WHAT ARE YOU KNOWN FOR?

INTRO

If you got fired from your job today, what would you be known for? ??

What are you better at than anyone else in the market? In what segment of the workforce is your value the highest?

I’ve talked to so many friends who are “senior” in their careers over the past year that have been laid off, and are feeling completely lost and disoriented. ??

First and foremost, let me remind you that before starting Up Top , I was literally fired from every recruiting job I’ve ever had. So, I can definitely empathize with that situation, and have felt the pain very deeply. ????

My friends know that I am here for them, I’m happy to offer insights that may be helpful, and use my resources to look out in any way I can.

That being said - I have noticed a few common trends in their thought processes that I think need to be addressed and adjusted.

MINDSET ADJUSTMENT

My first question to someone in this situation is always, “how are you thinking about your criteria for your next role?” ?

All too often, I hear responses such as, “I’m looking for a company I can grow with and make my home for the rest of my career,” or “I’m looking for a leader who can help take me to the next level and understands what to do with me.”

The issue I have with this mindset, is that you are essentially putting the onus and responsibility on the leader or the company to basically take care of you like family, and create opportunities for success for you. ???? ♂?

I don’t want to come off as insensitive, and need to acknowledge the fact that this is what we have been programmed to believe throughout our careers by corporate management tactics. So I get it. But realistically, this is NOT a recipe for success.

The reality is that the workforce is no longer designed for people to have long-term careers of 10+ years within one organization. On top of that, it’s an extremely high risk move for your personal growth trajectory to have such a narrow scope of experience at one company for that long.

If we accept this to be true, then we should constantly be indexing towards ways to expand and develop our individual skill-sets and knowledge-bases. ??

Again - no middle-manager is going to do this for you. PLEASE be proactive about this, and don’t wait til you’re “impacted” by layoffs to start thinking about how your offering will be valued in the job market.

FINDING YOUR NICHE

So, what’s the most productive way to approach this situation?

The single most impactful lesson I’ve learned over the last two years, is the value of dominating a small niche.?????

At the risk of exposing my narcissism, I’ll use myself as an example. ??

You may know that prior to getting into crypto, I was running a niche quant recruitment business, placing quants in high-frequency trading shops.

For context, I had been doing tech recruiting for investment banks before that, which I THOUGHT was a niche in itself. Somehow, it took me years to realize that if there are hundreds of thousands of people doing the exact same thing as me, that does not qualify as a niche at all.

The first thing I learned about “quant” was that it was freakin hard, and no one at my company understood it, or could be helpful to me in any way as I was trying to figure it out. Thankfully, I had the foresight to see the value of learning the ways of the quants. ???

Takeaway point - it will require some work to build your expertise in whatever area you decide to focus on.

Fast forward through all the drama at my last shop, and me telling upper management to fuck off (par for the course), which led to my graceful exit from the company.

When I ultimately hit the streets as a free agent, the biggest asset I took with me was my reputation in the market as an expert on recruiting quants.????? ♂?

You may not fully understand what a quant does, but the important part to note is that the good ones will bring a ton of value to the organizations they are working for, and have a heavy impact on the business. Therefore, someone like me, who is skilled at helping companies hire them, will be in demand as well.

My point here, so far, is that I used the time I had at my last job to learn the ropes and build this niche practice, so that when I was ultimately fired, I retained a lot of value as an individual, and established a personal brand for myself as “the quant guy” in the marketplace. ??

My entry point into digital assets was placing quants in crypto hedge funds - an incredibly tight niche!! You might think to yourself - that just doesn’t seem like a wide enough space to build a business around.?

Two things to note here:

1. Remember what I said earlier about how valuable these people are to their employers. ??
2. The smaller the niche, the easier it is to dominate, and quicker you can accomplish this. ??

CONCLUSION

So, what happens when you are crushing it in a tight space? Again - you will naturally build a brand and reputation as a subject matter expert in your field. When you are a SME, others will trust and refer you to more business within their networks.

Now, THIS is the starting point for launching a successful career path.

If, god-forbid, something awful happened to Up Top and we had to shut the business down, there is not an L1, L2, DAO, Dapp, or Exchange that wouldn’t want to hire me to build and support their talent function.

To take it off of me for a second, let me show some love to others who I’ve seen do this well:

• My man Max Burwick is not just another lawyer. He’s also more than just a lawyer for crypto. Max specializes in Employment Contract Law for Web3, which I’m sure required a lot of heavy lifting for him, in learning about how token allocation works. Now that he is being embraced by our community for that very specific subject-matter expertise, I’m sure there will be a ton of opportunities thrown his way in a broader capacity, based on the reputation he has built. ???? ??
• My guy Faris Oweis did not walk the traditional path to entry in the VC space. As he was establishing a name for himself, he decided to focus only on sourcing and supporting early-stage crypto projects in Africa; a segment that he knew other funds were sleeping on. A few years later, he has super tight relationships with most of the top venture funds, and helps top tier web3 projects raise capital. Faris broke this down further on my podcast , in case you want to hear it from him. ??

There are countless examples of successful people who have done this right.

For the record, I will say that these are just my opinions based on what I’ve seen and experienced. I would bet my career on it, though. ??