. The tokens were an interesting way to create wealth but it was the underlying blockchain technology that really started to excite me — this was the future.

Ultimately my philosophy and goal are pretty simple:

It’s a simple ambition but to me, that’s how the flywheel of change moves forward.

Community and creativity have been the tools that have allowed me to create change.

Kadena was put on my radar through Joel Woodman, a friend of mine who now sits on their Business Development team. Having learned about some of the scale challenges with existing blockchain projects, it immediately piqued my interest. It was one of those rare Web3 projects that actually got more exciting the more layers you peeled back. Their focus on scalability and enterprise-grade infrastructure paired with their own smart contract language seemed like the only way to get mass adoption. Plus the founders built JP Morgan’s first blockchain and led the SEC’s Crypto Committee.

It was time to pay attention.

That ultimately led to a conversation with Francesco Melpignano, CEO of Kadena Eco which sealed the deal for me wanting to get involved in Kadena Eco. It’s rare to find both world-class technology and a world-class team backing it all up.

One of the things that energize me most about joining as an Advisor is being able to act as a bridge between two worlds that are still operating fairly separately: Web2 and Web3.

There seems to be this interesting view from many companies building in Web3 that they have to do everything differently. They want to start from scratch particularly when it comes to go-to-market strategy. But from my vantage point, many of the scale lessons that traditional software companies have learned the hard way over the last decade are still very relevant. And over time, much of the talent, builders and operators needed to change the world will come from Saas companies.

My goal is to help bridge those worlds and bring some of the brightest, proven minds into the Kadena ecosystem.

Here is what Kadenians can expect from my involvement:

As stated before, my goal is to spend my life solving interesting problems with interesting people and helping as many people along the way as I can.

Kadena is looking to solve one of the most interesting challenges of our time and the team they have recruited is the most interesting in the Web3 space. Kadena Eco will give builders the tools to turn ideas and ambitions into reality which will help an incredible amount of people.

I am proud to be a Kadenian.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and say hello.

Let’s go change the world and build some cool sh*t together.

Kadena Eco is an innovation network fueling mainstream adoption of Web3, DeFi and NFTs. We unite technical founders and entrepreneurs with the world’s top blockchain leaders, venture capitalists and acceleration partners to support startups at every phase of their development journey. By leveraging Kadena’s builder-centric blockchain that delivers Web3 innovation with Web2 usability, Kadena Eco aims to speed the development and adoption of meaningful applications that benefit everyday people, worldwide.