A Web3 Talent & Token Compensation MasterClass | Zack Skelly, Aurora Harshner

Transcript

I recently spoke with someone who works at a lending company in the traditional Tech space who's kind of looking to get into crypto because he's seen some D5 protocols with you know 20 employees doing more loan volume than his current company that has 20 000 employees now this episode is brought to you by Circle the issuer of usdc which hopefully as you all know is the preferred stable coin of digital Natives and crypto natives with over 1.5 million holders globally you'll hear more about usdc later in the show [Music] hey everyone welcome back to Empire we have two very special guests here that um are gonna probably have the best pulse into the industry in terms of

recruiting and talent uh so we have the privilege of having Aurora and Zach Aurora has been involved extensively in Silicon Valley she was involved in the early days of coinbase and helping scale that team and then a poly chain where we actually first interacted in the last bear market and so here we are in the in another bear Market but she is advising a bunch of companies um has a really good pulse on on HR and landscape and crypto and Silicon Valley and Tech in general and then we also have Zach who has talent both internally and for portfolio companies at dragonfly one of leading Venture firms in in crypto which is focused on bridging east and west and I had the privilege of

interacting with dragonfly uh primarily at my time in parify so Aurora Zach welcome to the pod thanks thank you for having me thank you very much great to hear that's great um so before we get into it maybe just give us a quick background on on yourselves and and maybe that will set the stage for um for the discussion so Aurora feel free to go first uh yeah so I've been in recruiting nhr for about my entire career and um I think I was initially attracted into the startup into the startup world when I joined Airbnb when they were pretty small and realized that was a much better place for me and I just loved the creativity and being able to be entrepreneurial and uh was there for a couple of years and actually met Brian

Armstrong we became friends because he was the engineer who would always answer all my deeply technical questions so I could better talk to Engineers when I was recruiting them and he ended up a couple years later with Barry Kwok who's a mentor of mine also who worked at Airbnb they told me about coinbase and I had no idea what it was but he sent me the Bitcoin white paper and I read it and I think my imagination just started running and and also I wanted to work with Brian again because he was somebody I deeply trusted and I met the rest of the the small team they had and I felt like it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up so I would guess that the thing that got me into the space really was just interest in what the potential was of Bitcoin at the time and

also wanting to work with people that I thought were really smart and inspiring and that he trusted Zach um yeah thank you I think you hit on some of the key points but um I tend to talk about this for some reason in Reverse chronological order so I'm at dragonfly now I joined here around the end of May last year and uh yeah my role has been overseeing the internal hiring that's happening here and working pretty closely with about 120 130 companies in our portfolio on uh all suffer on recruiting and people um before this I worked at a company called Xerox which is also in the space I joined there around the end of 2017 at the time they did their token sale um and was their first recruiter and

head of talent and kind of helped them grow over the course of three years um before that I did something similar at an analytics startup called Heap which came out of Y combinator um I joined pretty shortly after their series a and their first recruiter and I feel like uh in a prior life at this point I was doing a bunch of engineering at Dropbox a few years before they went public and at Google probably when they were about 50 000 people I want to say there 200 250 something like that now so um kind of moving orders of magnitude smaller companies throughout my career and somewhat intentionally and I would say I've been interested in crypto since about 2015-ish working in it since end of 2017 or so and

uh it's been fun I think it'd be really hard for me to go back to a different industry at this point it's uh it's different which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about today yeah definitely that's a great point and I think a lot of times we we The Narrative is a lot of the smartest people are increasingly coming to crypto from your perspective I'd like to get your opinion on that is that true are you seeing a Slowdown given kind of the cyclicality of the space the risks and the space the uncertainty from a regulatory standpoint really curious to get your thoughts on on this point so I think that a lot of the smartest there's a lot of really smart people everywhere right you have a lot of smart people in small companies and some of the bigger more established companies I think a lot

of it has to do with smart people want to have opportunity to be creative have an impact and have some imp have some uh the ability to influence the direction of the product um so yeah I mean I think you'd probably see a flow of some of the most uh intelligent people drafting towards any entrepreneurial technology whether it's you know web3 or whether it's VR or you know name your name your Innovative technology that's coming about and so I do think that with web 3 specifically it's kind of a open Greenfield Frontier which is really fun for a lot of a lot of technical people a lot of creative people and so I believe that's why you're seeing a big shift of people

coming into the space and but uh yeah I I definitely think a lot of it has to do with life stage as well and that you know what from what I've seen people that are younger and younger and younger are getting into the space like I've hired people that are in high school more more times than I can actually count um which is amazing right I think that's kind of an indication of the trend of this is a completely new paradigm of how we do things and web3 space kind of breaks the traditional mold of what's been done in the past and it's very attractive to people that don't have a set Paradigm of the way the world works and so that's why you're getting people that are literally 14 years old that are brilliant that want to come and work in the space and I

think that's really exciting and I think that's probably the direction where the world is going yeah I think I agree with a lot of what Aurora said um I think people who are attracted to highly creative opportunities people who tend to be drawn towards some of the more bleeding edge kind of tech or um yeah things Green Field of opportunities to kind of play around with um there's something about the ethos of the space that I would think really attracts Builders people people who are passionate about building um I don't think there's been a trend away from that if anything um just anecdotally I feel like when I was starting to do recruiting in crypto and the end of 2017 or something um I don't want to say it was a small

miracle but it seemed uncommon uh to to be hiring people from places like Google and Facebook and things like that although it happened um and we were coming off a bull run and kind of entering a bust cycle at that point not unlike the one that we're in now um but nowadays I find myself chatting very very regularly with people from nearly all of the notable big tech companies um from the IC level through executive levels who are who are trying to get into the space I think even in the downturns um and part of it too might be you know um I I think the the metrics are becoming a little bit more clear like I recently spoke with someone who works at a lending company uh in the traditional Tech space who's kind of looking to get

into crypto because he's seen some D5 protocols with you know 20 employees doing more loan volume than his current company that has 20 000 employees you know um and I think that comparison probably holds up with different Primitives to like decentralized exchange protocols versus centralized exchanges um I think it's just becoming clearer kind of the power of decentralization over time the tech is maturing a little bit and uh it's kind of transitioning from this Pie in the Sky conjecture to real you know scalable kind of Highly efficient use cases and uh so yeah if anything I think the the trend is um increasing in terms of you know people

