Execs exiting cushy tech jobs for the call of cryptocurrency
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 startup.
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 startup sells website addresses that sit on the blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.
“It’s the perfect storm,” Carter said. “The momentum we’re seeing in this space is just incredible.”
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 catch-all designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which 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% 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 startups 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, CEO of search engine startup 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, was being driven by a desire to get rich quick by trading an asset class that often seemed based on internet jokes.
But the growing ranks of true believers said 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 only broke through to the mainstream this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies..
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 startup as those at traditional tech startups.
While employees generally accept a smaller salary at tech startups in the hope that the company’s stock will hit it big one day, workers at crypto startups 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 investment firm Paradigm who has written on the potential upsides of crypto startups for tech workers.
In some cases, crypto startups offer compensation packages on par with the biggest tech firms because of how easily employees can convert their company’s “tokens” — or the underlying cryptocurrency backing the startup — into cash.