Interview with Luciana Reznik, CEO at Cedalio

Summary: Luciana Reznik was one of our first guests to the Ikigai Curious podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation, and learned a lot about her approach to product and company building. Writing is still the best way for me to really dig deep into anything new that I am doing or learning, so I decided to write down the key take aways from our conversation. I hope you find it valuable as well!

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Luciana is a successful serial entrepreneur and a Forbes 30 under 30 leader. She sold her first company - Wolox, a cloud native and agile development company that builds digital solutions for their clients - to Accenture in January of 2021, and is now hard at work on her new adventure: Cedalio, a decentralized storage solution for structured data at scale.

Although my conversation with her went well past the intended 30 minutes, I still had many more questions that I would have loved to ask her. Below are some of the conversation highlights:

Wolox and Cedalio share the same essence: Innovation, product creation and company building. All to achieve value creation. 

I went in thinking that Luciana and her co-founders (Nico and Guido) had made a big change, going from leading a services and consulting firm, to building a blockchain-based developer tool. But Luciana helped me realize that it is not that different. For her, the essence of Wolox and Cedalio - and probably, of many companies - is the same: innovation, product creation, and company building. All of this as the basis to create value, for their customers, and for their own company. This is best achieved by falling in love with the problem, and looking to solve it in the best way possible, without locking themselves down to a particular technology.

Although Cedalio is just 7 months old, they are already practicing what they preach and evolving their solution. They initially thought that storing the data directly in the blockchain was the best option for decentralized storage, but their thinking quickly began to evolve as they realized that they were not the best solution to store private data (even if the data is encrypted, encryption can be broken, and is at higher risk as quantum computing continues to evolve). They started to “play around” and incorporate into Cedalio other decentralized structures that leverage many blockchain features, without actually being blockchains, such as IPFS, Filecoin, Ceramic… They are evolving the solution to fit the problem and create true value. 

Tokenization of real-world assets

This is a big trend that is likely to affect every area of life, from tokenization of physical assets, to financial assets, and beyond. Luciana explained that having companies comfortable with tokenizing physical assets and production processes, is the best way for them to start learning about the technology and its capabilities. A necessary step in the path to tokenizing payments and finance in general, which feels riskier and has much greater compliance implications. 

The first big use case that they are approaching is tokenization of assets and processes in supply chain, with a distillery as their first co-design partner, but they are already considering other big use cases such as DAO tooling and decentralized IDs. 

How to build a company that goes fast and far

Luciana, Guido and Nico have worked together for over 15 years, first at University, then at Wolox, and now at Cedalio. They clearly enjoy working together, and they trust each other, but how did they get through the normal ups-and-down of startup life (or just plain life)? The times when you are not at your best, or when major disagreements arise? She had two key recommendations:

• Aligned values. This is the most important thing. She trusts and respects her co-founders. Even if they disagree, even if they fail, she does not judge them, she knows they are coming from a good place. They are working hard trying to make the right decisions for the customers and the company, and they are executing to the highest standards. In spite of all of this, sometimes things go wrong, and this is ok. She knows they are all rowing as hard as they can and in the same direction. 
• Clear Direct Responsible Individuals. For Cedalio they have created 12 areas of responsibility, with each co-founder owning a subset of those. Yes, they discus, and debate, and provide feedback to each other, but at the end of the day, the co-founder responsible for a certain area, has the final say with regards to what will be done there. This helps for everyone to feel equally responsible for the overall success of the company. I am a big believer in this type of system, and it was very refreshing to see how cleanly they had implemented it.

A long-term strategy with three clear phases

Luciana and her co-founders know, from experience, that companies take a long time to build, and developer tools that follow a SaaS model are no exceptions. They are in it for the long-run, and they have a growth plan for the next 10 years. Well, in reality, they do not know if it will take them 10, or 5 or 15 years, but it is always good to put a stake in the ground. 

The three stages they envision for their company are:

1. Finding initial product-market fit with design-partners (likely 1 to 2 years): They are currently working with a handful of companies to jointly create the best possible product to fit their needs. In fact, they are making sure that they work with a different partner for each of the key use cases they want to solve. These companies know that the product they are using is not fully refined, but in exchange, they help drive its development, they have the best possible customer experience (white-glove treatment, provided directly by the co-founders), and very special pricing. This is a “traditional” B2B strategy. 
2. Achieving full product-market fit with a wider audience (maybe another 2 years): The plan is that once Cedalio has four to ten design partners heavily using its solutions, the product is probably mature enough to go to a wider audience. The plan is to do this by using channel partners, such as blockchains supported by Cedalio (currently all EVM compatible chains), complementary developer tools, other complementary products… Success in this stage, means confirming a good product-market fit. It starts to become an interesting mix between a B2B and a B2D growth strategy, as some of the channels will reach developers directly. 
3. Full-scale growth, finally focusing on developers (B2D starting maybe in year 4 or 5, after the product is fully mature, and ready to “wow” developers): Developers are tough customers. They normally are in a rapidly changing environment, needing to wear many different hats, and with constant changing priorities. They like to tinker and experiment, but at the end of the day, they need battle-tested and flawless tools. At this point, Cedalio will be exactly that, and in a perfect position to succeed in a bottom-up approach. Developers delighted with the product, using it outside and inside of work, and finally “demanding” that their company adopts it. 

I find this approach very interesting, and although other companies have been successful following a more straightforward top-down or bottom-up approach (she gives the examples of GitLab and GitHub), I think that this hybrid method is likely to yield the best results. 

Thank you again Luciana for your time, and best of luck to Cedalio!

Read this post in my personal blog: https://trishburgess.com/f/luciana-reznik-ceo-at-cedalio