The Pomp Podcast - Rob Paone, a.k.a. Crypto Bobby: How To Enter The Crypto Industry

Episode Date: September 21, 2019

Rob Paone, a.k.a. Crypto Bobby, is the Proof of Talent and the host of the popular YouTube channel "Crypto Bobby." In this conversation, and Anthony Pompliano discuss recruiting in the cryptocurrency industry, the Dos and Donts of the interview process, and how engineers, business development executives, management, data analysts, and marketers can enter the crypto industry. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visitcoinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Rob Payone, aka Crypto Bobby, is the founder of Proof of Talent and also host of the popular YouTube channel, Crypto Bobby. In this conversation, we talked recruiting in the cryptocurrency industry, the do's and don'ts of the interview process, and how engineers, business development executives, management, data analysts, and marketers can enter the cryptocurrency industry. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, crypto.com. They're a crypto

platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet crypto.com is helping people do that through buying earning lending and card payment everything you could want at crypto.com go help your boy out tell him pomp sent you download the app or visit crypto.com pomp's got you always ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how don't worry your boy pomp's got you everybody got some electricity and wi-fi all you got to do is go to coinmine.com you buy a coin mine it's like an xbox or a playstation that helps you turn your electricity into bitcoin that's right you purchase it it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your

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BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. If you follow Bitcoin and crypto, you've probably heard of eToro. They're the world's number one social trading platform, and I love it. They've got more than 10 million other traders that love it too. And guess what? They just launched in the United States. eToro offers access to the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. With the smartest trading tools and the ability to connect with the best traders around the world, there's no better place

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Digital, or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a special treat, the one, the only Crypto Bobby, aka real name Rob, but Crypto Bobby, thanks for coming to do this. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time. Absolutely. We've got the live stream going. People are being obnoxious as usual. I think that we just saw I Love You a couple of times, but we'll have fun with this.

Background. What did you do before you became Crypto Bobby? A couple of different things. So my first job out of college was in IT recruiting. So I did IT recruiting in Washington, D.C. for a few years. that's actually where I found Bitcoin. A buddy of mine sent me an article that was in December 2013, like the one of the big kind of original like Bitcoin bubbles. And the article was I think it was a Verge article. And it was like the Bitcoin is so 2013 Dogecoin is 2014. And I was like, what is Dogecoin? What's Bitcoin? And naturally, the first thing I did that night when I went home was I read more about it and found out that you could use your computer to

earn free magic internet money. So I went ahead and watched the YouTube video and started mining Dogecoin that night. And then what a legend. Since my first job out of college, I didn't exactly have a ton of money. So I also did what any entrepreneurial young chap would do is I I signed up for a bunch of free credits for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services and all the cloud providers and started mining Dogecoin and then Bitcoin through that as well. So did that, ended up moving into software sales, worked at Oracle and LinkedIn for about five years or so, and kind of made my way into crypto after that. All right. So you were taking the free credits and trial like services from AWS and Microsoft Azure and you're using that to mine crypto. Yeah. So pretty smart, actually. I mean, it was like one hundred dollars of free credits and I was probably making, God knows, not much money at all.

But it felt like a smart idea at the time. Probably was a huge waste of my time. but it was something where I was just kind of getting familiar with it. And I was in the process of getting a master's degree in information systems at the time. And the process of creating these different servers that I was running and feeling like I was doing something interesting and technical was kind of appealing to me. So I went through that and then I ended up buying the little, for a while you could actually mine Bitcoin with these little USB mining ASICs. Um, so I bought a bunch of those and just had those running. I had a desktop computer at my office. So I had those running 24 seven in my desktop computer with a little fan that was

blowing on at all times because otherwise they would basically melt your computer. So that was kind of like how I ended up getting into it. It wasn't necessarily like I really understood the kind of the finance elements or the economics elements behind Bitcoin, or not necessarily Dogecoin. Dogecoin was fun for a while, but I didn't necessarily understand those components as much as I was really interested by the fact that you could basically print money from your computer,

which as a 23-year-old kid, I was like, oh, this is kind of appealing. So I kind of dove in that way. Got it. How do you go from essentially beg, borrowing, stealing computing power to mine crypto to the infamous Crypto Bobby. Like what occurs between mining Bitcoin and Dogecoin

to having, how many subscribers on YouTube? It's like 130,000, something like that. So you got 100 plus thousand subscribers on YouTube and you started out using free credits on AWS. Like what's the transition there? So, I mean, it became pretty unprofitable to do anything. Like the free credits, I probably did that four or five times.

