Ben O'Hanlon

I think about growth as a Celtic knot.

I solve growth, adoption and distribution problems, building and leading the marketing functions to tackle them. I get hands-on first and grow the team around what works, extending its capabilities beyond headcount through ecosystems, partnerships, community and AI.

I don’t see product, distribution, adoption, partnerships and community as separate jobs that happen in sequence. I look at how they affect one another, then decide where interventions will make the greatest difference to the whole.

At Input Output, I built the ecosystem function from the ground up, hiring and leading a team of 5–10 as the company evolved from research and engineering into a venture studio. I developed product marketing capabilities and brought together internal teams, agencies and contractors.

I took Cardano from testnet to #3 by market cap. I connected the engineers building the infrastructure with the developers building on it, scaling the smart-contract ecosystem from 0 to 2K+ projects. I built the world’s largest DAO measured by population and participation and handed over stewardship of a $1.3B treasury to the community. I later led the campaign that won $190M in continuity funding for further research and engineering.

More recently, I’ve been taking RealFi’s stablecoin and RWA infrastructure to market across Cardano, Solana and Ethereum. I turned an existing validator network into a measurable distribution and activation channel, designing and launching the SPO Accelerator in my first 60 days. Four weeks of testnet activity generated 3K+ verified wallets and 40K attributable onchain actions.

My operating model is numbers before strategy. Shared measures make success clear and give teams and partners an axis for coordination. They can develop their own strategies and make decisions while remaining accountable for their contribution to the whole. I put the operating cadence around this so people can execute with clarity and autonomy.

I draw on a network across the US, Europe and Asia, particularly Japan, to bring talent, partners and specialist capabilities into the work.

Visibilia ex invisibilibus.