Today marks my 13th month working in the blockchain industry… what a ride it has been. After spending 12 years on trading desks at Goldman Sachs and Barclays I really had no idea what to expect on my first day at Fireblocks last June. Honestly I kind of barely understood the technology that powers our solution, but I knew that we were onto something big and I was excited to get to work. I was so excited, in fact, that I asked Barclays to please give me the shortest garden leave possible. So, two weeks after walking out of the trading floor for the last time, I woke up to my usual 5:55am alarm and sat on my bed wondering what to do with the extra 2 hours in my new mornings as the newest minted ‘guy in crypto’.

I had only ever changed jobs once before, when I left my seat doing EM Macro Sales at GS for a similar role at Barclays. My day-to-day never really changed then, though my quality of life did take a hit by having to commute to Times Square instead of Tribeca. But now, on my first official day at Fireblocks, I didnt even have to report to an office as we didnt have one in NYC at the time. It was just me, a new Macbook Air, and my old Ikea desk that had survived multiple discard attempts by my wife (a fate that the trusty Malm bed had been unable to escape), sitting in the bedroom. Our two Vizslas had just gotten used to having me at home all day instead of me running out like a crazy person in a suit and tie at 6am. I turned the computer on and checked my email. The inbox was empty. Such an alien feeling to not have dozens of research reports and random overnight recaps there waiting for the daily bulk-delete routine. I still can’t believe there’s an army of analysts out there all sending what’s pretty much the exact same compendium of market levels and news, but I digress. An empty inbox stared right at me instead, almost as if it was asking me “what’s next in your story?”, an empty digital canvas in its own weird way.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and looked at the calendar, we had a weekly team meeting scheduled for 10am. I spent the time until then studying all the training material that had been provided by a colleague via Slack, my first time ever using that app. It kind of made me miss Bloomberg IB, but I was happy to finally experience something that everyone else in the world seemed to use away from Wall Street. My Discord notifications pinged in the background as I said my gm’s to artists and night-owl NFT friends just going to bed in the West Coast. I had extremely little crypto experience but by then I had built a good name for myself in the NFT world, that gave me the confidence to feel like I belonged in the industry. Honestly I don’t think I would’ve ever moved had it not been for NFTs and how much fun I had learning, collecting, and trading them earlier that year. I was already missing being able to watch the NiftyGateway activity feed given my laptop’s screen space had become valuable real estate. “How do people work without at least three monitors?” I thought to myself.

At 9:50am, a Google Calendar alarm went off letting me know that I had ten minutes left before the meeting. It was funny to realize that I still had 600 seconds before I had to fully focus on something, a marked contrast to having the bell ring on a Bloomberg chat when clients were looking for a price within seconds. Actually, if the bell was used, that meant you were already late on pricing a trade, most of which involved millions of dollars of risk. I laughed to myself a bit, ten minutes was a lifetime. Plenty of time to go get more coffee, check Twitter, and make a restroom run.

I didn’t know what to expect on that first pipeline call with our global sales team. After a short introduction, one that quickly made me realize how much I would hate having my camera on during video calls, we got straight to business. This is a moment I would never forget. As our Global Head of Sales shared his screen, I started reading the names of the companies that we were already engaged in conversations with. My mind was blown. It was pretty a very solid list of Top Tier banks from the largest developed countries. I couldn’t help but to feel extremely bullish, even if ETH had just dropped 30% from its recent highs. Within minutes it became clear that my research was right, we were onto something huge. It was also very apparent that most of these clients were approaching their digital asset strategy with a long-term horizon, something that retail players in the space would benefit from doing as well.

It has been an incredible thirteen months since that day. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has been part of it so far and I look forward to seeing those long-term plans and visions come to fruition in the space. That is all I have for now, may you have a very great gm.