From FAANG to Web3: How I Made the Jump and What I've Learned - Chris Eberle

all right welcome to the wave stage everybody this is the quiet stage in the corner where the person presenting cannot hear all the crazy [ __ ] that's going on behind you hi zach thanks for being here everybody that's zach from coordinate say hi to zach all the way here at the mains at the wave stage all right awesome uh my name is chris eberle thank you so much for coming to hear me talk about my journey from uh working at fang companies to working in web 3. i've described myself as a recovering fang employee but truth be told there's you know some decent experiences i've had along the way so i've got a few slides here for you today to kind of talk through uh my journey and some things that some things that i learned so here we go um i won't take offense that these guys were like now [ __ ] that i don't want to hear about this this facebook stuff yeah i see you uh all right right on so chapter one the specialists um i'm gonna take this all the way back to college which for me meant a lot of time uh playing a mud anybody know what a mud is all right aging the [ __ ] out of myself here okay so a mud is a uh it's like a multi-user dungeons dragons thing but basically a like a command line text-based way that you can go game with crazy people all over the world right and when you're playing with those crazy people everybody has their own character you're a mage you're a thief or if you were like me you were a warrior and when i was mudding i would i would go do this you know after class or whatever sometimes all night but uh what i was actually doing was bonding with crazy people from all over the world and i didn't know their real names all i knew is that we got together at night and we did cool [ __ ] and we went on quests and we slayed dragons uh maybe we'd chat a little bit and get to know each other between dragon slaying but at the end of the day we all showed up uh we all had our role we were accepted as we were uh and it was kind of a beautiful thing and that was a very long time ago all just in text so uh in the end so much of this is about people and and you know spoiler alert it is really about the friends you make along the way um for me my my journey that you know has taken me here to this stage today has really been a lot about finding my people so um just to further age myself um this if you're not familiar uh is an aol screen uh back in the day there was this uh this like centralized way for you to get to the internet uh and i worked at that place uh a long time ago but before i worked there and like right after i was out of college uh i was a temp um i did like um you know basic web development and and and production work and photoshop and stuff like that and would just go out to various clients and help them with those those webby things and it was kind of awesome like as a young person to go out and get paid really good money have the flexibility of being a temp and i got to go in and see how a whole bunch of different companies worked right you learned about how different businesses work and you learn a lot about people the good and the bad of people and you learn about you know who you like to work with uh and you learn how to deal with people maybe you don't like to work with but in the end it was really about kind of finding the vibe that i was into and and much to my surprise when i took a temp job at at a long long time ago uh it was there that i found some really [ __ ] cool people that i wanted to work with um they were working on a business called aol shop direct it was run by this like 80 person company within a company that was kind of sequestered off in its own building in herndon virginia and this relatively small group of people was running a 400 million dollar a year business um and we were largely left alone to just work on that 400 million a year business because it was going really well we were transparent as [ __ ] with data we'd put out a snapshot every day of what was going on in the business but you could go self-serve and go really deep into what was going on in the business and how it was doing um and we were kind of left alone to do that and i think a big reason why we were able to run that business that way was the ethos of the team it was a flat organization the person who was running it was all about access to the person who knew what was going on so he didn't want to talk to the manager of the manager of the person who actually built something he's like i want to talk to the builder and so for me coming into you know to work at a big company which you know back then was my first time at a big company it was kind of this awesome opportunity to see how something was built and learn how you know when people actually you know trust one another to just go off and do cool things big things can can be done so i stayed there for a long time um we'll fast forward a bit to autonomy in a centralized world um you know i mentioned a big part of what like made that aol job cool which i know i just said at a web 3 conference in 2022 just talked about aol being cool but back in the day it was and that team was really freaking cool to work on because we were trusted to just go get [ __ ] done um years later i went to a different place um and found a lot of people who were just trusted to get [ __ ] done so this is hacker square uh hacker square at uh at facebook headquarters in menlo park california or i guess now it's meta or whatever but um so i went to work at facebook in 2014 and i joined to help uh build out a team of people to bring products and features that were designed for content creators to the world so back back in that day um everybody had the same version of facebook or instagram there was nothing special for creators there were no special features for people trying to reach tons of people uh influencer wasn't a bad word it didn't mean like some vapid idiot trying to whatever show their [ __ ] to you there actually were you know creators trying to