So it wasn't necessarily like I was paying rent with that. I probably made $100 maybe. But even the mining with the Bitcoin ASICs began pretty unprofitable pretty quickly. So I just kind of stopped that and would kind of dollar cost average into Bitcoin on occasion and really just focused on my day job, which was recruiting and then software sales for about five years up until 2017. and I was working a job in enterprise software sales at Oracle. I sold ERP software, which is accounting software. That sounds super stimulating. Yeah, I sold that to financial services firms in

New York City. So it was really exciting. Paid well. But yeah, so I did that for a while and I actually worked from home for the most part. So there was a specific day, it was like August of 2017. I made a video. There wasn't a ton of content about crypto at the time or a ton of content that I loved. There were a lot of people talking about crazy things and talking about BitConnect and just the YouTube game was kind of wild west back then. And I wanted to just kind of put my thoughts together on what I felt like I had a different spin to say. And I put the first video out there, got like 50 views. The second one got like 500 and the third one got something like five thousand. I was like, this is an interesting growth pattern and maybe I should continue to do

this. And so for like six or seven months, I made a video on YouTube basically every single day, sometimes twice a day. And that kind of just took off and was was a pretty crazy ride. Yeah. What were the videos about? So the videos were about everything from like daily price movements in Bitcoin to Ethereum to what altcoins were doing and just different like trends that I saw. And I tried to be not too high level at all, because I'm not necessarily the most technical person or I feel like I know more than a lot of people, but I'm definitely not in that like upper 2% as far as knowledge. So I definitely wanted to be in a position where I wasn't just kind of like a

relatable individual when talking about crypto uh and i think kind of what what something that was fun for me and also just helped the channel grow a lot was i did these like crypto happy hours which were kind of like this but it would be nine o'clock at night and i'd have three beers and sit on a live stream and just interact and answer questions and kind of listen to what people had to say and talk to them about things so and and with a hundred plus thousand subscribers when you do that like how many people are on at any time a couple hundred so it right now it's probably like three two to four hundred um in the peak of the the bull run yeah what's going on it's a bull run that was that was the most wild there was one time i was uh sitting in you know sitting in my

like office at home uh recording a live stream and there were 4 000 people on the live stream And I was just sitting there with a couple beers in me just like, what is – there are 4,000 people that are watching this. And here I am like the next morning waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to have a discovery call about accounting software. And there's 4,000 people that are watching this. And it was like mind-blowing. Dude, that's like a small stadium. Like literally, it's like you're like a stand-up comedian and you made it. You're performing in front of 4,000 people, right?

Yeah, it doesn't last long because it's totally correlated with the crypto markets. But yeah, it was a wild, wild time. Okay, and so you go, explain the crypto happy hours. You're streaming live, you're drinking, right? Not getting drunk, but just, you know, you're having a beer or two. What is everybody else doing? Was the idea that they're going to be drinking as well while watching the live stream? It was just kind of like whatever people want to be doing.

like i typically the majority of my audience would be u.s based so i would do it let's say sometimes seven eight nine basically after i was done with work um i would log in and then yeah i would you know ask people like like how you ask people on your stream hey where are you watching in from i would say where are you watching in from and what are you drinking and it would be you know everything from like crazy ipas to bud light to to vodka on the rock whatever it might be so that was always kind of a just a fun way to interact with people and then we just answer questions. I mean, a lot of times it would be like, what do you think about X, Y, Z? Should I invest in this? Should I put all my money in that? And a lot of times I have, I mean, I have no idea,

but I would just kind of try to provide some type of rational thought process, whether or not that ended up working out in the long run. Who knows? I love it. I love it. All right. So what are you doing now? No longer selling accounting software. So when I was, when I was doing the YouTube Channeler doing a ton of that, which I still do now. But I was really interested in the crypto industry, really interested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, a lot of the other things, and really wanted to work full time in the space. And for me, I had difficulty doing that because I have a software sales background. My job was to generate revenue for companies, or my job was to generate revenue for Oracle. I had a, whatever, a million dollar, million dollar plus quota. And my job would be to

