TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #396: How To Get Hired In Bitcoin with Bitcoin Talent Co.

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Join Marty has he sits down with Andy Thompson and Michael Tanguma from Bitcoin Talent Co. to discuss the process of finding talented individuals to work for bitcoin companies. Apply with Bitcoin Talent Co Follow Andy and Michael on Twitter 6:52 - Andy's background 11:00 - Bitcoin's intellectual capital bottleneck 14:55 - Reaching out for talent 20:14 - Understanding bitcoiners offers an edge 23:06 - Education 27:42 - Recruiters are the first laid off 29:46 - Recruiting pains in rapidly growing companies 32:09 - Back to education 36:25 - Crediting contributors 40:24 - Addressing concerns of bitcoin being too niche 44:15 - Everyone's going to need bitcoin knowledge 49:10 - BTCo just launched, what's next? 51:22 - The design bounty 52:56 - Comparison to jobs boards and general recruitment industry 59:38 - Common blunders in recruiting 1:05:25 - HEY YOU! Get a bitcoin job! 1:07:01 - Final thoughts Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

so freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc rip 396 we're getting close to 400 logan what are we going to do at 400 pop the champagne we're going to pop some champagne all right i'm gonna get a bottle pop some champagne at 400 should be in a couple weeks 400 episodes well only 396 i have to make it through four more hard to believe five years 400 rips coming up this one was a very uh i don't want to say different it was more like business focused sat down with andy and michael co-founders two or three co-founders of the Bitcoin Talent Co., a new recruiting firm looking to pair talent with companies in the space. They've highlighted this, highlighted and identified and are looking to fill this gap that exists between companies that desperately need good talent to build out the Bitcoin standard via their companies and the talent that exists out there that can actually do it.

Bitcoin Talent Co. is here to fill that gap. if you're a company in the space looking for good recruiting skills or a good recruiting firm dedicated to the Bitcoin industry or if you're somebody sitting at a tech firm, a big bank

that is that Bitcoiner that has a NIM that's been dying to get in the space, reach out to BitcoinTalico. We have a link in the show notes. But this was brought to you by our good friends at River. River's here.

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backwards reserves and has held a multi-sig storage it's a beautiful thing so go to river.com slash tftc set up an account with that ref link uh you have the chance to get bitcoin back twenty dollars after the first thousand dollars worth of bitcoin that you buy and then another eighty dollars on top of that if you buy ten thousand dollars via river river.com slash tftc this was also brought to you by our good friends down the hall at unchained capital they're here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model this plays out in their vault model their vault product excuse me it's a two or three multi-sig in which you hold two keys unchained holds one since you have two keys in that two or three multi-sig quorum you have control

over your bitcoin if you're ever in a pinch you'd unchain to be the second signature in that two or three quorum they're there for you they have a concierge team go to unchained.com slash concierge set up a consultation if you're a business a high net worth individual or an individual with a material amount of bitcoin that wants to secure it properly you want to eliminate single points of failure in your custody set up hit up the concierge team set up a consultation they'll walk you through multi-sig their vault they'll get you hardware wallets they'll help you set those up back them up geographically distribute them they're here to be a partner your business high net worth individual individual a lot of bitcoin you could potentially be a net worth

individual at some point unchained is the team for you unchained.com slash concierge use the code tftc you'll get 50 off that onboarding process last but not least is where it was brought to you by good friends at crowdhouse crowdhouse back freaks they're doing great things i had an incredible experience paying my first uh crowdfunded bill for somebody else not for myself via crowd health ux was seamless i didn't have to do anything it was good to know that i was helping another individual pay their medical bills but then more broadly that i was helping out with it with a company that really is trying to give sovereignty back to individuals with their health care expenses specifically it's much cheaper a lot of layoffs right now in the tech

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After a certain amount of months, when you pay your monthly fee, um we'll take a portion of that fee put it in your dedicated bank account put the other the rest in bitcoin so you can stack sats alongside your cuck buck bank account that's building up at crowd health go to joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc sign up today and you're gonna get 99 a month for the first six months use the code tftc enjoy this rip we're gonna win freaks you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to

devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What's up, freaks? How's it going? It's going good. We got a weird... It's not weird. We got two in the studio.

I wish I was there with you guys. We do too. Next month, he'll be here for the takeover. That's right. But we're here. Two of us in person, one remote. We're here to talk about something that's really not too sexy in the Bitcoin space.

which is recruiting getting talent into the companies that exist in the space and the companies that will be built in the space i'm sitting down with the co-founders of bitcoin talent co andy and michael michael we work we work closely many things andy i've been just introduced to you what in the last couple months but i'm very excited about this project because I think it's desperately needed before we dive into the nuts and bolts of how Bitcoin Talent Co. came to be, what you guys are going to be doing, and the mission, because I think it's a very important one. And like I said earlier, a desperately needed service in this space. Andy, let's learn a little bit more about you, your background in recruiting, particularly in the tech sector in San Francisco. Yeah. So as you said, I mean, my, my whole career has been in the recruiting landscape

and for better or worse, yes, here in, here in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the entire like startup scene. Right. And so for the better part of, you know, 10, 12 plus years now, I've, I've had the fortune of recruiting internally at large companies. I was actually an early employee at Uber, which obviously household name now, but I was there way back when, when it was a burgeoning startup, you know, almost 10 years ago now, seeing that company grow from just a couple hundred to 20,000 people globally by the time I left, real crash course in how to hire at scale. And then obviously seeing the downstream effects of what can happen when hiring processes are broken. So my stint there was PhD in recruiting, if you

will. Aside from that, I've had the opportunity to work in agencies, also supporting early to mid-stage startups here in the Silicon Valley landscape. And then actually for the past three years, I've been running my own business. So I started a recruiting firm back in January of 2020, again focused on that early to mid-stage tech landscape supporting c to series c companies across a wide array of industries i mean b2b b2c both everything within those two buckets and for the most part it's been going well you know i've enjoyed my journey as a business owner i've i've had the opportunity to work with a lot of exciting companies but to the side of this my journey as a business owner has been kind of running in parallel with my journey as a bitcoiner

right and in the past three years and especially the past three years goodness everything we've seen, you know, the global financial markets from, you know, COVID to now, I mean, my goodness, you know, if you don't get Bitcoin now, you're not paying attention, right? And so for me, these two paths, I've been really running in parallel. And as all Bitcoiners, you know, can attest to, at some point, you just, you can't have that, you can't be living in two worlds, right? So how can I marry business with pleasure? For me, it seems obvious now, but for the period of a couple months, I was just trying to think of how I could transition to a career in Bitcoin, how I could support Bitcoin at large. And light bulb went off. I've already built a business,

built a product and a service that actually can prove valuable in the Bitcoin landscape. And so for me, just thinking of how to repurpose the infrastructure I'd built, repurpose the recruiting services I'd built to now start supporting Bitcoin-owned companies is kind of where the initial seed was planted for what has now become Bitcoin Talent Co. This was happening towards the end of last year. I wanted to do this in the right way. I knew I came with the recruiting expertise, but I thought it would be super important to really align with industry professionals, people who are already in the space today. And so that's where I reached out to Michael. It seems like we've known each other for years now, but we really just started

chatting a couple of months ago, pitched him on the idea of Bitcoin Talent Co. Michael, to your credit, it clicked right away. He really seemed to understand what I was trying to do. He had experiences of how this could have been useful in his own background, whether with 1031 or Unchained. And so long story short, you know, we got to work, started building the building blocks of Bitcoin Talent Co. And here we are launching officially today. So really thrilled. Hell yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, Andy really embodies the ethos that you have of like, just do it. Just just jump in. Right. Sometimes we can overthink things. And so it's like, let's go. If we have a thesis, we have a product, we have things that people want, which they've already asked for.

