The world’s top tech companies might be experiencing a serious talent drain to the crypto industry.
According to the CEO of Polychain – the world’s largest cryptocurrency investment firm – tech industry titans such as Google, Facebook and Linkedin are now seeing some of their top talent leave to join the fast-growing world of crypto startups.
Talking to Fortune, Olaf Carlson-Wee, formerly number three at Coinbase, offered some uniquely positive perspectives on the state of the cryptocurrency industry and was keen to focus on the longer-term growth of the space.
Asked whether the ongoing “crushing” of crypto markets was worrying, the young entrepreneur explained that he remains confident:
Not at all. Having been in this full-time since 2011, I think it’s hard to communicate how much growth we’ve seen since then… what I pay attention to is not the month-to-month market price of these assets but rather the developer momentum around building novel applications – and today what we’re seeing is an absolute exodus from many of these major tech giants, Facebook, Google Linkedin Snapchat of really high-quality talent now starting cryptocurrency startups.
Adding that the true measure of the momentum of the industry should be about the scale of project growth, not short-term fluctuations of the market:
To me actually there’s more wind behind the sails on the development front than their ever has been – so by litmus test we’re doing better than the industry ever has, but I think that most passive participants who are maybe speculators care more about month-to-month market price…it’s quantitatively as well – just how many projects are being built. And you can quantify this in all sorts of ways through Github repositories and forks of major cryptocurrency projects…
Growth vs. Hype
Interestingly it is precisely this feature of the space that has some within the industry concerned.
With new ICOs popping up almost every day, and a study published last week claiming that 80% of 2017’s ICOs were scams – it is perhaps unsurprising that industry leaders such as Binance Labs CEO Ella Zhang are actually keen for the “ICO bubble” to burst.
Carlson-Wee, while acknowledging the problem, believes that the challenge is more fine-grained:
“It's usually pretty easy to spot things that are outright fraudulent…the trickier thing is that among the top 5%, or even top 1% of projects out there – [it is] determining which architectures could be the best suited for new use cases. So a lot of what we think about is what really can be enabled in a novel manner through this technology, what are the novel, new behaviours a technology might enable.”