coming from traditional Tech into the space and uh for me I've kind of always appreciated these these downturns in terms of hiring because I feel like uh it's a little less touristy to be honest with you um like the people who join now are the ones who tend to be really passionate about what we're doing about the mission and the ethos and they often end up becoming some of the most productive Builders so uh it's a cool time to be in the space doing hiring definitely that's such a good point uh we certainly seen a slow down in tech and and also in crypto a lot of the criticisms have historically been there have been a lot of kind of opportunists that come into the space how much of that is true and um I'm curious

um the reasons why people in large companies like Google Facebooks kind of of the world um are still hesitant to join this industry um so yes I will say that is absolutely something I've noticed and I've been in the spaces January of 2014. this has happened you know about three four times at this point and do you have these crypto Winters as we call them where you know the rest of the world kind of thinks that it's crazy and really dangerous and scary and they go away and the tourists um as you say I think is a great way to describe them because I actually prefer when they're they're not when the I mean obviously it's great when there's uh you know the

market is really doing well but you get a lot of noise in people that are I think attracted to the space for honestly money right there's a lot of uh Capital to be made in this space and I think that attracts a lot of the wrong type of people that aren't interested in the technology and I would say to answer your question directly like that's been the biggest shift is the people that are really excited about the potential of what can be built in web3 and what can change and if they actually take the time to read more about it and learn about the the you know the creative possibilities that usually in my opinion gets them over the hump of being scared of the space because if you watch the news right and if you watch the numbers go up and down and up and down sure it

can be seem very volatile and very scary for somebody who doesn't have a deeper lens but it doesn't at this point I mean we have there's so much knowledge there's so many podcasts there's so much reading about why there's more potential in the space so frankly it's a lot easier to get smart on the space and understand the true potential at least in my opinion compared to 2014. so I think that's probably why you're getting more and more people that are genuinely being interested in the space but I guess in honestly I think that it's a positive thing because it clears out the noise and the people that are going to join companies for a short period of time and then bounce because things get tough for maybe a year or two and and I it gives companies a chance to regroup

and build their infrastructure that broke when there was a last run and it's there's a lot of positives that get the industry settled for the next time that essentially the price goes up and everybody starts paying attention to the industry again no I agree with that and um I think you had asked Santi like why why are people maybe hesitant um yeah I would imagine it might be a few things but for one um I feel like the space in terms of the size of teams size of companies relative to other Industries um it's still pretty nice and and I feel like on average the teams are far smaller so part of it might just be personal working style like if you're used to working at a company that's a hundred thousand two hundred thousand people um there are not very many if any of

those in crypto at all so there's there's a little bit of a mentality shift um maybe a different level of kind of ownership or autonomy that's often required to join a company that might be typical of one that's in this industry um but I think another thing that might play into this is a I feel like there's a little bit of an education Gap you know very similar to what Aurora was saying like education is um pretty critical here and I feel like there's almost a polarization of Interest I would say like um for people who are I've kind of noticed genuinely very into the space and have kind of taken up a passion for it or have their own deep interest in it I've often found that it's you know two three

times easier to get people um excited about what's going on then it might be if you were in kind of a more traditional Tech environment whereas people who are still learning or um don't have that depth of background it's probably two to three times as much education that's required to teach them kind of like the fundamentals of the space before you can even begin to get them excited about the prospects of like a specific project or company or something like that so um yeah part of it likes to be workflow and Style part of it is probably just um the learning curve and I think some folks see that as intimidating if they're if they're not used to it um but in my experience immersion is kind of the best way to get exposure to

that stuff and there are many many many teams who are really excited about bringing on people that have a strong fundamental skill set and um just genuine curiosity and I think there are lots who are willing to kind of show the ropes to to that type if that makes sense yeah speaking about certain Trends and the type of people that are kind of more marketable and coveted like from your portfolio standpoint a lot of times people think that the space heavily excused towards engineering and Engineers they're really hard to come by I want to touch on this point and let's start with how much of that is true um you know if from your portfolio companies that perhaps what percentage are purely looking for

engineers and where are they finding them versus other roles and if you're seeing Trends around other type of roles that are increasingly more in demand versus kind of you know a couple years ago yeah for sure um I mean and just a thing and it's always going to be a thing I feel like you know any early team of Builders um is usually at least I don't know if I should say predominantly end but um notably engineering but with that said I mean I I think that's that's a misconception in terms of opportunities that are available um really I almost any role you can think of outside of crypto at this point I feel like is being hard for within crypto um and if you even go and check out like our portfolio jobs board at dragonfly

for example I think there are about 145 companies on there close to a thousand jobs and it spans you know literally everything from accounting to Administration data science product design legal marketing operations um sales Business Development so really you know there's opportunity for just about anyone in the space at this point across a wide variety of fields um I think there's something to be said for deep specialization in the space that might be another topic like people who are quote unquote like crypto native or really have a deep fundamental understanding and kind of strong track record in the space

um there's there's some Nuance there but there's there's an enormous amount of opportunity for anyone who I think is genuinely passionate or curious about it I don't know if you'd agree or but that's been my experience yeah absolutely I mean essentially companies need more traditional functions to build right and so that's exactly what you're talking about and I think there's a lot of there's a lot of emphasis on how different web3 is from web 2 but there's a lot of similarities as well you still need all the operations to run a company even if you're distributed all over the world um I think that it's probably you probably find more opportunities across the board when you know we're in a bull market and things are growing obviously um I think in a slower Market what like we're in right now some of the higher priority roles that I have still seen

companies hiring for is to your point always engineering it's never going to stop um engineering recruiters also very hard to find very important you have to go find the engineers but also Communications which is Communications and marketing like growth marketing which to me has been super fascinating because when I first joined coinbase for example we spent many years like I would say a good three years thinking do we need marketing is now the right time for it and we ultimately decided over and over again it wasn't really because it wasn't going to add a tremendous amount of value at the time but now I think it's just an indication of the maturity of the space or also the receptivity of the outside world to the space where you do need more of these traditional marketers that

have the ability to communicate what are you doing to the outside world and I think the nft space is just a very great example where you you're finding a lot of people that are coming with more traditional Communications backgrounds that are getting into the space and so that your average person can have a better understanding of what this is all about which has been really exciting for me because most of the products have been extremely Technical and very deep which makes a lot of sense given that we've been building these layers up until now but now we're kind of at this point where you have this application layer that's being built that your average person can relate to in its use cases that you know normal people can understand which is incredibly exciting for me because I'm

