Why I am thrilled to play a part in building the future of web3 with Chainlink

Even when I was a young lad growing up on a farm in rural Australia I was always interested in the technology of the future, mustering cattle by day in the summer holidays and by night battling with my parents for control of the single phone line that could only run either the internet or calls one at any one time (for a certain generation, IYKYK), in order to test out the latest game or bitorrent or chat tool. This desire to be part of a world of pioneering innovation and creativity led me first into a path with management consulting, and more recently to ? of a decade with LinkedIn where I have been lucky enough to work on some fascinating internal and external challenges to create a scalable sales engine across APAC. My whole life has been about charting new paths, in terms of location, function, career and family.

With the tumult and restrictions of the last few years of COVID, our family, like many others, has set its sights on returning home to Australia to be closer to loved ones and to be part of the lives of the countless babies born to family and close friends whilst we have been locked on our (admittedly tropical paradise) island. This significant decision has also come with the opportunity to pause, reflect and re-evaluate on what makes me whole – i.e. the experiences that have given me a sense of fulfilment and completeness when I look back on my journey to date. This reflection has helped me reconnect with my thirst for the new and thus the search began in earnest for a role that would help stoke my desire to find a personal growth edge and push the boundaries of my career to date.

With the guidance of my extraordinary wife (an executive coach in her own right), I settled on the following distinct but interrelated ‘ideals’ for a future role:

• A cutting edge industry focused on the future – I have always had a curiosity with doing something ‘that hasn’t been done before’?
• The opportunity to own and build – having worked in two exceptional but large and matrixed organisations in PwC and LinkedIn, being able to take the best of those experiences to an earlier stage startup is very exciting
• Plenty of white space for problem solving – cracking a challenging or complex situation (whether spreadsheet or market entry strategy) has always given me a huge amount of energy
• A fully distributed organisation – having experienced ‘remote’ working during COVID, I can see the intrinsic value of being able to work with the best talent regardless of their physical location and helping shape the future of this workforce model is fascinating to me

By pure chance of timing I feel that I have found all of these factors and more in the incredibly exciting space of web3 and I’m thrilled to be joining Chainlink as their Head of APAC.

For those less familiar with the web3 space or Chainlink in particular, the first 20 minutes of Sergey’s 2022 overview perfectly captures the reasons I am so excited about the promise of a truly decentralised vision for our future digital environment (How could you not get behind the brilliant encapsulation of Truth > Trust!?). Blockchain and related web3 technologies will power a huge range of real life use cases and the majority of these will be underpinned by smart contracts and the power of cryptographic truth. This ability to remove the need for a ‘trusted’ third party in any given value exchange has the potential to create a true paradigm shift not only in the way business is done but in terms of broader societal and cultural landscapes.

It's an organisation whose vision and values are deeply aligned to my own, and in this role I’m looking forward to building the team that will scale the cutting edge data infrastructure, off-chain and cross-chain computation layer for everything web3 related in APAC. There will be many challenges ahead, however I’m energised by the scale of the opportunity and the potential to revolutionise the way particularly emerging markets in APAC can participate in the global digital economy in a trustless, frictionless way.

For any of you interested in learning more about web3, I highly recommend starting your own journey into this incredibly fascinating space. Here are a few of my favourite resources I began researching into the space and I hope they are useful for you too:

• All-In Podcast – not web3 specific per se but a great way to get a high level overview of all things tech market related
• Coinbureau.com – a good entry point for crypto given the breadth and objectivity Guy and team bring to the table
• Bankless Newlsetter – free daily email newsletter that covers Defi (decentralized finance), NFTs, the metaverse, and other crypto topics
• Crypto Twitter – a truly bottomless vortex of incredible characters, tribes, ideas and debate – the best way stay on top of a market that moves at astonishing speed

To all of you that made it this far - thanks for bearing with me and would love to hear your thoughts on what motivates you in a role as well as any experiences you've had with web3.