I worked in the crypto industry from 2018-2023 and boy was it a funny thing.
At the time, I got into it because from my somewhat-naive perspective, it looked like the next big thing.
New technology, all sorts of interesting promises and ideas were coming out of it, and I was drawn to the technical nature of blockchains. I still am, in fact, it's interesting technology.
Looking back, I do feel a bit of embarrassment about my time in an industry which produced a truly stunning amount of grift, gambling, and other bullshit.
And yet, I don't regret it.
In no particular order, here's what I gained from my time:
- Leading at scale
- Learning venture capital
- Distinguishing hype from reality
- Learning just how adversarial financial markets are
Leading at scale
Crypto happened to put me into my first role where I was really leading at scale.
I learned the importance of communicating the vision early: what are we actually trying to accomplish, what principles are guiding us, what considerations matter, and how are we going to make decisions?
I learned that people need to be brought along for the ride rather than simply handed the output of your thinking.
And I learned how to think much more seriously about long-term strategy rather than treating leadership as a series of individual decisions and problems to solve.
None of those lessons are particularly crypto-specific.
Crypto was simply the environment where I got my first reps.
Learning venture capital
Crypto also gave me an opportunity to work in venture capital, and I used it to read and learn everything I could about how venture works. That knowledge has been much more useful outside of VC than I expected.
For one thing, it changed how I evaluate technology as an operator.
When I encounter a new company or piece of software, I now instinctively think about the market, incentives, distribution, funding, competitive dynamics, and whether there's actually something durable underneath it all. It's made me better at deciding whether some hot new piece of software is worth adopting or is probably going to disappear in 12 months.
It also made me substantially better at assessing job opportunities.
Lastly, it's given me a much deeper understanding of the technology market generally.
Due diligence is a meta skill worth learning.
Distinguishing hype from reality
Oh boy did crypto help me here.
Crypto was an extraordinary environment for watching narratives form in real time, and learning how rarely those narratives emerge independently of the incentives of the people spreading them.
One of the biggest lessons I took from the period is that sophistication is not evidence. Extremely smart people can construct extremely sophisticated arguments around something for which there is very little underlying demand.
I don't think this gave me some magical ability to always know what's real. I still get things wrong.
But it gave me earned confidence in my own bullshit detector.
I know what mass hype feels like from the inside. I know what motivated reasoning looks like.
I know that smart people, famous investors, enormous funding rounds, complicated technology, and beautiful arguments don't necessarily mean something is going to matter or is real.
That has been enormously useful during the rise of LLMs and AI.
Learning just how adversarial financial markets are
Lastly, crypto gave me a much better understanding of financial markets.
Beforehand, I think I had a somewhat sanitized conception of markets: lots of participants buying and selling things, collectively discovering what they're worth.
That's true, but naively incomplete.
Crypto was a first-hand lesson in how markets are also adversarial systems full of information asymmetries, positioning, incentives, and participants constantly trying to exploit an edge.
Large players can move markets to their advantage.
Entire strategies can be built around knowing more than the person on the other side of the trade or simply finding someone less informed to dump an asset on.
The lack of mature institutions and guardrails made these dynamics comically visible.
It was dog-eat-dog in a way that taught me much more about markets than reading about them ever could have.
I'm grateful I got out of the industry 😅. There is nothing about it that interests me today, but the bet I made turned out to be worthwhile.
The thesis didn't have to be right for the experience to have been valuable.
Five years inside a strange, intensely financialized, technically sophisticated, hype-driven industry gave me a set of experiences that I continue to draw on well after leaving it.
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