Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology · Riding Unicorns Productions

Simone Maini, CEO @ Elliptic, on Leading Through Crypto Winters and Building Elliptic into a Blockchain Analytics Leader

·36 min·2 clips

Elliptic built for enterprise crypto adoption before the market was ready, then kept the strategy anyway.

1. Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology features Simone Maini, CEO of Elliptic, discussing leadership through crypto winters and blockchain analytics. 2. Simone Maini is CEO of Elliptic, while James Smith is one of the founders and Chris is the chair she hired after becoming CEO. 3. The episode asks how Elliptic built a crypto compliance business, changed leaders, and kept conviction through market cycles. 4. Simone says she studied history, spent eight years at Deutsche Bank, and then moved into consulting after wanting a client-facing role. 5. Consulting work put her on projects involving anti-money laundering and financial crime, where she saw that large-firm AML was "pretty inefficient." 6. James Smith called her to say Elliptic had become an anti-financial-crime product, and she joined because the market problem matched what she had learned. 7. Simone joined Elliptic as head of product and became COO about six months later, handling commercial and operational work. 8. She describes early operational tasks such as creating a paternity-leave policy, drafting contracts for new jurisdictions, and onboarding the first big enterprise customers. 9. More than five years ago, near the start of the pandemic, James and Simone talked through a leadership change because he was less close to product and customers as CEO. 10. James moved back toward product and customer work, while Simone took the CEO seat and also inherited more board and investor management. 11. Simone says the biggest surprise was not the job content but the change in how the team perceived her after the title switch. 12. She hired Chris as chair because he had been a CEO before and could help her with board and investor management. 13. Chris coached her on communicating when things were not going well, how much to share, and how to keep board meetings productive. 14. Simone says over-communicating bad news built trust because it mirrored how she wanted her own team to talk to her. 15. She says the board adopted a shared dashboard of leading-indicator metrics so employees, leadership, and investors could work from the same numbers. 16. Simone marked a recent ARR milestone and a major product launch as signs that Elliptic and the crypto industry may have turned a corner. 17. She says the company is shifting from a classic B2B SaaS model with platform and usage fees toward a data-as-a-service motion for large sophisticated customers. 18. Simone says Elliptic once began as a Bitcoin custodian, then pivoted to blockchain analytics because the ecosystem needed trust, transparency, and safety more than custody. 19. The conversation is practical and reflective, with detailed examples about governance, hiring, metrics, and market timing. 20. Listeners who work in fintech, crypto, or early-stage scaling will get the most from this episode; listeners seeking technical product detail alone may skip it.

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