📺 SotN #40: Get a Job in Crypto | Rob Paone of Proof of Talent

hey bankless nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation david hoffman and i are really excited to bring you this special episode we are talking about the crypto economy and more specifically the question that's on all of your minds which is how do you get a job in the crypto economy we've got an expert here to talk all about that david how are you doing today absolutely fantastic ryan another great week to be in the world of crypto we've been beating this drum on the bankless program for a while there's a new world

out there in crypto and we need to build this world therefore there needs to be people searching for jobs uh and so that's something that i believe in and our guest rob uh has dedicated his whole career to building this out and so i'm excited to talk to rob today and and to talk about how we can get people to enter the world of crypto in a professional capacity yeah guys if this is your first state of the nation we talk about what's happening in the world of crypto we try to relate it to big picture stuff and then we try to drop some insight and

action items for you so i think the topic here is super relevant which is the economy the crypto economy how do you get a job in the crypto economy and we'll have some takeaways about how to brush up your crypto resume what sort of opportunities you can look for and uh and the how of that um this comes at you every tuesday we live streaming on youtube we also broadcast it on the bank list podcast on wednesdays um david we should talk about a few things that are new in the bankless nation first up our episode with hazu

just simply titled eip1559 no special title because that's all it needs eip1559 yeah we went through every single thing that makes eip 1559 eip1559 it's not just the thing that burns eth that people know it to be but it also is a slack mechanism it's also a better ux system it's also a gas management system it's also a mev mitigator uh there's a lot of different things that make up eip1559 and hazu's

particularly has been really spearheading this effort getting eip1559 integrated into the ethereum protocol so we brought him on to just go through to do a complete canonical episode as what is this thing and then we finish up with the conversation i think will get everyone really excited which is how does eip1559 impact the monetary policy of ether the asset in the security of ethereum uh and so it is a uh you can go from zero to a hundred about eip1559 with that episode i think everyone in crypto if you're

investing in crypto you owe it to yourself to understand what eip1559 is if you know about the happening the bitcoin happening you should also know about eip 1559 absolutely so check out that episode just came out wednesday uh just came out monday we're also tomorrow david we're recording with hayden adams hayden adams of uniswap this is a long awaited episode about a year in the making we got mark cuban on before we got hayden adams but now we're getting hayden adams on david what are we going to ask him oh every single possible question we ask

are we asked for extra time with hayden and so we were going to record with him last friday but we kicked it out to this wednesday so we could get just some extra minutes with him we're going through the complete history of unit swap all the way from before unit swap was unit swap to where we are today with unit swap v3 and what's coming down the pipeline with optimism really excited to have that conversation uh if i can edit this video as fast as possible then perhaps that video goes on the bankless youtube wednesday evening question maybe maybe maybe maybe stay tuned putting some pressure on himself yeah i like that tape i'm saying maybe

yeah all right so you heard it maybe maybe definitely the evening of wednesday um david this this whole conversation is going to be about jobs in the crypto economy speaking of jobs the bankless nation is hiring what what are we looking for what kind of talent we looking for so much so much we need a website first off we need a like the home page of bank list there's so many different streams uh we have bankless youtube bank bankless podcasts the newsletter articles apparel uh we need a place for that to live and so if you think that you can design the

coolest ever bankless homepage we are looking for designers and we're also looking for graphic artists who can make dope uh images just icons whatever for for to put on t-shirts you know apparel stuff of this nature but then also for uh digital art because we are trying to grow the world of bankless culture and cryptoculture and so if you think that you can fit those bills comment drop us a line at applications at banklesshq.com that's applications at banklesshq.com if you can help us out

with that and please help us out because i designed the original like bankless hq home page and it is terrible we don't talk at least we don't talk about it very often because it's so bad um david speaking of which i'm going to ask you the question that i always ask you the question at the start of these episodes which is what is the state of the nation today sir yeah the state of the nation is hiring as an ecosystem we are hiring which is why we've brought on the our guest rob who is again leading the charge to helping match make between

candidates and employers right there is this employment world this world of crypto labor and crypto is very different from the legacy world there's a ton of capital and not a lot of labor uh which means that like good candidates are extremely scarce and that means that that's beneficial for you if you are trying to find a job in crypto like perhaps that perhaps the advantage is on your side due to how much capital there is out there uh these are questions that we're going to ask rob um and then also as well like we said the bank list nation is actually literally hiring we

