Preparing for Scale: Recruitment, Culture, and Strategic Growth with Ceri Power

00:02 - Announcement (Announcement)

Welcome to the Blockchain Startup Show with Harrison Wright, a podcast dedicated to dauntless blockchain leaders building our new decentralized future. You'll hear stories, successes, trials and tribulations as we channel into the lives of high-performing leaders in crypto and Web3. Whether you're currently a Web3 founder or leader, or you one day aspire to be, you'll gain crucial knowledge and insights to accelerate your learning curve. Hi everyone, this is Harrison Wright.

00:35 - Harrison (Host)

Welcome back to the Blockchain Startup Show. I'm really excited to have today our special guest, kerry Power. Kerry is currently head of people at the StartNet Foundation. She has scaled multiple Web3 companies, including famous ones, chainlink Status. I'm really excited to have Kerry here today for two particular reasons. One is there's that old saying about how, if you're building any kind of company, you should build as if you're planning to sell it, because the things you need to do to build it to be ready for sale are the things you should be doing anyway. I think you could make the same observation about building for scale.

01:07

There's so much disorganization in early stage crypto teams and what I've noticed a definite trend I've talked about this maybe before a strong indicator for me. Let's say, there's a DeFi protocol. They have seven people on the team. One of them runs operations, so they know what they're doing and they're going to do well. It's a very strong predictor. So I think a lot of the lessons that Kerry has to share from later stage companies we could translate to hey, what do you need to be thinking about as an early stage founder? And the other reason I'm really excited to talk to Kerry is I think there's a great discussion to be had here around the debate of do we hire the crypto native people or what is the utility of hiring people who aren't so crypto native? And if you look at larger Series B and above companies, they tend to do a lot more hiring of non-crypto native people. I think there's really some lessons to be learned there. So, carrie, welcome, it's a real pleasure to have you.

01:58 - Ceri (Guest)

Thank you so much, Harrison. I'm stoked to be here. I love talking about this topic. I have made all the mistakes you could make in scaling.

02:10 - Harrison (Host)

So I'm kind of glad to tell you, just from my experience, what worked well and what didn't as well. Well, what's the old saying? It's great to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from other people's.

02:17 - Ceri (Guest)

Yeah, I think that no one ever scaling has all the answers. That's the thing, right? Everyone looks like they know what they're doing, but you have to fail and make a million mistakes to get there. You know, I think it's great that we could all learn from each other. We even have podcasts like this, right, because back in the days of company building, it was just so much harder to share information. Great that we have web-free communities. Great that we can have this conversation. I think there's a lot of power in being open about things that didn't work, because ultimately, we all want the same thing, which is the growth of this ecosystem that we're in. So, yes, if I could be helpful to anyone, very glad to tell you what I've learned along the way.

02:51 - Harrison (Host)

You know you just touched on something that is completely separate at the top of the topic, but I think I want to pick up on cause I think it's really cool. Yeah, Back in the day, you know, I started recruiting 2007, 2009, depending on your definition. I got fired from my first recruitment job in 2007 after three months, so that's another story.

03:07 - Ceri (Guest)

Personal best.

03:08 - Harrison (Host)

Personal best. It was deserved.

03:11

It's not always a bad thing to get fired, but back then sales and marketing was let's call these, it's pretty much let's make some phone calls, that's all you could do, and it's something I think isn't under. You know, we kind of talk about it in terms of community and we talk about communities and something, but I think it's an underappreciated reality what a huge value added is to everybody. But now the predominant form of marketing for any serious company is to create lots of free, valuable things for other people 100. You know. None of these resources would exist if there wasn't a marketing motive behind it. But but the fact that you can get huge value from a bunch of companies that you'll never spend any money with, we just take that for granted. It's amazing 100%.

03:54 - Ceri (Guest)

That's why I love this industry right. It's that it's not like, okay, we're reluctantly having to give away our knowledge or share it. It's like open source is powerful by design because it includes all of us and we all contribute, and that's kind of how we operate. So I love that. I think that's just amazing. There's like collaboration, not competition. So, yeah, 100%.

04:15 - Harrison (Host)

It's really huge. I'd love to hear well, I guess I already know, but I think the audience would love to hear. Before we dive in a little more, would you mind giving us a little audit history, kerry? How did you get into crypto? How did you get to where you are today?

04:27 - Ceri (Guest)

Yeah, 100%. So I've spent the first 10 years of my career in management consulting, which at the time I thought was like yeah, really interesting, right, like I wore a suit, I solved problems for really big companies, little problems for massive companies, and it gave me a really good grounding in things like problem solving, coaching, you know, guiding, all those kind of nice things. But I feel like my career only really started like in the latter half, probably in the last, I can't even count. I want to say like eight years, I don't know, the time has gone fast when I started working in startups so going in-house and actually being like I've helped consult HR teams on solving their problems. Now I want to actually be the person who's solving the problem in a very focused way, and I think I just really found my place in crypto.

05:11

It happened by accident. A friend brought me into a team and she was scaling, needed someone to help her out, and at the time it was probably less about crypto, more about like I, like the person. But you know, as I tell people, I feel like I fell down the rabbit hole, right. There's a lot about crypto that just matches my personal philosophy on work, like being a results-oriented workplace, like that's the only way you can work. When everyone's distributed and all over the place. If you're looking for a really niche, global technical talent, like you have to hire remotely. So all these things I kind of loved about work and HR remotely. So all these things I kind of loved about work and HR, I felt fitted very neatly in crypto.

05:48

I've also had a strong sense that, like we don't need to be in an office or wear a certain outfit or be from a certain school to do our best work, and so, yeah, I just kind of found my home.

05:55

I love the weird and wonderful and like the 24-7. And so, yeah, my kind of sweet spot is coming in and scaling crypto companies partnering with founding teams. You don't have to always say, like HR has a really fluffy reputation, but ultimately I'm just trying to help those teams win, and for most crypto businesses, it's about the people that they have and so making sure that as we invest in people, those investments are successful and we get the best people for the job. And so that's probably where I'm at today and what my third stint as a head of people in crypto. I love it. I think it takes a lot of conviction to do it. The timelines along the work is hard, but when we believe in the product that we're making and think it has real good in the world, it doesn't feel like work. I'm sure you probably feel the same right.

06:36 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, and you know it's interesting the background that you come from, because because I don't know if you've noticed the same pattern, but I've noticed it's not like there's a huge sample size, because not everyone has worked in management consulting, but from what I've seen, there's a definite trend where people who were management consultants tend to be very successful in crypto.

06:53 - Ceri (Guest)

Do you reckon yeah, maybe it's because you've just kind of seen how businesses run and you have some fundamentals, Like I think sometimes what we do at crypto is this, and we'll probably get to this later this idea of like ah, we're crypto, we're so different, like, indeed, we are very different in culture, product. But there's some things about running companies that are just you know, there's best practices and they just say, wherever you go, so maybe it's just that you've got a bit of pattern matching and you can apply it, but you've also kind of worked across different problems so you could solve it. I don't know. Actually, I thought it was more of a downer than it was a good thing earlier on, but maybe this actually set me up for where I wanted to be now, but it felt very dry and corporate at the time.

07:31 - Harrison (Host)

I'm really glad that crypto isn't that Same. You know kind of related. I don't want to go off on too many tangents because I'm really good at doing that when I want to. Same. When I you know, in my first industry that I recruited in industrial automation it was we always had to find out what qualifications someone had and we mainly used to recruit technical salespeople. Some companies they would only hire salespeople who had an electronic engineering degree. Some would accept what was the UK qualification at the time, hnc or HND.