not a technical person and I love recruiting software Engineers because I find the way they think really fascinating but I also think that this the ability to start getting the rest of the world to understand it is so crucial so seeing this uptick of marketing and Communications people that are coming into the space has been really exciting for me yeah yeah I agree with that and I feel like um honestly I I think uh there are there are some nuances to hiring within crypto or web3 um versus hiring a more traditional tech companies but my honest opinion is um there are a ton of parallels to hiring in any company outside of the space um like they're they're happy to talk

about what I think some of the differences are but a lot of the teams that I work with are very much zero to one like making their first 20 hires and there's not a standard order of operations for doing that but I feel like um it's not uncommon in the first 20 hires to see a good handful of Engineers um a designer maybe somebody handling business development product management recruiting Community Management um legal potentially Finance potentially customer support um so like I was saying all of the same functions that you would expect from in a more standard kind of traditional tech company um it's it is very much the same I think in crypto although there there's some

unique Nuance to hiring effectively in the space if that makes sense yeah maybe touch on that um or sorry all right that's exactly what I was going to do is kind of add a little more context to that you have these uh more you know these structured roles that you also see in different organizations but you you really can't and probably especially if you're a small company you shouldn't go find somebody who has done this for 10 years at some big organization because they're unlikely to be successful because they can't scale down to a size that small they're not used to running with a team of one right and so that's something that I emphasize with startups a lot is you may need these skills but you really want to prioritize for

scrappiness humility flexibility the ability to run with things and um again I'll kind of emphasize the humility aspect right because you can come with the the traditional skill set that you might need to run any number of these things that that Zach just touched on but you also need to understand that you are still a 20 person company and you have to be asked to do five other things that may not necessarily be a part of your skill set but you have to have a great attitude and be excited about that and finding those people that have that traditional skill set so they can add value on that front but also are excited about the prospect of just being part of a team that can and jumping in wherever they're needed is I think a crucial

element when you're hiring these people and it's interesting because I have seen companies that do optimize where we're going to go hire the not going to pick on any one company we're gonna go hire the executive or the really experienced person who's done this for 10 years at name your big thing and they struggle we did this honestly coinbase where we brought in people that just couldn't get into the weeds enough and so I think it's a really big lesson of yes go find the skill set but make sure you also find that other flexible aspect as well and you're looking for these people in Zach I'm sure you have a ton of thoughts on this as well because you're doing this all the time with dragonfly yeah no I think I think you're right um I feel like that's probably true of startups outside of crypto too to be

honest with you um anytime you're at a company that's you know at a certain stage I think it's beneficial to bring in people who have a mindset that works well for that particular stage um and just because the space is still quite nascent and again on average I may have a little bit of a skewed perspective in that we mostly do early stage Investments but on average the teams are quite small I think you're right like finding people who have humility who have um pretty high degree of initiative um like a high degree of creative freedom are able to operate you know relatively autonomously or at least ask questions um and loop help in when they need to um that's been pivotal for a lot of the

teams that we're working with um so yeah again I I do feel like there's unique Nuance to hiring within crypto but the more time I spend in the space um the more parallels I see honestly I think to even traditional tech companies as well I want to get your opinion on two things one um and on culture like hiring pseudo-anonymous or Anonymous people and what your thoughts are on that um and let's maybe just start there yeah I mean as I was just saying I think there's some unique aspects to hiring in the space and and part of that in my opinion is there there are entirely new hiring structures that are coming out of this industry that we've never seen

before like um Dow hiring for example you know like how decentralized autonomous organizations which are a relatively new thing are are doing hiring and um that can get weird depending on how the Dow is structured um you know in many cases they might have a centralized entity that's kind of just hiring like a normal team or company would and that entity kind of Simply contributes to the Dao which then collectively makes governance decisions on you know what happens overall with its resources but um if it's a full-blown decentralized hiring thing um like hiring even is fully handled by the Dow um that's a whole different game like if

you're if the Dow is kind of deciding who to hire or what to pay maybe even it gets to a point where they're doing like Community Driven performance reviews and compensation adjustments and things like that um I don't think we're really seeing a lot of that yet but um it's it's a thing and people are thinking about it and I wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more of it in the years ahead um and to your point about you know Anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hiring um that's a hard one uh like some of the challenges there are if you're in the US for example how do you verify that they're not from sanctioned countries if you don't really know who these people are um or can you trust them not to run off with Trade Secrets and these these are questions that have potentially massive

implications um and again they're all doable um but this stuff is very much still unfolding and I think it requires uh a certain degree of rigor in in understanding like this is stuff that we think a lot about on the VC side I think in trying to provide support to these teams but um that's where it starts to become a new ball game I think in a big way with crypto yeah what are your thoughts on like Dao and and Dows in particular and this idea of hierarchy um a lot of times Dows like to say oh like we're flattening the structure and a lot you know I'm curious to get your thoughts on the future more generally like future work obviously with covid I think people realize hey we

can work remotely what do you what kind of what can we expect or what are you seeing from companies being kind of like just curious of your thoughts generally on the future work and hierarchy endows uh in particular I mean it's it's pretty this is a really new space right and I think that if I look at how I think things might play out with Dows in the future if I look at more of like a centralized organization what are the things that the the hierarchy really provides and I think it's communicate in my perspective it's communication prioritization holding people accountable right making sure that there is um just free flow of information so people understand what they're all working

towards and this is I guess we're sort of like the in the middle stage where you have all these companies that are decentralized and working all over the world and so I guess my answer to you is building in structure I think is crucial when you have these decentralized organizations where you don't have like single points of people who are responsible for communicating uh Mission the priorities as well as holding people accountable and so I think it becomes absolutely crucial to have consistent structure that's built from the very beginning of how decisions will be communicated out how Communications will be decided on how you will hold how you will make sure that certain projects come to fruition right um and I'll be honest I don't actually

have a great answer on this one just because I think similar to token we're kind of figuring out how this works as we go right um if you had asked me two years ago where I thought token comp was going to go I would have no idea frankly but now I think I have a better idea because we've kind of all been frankly bumbling through it and seeing what works what doesn't and coming up with models that we think are helpful and I think as I give advice to companies my own advice is changing um pretty frequently which is normal I think in this space because I may have a certain idea where how I think things should work and then it's broken and I have to find another solution on how to help guide those people so unfortunately I don't have a great answer for you but