are we are literally hiring people uh and so uh in all respects there is cap there's money out there to be found by people that can contribute labor to this ecosystem and so we're trying to figure out a ways to get this world employed let's let's get this done absolutely crypto economy it has the capital at this point in time definitely has the need to build infrastructure and all it needs is the labor are you going to be part of that labors the question and how do you plug into that is going to be the topic of today's conversation we're going to come back

with rob paone in just a minute but before we get to the episode we want to tell you about the fantastic sponsors that made this possible gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange i've been a customer of gemiini since i first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide and on gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets including many of the hot tokens and it's one of the few exchanges

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um here you can see me getting a 200 usdc loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and eth i'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock that interest rate in person one of ave's v2 features is the ability to support things that you want to have

without having to draw your assets so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's a aave dot com all right bankless nation we are here with rob payone who was once known as crypto bobby and ran a very successful youtube channel in the height of the 2017-2018 crypto mania uh and i i

appreciated crypto bobby because it was a very sober and well informed and highly entertaining uh youtube channel uh and in the the sea of [ __ ] that was just 2017 uh it was a nice little oasis to to escape to so crypto crypto bobby i appreciated that but you are no longer crypto bobby uh your brand yeah complete rebrand uh and so something pulled crypto bobby away from the world of crypto content produ uh production to turn him into rob paone and that opportunity was recruiting and

matchmaking for hiring companies and candidates in the crypto space so rob now that you have proof of talent which has become one of the most successful crypto matchmaking firms in the entire space so rob tell us about this decision to move away from crypto content production and into the world of uh you know recruiting and matchmaking yeah so i guess you know at a high level like my first job at a college was in recruiting i did that for a few years and ended up working in software sales for a while and i've towards the tail end of my time

i was selling erp software which is like business management accounting software to fintech firms at oracle um and i was doing that and i had a literally a spare blue yeti mic that i had purchased and i just threw out a video on youtube like in august of 2017 and the whole thing just snowballed it was like really lucky timing and i was still i was working from home for my my software sales job and the youtube challenge just kind of blew up and got like really popular really quick and i had honestly no idea what i

was doing half the time i was just kind of having fun with it and just talking through what was happening what was going on and got somewhat lucky and i think this is also kind of indicative of of crypto jobs and taught me a lot as far as that process went uh but ended up getting a job at uh air swap so i i worked in growth in bizdav at airswap uh and it was really helpful to understand kind of like what was happening within the industry and build a lot of connections and through that time and airswap towards the towards the kind of tail end it was uh i think may of

just really had the idea to start a recruiting firm in the blockchain and crypto space kind of thought it was a good marriage of my experience previously in recruiting the knowledge and connections i had in the blockchain of cryptocurrency space and then my my sales background kind of thought like if i put the three together i might actually have something and before i left my role at airswap i kind of networked with a few different people in the space uh that were running their own companies was kind of asking around like what's the biggest challenge in almost every single person even back in 2019 was saying like hiring is really really

difficult it's impossible for us i was like if i started this would you maybe you know want to be a customer of mine and a few people said yes and it kind of snowballed from there so that makes me uh that reminds me of just uh you know kind of building out my my two side gigs before um before i really went full time into crypto like pov crypto my first podcast was my side gig while i was going down like the healthcare route and i didn't really leave that traditional world until i knew that you know this the whole crypto

thing could actually support me if i did jump into that so before you actually you know dedicate your time to proof of talent full-time did you feel that security or did it feel kind of like a risk like how what assurances did you have that this was actually going to work out there were no insurances uh i would say that i mean it was it was definitely a risk i had a little bit of savings ready to go but it was it was definitely a nerve-wracking time because from the time i graduated college i graduated in 2012. um so i had a job lined up and i

started working two weeks after i graduated up until the time i left air swap in june of 2019 i've always had a full-time salaried position throughout that like throughout that period i've always been like kind of entrepreneurial like i started the youtube channel i had done some things before then where i was always trying to make like a side hustle but i've never been to a point where i was fully like i guess unemployed or self-employed and so that was it that was a big like risk for me but i kind of felt like you know if there's a time worth doing it it's it's right now and