07:59 - Ceri (Guest)

Some didn't mind. Yeah, right yeah.

08:03 - Harrison (Host)

You had to have some sort of engineering qualification even to do the sales job. Uh right, what that was dependent on the company and how much support they had. You know some companies were big enough they would have a, you know, technical support person who'd work with the salesperson. Other other companies you had to do the whole thing yourself. But people cared about qualifications, people cared about you know there was this perspective in that industry that hey, eventually, maybe after 20 years, you would get your shot to be the sales manager. You know I had actually the time we're recording this. It hasn't released yet, but I had someone on his podcast. I met him three years ago as a junior mid-level marketing person. Now he's running a foundation. That's what you can do in crypto when you have merit.

08:42 - Ceri (Guest)

A hundred percent. That's the other thing. You hit the nail on the head right. It's the meritocracy.

08:47

I love working in an industry where who you are, where you're from, just doesn't matter.

08:52

I say this maybe sounds like I have an ulterior motive, because I've actually dropped out of two universities and have never actually finished a degree myself, which in my earlier career I always felt like, ah, if someone could just see that I really care about my work and I feel like I put a lot into it. I'm just sort of defined by a thing that I do or don't have. So I really appreciate that now and that's really important to me when I recruit, because I just think, like, at least true, in crypto, if you look at the biggest success stories, they're not people who come from traditional backgrounds or have traditional qualifications, and I think it's an industry on the whole. It's is very pro, like let the ideas win, not the person. Have the space. People can participate in a very permissionless way and get to the place they want to be just based on, like the work that they do and not the person that they are. So just personally, it means a lot to me on that basis.

09:39 - Harrison (Host)

I'm with you on that. I dropped out of school. That's another story. The last year I went to school I was 14. But I learned infinitely more from not being at school than I ever would have by staying in school.

09:49

You know, there's a huge normalcy bias with these things. I remember I don't know. I think I need to explain this in the context of what I'm going to say. It's not otherwise really relevant. I didn't go to school for a few years. I went back. So in the US maybe this won't make sense to you In the UK that you have school and then you have college.

10:07

College is not the same thing as college. In the US, college is the thing you do between 17 and 18 and is optional. Actually, the mandatory school in the UK finishes at 16. But generally the perception is you have to get what's called A levels, which are the qualifications you get at 18, and then go to have a chance of of a good life. So I managed to talk my way into college to do a levels and they said there was oh no, you don't have the, the lower level qualifications called gcse. Generally that's six to eight of a certain grade or something. Get admitted, we don't have these, so you can't come.

10:36

They tried to sell me hey, you should do this. Vocational qualification in airlines and airports. Why would I want? There's a? And I literally just sat there and I would not leave until they agreed to give me a spot, and they did.

10:48

And then I completely screwed it up. I got eased the first year, not because I couldn't grasp it, but I had no sense of the work ethic that was required because I hadn't done anything for all that time. So next year I sat there again. I would not leave until they let me back on. And then I actually did really well and I got the qualifications and everything else.

11:06

But when I was finishing up all the lecturers were like you have to go to university, you have to go to university, you have to go to university. And I was really good at English and they said oh, you need to study English literature. Why would I want to do that? I have zero at this time, zero idea what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I didn't want to study things because I hated doing that. Never been a fan.

11:28

And I did actually apply to university. But I applied for psychology and I applied for aerospace engineering at the same time. You know that's how much I didn't know what I wanted to do. You can get two further apart things than that, right? No, I mean, I just didn't go.

11:44

But they were all convinced I was making this huge mistake, and how dare you? But you know what I think, what I had. Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit here, but I think what I'd seen at the time was you know, I could already see that we were entering. We were in a change of sort of societal transition where before you needed credentials to prove you're able to do a thing and gain entry to a place the world we have now. I've never been asked about someone's qualifications in crypto, not once. And now we fast forward 20 years. People take this for granted, but back then nobody could see it, and there's so many things that are like that where people will call you insane. But it's actually you've just seen something that they haven't seen yet, and five years later they'll be claiming like it was obvious that they haven't seen yet, and five years later they'll be claiming like a lobbyist A hundred percent and that's it.

12:28 - Ceri (Guest)

Like. There's lots you can say good and bad for Web3, but I think that idea of just like taking people what they are and not just based on things that may not be relevant, is super important. And I think to the point, like we both are in the business of recruiting, right, and I think I always try design hiring processes that like give the candidate the chance to really show what they can do, and I think that's hard in a typical like interview, interview, interview format, right, not everyone can speak well on the fly or not even know how to sell themselves. I think it's on us to find ways to like bring out the stories, give people a chance to really show what they can do and look beyond the obvious, like keywords or markers, and if it's something of a personal quest for that reason it sounds like it is for you too, right Just like really looking at what someone could bring, rather than just like what traditionally we've been told makes a good candidate.

13:15 - Harrison (Host)

I saw something on Twitter recently which was in a different context, but it was, I thought. I never quite thought of it in those terms before, but I realized they were drawing a distinction between. Everyone wants to talk about intelligence. Oh well, the more intelligent you are, the more successful you're going to be, and I think there is some truth to that. But there's another side of the equation that gets completely missed, which is there's also low agency people and high agency people, and the actual thing that makes a difference in success in crypto more than anything is the agency side of things. You know the low agency person. They might be really intelligent, they'll go and get the qualifications. They'll go. You know, work in that academic setting. Never rock the boat. That's not going to work. It's the agency. That's the defining difference.

14:01 - Ceri (Guest)

I like that word agency, because, as you were talking about that, I was trying to put a word to it myself and I was coming up with like is it grit or hustle or resilience or something? But it's like the willingness to just like kind of apply yourself to the problem. And this is the thing about web3 and open source right, like there are so many ways you can like say, if you don't have experience, you can get involved, contribute to projects, demonstrate something in very non-traditional ways. And I think you're right, it's not necessarily about like who's the smartest person in the room. It can help. But it's like you know your conviction in what you're doing, your willingness to apply yourself, to go above and beyond, like driving things through to completion.

14:37

This idea of ownership, I think, is really strong in the work that we do as well, and I think it's an industry that makes space for it. We don't put people in boxes. We don't have these very like stratified titles, generally speaking, like we let people run, and especially in hyper growth, hyperscale companies. Right, like there's an opportunity to come in and if you work hard and apply yourself and you're good and you find the opportunity and you exploit it to like really grow upwards with company that you're scaling. So I think it's a really magical thing and it just um, it's been really refreshing coming out of that corporate environment. That is just very much like work your way up through. Just one narrow role is standard 100.

15:13 - Harrison (Host)

And let's not forget the little things like hey, you know I'm not fully in one side on the other when it comes to impeccably dressing well and being a beach bum or whatever like this is the fashion nowadays. But you know, I really enjoy wearing suits when there's a special occasion for it. But there's nothing I hated more than having to wear this stupid suit every day to sit in an office on the phone where no one's going to see what I'm wearing. Anyway. That's the most annoying thing and I'm so glad we don't have to deal with that anymore 100% Like.

15:38 - Ceri (Guest)

It's good to like. Just get rid of these things that don't actually matter. They're not markers of success or performance, right, like and especially you know a lot of like. Building a company is who are you, what is your ecosystem, who are you selling to, what are they expected you? And, of course, maybe you may have enterprise clients. That, of course, a suit makes sense, uh, but for the most part, it feels like if it doesn't marginally add anything to the value of your business, probably not important to focus on and that goes for many things, whether it's like working policies, how you hire people, certain processes, like if it doesn't add anything, you don't need to replicate what worked before in other contexts.