I think that we'll figure it out yeah I feel like comp would be something really interesting to discuss in more detail too right that's that's yeah I do want to go to that next yeah definitely um another thing that's definitely got some Nuance as far as it comes to crypto but um to your to your question about uh hierarchy and that kind of a thing the the first thing that comes to mind for me is um at least from a company perspective uh I don't know when I think of dows and kind of future of work and a lot of the ideas that are associated with that um personally I I go to this uh mental model of I don't want to say freelancing but you know everybody is kind of more autonomous in their work or um there's an idea that maybe people

will work for multiple Dows and and um I guess from a company perspective the one thing that I often hear in conversations about this is uh the benefit of having someone kind of embedded fully in their project versus um maybe being more of this freelance type that you know might work with many many projects um across the industry or different Industries and trying to draw an analogy to like my own work um having been a dragonfly for you know about a year and a half I feel like I've picked up a lot of really unique context that's specific to our portfolio where I could go freelance probably and and do

this for many many other companies but I wouldn't have that same level of knowledge or expertise as I do spending my time full time here on on this one kind of project so I think companies are thinking about that a lot in the context of Dallas too like um what's the benefit of having somebody working on our project full-time versus having them distributed across many many projects and that again can be like a much deeper understanding of their specific um structures and it can also be deeper relationships with other people on the team um maybe an easier ability to kind of Leverage colleagues or other people um in their own projects and in their

own work um so I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it all unfolds as as to how it's kind of proliferate over the years ahead um and even tools that help orchestrate Dows and and you know pull together um workflows improve which I think has been happening if that makes sense all right everyone time for a quick word from Circle and uscc as a crypto user you know the power of stable coins dollar digital currencies that transcend borders banking hours and Legacy Financial rails while circles usdc has quickly become one of the most trusted and widely used stable coins it's simple people use usdc because of its composability its stability and its

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crypto apps as a seamless trusted dollar digital currency usdc is a zero to one opportunity for the financial system if you want to learn more about usdc I would recommend you check out the recently published transparency Hub on circle.com it's a great update to circles content on usdc it outlines everything from links to their weekly Reserve reports monthly attestations blog posts that are written by their exact team that highlight how and why usdc was built so it is really recommend it just go to circle.com backslash transparency to access it now let's get back to the show yeah no definitely let's turn to compensation it's a big topic um maybe just what have you learned over

the last years or you mentioned there's a constant evolution in this topic so maybe just let's start there and then discuss this in in detail yeah absolutely it's really been eye-opening because the market has shifted and I think that's exposed a lot of vulnerabilities and how people had been talking about compensation over the past year and and I think a year year and a half ago people were kind of for better for worse equating compensation to equity which and I think is is a big mistake right because it sure they've been sort of replacing the equity component you might have in a company with tokens which does make sense given the nature of the space and that it is a decentralized space right but there are very different tax implications on how

tokens are treated versus equity and I think it's really important when companies are deciding if they want to issue token packages to understand work very closely with their legal team on what are the ramifications for employees because coming from a recruiting lens or just a people lens period This is not something that anybody has really done before and so you you I think employees are kind of looking for companies to guide them on what this actually it means right because For Better or For Worse if the market takes a dip the companies do get blamed for it and that's what I'm seeing now is you've had these packages that were issued at the top of the market when you know a token may be worth 25 and then it shifts it drops and now the token is worth two

dollars and so you have all these different challenges around my packages my packages disappeared maybe it was pitched as a bonus which is the wrong expectation setting right I understand why companies pitch it as a bonus but I think a lot of employees have certain mental models around what a bonus means and and you've had this shift of people were talking about packages in terms of dollar amount and I think that's also a mistake right because you can't control the dollar amount and I think if I were to give companies advice at this point I would definitely say you want to think about this in terms of just token packages and number of tokens and then you tell a story it really becomes about what the narrative is around what those

tokens will be worth in different scenarios right now we're in a downturn and so the tokens are going to be worth X because of X Y and Z right but we're building these different products and we're working towards a common goal and we have you know we believe that the token and the network will be worth X if we were to launch and execute on these different goals right and I think it's what it really comes down to is selling people on the long-term vision of what we're trying to build here um you know if we had had the flexibility or the visibility into our Equity price with coinbase during the last you know many many years I think there would be a lot of a lot of tumultuousness right but when I was early coinbase you didn't

know because it was just an equity package it was a 409a and there was a preferred value and that was kind of all you had it wasn't changing day to day and so I do think that companies really need to go back to who are they hiring and how are they selling the vision and finding people that are genuinely bought into the long-term Vision rather than the tourists as we talked about before that are really just interested in chasing the dollar because it's a very volatile Market yeah Zach before I go to you or two things I want to ask you one like how do you what are some of the red flags and how do you qualify a candidate like for for a Founder out there was saying hey I don't really know how can you tell if he's a quote-unquote a tourist

well people always tell you that they're not they'll always tell you that they're excited about the long-term potential of the space but usually if you dig a few layers deeper and you just kind of follow a thread it dissolves pretty it unravels pretty quickly right and so if you're you know asking about like how how are how long have you been following the space like why are you interested in the space and if it's something that's popped up just in the last you know couple of months and they've been they have a bunch of friends that are talking about it I would say that could potentially that could be the beginning of something deeper right but how much initiative have they taken to really go down the rabbit hole since then um are they pulling in different examples of why they think this could you know change the world are they

pulling in reasons why this is more meaningful to them so I think that's that's one of the things is just I'll follow the thread and see how quickly it unravels um but another thing too are people that are really pushing hard on the comp piece right I think compensation is important right we all need a certain amount of money to live but there is an excitement level of being willing to optimize for tokens or Equity or you know and being willing to just have flexibility when it comes to that that to me is a positive signal right and when people are very very rigid on that and they have certain Hard Cash amounts that they aren't willing to adjust on that's a red flag because if somebody is only interested in cash then

when the market flips they're the first ones to leave yeah I agree I think that makes a lot of sense and you know I feel like I should be careful using the word Taurus too just because I feel like uh everyone starts out as a tourist you know and and I I think there's there's room for tourists in the space for what it's worth you but there are also um yeah you know and so it's I don't know the more I think about it that word um there's truth to it and I I said it for a reason when I first said it but um I don't want that to seem unwelcoming to anybody who might see this that um is interested in the space and kind of wants to get into it and I also think that anytime you're doing recruiting um the onus is kind of on you to to