create things and you know yadda yadda but um there was a real opportunity and what attracted me to working at facebook was the opportunity to build something like that to connect people to content and as a as a builder i i went in and put together uh when i first started we put together a proposal me and a few other great people a proposal to stand up a team to do all this stuff this sort of mix of uh product marketing and client services and ops and support we put together a proposal and said hey we can send up a team that can bring this stuff to the whole world um all different kinds of content verticals you know creators of various sizes in major markets all around the world and we need x x amount of dollars and we need a year and the response that i got back was okay cool you've got your money and you've got six months let's go um and we were trusted to just go do that at this big at this big company with all these checks and balances and stuff but back then we were trusted to just [ __ ] go and it was one of the best experiences of my career i got to like stand up teams really quickly in different spots around the world i got to learn the nuance of language and culture that affects the way that you know that content is created and the difference between bringing content that's you know about music or about sports or or what have you um and it was an amazing opportunity one that i that i wouldn't trade for anything and i think it was because at that point in time facebook was about moving fast and breaking things right which you know there are worse there are worse things to things to live by i'm going to take a quick drink of water so during my tenure um i was at this meeting where zuck got up on stage and said hey everybody so check this out we're gonna move instead of like move fast and break things we're gonna do move fast with stable infra which if you haven't been to sadtrombone.com check it out actually it's a real thing you just go to sadtrombone.com and you hit i think it's like yes and it's like um which you know that was a that was a signal of the sad trombone.com that facebook became to me as an employee because it wasn't an overnight shift but it was the beginning of a shift into less autonomy less ability to just go build cool [ __ ] and put it out there um and more you know stable infra which is not sexy uh at the same time it's not illogical right for a massive company like that to uh you know on the hook to deliver value to shareholders on the hook with a lot of people's uh well data and other things like that to need to have stable info so it didn't it wasn't necessarily a bad business decision but as somebody working there uh kind of a bummer uh fortunately in 2017 um enter the dao which for me was a you know a discovery of uh of crypto of of all things uh we didn't call it web 3 but of all this crazy [ __ ] that was going on here and my brother-in-law um was and still is to this day like crazy crypto evangelist and got me really excited about ethereum um got me sort of the basics of on a basic understanding of how blockchains worked how ethereum worked and how all this crazy [ __ ] could be built on top of it and how nobody was there to tell you what to do and how everything that you did was transparent and immutable and in all of this stuff was something that got me really really excited and so i bought this uh dual gpu gaming tower i set it up as an eth miner i did not make much money from said ether but for me the process of getting to the command line and understanding uh ethereum in that way just unlocked like all this stuff in my in my mind and so i left uh i left my job at facebook um to go to go full-time into crypto in 2017.

um and did that for a couple of years this is another like yadda yadda part of the presentation just because we're limited on time but uh happy to expand on that if anybody wants to go deeper into sort of my my first couple of years in crypto but um at the end of the day uh it was about this this moment right and the you know after seeing like too big uh too big to fail banks um and just sort of feeling limited to build only on top of legacy systems to be able to build you know only in ways that you're allowed to in in legacy world it was really appealing to me to see people back then at least starting to build things uh in it in a different way however um in 2019 in the bear market which some of you i'm sure were around for um things got a little bit dire things for this guy were a little financially tough and so i started uh a a job hunt and my ideal would have been to stay working full-time in crypto and find a gig in crypto but i didn't find a great one um but a kind of uh serendipitous thing happened which is that my friend matthias uh he encouraged me to make a resume that was just one page um and as you've gathered from from these slides i've i've had a couple of jobs i've been around the block couple times a one-page resume is pretty tough and you know when you're job hunting you have like 10 different versions of your resume right for different kinds of jobs or different size companies my buddy matthias said just make a one-pager and just focus on the work that you are most proud of the things that you had the most fun doing the teams that you are most stoked to be a part of and so i did that um and what i found was that the the common thread and that work that i was most proud of was about connecting people to things that that brought them joy and about you know global growth and that sort of arts art science collision of you know bringing things to people people around the world and um in pretty quick fashion that um that resume actually brought me to a company called netflix and so um i'm the you know i'm the guy that that left full-time crypto to go work uh at netflix in 2019 um and it was kind of an awesome opportunity it was like when i had put together that resume um so much of it led to working on on culture and i'm sorry on content uh and to seeking a culture that kind of matched with my values and