um what was interesting you said in the beginning is it really isn't like recruiting isn't sexy unless you need it and so there was two lenses i looked at it like when we were trying to scale and chain from 10 to 100 it was the bottleneck and when you invest in a company it is the bottleneck after the capital comes in because the only thing after bitcoin that's more scarce is human capital that understands bitcoin and can actually operate at the highest level and so when andy talked to me i was like well of course and you know i've mentioned this to parker we thought through like trying to find somebody because every bitcoin company has its own like nuance you have the traditional world being able to execute at a high level whether you're in

product design engineering but then going into a company like a strike and unchained whatever the bitcoin company is has its own subtle twist on what's needed and finding that right mix and i specifically think of like client solutions with unchained capital there was a mix of needing financial services but also understanding multi-sig collaborative custody and then also being able to speak to people and being having a traditional background in sales that's practically a unicorn was a unicorn back in 2020 it's still a unicorn because there's very few people that have that like skill set mapped out um and the other part is the thesis that we both have held is that the majority if not all the businesses and individuals that are going to scale most of

the businesses and individuals going to scale Bitcoin haven't actually come in yet. We're still so early. And so that's where it's really interesting to having Andy, for better or worse, sitting in Silicon Valley and SF. We'll get him out one day. We'll save him.

We'll get him down to Austin. But close to that network is how we can incept the next wave of folks coming in that would have traditionally looked at Web3 and get them down the right path early and then in the right position so we can do what we're all here to do. Yeah.

Like you said, the bottleneck, one of the largest bottlenecks in the space is getting that intellectual capital into the space and then able to execute. Like you mentioned, Striked and Unchained. Strike, obviously innovating in the Lightning Network. That's a whole different monster than multi-sig quorums at the base layer protocol. So finding that talent that actually understands the nuances between these different areas of the Bitcoin stack is not easy. And so what you guys are building with Bitcoin Talent Co., it's more than just a simple recruiting firm, correct? You guys have to vet potential talent. But not only that, you can help produce talent via education as well.

So that's going to be a big part of what you guys are doing. Yeah, I'll let Andy speak to some of what he's already been doing. But I'll just emphasize to your point how important it is. like when we think about, uh, Unchained specifically and, and educating on collaborative custody and, you know, discussing with Bitcoin holders, high net worth individuals, why this is a better format. You can't just kind of, uh, get onboarded in a week or, um, have a class because when you, when you think about going to somebody that has a large amount of capital tied up into this asset and they're parking it with you or trusting you, like there has to be this

visceral conviction and understanding and and there's a process to that and so something like that at the time required proof of work it required somebody already either being a client of unchained or having leveraging multi-sig and can really speak to it but there is this concept of um you can shorten that gap and and all the different nuances we talk about whether it's lightning on chain design you know somebody at fold there is this world where you can actually tighten that uh and shorten that time to fill and there's different ideas there but i'll let Andy kind of talked through what he's been doing existing and then like some of the thoughts that we have and really being able to help Bitcoin companies. Well, kind of starting at more of a

higher level, I look at it this way, you know, as Bitcoin assuredly kind of absorbs the wealth from all other asset classes, we believe this to be true. We think we're on the path. We know we're on the path type of Bitcoinization, right? So as this happens, so too will it start to attract the top talent from other industries, right? That is something that will to some degree happen organically right. But it will happen over time. It'll happen slowly. And to the extent we can kind of close that gap and speed that up and bring the right kind of like innovators and builders and operators to the space today to help build the consumer apps that will drive adoption, to help build better user experiences and infrastructure and mining services, all of that. All of these

things are going to ultimately help Bitcoin at large. And so for us, we look at it in a couple ways. Bitcoin, I will say this, it's pretty unique with respect to other industries where you're going to have talent pools coming from different directions. We'll start and just say the existing excitement within diehard Bitcoiners today, that's amazing. There are already people who have made the decision to dedicate their lives to this, to transition careers. You don't find that as much in other spaces. There's no like, people just, I need to quit my job to work in CPG. I got to work at a consumer marketplace. You're not finding this right. So Bitcoin already has that above others where, you know, to the extent we can raise that flag for people who are

already expressing interest, already excited to come into the space. Great. You know, let us know and we'll help connect you with the right companies. So that's a huge talent pool. But to build a Bitcoin companies up to date and the ones that are that are still to come with only that existing talent pool, it's not going to be enough. Right. So this is where, you know, the actual recruiting machine that we're seeking to build. And what I know, I mean, as a recruiter, I mean, just maybe a chip on my shoulder, right? But recruiting teams are important. Recruiting is a process. Recruiting is a skill, right? And building team. Uh-oh. We're not frozen.

Landscape with operators from other spaces. And this is where we can talk about all of the facts that we know in the recruiting landscape around the vast majority of the workforce being made up of passive talent who are not actively seeking jobs, right? There's an exceptionally higher number of high quality candidates coming through outbound sourcing than inbound applications. I think it's like, you know, sourced candidates are five times, over five times more likely to be hired than inbound candidates. And so this is something that we really need to be focused on as well, is bringing the talent pool from both sides. And so that's some of the systems and tools that we're putting together. And to some degree, not reinventing the wheel. I want to

take away our secret sauce here, but recruiting as a service has existed for decades, right? I mean, this is a valuable resource for companies. We're just surprisingly enough looking to be the first ones to focus that on the Bitcoin landscape. So yeah, starting this now, it's really exciting to see, I think, what we can start to do to support the space. Yeah. Andy, you cut out there for a little bit um but i think i grokked what you were saying outbound so going out to talent that exists in other areas is much more successful than than inbound people coming in putting in their resumes and so i guess on that side like doing the outbound like knowing that there are these companies with particular needs and i know you guys have a few lined up at bitcoin talent co

