The Pomp Podcast - #1474 Kenny DeGiglio | How To Get A Job In Bitcoin & Crypto

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Kenny DeGiglio is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Crypto Academy, and we have helped over 3,000 people get new jobs. In this conversation we discuss how to land a job in the crypto industry, helpful data points, tips, how to grow connections, importance of being a participant, and helping you design where you want to be.  ======================= This episode is brought to you by Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for AI. Led by a seasoned management team, Bitdeer is driving innovation with its proprietary SEALMINER ASICs for Bitcoin mining and has a massive 2.5 GW power portfolio across three continents. Learn more about Bitdeer at www.bitdeer.com ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should

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pomp to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com slash pomp. What's going on, guys? One of the biggest questions that I ever get is how do you get a job in the Bitcoin and crypto industry? Thankfully, I've been spending the last four years helping over 3,000 people get a job in the industry. I've got an entire team of people. We've got three different products and companies

that have been working at this. So I've got a ton of experience in terms of who's actually getting a job, where are the open roles, how much are people getting paid, and what can you do at home in order to get one of those roles? Now, one of the things

that's really, really interesting about this is that these companies that are hiring, many of the times, they're fast-growing startups, whether they're small companies or big companies. And so if you have a fast-growing company, the opportunity for somebody who gets a job there is if you do a good job, you get a lot more experience and you very quickly rise in the ranks.

As you rise in the ranks, you can make more and more money, whether that's cash or upside compensation. And so naturally, when there's bull markets, tons of people want to transition. They want to leave their job that maybe pays well, but frankly, they're not that inspired by it. It's not that fulfilling. They don't really feel passionate about it.

And they want to go into an industry where they're spending all of their free time. Many of these people are spending tons of time online or their husbands or wives are tired of hearing them talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency every single day, all day long. I know that's something of you. And so naturally they say, well, if this is what I'm passionate about, if this is what I want to spend so much time on, why don't I go work in this industry? And so they go looking for a job. Now, the hard part about finding a job is a lot of people think they have to become technical. You don't have to become technical.

One of the beautiful things about this is that you can actually just say, what am I good at? Am I good at sales? Am I good at accounting? Am I good at operations? Am I good at customer service? am I good at marketing or am I good at operations as well? And then when you know what you're good at, simply go try to get a job doing that same thing. If you're good at sales, go get a sales job at a crypto company. If you're good at marketing, go get a job at a Bitcoin company doing marketing. That's how you get into the industry. As you'll hear, one of the people that I work very closely with is Kenny. Kenny is the CEO and the co-founder of the Crypto Academy. In that business, we have helped over 3,000 people get new jobs. Now, why is that so important?

because out of the 3,000 people, he has seen almost nobody be able to transition from a non-technical role into a technical role. It's very hard to do, so don't waste your time doing that. Now, what have we been doing and how do I know exactly what you should be doing? First of all, we have three different products that we have. We have a job board.

You can go into the link in the description and you can click it. Anyone can go and you can upload your resume and apply to whatever jobs you want. It's completely free to use. The second thing we have is we have a recruiting firm. It's called Proof of Talent. There, you can upload your resume

and the recruiters will help you find a job. It's like a white glove service, again, completely free to you. Those recruiters are working with companies to figure out what are the open roles, what are the different skills and experience they need for those open roles. And then they look at all the resumes that they have

and they try to figure out who's gonna make a fit. And then they walk you through that process, help you go through the interviews and make sure that you're able to negotiate the best compensation package possible. So those first two things are completely free. The third thing we have is a training program because there's a lot of people who say,

you know what? I don't actually understand anything about crypto or Bitcoin. But what I do know is I'm really good at sales for marketing or operations. I need to better educate myself about the industry and the technology in order to be able to get one of these jobs.

And so this training program is a three-week, highly intensive program. It's about 50 events or so that we operate in three weeks. We've put thousands of people through this thing. And in that program, what we do is we teach them everything from the legacy financial system, the problems, Bitcoin, how it got created, what the technical architecture is.