16:14 - Harrison (Host)

Exactly so. With that, I'd love to hear your perspective a little more on hiring non-crypto-native people and the value of that.

16:25 - Ceri (Guest)

Yes. So this comes up all the time and I think it's interesting because sometimes even the terminology we use gives it this slightly like aliens v non-aliens, feeling as if, just like, by being crypto, you're on one side of the tracks and non-crypto on the other. I think increasingly those lines can get a bit blurred. But it's definitely a conversation I've had with founders. As we scale companies, you know what's the right way. Who do you hire? When does it make sense? I mean, I'll start by saying this Blockchain as an industry. Well, it's like under 10 years old. We don't have that many large, late-stage, super successful unicorn companies. We don't have the depth of talent Like you simply will not find, like you know, a CTO who has been in a Web2 org for longer than 10 years. So I think, first of all, there's just a realism, right, like the depth of talent maybe isn't always there, just because, simply, these organizations, these industries, they have not lasted that long. So I think it's that and I think really, sometimes, if you're thinking about, like Web2 people, what you could say is, yeah, like they may have come from larger organizations, seen what a company looks like at late stage, so that could be a good pattern match for maybe, like, if that's where you need to get to, you need someone who's kind of been where you're looking to go.

17:41

I think sometimes hiring Web2 people can be helpful from a point of view of, like you know, we talked about this before but like best practices, right Mature companies people who have worked in there will have seen what works and what doesn't. We don't always need to reinvent everything because of crypto. We don't always need crypto native opinion. Someone who knows what a good sales process looks like probably can apply that in a crypto setting. Uh, you know, if we're looking at like the process itself, so I think, just understanding that like there's a lot of experience tenure and like lessons learned that can come from people outside our industry, um, but, and I think, like I don't know how you feel about this, harrison, but I feel like sometimes the new perspectives are helpful.

18:19

Like we exist in a crypto co-chamber sometimes, and I think, just as you need diversity across several demographic groups, I kind of think about sometimes diversity between crypto and non-crypto people. Actually, in a past org, I have tracked that as like a metric of how are we doing over time. I don't know that we had a concrete goal, but I always felt like it was interesting to keep an eye on, because we actually felt like, au contraire, rather than just being like two competing forces, it was like two groups who could cross-pollinate each other's thinking with ideas and new perspectives. So I personally always kind of looked at it as like a mix that I wanted to make sure was, like, kept in balance, and certain parts of the team you have different mixes that make sense. I don't know how you feel about this, though, but for me, I think it is really helpful to have a bit of a blend in an organization.

19:09 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, you know, I've seen this in other industries. That becomes this kind of incestuous circle. Pat on the back thing Before I was in crypto, I was in life science and it wasn't the same, but it was a very similar dynamic. So this was a very harebrained idea that in hindsight I wouldn't do again. But about 10 years ago, um, me and a former boss of mine started up a recruitment company specializing in something very specific sales and marketing and life science. We thought it was such geniuses. No one else is serving this market. Of course, no one else was serving that market because it didn't need serving, but that's another story.

19:42

But you know I, the um, you know I dealt with a lot of marketing people in life science and that you know what the normal path for someone to become a marketer in life science is. They'd be a scientist. Um, they'd get bored of working in a lab. How do you like to work in marketing? Great, okay, I work in marketing now and you know so. They were constantly 10 years behind the tech industry in terms of they didn't know anything they were doing. You know most of the marketing people at these big, you know prominent life science companies didn't really know much about marketing. They were just buying stuff using a budget and it was so antiquated and you'd see someone come from outside the industry and they do very well a trend I also noticed. Actually I noticed this not only in the context of life science is that pretty consistently, I find marketers who have a sales background tend to be much better marketers.

20:28

Um and I see that a lot of the useful things I've learned, like I took three years out. You know I've worked in recruiting pretty much my entire life, but I took three years out of recruiting to do B2B sales and, you know, account management, that sort of thing. I learned more that I applied to recruiting from that that I would have learned by staying in recruiting the entire time. I think when you see something that's really brilliant, it's often where someone has sort of combined ideas from many different places to create some new thing, versus, oh, let's copy paste another layer too exactly that and let's say you know, we talked about it earlier right, like applying something from one background to another, and I think there's really value.

21:03 - Ceri (Guest)

There's a lot of value in that and I think sometimes you know, if we have people who've just come up through crypto, there could be not only suspicion, but it's like you know, you know they know the industry, it's like, okay, that person may not be like a diehard crypto person or an S maxi or whatever, but actually it's like you can see how things work and take inspiration from other things and I think that's really powerful. Like you say, what is a good process in this look like? Or what does this look like at scale? I mean, I think sometimes we in Web3 can be quite cliquey or seem quite cliquey, but I would say deep down, actually, what I would want Web2 people to know, is we kind of love converting people. Like for me, there's no bigger joy than just sharing this ecosystem that we work in and just being like, yeah, you know you start right at the top of the activation pyramid, let's say, and it's like oh, crypto, is it like scams, bitcoin, dark web? And then you go into, like, the tech and then the use cases and I think it's really cool seeing people come on that journey and feeling like, oh, this is actually an industry that has like all the speed and innovation of tech and all the kind of good of a nonprofit and it kind of meshes these things together and I think it's just, like you know, really awesome.

22:06

So what I would say is, even though we seem kind of like an industry that has a very close circle, actually it is great and we all want to bring new people in and that's what we need. We need a new, you know, infusion of skills, we need new perspective and, you know, I think like we can offer a really compelling career to people. It does feel like a leap of faith for some Web2 candidates because, you know, it feels risky. The job security is a question. Token values are all over the place. Like I get it. It takes a lot, but I think just in terms of like the purpose, the quality of the people that you work with, the job satisfaction, uh, the conviction of what you're doing, for me it's unparalleled in any other industry.

22:42 - Harrison (Host)

I mean, I'm probably biased because I work here, but that's what I would say you know I wasn't planning to talk about this but since since we got onto the subject, one of the reasons I got out of recruiting was that I kind of burned out on it, and I'll tell you why. I think most people who get into recruiting it's a by accident thing. You know, they go to the recruitment agency and they're like, hey, you'd be great at recruiting, let's try it out. And I'm like, okay, I'm a recruiter now. I never dreamed of that when I was growing up, but I really wanted to be a. I read the textbooks and I was like, oh, this is fascinating. This is like the art and science of headhunting and the craft. That was already fascinating.

23:15

I read all the books and I got into my first recruiting job and it basically you spend the mornings cold calling people hey, can we be agency number seven on your list? Like cause, you don't need six already, pick me, pick me. And then the afternoon is pressing F5, refreshing the job boards, looking for the latest resume of the person who was not a good fit. But hey, you had to get them for the other agency. And then I ended up working somewhere. Good, but I guess the point I'm making is I was quite. I don't think idealistic is the right word, but I had a certain perception of what it should be and the value it was adding, and I realized eventually that what I was doing 90% of the time was taking someone who hates their job, putting them in a job they hate 10% less and paying them 10% more, and nothing would really change. You stay in these industries long enough.