close software as a service deals. And that was difficult when I would be looking in the crypto space because there wasn't necessarily a lot of companies that were A, bringing in revenue or B, the types of companies that were bringing in revenue were mostly cryptocurrency exchanges where they're looking for somebody with a Wall Street institutional finance sales background, which I just don't have. So it was really tough for me. So what I was eventually doing at that point in time was I would apply to different jobs. I would just hear nothing back. and a lot of people would reach out to me about interviews on the podcast, and eventually what I started to look at was,

okay, if somebody's reaching out to me about an interview, I am going to check the company. If I know of the company, I'll check their website, and I'll look at it and say, oh, wow, they actually have a job opening. So I'd reply back to their interview and say, hey, you know what? Love to have you on my podcast. By the way, I saw you had a business development role. Would love to talk to you about that as well.

and that was something that eventually kind of got my foot in the door a little bit and I interviewed with a company that you've talked to Oved Fluidity Airswap so I actually interviewed Oved on my YouTube channel and I was talking to him before the interview and he's like what's your end game what are you trying to do it's like well I'd love to work full-time in the industry and he's like come in on Sunday came into the office on a weekend met with the team two weeks later, made the jump and left Oracle to work in the crypto industry full time. How freeing was it to shed the man and enter into the world where people are freaking half crazy and frankly, half overly ambitious?

It was really interesting. I mean, I actually really liked software sales. If the Bitcoin industry as a whole wouldn't come around, I feel like I'd still be doing that for sure. I think that's a great job for anybody that's ever interested in that. It's awesome. But it was really interesting on my end because when you just make content, I kind of felt like an outsider looking in on the industry. I was like, okay, I'm making content. I'm talking about this stuff. But I don't necessarily know exactly what's going on in the inside.

There's not necessarily a ton of respect in the world for YouTubers amongst the established leaders of the industry. So I was just looking to do something where I had an opportunity to actually participate in what was going on within the industry, try to build things, try to learn things as much as possible. And it was really awesome to be able to go into an office every day and just be able to work with like-minded people who were passionate about Bitcoin, passionate about Ethereum, were really interested in seeing the industry grow. So that was my favorite part about it. And you go from that to starting a business in the space. Talk a little bit about what you're doing now and kind of what the genesis for starting Proof of Talent was. Sure. So in 2019, I was still at Fluidity and started to think a little bit just in the back of my head about what the long-term game in the industry for me might be. We're going so fast, we need some water.

So thinking about that a little bit more in depth. Is this like crypto happy hour like in the morning? Yeah. Is that spiked coffee? If you have booze, that'd be great. Now, it's Friday, right? It's never too early on a Friday. People on the live stream think you need milk.

I don't know why, but that's what they're saying. Water for the buffalo chicken cake. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, we're going to get to the Jets and the buffalo chicken in a minute. Keep going. Don't do the Jets for me, please. Um, so I was just thinking a little bit about like long-term where I could add the most value

in the industry and had the, at the time what I thought was kind of a crazy idea to start a recruiting firm. And I did a bunch of research. I was, I was driving up to Boston one day and kind of had the idea that popped in my head. And I was like, you know what, this actually seems like something that's not that crazy. And I did a bunch of research and didn't necessarily find anybody that I thought was kind of meeting the specific needs of the market. And then I started to reach out to different people that work in crypto and run companies. So I started to reach out to different CEOs and I was just like, hey, I have a quick question for you. You know, people that I knew, people that I was friends with, I was like, you know, what do you do for recruiting?