Then we get into smart contract platforms. We talk about a ton of crypto experimental technologies. We help them understand regulatory stuff, taxes, the geopolitical situation, and also what all of this means for the individual companies that are employing this technology. This is a highly intense program, and that program has been highly effective. We actually created the program and the curriculum with a number of big companies in the crypto industry. I called them up and I said, hey, there's a ton of people that we're sending to you guys, either through the job board or through the recruiting firm. And you keep

telling me, hey, this person is great at their job, but they don't know anything about the industry. How do we fix the problem? Tell me what they need to know. I'll create a program. We'll train people and then we'll send them. And so you can go to thecryptoacademy.io or you can click on the link in the description to check that out as well.

So here I want to have a conversation with Kenny because Kenny's got a ton of insights into exactly what's going on in the industry. And he's going to help us better understand if you're the right type of person who's actually going to get a job in this industry and what it could mean for you and your career if you're able to successfully make the transition.

So Kenny, I thought a great place to start this conversation would be the people who want to get these jobs. I was talking earlier about not making the transition from non-technical to technical. What are the data points there? I think there's been 3,000 or 4,000 people who've gone through this training program or gone through kind of all of our different products. How many people have successfully done that? Two.

So we've had over 3,000 people who've gone through the program. We've had two people who went from being completely non-technical to getting a high-level technical role in the industry. Now, the number of folks who went and they said, what am I already really good at? whether it's sales marketing operations finance and they took that skill set and they laser focused on roles that fit into that function within the bitcoin and crypto industry are the remaining over 3 000 people that we've helped get jobs and these people come from all different walks of

life like the ones i just remember off the top of my head is we've got a gentleman incredibly uh incredible human incredible person you know incredibly intelligent he was a public defender doing something that many people would say like that is a uh a task worth doing for society and he said, look, I'm passionate about crypto. I want to transition. He ended up going from being a public defender to getting a job in crypto. He's not a lawyer in crypto, right? He's actually doing something else. Then we have people who we've got mortgage brokers. We've got insurance agents. We've got people who've been sales folks. We've got people who've worked at high quality tech companies. We've got people who started startups. It really spans the entire gamut in

terms of what people were doing previously and being able to transition over. Absolutely. And so the interesting thing about the gentleman that you mentioned is he's a lawyer. He's passed the bar exam. He really knows what's going on in the legal side. He got hired in a director of community role. The interesting thing, it was for a startup. And so what happens in a startup, you need people that can wear multiple hats. And so guess what? He primarily focused on community development, but he also did some operations. And guess what? Anytime they needed an NDA sign or a commercial contract sign, he was the person that they went through. And so if you are somebody with a very well-defined skillset, but you're interested in maybe broadening your skillset,

Or if you're a lawyer and you're just tired of being a lawyer, there's a lot of leeway, especially with startups, to kind of switch the trajectory of your career while you're also changing your industry. So I think that's one thing that's really interesting. Another really interesting data point is small business owners and people with non-traditional backgrounds. People who come to us with non-traditional backgrounds are, in general, some of the highest skilled people that we work with.

Almost all of them come to us and they go, I suck. I'm not really good at anything. I don't have a skill. I don't understand how I would transition into the industry because they've done everything across their organization, usually for a really long time. And so one of the things that is most valuable to folks like these, if you're someone out there who falls into this category, is forward center of mass and momentum. Having a group of people that you can toss ideas out to, get feedback, having a bunch of other people who are kind of the weird Bitcoin person and now being in a group with

these other people where you can exchange ideas, I very much believe, and we have a lot of evidence that shows that it's a one plus one equals three type of scenario. Meaning if you were looking to transition into the Bitcoin and crypto industry from another industry, and so was I, and we were putting in a bunch of effort, it's one plus one equals two. If we're on our own, if we're putting in all of that effort, and then we also spend a bunch of time talking to one another and exchanging ideas and kind of having conversations where we can push, kind of get an understanding of what do we actually understand and what can we articulate and what can't we, it is this kind of one plus one equals three scenario. So those are a couple more detailed things that we've seen out of folks who've

gone through the program. So let's talk about some of the tips that you have as to how people can, you know, increase the odds of them actually getting a job. The first is making you a known quality, making sure that people know who you are. What exactly does this mean? So one of your favorite pieces of advice is do the job to get the job. And so this is the idea of making yourself a known quantity and the limit. And so it's the most extreme version of that. And And so we have one of our businesses, Token Relations, and we hired some research analysis. How did those people get the job? Well, when they submitted their application, as part, I think, of their resume along with