and i would have regretted it if i didn't do it so the way that i've i've positioned this in my head is like we have this this legacy world where most most of the businesses that could be made have have already been made uh and that's just kind of just the nature of this legacy world it's already existed for so long and crypto's the opposite where there's so much to be made we actually really just don't know what the limitations are on what can be built therefore my mind goes to well there's going to be a need for a lot of

labor to come build this whole new space uh which means that the the opportunity job market opportunity is perhaps massive is that how you kind of see things as well yeah that was that's definitely how i see things now and also kind of how i looked at things back then too when i was when i was starting it like i looked around and i think the the industry as a as as a whole now is obviously massive and 2019 was still like really large but uh there were a number of different i think like you know service providers for the space and nobody that really kind of came to a

front of mind when you think about recruiting or of looking for a new job in in crypto and that was kind of the thought process that i had when starting it like if you think about like legal the legal profession in crypto like you'll think about a number of different lawyers in this space like jake travinsky steven paley like folks like that there are all these little different niches i think that do an incredible job of like supporting or working in the space and it built really strong brands and when i thought about that like there are so many people that are going to work in this industry and there's nobody right now that really comes front of mind to

actually help people find jobs in the space and that was kind of the the point of proof of talent i feel like your story rob is like sort of a microcosm of advice we give so often on bank list when people ask us like how do we get into the space how do we get a job and we we often say things like this like if you want to work for a protocol give a protocol what it wants you find out what a protocol wants or you find out in your case what crypto wants and what crypto really wanted was this niche of of of talent right they didn't have a good way to get it so you

went and you you filled that niche um it's kind of a microcosm of what everyone needs to do if they're starting something in crypto and getting involved in cryptos to figure out what the holes are what the crypto industry wants and go fill it you were talking as well uh rob about sort of the the opportunity size like the the size of the economy and what i love is you started this in 2019 right during like still it was a a bear like market right people needed talent but it was a lot smaller than it is now can you give us some sense of the

size and the magnitude of the economic opportunity here i don't even know how you'd measure this in terms of like number of new jobs uh per year that this industry is spitting out i don't even know what how you'd measure it but give us a sense of the size of this thing yeah i think overall it's it's definitely like you know a large and impressive industry to be working in um i think you can break it down too in a couple different ways and a couple kind of different like sub sectors like i i really when i like think about the industry overall i do think about almost

these like little sub sectors or niches within the industry like the largest employer of the space uh is and are like centralized exchanges and like the the financial firms behind it so like the coin bases of the world have you know a thousand plus employees you have the dcgs and kind of all these companies that are building like traditional financial infrastructure on top of the kind of the the like crypto um like the crypto economic layer so like all those companies kind of have to adhere to the traditional regulations and because of

that like the block wise of the world like fuckfi grew from 15 employees to like 500 plus um in two years it's crazy um and it's it's incredible so i think you have you know companies like that you have i think a really like interesting kind of impact now with with these d5 organizations where uh i i don't know how many people are on the core like uniswap team i know you mentioned hayden adams is coming on tomorrow like the the amount of of weight that something like uniswap punches for like the amount of volume they do they might have what 15 people

on their core team which is incredible in comparison to something like a coin base um so there's definitely a number of like growing areas off the top my head i don't know the exact numbers of it but it's definitely i would say in like probably the 30 plus thousand range probably probably more than that um but then i think you also have to consider there's full-time employees there's there's core contributors there's there's open source developers there's there's all sorts of people that are involved in this industry in one way or another be it

full-time or in a part-time capacity yeah can you give us a sense too of another way to measure this which is and you kind of hinted at this by talking about block five's growth it's like what is the growth of this space it's it just seems like it's absolutely massive is is you know are we growing at a thou you know a hundred percent a thousand percent per year and how does that ebb and flow with the market cycles yeah so i i do think that hiring in the space is definitely cyclical um you know with

