Is it better to hire people with crypto experience or those with strong learning abilities?

Authors: Ian Dutra, Craig Naylor, a16z Crypto

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

As the crypto industry evolves, it has created a massive demand for talent. Crypto founders need to know how to find and recruit top talent—both from crypto natives and those with traditional tech experience. However, one of the biggest questions is whether you need to hire people with experience in the crypto industry or those who can learn the industry knowledge quickly. This has sparked endless debates within companies.

The good news is that the cryptocurrency industry is not the first to face challenges in talent sourcing. This means you can draw on some established best practices to find the right talent with the appropriate skills. The purpose of this guide is to help founders and recruiters determine when crypto industry experience is crucial, when other types of experience can have the most impact, and what challenges and considerations need to be addressed during the hiring process.

To simplify the thought process, it can be understood that while there are indeed some differences between crypto companies and traditional tech companies, in terms of the processes and best practices for finding, hiring, and onboarding talent, you are not building a "crypto company," but rather a tech company. Therefore, it is essential to apply those established best practices to find talent with the right skills.

You need talent with both crypto-native and traditional skills

The rule of thumb is that crypto-native professionals have a crucial advantage: they can hit the ground running. High-risk projects are often time-sensitive, and every day counts. Sometimes, native crypto expertise is essential. This is especially true for positions involving blockchain technology and its application infrastructure, where even the most skilled professionals may face a steep learning curve.

Smart contract development is a great example. These self-executing protocols are coded directly on the blockchain and require precision and an understanding of decentralized logic, which is fundamentally different from traditional programming. A single vulnerability in a smart contract can lead to catastrophic consequences, potentially resulting in millions of dollars in losses, making it a high-risk area where understanding the rules is critical.

Bringing talent into an industry with such a steep learning curve can be a challenge, as candidates may need time to adapt to the nuances of blockchain technology—decentralization versus centralization, more open-source, etc.—as well as the "cultural spirit" of the crypto industry, which encompasses everything from different cultural terminologies to mindsets. However, talent from non-crypto companies can drive the crypto industry forward in many areas, especially when companies begin to scale. For example, traditional professionals with backgrounds in software engineering or operations can bring diverse skills and rich experiences, often honed in large software companies. These professionals often wear multiple hats and can navigate complex internal bureaucracies and obstacles to drive projects to completion. This operational flexibility becomes a powerful asset in the rapidly growing multidisciplinary teams of the crypto industry.

Experience in scaling is also crucial. Traditional candidates often have experience in developing products used by millions of users and have tackled the challenges that come with success: ensuring systems run smoothly under extreme infrastructure loads, optimizing performance at scale, and managing unpredictable surges in demand. This experience directly applies to Web3 products, as these products are transitioning from niche crypto audiences to more mainstream markets.

For instance, candidates from fintech companies may have significant relevant experience in payment technologies or financial regulations, which could also play a role in your business. If you are developing infrastructure or consumer applications, there is a large pool of talent that has accumulated years of scaling experience in these areas. Consider the overlaps in these experiences and assess how to help them quickly grasp the specific technologies of the crypto industry to build your ideal team. More broadly, candidates with experience in design, user experience, scalability, security, and leadership can also accelerate innovation in the crypto industry, as these skills often have domain expertise and may even be more suitable than those without such experience.

Once you have identified the necessary skills and personnel (including determining whether they really need to have crypto-native experience), the next step is to go out and recruit them.

Recruiting top talent from any background

The biggest challenge and the greatest opportunity are actually two sides of the same coin: you are a crypto company.

For some candidates from traditional companies, the volatility of the crypto industry, recent regulatory uncertainties, industry jargon, and decentralized products may feel too foreign or unappealing, or even both. But for others, the same unfamiliarity and occasional instability may excite them—rather than being a flaw, it is a characteristic of the company. In recruitment conversations, delve into how candidates view the stability and comfort of large companies versus the opportunities and challenges presented by fast-growing companies. Introduce them to a challenge your team faced in the past few weeks, explain how you addressed it, and emphasize the responsibilities each team member should take on, considering the company's size and stage of development. Their reactions may reveal how they would respond in similar situations, and at the very least, it will inform them of the company's expectations for everyone when the next situation arises.