their CV was, hey, here are a set of protocols that I'm very interested in. Here are detailed reports. And so right away, the hiring team goes, okay, not only can I look at this person's resume and check out their social media, I understand what I should kind of expect in terms of the quality of their work. You don't need to hop right there. What I mean by make yourself a known quantity is when teams across the industry, specifically in crypto and very much with startups, when they're hiring, so it's very difficult to go from five

people to 10 people, and it's very difficult to go from 10 to 20. When you're growing a team in the early stages, as you know, and the way we've run our teams, is who do we know personally that is the perfect fit for this job? Who have we worked with in the past? They're a known quantity. It de-risks it. There's a bunch of reasons for hiring like that. It's on each individual to make themselves a known quantity. So this can be as simple as reaching out to people who run or are on teams that are, you know, companies that you're interested in and connecting with them. And it doesn't mean, hey, I saw you're the director of operations for XYZ company. I want to be a director of operations and doing something formal. It's no, hey, I saw you on X podcast, or this was an

interesting tweet. We have a similar interest in lifting weights or golf or people are into the carnivore diet, whatever it might be. Do you have 15 minutes to chat? I want to introduce myself and I want to get to know you. That can be a place where you start. Recently, in a recent group, we had a guy, young guy, very smart guy. He works for one of the investment banks. He wants to transition into the industry. So he spent his career, probably eight years on the private wealth side of the business. And so he's smart, very reputable investment bank. He wanted to do something in the industry, specifically Bitcoin only. We had our career day and we had a company, Honorant Bitcoin, who came and they presented. And so this guy reached out to one of the folks

who presented for Honorant Bitcoin and he said, hey, I'm looking for a job. They responded, we don't have any roles available that suit your skills. He said, okay, would you mind setting up some time so we can talk and we can get to know one another? They set up a time, probably they that 15 minutes. They hit it off, spent much more time than that speaking. Then they continue to chat and they continue to keep in touch. Well, guess what? An opportunity opened on the business development side of the business. They go, do you want to give it a try? Why not? We need somebody. We like you. Do you want to do a trial 1099 part-time basis? Now he has his foot in the door a little bit more. Does an absolutely unbelievable job. Does that for a bit. They go,

do you want the full-time offer? Can you leave your job at this big investment bank to come work with us? And it turned out that the answer was yes. And so this is kind of a sequential way that we see this happen is he didn't write from the back, go, hey, here's a list of all of the folks that you should be targeting. Like that's a good approach, but he did it more in a kind of step-by-step way. And so the kind of broad piece of advice here is get to know a bunch of people, focus on personal relationships, and don't necessarily right off the bat think about what can I get in return. Get to know people, become friends with people, and that's kind of the way that you can get started. So that's the first step. The second tip that you have is to

focus on kind of the big three. Yeah. What are the big three and how do we go through this, right? You've got a competency, likability, and connections. How do those work? There's a couple of things here. So these are the biggest, the three most important things that we've seen that really influenced the job search. And so competency, think of that in the functional area. So are you world-class at a skill, whether it's sales, finance, on the technical side? Then you have likability. So it's something that most people don't even consider, but it's very important. And so the first thing that we see is people tend to over-focus on one area and they ignore the other two. And so most people focus on competency exclusively.

And so they go, I want to transition into the Bitcoin and crypto industry. I need to know everything about the industry and I need to go and get a bunch of certifications and I need to take a bunch of classes. Certifications and classes obviously have a role to play. But if you only focus on that and you completely ignore likability and you completely ignore connections, you're going to have a really tough time. So we have competency, likability, and connections. It's actually in the reverse order. And so what we've seen is that connections is the way that you get your foot into the door. Making yourself a known quantity is how you get the interview. Likability is the way that you actually score the job. It's the way that you go from being a

