What I learned working at a high-growth crypto startup

On personal learnings, building products, and company scaling

OpenSea – an NFT marketplace – was my first 10-100 startup experience.

I joined when the company was ~25 people (with an even smaller product/eng team) and saw the chapter of it scaling to 300+ employees and $20B+ GMV before compressing as markets turned.

What follows is a few of my observations & reflections of being at a hyper-growth company in a hyper-growth industry.

On surviving & thriving as an individual

Everything is made up

When you’re moving quickly, and especially in a new industry, there is no “right” answer. There are only intuitions that serve as a foundation for action, and are then reinforced (or invalidated) by reality. The goal of an organization (post-PMF) is to capture the opportunity, expand TAM, build defensibility, and do it in a way that doesn’t destroy the people or culture. There will always be questions on the direction of a company. But accept there won’t (and shouldn’t) be 100% alignment. You are always operating with imperfect information, and speed often matters more than perfect alignment.

This is true on both a macro and micro level. Don’t optimize for the “right” way to do something - put together a (thoughtful) plan based on first principles, get feedback and buy-in, and then act on it. Most of the time people are just happy someone is taking action. The most common mistake I see where this advice goes wrong is being too gungho with company processes & broad strategy. People are sensitive to process, and so only enact them in places where you have a lot of social capital, like on a team you run. Alternatively questioning existing processes, and replacing or removing them altogether, is often the best answer.

Lastly if your plan doesn’t have a direct tie in with company strategy (or explicit mandate) it will probably be DOA - people can sniff out when something is more self-serving or orthogonal to what they’ve heard leadership say. That’s not to say don’t push for innovative, step-function projects. Definitely do so. But do it thoughtfully, with the right buy-in, and with the nuanced understanding of what company P0s should be traded off against and why. Get comfortable with leaving fires burning and putting more resources behind the most important no-fail initiatives.

Expect change

I used to say that OS was a different company every six weeks. Whether it was a hire, fire, reorg, new competitor, strategy, etc. there was constant change and evolution in the company. And this is healthy! As an employee, understanding this and then expecting unpredictability, became the predictability that I needed. Don’t like the current market, your role, company direction or current project? Well that’s okay, because there’s a good chance it will change.

Personally, this meant being ready to act as soon as a change occurred (after validating that it was not a head-fake, which was sometimes the case). The speed by which you move and reorient helps to make the transition smoother and align day-to-day tactics with broader company strategy. And as you grow more tenured in the organization, your social capital buy-in and willingness to commit to a new direction becomes a beacon for newer folks who may not be used to such dramatic swings.

Show progress

Businesses are a series of ROI calculations. And the more proof points you can provide for your project, the more fuel that can be poured on it.

The best proof points are real tangible progress – metrics, production code, customer feedback, demos, etc. while the weakest proof points (besides nothing) are well thought out written memos. Giving good consistent updates of what’s happening is a good way to maintain visibility in the organization while also building grassroots excitement for the work.

Specific knowledge matters

I pride myself in being a generalist, but one of the lessons I’ve learned is that specific, relevant knowledge and expertise is quite important to build momentum and personal edge. The OS CTO was early in his career, but had the opportunity to lead a company of this size because he had such specific knowledge about crypto while layering in a baseline level of execution muscle.

Similarly, I found that over time developing deep domain expertise in fiat payments, multichain, protocol infra, and marketplaces all compounded and led to deeper conversations and relationships (internally & externally) that wouldn’t have occurred had I just stayed surface level on them.

Even being in crypto itself is specific knowledge when compared to those looking outside in. Most are curious to learn, but not deep enough to underwrite or participate meaningfully in the space without some guidance. And it’s rewarding to be that guide.

On company scaling

Use the product. Again. And again.

Devin – CEO of OS – has a strength of being an obsessive user of products and relying on his usage as ground truth. This was not work that was beneath him, and so he spent a lot of his free time just clicking around the site, finding bugs, and getting an intuitive feel for features during their development stage. He also did this with non-OS products – the first thing he’d do is just try the product and found several bugs in well-known companies and their crypto offerings. He knew the quality of other products better than some of the leaders of those products themselves. This is a very common trait of other founders I know.

Product is ground truth - from onboarding to discovery to customer action - and the only way to get to reality is to be on the ground and use products extensively. You can’t rely on others to do this for you, it’s important for you to do it yourself and truly feel it.

It involves spending a lot of time with customers, and not just “talking” to them, but deeply observing how they use the product and how it fits into their lives. Issues will emerge and natural extensions of what to build next will unfold. And it won’t be theoretical, it’ll instead be grounded in the reality of usage (or not usage).

