Digital infrastructure becomes most visible when it moves from experimentation to enterprise use. In crypto, that transition is forcing product teams to solve a very different class of problem: not how to build novel technology, but how to make it usable inside regulated organizations with existing controls, workflows, and risk requirements.
That shift also changes what product leadership looks like. It is no longer enough to understand blockchain at the protocol level. The harder work is translating complex infrastructure into systems that compliance teams, IT leaders, and enterprise decision-makers can actually adopt.
Miles Wong has spent much of his career operating at that intersection of scale, product, and commercialization. His background spans agency, internet platform, venture building, and blockchain infrastructure — from managing large-scale digital products and nine-figure budgets at Baidu Music to building cross-border ventures and now working on institutional MPC custody infrastructure at TecStation. Alongside that, he is also an active angel investor backing early-stage companies in AI, robotics, aerospace, fintech, and digital infrastructure.
In this conversation, Wong reflects on what institutional crypto adoption looks like from the product side, why most companies misunderstand international expansion, and how AI has changed the operating model of a solo investor and builder.
1. You’ve gone from Ogilvy to Baidu to blockchain infrastructure. That is not an obvious trajectory. What is the thread that connects those roles?
Miles Wong:
The thread is always the same question: how do you build a platform that actually works for the people using it, in the market they’re in?
At Ogilvy I learned how brands talk to consumers. At Baidu I learned what happens when you’re operating at hundreds of millions of users and your product decisions have real financial weight — I was managing budgets north of RMB 100 million and leading a full product migration across Baidu Ting and Baidu MP3 into a unified music ecosystem.
When I moved into blockchain, the question didn’t change. It just got harder, because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet.
2. You’re now CPO at TecStation, working on MPC custody and wallet-as-a-service. For people outside the institutional crypto world, why does that product category matter?
Miles Wong:
Here’s the simplest way to think about it. Banks and asset managers want exposure to digital assets. But they can’t hold crypto the way you or I hold it on a phone wallet. They need custody infrastructure that meets compliance standards, supports threshold signatures so no single person can move funds unilaterally, and integrates with their existing security architecture. That’s what Multi-Party Computation custody does.
What we’ve done at TecStation is take that technology and make it deployable — not as a multi-year integration project, but as something an enterprise can onboard in weeks rather than months. That’s the product challenge: translating bleeding-edge cryptography into something a compliance officer and an IT director can actually sign off on.
3. You’ve said enterprise Web3 deployment used to take months. What did you specifically change to compress that timeline?
Miles Wong:
Three things.
First, we standardized the onboarding pathway. Instead of every client getting a custom integration, we built repeatable implementation patterns.
Second, we designed the API-driven security architecture to map onto how enterprises already think about access control — roles, thresholds, approval workflows. We’re not asking them to learn a new paradigm.
Third, we built cross-team collaboration directly into the product process. I worked across product, security, and commercial teams to make sure the platform wasn’t just technically sound but actually sellable and supportable.
4. You also founded CODA WEB3 in London, an NFT infrastructure platform launched in 2023. What happened there?
Miles Wong:
Timing was brutal, no question. But the thesis wasn’t about collectible JPEGs. It was about digital asset creation, distribution, and lifecycle management infrastructure — the plumbing layer that creators and brands need regardless of market sentiment.
I led the product architecture and personally oversaw more than 60% of the core platform build: smart contract structure, minting logic, wallet connectivity, metadata handling, on-chain verification.
We navigated the 2023 market contraction by prioritizing capital preservation and implementing a structured wind-down of operations after completing the core development milestones. We maintained full UK corporate governance and statutory compliance throughout. It wasn’t a failure narrative — it was a deliberate decision to build, ship, and then manage the business responsibly when the market couldn’t support the growth phase.
5. You ran a cross-border venture platform out of Shenzhen for eight years. What did that teach you about international expansion that most companies still get wrong?
Miles Wong:
That localization is an operating model problem, not a translation problem.