candidate to someone who has an offer. And it's the way that you actually get to know people within the organization when you start your role. Competency is actually way down. People actually don't truly know how competent you are until you've had the job for a month in many cases. And so what happens is if people only focus on competency and they completely ignore likability and connections, they're not really going to have a way to get the flywheel started. And so connections, we talked a little bit about, get to know everybody. The more relationships, the more friendships that you can establish across the industry, the easier of a time you're going to have. Likability is a weird one, right? Some people are naturally very charismatic and

that's awesome for them. Some people aren't. The way I'd classify likability in this context is how apparent is it that you're passionate, knowledgeable, and articulate about both your skillset, so your function where you work, and about the industry. And so a lot of people, kind of the stages that people go through is this, is I'm obsessed with Bitcoin, or I don't know anything about Bitcoin and crypto, but I think it's interesting and I want a job in the industry. The next is I'm obsessed with Bitcoin and crypto, and all I do all day is listen to podcasts. That at this point is table stakes. The next stage that people get to is I understand a lot about Bitcoin and crypto, and I'm pretty articulate. I can explain basic

ideas to people. I have some viewpoints that maybe other people don't have. That's the point that you want to get to. And so as far as the interview process goes, likability comes down to are you clearly knowledgeable and passionate about the industry? And then maybe do you have some unique ideas that all of the other candidates don't have? And can you articulate those ideas well? And so a big part of what we do in the training program is the only way to get good at articulating yourself well is to practice articulating yourself well a lot. And so we spend hundreds of hours together in free forum discussion groups where we have the opportunity to play around with ideas.

And if you say something stupid, it's no big deal. Or if you get to the limits of your knowledge, or more commonly, you think you know something, but you realize you're just repeating what maybe Pom said on his podcast, we give you the opportunity to say, okay, why don't you try explaining it like this? And someone else will pick it up and they'll go,

hey, actually a more interesting way to explain this topic is this. And so likability is the most overlooked. And the way to get more likable in this context is to become more articulate. The way to become more articulate is by practicing it. It makes complete sense. What about be a participant, not a spectator?

Like I just said, listening to Bitcoin and Crypto podcast all day and following all of the most popular influencers on X and reading the 20 books that are now part of the Bitcoin and Crypto canon, that used to be a way to make yourself stand out. Now I'd classify it as table stakes. The next step from that is just like we talked about having conversations is the way to become more articulate. You need to develop some sort of personal proof of work portfolio that you can share with people as part of the job application process. It's different for everyone. And so one of the most common questions we get is, I'm a private person. I don't really want to become an

X influencer and I don't want to worry about posting five times a day every day. That's totally fine. But have some way to take the information that you're consuming, put it through your filter and create something. In my case, that is the businesses that we've built. That is the way that I express myself and my ideas. For other people, it might be a sub stack newsletter. For other people, it might be publishing intermittently on Medium. There's a bunch of things that you can do. You need to do something where you get really good at taking the process of information coming in, passing it through your filter and creating something that's uniquely yours and your own. That way, when you're having conversations, you can point people towards that. And it very quickly

gives them a clear idea of this is how this person thinks. And especially if you're consistent, that says a lot about you, right? If you've published every single week for a year or two years, that is evidence that you're someone who can be consistent in the role that they may be thinking about hiring you for? I think of it like if you're going to hire a woodworker, what's the first thing you say is like, hey, what have you built before? Right? Show me your- Yeah, let me see a table. If you're going to hire someone to build a house, you say, well, what other houses have you built? And so same thing here, right? And by the way, it's difficult to get started. Of course.

As you can vouch for, once you get started, it becomes a little bit easier. And then maintaining that momentum over time gets easier and easier. And so a lot of people say, I'm not the type of person to do X. It's like, yeah, we are all not the type of person when we start and nobody's going to pay attention at first and you're going to probably stink at it at first, but you need to get the process started now and you got to continue working at it.