the hiring where it was in 2019 when i started the business it was it was nowhere near where where we were right now um and i think a lot of that is due to the kind of effect that the price of bitcoin and the price of ethereum do have on the actual hiring both for centralized companies and on the on the flip side for more of these like d5 focused or kind of decentralization focused companies because if you look at it in two ways on the side of the the larger companies like i mentioned the exchanges most of those companies are making money

on uh trading volume as well as maybe like deposits withdrawals things of that nature and trading volume is through the roof in comparison to where it was previously so their revenue is way up their customers uh the the new accounts those are way up so they're hiring more in terms of legal compliance customer service like across the board they're hiring and then on the flip side you have a lot of smaller companies and we kind of started noticing this last summer but you have a lot of these smaller organizations that are just starting up um be it kind of small d5 projects or

whatnot but they're raising you know seed rounds to kind of help to start their their development and things like that so maybe they raised a two million dollar three million five million dollar seed round and you're seeing a lot of hiring demand both on the kind of smaller end of the spectrum and then on the larger end of the spectrum too but when you see the the market pullback i think on on both ends of the spectrum if it does you know at some point in time who knows um you're gonna see you know maybe less of a demand in the client support less of a demand also in terms

of venture capitalists deploying capital into these smaller projects so they're not going to be hiring as much maybe for the time being as well so rob proof of talent has been around for almost two years now which uh congratulations um and uh to me the whole entire crypto industry changed in march of 2021 when like the asset prices just like plummeted then coveted hit and it really seems to be there's been this pivot point since then so my question to you and you answered a little bit and so maybe you've already covered a decent

amount but just to top it off how has the market the job market changed be as a result of this mo the recent developments of covid government stimulus money printer go bur how has that changed and then also um the other question i want to get to is like are when when uh firms come to you to fill a position are they coming to feel like one position or are they trying to like recruit an army or a whole division like what's been the representation around that yeah so that the hiring in the space has has picked up pretty substantially it's

been i mean it's been incredible to to watch and kind of be uh our a participant in some of the companies i mean we work with really a full range in spectrum we work with about 40 plus different companies right now or projects and it's everything from two or three person d5 startups that just raised their first seed round up to the probably a few largest exchanges and and trading shops that are a thousand plus employees and kind of on the ipo path or or already public uh so it definitely runs a full gamut as far as

the types and size of of organizations that um you know we kind of work with i would say one of the things that was kind of helpful for us and especially in the crypto world in the post coveted error is i think crypto companies were able to very quickly pivot um some and actually good amount of firms were already or like were mostly let's say in physical locations but they had the capability to very quickly and easily go remote and i think that was something

that the traditional financial world and a lot of traditional companies did not have the luxury of because when you think about all these companies in the crypto space like the oldest most established companies that have been around for the longest were probably found in 2012 or 2013 they have like brand new fresh tech infrastructure they're just very modern organizations and then you maybe compare and contrast that with something like you know jpmorgan chase and them of having their traders work from home that is a much more different kind of tougher experience to move those people home

than it is to have let's say a large exchange like coinbase just go kind of like fully distributed in the matter of a week like it's it's a very it was a very easy process i think for pretty much every company we worked with and kind of pushed those individuals into going distributed which was a great thing to see and i think also representative of like what the industry is trying to be in terms of like a distributed global industry it almost it almost helped to kind of accelerate that process for us

so rob as as we switch kind of from the the macro to maybe the more the personal for the listener who's who's wondering like okay what about me right what about me in this the first question i want to get to is um i think there's a lot of people in the bankless community who they have a full-time job and they're in crypto as a hobby and sometimes that turns into an all-consuming hobby as we all know uh we call that falling down the crypt of rabbit hole obviously right um but i think a big question in in people's minds is

how do they know if they're ready to take that leap into crypto i i want to talk about that like what advice would you give right somebody who they love crypto they eat and breathe it they're they're bored at their regular job you know crypto brings sort of the the light back into their eyes and but but there's some risk there and like maybe that risk is compounded by the fact that they own so much crypto right a significant portion of their net worth is in crypto and they're attracted to this industry

but they're also worried about having an income source also reliant on it in addition to a significant portion of their net worth help us through the filtering process what advice do you give for somebody who's who's thinking about taking the plunge yeah i i am personally and this is not even necessarily like proof of talent related but this is even kind of going back to my experience at airswap um and for me it was not easy to find like a job in crypto i was a software sales account executive that was selling accounting software to fintech companies

