Top Learnings from Working at a World-Class Crypto Investing Firm
#1: Stay Hungry. Always.
Set goals. Set a time to complete the goals by to actually achieve goals and meaningful growth. Actively go find people to help out. The more hours you give others on your team by doing meaningful work, the better. The hungrier you are for working on your passion, the more you’ll get done and the more competent you would seem on the team.
#2: Prioritizing mastery of what you don’t know, to gain understanding of what you don’t know that you don’t know.
When I first began participating in team calls, I had absolutely 0 idea of what was going on. I began to recognize the patterns of what we cared about when we looked into a project the more calls I began to hop on. Today, I’m still far from mastering the art of finalizing a good investment decision, but I’ve gained understanding of something I would’ve never known without this experience.
#3: It’s okay to mess up… only if you learn from it.
I’ve definitely had my share of mistakes when working on things from investment thesis presentations to research memos. It’s always the feedback that makes you better, and the more feedback you get, the better you’ll do next time. Getting more feedback is perhaps the number one way to improve the quality of your work… but so is failing smart. Failing smart means giving everything your 100% of care and knowledge, while understanding how you failed and your previous intentions before failing. This involves doing a pre-mortem to set your intentions before the project and a post-mortem to understand what was good and what went wrong.
#4: Building relationships is important.
Without building the relationships I did, I wouldn’t have ever gotten to know all the A+ humans on the team that offered me so much support and mentorship along the way. The people were one of the top reasons why this summer has been so enriching in learnings and fun.
#5: Block out at least 1–2 hrs a day to read whitepapers or get technical
I wrote a lot of research articles and technical writing, and in order to do so at a high quality level, you NEED to block out many hours in a day to fully comprehend whitepapers. It would not have been possible to achieve actually good work without doing your due diligence on projects and sometimes getting your hands dirty by building yourself.
#6: Writing and conveying your thoughts is critical.
During my time of deep diving into completely new blockchain ecosystems and tackling issues like MEV, explaining your findings in a way that people can understand was one of the hardest tasks of all. Especially given that some people on the team might have different levels of understanding than another (say, researchers vs HR / legal counsel), democratizing the information was difficult. Analogies, pictures, and getting feedback from different audiences before the presentation were all critical pieces toward solving this problem. The more of these you can get, the better.
#7: Take ample time to reflect.
Reflecting is a means to make a checkpoint of what you have learned thus far. The more checkpoints you have, the more lessons you would meaningfully absorb by the end of the experience.
#8: Do what you want to do.
One of my first calls when meeting my various team members was with Olaf, our founder. He told me to pour my heart out into what I want to learn about and love doing. I followed the advice, and to this day I still can’t think of one singular piece of work that I did that was not meaningful for my growth in some way or another. If something seems far from reach at first, don’t let your fears stop you from doing. The number one reason for not doing is arbitrary, perceived struggles that stand in the way.
#9: It’s all in the numbers.
Numbers and data show historic trends and can be used to predict the future. My mentors showed me the importance of analyzing crypto volatility and doing macro-analysis. Understanding this data deeply, when combined with the qualitative research I was doing, gave me a very good grasp of where crypto prices were headed (which I was even able to personally capitalize on to minimize my college costs)
#10: Crypto is a LOT closer than you think.
Even as one who has spent his entire being deep-diving into crypto for the past year, the space continues to surprise me with how many applications it can have right now on our current lives. Projects that 10x what you use every single day are being worked on right now. Ecosystems are growing more complex by the day. The time to jump in is always NOW.
I’m Xiangan — an 18 year old blockchain developer passionate about learning, and I appreciate you for reading! If you enjoyed the article, please feel free to follow me on my LinkedIn, Twitter, or make a donation to xiangan.eth (college ain’t cheap yanno). Drop me a line & let me know your 🔑 to success!
Here’s a capybara family for making it to the end.
