The Web3 / Crypto Ecosystem Continues to Explode, Keeping Search Firms Busy

Joe Suliman, from Daversa Partners, and Warren Lorenz of TechMeetsTrader join Hunt Scanlon Media tomorrow for a webinar focusing on the burgeoning Web3 / crypto ecosystem. Both leaders are bullish on cryptocurrency and NextGen companies in general. Web3 companies have reaped billions from venture investors in the last year, and despite volatility, Messrs. Suliman and Lorenz only expect the hyper growth to continue. Find out what it means for recruiting talent.

May 10, 2022 – When hiring any Web3 executive, you need someone who’s going to drive innovation, scalability, and lead the organization through a hyper growth period. Hiring world-class talent for the fastest growing technology companies is only going to become more competitive, so understanding what skills are needed and where to look for the best talent is more important than ever.

Daversa Partners and TechMeetsTrader have teamed up with Hunt Scanlon Media for a highly anticipated webinar tomorrow. The session will focus on the Web3 / crypto ecosystem as it continues to explode, with an emphasis on venture capital, talent acquisition, new models, macro-economic factors, and governance. Find out how firms build and protect the technology that supports this market . . .  and where they source executive leadership from.

We will be joined by Joe Suliman, managing director at Daversa Partners, and Warren Lorenz, managing principal at TechMeetsTrader.

The best talent for the Web3 / crypto sectors are coming from best-in-class organizations building innovative products and solutions and taking them through hyper growth, according to Mr. Suliman. “No different than searches we at Daversa have executed against over the last couple of decades,” he said. “We have been very busy over the last 24 months in the crypto and Web3 market building leadership teams for these businesses, but it’s not like we can go recruit these executives out of last generation best Web3 companies. This is the pioneering group of leaders who will build companies that are the first of their kind.”

“When you consider the Web3 demographic, the best talent in crypto is typically young, value-driven, and entrepreneurial,” said Mr. Lorenz. “There’s also an inherent value system common across Web3 built around anonymity and decentralization, which makes finding trustworthy talent in this market extraordinarily challenging. The cohorts of Web3 typically circulate amongst themselves. They do this by creating token (or NFT) permissioned Discord servers and/or Telegram groups.”

Hyper Growth

These gated access communities house some of the brightest minds in crypto and may not be as exclusive as you think, Mr. Lorenz said. “The channels are typically open to the public, albeit it’s a pay-to-play model, where you need to have physical custody of the tokens (or NFT) in order to participate. In other words, these channels typically require you to buy a certain number of tokens or NFTs in order to be granted access.”

Mr. Suliman said: “Be it engineering, marketing, product, or operations, the one common theme among the Web3 companies we are working with is most of them are growing incredibly fast, so where do we look? To executives who have seen that movie before, those leaders who have been drivers in hyper growth environments previously, and that turns us to companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, Snap, and Atlassian.”

New Talent Coming into the Industry

There’s a huge talent suck into Web3 right now, according to Mr. Lorenz. “The easiest transitions we’re seeing for new talent coming into the industry currently work for existing industry service providers, such as auditors, lawyers, and custodians (sales, business development, operations). These firms are typically the gateway into crypto for those who are nontechnical,” he said.

“Many use this experience to learn specific expertise and that talent is highly valued in the industry and subsequently recruited faster than they can be trained. It’s unbelievably disruptive for both the firms and their clientele. We’re also seeing high-quality talent opt to work in the new corporate structures called a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which are community-owned projects without centralized leadership. This is where the token gated communities mentioned above become most relevant.”

“The blockchain and digital asset ecosystem are seeing record inflows from institutional capital. Of course, it’s going to be volatile, but its growth has undeniably outpaced almost every other industry over the last few years,” said Mr. Lorenz. “My expectation is that is likely to continue as the world shifts its new internet infrastructure from centralized software systems to distributed systems known as Web3.”

“Competition is at an all-time high,” said Mr. Suliman. “I would say for a couple of reasons. First, the number of companies raising money in Web3 is accelerating at an incredible rate. Over $33 billion of new investments from venture firms were made in 2021 into crypto and Web3 startups. The fourth quarter of 2021 saw over $10 billion alone which is more than the entire year of 2020 saw. So new companies are getting funded, growing companies are raising more money, and with that new capital they are going to invest in growth and need new executive leadership to drive that growth.”

“Secondly, I talk to executives every day who used to be skeptics and now only want to hear about crypto or Web3,” said Mr. Suliman. “The market on the margins has accepted that Web3 is here and here to stay. There are fundamentals in Web3 businesses that allow these companies to scale at breakneck pace. Their path to liquidity is materially quicker than Web1 or Web2 companies primarily due to the tokenization and listings on platforms like Polygon and Coinbase. And we are seeing legitimate businesses really hit an exciting level of scale, like OpenSea and FTX and many others. So candidates are flooding the market, the market is growing, dollars are flooding the market, it’s a perfect storm for a competitive executive hiring landscape. But that’s exciting IMO. It lets our CEOs maintain an exceedingly high bar for these hires.”

“Overall I don’t see this slowing down,” Mr. Suliman said. “I think winners will emerge and losers will fall by the wayside, similar to any explosive market we have seen in the past. I am bullish on the usability of the software and the levers that Web3 presents businesses to expedite growth.”

 Topics to be discussed include:

  • The “alphas” of Web3 
  • How to evaluate new, early staged Web3/ crypto investments 
  • Emerging Web3 technologies & models that we should be paying attention to
  • Compensation: Equity vs. Tokens 
  • Crypto governance 
  • How to measure the growth of crypto currencies when considering other macroeconomic factors 
  • The “Talent Market” – how to look for the best in class “pioneering operators”

Free registration … Click here to sign up!

The Speakers

Joe Suliman is managing director and head of Daversa’s Boston office. He works closely with founders, CEOs, and boards to execute on critical executive leadership searches for the fastest growing companies in the technology sector.

Mr. Suliman has spent the last eight years building deep functional expertise and product, engineering and general management having placed over 100 executives in industry sectors such as consumer internet, enterprise SaaS, frontier tech, security, fintech, and health tech. Mr. Suliman has eight years under his belt spent in Silicon Valley helping lead the firm’s West Coast practice before moving to the East coast to run the firm’s Boston office. Mr. Suliman has placed C-level executives at companies like Reddit, Nextdoor, Postmates, Brex, Dataminr, Google, Podium, NexHealth, Nylas, Cruise Automation, NerdWallet, Scopely, and ClassPass, among many others.

Warren Lorenz works to extract opportunity from volatile markets via proprietary trading strategies and financial engineering. He is involved in the direct development of quantitative trading systems for a wide variety of asset classes with a robust finance, math, and engineering background.

TechMeetsTrader is a private investment company, specializing in early-stage ventures and market neutral trading. Its Venture Studio actively manages a market-neutral investment strategy and parlays those profits into venture capital activities. Its consulting firm provides white-glove services for blockchain and fintech companies, cryptocurrency exchanges, brokerages, family offices, hedge funds, and proprietary trading offices.

Attendance is free. To learn more and register to attend, click here

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media

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