um uh you know i i found one in netflix i was going to say i thought i found one i did find one in netflix i think netflix is a very well-intentioned company and as far as big companies i think if you got to work for one i would say it's one of the best ones to work for that i'm aware of but um if you look at some of the core the core tenets of netflix culture it might actually sound more like web3 right avoid rules people over process context not control freedom and responsibility the whole idea is to empower people and trust them to just go off and do [ __ ] and not slow them down with a lot of red tape and layers and all those kinds of things so in in theory kind of a kind of an amazing system in practice you run into some of the same kinds of things that facebook ran into right and the move fast with stable infra uh you know phase in their existence where at the end of the day when you're a large uh a large corporation with obligations to stockholders like you need to have some level of control um and so i i went to work there it was a great job i was running globalization so um all that art science collision stuff and and uh and pretty fantastic but um at the end of the day netflix as many companies are limited by hierarchy your ability to operate with context not control freedom and responsibility is only as good as your part of the organization it's limited by your manager uh if your manager is a command and control kind of person then in a meta kind of way they are empowered to run their part of the organization with command and control and so between those kinds of dynamics and the fact that i spent uh inordinate amount of my time managing up and kind of shuttling information back and forth between groups um i left um but i left because um i discovered something called urine finance and this is not the urine finance shill part of the the presentation however um i started talking to uh a guy that goes by the name of tracheopteryx um a while back a little over a little over a year ago we met through a common friend and just started talking not about defy not about uh yields not about strategies but about people and organizations and how people are happiest and most fulfilled people can rally together um and build most anything and if they are if they are aligned people that are empowered and uh and trusted and have autonomy that they can just go get cool [ __ ] done and what i found in talking to trake i found in talking to every other person that i met on the yearn team and i saw this opportunity to live many of the things that i had lived in some pockets of my career before but either i saw companies grow too big then they outgrew those things and couldn't be that nimble anymore or just that were kind of too good to be true like where you just really can't operate that way in a big certainly in a big public company um and so i i know i i help out at yearn and i think that's the other thing too i could do a whole other talk on over my career you know i got very excited for a long period of time about growing my career and having big titles and having promotions and all those things and i've had all of them i've been a vp and an svp and a cmo and now i'm a helper a contributor and it's [ __ ] awesome i like i used to have like a big corner office and a big global team and yeah i had a good time thank you doggie um i just got hack gold from the back of the room um but i you know i had great times on those jobs but i promise you none of it compares to just being a helper being a contributor um running short on time so i'm going to jump into this so um at the end of the day what does this all come down to and and how can you find your happy place and why did i just spend 17 minutes talking about my uh my past because at the end of the day what i was looking for was there all along right it was built up from the experiences that i had good and bad along the way and so they came down to these things number one find your people if you're most attracted to the opportunity to go make money probably not going to be a good fit in the long run money's great but at the end of the day it's who you're working with what they're all about um and are these people that you feel like you can lock arms with and go you know go conquer the world with two just jump in um the whole idea of not having a boss is fantastic and sounds great right however there's a certain amount of overhead that goes into telling people what to do checking in with them to make sure that they did it giving them feedback on it all those kinds of things like there are valuable aspects to having a boss um and i promise you that if you just jump in and share what you're doing and hold yourself accountable you can go way further way faster but you got to just do it and you got to find it within yourself because nobody in web 3 will tell you what to do um but they will give you help if you ask so embrace autonomy with transparency right share what you're working on share what you're doing forget about managing up forget about delivering only good news forget about posturing for the next promotion or protecting information all the things we were taught to do in big in big companies just share what you're working on and how it's going and where you're stuck right and i i promise you because i have lived this the people that you will find uh drawn to you like magnets are the best people in the world for you to work with um and lastly pick your focus area right all the way back to the mud the mage the cleric the thief the warrior right pick your focus area you will never be fully caught up on what's going on in in web 3. you will never there is no inbox zero in web three right there's always more going on than you can possibly keep up with so be a [ __ ] warrior pick your spot go and go deep be yourself find your happy place thank you very much uh presentation over not game over the beginning of the journey i'm chris everly get in touch uh define ginger on twitter chris at defiance llc thank you very much [Applause]