"OAKLAND, Calif. — When Sandy Carter left her job as a vice
president of Amazon’s cloud computing unit this month, she announced in a
LinkedIn post that she was joining a crypto technology company. She included a
link for open positions at the start-up.
Within two days, she said, more than 350 people — many from
the biggest internet companies — had clicked the link to apply for jobs at the
firm, Unstoppable Domains. The start-up sells website addresses that sit on the
blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.
“It’s the perfect storm,” Ms. Carter said. “The momentum
we’re seeing in this space is just incredible.”
Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers
leaving cushy jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and other large tech companies —
some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation — to chase what
they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. That next big thing is crypto,
they said, a catchall designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin
and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that rely on the blockchain.
Silicon Valley is now awash with stories of people riding
seemingly ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on
a dog meme, to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has soared around 60 percent this
year, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has
increased more than fivefold in value.
But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of
the tech industry’s best and brightest sees a transformational moment that
comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift
before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how
the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the
status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires.
Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than
$28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times
the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private
investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone.
“There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto,” said
Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former
Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. “It feels a
bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It’s that
early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity.”
Crypto, which has also been rebranded as the less foreboding
web3, may be no different from past speculative bubbles like subprime mortgages
or the tulip craze of the 17th century, skeptics said. Much of the mania, they
said, is being driven by a desire to get rich quick by trading an asset class
that often seems based on internet jokes.
But the growing ranks of true believers say crypto can
change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not
controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed
since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to
the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech
companies into the crypto world.
This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of
Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up.
“I’ve seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something
this big is just emerging,” he said in an email. “We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs
and their impact.”
(John Zimmer, Lyft’s co-founder, said he wished Mr. Roberts
well on his new venture.)
Last month, Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter’s chief
executive to spend more time on cryptocurrency and web3 efforts at his other
company, Square. In a nod to the blockchain, Mr. Dorsey also renamed Square as
Block. He underscored the change by revamping the photo portraits of Block’s
executives as block-headed avatars, and built a software tool so others could
create their own block-headed avatar.
And David Marcus, the head of cryptocurrency efforts at
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that he was leaving by the end
of the year to follow his “entrepreneurial DNA.” Mr. Marcus, 48, plans to work
on his own cryptocurrency project, two people with knowledge of his plans said.
Mr. Marcus declined to comment, as did a Meta spokesman.
Crypto’s allure has been so irresistible that some of the
biggest tech companies are scrambling to retain employees. At Google, concerns
about keeping employees — including not losing them to crypto companies — grew
so pressing that the issue became part of the executive agenda discussed every
Monday by Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, and his top deputies,
two people with knowledge of the discussions said.
Google also started offering additional stock grants to
employees in parts of the company that seemed ripe for poaching, these people
said. Google declined to comment.
Unlike Meta, which has embraced crypto, Google has been
reluctant to jump into the movement. But Google employees saw crypto’s
opportunities firsthand when Surojit Chatterjee, a vice president, left the
company last year to become the chief product officer of Coinbase, one of the
largest cryptocurrency exchanges.
When Coinbase went public in April, Mr. Chatterjee’s stake
in the company soared to more than $600 million in value. He had worked there
for just 14 months.
Such vast amounts of crypto wealth have created a fear of
missing out, or FOMO, among many techies — especially those whose friends
bought Bitcoin several years ago and now are hugely wealthy.
“Back in 2017 or so, people were mostly in it for the
investment opportunity,” said Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief executive of
Mysten Labs, a start-up focused on building blockchain infrastructure projects.
“Now it’s people actually wanting to build stuff.”
A Guide to Cryptocurrency
________________________________________
Card 1 of 7
A glossary. Cryptocurrencies have gone from a curiosity to a
viable investment, making them almost impossible to ignore. If you are
struggling with the terminology, let us help:
Bitcoin. A Bitcoin is a digital token that can be sent
electronically from one user to another, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin is also
the name of the payment network on which this form of digital currency is
stored and moved.
Blockchain. A blockchain is a database maintained communally,
that reliably stores digital information. The original blockchain was the
database on which all Bitcoin transactions were stored, but non-currency-based
companies and governments are also trying to use blockchain technology to store
their data.
Cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin was first conceived in 2008,
thousands of other virtual currencies, known as cryptocurrencies, have been
developed. Among them are Ether, Dogecoin and Tether.
Coinbase. The first major cryptocurrency company to list its
shares on a U.S. stock exchange, Coinbase is a platform that allows people and
companies to buy and sell various digital currencies, including Bitcoin, for a
transaction fee.
Crypto finance. The development of cryptocurrencies spawned
a parallel universe of alternative financial services, known as Decentralized
Finance, or DeFi, allowing crypto businesses to move into traditional banking
territory, including lending and borrowing.
NFTs. A “nonfungible token,” or NFT, is an asset verified
using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records
transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. NFTs make
digital artworks unique, and therefore sellable.
Mr. Cheng, 50, left Facebook in September after six years
there, most recently working on Novi, its crypto effort. Of Mysten Labs’
roughly 20 employees, most of whom are scattered across San Francisco, London,
New York and elsewhere, roughly 80 percent come from tech companies like
Facebook, Google and Netflix.
Companies focused on blockchain technologies have
proliferated, including cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitpanda, Gemini and
CoinList; NFT and art collectible companies like OpenSea and Dapper Labs; and
infrastructure companies like Dfinity and Alchemy.
Some of the brain drain into crypto has also been spurred by
worries about the control and dominance of the biggest tech companies by their
own employees. Many had joined Google, Facebook and others to create something
new, only to encounter bureaucracy and the backlash of working at the
behemoths.
Those leaving behind a Big Tech salary do not have to wait
as long for a payoff at a crypto start-up as those at traditional tech
start-ups.
While employees generally accept a smaller salary at tech
start-ups in the hope that the company’s stock will hit it big one day, workers
at crypto start-ups are provided “liquidity,” or the ability to cash out their
shares, much earlier. Often, they can do so in the form of trading their
company’s cryptocurrencies, according to Dan McCarthy, a recruiter for the
investment firm Paradigm who has written on the potential upsides of crypto
start-ups for tech workers.
In some cases, crypto start-ups offer compensation packages
on a par with the biggest tech firms because of how easily employees can
convert their company’s “tokens” — or the underlying cryptocurrency backing the
start-up — into cash.
“It’s not necessarily the case that you have to go take
one-third of your Big Tech salary anymore, because a lot of these companies are
so well capitalized,” Mr. Cheng said.
Ms. Carter, the former Amazon vice president, said people
were interested in working at crypto firms for more than just money. Some were
drawn to the ethos of web3, which strives to decentralize power and decision
making. It’s an alternative to how Google and Facebook came to dominate the
internet by sucking up personal data from users to sell targeted ads.
Ms. Carter said there was a great deal of interest about
web3 at Amazon but was not recruiting there because she had agreed not to
solicit her former colleagues.
So would the exodus of tech employees to crypto continue?
“The answer is absolutely yes,” she said. “The time is just
perfect to jump in on it.”"
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