In the past, I’ve provided advice to strangers and friends who are looking to get a full-time job in crypto. I’ve previously written about this before at length. But it’s been a few years and there’s some new actionable advice I wanted to offer as well as update my advice with more recent examples (what worked two years ago might not work today).

Why should you work in Web3 – aka crypto – if you’re just starting or in your early career? Well first, because it’s going to impact nearly every sector over the next two decades. Second, Web3 provides young individuals – regardless of job position – the ability to become an expert in this growing field without having to climb the decades-long latter (*cough* consulting/bank/tech *cough*) to reach a level where you can contribute meaningfully to a company or specific field of work.

Lastly, the smartest people in the world are moving into Web3 – exiting FANG companies – and joining crypto companies or DAOs. The closer you are too exceptional people, the more you learn. You should optimize for this effect in your early career.

Sponsored by: Messari

Messari is hiring for various positions, including developers, full-time analysts, marketing, business development, and more.

Some Words of Advice

There are only two types of advice: the advice someone passes on because it worked for them, or the humbled and ever-present advice learned from regret. Both are valuable, but you should only replicate the former.

My advice stems from both what worked for me and the things I didn’t do. While applicable to many people, my advice is directed towards individuals with little work experience, current university students, or those with a few years under their belt looking to make a career change.

Think of this advice like a menu, pick and choose a couple of options that sound appetizing to you and commit to them. Consistency matters.

Become an Intern

Interning is the fastest way to find out if you like a field. If you’re a student at any level and have the chance to become an intern I highly recommend it. This is perhaps the best option for students looking to learn about cryptonetworks and get some experience. While doing my MBA, interning for a local cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong was a great initial experience to get my feet wet and become immersed in the crypto space.

Join a DAO

There’s a variety of DAOs that contributors can join – social DAOs, protocol DAOs, NFT gated DAOs/communities, investment DAOs, and more.

Social DAOs – DAOs that predominantly form communities on exclusivity, events, or community activities – are great first DAOs to join in order to form connections and get a taste of how DAOs operate. These DAOs include communities in specific locations like ATX DAO, NFT gated communities, and DAOs like Friends with Benefits.

Alternatively, if you have knowledge or a particular passion for a specific product or protocol, joining that DAO can be a great way to gain initial experience and build your reputation. Many DAOs include Sushi, Rarible, Index Coop, Yearn, among others have various working groups for a range of individuals. Showing that you can provide value in a DAO is a great way to 1) develop experience and show that you can add value to a product/protocol and potentially get rewarded by the DAO for your contributions.

A word to the DAOists, you probably won’t be able to effectively contribute in more than 2-3 DAOs (unless the DAOs are very small). Optimize for high quality contributions rather than low quantity contributions. DAOs want to work with people who stick around rather than those who jump to the hottest DAO.

Become an Early Adopter

Being an early adopter is easy in hindsight. However, in the moment it requires taking risks. Those risks include opportunity costs in time, capital, and attention. Staying up to date in crypto, using new applications or protocols is costly and often comes with risks of potential ruin. Sometimes it requires being plugged in so that when a project like Loot or YFI drops, you’re available to mint or farm it immediately. Other times, it requires spending money yield farming or transacting on protocols that might never promise an airdrop or distribution to users. Remaining open-minded and not immediately dismissing new protocols like Solana, Cosmos, or Terra can also be challenging when you’re already invested in other competitors like Ethereum or how many Bitcoin maximalists avoided Ethereum early on because they didn’t wish to see the potential. Strong opinions, loosely held is a saying often repeated in tech investing, but its even more relevant in Web3.

Luckily, there are DAOs like Rabbithole that are helping educate the next generation fo crypto users, either incentivizing them to use protocols or offering the ability to perform tasks in exchange for XP. Rabbithold has successfully increased adoption in protocols like Polygon as well as enabled all its ENS successful quest completors to receive the ENS airdrop. While not all airdrops are substantial, several airdrops have generated significant returns.

