Mr. Digital: “Has there ever been a moment during your time with Constellation that you’ll never forget, that you can still remember exactly how that moment feels, like when you reflect back on the last three years, was there any specific time where you were like, that one moment was a defining moment that I’ll never forget.”
Diggles “Yeah, yeah I mean I bring it up often to folks, you know, I talk about it all the time. This moment, it was July of 2019 when we I would say as a company, were at our lowest. Our community wasn’t really in a good spot, our token was at like a tenth of a penny, maybe even lower than that, I mean it was just, it was basically flatlined, and we were really kind of just struggling.
I was beat down because I came from red carpet, meaning when I was at oracle anybody was excited to talk to me, and they were open, but when I’m in an emerging blockchain company especially infrastructure that’s pre-revenue, folks are like, look I don’t really know what to do with this, and so my self-esteem was really at a tough spot. And I was sitting with Mathias, Wyatt, and Jorgensen in a room, and we were in tears, because we were just having to make a decision, like what are we gonna do? And candidly, we were weighing some pretty heavy odds, like hey, should we do this, like god should we do this, and we just bound together and just like did a group hug, and we said you know what, we’re gonna fucking go – let’s do this.
And we were already depleted man, and this is when things turned around. And when I was on a flight down there, this is a very intimate story that only four of us know is that, I’m on a flight down in this emergency meeting I’m like on a 24 hour flight, got to get down there to San Francisco to meet with the team, and I’m sitting on the plane just kind of contemplating. I’m feeling pretty low, and there’s this gal next to me, that’s doing calligraphy right, and I just couldn’t help because I think calligraphy is really beautiful. So, and she had written on this paper, “The colors of a constellation falling into place”, and so I lean over, I was like, hey is it okay if I take a picture of this? She’s like sure, and we printed it, we put it up on the board during this meeting, we’re like, we have to do this.
And so, it was incredible because I had been hustling the DoD at that point for a few months, and it was probably three weeks later that I was at RGA, I was sitting at this agency, I was the EIR for this blockchain program, this venture studio, and I got the award notice, and I just started crying I couldn’t help it. I just started, those are the two defining moments where I was like, okay – we’re gonna be okay, this is paying off man, but that was – July 2019 was a defining moment for us.”
Mr. Digital: “Right, so it’s clearly ended up better than what you were expecting during that time?”
Diggles : “Well, it couldn’t have gotten any worse. So, because we were just you know, the technology – Wyatt was doing a great job, but like from a business adoption perspective, and excitement, and community, and token price, all the indicators that let you know that the health is there, they were rather anaemic. They weren’t gone, but it was just like, damn this is tough, but we did it – we did it.”
Mr. Digital: “Yeah, absolutely.”
This is an excerpt from Mr. Digital’s excellent interview with Constellation CSO Benjamin Diggles. You can find the full interview here: https://youtu.be/NqRJ-uFijX0