Candidates may not know much about the crypto industry when you first reach out, but their natural curiosity and interest in the advantages of decentralization are key. An important signal during the recruitment process is whether their knowledge and engagement deepen over time: Are they researching relevant topics on their own? Are they asking more specific questions after learning new information? And so on.

To distinguish between two types of candidates—those who are skeptical about the crypto industry and those who are interested in it—and to avoid wasting your time and money, it is essential to understand candidates' motivations early on to ensure they align with your company's direction. This is a fundamental principle of hiring, but it is worth emphasizing because it is crucial, especially in the cryptocurrency industry.

Every recruitment conversation needs to be tailored to the specific candidate: What drives them to choose their current job? What keeps them in their past roles? These factors are likely to be significant in their decision-making this time around. Start uncovering the answers to these questions from the very first phone call with the candidate.

At the end of the recruitment process, you want to hire someone who aligns with the company's vision and is passionate about your product. At the same time, your team needs to be excited about the new hire; this will help you assess whether the candidate is a good fit for your company, regardless of whether they have crypto industry experience. This should always be your guiding principle.

Since you are targeting highly curious candidates, you need to tailor your recruitment messaging to their characteristics. You can start by explaining the two cultural differences in the crypto industry: one is "computer culture," which views blockchain as a tool for building new networks to drive a new computing movement; the other is "casino culture," which focuses primarily on speculation, trading, and gambling. Then, you can share how this emerging industry offers candidates a unique opportunity to reshape the future of technology, reminiscent of the early days of the internet.

A useful thought experiment is to try discussing your product and company without mentioning crypto technology. What problems does your company solve? What motivated you to start it? How does it make the world a better place? This approach can help you convey the company's philosophy and vision without distracting the audience with technical details.

Another good entry point is simply to ask, "How much do you know about the crypto industry?" Even if the response is skeptical or negative—such as stories from news reports or narratives about casino culture—it can open up the conversation and allow you to listen to their genuine concerns: external factors (policy), internal factors (technical complexity), personal factors (risk tolerance), and so on. You can share that many people in the crypto industry also agree with some skeptical viewpoints and steer the conversation toward the cool technical problems your project is solving.

Not everyone’s primary motivation is money, but you also need to be prepared to emphasize the financial rewards of the crypto industry. Historically, top talent has often been reluctant to join early-stage companies for three reasons: (1) a high-intensity work culture; (2) poor work-life balance; (3) lack of liquidity compensation. Even if you address the first two issues, the third could lead you to lose a significant number of potential candidates.

Compared to rare liquidity events like IPOs or acquisitions in the Web2 era, innovations in compensation such as token-based salary structures can provide early-stage companies with financial benefits and liquidity. Be sure to implement a vesting/token grant plan that somewhat locks in long-term goals, aligning employees with the company over time. Compensation is a complex topic and clearly a top concern for job seekers, so ensure you are well-prepared to discuss it.

If you can execute these steps well, you will have a great opportunity to attract top talent from outside the industry to take an interest in your company. Next, you need to help them clarify how to contribute their best performance in their daily work.

Considerations for onboarding

Integrating new talent into a Web3 company requires education to shorten their adaptation time. You have already identified each person's knowledge gaps during the interview process. Use this information to design the onboarding experience to fill these knowledge gaps as quickly as possible.

For example, new employees may need help moving beyond the technical details of blockchain and decentralized systems to understand the real problems they will be solving and to build confidence in their roles.

Regular knowledge-sharing sessions that allow new employees to interact with more experienced team members who have deeper crypto industry experience can foster collaboration and enable team members to learn from each other's strengths. Mentorship programs can pair new members with seasoned Web3 professionals, providing valuable hands-on learning opportunities. Better yet, you can structure projects to pair "unicorn" talent in the crypto industry (i.e., individuals with all the skills, knowledge, and backgrounds) with new members, allowing them to develop into their own crypto industry unicorns over time.

Skill enhancement and education are also necessary and will remain important as the industry continues to evolve. Resources such as blockchain-related blogs, podcasts, and educational courses—like how to use smart wallets, how to stake, token economics, smart contract design, or basic concepts of blockchain in different scenarios—are excellent starting points for continuous learning. Collaborating with mentors from established crypto organizations can provide practical experience, while thought leaders in the industry can offer deep insights through reports, including our own State of Crypto report.

The key is that whatever your new employees need to stand out, your job is to help them learn, find, or acquire those resources from day one.

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