what's that process like of of pinging somebody doing an outbound reach like hey i notice you have these skills we've got a company over here in the bitcoin industry that's looking to fill a role that that you may be good for what's what's that process sort of like he dropped out i think we lost him he texted me what'd he say did we freeze and he's back there we go you're back all of it it was a beautiful soliloquy no we got it we caught most of it all right yeah let me know where you lost me though well i think i think on the note that he left off so uh marty was asking about the the outbound and this is a healthy uh uh not debate but the market will tell us that i have this thesis that traditional outbound is always will always be effective but that there's

been this missing um intermediary in the market because what we know about bitcoiners are sitting at these companies so and is an example of us exactly they're sitting reaching out and some of the best folks at unchained capital reached out to me cold on linkedin from the black rocks of the world truest that were looking for positions and there's just been this difficulty for individuals at these large-scale companies to get in whether it's present themselves figure out if they're even hiring there's just like this mismatch in the market and so that was one of the big light bulbs in any approach it's like the kind of thing that's like well this has to exist because if we don't do it somebody else's and it needs to exist because that intermediary

to facilitate okay well i have design i have product i have marketing and then that's where i see the ultimate opportunity as being that two-sided marketplace to be able to match in the time to fill because it's one thing to find the right person for six months or 12 months but to be able to do it in six weeks after you raise capital and get to market is an incredible business opportunity and moat and that's part of the thing we can we can talk about as some of the advisor team that's come in because we don't know design we don't know product we don't know engineering um but we do have an understanding of the bitcoin landscape and who are the right people and then how to like vet and understand them because that's another component we should

touch on is just being able to think strategically in this market because you can hire a recruiting firm and some are going to go cold outbound and literally have no everybody's had it where somebody hits them on LinkedIn or email and you're like why is this person spamming me and then at best you're having somebody that understands somewhat strategically like okay well I'm in a SaaS firm I'm B2B you know design but to have that strategy and understanding somebody's business along with the Bitcoin nuance is like where we're in my mind positioned perfectly to not only help companies find the right fit but then help the right people in that middle spot either get the little missing pieces or get the right fit right out the bat where somebody comes in it's like oh

no you know everything you've already been you built specter and you're at a financial service firm and unchained's looking for this is a real world example of somebody we brought in that was like already built their whole thing so it's like they got it yeah yeah it's about being more efficient right so how can we how can we shorten the hiring cycle how can we improve quality of candidates coming on board but also like how we retain candidates moving forward making sure that we place the right person who will be successful for the long term. And so part of that, yeah, I mean, it's reaching out to the right folks. It's doing what we as recruiters do and finding that passive talent. But again, leaning on our advisor network, it's how do we truly vet a

designer or an engineer, right? How do we design the interview process itself before we even start reaching out to candidates to be perfectly aligned to finding the right fit, right? And this is where we're thrilled to actually be working with such a strong advisor network to be able to bring into the fold you know as it relates to executing these searches yeah i mean i've been saying this for years the space needs more competent and high caliber designers particularly ux designers but again it's hard to design for bitcoin particularly around user experience because you have protocol level you have lightning you have liquid if you want to throw that in there we'll have fedament soon then even at the protocol level you have different address structures you

have legacy of rap segwit you have uh segwit version zero v1 and we have taproot addresses and like communicating that i know you guys have worked very hard at unchained uh sahil particularly to um communicate with the end user then client what exactly is happening in a vault when you switch out keys or what address you're using or if you dump it in xpub um yeah these are like learning curve things that are going to take some time for people to develop and then actually be able to apply their skills in this industry. It's so early. Yeah.

And then I think that actually is a great segue into why the education piece is going to be super important for us, because we know that these problems are the most important problems to be working on right now. That might not be so widely known. are talented product designers trying to build you know better apis for like plaid type banking structures right or i mean my goodness those could go on and on where talented designers exist today but to the extent they start to see that you know the success of bitcoin and and realizing the sound form of money the most sound form of money ever discovered right can actually bring rationality

back to the world can bring you know so many positives right when you start to see that is actually like the most important thing to work on then then you're going to get that kind of talent And again, I keep saying this, but it's all about shortening that timeframe, right? How can we bring those most talented operators into the space today as opposed to years down the road? Yeah. And I think you guys are launching this at a perfect time. We're sitting here February 15th, 2023.

So far this year, there's been over 105,000 layoffs in the tech sector alone. There's a lot of people, a lot of talented people out there who are looking for jobs. There may be many of those Bitcoiners you described who are working at these traditional tech firms that wanted to get into Bitcoin and now have the opportunity to actually focus or be forced to focus on breaking into the industry. It's terrible what's happened, but I think framing the layoffs themselves as something that could have perhaps been avoided if Bitcoin were more widely adopted at this point. It's an interesting kind of angle to look at, but that's actually part of my journey to Bitcoin was frustration with what was happening,

seeing, you know, your portfolios up and down, up and down, going through layoffs, seeing friends and family, you know, suffering financially through this. Right. It's everything's been very short sighted financial decisions on both personal and company fronts. Right. And so the loose analogy here, but if you could look at, you know, what's happening in the pain being felt to the marketplace and how Bitcoin can help to fix a lot of those issues, then, then hell yeah, i want to go work for it now yeah i think um touching on this like there's a the thought of the the cyclicality in the market and the ebbs and flows of expansion of bitcoin and then the retraction is uh something that i think is really going to resonate it already has we've kind of

been a little short to go out and do business development because i do think there is something to the thesis of we want to build two sides of the marketplace and so rather than do full outbound we want to have that kind of that growth effort on folks coming in after we launch and being able to say hey i i doing this i'm doing this um you know whatever the vertical is and that i have an interest in the space i have this many years of experience um but this cyclicality and this was one of the things when andy approached me it's like from our experience at unchained you know somebody coming in to recruit generally doesn't have a background in bitcoin so they have background in recruiting they don't understand bitcoin or the firm and so there's a learning

curve that comes there and so that learning curve comes and and in so it comes with time and it doesn't only come with time for the individual but it comes with from time from the hiring managers because now you're interviewing folks that aren't necessarily the best fit and it comes from the folks that are interviewed as well right they have jobs or whatever and so by the time you get to let's call it three to six months because this stuff isn't fast especially if you're not even in bitcoin now you're you're hitting your stride and the market's basically topped out and you still need to hire or you've maybe gotten a few people you've probably got more through organic networks right versus like the traditional outbound from somebody that is a no bitcoin

and um so a year later and this is somewhat kind of uh in parallel but you know you're later than the market you're not hiring anymore because you've outpaced growth or you're at this static you know nice equilibrium and then the person either and we've seen this across the even the bitcoin industry somebody there's either layoffs or they just leave because there's not enough work and so now you're stuck and you're like well we just trained somebody for a year and so there's this real world application of embedded services that andy can share more about of like if they're traditional to recruiting but then i think they're really going to be applicable in the bitcoin space and we've already heard demand for it because it's like well why would i do that when i can just have

somebody in bed embedded with me as a platform can use all the processes building those out which i even touch on these stuff to build out how do you like actually have a proper hiring process and respond um so i think that's really going to be interesting here because it's a it's a nice positioning eventually hopefully we don't have these cycles and we're just kind of ebbing and then we're just in it maybe that recruiting comes back to bitcoin companies but i definitely think there's something there from an efficiency and capital preservation to not have to hire and deal with all that yeah this phenomenon i i seem to be true across all industries to be honest it's It's a sad truth that through each of these layoffs, recruiting teams, people teams are usually the first, very first to go, right?