24:02

You just see yeah, the salespeople will just go around and merry-go-round to the different companies. Nothing is really changing, and so that was one of the main reasons that I got out of it. But the other reason was in industrial age kind of industries where I was working at the time, people tend to see hiring as a necessary evil and, to be honest, I got tired of doing this really difficult thing that people didn't actually value. But both of those things I don't find to be true in crypto. Almost everyone I speak to loves their work, even if I don't find to be true in crypto. Almost everyone I speak to loves their work, even if they don't love their particular team situation right now, and I think founders tend to agree that hiring is the most important thing they do alongside fundraising 100%.

24:40 - Ceri (Guest)

And that, honestly, is one of the things that just keeps me in this industry Like, let's be real, it's a roller coaster, it's not easy to work it. It takes a lot of faith. But it's like you know, you and me both right, whether you know you focus more on, like hr recruiting I do a bit both. Um, it's like you're in the job of selling something to someone, whether you're selling like a new opportunity or they're in the company and you're continuing to sell them. You know, sell them to get motivated to keep slogging through the difficult problems that you have to keep slogging through. And I find that very hard to sell when I don't believe in something or if I feel that the thing that I'm selling ultimately just rolls up to like profit to the person at the top. Right, I get that's the practical reality and in crypto that's not the case, and so I feel like it's something that I can sell all day, every day. I mean it doesn't feel like shilling because I, you know, I hand on heart, just really believe in what it's doing.

25:30

And I, you know, you look around high conviction people. You know a lot of founders could do anything else. They're smart people, they have resources, but they choose to put blood, sweat and tears into this thing and that's why I really enjoy partnering with them, because I'm like you, have a vision, you have a passion, you have convictions for what you're doing and I'm here to sort of like translate that into organization building and go with you on this journey. I find it really inspirational and I think like it would be. Like you say, it's easy to burn out when you know I see a difference between working long hours on something where it's like intrinsic and I want to be there and I'm dialed into the mission, versus just like working long hours for a boss because they tell me to, or like the corporate culture is terrible or toxic.

26:10 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, it's really true, and I think, for all the myriad things that go wrong in management, in crypto and there is a long list one of the things that's really well done is providing that sense of intrinsic motivation versus the. I'm sure we've all been there. I worked at a company one time that was just miserable. Everyone hated being there. All they would do is complain, but somehow they'd stay there for 10 years anyway. I don't know why I lasted seven months, but it's just. You know, the only reason they're there is because they need a job and it's a really depressing place to be and we don't have that. It's great.

26:44 - Ceri (Guest)

Yeah, exactly, and everyone is there, I feel like, because they want to be there, because I always say to people there's a lot easier ways to get a paycheck than this. So be sure that you really connect with this and it resonates with you before you come on board, because it's not for the faint of heart. Maybe a lot of industries say that, but I do really think, like crypto, it's like if it's for you, you're going to love it. It's going to be really inspiring.

27:17 - Harrison (Host)

But if not, not, it can be hard. It's not an easy industry to work in. You know this is going to sound really random and it is, but when I was this kind of I kind of laugh looking back now. But when I was younger, um, I really wanted to be in the military and I tried.

27:24

Actually, I found out I had full arthritis from an old motorcycle accident when I tried to join the royal marines reserves some years back yeah, I was like oh, I think, yeah, I think, oh, no, yeah, okay, he said you can join, uh, and you'd be capable of it right now, but in a year you won't have an ankle left. Okay, maybe not.

27:40 - Ceri (Guest)

Um, but you know what?

27:42 - Harrison (Host)

was. The thing that was appealing about it to me was that it's this kind of uh sort of life encompassing purpose thing, whereas the way people in the 20th century treated work was, hey, work's that thing that you do, that you have to do, that you hate. So you just block off these 40 hours a week and that's not. That time doesn't matter, it's just what a way to live. And then people I especially saw this back in England. I don't find it so much in other countries, but something I personally personally no hate to anyone in england still, but something I personally found it really depressing about that the uk lifestyle is kind of hey, let's go and sit at a desk and then after that we go home we sit watching a box and drinking beer to avoid. So where's the actual life that's being lived here? You're either doing the thing that you hate or escaping from the thing that you hate, and that is.

28:33

But if you look at historically, people did not see work that way. You know, work used to be a source of meaning and inspiration and creativity, and now we're coming back to that model again and it's just so. I think going back to you know what I was saying the whole military appeal. I think it's the same with crypto. You know a lot of people that work in crypto. Their entire life revolves around crypto. But it's better to have a purposeful life that's full of work than one where work is a necessary evil that you try and put in a box a hundred percent like that phrase, like the sunday scaries is it like that feeling of dread in a sunday?

29:04 - Ceri (Guest)

like I get it and I've been there, but you know, I aim to build companies. Where it's not the case, I think, like in crypto, it just makes my job a lot easier. Right, I'm not having to think how do I, how do I make this exciting? Or you know, it's already there and it's true like people are so committed in this industry, almost to our fault, and we maybe this is a friend of the time, but I think on the opposite side, there's like a very real burnout problem. But it's funny. For example, now we're coming up to the end of the year and trying to get people to spend down their holiday balances and you know, your average person working in crypto doesn't take enough time off, because you know it's the 24-7 nature of the ecosystem that we're in, the people that you interface with, your excitement for the work, how fast things move, how you know the industry just is nonstop and so, yeah, it is. It doesn't feel like work, but, um, we also do have to take care of ourselves. I think there is just a very real burnout thing. But it's interesting, you mentioned the military. Actually, I'll just hit on that real quick while I'm there.

29:57

It's like I do see a lot of crypto companies that are almost like not cults of personality, but they have these very visionary, inspiring leaders at the top and they can inspire and motivate, just like complete commitment and hype, in the people that work with them and I think, when channeled the right way, it is just very powerful and very exciting.

30:18

But obviously it can go too far, as we've seen in some cases. But I don't see that as often in non-crypto companies and I think it's really cool that you have we can talk about this later but like how the founder sort of sets their vision and mission and makes something like exciting and inspiring that people want to get behind because that's it. I think sometimes people think of like selling candidates on a role as just like yeah, here's what you're doing, you know for the job and here's the compensation. But actually it's like here I am and here's why I'm really excited about this product and here's why I think it could change the world, and like get on this roller coaster with me, let's go there, like we're going to work together and just like getting people hyped. I think it's a big part of the job of a founder in hiring.

30:59 - Harrison (Host)

You know it's changed so much as well. When, I think not that long ago, when would I ever? I remember one of my first jobs after I got fired from my first recruiting job, before I got into recruiting again, I worked for a photocopier company. I was setting appointments and the marketing material they had this marketing manager and they would come up. You know, marketing back then was a very different job than it is now and much less skilled, in my opinion. They would come up with these brochures like when you choose Peninsular, you're choosing a partnership. Well, it was all this meaningless corporate nonsense. But you know the CEO, the founders of those. You wouldn't see them in the public eye. No one knew who they were. They were the guy that sits in the back counting the money while everyone else goes and does the work.

31:38 - Ceri (Guest)

Yeah.

31:39 - Harrison (Host)

Like. I saw a post from Mert the other day. You know Helios talking about hey, you, as the founder, it's your job to be the face of the company, face of the company. You have to be out there, you have to be giving the speeches, you have to be on the podcast, even if you're uncomfortable with it. That is your primary job. It's the one job you can't outsource. And it's true, and I kind of you know, I'm not running a funded crypto company, but my little recruitment company. I didn't start posting things on social media until about a year ago. It's not something I grew up with. It's not naturally what I enjoy. It's not something I grew up with.

32:08 - Ceri (Guest)

It's not naturally what I enjoy. It's not a natural skill set for anyone.

