My Career Change

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Quite a few people have asked me about my recent career pivot, so I thought it would be most efficient to write a brief article.

In April last year, I took some sabbatical leave because of an illness within my family. This afforded me a little headspace for the first time in about 7-8 years. I spent this time investigating blockchain/ crypto/ digital assets (including cryptocurrencies, DeFi, NFTs, community tokens, DAOs, and a bit of the metaverse). I had been interested in Bitcoin as far back as 2012-2014 but got a bit spooked by the volatility. (Big mistake!). I had always meant to return to it, but work/ life/ other stuff took over. (Compounding my big mistake!).

I was taken aback by what I found this time around. The whole space is expanding at incredible speeds (e.g. crypto adoption is significantly faster than internet adoption was at the same point in its evolution). It is sucking in vast swathes of talent from more mainstream endeavours, and it is churning out huge volumes of technology and solutions (some of which is transforming/ will transform the world).

Fast forward 9 months, and I have decided to leave a 20+ year consulting career to co-found some organisations (both centralised and decentralised) focused on Web3.  My rationale was as follows:

·      I have a finite number of working years ahead of me. I want to use that time as effectively as I can. As an example, I have spent much of the last decade working with retail banking clients. At the point of writing this, the nascent world of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) already has a number of better solutions for customers than Traditional Finance (TradFi). Soon (next 0-3 years), it will beat TradFi on all products. U.K. banks could have chosen to compete, but they didn’t. Instead, they chose to obstruct (e.g. under the guise of managing fraud risk, several of my banks outright ban their customers from transferring what customers think of as their own money to crypto exchanges). From up close, I have watched TradFi giants try to transform their closed legacy digital systems. They’ve spent years and billions of pounds, and they can’t do it. They’re too complex and too broken and now it’s too late. The open networks have already won – we’ve all just got to watch the final moves play out.

·      The pandemic has had a big impact on my outlook. I no longer wish to work from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m Monday to Friday. I don’t want to commute into an office every day.  I want work at times that suit me and my family. I would like to base my family outside of the U.K. for several months a year. This is possible in Web3. The old model is on its way out. So is the idea of organisations with huge offshore centres/ teams. The new paradigm is globally disbursed networks of makers/ talent with sovereignty over the way that they work. Outcomes trump almost everything else.

·      I am intrigued by the concept of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). They’re an attempt at creating better structures within which to work and interact. In many instances, they will replace traditional companies. At their best, they are non-hierarchical, decentralised, democratic, pseudonymous, and their incentive structures optimise growth (i.e. members are rewarded for the value that they deliver to the community). We’re still early though. From experience, they aren’t perfect, and it is sometimes necessary to compromise on the ideological purity for a limited time in order to get a project off the ground. However, they are a noble experiment and have the potential to solve a lot of the problems that we have all experienced in centralised organisations.  I want to play my small part in creating these workplaces of the future.

If anyone has any views on this whole topic, please feel free to comment or send me a message directly. It’s probably best to contact me on LinkedIn - I’m active in the Discord servers of various Web3 projects and on (Crypto) Twitter but I’m mostly anon in that world.