Leaving the bank
I left JPMorgan for Biconomy in 2021. From the outside it looks clean: bank, then crypto, then a founding seat. From the inside it was a year of feeling behind.
I had been around coins since 2017. I had not built anything that a protocol would point to. Kernel, the Gitcoin programme, was useful mainly because it put me next to people who already lived in Telegram. The job I wanted did not come from a portal. It came from doing the unasked work until someone at a small company answered.
I still think portals are a poor way to get into a company of ten people. I also think the internet advice around this has become a costume: spend ten hours on a fake strategy deck, mail the CEO, offer to work for free. Sometimes that is sincere. Sometimes it is spam with better formatting. I have been on the receiving end now. I can tell the difference, and I am not always kind about it.
What worked for me was narrower. I cared about a specific product (gasless transactions, then account abstraction). I could talk about it without a script. I was willing to do the parts that were not engineering. They needed that more than they needed another person who wanted to be a founder in eighteen months.
I was afraid of looking unserious to the bank people, and afraid of looking like a tourist to the crypto people. Both fears were reasonable. I did not have a big following. I did not have a famous intern stamp. I had ops habits and a high tolerance for unglamorous chats.
Biconomy hired me for a hole they already felt. They did not hire me for a five-year plan. I spent too long trying to sound like a future GP and not enough time asking what was on fire this month.
I got lucky on timing. Account abstraction was about to become a phrase everyone used. I did not invent that wave. I stood in it. I try to remember that when the story gets too neat.