32:10 - Harrison (Host)

Especially people pushing 40, I think, and I spent ages trying. I was looking at hey, maybe can I hire ghostwriters to do this. I want to spend my time doing that, but now what I've realized is that literally, it's the one I could have, this huge team at some point that is doing everything else, but it still needs to be me giving the talks, running the podcast. I can delegate absolutely everything else, but not that, and that is something that has dramatically changed with the new model of work.

32:38 - Ceri (Guest)

Yeah, 100%, because ultimately, a company's DNA is like the company's culture is basically based on the DNA of the founder. Right, like who they are directly impacts what it is. And you know, I to the founders in scaling companies, even like hiring managers, team leads, it's like when you're, when you're trying to scale and bring people in, it takes an incredible amount of time and energy to actually like sell, be out there talking to people. You're just on this constant like sales motion, like even up to like 30 of your time just interviewing, meeting talent, but it's so important to like be that space, because that, I think, in crypto, is what really matters. Right, people are, you know, of course, hitching their wagon to a product. They want to make sure those technical fundamentals are there. Does the you know? Is there runway, does the company? Is the company well run?

33:25

But it's the vision of the person at the top that I think is really compelling and that's where I see you can really grab a candidate or not.

33:36

And that's why I think you know advice to founders is have a real clear pitch about what it is that you're trying to do, why it's exciting, why someone should join you, because it is such a crowded marketplace and you really have to stand out and the difference between getting like the B player talent and the A player talent like that sets the trajectory for the rest of your company.

33:56

And so, to the extent that, like, if it doesn't come naturally to you to like, pitch or be a salesperson, that's a skill I think every founder should work on, because you get in a call, whether it's like externally, you're pitching the product or pitching the company to a candidate, you have a very limited window to make an impression and if you make the right impression, you know, just based on like, conviction, passion, being compelling, that really can change everything and get you a person that you never thought you could hire. But, like, people in crypto are so open-minded. Yeah, I think I see more willingness to like, take a risk on maybe like compensation or stage of company or something that's a bit less known, because actually it's like they can kind of analyze the opportunity for themselves and if they see something in like, everyone kind of likes that opportunity right To get in early on something and build something and be part of the founding team and have their input on it. So I do think that, yeah, that selling is really key.

34:43 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, it is and it's, it's almost. The change has been. The founder used to be the person directing the thing.

34:55 - Ceri (Guest)

And now the founder is more like the cultivator of the ecosystem in the middle, exactly Like a cultural orchestrator. And I always say like I think sometimes it feels like as a founder that you're just repeating a lot of the same messages over and over again. Like I always say, if you feel like you're being a chief repetition officer, you're probably doing the job right, because it's about just having a real clear like this is the mission, this is the vision, these are our values, these are our goals. And just painting that target red and just keeping people on them and it's that drumbeat of consistency and conviction in what you're doing. And you know, if there's values, are you living them? Are they enabling the company and everyone to make really tough trade-offs? Like those are the things people notice and I think it's just having a real clear sense of that, that is really important.

35:36 - Harrison (Host)

I've noticed that people who are really, really good at branding and really really good at growing followings, they basically say the same three or five things over and over again in a hundred different vehicles. Tell me what are the things I mean?

35:50 - Ceri (Guest)

that's the thing thing, right, it's not necessarily any specific set of that they will have their specific three to five messages, and literally almost every post is the same message but just in a different packaging that's it, and I think it's like it gives people confidence, because there's nothing worth like as a leader or a founder if you say something but you don't live up to what you say, or you go one way and the market moves and then you sort of make a pivot. Now, of course, making a business pivot is totally fine, but if it's something as core as your like culture okay, our culture is this, oh no, our culture is that that flip-flopping really erodes confidence, and so it should be like. Of course, the wordsmithing changes over time. You build out, okay, like what does it mean? How we see it in practice? And you sort of like get more and more specific as to what you're looking for. But those shouldn't really change so radically like overnight, and I think if they do, people have a hard time following it. Right, because a lot of crypto companies they're built in a very distributed way and to execute at speed in a distributed setting, you need a very clear compass, compass and that compass is like the culture, the values, the mission, like. So it's such that you enable everyone in the company to replicate your decision making at scale.

36:58

So success in that job, if you've kind of done that repetition part over and over well is that, like a team members in a meeting, you're not there.

37:05

They can then say, okay, let's take this call and they know it's right because they're kind of like okay, but according to our cultural value of transparency, like this is the right thing to do.

37:12

I'm going to do it Like that is success. So it's true, it's just like having that thing and drumming it in and I think, like you know, of course, the founder job is really busy, but like I always, in my role, advocate for them to you know, teaching the team about it, repeating the messages on call, welcoming new joiners, mentioning it in final interviews again, we're talking about super repetitive, but if people see that you're a really busy person but you care so much about these things that you take the time to explain them and live them and teach people about them, I think that's really powerful and it's like these absolutely do matter, because the worst thing like culture and values can be is just like a list on a website that is so generic it doesn't really say anything and no one does it. And, even worse, that you just do something completely different, the company tolerates it and then that's just a bad culture, right.

38:06 - Harrison (Host)

Exactly, and I always think these things are. It's a show me, don't tell me, kind of thing. I pretty reliably observed that the people who talk the most about how good of a person they are tend to actually be the worst people, and I think the same applies to values at companies 100%, isn't it like culture is like the worst behavior that you're willing to tolerate, or you net slide, and it's like that.

38:28 - Ceri (Guest)

And you know, I think sometimes, once you've set that culture and of course culture should evolve and I'll say this right, because if you kind of are very early stage and it doesn't evolve over time, you're probably doing some janky things that you've outgrown. So of course it must evolve. But generally speaking, like if you have a culture and you're not kind of implementing it, you know operationalizing it throughout your design, for example, say you have a cultural value that says something like we are team players or we're super collaborative. It's a generic one.

38:56

Then you have the classic engineer, who's very bullish, has a lot of friction, makes a lot of enemies, but you promote that person. You're basically saying is well, we kind of promoted someone that didn't really live all of our values, but they do good work, they're good with customers. And that's a challenge, though, right, because how can someone really believe that you care about that thing if you're not willing to make the hard decisions? So I think it's always being aware of what are the tensions when we set these things and are we really willing to stand behind them? When we promote people, when we give pay increases, when we design hiring rubrics, are these built in at every stage in the employee life cycle to show that we really, really care? And success in this company means really living these things?

39:36 - Harrison (Host)

Coming from a different industry, but it brings to mind something that often used to occur in UK recruitment companies. Now, I've only worked in firms in the UK, I've only worked for myself since I left the UK, but my perception is the UK recruitment industry is about 10 times more cutthroat than it is anywhere else on the planet. Yeah, you know, there's a whole cottage industry of people that recruit recruiters from the UK to go and work in Australia, usa, hong Kong, etc. It's this huge. It's probably the UK's greatest export besides whiskey, which is really random. Um, one of the things that used to come up quite often was you know, these are the things that we value. That becomes very challenged when you get someone on the team who is bringing in double the revenue of anyone else but is a nightmare to work with, and that kind of situation is the real test of do these values actually matter or not?

