- Some of the top talent working at the biggest tech firms including Facebook, Google and Amazon are leaving lucrative posts to join Web3 and crypto companies.
- Aside from the fat paychecks that the new industry is offering, these execs view it as the most exciting sector in tech and want to play a part in the future of tech.
When the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft became the fastest-growing tech companies in the world, they attracted the best talent in the market, with many leaving previous behemoths like banks to join them. Now, these tech companies are losing their most talented staff members to the new fastest-rising industry – Web3 and crypto.
The third iteration of the Internet, known as Web 3.0 or Web3, focuses on decentralizing the Internet and giving users more freedom and ownership of their data. Blockchain technology and crypto are at the heart of this new movement.
Related: The 10 predictions for crypto and Web3 in 2022 by Coinbase
And as one report reveals, Silicon Valley is backing this new sector. The report unearthed the great exodus from some of the top tech companies, with top talent choosing to work with Web3 and crypto startups.
One of these is Ryan Wyatt, the former head of YouTube Gaming who left Google to work at a new gaming studio from Polygon, the Layer-2 blockchain network that seeks to solve Ethereum’s scaling problems. Wyatt compared Web3 to seven years ago when he joined YouTube gaming. Back then, nobody thought it could grow to become the second-largest vertical for YouTube and seriously compete with Amazon’s Twitch.
He told CNBC:
When I started at YouTube Gaming almost eight years ago, I was the first person there. We didn’t have a team. People were really starting to show interest in gaming video. I look at this opportunity very much the same way.
Wyatt is just one of many ditching regular paychecks and job security to work at blockchain startups. Sherice Torres left Novi, the crypto division at Facebook, to work at Circle, the maker of USDC stablecoin. At Novi, she was the chief marketing officer.
Speaking of Novi, its former head David Marcus could be heading to the Web3 world judging by some of his latest tweets (he hasn’t officially announced what he’ll be doing next after resigning from Facebook).
I’ve never felt this connected to a community of builders like the crypto/web3 one. I’m not talking about folks who are in it for a quick speculative win. I’m talking about people who want to rebuild the internet’s infrastructure to move value and power in the hands of people.
— David Marcus – dmarcus.eth (@davidmarcus) January 26, 2022
Pravjit Tiwana left Amazon Cloud in January, where he was a top exec, to become the chief technology officer at Gemini, the crypto exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins.
These experts, and many others, are betting on Web3 being the future of tech, Alex Bouaziz, the CEO of payroll software firm Deel explained:
Naturally, people will want to work on what they view as the most exciting and innovative developments in the technology space, and currently, that is crypto and Web3. Many are seeing it as the future of the tech industry, in the same way that Facebook and Amazon were attractive in the past.
The fat paycheck that these top talents receive doesn’t hurt either. According to some sources, Coinbase pays as much as $900,000 annually to its software engineers.
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