How do you handle hiring? What are your thoughts? Do you see a demand? And basically every time it was just a conversation about like some of the business challenges when I was trying to do some market research. Almost every single CEO is like hiring is a huge problem for us. It's a really big issue. And we're just not able to hire fast enough. So just kind of put a bunch of wheels into place and ended up deciding to leave full time with Fluidity to start Proof of Talent, which is a technical recruiting firm that works exclusively with companies in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Got it. There's a lot to unpack here because one, I definitely agree that there is a ton of people who want to hire, but they're struggling. Maybe let's start on that

side with the companies. Sure. Like what are you seeing or you're sitting in the kind of the middle of that marketplace? So you talk to employers every day, you talk to people who are in the industry looking to switch jobs, and then also people outside the industry looking to get into the industry. On the employer side, like what are some of the trends you see and some of the challenges that they're facing. Sure. So yeah, I think you summarized it well. I mean, basically proof of talent. I practiced. Last night, I stayed up late to practice that one little speech. So proof of talent is pretty much like a, it's basically a matchmaker between companies that are hiring and talent. And so for the companies that are hiring, I think you've seen kind of an

interesting, just like with the industry, how things have changed since 2017. There's definitely a somewhat of like a unique perception where I feel like things have, the outside interest has maybe pared back a little bit, but it's definitely been a lot more legitimized over time. I think every day that Bitcoin continues to exist and continues to succeed, that's the just kind of legitimacy for the industry continues to grow. And you're starting to see companies that are, I think, finding different and new unique use cases.

and that's where I think like for me that the majority of the companies that I work with are trying to fill those gaps I think previously you know what you've seen is like the only successful companies have been the basically exchanges for the most part like the companies that have done really well have been cryptocurrency exchanges and in 2016-2017 you had a lot of of token sales and ICOs with these lofty goals and for the most part the vast majority of them have have not panned out. And with that, you have this kind of new emerging class of business that is mostly like a venture backed company that's building some type of infrastructure or service within the cryptocurrency world, whether that is research or data or like APIs around exchange. There's a lot

of different nice niches and unique components that businesses are kind of going after outside of just the exchanges. And that is one of the areas where I think people have to kind of prove their ability to succeed because you have these companies that everybody is building the next big thing. But kind of proving that you're able to is really important when trying to attract that next generation of talent. All right. So the employer side is obviously the businesses are going to do what they're going to do. We already have people asking in the live stream things like college grad with programming, smart contract experience, how can I expose myself to crypto dev positions? Sure. So let's flip around to the other side of the market. Whether somebody's been

in the industry or not, what are you seeing from people who want to fill these jobs from a trend perspective? Sure. So like if you're looking at talent, what I typically see, especially in the technical side, primarily proof of talent is a technical or recruiting firm. So about 70% of the positions we work on are some type of software engineering role. The other 30% might be like a smattering of business operations, legal. But for the majority, it's engineering type roles or development type roles. And for the most part, companies are really looking and interested in people that have experience with like core technology outside of the blockchain or cryptocurrency world. You know, whether that might be like a back end engineer that has

experience with Java or C++ at a startup or a larger tech company or front end engineer that's worked with JavaScript and React for a few years. There's not necessarily as much of a demand for that that I'm seeing right now. At least there's not as much of a demand right now for somebody that has, let's say, experience specifically working on Bitcoin or specifically working with Solidity and Web3. There are opportunities like that. But I, for the most part, see that companies are more strict on finding individuals that have poor technology experience and less strict with somebody having blockchain experience going into it from day one got it and then let's get into a little bit of like advice yeah people right so um what are some of the do's and don'ts

let's start with the don'ts right so there's a bunch of people who they want to get jobs and they either kind of shotgun out to a bunch of companies they come to you whatever what are the big mistakes that they're making that they shouldn't do anymore So I think that, and coming from somebody that has been in this situation, like I said before, when I was at Oracle, I was sending out resumes, and I was basically hearing nothing back. I wasn't the perfect fit for the positions on paper, but I still felt like I had something to offer. And I think a lot of people feel like they're in that scenario, where they don't feel like they're necessarily, like they look at the job description, they know, hey, I don't have

everything but I think I can add value and what I would say on that end is that for the most part the crypto industry is still small enough where personal connections I think really make a big you know big difference and so if you are somebody that I think networking is is like a huge huge thing to to be like successful within to be successful within the then the job search is you know, going to, if you're in a large city, going to different crypto meetups and trying to meet people there, or even like Twitter and Telegram are still, I think, hugely important and helpful. Like you can be in any location in the world and you could still interact with people on a consistent basis. So I think building up a network as much as possible and trying to get

warm introductions is something that's helpful, especially for people that aren't maybe the best fit for specific roles at least on paper skirt skirt want to know who has the best url crypto.com that's right crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal motherfucking mass adoption that's why we're all here we're trying to get crypto in every wallet crypto.com is helping people do that through buying earning lending and card payment everything you could want at crypto.com go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's

like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You plug it in, connect to your Wi-Fi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your CoinMine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at

BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds so you receive a 6.2% APY which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. Yeah. And you and I were talking before we started recording. It's almost like this idea of like giving value before you try to capitalize on it. Maybe explain a little bit of that. Sure. So one thing that I think is really important for people that are not within, they're not working in the crypto industry right now or in

the blockchain industry. Maybe you're a college, you could be in college, you could be a college grad. You could have whatever, 10 years of experience on Wall Street doesn't necessarily matter. I think that proving your actual interest within the industry is really important. And there's a couple of different ways that you can do that. And why I say this is because a lot of people, when you're having, I have conversations with job candidates multiple times a day. And there's a lot of times where, you know, you'll speak to somebody and they'll say, hey, I'm really interested in Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever it is. And then I'll ask, is there anything that you have that I can show to somebody that we can use that to prove your interest?

And for the most part, there's not. There are a few people, and I've seen these people have a ton of success, where if it's somebody that's non-technical, they're an analyst or a researcher, or they're just working in some type of business role, they write their thoughts down on Medium. Maybe they only have two articles, but it goes to show like, hey, I've given actual thought to this industry and I've tried to put some time and effort into what I'm doing. And I'm interested even if I'm working a full-time job doing something completely different. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a software engineer, one of the easiest things that you can do is find a project that you're passionate about and contribute. I mean, basically the entire industry is built on an open source ethos.

So if you find something that you like, contribute a little bit, put a little bit of effort in, and just build up your GitHub profile a little bit. And I think that will go a long way as far as just ultimately showing that you do care about this more than just saying, I do. Yeah. It's almost like do the job before you get the job. Yeah. Right? And I like your example of the researcher because the technical one I think is very obvious, right? Oh, you're interested in the space, build something, right?

And then you can show people this is what I built, and they either like it or they don't. They figure out can they work with you or not. The non-technical positions, though, a researcher, an analyst, it's so simple, right? Just literally right. The ones that are probably harder and I want to hear your thoughts on are, like, folks like business development, right, or marketing. How do you think about what they can do before they actually go in to apply for a job to kind of show value or, you know, prove their worth, if you will? In some cases, it might be doing something that's a side project in addition to your full-time job. If you're working in marketing and you want to maybe help somebody out for five hours a week on the side, that could be something that's interesting.

Or if you're in sales, maybe trying to help somebody out on the side. There are a couple different, like Masari has their analyst program. I've talked to a bunch of different people that they might be working and they might be looking for a research job. Maybe they don't. They're not looking for that at all. But by participating in that analyst program, it's basically like a free volunteer program that they're doing. But it's kind of a resume builder. And that's what they're looking at it as. And it could be somebody that's working in operations or sales trading on Wall Street. It doesn't necessarily matter. But that type of just helping and being involved within the industry is really important for a lot of people. Absolutely. We've got people in the comments. Ah, Catherine Cooley, CEO of Binance US, saying, I am hiring looking for active folks who successfully drove results at scale.

Versatility is key. Perfect example of somebody who's saying, look, we're hiring and we're looking for people who can drive results and who actually have skills, but it's not necessarily you had to do it in the crypto industry, et cetera, right? Yeah. And I think too, like when you just job searching in general, and when you're applying for opportunities, it's, you know, you're trying to make yourself the most attractive candidate possible. There are going to be, you're not going to be the only applicant for these opportunities. And you want to put yourself in a position where your background, your resume is the most appealing and not necessarily just like your resume. I think that's somewhat like a little bit like outdated in general, but like your, your experience, your background, what you bring to the table is the most appealing thing to somebody else. And ultimately you have to sell yourself to the company. They have to sell yourself. They have to sell them to you as well, because hopefully you'll have multiple opportunities that you can choose from.