40:24 - Ceri (Guest)

And I saw in one case where they let this person pretty much destroy the entire team because they were attached to what he was doing, but it was a nightmare 100% and, to be clear, it may be that your company culture says results over everything and in which case the person who gets double the revenue but is terrible for morale may be right it's not for everyone, but I think if that's not it and the person is living counter to your culture, then of course it's an issue. And I think those situations, if left unaddressed, can really become toxic over time, because crypto teams typically are small, right, like a toxic person can have an outsized impact on the team and even somebody who's maybe nice but low performing. And that's probably one of the most difficult transitions as an HR person that you have to make is this idea of, like you start your career earlier and it's about like, oh, I like people, I'm a people person, I want to make sure people have you know they enjoy their jobs. And then it's actually like, yeah, people being happy is kind of like a means, but it's not the end. The end is I want to make a winning company, because without a winning company, there's no money for salaries and there's no people at all. So I think people will really be happy if we have a winning company. I think, like the difficult thing is making that transition that, like I deeply care about every employee on the team.

41:40

But sometimes the right thing for the business is making that very difficult decision and pushing founders to also kind of realize that and come to that themselves. And I think like sometimes it's very difficult as a founder to make those calls. Or maybe it's something you just kind of say, like you push off to HR, but it's like your culture can be so diluted by like one wrong person or one low performing hire and it's a real drag, like if you want excellence in your team, like high performers want to work with other great people who are like collaborative, they do the job, they're high ownership, high agency, and so it's really important to like address those issues early and make the tough decisions you get. It gets easier as you go along. I think that's the thing with founders it's sometimes hard at first.

42:19

Right, because you may have an early team member been with you since the very early days. You feel a lot of loyalty towards them. You've gone on this journey together. Maybe they no longer work out, maybe they don't have the skills for where you're going to next. It can be very incredibly hard to make those decisions, but I think that's why you know HR. I think is important to say like this is actually what's best for the team and the business and long run, I think it's best for the individual as well, because you know no one is happy being an underperformer and I think the quicker you can kind of resolve a situation, situation and get someone into another place where they can be successful, it's the better for everyone.

42:52 - Harrison (Host)

You know, that's something I struggled with when I first ran a team, and I think my message out there for aspiring founders or first-time founders is being nice and being good are not the same thing, and when you're nice, the instinct is, oh yeah, we'll let that slide. They're doing their best and so on, but that's actually not being good. It's creating a detriment to everyone else on the team. It's creating a detriment to the investors who spent millions of dollars to enable you to do what you're doing. It's actually a detriment. It's even a detriment to the person you're trying to be nice to. You know, when I got fired from my first recruitment job all those years ago, it was a relief, and you know it often is. Sometimes you have to let somebody go in order for them to find a thing that they're better suited to do, and there's nothing wrong with that.

43:38 - Ceri (Guest)

That's what I would say. It's like this isn't working. The sooner you can make that decision and someone goes to a place where they can make it work, the better. And you know, it's actually interesting because this is another sort of thing that I've noticed about Web3, since working in it is like in my previous days, terminating someone, firing someone, whatever you want to call it, was definitely a very final thing, you know, very acrimonious it was done. But I think you know I always try to end things on really good terms with everyone, and it's interesting.

44:07

Actually, crypto is such a small industry where, in situations where it hasn't worked out, you'd be surprised how the relationship often continues right. Like you know, at the end of the day, you're both professionals, you understand, like they're also highly ambitious people who kind of move on to the next thing and do really well, and you kind of meet up with them at the next conference and you remain friends. Everyone knows each other anyway, and so I'm not painting this idealistic vision. I don't mean to downplay it, because getting fired is horrible and you know it's still bad for anyone that's in that situation. But I think when done right and that's what I always focus on right it's just being fair and doing the best I can by people. I think in the end, in the long run, it's just such a relief and it's better for everyone and I appreciate that we're in this industry that kind of like. You know it's business, we move on and you know it's a small industry and trying to.

44:55 - Harrison (Host)

You know you'll surely see someone again in some other place and you try and keep in touch. Yeah, I think that's a really good point as well. I really want to get your perspective on. So you scaled these companies at a later stage. Let's say we're talking to a seed stage founder. Maybe they raised a few months ago, they've made their first few hires, they're starting to put the building blocks in place. What should they be thinking about from the current point or maybe even earlier than that, if you think it's relevant right through to that point where the scale up starts to happen? What should they be getting in place that's going to make life so much easier and increase chances?

45:26 - Ceri (Guest)

of success later on? Great question. So I always think of it as, like everything that's happening at this point is setting the foundation, like every decision, unfortunately, will have some impact way into the future. So I think we kind of mentioned this earlier. But my biggest thing is hire the best people. I would tell founders, your first 100 hires are absolutely critical. They set the tone. They are the people that are going to make your business, make your product, really lay the foundations to everything that you're going to become. They're going to solidify and carry your culture.

45:56

So if you hire A players, those A players will then hire A players underneath them. You hire B players, they will typically hire C players. Players will then hire A players underneath them. You hire B players, they will typically hire C players. And so if you seed earlier a culture where it's like F, we're desperate, this person, we had a few flags but we needed them, we hired them. That's going to be their standard and people will see that If you are somebody that has an uncompromisingly high bar for talent and if your team sees you walk the walk on that like you will not make, you will personally work all hours until you find the right person for the job.

46:26

That's going to make your life easier because you're just simply not willing to hire someone just for the sake of hiring. So what? I think that's really powerful and so I would say be involved in the hiring process, do the final interview. Make sure you personally vet everyone because they also have to be super aligned with your culture. Like there's no massive organization where people can hide if they're not on board with what you're doing. If you don't personally think they're great, it's not a good start. So make sure you get the very best people that you can and have a high bar there.

46:52

I think the next thing is really just like setting that culture we talked about this right like know who you are, know what you want to be as an organization, set the vision, the make sure people have that compass, because it's very easy in crypto to just start running, but if you're not running in the right direction, that's just like activity over achievement and so making sure that you communicate that well, because it's very easy in distributed organizations to get siloed or people just can kind of go off in different directions. And even worse, I think sometimes, because we love decentralization in product, we sometimes can make that with decentralization in management or organization and actually sometimes I think you do need to be directive and just say, okay, like here's the plan, this is what we're doing, of course, like there's consensus on some things, but like this is where we need to go. I think it's very important to have a clear direction. And then I think other things I would tell seed stage founders is get comfortable with delegating. I've seen this a lot.

47:45

The project is your baby. You're in everything. It's very hard to go for a mode where you are directly owning and involving in everything, to kind of starting to lift yourself up and putting people underneath you. Who's going to take things off your plate, and I think that's so key from just like a leverage point of view focus, um, finding the right people, trusting them, but ultimately, like you have to know where is the highest value use of your time, whether it's like getting out there and selling or marketing, whatever it is that you're good at, uh, there will be things that just drain your energy. You're not good at that. Get someone good to take that off your plate, because you can't do everything.

48:20

And I think the final thing to note there is probably like avoiding racking up debt and there's all kinds of debt that you can rack up when you're moving quickly and you're putting in short-term fixes, so like title debt. It's like someone comes in. They're like, well, I'm not going to come in unless you call me a vp. Great, you call them a vp, but then tomorrow I can't. That it's not going to come in as a vp because he to be a C-suite that could just get out of control really fast and that applies to compensation as well.

48:45

Just trying to make very sensible, consistent decisions and not be kind of drawn too much by where candidates want to go, because ultimately you can end up in really unequal situations that need to be unpicked later. Same thing also with, like, technical debt in the product, operational debt, just like processes that get out of control. So it's like anything you put in place now does it scale, is it elegant, is it simple, is it the minimum viable process? Just thinking about like, okay, this works now, but if I 10x the throughput, will this system still work? I think these are very hard things and you need good people on your team to help you figure it out. You can't be in a million places at once, but I think it's really that just everything is about those foundations and be really thoughtful about how you're going to scale them.