More improtant than airdrops, early adopters often become the best people to hire early on as they become the most engaged members of a discord or community. Additionally, founders want to hire individuals who believe in their mission. Early adopters who are already contributing to projects in their free time are far better candidates than mercenary employees searching for the highest paycheck. For evidence, nearly every single one of Messari’s early research analysts came from its community analyst program which called for hungry, crypto passionate individuals willing to work for free. The Messari Hub today pays analysts, but still calls for the dedicated and crypto-obsessed as as a result, the majority of Messari Intelligence Team hires come from the Messari Hub.

Join The Messari Hub

Joining the Messari Hub can be a great way to get some experience, build your resume, get paid, and create connections in the crypto world. I participated in the original Messari analyst program by writing cryptoasset profiles. Ryan Selkis’ initial call for analysts was exactly what I was looking for, a place to get started, to jump in and learn as much as possible. I learned directly about ERC20 tokens, layer 2 state channels, and more by writing cryptoasset profiles, as well as indirectly through osmosis. When you’re around exceptional people – such as a mentor or other Messari Hub analysts – their knowledge and experience flows from them to everyone else.

Personally speaking, Messari was a significant benefit to my career early on, not only in experience, but also in terms of stature. In the ‘real’ business world, people listen when your resume has an Ivy League school or reads McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or [insert your favorite big-name company]. In crypto, people care less about your education (Messari doesn’t care about it at all) status or TradFi experience, but names like Coinbase, Messari, OpenSea, Uniswap, Compound, Chainalysis, are all signs that you’ve risen above the noise. It may be unfortunate, but humans have a desire to assign status.

More anecdotally, I’ve seen many Messari Hub Analysts move full time into crypto all because when given a more substantial platform – the Messari platform – they used it as leverage to get themselves noticed by the right people.

Write

Nic Carter, Chris Burniske, Ryan Selkis, Derek Hsue, Phil Bonello, Ryan Watkins, and Kyle Samani all became names in crypto because they started writing blogs about blockchain topics, mostly related to investment or research. One of the highest skills you can leverage is your ability to write. It’s hard not only to write good content, but to have the guts to put your opinions out there. That being said, anyone can be a writer—never tell yourself otherwise. I never thought of myself as a writer either. Hundreds of thousands of words later and here I am, still with typos in my pieces.

Some easy pieces or forms of writing:

Tweet

If you don’t like prose, Twitter is here for you. CryptoTwitter values those who participate or ask relevant questions. Some of the brightest people in crypto use Twitter to build their brands like Pomp, Ryan Sean Adams, Meltem Dimirros, Arianna Simpson Nic Carter, Ari David Paul, Hasu, Tom Shaughnessy, Jason Choi, Ryan Watkins, and many more. Just don’t be a troll or a shill.

Tips for Twitter:

You will start with zero followers, getting to 1k is the hardest, 10K is still a grind and it gets easier from there.

The last rule for Twitter – be authentic, people want to follow people, not robots.

Leverage Other Social Media Platforms

While Twitter has the strongest crypto community, you can find your preferred medium using Instagram, Reddit, Periscope, TikTok, or other social media networks. Most people can only be successful at a few mediums like Twitter and Linkedin or Instagram and TikTok so use whichever feels most authentic. I also highly recommend embracing new social media platforms or features like TikTok or Twitter Spaces. If you’re on a channel and you think to yourself “wow this content is garbage, I could def do better” then you’re probably right and there’s room for someone to grow an audience for quality content (looking at you TikTok). Generally, the takeaway is to experiment with new forms of media, and then stick with what works best.

Start a YouTube Channel or Podcast

Perhaps you’re not a wordsmith, but you excel at making videos, especially live content. Start your own Youtube channel or make some tutorial videos. YouTube is the second largest search engine – leverage it.

Podcasting is primed for crypto discussion. Jill Carlson and Meltem Demirors have a great podcast. Tony Sheng experimented with a fun podcast (still waiting for the next season). What Bitcoin Did by Peter McCormack. Nathaniel Whittemore started Long Reads Sunday which curated content and now hosts a successful podcast/Livestream.