educate and uh highlight you know why this space makes sense and so um I just want to encourage people who might be interested even if they are still getting into the space to just to still think about it to still pursue it there's there's plenty of options it's okay to have growing conviction over there yeah absolutely first totally but you're Aurora's Point like um there's something to be said for a certain level of conviction or passion or curiosity or initiative in terms of diving into this stuff on your own and uh yeah I think that Curiosity just kind of naturally comes through as you talk to someone in terms of the the questions they ask or um yeah maybe maybe even how they think about the kind of the fundamentals of the space um and the the point about comp I I generally agree I think there are

some people who um came into the space or are trying to come into the space because they they see a potential outsized upside opportunity and I think that's true um but I I've also kind of found that even you know very sexy successful projects are still having trouble finding talent and it's it's more about a lack of Supply um I think it's because regular Tech obviously has much deeper Pockets than anything in crypto but supply and demand are are more balanced you know like people have had kind of decades to understand the tech um so comp I think gets particularly fierce when you're looking at like

crypto native Talent OR Talent that's kind of been in the space really has a deep understanding of it he has some expertise around um smart contract development or some other kind of Niche um thing within the industry because demand kind of far outweighs Supply so these these Specialists you know like protocol researchers or Engineers have an incredible amount of opportunity available to them and uh a fair amount of them are in pretty nascent but promising niches and and again can offer a lot of upside um and Beyond kind of the amount of money that's flowing to candidates being very high uh there's also a lot of Greenfield opportunity with how quickly

the space is growing and moving um and that means there's a huge opportunity cost for these folks who have this expertise that are that are looking to join different companies um I think lots of folks are even interested in kind of potentially founding their own things to tackle these problems and you know reap higher ownership or higher Rewards or whatever higher creative freedom whatever it might be um and I'll come back to the comp piece in a second but interestingly I think that doesn't also that doesn't only mean that um it may be more difficult to hire this type of talent up front I think it also means it can be harder to retain talent in this space as they develop deeper competence in in the industry because

again the demand is just so high and they have like an enormous amount of opportunity that kind of opens up to them um but as far as comp yeah I mean uh there's some stuff that's really special and unique to crypto the big one being token based comp and I have a lot of thoughts on token based comp um but beyond that yeah um I think it's just that you know for highly specialized roles you can you can see comp kind of be all over the board and and very very outsized um in terms of tokens specifically I think uh a lot of people might not be privy to like some of the benefits of it as well and to Aurora's point it is actually very different than Equity like there's

um instant liquidity faster time to Market like you know no no need to wait for a company to kind of go public or get acquired um there's often no exercise cost uh like options when you have tokens um I think it's it's it's arguable that the rewards are kind of more directly tied to the company's product or Community um rather than just being like a subject of kind of the capital structure of the business um you have access to lending markets where you can kind of uh tap underlying liquidity um there's all sorts of stuff you can do like staking and lending and yield generation with tokens um and interestingly I think it's

significantly for companies um there's often no dilution for tokens at least if you have a fixed supply of tokens exactly and um from a company perspective this leads to some really interesting challenges in terms of uh figuring out the right amount of tokens to give somebody or how do you how do you calculate the right amount of tokens um and I think Aurora was touching on this a bit but um different than equity in that you know for a traditionally funded startup um your valuation might be pegged to your more recent 409a unless you're like just coming off of a raise whereas with tokens this is kind of constantly Dynamic and constantly moving so if you're trying to calculate the amount of

tokens that you want to give to somebody based on the dollar value especially in such a volatile Market you may have somebody who joins when your token is a dollar and a month later it's a dollar forty and they have the same level of experience and they're doing the same kind of job but um just by nature of where the market is you know people can end up with like wildly disparate comp packages over time um so like we're always saying I think educating people on this and making sure that you're kind of taking an informed approach to how you calculate these offers is really important and there are various methods to doing it all of which I think have pros and cons um I've written a little bit about this um some some blog posts and stuff but um yeah token Compass is kind of a whole

different world and I I think when candidates learn about the benefits of it they often naturally get very excited but um it can be a draw for I don't want to say the wrong reasons but you know like like we're saying it can be a primary decision-making factor for some people um if that makes sense how how distracting is it for candidates or like once you hire someone you have real time Ticker on super early stage companies historically and you know web 2 land it takes up to a decade or so for a company like coinbase uber Lyft to go public and there's something comforting around that Aurora you mentioned this earlier in the coinbase example how distracting is this for candidates

and I guess I think it is distracting so let's just assume that's the case it's always lurking in the back of your mind uh whether one day you're a millionaire and another day you're not a millionaire um and so what are some of the design structures that you've resorted to to kind of combat this issue if you will Zach you kind of alluded to this just now yeah um I think the first thing is just consistent education like uh from day one um you know kind of informing people that um this is kind of the nature of the industry in a big way like you're we're talking about essentially like a brand new asset class um all sorts of new financial instruments and

um it's not super common that people have an opportunity to see the development of that type of market so I think from the time that you're kind of introducing the space to them or telling them about your company um encouraging them to understand the historical Trends in the space um is is useful and um with Founders that I've worked with I often try and drive at the importance of maintaining that education even during you know bull markets like you you should still be telling people kind of um this is this is what we expect this is how things might go like it's a great time to be here now but you know um education is is a critical part of that um I think um like how much of it should be upfront you know how much of it should be at the

discretion Milestone based how easy it is is it to embed certain Milestones uh trusting the core team to like you know honor certain promises how do you set a bonus how much of it is that a practice I'm just kind of thinking of my days in Investment Banking and that like I've worked in different fields and they're all kind of different um a lot of it is maybe tied at bonuses but setting a bonus is tricky and can piss people off and so I'm kind of curious um how you think about all of that yeah I think there are trade-offs to all these different approaches and in my opinion um fairness and consistency are something that you should be taking into consideration too like um you can do this any which way and there will be

benefits and detriments um but I think picking something that works well understanding why it works well for you and being consistent and transparent about how and why you're doing it is um has a big impact on how your team might feel about how you're doing things if that makes sense so I wouldn't say it's not sensible to set Milestone based you know um comp targets or something but to your point um some people might not like that versus you know kind of the more guaranteed cash flow or liquidity that they would get um in a more traditional structure um yeah I would really plus one what Zach said on that just um you know every different cultures are going to want to