in manhattan that is not something that like most crypto companies or projects needed and i kind of had to like hustle my way literally the way i found the job at airswap was somebody tweeted about a youtube interview and then somebody tagged me in it and i had a conversation with one of the founders kind of prior to the youtube uh the the the interview and i and he was asking like what my what my end game was and i was like i really want to work in this industry and i quit my job tomorrow and like two weeks later i quit my job after going and interviewing with him a bunch um

but i i really believe that if you work full-time in the industry you receive some significant benefits that outweigh the potential risks of like the i guess the perceived the perceived risks of being in the crypto industry um i think that you're able to build connections uh with other individuals with other organizations much easier than you are on like the quote unquote outside of the industry i think that's hugely valuable um not only for just like having good like

information but i think also like um once you're able to have that kind of connection and the different like layers of working within the industry you're able to over time maybe maybe the first job you take in crypto isn't the best thing in the world but you build 20 great connections and then you meet somebody and you end up kind of working at the you know the next place i think that's one of the biggest things and one of the best things possible and it's a lot easier once you're within the industry to to make those moves than it

is when you're kind of on the outside of it uh so i'm i'm definitely like a big proponent of of trying to um you know make your way into the industry i think you should still obviously be selective and not just kind of go for the first thing just to get into it but i do think it's highly advantageous and kind of worth the risk reward of maybe being a little bit nervous about an industry that fluctuates uh you know according to the price of the assets let me just say rob i i totally agree and that's that's my story too but what i found was like i

had to decide my time horizon for this industry right i was like i'm going to join this industry not with a one year two year time horizon not with a market cycle time horizon but like i'm going to spend the next 10 years in this industry right and i made that decision before coming into the industry like i i knew that which is committing to bear markets it's committing to bear markets right because i want you to also illustrate the flip side because i totally agree with the the net benefit case that you just made right now i would make the same case i think david would do and

it's our stories but sometimes i scratch my head and i wonder oh how much of this is survivorship bias right like because talk about the pain of a bear market because you've been through them and the pain of a bear market when you see kind of any net worth you had in crypto go down by 90 right but then you also because you're in the industry you feel the impact to your business and everything like tightens up and there's this sense of doom can you describe that because i want people who decide to commit to this

to be ready for those kind of markets too yeah no i i definitely agree with you and i think part of it too is just like self-understanding and it's like looking within yourself and thinking like do i really really love this industry am i really passionate about it or am i just enjoying right now looking at blockfolio and watching number go up and enjoying that because there's nothing wrong with that like it is addictive and it's an incredible dopamine hit but like you should really understand like if this goes down are you going to stick around are you really passionate or is

it you know again like are you just kind of addicted to the dopamine head of number go up um because i think like you said i've kind of been in both scenarios i started i basically joined airswap at the top in 2018 and worked there for a year and a half during the bear market and then started proof of talent somewhat in the bear market and like i hired my first employee colton uh shout out to colton who's wonderful um i hired him a week before covid started and so that was that was a fun time having my first first employee and like the first salary

that i'm ever ever responsible for in my life start like when the world ended so that was like you you know you really have to be dedicated to it you have to be passionate about it and i do think that there were a ton of people in 2018 that joined the industry and didn't have that conviction and ended up leaving uh whether they stayed for six months whether they stayed for a year there were a lot of people that kind of came in they were migrants and i mean you can like i this is a kind of silly story but like i

was cleaning out my car it was a few months ago and i found business cards from a conference i went to in dubai um for cryptocurrency and i think there were eight business cards and i went i was just like curious i was like are any of these companies still in business i think like six six out of eight didn't have websites that worked so like there is there are definitely a lot of migrants that come during a during a bull market and i think you just have to recognize that and kind of just have that self self reflection of of knowing like what you

are and who you are in that process great advice from rob here are you a tourist or a settler i think that's the question you have to answer before you enter this space rob we're going to come back uh we're going to do some advice for candidates how to prepare a crypto resume we're going to be back with all of that information for you but first we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this episode possible if you are looking for a product that connects your fiat bank account with d5 tokens and products you need to download the dharma mobile app dharma is a

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