I built and led a 30-plus member international team across Greater China and Southeast Asia. We delivered more than 300,000 active users for partner platforms and activated 200-plus KOL and media partnerships across multiple markets.
The biggest mistake I see companies make is thinking they can go global by sending bilingual staff from headquarters. It doesn’t work. You need local operators with decision-making authority. KOL strategies in South Korea look nothing like KOL strategies in the Middle East. Community-building in Southeast Asia has a completely different rhythm than in China.
You have to redesign your approach market by market — and that requires giving local teams real autonomy, not just a translated pitch deck.
6. You’re now investing through AngelList across AI, robotics, aerospace, fintech, and digital infrastructure. What is your investment thesis, and how does it change across sectors?
Miles Wong:
I invest in Seed and Series A companies where the founding team has a genuine technical moat, a realistic route to commercialization, and where I can add value beyond the cheque. My portfolio spans AI infrastructure, robotics, aerospace, fintech, and digital infrastructure. That sounds wide, but the common thread is deep tech with a clear product wedge.
I co-invest alongside established Silicon Valley syndicates through AngelList. But I’m not a passive LP. I source opportunities, screen founders, build my own conviction, and then actively support portfolio companies on product positioning, go-to-market, and narrative framing. That last part is where my operating background adds the most value — I can help a founder articulate what they’ve built in a way that resonates with their next investor or their first enterprise customer.
How my evaluation changes depends on the category. For AI infrastructure, I’m looking at whether the product wedge is defensible or whether it’s a thin wrapper that a foundation model provider will absorb in six months. For robotics, the questions are about capital intensity and timeline — can this team get to commercial deployment before they run out of runway? For aerospace and deep tech, it’s about defensibility and whether the team has the credibility and patience to execute on a longer timeline. For fintech, it’s about regulatory path and distribution.
But across all of them, the founder quality filter is the same. Can they explain the problem clearly? Do they understand their customer? Are they honest about what they don’t know?
7. You’ve talked publicly about using AI tools as a co-founder in your own operations. What does that mean in practice?
Miles Wong:
I operate across investing, product work, and content at a cadence that would normally require a team of five or six people. AI lets me do that without compromising quality.
Specifically: I use LLM-based tools for research synthesis, first-draft writing, and structured analysis. I use AI coding assistants to build internal tools and workflows. And I’ve systematized a lot of my repeatable work — KOL discovery, investment memo preparation, SEO architecture — into pipelines where AI handles the heavy lifting and I apply judgement at the decision points.
The key insight is that AI doesn’t replace your judgement. It replaces the hours of prep work that used to sit between a question and a decision. If you set up the workflows correctly, you can operate at a much larger scale while actually making better decisions, because you’re spending your time on the thinking, not the formatting.
8. What do you think the institutional Web3 world is still getting wrong?
Miles Wong:
Everyone talks about institutional adoption as if it’s one thing. It’s not.
The buy side, the sell side, custody providers, compliance teams, regulators — they’re all moving at different speeds and have different blockers. The product builders who will win are the ones who understand that this is an integration problem, not a technology problem.
The crypto is the easy part. Getting it to work inside a regulated entity’s existing infrastructure, with their existing controls and their existing reporting requirements — that’s the hard part. And that’s where I spend my time.
What This Conversation Shows About Enterprise Crypto Adoption
Miles Wong’s perspective suggests that institutional crypto is less a story about speculation or even blockchain innovation than about product translation. The technical capability may already exist, but adoption depends on whether that capability can be shaped into something that fits enterprise controls, compliance processes, and operational reality.
The conversation also points to a broader pattern across product, investing, and international expansion. Whether the challenge is MPC custody, multi-market growth, or solo-scale execution with AI, the underlying question remains the same: can a team turn technical complexity into a system that works in the real environment where decisions get made?
Miles Wong works across product leadership and early-stage investing. He is Chief Product Officer at TecStation and an active angel investor backing companies across AI, robotics, aerospace, fintech, and digital infrastructure.
