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A recent trend shows that the crypto industry is attracting high-yield companies, not only from the best banks but also from centralized IT giants.
A co-founder of AngelList wrote in the spring that the blockchain industry is attracting first-rate professionals from Silicon Valley faster than any other innovative sphere since the Internet appeared.
This was true despite the bearish sentiment that dominated the market throughout the year. Among those who have decided to abandon their safe lives working for global IT giants, there are those who used to hold high-level positions at FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. These people have dared to support blockchain and crypto startup with their time and effort. Let's see who they are and where they went exactly, dropping their previous safe and highly paid positions.
Kahina van Dyke
Left Facebook, he went to Ripple
Before Kahina van Dyke obtained the position of senior vice president for business and development of Ripple, she had some extraordinary works on her curriculum vitae that any high-level artist can envy: Facebook, Menlo Park, Citibank and Mastercard. But since many people in the cryptography industry see Ripple as a centralized platform, which also aims to work with the best banks to help them conduct payments with XRP globally, it could be said that Kahina van Dyke has chosen a job more or less the same lines – she just went to another company.
Van Dyke left for Ripple in June, claiming that the platform has the potential to help banks and ordinary users get rid of the obstacles that make transnational payments extremely slow and expensive.
Leo Chen
Amazzone shot down, joined Harmony
Chen was part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team, the cloud division of the online retail giant, and joined Harmony. This is a consensus platform that continues to work on its development and aims at quite high results in the industry in general.
His interest in cryptography began in 2012, when he invested in Bitcoin, earning good profits and then became interested in Ethereum. Chen admits that working for Amazon, he has learned some useful software architectures and can be a basis for building a secure and high-performance blockchain platform.
Alok Kothari
He left Apple to found harmony
Harmony gets two points here. Kothari works as an engineer there, and was also a co-founder. The team of Harmony seems full of people who have a past of FANG, and this shows a simple basic principle true for many startups crypto: if you find a former collaborator of FANG, surely you will meet more in the same team.
Kothari had worked for Apple for three years, and his responsibilities included working on Siri, the vocal assistant. But he later decided to open a shop. He believes that blockchain can transform the world and help data become decentralized for the benefit of all.
Ryan Lechner
The former Netflix employee joins ConsenSys Labs
What Ryan Lechner does in ConsenSys Labs is that he manages the many investments that have made this ETH store, located in Brooklyn. At Netflix, he was trying to expand the strategy of non-fiction content.
He joined ConsenSys Labs after listening to a podcast on the transformation that DLT and crypto can bring to the world; this was added to his previous reflections on these two innovative sectors and made him leave Netflix to join the encrypted startup in 2017.
Alex Feinberg
He left work at Google to work with OKCoin
Feinberg holds the position of director of commercial development at the OKCoin cryptographic exchange. In reality, this is not his first "encrypted work". After leaving Google, he joined a startup called Petram Security.
He admits that his interest in cryptography is financial. Once, his friend had told him during the dinner he had invested in virtual goods and got good profits. So Feinberg thought that people who share his vision of the world outside of Google are richer than his colleagues who see life from a different perspective. He left Google at the start of this year.
Chandan Lodha
Abandoned Google to found CoinTracker
Lodha co-founded CoinTracker, an app that calculates crypt investment tax.
Lodha has renounced his position as a product manager at Google in mid-2017. He admits he has already dealt with crypto before, but was rather skeptical about it, treating it as a hobby. But then the crypt began to grow in price and Lodha began to take it seriously.
Together with another "googler", he had the idea of a startup working in the cryptographic sphere. He admits that his work for Google gave him the necessary experience to focus on customers to create simple and user-friendly products for them.
To sum up
It is hard to say whether this trend will continue now that the market remains bearish, since as we can see above, not all people who switch from traditional technology to the cryptographic / blockchain sphere do so based on convictions and enthusiasm.
Some of them are attracted financially by the possible results. As often happens, almost every industry is based first and foremost on the enthusiasm of its workers. Because if there are not big profits for a long time, those who only pursue finance and benefits will move somewhere better, and only those who truly believe in what they do will stay. Time will tell if they succeed.