do different things and so you know some of them may do incentive bonuses some of them may get creative with the vesting schedules right um to incentivize long-term retention and then to Zach's initial point just tons and tons of Education around you know why they're offering what they're offering and how that's consistent with the way the company does something right um but I do I really really Echo the consistency piece of being fair across the board with all the employees because you can just assume that employees will talk about their comp in general and making sure that you've hard-coded fairness into how things work is really crucial would you put comp in a smart contract which is Honorable and observable to everyone do you think that's viable and a smart thing to do

um or would you advise Founders to not um kind of embed this in a smart contract uh and be kind of open to everyone to observe yeah not only is it viable I mean it's happening you know like there are companies I mean people people see your wallets right of core team and like they're like okay well they distributed x amount to someone and it's fairly easy to identify right yeah and I I think that's one other unique thing about being in this space is the the space in general is very highly open source um and transparent and I don't even just mean from an engineering perspective but uh yeah in my opinion another reason why I kind of consistency and transparency and doing things from an ethical kind of first principles perspective is is so important because

you're right um these things are not impossible to discover you know if you can figure out a team's multi-sig it's not that hard to figure out where tokens are going and yeah yeah my interaction there's a really interesting uh like coordinate for instance that came out of urine that they've like embedded a lot of one of the core that Deb's air was very much an HR Theory and kind of openness and radical transparency if you all kind of like Bridgewater um How uh what are your thoughts on that like you know this idea that everyone should kind of freely understand and know and maybe even like upvote and distribute if like if there's a common pool of a co-op if you will like people should have the ability to on a merit-based ongoing basis which is

subject to like every quarter the team kind of votes hey Zach this quarter you really contributed to the code base and you deserve 40 of like the revenue or whatever next quarter if you didn't do you know such a good job you may get like the bare minimum of five percent like do you think that type of structure works is it too complicated uncertain for candidates or is there potentially a scenario where these type of more like on the frontier compensation structures and hierarchy structures potentially could work in this context um you're are you asking like across one specific team whether it makes sense to

kind of um empower the whole team to have input on like one person's comp and and you know be transparent with the whole org about what that comp looks like kind of a thing yeah yeah if you're familiar with these type of structures yeah I would curious to get your thoughts on that yeah I think this is what I was alluding to a little bit earlier when I was talking about like um some of these new models like you know Dows maybe where in the future you know it could even be people that are outside of the company that are maybe token holders um who are kind of like reviewing the performance of people who are Dow participants and um actually having an impact on how these folks get paid or reviewing their performance period um it's a hard one it's it's that's a big

philosophical question that I probably want to spend a little more time kind of thinking about I think you have to be thinking about fairness and you have to be thinking about how well the people who have input are really able to evaluate like do they do they have the right skill set to fairly kind of make those decisions and impact somebody's livelihood in that way yeah I I definitely yeah I think that you know Zach brings up a very good point in that um people while you can have a community of people that are all inputting you know if somebody what somebody's comp should be there are so many other factors that make us human that can

affect how somebody might view if somebody is deserving of you know an increase in compensation right there's insecurities there's lack of knowledge there's a number of different criteria but also I think another piece is is it measurable right there are certain roles where your output will be very easy to measure and I'm oversimplifying this right but you can see if you know a certain amount of code that's put into a code base is effective you can see it's just easier to measure that type of thing whereas coming from like a non-technical background there's a lot of things that are much harder to measure for example HR right how the heck do you measure HR is it important to running a company 100 because humans

are humans and they need to communicate communicate and they have emotions and they have like I said insecurities that have to be sort of attended to and managed and so it can be just as important to have somebody in that role but how do you measure that and how do you have a community vote on if that person is doing a good job or not so I think you know I love the idea I think philosophically having complete transparency addresses things like inequality right which I think is fantastic but trying to figure out what how do you build that in and what are the measurements that you use as you're putting it into the smart contract to decide how the system works is pretty complicated absolutely yeah and I guess the last

point on that too is like if if you think about having complete transparency around compensation I think uh there also has to be complete contextual transparency like transparency around goals transparency around all the different evaluative points that might play into someone's performance adjustments um and whether or not it's to the competitive benefit of the company to have all of that public is is another philosophical kind of quandary if that makes sense yeah no absolutely um what are your thoughts on references I've heard some folks say hey sometimes a particular candidate references extremely poorly or like is really smart folks sometimes tend to be

bipolar in the way that references kind of come out I'm curious if you found that to be true and your thoughts generally on doing references how much weight you should be placing if for instance you get a terrible reference how much like instances where you've like overlooked that and you know even hired the candidate after getting a terrible reference this is a fun question I feel like this is always kind of a controversial one depending on who I'm talking to I won't hire like I feel like if you if you reference Adam Newman like a lot you're gonna get like all kinds of answers yet here he is again raising again and again so right right uh and the reality is I think there's a lot of people in the space that can be a little

bit um extreme in terms of their personalities they're brilliant they're going to make something big happen but they're not exactly fun to work with um but I I wouldn't personally hire if I could avoid it I would not personally hire anybody without thoroughly back channeling them and I don't mean front door references I mean back channels where I find people that have worked with them in the past and I'm very careful never to threaten their current job right I'll find people that I trust who are willing to give me confidential information um that have a very well thought out applicable perspective on this person I'm not gonna go talk to somebody who worked with them 10 potentially at a company five years ago right that's not going to give me any signal but I think it I don't make any decision based off of one reference to right you get as

many as you can and so if you get one that just tanks the candidate you consider it in the context of what other people are saying and what you've observed with the candidate yourself I've actually had a candidate this is really funny I interviewed somebody I will just nameless person at one of the companies and actually really didn't like them I thought that they were really abrasive I thought they were poor communicator and I thought that they were just going to be very challenging for the whole team to work with but they were brilliant technically sound familiar probably like many people in the space um but you know the engineers that were work that were basically work traveling this person were telling me like this is one of the best people that I've seen in a really long time and so I thoroughly back Channel this person with people

that had worked with him in the past and I got so many positive results of people that said he knows his stuff also when he's really excited he really leans in and he's quite collaborative when he's really excited about a project and so we ultimately we decided as a group because he is he was prickly for sure um and he definitely rubbed some of the engineers the wrong way as well but they ultimately couldn't get past the fact that he just was such an amazing thought partner and engineer so we took a risk hired him and I'm so glad that we did because he ended up being one of the top performers but also once he got comfortable in his own environment some of the peculiarities about him of being in an environment of interviewing kind of