And so you've seen that happen a lot. Again, this is my world that I come from. I have tons of friends, former colleagues who are feeling this kind of pain right now. And it's unfortunate, short-sighted. Talent teams are valuable. Even in down markets, there's lots of things that these folks can do to provide value for a company, but that's a whole other conversation, right? So what I think will happen is external services like ourselves will be a more valuable kind of proposition because we can flex up and down with your needs. You go through a hiring sprint, your bull market kicks off, everyone comes in, 100 hires in six months, like, great, we can see that through.

Unless that hiring pace keeps up, though, then you're not going to need that same kind of recruiting input, right? And so it's fine. You can flex the sources down, the resources down. So be it. Come back to us when you need more help. But that's an easy thing for a company to go through. And for us as well, looking at us supporting a number of companies, we will always be able to be available for those who need the help.

I also, there's this interesting phenomenon I think will happen where I keep talking about more and more talent coming into the space. I also think more and more financial capital coming into the space. You looked at 1031 as one of the leading Bitcoin-only investment firms, but that will continue. And we can say whether it's good or bad, but non-Bitcoin-focused investment firms will also want to start investing in Bitcoin companies.

And so you start to, to some degree, break away from like the traditional world, like the overall macroeconomic cycles and Bitcoin, I think, you know, breaking away from the, you know, we'll call it four year cycles as well, where companies who raise money are kind of immune to whatever's happening. If you just raised tens of millions of dollars to build out the next strike or the next rip, whatever it may be, you're going to be hiring. You are going to be deploying that capital. And so you'll start to see the overall Bitcoin itself will go through cycles, but individual companies will kind of be at different arcs in their own growth journeys as well. yeah no and i think this is a good opportunity because this is something we talk a lot about at 1031 particularly for companies that are reaching their series a series b and hitting that that growth stage or potentially hyper growth stage and andy is somebody who was front and center on the ground floor of one of the biggest unicorns in the last two decades in uber i think

it'd be very valuable for anybody who's running a company in the space listening to this episode to look to hear more about your experience there like being one of the first hires there and then seeing it scale up to tens of thousands of employees what what was that like what were some of the pain points that you guys ran into what were some of the the the trip ups that you ran into that that others listening to this may be able to avoid from your experience they were many right and i will say you know despite all the all the downfalls all the issues pains felt as a recruiting function, I mean, it was still the experience of a lifetime, you know, to have the chance to be in one of those types of companies at that stage, it's hugely valuable,

whether it's from the network that was built from the operators there at the time, or also just the learnings in your individual career, right? But, you know, to take some of the lessons from that, you know, moving forward, I mean, the importance of just really well-crafted interview processes up front, never breaking process to keep up with the pace. To be more specific, it's looking at how an equitable interview process that is like a formulaic approach, defining this up front with a hiring team or hiring manager actually does make the process more efficient. You think that by using case-by-case changes and doing ad hoc updates to the process can make you move faster, but ultimately it'll break things. And so to be really steadfast in that and actually

We hold hiring teams accountable, is a lot of the experience gained in that situation. We will always be working with clients who want to move fast, and we will help them to move fast, but we will stress the importance of aligning on an appropriate process upfront to vet all candidates to ultimately get you the best person for the role. That's just one example of many, but those pain points were felt broadly outside of even just recruiting. We can look at all the issues that a company the size of Uber went through. They were one of the most documented companies to go through that.

But every organization to some degree feels some of those pains that we felt. Yeah. I think on the hyper growth side of things, like the thing that's not prepared in the market is a strike and unchained going from a hundred to a thousand. And how do you onboard enough people that are world-class talent and also get Bitcoin? I don't think there's enough. It doesn't exist. And so this component we kind of glossed over earlier, which is going to be a big part in

in the strategy from uh providing value but also um the top of funnel is education and it's this thought i was thinking about like bitcoin you know the ultimate aligner of incentives it's been kind of crazy if you think about it there hasn't been anybody that's put out the right education in like modular format that is like concise and deliverable and it should be free right it's all out there uh it just hasn't been packaged and and i was coming to the conclusion like there hasn't been an incentive to do it like who what's the benefit and to andy's core point is like the core business is recruiting providing world-class talent and there's monetary incentives there but then on the other side well there's education that's required as a top of funnel

for folks coming in and wanting to learn the different verticals that map to their personal journeys but then post that well what does it look like when strike goes to a thousand people at unchained like and somebody's coming in they're not gonna they can't like inherently have six years of experience looking at this so you need to develop the right packaging for them to come on and be able to ramp up whether it's six weeks six months whatever the timing is we'll develop that we'll work with companies to do that and this is a this is a future state i'm kind of riffing on like the thoughts we're thinking about but this also maps to traditional companies right now there's firms without naming names that are either in like you know publicly traded or the big you

know crypto exchanges they're paying people a lot of money to like uh teach their teams about the metaverse and like uh defy and all this stuff and it's like that same format it's a very easy pitch to say like hey like it's the same 1031 pitch your own chain pitch is like let us tell you where the signal is let us explain what you should be paying attention to and it'll be slow at start but we're going to be on the right side of history because we're going to take the slower approach and then they're going to come like oh that's the firm when i need my and when i hesitate in saying my bitcoin strategy because we know this is just your strategy right like it's just like an internet strategy it's like no this is just our strategy now we need help for it no i mean we've seen this

a lot at 1031 the last few months people coming back to us like oh i see why you guys are running with that thesis it makes a lot of sense after seeing all the chaos in this market but talking about the education piece so are you going to have like broad education just for people looking for jobs and then will you have sort of dedicated education courses for particular companies to get potential talent up to speed with how they operate individually on the company side of things? Yeah, that's correct. To Michael's point, a lot of this, all of this to some degree exists out there. And I will say, actually, there is great content. There are people who have done it the right way. It's just, again, more of the issue of packaging it for the right

audience. And so the way we see it working, it's obviously free access to educational content for that self-driven person who maybe they've already said to themselves, yes, I want to work in Bitcoin now. Where do I start? How can I learn? Again, come to us. We can give you some of that information. We can also connect you with the right companies if it comes to that. But then the use case, again, as Michael said, of a company who's going through hyper growth. We keep using Strike and Unchained, but so many other companies out there who will be going through this kind of arc, to some degree, maybe having to sacrifice, like having all hires being existing, dedicated, like diehard bitcoiners right and that's okay i want to i want to be clear like as long as someone

is uh coming into these environments like expressing interest in bitcoin and wanting to to be in the space and identifying at least to some degree why bitcoin is different than everything else then then yeah yeah they can come and provide their expertise from their discipline right but those companies from an onboarding standpoint should uh help these individuals to to kind of integrate into the company and understand obviously what that particular company offers within the bitcoin ecosystem but then bitcoin at large you know what are some of of the talking points that we all know to be true now and so yeah it's it's packaging it as like onboarding type modules for for large organizations who want to want to obtain and retain the right

kind of talent and how's it been i know you guys have been talking to many companies in the space how's it's been received from them talking to you guys it's really funny because it's the similar approach like why it didn't why hasn't this existed or like of course um you know like i mentioned we're talking to some we keep the discussions limited simply because of the um i really think there's this market of folks that are going to be very interested and and want to like have that equilibrium fit versus like you have a bunch of demand and now you're going out to the market to fill it versus um knowing that we exist now and there's a place for that but um yeah i mean to the main question it's it's like oh yeah of course it should exist and