49:28 - Harrison (Host)

I think that's a really great collection of things, and we could definitely get more into the tactical weeds of how do you do these things. One observation I did want to make, though, is something I've seen from personal experience, not only in crypto, but all sorts of businesses and even my own company and my own experiences. One of the biggest traps that people fall into is trying to scale a thing before it's ready to be scaled. I did this, I will freely admit. So I had a couple of years ago. When we hit the bear market, I thought, okay, what are we going to do here? I'll hire a guy to do sales for me. And you know the crypto market was so hot back in, say, 2021 that I remember it described to you how crazy it was. Literally with zero sales and marketing, we were getting three or four inbound inquiries a week. Just, hey, can you help us with this? There was zero effort needed to acquire clients and all this stuff. So I'm kind of a victim of complacency slash own success Market and all this stuff. So I'm kind of a victim of complacency slash own success Market crashes, let's hire a sales guy. But I didn't have a sales process. I thought, hey, let's give this guy a huge list and effectively he was having 70 conversations a week. I thought it doesn't matter what else happens if he can get through to that many people. No, he was here six months. We didn't win any clients from his work and it's not his fault, it's my fault, because I had no business hiring a salesperson when I didn't have an outbound sales process that was working already.

50:52

You can't bring in a mid-level person or a junior person and expect them to figure that stuff out. Sometimes you can bring in a c-level person and delegate that, but it's like a. I spoke with a pre-seed company one time. Hey, we need two technical founders, we need a marketing person. Our budget is eighty thousand dollars. I just immediately said don't even bother, like there's no point you hiring eighty thousand dollar a year marketing person. They're going to burn all your money. They're not going to do anything useful nine times out of ten. You need someone who knows what they're doing, and so they end up getting a consultant to work with them part-time, really expert, and then bringing someone in to execute and but yeah, if you don't have the expertise, you've got to build it.

51:28 - Ceri (Guest)

Prove that it works, get it, and then you can scale it 100, and I think getting that level right is a hard thing, sometimes right on both sides of the spectrum, because sometimes it's like you may see a founder or somebody building an early stage business where it's like they're in this like talent grabbing mode. Maybe they've got some like VC monies and tokens or whatever and it's like let me get as many senior people and it's just like stack the organization that figure it out later Sounds great in theory, especially if you can get very talented people, but often what can happen is like crowding or clashes or people just don't have enough room to grow. So you end up sort of cannibalizing your own talent because you've got too much. On the flip side you're right, like maybe you don't hire experienced enough and you have gaps where it's like you have a lot of junior people. It's like you know the motivation is great, the energy is great, but you just don't have that depth and your people are basically learning on the job and you want that balance of people who know what they're doing and are learning on a job to be right. I mean it kind of depends. Sometimes it's like 50 50, sometimes it's like 70 30, but like, uh, it can suck up a lot of organizational resources if you're just not quite ready.

52:30

And so I think the point that you made around advisors and consultants is really good, and I always sort of advocate just being as creative as possible.

52:37

Like sometimes you won't be able to hire the perfect person, but it's like can can you get them while it's an advisor. Like it's incredibly powerful even getting like an hour a week of someone's time who could supplement like an upcoming leader or someone who just is more of an executor, like who can you bring into your orbit, has connection and ideas, or who've seen what good looks like, even if it's not a full-time person, and so just having really good networks. Like tapping your vcs, you know you meet a candidate and then the last question you ask them is who do you know? That's excellent. You gave the name, you asked the next person.

53:09

Like all this is incredibly powerful because you're basically on one massive, highly labor-intensive treasure hunt for talent and that's what it is. It's just finding the right talent and the org design and this is what hr helps with. Right it? Like how do you compose them in the right structure to get the best results? Like you say, you may hire someone good, but if you don't have the foundations or the structure or the process to actually make them successful, it's wasted money.

53:31 - Harrison (Host)

This is one of my biggest frustrations. Maybe it's because it's a product of my analytical brain, which I think is unusual for someone working in recruiting. You see people hire half the time. We you see people hire half the time. We need a developer. We need someone who has I don't know let's pick a number out of the hat six years experience with this thing. Who takes this boss? Okay, what do they actually need to do? They can't define it. I would rather they're starting completely the wrong place. What are we? That's the wrong question. The right question is what are the tangible things we need to accomplish? And then, once you have that, you can reverse engineer it to what is the workflow, as best we can figure it out, going to look like in need to accomplish? And then, once you have that, you can reverse engineer it to what is the workflow, as best we can figure it out, going to look like in order to accomplish those things? And then you're in the right position to answer okay, who is that person and how do they fit in?

54:11 - Ceri (Guest)

Yes, I think unstructured hiring is something that I see go sideways quite often. If you don't have a clear sense of what the person is going to be doing, how can you possibly decide if you have the right person? And I've seen that before. It's like if you embark on a search, um, but you haven't done the groundwork to define the role, the requirements, like you can see candidates and oh and on. It comes down to this like comparison exercise. But actually you know it could be if you had a clear set of requirements and criteria and you find the right person, that's just the right person because they took all your boxes. And so I do see that sometimes you know, when I speak to founders and it's like, oh, search, we're just not managing to find someone. I find that, like not investing that time up front to actually get a clear set of requirements can sometimes be the issue, but we don't actually know, like what we need. We have a vague sense.

55:06

But this also is another problem, right, because a founder will not always have done the job themselves. Maybe they don't know what good looks like. So again, this comes down to like making sure you have a network of advisors who can just validate like? Is this a scope? Is this a step like? Can you advise me on what good looks like for this candidate? Can you introduce me to someone? It's like you know working with an agency such as yourself. It's like making sure you put yourself in the best position to succeed, because you may not always know what that job is you know and what you're actually looking for well, I have a coach.

55:29 - Harrison (Host)

We meet once a month, sometimes a little more. He's built and sold to 50 million dollar recruitment companies, with all the systems that entails. He's way further ahead where I am or probably will ever be. Uh, necessarily plan to build a 50 million dollar company, but but you know, he knows things that I would take years to try and figure out and so I run things. Okay, do this Perfect. I think everyone needs that.

55:51 - Ceri (Guest)

Exactly. It's like a sounding board, a sense check. You probably have the idea, but it's good to hear it validated so you don't end up in that cycle kind of spinning or not knowing what you need 100%. Even the most people who appear the most knowledgeable, most confident, like no one has ever not benefited from the advice of someone who's a couple of steps ahead of them. Like we could all use that, and I think that's something, particularly if we look at like a less mature industry like crypto. There's sometimes a sense of like the lone wolf, the heroism, and this goes with people at all levels. But I think companies can really help people by pairing them with mentors or people who they can bounce ideas with, and it's valuable across the board. I don't see it enough, but I think it is just really powerful.

56:29 - Harrison (Host)

Yeah, I totally agree. The last topic I wanted to touch on with you is, you know, when we're talking about that, one of the most important things being getting the best people. Where do you think this? How do these things intersect? The best people? Where do you think this? How do these things intersect? You know, founder driven hiring, external recruiters, having an internal team?

56:50 - Ceri (Guest)

you know what is the optimal way to handle all of that. Yeah, so I think in the early days of any company, when you're like sort of early seed series A, you're basically like more weighted towards the talent acquisition than the HR side of things. So you're trying to build the talent machine. I think you know your first view is going to be very much like the founder and their network and then probably like the next hire that you're going to need is either TA or a recruiter. Now I think still a recruiter. Now.