But that's something that, you know, you want to always try to put like the best package forward for a company to look at. For sure. All right. We'll come back to hiring in a second, but I got to, I got to ask two questions. One, you're a fanatic when it comes to buffalo chicken. What's going on with that? I've never had a buffalo chicken sandwich. Is that bad?

Yes. That's terrible. I'll have to buy one for you. All right. What's the fascination? So it was kind of a running joke in like mid to late 2017 when I started Crypto Bobby on Twitter and on YouTube. you know there would be times where I'd go and I'd get like a buffalo chicken for lunch and for whatever dumb reason I would post it on on Twitter and then like 30 minutes later the price of

Ethereum would be up 50% or the price of Bitcoin would be up 30% and I'd be like I need to eat more buffalo chicken wraps and it just kind of like turned into this running joke and I also could eat like a buffalo chicken wrap like three times a day unfortunately I haven't found any like super great ones in New York City. So I'm still, still struggling for that. But yeah, it just, it, it rolled. All right. So we're going to go from something you love, which by the way, McDonald's, if they had a Buffalo chicken wrap would be even better, but McDonald's is the best restaurant. I'm a big Mickey D's fan. I'm a Mickey D's stockholder. So I hope it, hope it goes on forever. That's what my brother, my brother has a little bit of McDonald's stock and whenever we

goes somewhere outside the united states pays a nice dividend we literally go to mcdonald's and he's like oh i'm checking on my investment i there's there have been a few times where i was in i think it was like dubai malta a couple other like brand international places for crypto conferences uh prague and every time i go in i get a big mac you got it yeah why not i'm personally a mcchicken fan though i'm a big mac guy no i gotta go to mcchicken all right we got to talk about a serious uh topic now what the fuck is going on with the New York Jets um I'm a I'm a die-hard New York Jets fan I actually why uh do you enjoy pain well at this point in time no but yes by the way as a New York Giants fan like I feel for you right but go ahead so my dad was a

Jets fan so I naturally I became a Jets fan it's funny because I actually got a uh cold I went to the first game of the season and i got a cold call from uh the season ticket office yesterday and then i got an email and i did respond but uh i was just kind of laughing in my head like if there's if there's any worse sales drop on the planet right now than selling jet season tickets i don't know what it is but i'm a huge jets fan i'm a diehard jets fan they're like the fact that the season is basically over two weeks in is the most i was so pumped went to the first jets game tailgated super pumped what was the score it was 16 nothing and they blew 16-0 lead lost 17-16 and uh because of two missed field goals and then our starting quarterback who is I think gonna be

I think Sam Darnold's gonna be awesome but gets mono and is out for at least a month and I don't I haven't heard of uh anybody above like 15 years old getting mono since I never so that's just the that's the Jets luck is your starting quarterback gets mono your backup quarterback breaks his ankle And now you're on some third string, so there we are. If it makes you feel better going into the season for the New York Giants, Eli Manning, you know, when is he going to turn it over? We're in week three, and he's already benched. So that tells you how the Giants season's going.

They might be the only team worse than the Jets. You have a Super Bowl in your lifetime. I'll never have that. Yeah, that is true. We have two of them, actually, beat the Patriots. Oh, thank God. All right, so other than football and chicken wraps, where can people go if they're looking for jobs in the space right with proof of talent in terms

of what's the best way for them to get in touch with you and where can they go? Sure so with proof of talent I'm really trying to build a company that people on the the job seeking side really think of as a place to go and reach out to us when they are looking for opportunities whether they're looking within the space they're already working at a at a company in the crypto industry or if they're looking from outside, they're trying to make their way in. So really trying to serve as a point of contact for individuals on that end. And also for companies, looking for companies that are hiring that need assistance with technical talent or non-technical talent, a place that they know and that they can trust to help them find that talent.

As far as companies and individuals reaching out, proofoftalent.co is our website. There are a number of job opportunities you can see there. You can send in your resume, a bunch of different things. And also if you're looking for different positions, you can certainly reach out as well. And then on Twitter, my DMs are open, which is something I had closed DMs forever. And once I started the new business, I was like, you know what, I got to open them. And it's been an interesting experience. What's the craziest thing and the most valuable thing that you've been DM'd?