disappeared and it became sort of endearing almost so I think that's a good example of you know I think when it worked out referencing because we were able to get enough signal to decide that it was worth taking the risk but uh yeah I'm a big fan I guess in some I think it's very important to reference and I would advise all founders to do that when they're hiring yeah um I think I I agree with Aurora although I may not feel quite as strongly about about it um it is I do think it's really important and you know I don't know in my opinion I think this could be viewed as contentious um I feel like references that a candidate provides to you are at best partially effective in that they have the chance to kind of cherry pick the people who you contact

um but with that said there there might be a case and I have seen it happen where you learn something Illuminating and I think it can be especially helpful when um you're hiring someone like a manager or someone who has responsibilities uh you know managing other people um because manager report relationships have a very interesting Dynamic um but 100 echoing what Aurora was saying I think infinitely more valuable are back Channel references kind of behind the scenes conversations um with mutual connections that you trust and that's honestly just the nature of the industry like it's just going to happen um I think you know there are constantly reputational tidbits kind of being shared and that that kind of context can

be can be super super useful um and yeah is is common practice for sure I'm sorry I don't think go ahead sorry so sorry Zach I think Zach makes a really good point too though like I don't totally discount front door references right the ones that they give you because sometimes that's all you can get especially with Junior candidates that don't have a big Network and and to your point they can provide a lot of value especially when you're looking at like 360 degree references which is you know what he he had mentioned if you're hiring for a manager you should try to find somebody who's worked for them that has an opinion on what it's like to work for that person um so I think you know I probably came across as a little strong in that I like I won't hire without reference checking

and have I ever hired without back Channel referencing I have because I've had to in some cases right and you kind of get the most signal you can and then you you take the leap and if you if it works out great and if it doesn't you've made a mistake then you fix it as quickly as possible I I think I tangentially related thing that I I'm often telling Founders is like yeah you know to the immediate question about references like yes I think they're worthwhile and I think that kind of references in particular can be especially worthwhile but um maybe more importantly I think uh you should have confidence in your interview process period and the it should be a major goal to have your process so well designed that um you can hire without references if need be

that's not to say that you shouldn't do them but but I do think it's it's really really worth it to um be deliberate about what you're looking for and make sure that your interview process is kind of extracting all of the specific signal that you want um and it can offset some of the risk around references period whether or not they're they're worthwhile to run I guess more at uh I mean this has been a fascinating discussion I do want to get your thoughts both of you have been around the space for quite a bit of time you mentioned that there are things that you have adapted to change quite a bit over the years crypto is seen a lot and we've grown a lot as an industry but we're still early I think what are some of the kind of recruiting tactics or skills or things that you

place maybe wait on that you've changed or adapted in a meaningful way over the years particularly perhaps things that you would have thought would place a lot of emphasis on historically and now you've totally changed your mind on I feel like we were just talking about this actually uh I think the one that we were talking about earlier was actually it's less of a recruiting and it's related to recruiting but it's actually on the if you're working in the office or not I think I used to be a very big believer that you needed to be in the office getting a lot of face time with people in order to develop relationships of trust and have better communication

build a strong culture and I do think it helps a lot when you have that but I also have been kind of forced to change my viewpoint on that since working in the space and since the pandemic hit specifically and it kind of made it just easier for everybody to be completely distributed and companies are going to do it whether you think it's a good idea or not and they've been hiring all over the world and completely distributed form and it's forced me to kind of think about how do I give companies advice to make sure that we can mitigate some of the downsides when you do have a completely distributed Workforce and what what is basically the structure to ensure strong communication and clear prioritization of what what is happening

and how can you do that and there are actually many ways to do that there's a lot of tools that are available to make sure that you have that communication so I think that's that's a big one and then I think another one is when I first started it was in 2014 and there were not really there were no Crypt of native Engineers really right it was too early in the space there might have been but most of the time they were just it wasn't really a thing I don't think that was really even a turn back then and so I definitely would try to find people that were building with technologies that you would use in the space and I'd come through GitHub to try to find people that had basically you know working with the Technologies and the

tech stack that our company was using but I think as time has gone on and we just as to what was Zach was talking about before you have a supply and demand issue right and I think there's so many talented people from web2 that can't are they are coming in and they have a great skill set they have um great rigor and experience they're bringing in from some of these other companies that are in web 2 and I think think that those make some of the best engineers and as long as they have the desire and the inclination to ramp then you can bring them in and I think obviously we recruited only those people in the early days of coinbase because there weren't crypto native Engineers but I think um even more and more I've developed a conviction that smart really motivated

Engineers can learn anything and I don't necessarily think that it is as crucial there's certain roles right where I think it is more important like protocol designers protocol Engineers but I think I'm now more comfortable kind of giving guidance to companies to go recruit from web2 to find people that are going to come into their companies because supply and demand but also I think if you find the right people they will they will figure it out and then if you set them up with the right structure to onboard them then you can still make sure they're going to be successful yeah that's a good point I I agree with all those points and um I think two things that have come to mind as I was just thinking about this now um things that I've learned to place more value on or um the value of these practices has

become increasingly clear throughout my career doing recruiting especially um as I've moved towards earlier and earlier stage companies um one in my opinion is the importance of like a values driven hiring um so uh being very explicit about what you value as a company and the things that you want to see and everyone who you hire and kind of what your principles are to begin with and um incorporating that explicitly into your hiring process I don't think every company does this or cares to do it but I think there's a lot of benefit to it especially in the early days or in periods of rapid growth like if you're going from five people to 50 people over the course of the year

um making sure that you know what you really care about and that you're screening for those kind of principal level things can go a very long way in terms of like maintaining and safeguarding your culture as it scales um because it's naturally going to shift a lot when you're when you're growing at that rate and you're pulling in people from various backgrounds and kind of different cultures to begin with um I also think it's a really really big attractant for candidates if you can very clearly say what you stand for and how you work and they can kind of make a decision on whether or not they feel like there's alignment there so I think the importance of values driven hiring and seeing that as just as important as someone's technical skills is something that um has become more important to me

over my career uh the the second thing that kind of came to mind and I'm sorry if if you were gonna ask something or something I'm happy to pause yeah I was gonna say like uh on this point that I want to get both of your kind of how do you succinctly describe culture uh Ben Horowitz is a good book I think touches on this which is uh what you do um what you do is who you are how to create your business culture uh he has his own definition I'm curious to get your thoughts on culture which we talk about a lot in this industry but how would you succinctly describe culture do you have thoughts are you want me to go I do but I'll let you go first sure um uh in my mind I feel like it has a lot to do with

