Last night I had the privilege of talking about crypto careers and working in web3 with 80 grad students from Columbia University's School of Professional Studies Technology Management program.
This ended up being a great opportunity to share for the first time what I've learned in navigating an entrepreneurial, fractional work mode in a nascent industry. I had a lot of fun with the presentation itself and wanted to share it. You can read the whole presentation here.
My goal was to share a bit about some of the cultural anthropology that I've picked up through my various web3 work over the past 3 years. I also wanted to demonstrate the way that jobs lead to other jobs in a way that isn't always clear at the time, but ends up becoming a pretty fun path (if you can stomach the high risk, ever-changing nature of work).
I believe there are a few versatile and transferable things that helped me traverse the terrain from being a non crypto-native tech worker (aka: "boomer") to being able to secure fractional leadership roles in a wide variety of industry leaders (aka: "super OG").
These included:
Finding a trusted source to guide my initial exploration into an emergent industry. (aka: a "sherpa"). I am endlessly thankful to @sinahab for all of his early guidance around understanding the landscape of Ethereum builders, and for giving me a chance to connect deeply with founders and many operational experts from an early stage. Whether you're pivoting into a new industry or just carving out a new niche for yourself in your current one, I highly recommend finding someone to shine a flashlight for you in the direction you're trying to go.
Securing a "landscaping" role that gave me visibility into the broader ecosystem. Working in VC for five years taught me a lot about the value in being able to recognize patterns. It also taught me enough about crypto to know that market timing is everything and even just a couple of missteps could lead down getting scammed or worse. Working with the team at Variant for 10 months on overseeing the initial buildout phase of the Variant Network for their founders was the best way to help me index on what a "best in class" builder looked like in web3, and give me ample ground to identify a project where I wanted to dive in. I will continue to seek out early jobs in new industries that give me a similar "portfolio effect" of the landscape. This will not only teach you where the "edges" of that industry are -- but the degrees of variance that might exist for you to time your own skills to fit those needs.
Getting my first operational leadership role as an exec in web3. Anyone who's worked in crypto knows that while novel ideas are where things begin, execution and building is where the rubber meets the road. I had been looking for an anchor project to really help me tie together a lot of my macro-level lessons and feel so fortunate to have found my way to the Uniswap Foundation for the better part of a year. One of the best parts about working in a new industry is being given the opportunity to write playbooks as you are pushing product out the door, and our teamwork in shaping the next phase of the strategic grants process was the most fun I'd had at work in years. This job to me was an important and critical demonstration and application of all that I'd learned up until then -- it always feels good to be able to apply what you learned.
In my case, neither of these steps -- the exploration phase, the landscaping phase, or the operational phase -- would have been possible without the work that preceded it. I've realized that this is part of how I need to learn as an adult, no longer in a structured classroom environment. This is a pattern I will repeat in any new industry or domain where I take on work (as I am beginning to do right now, with my first project in AI).
Whether you're "crypto-curious" or just want to check me on the vibes slides of the rest of my presentation, I'd love feedback on some of the other tips and advice I included in this deck.