Unsolicited podcast advice from someone who’s never hosted a podcast:

The Meatspace: Join Meetups, Events, and Clubs

If you’re in a locale teeming with blockchain activity, I recommend going to meetups or community events, most of which are free. Some common places to find events include Meetup and Eventbrite. For university students, check out your school’s blockchain club or start your own! I don’t recommend conferences if you’re looking for a job, as conference tickets don’t give a good ROI unless you’re incredible at networking (let’s face it you’d probably be employed if you were). Early NFT communities are starting to have meetups as are social DAOs like Bankless and Friends With Benefits.

Move to a Crypto City

By nature, we are all products of our environment. It’s no secret that if you want to be successful in tech, you should probably live where innovation is happening. I’m not saying you need to move to a major tech city like New York or San Francisco, but you should take advantage of it if you live there. Other up-and-coming tech cities in the U.S include Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, and Seattle. If you’re willing to venture abroad, you have even more options. Berlin, Shanghai, or Singapore are all great places to move to give yourself an edge.

I will caveat this by saying where you live is becoming far less important. Most crypto companies are remote-first, but if you’re young, I still recommend meeting humans in-person to cement those connections. It is soooo much easier to build connections with your coworkers in an office or over drinks on a Tuesday afternoon than it is over Zoom. It’s still very possible to build great connections in a remote-first environment, but it requires more effort.

Leverage Your Strengths (Wizard Abilities)

Those with some working experience should utilize it. If you have any skills including:

If you have any of these skills, then you possess an advantage over many others currently in crypto. For the students and youngsters out there, leverage your time to learn new skills or gain experience.

Offer Your Help and Assistance

This doesn’t mean telling someone “please let me know how I can be helpful” as if you’re a VC or parody VC account. The crypto world is small compared to any other industry. You can reach out to people on Twitter and to a lesser extent email. Don’t reach out to the manager of a VC firm or CEO of your favorite crypto company. They likely won’t respond. Find someone newer to the firm as they likely have more time and will relate to you as a young professional. There are a bunch of articles about how to reach out to people, so I won’t say much, other than you should find a way to offer value.

Some examples:

Find a crypto buddy

ETH has friends and so should you. Find a friend that is just as passionate as you are and work with each other on any of the above topics. Nobody makes it to the top alone and if you do it’s lonely there anyway. Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman are a well-oil content machine. Hasu – arguably one of the best researchers in crypto – writes with other individuals quite often.

How to Find a Job

There are two ways to find a job. The easy way and the hard way.

The Easy Way

Be a human and go f*cking network. In all sincerity, networking is the best way to find a job. Putting in the effort to reach out, go to networking events, or communicate online will help you more than you know. At the end of the day, people want to work with their friends.

The Hard Way

The best piece of advice I can offer: you need to stand out and target your audience. The quality of your application is more important than the quantity of applications you send.

Sending the same cover letter or application to 100 jobs may get you a job, but if there are only a handful of companies you really want to work at, you need to put in the effort to get that job.

My last piece of advice for crafting your application – badass people are different, so think differently. Here are just a few ideas:

Employers value people who act on their own and produce cool shit.

If you’re still a student or only a year or two out of school, consider yourself lucky. You most likely have fewer commitments and plenty of time on your hands – or time you can spend more efficiently – to build your brand and follow the above suggestions.

A Note About Your Resume

Again, make your resume specific. If you’re totally lost on how to craft your resume or want to start from scratch, Harvard offers a lot of free material. Also, get creative on your resume – make a notion page – or at least add some aesthetically pleasing template. Remember, you’re dealing with humans – with lizard brains – who are naturally drawn to bright colors, graphics, and pictures.

Importantly, use data and metrics when possible, even if it’s just showing your month-over-month social media growth, best blog post, newsletter subscribers, or something else impressive.

Also, nobody reads your entire resume. They want the highlights, relevant experience, and links to your important channels (i.e. Github, Twitter, TikTok, etc).

These are some great resources to find a job:

Final Pieces of Advice

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

You will feel like you are not qualified. Apply.

You will be afraid to tweet or post thoughts publicly. Do it anyway.

You will be wrong. That’s okay, your opinions are allowed to change.

Apply.

Final Thoughts

Work hard, stay humble, and live happily.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Messari for giving me the opportunity to work in a field I love, surrounded by incredible individuals. Also, thank you Crypto Twitter, most of you are awesome.