How do you think about designing like where you want to be? I think that's kind of your last tip here is trying to design really where you want to go and then working really hard to accomplish it. Yeah, this is, we've worked together for a long time. You know, I'm the king of this. When I decide I'm going to do something, I run very quickly.

usually I start off by running in the complete opposite direction, right? And so when you're thinking about transitioning into the industry, and you're thinking about where do I want to sit within the industry, and then you think about what type of role you want to and what type of people you want to work with, you should very much think about that upfront. And so probably the worst thing that you can do is just start running in a direction and say anything in the crypto industry is enough, any size team, any types of people is enough because you're going to run very quickly. And you're probably going to make a lot of progress only to find out, I really didn't think about this deeply enough. And I ended up working for some very long tail

crypto protocol, but I'm a Bitcoin maximalist, right? And so very in the first thing that you should do, and this is something we help people with, is go through a process where you ask yourself, what am I most passionate about? Kind of, it's corny, but like, what's the change that I want to see in the world? What comes easily to me that's very difficult for other people? And we have a list of 20 questions that we ask ourselves and we workshop them. And it's a lot of writing and thinking. It's hard work, which is why most people don't do it up front. Do that up front.

And then you can be a lot more confident that when you're sprinting in a particular direction, it's the right direction. The other piece of that is, for lack of a better term, you have to work your ass off. And I understand that this is difficult because people have demanding full-time jobs and they have, you know, family life and all of this stuff going on. there's some level of randomness to transitioning into the industry. Some people who are not that qualified get very lucky early in the process. Some people that have a resume that's essentially perfect, it takes them a long time. And so that's another thing is it will be a lot

of hard work. There are a lot of things you can do in terms of strategy and what I kind of call blocking and tackling to make the process easier. But upfront, make sure that you can commit the amount of effort, energy, time, and intensity that's required because all of that stuff is required. Where can we send people if they want to learn about the training program? And then what's your pitch as to if somebody goes through the training program, what will they get out of it? Yes. The first place is send people to thecryptoacademy.io. There's a bunch of information about the program there. We start the next group officially on March 10th, but we are fully up and running right now. We have a bunch of awesome people in the group. We've been doing weekly

social events, and a bunch of other stuff. So check out the program. If you're interested, apply. After you apply, you'll actually have the opportunity to set up a call with me. And so if you're kind of on the fence, or you just want to learn more, or you want some advice, set up a call with me. I love doing it. I spend a lot of time talking to people who are thinking about transitioning into the industry. So that's the how. The why. If you are somebody that wants one of these three things, the training program is probably a good fit for you. If you're someone who wants to transition into the industry and you know that you want to transition into the industry, but it's this abstract idea. You go, look, I'm 10 years into my career in corporate

finance and I'm into Bitcoin, but I'm also into some other crypto stuff. I think it would be cool to work into the industry. And that's kind of where you sit. What we'll help with is taking this really abstract notion of working in the industry will be cool. And like we just talked about. We will help you get very specific, well-defined goals and a plan of action for what is step A, B, C, D, and E that you need to take to actually go and achieve your goal. And so, I classify that as if you want to dramatically accelerate your transition into the industry and how easy it is and how long it takes, you're a really good fit. If you're somebody, whether you're beginner, intermediate, or advanced,

where you want to learn a bunch more about the industry in a condensed timeframe, or if you're someone, and this happens most commonly at the kind of advanced intermediate stage, you feel like you're at a plateau. You learned a bunch about Bitcoin and crypto, but your rate of learning isn't as rapid as it once was. The program's perfect for you because you become a participant rather than someone sitting on the sidelines. And so if you want to unlock kind of the next level of your understanding and your ability to articulate the ideas that you're interested in, it's perfect. So the second category is like learning. And then the third, which is my favorite, is if you are the Bitcoin person and at Thanksgiving

and Christmas and your husband or wife's Christmas parties, you are the Bitcoin guy and everybody in your life is sick of it and you want to be put in a group with a couple hundred other Bitcoiners, you should definitely do it. As I mentioned, we spend hundreds of hours together in social events and discussion groups and we get to know each other. We're all Bitcoiners. We explore ideas. We goof around.

And so if you're looking for other Bitcoiners who are like you, that's really kind of at the core of what we've built. I love it. Thecryptoacademy.io. Thecryptoacademy.io. Bunch of information, link to apply. Set up a call with me. Amazing.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope every single one of you gets a job and we'll do everything we possibly can. We've got a whole team standing by waiting to help and see what we can do to help you guys all. So go check it out, thecryptoacademy.io. And we'll go from there. Cool.

Thank you, Bob. Thank you.