And then there's going to be a lot of firms that do this. And so that's where it's probably worth mentioning the advisor team we put out of. And disclosure, Marty is an advisor. There's not a specific niche because you're kind of all over the place. I like to think of the mining as like that thing that we're missing. But, of course, you've done the media stuff. You're spread all across. Oh, thank you.

Yeah. And then a few others. So Sahil on the design, Justine coming in on the education. and this is like a specific uh vertical that you know we think we we or we love we would love help but of course everybody's pretty uh multidisciplinary in this space uh ck from bitcoin magazine you know a longtime friend operated operations leader has helped scale that company and then um keep me honest if i'm forgetting but last but not least is uh our good friend and buddy rockstar dev yeah coming back from the dead he's dead he's dead his new name yeah his new name um

But yeah, I mean, obviously Rockstar has been incredible in this space with whether it's BTC Pay Server or with Strike and leading that. And he's really at the forefront, to be honest, of a lot of that. We talked to him about this and he's done some incredible stuff on the assessment side of really thinking through how do you get that proof of work before coming in? Because that's the whole field world, right? Where you just like submit applications and you're just like getting the job versus in Bitcoin. There's that nuance of sharing, you know, why your interest is there and going a little bit further than just like, oh, I'm interested in digital assets. uh and so we actually did this as uh we had some experience with this and it worked very well when we were hiring um so i think there's definitely something to it of like what is the the proof of

work before you start kind of talking with folks yeah no it's very important and i think i'm very excited again i keep because we talk about this all the time like there's incredible talent in the space right now there's also incredible talent outside of the space that we desperately want to pull in because we think they should be building out this future that we all know needs to be built because if not the world looks pretty shitty and so like what i'm really excited for is bitcoin talent co getting that talent into these companies and like you said andy like depending what your vertical is maybe you're a designer maybe you're a back-end engineer a growth marketer whatever it may be but you have a lot of friends in the industry that you're in

as soon as we start picking off some of that core talent into the space and then they begin like inducing FOMO and their friends in the traditional tech sector like yeah it's great over here we're building we're talking about viral loops and and like consumer businesses in the tech world a lot I mean I think that'll start to happen to some degree here too I'm thrilled actually I might not have been been laughing about this but you know with the official launch and kind of really putting our flag out there I know that we're going to have so many people reaching out to us that we know already right but we never knew to be bitcoiners right and and this like people kind of coming out of their uh their holes right and and i mean that's

where it starts yeah just the first hey i'm curious hey i'm interested and then from there i mean yeah it's it's a pretty short path to you yeah finally getting a job in bitcoin right yeah and what would you say to those those people out there working at these firms that are down the bitcoin rabbit home maybe they have nims that they're they're tweeting from uh that they never want their their employer to find out about like there's always been that that mean that like uh it's two nation of an industry it's too small it's too there's too much career risk if i make that that transition and go all in on bitcoin i mean we talk about it like we're i mean i've got this media company it's all about bitcoin i'm a partner at 1031 that's investing uh directly in bitcoin

I've got mining operations, my, my whole life, I've bet my, my whole social and financial capital in this industry. And that's scary for a lot of people to take that, that jump. What would you say to any, anybody with those types of apprehensions out there? Like, you know, I mean, my, my honest thought is following any, trying, trying to marry your career with your passion, right. Is never going to serve you wrong. Right. And even if, I mean, even if that industry itself doesn't succeed, I don't think this would be the case for Bitcoin. Right. But, you know, maybe mapping back to my Uber experience, there was a plethora of the Uber for X type companies that sprouted up, as we've seen with the original Uber itself has had financial issues for a long time. Just, you know, making the marketplace dynamics work, things like that. All these Uber for X companies sprouted up. They got a lot of good talent. There is a lot of money. A lot of them went under. Right. But those folks who are great operators, they still got a job after, you know, they weren't they weren't like, yeah, there's no stamp on them moving forward. Don't hire this person. You know, so I think you can separate the individual, the operator, their personal experience from maybe perhaps choosing an industry that didn't work out. Again, I don't think that's going to happen for us at Bitcoin here. But, but yeah, don't don't avoid taking that risk. If you believe that Bitcoin working on Bitcoin and having Bitcoin succeed is a noble pursuit. You know, you're going to be well served by following your passions there.

yeah i the i'll take a little bit of different approach in the sense uh you marry your career capital the same way you marry your personal economic capital it's like it's the amount of education yeah so if you're still early i don't know if the volatility makes sense in coming into a space that may have layoffs may the company may not be capitalized but similarly if you don't know much about bitcoin and the volatility you may be shaken out if you didn't know much other than like number go up but on the flip side we all know whether it's tech bitcoin bitcoin company in tech um the earlier you are the more financial upside there is so it's in your best interest to figure out like what's going on and understand why it makes sense to andy's point that you didn't make

the wrong decision because if you get it getting laid off can be two things you can either go back to google which would suck or you can go to the next company and leverage that experience because the point still stands that like human capital in the bitcoin space the knowledge is very rare and so like that is your own company or you can start or you can start yeah that is a very good shout out to uh that's the other side is that you don't maybe you're interested and you're not interested in going to join a company but you have a great idea and you're part of these world-class operators which is the thing that's like we've said but i don't think it's fully like understood is similarly we work uber like even ahead of google was the best human capital i'd ever

experienced like the sharpest minds in the world those people coming into bitcoin is going to be incredible whether they start their own business and we have a purchase we participate in funding them or they go and join a company that we've invested in or they go and join a different company like getting them into the space is how we get to where we need to be and that's like ultimately where how we ended up in this position i didn't think i was going to be part part of a recruiting firm but like at the end of the day it's like what you talk about with mining or the bent it's like you just kind of pick up the shit that needs to be done um because that's how we're gonna get you know all this stuff fixed yeah if not me then who if not you then who if not