Test out edge cases, try out random things, and become the customer when you can. Help customers get to the core value prop faster, cleaner, and in a more polished way.

Explain why you exist

Startups are an exercise in the today – what did you get done – and an exercise in the future — why do you exist. OpenSea frankly struggled a lot with the latter.

Day-to-day execution is the magnitude of the vector. But why do you exist is the direction. Your team and customers want both, and one without the other can lead to burnout or apathy. This is especially true in crypto, where we’re still in a heavily financialized (and oftentimes nihilistic) part of its development. People want to be inspired and be part of something bigger than themselves.

Who are you trying to serve? What is the change you’re trying to bring in the world? Answers should mirror the founder’s motivation, the team’s actions, and the realities of the market and world you operate in.

Hire only when it's painful or uplevels the team.

There is plenty of hiring advice out there - I’m here to tell you most of it is true. During the bull, OS hired way too many people and tried to become a “big company” way too fast. It’s an unfortunate default state that many, many companies fall into (I have theories on why, but that’s for another day).

Startups sometimes forget about operating efficiency and looking at opex leverage compared to business metrics. But the beauty of software (and especially crypto protocols) is that the marginal cost of distribution is zero - you don’t need to hire more people to get your product in the hands of more people. Headcount growth should be sublinear and at most linear to company growth (possible exception being making new orthogonal bets). Fight the temptation to throw people at a problem, even for direct customer/revenue scaling roles like community, support, sales.

It’s better to only hire when you find someone so incredible that they uplevel the team entirely. And in the best scenario the person is a “barrel” and a driver of new, independent value. Another heuristic is to hire when there is enough specific work for someone to do, to the point where even the new hire would be overwhelmed by it. You will literally waste more time training someone up than not. And getting a hire wrong is extremely costly.

Interview fatigue is also very real – OS spent too many hours doing final rounds with candidates that should have been filtered out much earlier. You need extreme rigor on quality control, and that starts from the top of the funnel. Be opinionated on the role, calibrate interviewers on what great looks like, and run tight processes. Excessive interviewing leads to fatigue, distraction from serving customers, and lowering of the bar. Interviewing is a necessity, but save the energy for the best candidates.

Your benchmark for your company and product growth is probably too low.

When your product/company is growing say 20% WoW, it’s easy to just focus on keeping up with demand and riding the wave. However, what if you could be growing 30% WoW? 50%? How do you know what the benchmark for success should be?

A mentor once told me that one reason Uber Eats was so successful is that their benchmark for growth was Uber - one of the fastest growing consumer products of all time. This means that even when things were working, they would often scrap the entire thing and start over because it wasn’t good enough. Eats was lucky they had Uber growth as a benchmark. But most high-growth companies are single product and don’t have that.

A key risk for many high-growth companies isn’t that things aren’t working. It’s how well they COULD be working. What is the upper limit of potential here? What do you need to do now to ensure defensible, accelerated growth 18 and 36 months from now? It’s strange to think you can get complacent when things are going so well. But the game is to meet and capture the full potential of the opportunity.

Bring in new perspectives, ask your investors, ask and re-ask your team how they can step function change what they’re doing. Study growth of structurally similar businesses in different industries. Be willing and comfortable to start over.

The most important check in my opinion is figuring out where in the development of the product you’re in. Are you still trying to tighten & deliver enough value with your product? Or are you trying to grow and scale something that is already working (ideally with diminishing CAC)? Too often people try to do the latter when the issue is the former.

Simplify, clarify, and deliver more product value to delight the customer and get the flywheel going.

Conclusion

When I was a founder, I used to think finding PMF was the holy grail. But I’ve found scaling something up and taking it to the next level is equally as difficult. Hiring & getting culture right is hard. Building defensibility & a compounding advantage is hard. Creating new products and channels of growth is hard. Thriving as an individual during hypergrowth is hard.

But it’s also extremely rewarding.

It’s special to have people come together to try to do something different and attempt to build a generational company or protocol. The personal learnings are innumerable, relationships built are meaningful, and the war stories last endless drinking sessions (and blog posts).

It’s rare to found or be part of a high-growth journey. If you have the opportunity to join one….take it. And if you’re in one right now…..enjoy it.

---

If you agree/disagree, or have other takes on scaling companies, I'd love to hear them.

And if you’re in the middle of a high growth company journey or trying to figure out how to join one, I’m happy to be a sounding partner. DMs and email are open.