The level of C-level executives at large companies that will come in to just send you a message via Twitter or on Telegram, it's pretty incredible. I think people like – I post a lot about the job opportunities on Twitter, and people are like, you're never going to find that position on Twitter. And then I have a 20-year lawyer with experience working at some massive financial firm in the SEC that sends me a message. And he's like, hey, I'm looking for a job in crypto. I run a lightning node and I'm really passionate about this stuff. It's like, oh, you can't find this type of thing on Twitter? Twitter's the new LinkedIn. Yeah.

I still utilize LinkedIn and I think it's helpful. But the organic conversations that you have on Twitter are, I think, a lot more, at least for me, just because that's like where I have the most audience and I've built up the most relationships. There's definitely more of a kind of an organic feel, I feel like. Yeah. What is the Twitter account and what's the YouTube account? I'm never going to think of you as not Crypto Bobby. So on Twitter, I'm at Crypto underscore Bobby. There's also at Proof of Talent if you want to reach out about any job opportunities.

You can certainly do that there. And on YouTube, it's just Crypto Bobby if you search it in. No underscore. No, it's just Crypto Bobby. Do we know who has the at Crypto Bobby no underscore on Twitter? I don't. And the only reason I'm actually Crypto Bobby is because I go by Rob for the most part in real life. But CryptoRob.com was not available.

So I decided to buy CryptoBobby.com. So that was basically people are like, why do you go by Bobby? I'm like, just CryptoRob.com wasn't available on GoDaddy. I almost don't want to admit this, but one of the URLs I bought, I think a pretty long time ago, PompBitcoin.com. It's actually a pretty good one. Pomp it. I'm probably not going to do anything with it.

PompIt.com. But the fact that that was available and I got it made me so happy. So whoever's got CryptoRob.com, I've got a buyer for you. I'll facilitate a trade. all right rapid fire questions most important company in crypto other than proof of talent uh no definitely proof of talent now um i'm surprised no one's fought me on this question like some no one's ever been like no actually it's our company i think that coinbase is one of the most important and one of the most interesting um i feel like they've they've done

some just kind of uh eyebrow raising moves in terms of i feel like they've gone from one of the most conservative companies in the crypto space to, I don't know if you saw yesterday, considering adding a bunch of new Telegram and Handshake and probably 15 different assets. So I feel like they've definitely taken a more retail approach. And I'm interested to see how that pans out for Coinbase, given their user base and their pull on the industry, rather than some of the more institutional and focused answers around ETFs and things like that. Yeah. We'll see. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

I mean, I think the vast majority of the vast majority of people will say the the accredited investor loss as somebody who, as of recently, previously was a New Jersey resident and now I'm a New York resident. The BitLicense is super, super frustrating as a new New York resident having to deal with that. It's something that I feel like every different crypto exchange or product or anything, it's like, we're available in 49 states minus New York. So for very selfish reasons and also because I think it's onerous for companies to comply with, the BitLicense is something that I'd love to see changed. At some point, they're either going to have state by state regulation or federal regulation. If the federal regulation comes in, it may get rid of the state regulation. So we'll see. That would be nice.

Most important book you've ever read? There have been a lot of interesting ones. But I think my favorite and the one that's had probably the longest lasting impression on me is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's an awesome book. And it just goes to show, especially now where you kind of see the overnight success of a lot of people and in like the tech focused world and with a lot of startups. I mean, companies going to billion dollar valuations in minutes and seconds, basically, it feels like. And I think Phil Knight going from like eight thousand dollars in sales his first year with Nike and wasn't even Nike was blue ribbon to like sixteen thousand.

And basically doubling in sales from absolutely nothing to being a multi-multi-billionaire over the course of like 20, 30 years is such like an inspiring story just around dealing with adversity. So that's probably the most interesting and important book for me. All right. Aliens, real or not real? Exist or don't exist? I'll say they exist. Yeah, they exist. You don't sound very confident.

