One night in Crypto as many would call it was what I experienced last night. I’m on an island — it may or may not be one of the US territories — it may or may not be one of the only tax havens in the world where you don’t have to give up your U.S. passport to pay 0% capital gains tax — more important to me, it's one of the best networking hubs I've ever been to.
So after a night of connecting with various individuals working in crypto, I gathered some take-aways below that I think traditional finance should adapt or at least acknowledge.
- Hiring talent: Why limit yourself to the 25 mile radius of a large city anymore? If you’re building a world-class organization, let’s recruit from the world. Remote-first — not because our people don’t want to come into the office but mainly because we don’t want to limit ourselves when looking for individuals within a specific local or region. There are smart, hungry, intellectually-curious people all over the world. If we need to pay top $ for talent anyway — might as well have access to a larger pool, no?
- Promotions: None of the time-stamped promotions anymore — if you’re an analyst, you work above and beyond amongst your bunch and you’re the best analyst that your group has ever seen, you still only get promoted according to a timeline within 2-3 years? Not here. We’ve done away with that — let’s focus on whoever wants it the most and whoever shows that they are talented — those individuals will get promoted and move up within the org, no matter if they’ve been there for 5 years or 5 weeks.?(Titles matter less in Crypto and the idea is top-performers will do extremely well).
- Culture: If we are a remote-first org, not only can we recruit talent from anywhere in the world but we owe it to them to have office space to go into — NYC offices, SF offices, Miami (wherever people want to be) and then let’s do an offsite when we can — off-sites for 8-10 days where we can go out/get to know each other. If we need to have a longer time period for upper management to get to know each other — totally fine, we’ll have them do a week to themselves as well.
- Respect: Respect starts from the bottom — as in if you don't respect the most junior folks within your organization, you're not respecting the future of your organization. Sure right now upper management may look a certain way but the reality is if an organization is forward-thinking, they have to think of a succession plan for their org. to outlive them. If you don't respect juniors and engage and interact with their thoughts and how they want to do business, you're living in the moment and ignoring the future (of your business).
What's most interesting is that individuals in crypto show the excitement that I recall during my time living in San Francisco meeting engineers/sales folks out and about. If you hear the excitement amongst some of these people as they speak about their projects... much more than when I hear my banking friends talk about their 'Projects.'
Thanks for sharing this exciting perspective, Rohit. As more professionals pivot from traditional finance to crypto, what advice would you have about adaptability and professional development? It is interesting to see the vast difference between these two sectors as we prepare for a new future in finance.