57:13

I think it always should come down to like having a very clear sense of how you intend to grow and scale, because I do see recruiters as being very unfortunate victims of like the boom and bust cycle in crypto, where it's like boom times, let's just hire a massive recruiting team or whatever We'll just like lay them off in a year's time when things are rough. So I think just being very mindful, like if we are not sure, maybe external is the way to go you can find. I mean, I think agency recruiters sometimes have a bad reputation as being kind of like salesy, but like the industry has moved on and I think particularly people who do this in the Web Street industry. Have that sense of partnership. That's really important. And then you can find, like, the right partner or the right model where it's not just like somebody slinging CDs over a fence at you.

57:56

So I think, just having a sense of like, does it make sense to invest in house function? Do we have the scale for it? Do we think we can keep someone employed for the next one to two years, regardless of what happens? I think it's really important. So I think, definitely, just in terms of the logistics, the time it takes to talk to people. A founder will very quickly burn out of trying to do that on their own. And you know, once, particularly like you've kind of tapped out your immediate network, you need to put that in place. But, like I said, I think it will always be important for them to be involved, because they're so critical, like you're selling their vision, the chance to be on their team. It's very hard to do that in a silo without them.

58:31 - Harrison (Host)

I think there's a sense of stewardship that needs to happen around that, like you kind of alluded to, where, you know, the last time the bear market happened, there were so many internal recruiters out of work and some of them were out of work for a year, even though they're really exceptional at what they do and I look at that and I don't want to work internally because I like running a business. I say I like business more than I like recruiting, although I like both. But there was a movement and there were a large number of agency recruiters that got pulled in-house and it used to be reverse.

59:06

10 years ago, the talent acquisition function, like it is now, wasn't really a thing. There were no headhunters inside a company. Now there are, and you had a lot of people coming from oh, this is a new, legitimate career path now. But if you just boom and bust, hire these people, that's not a sustainable career for anybody and I've spoken to people that, hey, I'd love to work in-house. I like the sense of partnership that we get, but it's too risky Because no agency wants to take you back after you've worked in-house either, because they think oh you don't want to do agency.

59:34

So as soon as the thought process says hey, as soon as the next hiring boom comes back, you'll just leave and go in-house again. So it's a risky thing.

59:45 - Ceri (Guest)

It is and that's it. I think you know I feel a lot for recruiters, particularly like the last couple of years we've had in crypto. It's just been up and down, and so I really think, like you know, I'd much rather just spend more on external, if I'm not sure or I can't make that. It's a social contract that you enter into with someone and they get the business changes, um, but you know, it's also not just kind of around the person, but if you hire someone and then you kind of fire them, uh, think about what that does for your company culture. You know, it's not just the person that you let go, it's the people that remain. That kind of see, okay, like this is how we treat people here.

01:00:15

This is like what, what loyalty looks like and also, frankly, the loss of institutional knowledge. Right, like an in-house recruiter will have a very different process for, like, knowledge acquisition than an external will who are kind of more used to like slotting in. So I think it's just about very intentional design and, like I would say, like scale responsibly. Like it can be very intoxicating to hire a lot of people and just build when there's money but, like we know, just as soon as there is a boom, there is a bust coming and so just thinking about like, okay, if token price was like a 10th of this, could we afford to still do this at this velocity with this team? And let's just be very lean and do it with the minimum that we can to be sustainable. And that's what I really care about is sustainability.

01:00:58 - Harrison (Host)

I noticed. I don't have any hard data on this, but I call it a pattern matching ability. It was pretty evident to me in the last cycle that it was all the same companies that had gone on these crazy hiring sprees, hiring endless people, the same people that were laying a ton of people off once the bear market hit.

01:01:14 - Ceri (Guest)

That's it. And it's like people remember we work in a small industry and so it's like surely you'll get the reputational boost when you have a lot of roles open. But people talk and it's a small industry and that's not the reason why you shouldn't have these hiring practices. It should be because it just doesn't actually make good business sense. But I think it's really key. Your reputation is everything like the quality of your project and people come back around. It's a really small industry and so treat people how you would want to be treated.

01:01:45 - Harrison (Host)

That come back around. It's a really small industry and so treat people how you would want to be treated.

01:01:47 - Ceri (Guest)

That's always super, really important to me ethically, yes, and also pragmatically, because if you don't do it in crypto, you're going to be screwed pretty soon. 100, yes, that's it. And it's like you know, the horizon thing. What we do on long term, right like there's. No, of course there's short-term things that you could do, but ultimately, like you know, build relationships, build teams with a longer view, build models that are sustainable, because that's actually what's going to make us go the distance, and we need to go the distance to get our technology in people's hands.

01:02:11 - Harrison (Host)

I think my last comment on that is I think a lot of the things that people do wrong in crypto come from this perception hey, crypto moves fast, so we need to do everything at lightning pace. No, you're not getting any benefit by doing the wrong thing quickly A little longer to hire, a little longer to scope things out, a little longer to plan. Get it right the first time. What's the old proverb about? Actually, you live in Greece, so I don't think this is the old proverb, but I thought this was a hilarious one. He said if a tree needs to be cut down, so the saying goes.

01:02:42

It's a bit unfair, I know, but what the Greeks will do is they'll spend 12 hours cutting down the tree. The Germans will analyze the tree for three hours and figure out the precise cuts, and then they'll cut it down in five minutes.

01:02:54 - Ceri (Guest)

Go fast to go slow. That's it, and this goes with a lot of things in company building. Take the time to fire right. Take the time to map out your culture and train people on it. Take the time to build processes, you know. Take the time to you know all of this. It's like, yeah, exactly, I think we can make a lot of excuses for Cordica. I'd say what actually, you know, just take your time. Like we will always be a fast paced industry, but you know it's very expensive and very hard to unpick certain things, and we talk about, like scaling debt, like there's many examples of that. So I agree 100%, like we don't always have to be super rushed.

01:03:29 - Harrison (Host)

Well, Kerry, it's been a real pleasure having you here. I think there's a ton of valuable insights that especially early stage founders can take it. Is there anything else you want to share?

01:03:39 - Ceri (Guest)

No, just anything, Just to say I appreciate, appreciate, founders, what you're doing. Uh, you know, I, I see all the work that goes into this and, as someone that kind of has the same feelings about the tech as you all and and the fact that you create, you know, companies, jobs, opportunities, products change. Uh, you know, have just a lot of deep respect and admiration for it. And uh, yeah, you know, like plug for the hr department, I think you know, like plug for the HR department. I think you know, get yourself a partner who kind of understands that journey and is with you on the road.

01:04:09

But, um, you know, I just want to say like, although it is a lot of hard work and difficult, I've never met a founder who didn't completely enjoy and love what they do and feel really proud of it. And so, yeah, it is just, uh, it's a great thing to be involved in. And, you know, humans are not mysterious, not scary. There's always kind of things that can be figured out. And so, yeah, just encouragement to keep building, building sustainably, building, you know, with good foundations in mind. And, yeah, just enjoy the journey because it really does move fast.

01:04:42 - Harrison (Host)

I can absolutely get on board with that, kerry, thanks so much, it's been wonderful.

01:04:46 - Ceri (Guest)

Thanks, harrison. Sorry we didn't have a lot of time, but yeah, I appreciate the chat and I'd love to sort of bounce the ideas with you and, yeah, hope to chat again soon. Thanks for having me on.

01:04:56 - Harrison (Host)

Likewise and to everyone listening. Thank you and we'll see you soon.

01:05:00 - Ceri (Guest)

Yes, bye.