you and even who but this also gets into a broader theme that we discuss a lot of 1031 and something that we're paying attention to um right now we've been in this conversation been focused on getting talent into bitcoin focused companies but moving forward if we believe that bitcoin is going to succeed every company is going to be a bitcoin company because they're going to need to accept bitcoin and add bitcoin value-added services to their product suite and that presents another opportunity uh not only from the 1031 perspective but from your perspective you guys can position yourselves as bitcoin talent co the the week we lost andy again but he'll come back the and i know you can riff on this so i'll continue the question uh you sit here hyper

focused on bitcoin now but at some point in the future all these traditional tech companies are going to need bitcoin talent and you guys will have the stack that allows them to onboard people that actually know what they're doing that's the the most fascinating part that is like uh the alpha if you will like that most people haven't woken up to is that whether it's the cute and i'm patronizing ourselves and like where people think it's the cute vc firm that's only interested in bitcoin or the cute recruiting firm it's only interested in you know bitcoin how big is that it's like actually every company needs talent that understands bitcoin and so all these large technology firms and we'll not pick on them but like leverage or bring up um replet and

amjad like when they realize with the ai and just everything that they're going to need to programmatically have lightning embedded into like these different things they're building well where do they hire those people like they're going to need some background in bitcoin and this is the same thing with like large banks that are going to eventually wake up and realize okay now we're going to build this out um and i won't name the financial firm but um there was a large somebody that came on the scene back in 2020 that uh made a big splash in the institutional space and they raised a lot of money and they lost like half of it because they went to headhunters and they went and picked off people on wall street and they went and lent against a six

at a 10k price never knowing that it could go down 70 and that they're physical and you have to go on some ranch in the middle of wyoming to get it back to get your money back like that is inherently that's intuitive to anybody that's in the space but if you hire somebody that has no idea what they're doing that that's not and so you can see how like this actually this is the the key to building a sustainable business whether it's a large wall street or institutional firm or it's a small bitcoin company or anybody in the middle it's like you have to have this knowledge and knowledge is few and far between right now yeah yeah no it's i mean again going back to like the the trope we get that a lot of 1031 we'll go out we'll pitch a we're bitcoin only vc firm focused

on investing in infrastructure and a lot of a lot of people like oh that's cute like what are you You're not in Web3, you're not in NFTs, any of that. It's like, no, we're not. But believe us, at the end of the day, this is going to win out against all that. And you're going to need to either have exposure from the 1031 lens or you're going to need to implement this into your business processes from the business lens.

And when people wake up to that, having a dedicated recruiting firm like Bitcoin Talent Co. is going to be a massive value add Because their internal operations, HR, people operations is not probably paying attention to Bitcoin and going to be able to scale up that knowledge to hire the correct people. Yeah, I actually have a question for Andy that we haven't talked about. I'm curious. So Andy, in between Uber and starting his firm, worked for a recruiting firm. And I don't know if you're comfortable saying that they're a leading firm for that, like help with Silicon Valley's best venture.

And I'm curious, like what your feedback is there from the learnings and anything like that, based on what Marty said, how that mirrors to your experience? Yeah, I mean, I've always just had this bias, perhaps because of the world I've lived in, the companies I've come from, right? You know, recruiting has been cemented as like a valuable resource. So it was never me, like, I never see selling recruiting services as like a pitch, like it's going to be needed, right? How can we just create the best version of that, right? And how can we have the one that's most aligned, obviously, to companies in the Bitcoin landscape? being able to talk the talk being able to do the right vetting right um but this is just this is something that that will always be needed and it's not always in competition with internal talent

sources either right you know we we serve as a an extension and or an augmentation of what other recruiting efforts you have going on in place already right and so i think there's there's always going to be a way for us to plug in and provide support as much or as little as it needed yeah and so where do we go from here you guys are launching i mean we're recording this today you're launching officially tomorrow but this will be released on launch day what what do we tell anybody out there whether you're a business or an individual a business looking to hire talent or talent looking to get into the space it's as simple as that it really is i mean on the businesses side you know if you have active searches on which you need support obviously

we're here to help if you are curious you know you have questions about how to even begin these hiring processes for kicking off with a full-blown engagement we can offer you know value there and always always be a thought partner when it comes to hiring you know bitcoiners then on the candidate side yeah simple we'll we'll have uh be able to direct people to our website you know we have a general application if you're curious you already want to submit your information let us know what looking to do you know whether it's engineering marketing sales etc um we were excited to start building that kind of engaged community of job seekers within the bitcoin landscape too to then ultimately match them with the right opportunities yeah i think the the ultimate goal is like if

somebody came to you or me and randy um that was a friend in the space you know there's only so many bitcoin companies like hey do you know anybody good in that space in that role we're only trying to try to scale that whether it's bringing in recruiters into the space providing our strategic background so whether it's a company that we've mentioned another company that's looking for individuals uh i found out like just based on a limited experience with bitcoin founders they're not very good at like recruiting because you like you don't necessarily want to go sell your company to people why they should work there there's a few reasons why but the idea is that we would understand your company and understand the people you need and um and this is a conversation with

with rockstar and and how i like experiences like when you're trying to scale a business you're looking at every individual as like your it's your job and it's your paycheck that's part of it because if it doesn't work then you're out of you're basically out of money you're you're laid off whatever the business goes under and so like that's what i really want to emphasize or like how i want to help us scale this business is thinking through well how do we truly partner with bitcoin companies and not just go out there and say oh we're hiring we're going to give you a bunch of people get a bunch of people in front of you it's like no how do we find the right people for your business um and so we have to execute on that but that's really one of the big things

and then andy i don't know if you want to share uh the the design uh experiment we're doing because we're not designers yeah if you give a little background before we wrap on that yeah this is a great way to end it um kind of a little just a little tip of the hat to the community right so we in launching we'll have our website everything's ready to go right but um to michael's point we are recruiters. We are operators. We've done all different kinds of things across our career.

None of us are designers, however. And so we are very excited to have a fun little contest for the design community, the Bitcoin design community to help us design our logo and the whole brand identity that we'll have moving forward.

So what you see live out there now will not be for long. We're going to be posting on Twitter kind of the guidelines for the contest and really excited to hopefully get some great submissions from talented designers in the space. We will be offering a prize. We'll be sending stats to the winning design submission

and yeah, more to come on that. But I'm really excited to, again, yeah, kind of from day one, look to the community to help us build this together. Yeah. Design bounty. We'll call it that. So is Bitcoin Talenco recruiting for your own company right now? Is this what's happening? Is this like a bounty that'll lead to a full-time job? possibly yeah i could say maybe i think the tentative uh announcement we were thinking during takeover in march and he's going to be down here eric our other co-founder will be down here as well um it'll be a good time to get everybody together and then uh yeah yeah and i don't want to wrap up just yet i know i said where can people go this is your show we wrap up

whenever there's there's other questions like because that that's one thing and i've used it before and i'm very happy these people built these products but like the jobs boards like how would you compare yourselves or the value that you had above and beyond? I can't believe I haven't touched on this yet. I can't believe it. So there's a lot to be said for it. I mean, the job boards that exist in the space today are, are valuable. I actually look to them. I commend them. I think they're necessary. They provide just a small portion of what's needed to, to really have that inflection point and bring more talent into the space though. Yeah. So a couple of things I'll say All companies should advertise their open roles.

