Conversations #8: working in Web3
Working in web3
Amidst all the bearish & anti-crypto sentiment, one undeniable truth stands out: web3 might be one of the most attractive industries right now.
Instead of continuing to bother my friends on how it elevates my quality of life, I decided to write an article boiling down my thoughts on the topic.
Remote work
The obvious perk of working in web 3 is remote work. Covid murdered the excuses from old-time managers preventing most “intellectual” workers from staying at home, but even then, those working in investment banking, corporate law or other uptight jobs might have noticed managers have a hard time letting go of the good old office.
Unlike the old world, web3 companies are online first, which means remote is the default setting of work. Now, I’m not just talking about three days home, two days at the office, but potentially the full-five days home, no office lifestyle, with sometimes collaborators on different timezones. This means that web 3 workers are not just working from home but also traveling all around the world, living the full remote experience.
From traditional management, it can be thought as madness: is your team actually working ? Coming from this world, I also took some time to adjust (and still do). However, it turns out you don’t need to police your team for them to work. Hiring the right people, giving the clear milestones and paying them correctly is actually sufficient to run a fully remote small to medium scale project.
Of course, to efficiently enable this, your team needs to synchronize frequently, have an asynchronous work office (hello Discord, Asana & Github) and meet in person to create closer work relations. Oh, and you will need a zero tolerance policy for slackers.
It’s not an easy management method, but it works, and you will attract the best. However, it is extremely important to realise that this rhythm of life is not for everyone. Some view their workplace as the prime social moment of their life. For them, working remote is a torture cell of solitude. Before working remote full-time you have to be sure you either can live with solitude or have a vibrant social life on the side.
This is especially true for founders, as you can get sucked in your work so hard that you end up working 24/7: you interact with partners & your team during the week and do community management during the week-end. This is due to the fact that most retail users use DeFi as a hobby, and spent most of their time in the ecosystem on week-ends.
The new frontier
At their core, blockchains are trust machines. Far from being a panacea, their applications potentially impact a wide range of industries like finance, logistics, art or politics.
In crypto you aren’t just bound to build on top of pre-existing systems. You can chose to become your own central bank, to create entirely new networks from scratch (and discover how complex the ones in place actually have to be to be functional at scale). The sheer breadth of possibilities, in inventing, replacing and / or liberating, in all of these industries is a dizzying experience. For people with big dreams, web 3 is the best sandbox they could ever dream for.
Changing the world has mitigated from writing books to writing code on blockchains. And unless nation states find a way to totally shut down blockchains, the opportunity is not going away.
So, to summarize, working in web3 is accessing the most flexible working conditions, on some of the most interesting technologies, and the pay is most of the time good. What’s the catch ?
This vast ocean of opportunities is, as always, accompanied by major regulatory risks, since innovations cannot be regulated before they mature (the law-makers need time to understand the issues). These issues are going to be more and more blatant as normies realise that crypto is not a neutral tool but a highly ideological one, pushing for the Cypher punk ideology.
Web 3 was built on the back of bitcoin as an allergic reaction to centralized control of nation states and banks. While raising from Silicon Valley VCs and onboarding a good chunk of less cypher-pilled users has severely diluted the mission of the industry, we are often reminded of its importance, but also it risks. Coding protocols in the grey area of the banking regulation can have some serious consequences as some developers have to discover. This will increase as scammers and hackers have been roaming freely for all too long and Garry is more or less shooting at everything on sight.
The cool thing to notice is that a lot of the brilliant builders attracted to web 3 by the opportunity, the freedom or the money are slowly adhering to the cypherpunk ideals, despite, and maybe because, of the risks.
I view today’s web 3 industry as a honey trap for smart folks towards the cypherpunk ideology.
See you online frens!
Worth your attention:
Recycling electric batteries is not as easy as it seems
AI is becoming mainstream, you can now ask it if something is politically left or right