Silicon Valley and big tech firms are increasingly having trouble keeping talented and high-profile individuals from leaving their organizations. It’s now evident that Web3 and the wider crypto- and blockchains space is becoming increasingly interesting for talents to join. It wasn’t long ago that landing employment at one of the big tech companies was a dream come true for many, and it may still be, but now there’s an attractive alternative career path in the crypto space.
In a report by Business Insider, recruiters say that they’re seeing a significant trend of high-profile executives and developers leaving established firms to crypto, blockchain, and other decentralized tech projects.
“We are unquestionably seeing some of the best and brightest of Silicon Valley, or tech, move over to crypto. I’ve been at this a long time, I’ve never seen a change happen this quickly,” says one of the recruiters who managed to pull several “very senior folks” out from Amazon, Meta, and Google.
There are numerous examples to support the case: Novi, Meta’s (Facebook) wallet project lost their CMO to the payment tech company Circle in January; Amazon’s GM of AWS Edge Service jumped to the role of CTO at the exchange Gemini; and both the former CFO of Lyft and Uber’s ex-director of corporate development headed over to NFT marketplace OpenSea. Also, former head of Gaming at YouTube, Ryan Wyatt, left the tech giant to become CEO of Polygon Studios.
Many seem to believe that crypto exchange Coinbase pioneered the trend when the company became public, which may have opened up for talents to move to the company, and Coinbase became one of the first to recruit executives from big tech companies such as Google, LinkedIn, and Lyft.
One interesting aspect of this nascent movement is a potential snowball effect in that many others may follow the first movers, as the pioneers try to recruit more people to their new workplaces.