I mean, from a signal standpoint, from just communicating with the market, helping to describe what you're trying to do, it's always helpful to have that public-facing job description. And then to take it one step further, I mean, we'll say a site like the BitCorner Jobs, yeah, they're probably the leading one. I'd say definitely the leading one out there. What they've done that's great is solving the discovery issue, right? So by consolidating a bunch of different companies that are hiring, anyone who, again, is interested in a job can go there and just there to find the job posting that they want, but also maybe

when they hadn't thought of, a company they'd never heard of, right? So that's actually a really exciting thing to accomplish as well as by that discovery piece. But I kind of mentioned this earlier, looking at inbound talent as your only source of hire is not going to get the job done. It's definitely not going to get the job done when you're hiring at scale, right? And so you need to augment inbound with outbound efforts. And I walked through again earlier, you know, the significantly higher conversion rates of

source candidates over inbound candidates, you know, the higher quality that comes with that, nothing against people who are applying. But just, you know, in the recruiting landscape, we know it's a lower conversion rate of hire compared to referrals, first and foremost, or sourcing, you know, passive talent. And so that's what we do. We take it one step further. I mean, a job board is great, but we will be more kind of the value we have is behind the scenes, if you will, right? You're actually working closely with companies hand in hand, partnering to, to understand exactly what they're looking for and then going to market to find that one person. Right. So that's, that's what the value is. Yeah. I think there's a function of time

that's important where an individual may come in, show interest after this episode, but they're, they're pretty happy at their current role in, in, in the fiat world. And six months from now, we have an engagement or a year from now, and we're able to categorize and figure out the right internal infrastructure to like you know know what that kind of person was looking for the right fit and then going back out to them in a similar fashion that's that is that outbound but within our infrastructure and saying oh hey we have this like interesting opportunity that we've been you know we remember you remember you're very like talented but there wasn't the right fit at this time and you can imagine this is really interesting when the market's running right because everybody's

interested and now you get all the noise so you got to filter between that versus the people that But right now, you know, quote unquote bear that have indicated interest that have peaked, like anybody around right now is pretty much, you know, diehard. Yeah, they're going to be around for a long time. And I think that's a big thing that we hadn't even talked about and I randomly stumbled into is that when the market's flying, everybody wants to get into quote unquote digital assets. But, you know, it's like what you saw from that institution I mentioned, like they all left after the market crash. The diehards stay around for the bear market. And that's like another thing, Andy, I think you can probably touch on this more. just like lean into the value prop I imagine there's a ratio that exists for companies that

are trying to do this themselves but really don't have the chops to like do recruiting at scale like you guys can so I imagine there's this ratio of people that are interviewed versus people that actually get the job at the end of the day do you guys like help lower that ratio yeah I mean essentially what you're looking at is like the funnel, if you will, of candidates from the very top all the way through to getting a higher, right? And the conversion rates, we can get really, really deep in the weeds, which may not be as interesting for the audience. But, you know, thinking of conversion rates and how we measure both quality of the process, meaning like how quickly candidates are moving through each successive stage, you know, are we being

efficient? Are we providing a good candidate experience? All these things are super important. But then also equally, if not more important, the quality of the candidates, right? So what percent of candidates that we reach out to respond to us? What percent of those candidates that respond to us ultimately are a good fit for the role? What percent of those does the hiring manager agree is a good fit for role? And then so on and so forth down the process to the end. So you'll always have drop-off. You should have drop-off, right? But working with clients to understand what we should be targeting, what numbers define a successful process, yeah, that's absolutely part of the value we provide and driving that with a team.

Yeah. Yeah. One, one of the, it wasn't concerned, but it was a thought when I referenced earlier about scaling ourselves and thinking strategically and understand the landscape. And I should have known, and he's a great recruiter because he's been in recruiting, but we're brought on somebody from a large exchange that will be helping in scaling this. And I had a call and I was just blown away. He was like previously at large FinTechs, you know, just understood, but he was very strategic and he and he was the exact person that he had basically illustrated why um how he had grown his career and how he had to understand hiring managers needs and really it was a partnership and i think that gets lost on a lot of people especially like folks in regular tech

or if you're in bitcoin and you have a hiring manager and you're trying to recruit a lot of that like and this is probably a fiat culture thing but like you're just like submitting numbers and you're getting to them versus somebody that like actually genuinely cares and wants to understand because that's going to change the conversion number on like oh does this person the right fit for what this other person's trying to achieve because somebody wanting to work at fidelity is very different than somebody wanting to work at a 10 person company they're both they could both be bitcoin and so that's just part of like this whole understanding and how we think about it yeah i don't address this enough actually but but i think it has to be said you know to kind

of solidify the value again you know i come from a world where recruiters are talented you know they're valued parts of the organizations that they work at they're they're they're successful right but yes i have to admit that recruiting the recruiting industry at large there's a lot of a lot of bad in it right and i think anyone who's been in a corporate environment has worked with bad recruiters or a bad external firm right throwing resumes over a fence seeing what sticks not acting like true partners and again i i just don't i don't think of this because it's not the world i come from but but yes we have to state that that's that's not what we provide we are true partners we lean in and we we essentially act as if we were your own internal talent team

So I think that's, that's really something, a point that has to be driven home too. Yeah. The one thing I wanted to ask you, Andy, is I know we touched on it earlier, like having a strict hiring process is important, but what are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies make while they're hiring outside of not having that process? Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of it does tie to the process. So not to rein it back to that, but the skipping of steps here and there, not having a similar rubric, so to speak, for which you're assessing candidates.

So you like John for this reason, you like Sally for that reason. But then how do you decide which of them is actually right for the role? Are you grading them to the same assessment, essentially? So that's where things really derail the process. And they lengthen it, too, because you start to go on this like you're kind of chasing a moving target, so to speak, in terms of what you're actually looking for. So part of our job is to rein us back to what we identified before we even started talking to candidates, what the right fit is. If it shifts over time, and it does, as you start to talk to candidates, that's okay. But we all collectively as a hiring team need to be aligned on what that is so that we can make changes and then again, move forward with the new scope. So that's the biggest thing, I think. Beyond that, there's a couple of things I can mention. Top of my head, I mean, not being really buttoned up as it relates to how you're pitching your compensation philosophy, things like that.