um your principles kind of what what you stand for um your workflows like the the way that you operate um those might be some of the main things um it's kind of I need to give that a little bit more thought for a second but those are those are the two things that kind of come to mind like um what are the things that you want to see remain consistent throughout the course of the company's growth um what are the things that you're proud of that we've accomplished or the types of things that you would feel proud of if we were able to accomplish um Are there specific traits that you feel like should be carried through and anyone who we hire I think that has a big impact on the cultural environment of

um your team and and what it is that you're building what kinds of things do you celebrate um what kinds of things do you want to avoid these are all kind of philosophical cultural um culturally loaded questions in my mind but yeah the the two words that immediately pop into mind are like um principles and kind of workflows as just a quick quick answer yeah I would agree with the framing of its active principles and uh workflows as well because I learned a lot about this during my time at Airbnb I think Brian chest the founders at Airbnb are obsessed with culture in a in a great way and I think um they were they were very thoughtful around thinking through the values and

actually incorporating a bunch of the employees as part of those to understand what do these mean to us and how do they Define how we do business together um and I really liked that because I think it it I think people have a tendency to think of culture as you know the people which right would make sense right but like what is it about the people that makes it such a great place to work and um by kind of distilling it down into these specific values that govern um or at least that you look for and when you're hiring it helps you to understand okay you like this group of people but what it why is it exactly that you really enjoy working with this group what is it about this person or about these people what are the characteristics that make you really

want to work with them and it gives you kind of a framework to understand how are you going to evaluate people that come in so you can continue to build on that type of person right and and the we've what I've what worked well at Airbnb and then also we took that same philosophy and we did that at coinbase was to break it down into these values and then incorporate them in a very structured way into the hiring process and so you decide okay as a company what are your values or what are your principles if you will and then you come up with a very structured rubric on how do you interview to look for those specific qualities and very consistent right because I think there's a danger when you're talking about values and culture for unconscious bias to creep in

and you have to be very structured to avoid that because otherwise people just hire people that are similar to themselves right but if you're very structured I think that can help you avoid that trap and and by tying it into not just the way you hire but also how you make decisions right um incorporating it into how you run your team meetings and how you how you decide if you're going to bring on a vendor right like if one of your values is um you know efficient execution to talk about one of coinbase's values that's a really important certain way that everybody functions and so finding people that are going to align with that works well or you know be a host is one of airbnbs and it's very uniquely Airbnb but finding people that you know kind of are similar on that front and care about

that as as a way that they they function so I think it's it's a very important to you know be thoughtful about how you kind of Define these principles of the way you do business but also to you know be very structured in how you're executing it yeah yeah I guess um well this I really enjoyed this discussion I think it's an important time for um you know people to understand the opportunities that exist in crypto um especially during this downturn uh the space is not going anywhere increasingly so I think it's continuing to attract really smart talented individuals um in spite of all the risks the uncertainty the volatility it's not hard I mean it's not easy uh to come into this space but increasingly

this house of classes movement is capturing the imagination of an entire generation across multiple verticals so really appreciate your perspective I guess like parting thoughts um you know for anyone listening out there Builders people that are want to get in come to the space um what would be kind of your advice and just parting thoughts and especially where people can find you can learn more about your Zach you mentioned you have a Blog so yeah where can people learn more about your your current um involvement and thinking in the space yeah for sure um trying to think if there are any super Salient parting thoughts I want to say if this is something that's interesting to you um pursue it there's probably more opportunity than you think and I think

that opportunity is ever growing um and if if I can be helpful happy to try you can catch me on Twitter um my handle is z-o-r-k-a-r-y zorkery which is a weird name that an old boss gave me a kind of a strange Twist on my first name um I don't have a personal blog at the moment but um I did write a couple of pieces that are on dragonflies research blog so if you check out dragonfly's website and click through to our medium you'll find them there uh there are two on token comp specifically um but I guess parting thoughts one one thing I think earlier in the conversation I said it would be very very hard for me to go back to another industry at this point um the reason probably being uh it's

incredibly intellectually stimulating it is incredibly multi-faceted like it's the intersection of so many different fields and disciplines in a way that I've never really seen before um I think that people who are naturally drawn to this space tend to be very ambitious and creative and um thoughtful and and establishing what's essentially like a brand new industry um so it's just a very exciting um worthwhile pursuit in my mind you know very very different from uh having been in some more established types of plays in in the past so uh yeah if I can be of help let me know what I would say follow your heart pursue it if it's something that you want to do I'm sure

there's a space for you yeah I think party thoughts on my end are you know if if you are interested in joining the space I think sometimes people have a misconception that it can be a very intimidating space like there are they're afraid to ask questions because it is a very technical space but the reality is people are incredibly welcoming and kind in the space and I think that surprises a lot of people that are new in that they will have a question that they deem stupid and in fact it's not um there's about 100 other people that were wondering the same exact thing and whoever has the courage to speak up is usually rewarded with somebody who's willing to not only answer it but do a deep dive and offers to go and you know meet them for coffee or to hop on a

video com video call to explain it in more detail and that's definitely the norm and so if you are interested in getting into this space don't be shy don't be afraid to look stupid just jump in because I think everybody across the board realizes that for this to grow we have to bring in more people from all different walks of life and um you know if there's a way that I can be helpful is the you know the admitted non-technical person who can you know explain what I know and point you in the direction I'd be happy to help and um admittedly I'm not um I think it's probably the best way is to just share hit me up on LinkedIn I think that's the best way to contact me but um I'm always really excited to get more people into the space and would love to help in

whatever way I can awesome well thank you both very much I think you're absolutely right on on that which is this space the ethos of Open Source is very collaborative we were all tourists or noobs at some point uh and and a large part of that is their respectivity and the access that you can have to to people in the spaces I think unparalleled relative to any other industry joining Discord channels on Twitter or the conversations there and you can have access to practically uh anyone out there so it's a very public open space and that's perhaps one of the more important pieces of of this movement so really appreciate both of you coming on uh really exciting times in spite of the market in spite of token prices and all that uh Builders will

continue to build and talent will continue to be intrigued and captivated by the possibilities of the space which are just emerging so really thank you very much both of you for coming on we'll likely want to have a follow-up episode um depending on how this Market shakes up but uh to remind people that the opportunities are still there in spite of everything that's going on so thank you very much for coming on and sharing your perspective really appreciate it yeah thank you it's been a lot of fun thank you thank you for having us [Music]