Every single decision you make comes with an opportunity cost--the unquantifiable question of “what could’ve been.” Nobody wants to live life mulling a future that never came to pass. I certainly didn’t. This time last year, I realized that the opportunity cost of continuing to be employed was way too high.
If you’re reading this, you and I likely share a somewhat similar life trajectory. Good grades in high school, respectable GPA in college, smart friends, a stable career start--all the things we’re supposed to do and have. Our life has been a series of delicately planned events that set us up for the next big thing . We’ve worked incessantly to go from one milestone to another and, to be sure, we have much to be proud of.
But what happens when we hit pause on this hamster wheel, step off, and reconsider everything from the ground up?
While working at Capital One, I went down a deep rabbit-hole of everything crypto related and found myself smitten by grandiose promises of transforming finance, social media, and just about everything else through crypto. To me, an open decentralized web with verifiable ownership of digital goods was a complete no-brainer. Tokenization of assets on a public ledger would obviously create novel financial structures and incentives that could be used to tackle some of our biggest challenges. Zero knowledge cryptography clearly offered an entirely new way to think about privacy and data management. The list went on. I was convinced that we were in the 1995 internet era equivalent of crypto and I simply had to be a part of this industry’s journey.
Soon enough, I quit my job.
I gave myself six months to figure out the whole crypto situation. In the coming months, I traveled to conferences, helped start a DAO, talked to interesting people, and learned as much as I could. The unstructured nature of my time was just as liberating as it was daunting: the complete freedom to pursue intellectual passions also meant guaranteed failure if I got lazy and spent my time doom-scrolling everyday. I also saw my former colleagues get promotions, move to nice apartments in big cities, and make their way up in life--the opportunity cost of unemployment kept piling on.
(Ad)venture capital
The idea that a group of highly motivated, talented individuals could leave their stable jobs to pursue building their own enterprise is relatively new. When the Traitorous Eight left their jobs in 1957 to start their own company, the backing that made it possible was called “adventure capital.” The name made sense: they were embarking on an adventure that could either make them wildly successful or entirely broke. Decades passed and the name evolved, but receiving venture capital funding today still means that you’re (likely) doing something new, exciting, and risky.
But I never considered venture capital to be a viable career choice. What advice am I going to give founders? And who am I to say which project deserves funding or not? I had a grand total of 0.5 years of professional experience out of college and an inkling of what a term sheet meant. But crypto turned things on its head: here was an industry that was just nascent enough to where most people involved felt like they knew very little. In this new frontier, even the “experts” had only a few years on me. There was a clear path for me to catch up and compete on a level playing field that would be simply impossible if I were to, say, suddenly become an investment banker.
In venture capital, the Power Law dictates everything. It’s the idea that a few bets you make will yield exponentially higher results than every other bet combined. It’s why venture capital funds tend to ‘spray and pray’. They invest a little into a lot of different companies, hoping that maybe just one of them will be the next Google, Meta, Airbnb, or Figma. But you can’t possibly replicate that in your own life: imagine doing twenty different things all at the same time, hoping one of them takes off. Life cannot, and should not, be lived in a state of boundless optionality.
A better way to understand the Power Law in your own life is the 80/20 rule. It’s a fact that ~80% of people live in ~20% of cities and ~80% of all citations come from ~20% of scientific papers. Similarly, 80% of your life’s outcomes are likely to be dictated by 20% of your decisions. As Sebastian Mallaby discusses in his book, there’s nothing magical about the numbers 80 and 20. The central point is that a small percentage of actions can, and often do, drive an outsized percentage of results. Choosing to quit my job to pursue an open-ended career in crypto was definitely one such decision.
Joining BlueYard
At the very tail-end of my self-imposed six month deadline, I stumbled across BlueYard Capital, an early stage VC firm that has backed some prolific companies. I immediately knew that we shared a similar world-view when it came to crypto: we understood its transformative power to build a more utopian society and were not in the game to flip the next shit-coin (a tempting proposition for anyone at the height of the bull market, believe me). We wanted to live in a world where coordination costs are low, power is decentralized, and the financial machine is better, faster, stronger.
For someone who couldn’t tell Ethereum from Solana a year ago, landing a crypto analyst role at this company was an incredibly unlikely outcome. It would’ve also been entirely impossible if 1) I hadn’t left my previous job, 2) took those six months to recalibrate my life, 3) think deeply about the kind of career I really wanted, and 4) recognize that the long term gains of deliberately switching careers outweighed the short term gratification of getting a biweekly check.
I’m yet to find out whether my decision to pursue six months of constructive unemployment and hope for the best will yield insane, exponential results. But it feels worthwhile already: I get to work with incredible founders on the cutting edge of web3 and help create the kind of future I want for crypto.
Most people hate their first job out of college, and I was no exception. But maybe- just maybe- the way to find something you do enjoy is to be entirely unwilling to accept the opportunity cost of employment.