Not being forthright with that in the process in terms of making sure that it's the right fit for a candidate from a financial standpoint. These are things. So these are reasons why things can break down at the end as well. So to the extent we can get pretty buttoned up on that upfront, it'll obviously help us as well. yeah no because i think there's a lot of lessons that many of the companies in the space need to learn you'll find like hardcore bitcoiners typically with a highly technical background starting a lot of these companies and like i experienced myself here luckily i found logan but even at tftc this media company i'm like how the fuck do i hire people like i don't know

like i know what i want but i don't know how to like articulate that and then go vet and filter and it's not in people and it's not intuitive and then like you go and if you don't have the background and to annie's point the process then this is all from experience like well maybe you don't have the right process to follow up and like it may work okay with bitcoiners but eventually like it's a kind of a a stain on your brand as a firm if you just like leave people hanging and i would imagine any is like lots of thoughts there and then the other one that talking with one of our advisors uh that's that's helped grow is like the just inherent bias like there's this thing that's always stuck in my head even before any of this is that like somebody finds out if they

want to hire somebody within the first 60 seconds. And then the rest of the interview, they're just basically filling that, um, version of like how they like the person or not. And so to Andy's point, it's like having that rubric and figuring out, cause there's a lot of people that, Oh, I like this person, but people are very good at interviewing. They're very good at telling you what they want to hear, but it's like, you got to follow a certain process to really figure out, is that the person for your role? Um, so yeah. Yeah. I think we may need your services here. i'm not very good at uh i'm not good at interviewing people yeah what do you do just have them on the pod that would be an interesting format all potential candidates

all finalists have to come on you have a live episode the one with the most downloads gets you hired i do think that there is something to this um this filtering of interest like uh you know wolf did we saw it on their website um that we liked and i don't know if we're and incorporate but like where they you submit an application for their talent pool there's there's some format where you submit info and you just basically have to pay 10 zaps just to prove that you can actually just you have a wallet right uh until and and you know again when we're advisors on the engineering side like assessments on what does that process look like and i think there's something to really vetting um and i don't know if it's for an individual company or ourselves but

like there's something to like just showing a little bit of effort i think that's kind of like gone away uh with how many people are hiring how easy it is to spray and pray resumes and then you're just kind of like in this weird game versus like just doing a little proof of work to vet because i think that goes a long way and if you're really interested that shouldn't be any any skin off your back to do yeah no i mean that's an easy low-hanging fruit filter like can you pay an invoice in bitcoin yeah it should be that should be something anybody trying to get into bitcoin company should be able to do yeah if they don't yet know it they'll learn how to with our education services yeah it's uh it's fascinating i'm excited for you guys yeah i'm excited to have

you as an advisor and support us and you've already been sending us folks over and this is part of the cool part is like there's a lot of people that we're friends with to andy's point that have been looking for roles and now we're just going to get hit up and we're gonna be able to like figure out how to how to facilitate that and then help the companies that have been looking to find those people yeah and i would take an opportunity to speak to anybody at these companies looking for talent definitely reach out to these guys at bitcoin talent co because i mean again i see it from tftc just having interviewed a bunch of people in the space we see it at 1031 with all the portfolio companies that we have like there is this disconnection

between um hiring and finding the talent that is right for the particular roles that you're looking to fill and like you said like when you guys started pitching this to me a couple of months ago i was like oh yeah this is desperately needed because like i said in the beginning recruiting isn't sexy and to be honest andy like up until i started talking to you i had that that negative connotation of recruiting it's like people just drawing resumes over uh to see what sticks you heard it here first parker lewis said it was genius genius genius yeah yeah so no we've i mean yeah we've been telling people behind the scenes um in meetings they're like oh yeah obviously well parker knows we're in the trenches hiring in uh 2020 2021 and it was not easy uh

their collaborative custody is very nascent so um hopefully it's it's kind of grown but yeah yeah that's the other thing companies have to realize is again going back to the scarcity of the intellectual capital outside of engineering like the sales teams the growth teams that can actually articulate and understand these different nuanced products throughout the ecosystem is extremely scarce right now highly valuable assets yeah we have a friendly firm uh that's been looking for a cfo for a while and i think it's been like four months so if you know they just can't find it um they're not even a client of ours they're just a friend uh so if you're a cfo out there and you're looking for a role in a bitcoin company reach out love to get you uh

yeah let's let's heckle some of the people in the traditional tech space or banking industry that that are listening to this if you are listening to this you're probably a bitcoin or you're sitting there thinking i don't know i don't know come on this is this is the this is the sign right you've been thinking about it you've been listening to this pod you've been on bitcoin twitter it's time to get a job yeah you've been listening to marty for five years knowing that you want to get in the space now here's your answer here is your solution it may not be it could be tomorrow it could be a month from now it could be a year from now but yeah start the process as early as possible we need you i can't be building on the show i can't be doing like scribb mining vc like

we need more talent yeah i'm just taking on as much as i can come help us we need to build the future if not you if not me then who we got to fix the money yeah all of you listening get off your ass follow the link in the show notes there you go fill out an application um all right when we Yeah, final thoughts here, outside of heckling these people listening, that should be working in Bitcoin. Just really excited to see where this goes, to be honest. There's a huge opportunity at hand, and it's, I think, one of the best things to do is have the flexibility to know that you don't have the, you know the bookends. Bitcoin is money, and we're at the starting point. Let's see where the rest takes us and just try to give back as much as we can.

yeah i mean just to to sum it up this this is arguably one of the biggest levers you know to increasing bitcoin adoption shortening its path to hyper bitcoinization getting the right people in the space and so to the extent we can even we can even provide a small amount of value and in that arena you know we're really excited for the opportunity yeah well i wish you well i'll be advising you as we go on this journey together we'll give a shout out for parker Bitcoin Takeover. Andy will be in town. Our other co-founder, Eric. Is that why he was in the window? No, he was just

turning on the on-air. Just trying to be respectful, keep the noise down. We'll all be here. If you're looking for a role, you want to say hello. Bitcoin Commons. Parker's blowing it up here. We'll have a headquarters in Austin and SF out of the Commons.

Maybe we'll do a three-way in person. pod we'll do it we'll do an in-person free person pod let's do it close on andy and with that enjoy the rest of your day on the west coast you guys we've got we've got a busy day ourselves we gotta get going yeah you got a lot i mean you got a very busy day yeah i do it's a lot going on but it's good things it's exciting building in the bear market I know we're trying to wrap it up but I just have this thought come in

this is the most building I've ever seen in the bear market this is the most bullish bear market I've ever seen things getting built, companies getting funded there are companies still getting funded it's the right time our heads are going to explode when the market takes off just absolutely explode

so please reach out a little bit more heckling for the people out there sitting in tech companies or banking it's a great time companies are just getting funded maybe some of them have equity comp packages for you get in at the ground floor

not when we're ripping 200k at the top of the bull market you're going to get in and you're going to see some turbulence that might scare you get in now when the dust is settling and we're going to be going on our way up

gentlemen let's go win, we're going to win peace and love take care Thank you.