I got enough problems on Earth right now that I got enough things to worry about here. So as long as they don't come down in an Independence Day-style fashion and we need Will Smith to save us, I'm not too worried about aliens. Higher probability of a human being able to prove contact with an alien or the Jets going 16-0 in your lifetime? Definitely aliens. like when there is zero percent chance like negative zero percent chance the jets will ever uh ever go 16 and 0 so yeah and if they do they'll probably not make it to the super bowl so yeah aliens definitely the uh so i originally started asking the question and people on the live stream uh seem to remember uh alien pets that's where it came from was uh i was laying

in bed one night and i was like if aliens showed up would they have would it be like a multi-species right where they have pets and there's like the human equivalent or are they just all the same thing like what do you think it might yeah you know i feel like the the pets is probably uh probably a solid move i feel like it's very presumptuous presumptuous of us to just think that you know there's just gonna be one race of aliens like there's probably multiple yeah and we are their pets yeah of course we uh we are in the simulation um all right to finish up and then We'll take a couple of questions from the live stream once the podcast is over. What question do you have for me?

How do you view distribution? I feel like that's something that you know just about as well as anybody in the crypto space and has underrated importance and would be curious just like generally around your thoughts on distribution. Highly controversial thought. Many people would get mad at me for saying it, so I'm going to say it. and then it'll make sense why every single piece of content on the internet is entertainment so even the news is entertainment yeah and uh whether people like it or not it's not the fact that i think that's the way it should be it's just a fact of life it's entertainment and the second

that people start looking at content creation distribution etc as entertainment it completely changes the way that you do things, right? So if you look at it, there's a lot of people who have a distribution strategy of, I'm going to educate. But if the educating is boring and not entertaining, it goes nowhere, right? There's a lot of people who say, I'm just going to overwhelm the market with content. If it's not entertaining, you don't get anywhere, right? There's a lot of people say, I'm going to write the news. I don't care if you write the facts or not. If it's not entertaining, no one's going to read it right and so the the entertainment factor uh is either misunderstood or left out a lot of times um what i think that translates to it doesn't mean that you have to be

funny or you have to have high production quality from like a you know hey we created a skit and here's a video um it's just the fact that i mean take this live stream for example there's some people who are watching they might not understand 80 of what we're talking about but the fact that we're having fun we're laughing whatever like it's entertaining to them so they keep watching They don't know if all of a sudden one of us are going to say some crazy-ass thing or whatever. And so to me, distribution is entertainment, entertainment, entertainment. And I was joking, but I wasn't joking when I said to somebody recently, I said, all the marketing is the pre-work for the important stuff. What I meant by that is like all the entertaining and the tweets with the emojis and trying to go viral and all this stuff, it's just you're doing that to build audience.

You're doing that to build up impressions and eyeballs because then when you have something important to say or you're a business and you want to sell your product or you're, you know, for you, you've got a job opportunity that you're trying to fill, whatever, all of that pre-work has become a habitual to folks that they're paying attention. Sure. And then once you have that, then you capitalize on it by presenting the important information, right, or whatever the goal is. I think that there's a lot of people that they don't want to put in the pre-work because they think it's stupid it's beneath them it's too hard it'll take too long too much energy whatever it is and then what they try to do is they try to capitalize but it's like you haven't earned the right to do the capitalization of your efforts until you've done the pre-work you've been entertaining etc and you know if I said to you right now hey I need you to go on YouTube

and get a bunch of people to sign up for something, you're just cashing in social capital, right? Like, they're like, yeah, we know this dude. We paid attention. Like, okay, he likes it. I'll go do my own research, but, like, I'm in. And so from a distribution standpoint, it's the WWF. Like, that is what Twitter is.

If you look at Twitter, there are good guys, bad guys. There's heroes. There's villains. You know, there's all this stuff. It's just entertainment. Yeah. it's i i definitely agree with that i feel like content is kind of like an escape for a lot of people too it's you know it's it's something to somewhat distract from from the everyday

and there are i mean especially like crypto twitter and some of the you know some of the elements around that it's such a wild like unique world with like you said so many different kind of types of people subsets of the industry that take a lot of kind of complex understanding and different people trying to entertain different groups so for sure so uh before we shut off the podcast i'll leave you with one comment that you didn't see uh somebody just said the jets are entertaining i i would highly disagree with you on that as somebody who was sitting on my couch on monday night watching a pitiful 23 to 3 loss that was not entertaining shout out wu-tang clan And 10, I see you in the live stream.

I know who you are. You're hiding, but I see you. All right. I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thanks a lot. Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain

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