I am absolutely ecstatic to announce that I have joined Chapter One, a web3-native venture capital firm, to lead talent and education initiatives.
Why Chapter One?
After 3.5 years at Andreessen Horowitz, building the a16z crypto talent function from scratch and working alongside the top founders, talent, and colleagues in the web3 space, I’m excited to continue my journey with this absolute all-star team. Jeff, Mene, Doug, Yash, Jamesin, Maria, Karla, and Jack have all been operators at fast-growing companies and are obsessed with founder experience and “doing more with fewer people”. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be building with them.
The minute I met the C1 team, I knew something special was brewing and the unequivocal right next Chapter for me (pun intended). Chapter One focuses on pre-seed and seed stage investments - stages where we can help provide our investments an unfair advantage with our operational expertise and truly create an 11-star experience for our portfolio and our talent alike.
Why recruiting talent matters:
First, I tend to stay away from the term “recruiter” or talent “acquisition” when I talk about myself/my industry as I believe the connotation of “recruiter” elicits the notion of a transactional relationship of a headhunter emailing hundreds of prospective candidates with a templated, non-personal message. Recruiting is fundamentally broken - which is another topic for a future blog post - and I’ve joined Chapter One to challenge the status quo of how talent collaborates with founders in building this entire ecosystem.
Talent matters because a web3 organization’s strength comes from aligning its internal talent with the passion and fervor of its community. We’ve seen time and time again in web3 that a collective of passionate people who understand their community can achieve great things. At Chapter One, we take a long-term view with talent and believe in forging long-term relationships rather than providing simple transactional value. We want to help guide you on future career chapters - whether that’s working in our portfolio today, in six months, in two years, etc. and/or whether that means keeping us abreast of your entrepreneurial desires so that when you’re ready to pursue your own venture, we’re the first people you contact when you’re seeking funding for your vision. To that end, my goal with the community is to continually foster relationships with the most talented people across web3 (and convince those in web2 to make the jump!), educate and shepherd to the proper next step, and ensure that you are the driver of your own career.
For our founders, without giving away our secret sauce, I will be working to bring best-in-class, 11-star founder experience and flex wherever you need assistance on the hiring side. This is your dream and we’re going to make it a reality together. I look forward to meeting and supporting more founders and providing more recruiting tools for the industry at large. More content to come around these topics.
Why education matters:
There’s a fundamental shift happening in web3 with regards to how to enter the industry and how to get up to speed when everything seemingly moves a million miles an hour. The web3 space has done a good job of proving that reading from textbooks and traditional educational paths is not necessarily the best way to “get educated” in web3. Contributing and building is.
The droves of folks leaving web2 and joining web3 is clearly a boon for the industry and setting those folks up for success is paramount to the continued success of the ecosystem. As decentralized identity and reputation become more ubiquitous - (and there are quite a few projects I’m excited about that are tackling specifically this! - the battle for top talent will become even more difficult than it is today. Ensuring that those new to web3 understand the what/why/how to build effectively will only encourage more people to make that leap.
For example, one of the key differences from web2 to web3 is how the actual roadmap works. Those coming from FAANG companies (and getting folks to leave FAANG to join web3 is sort of my bread and butter - get in contact if this is you and you need another perspective!) are accustomed to having the product roadmap scoped out, set up milestones, and then build to serve the community. In web3, you often start with the community, treat them as users, conduct constant user research, and end with the right product to serve them.
There are several initiatives being taken around web3 education right now (@Odyssey_DAO and Alchemy’s @web3university are personal favorites of mine) and I plan on not only partnering with various groups upleveling those on the technical side, but also educating recruiting talent. Head of Talent and in-house recruiters continue to be the top request from web3 companies and I plan on helping web2 recruiters transition to web3, which means not only teaching more innovative sourcing techniques and strategizing on hiring plans, but also helping to “unlearn” a lot of what goes into web2 recruiting - something I’ve personally not seen done to date in the space.
How I got here:
Believe it or not, I didn’t dream of being a recruiter (err. . .”talent partner”) when I grew up (and if anyone you know says they did, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you). I truly thought, until I finished my master’s degree, that I was going to stay in academia forever, conduct research, write papers, and live the professor-life. After finishing my master’s degree, and prior to starting a PhD program, I took a role at a small recruiting agency started by a fellow alum from my grad school and never looked back.
Over the years I’ve worked at various companies in various industries at various stages, but the commonality has been that I’ve seemed to have a knack of being early to the party: I joined Zynga right as the mobile developer boom began, I joined a chat company (imo.im) at the precipice of the chat industry taking off (see: Viber, Line, WhatsApp, Kakao, etc.). I realized I needed more global recruiting experience and moved to Stockholm, Sweden to join a small FinTech company called Klarna in their early days (now they are a $45B+ company) and my team and I hired 575 people in the year I was there. . .this is also where I fully went down the crypto rabbithole in early 2015 which is a longer story for another time (tl;dr - pretty tough to pay American student loans from a Swedish bank account, needed to move money somehow!).
When I returned to the US, I worked at Imgur during its peak, Google (as one of the first 10 recruiters on the Google Cloud Sales Engineering team, so “technically” early!), and a blockchain company called Chronicled (which was, IMO, way ahead of its time) before moving to a16z.
All this to say, my superpower has been understanding the matrix of how a company works and what’s needed to take said company to the next level. Working in the web3 venture space, I synthesize what all our portfolio companies are looking to achieve, understand the growth, play personal matchmaker with my network, and act as a trusted advisor to founders looking to achieve the scale that will allow for extraordinary and delightful user experiences. I’m pumped about continuing to do this for the Chapter One portfolio and bring web3 to the next billion users.
Want to work with me?
Please apply to join the Chapter One Talent Collective. This will be a constantly evolving resource for you to stay on top of everything we’re doing at C1 and I’m excited for you to be involved.
Likewise, I’m always looking to meet new folks and riff on all things web3 and recruiting. If you want to work in our portfolio, are curious about making the transition from web2 to web3, or have a great idea you think we should look at, feel free to reach out at [email protected] or Twitter.
LFG,
Greg