The Contributor Chronicles: captainpearson
Decent presents The Contributor Chronicles, stories from the people bringing the Decent DAO vision to life. Our first edition features captainpearson.
Decent presents The Contributor Chronicles, stories from the people bringing the Decent DAO vision to life. Our first edition features captainpearson.

At today’s rate of innovation, only our imaginations can limit the potential applications of blockchain technology. Its threat of disruption is wide-reaching and thus widely appealing. As a result, the motivations for entering the crypto space are as diverse as the people who occupy it.

A common thread among Web3 enthusiasts lies somewhere between an affinity for counterculture and a disdain for the status quo (assuming a distinction even exists). And it’s certainly that countercultural streak that has led captainpearson here, working fervently towards a decentralized future.

“I've always been someone who's against the grain.”

After growing up in suburban New Jersey and spending four and a half semesters at university in Montreal, captainpearson moved to the city of Chicago. It made a lot of sense; the rest of his family had moved there, and he’d already completed a summer internship at GE Capital in Chicago. However, unlike most of his classmates, captainpearson wasn’t eager to leap into the field in which he’d previously interned.

“Once I got to Chicago, I didn't feel, in that moment, that I wanted to do the traditional route of working in a bank. I didn't want to do that corporate finance role.”

“It just seemed like everybody was doing that. And I wanted to find out more about myself and pursue passions that were top of mind for me, rather than following a roadmap that everyone is told to follow. I knew I had time to do what I wanted to do.”

Instead of rushing into finance for the sake of it, captainpearson began integrating into his new community the best way he knew how: by coaching lacrosse, a longtime passion and an avenue of personal growth. Coaching while also working at Whole Foods helped him acclimate to the city and build relationships. It wasn’t until about a year later that captainpearson felt the urge to return to the corporate world—with a more suitable role in mind.

“The role I wanted to do within a corporate environment was sales. I loved community [and] loved people. I was always told I had the gift of the gab. So sales seemed like the best corporate route for me to take.”

His first gig was a pair of resume-building internships: first at Bank of Montreal, then at the consumer credit reporting agency, TransUnion.

TransUnion really was a good internship, I guess. But it was also the shining light that I didn't want a corporate job like a TransUnion because I really felt the day-to-day monotony and the bureaucracy and the whole corporate ladder.”

With newfound experience and a deeper sense of his ideal work culture, captainpearson landed an entry-level position at Tesla. Many facets of this job appealed to captainpearson. Working for a brand-name company was nice, but even better was Tesla’s culture, a stark contrast to the corporate bureaucracy captainpearson had left behind.

“And that's why Tesla was so appealing to me too…Elon's freaking employee handbook is called ‘The Anti-Handbook Handbook.’ And Tesla liked to fight against corporate structure.”

Most of all, Tesla’s mission, ”Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” made it easy for captainpearson to find real purpose in his work. And that cultural shift to purpose-driven work showed through his performance. He grew from booking test drives to becoming one of Tesla’s best-performing inside sales advisors, according to company metrics. He was promoted to lead a team handling direct phone sales for both Tesla vehicles and Tesla Energy, which prompted a move to Las Vegas.

captainpearson’s tenure at Tesla lasted from October 2017 to April 2021, a nearly four-year stint that he remembers fondly (though he notes that Tesla’s culture did start to change as the company scaled and integrated new teams). But the deciding factor in his departure from Tesla was his desire to explore an exciting new industry: crypto. In fact, captainpearson’s intentions to work in crypto began before his job at Tesla did.

How Community Led captainpearson to Crypto

captainpearson first heard about Bitcoin in 2012 the same way many young adults did: through a friend who used it to obtain drugs on Silk Road. Aside from the resulting reservations about Bitcoin—that taint people’s view of cryptocurrency to this day—captainpearson’s main takeaway was the inefficiency of the process.

“I just remember that the steps for him to use it were complex and that price volatility was a factor.”

Bitcoin wouldn’t grab his attention again until 2017, just before his birthday. A close friend from his yoga community introduced him to a Bitcoin-savvy yoga classmate.

“That friend ultimately became a really good friend of mine. And every single day after lacrosse practice, I would just sit in his room for hours on his computer, talking and learning about Bitcoin.”

The disparity between captainpearson’s two “introductions” to crypto highlights the fact that, for those considering a foray into crypto, context is key. captainpearson credits his community for allowing him to find Bitcoin in a way that resonated with him.

“2017 was right around the time I really started to find my hippiness. I was into raw foods. I was big into yoga—it changed my life. So my hippiness started to accelerate, and Bitcoin came onto the scene with a very similar energy. The way that I got reintroduced to Bitcoin resonated with me just around sovereignty and freedom. And then you start going down the rabbit hole about how Bitcoin is solving the money situation.”

Finding Decent and Finally Landing a Role in Crypto

captainpearson soon realized that his future would be in crypto. He dedicated more of his free time to it while working at Tesla, looking out for opportunities in the space. He even brought his crypto enthusiasm to work.

“Within two months of starting at Tesla, I went to my boss and said, ‘Tesla should get Bitcoin on the balance sheet and should use Litecoin for supercharger transactions.’ I was actually four years ahead of Elon's thinking. That's really funny for me.'“

Identifying a suitable role in Web3 was a journey for captainpearson. He was deeply interested in DeFi, but without extensive TradFi experience, those jobs were hard to come by. Soon enough, though, he met Decent Co-Founder Parker McCurley (aka moondog).

“I absolutely just poured [out] my soul and passion to him and brought some cool ideas to the table that I can remember he appreciated from an innovative standpoint. Parker always said that he really did appreciate my sales skills from Tesla coming into the role, but he also knew that I was crypto savvy and crypto curious.”

Decent (Decent Labs LLC at the time) was an obvious fit for captainpearson. It was a small, remote, crypto-focused team with a free-flowing startup culture. He joined to support sales and business development. Since then he’s had a hand in guiding community growth and now focuses on the content side of things for Decent.

Decent Labs LLC was such an incredible culture because it was a startup venture studio with people working remotely. It was such a small team; there was no bureaucracy or red tape. It was a really cool culture.”

Decent’s culture shared many of the elements that had attracted captainpearson to Tesla but with a few key differences. Most notably, Decent’s size made it far easier to preserve culture than the already large and rapidly scaling Tesla.

Decent’s commitment to the crypto space and its eventual DAOification enabled that openness and lack of bureaucracy to be codified in a way that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible. The result, captainpearson says, is that Decent has bypassed many of the cultural woes of traditional organizations as they grow—woes that his Whole Foods colleagues experienced (both when the company first went public and when Amazon acquired it) and that he experienced firsthand at Tesla.

Despite the potential pitfalls of scaling, Decent’s transition to a DAO had a positive impact on its work culture. After all, Decent Labs’ culture was already strong, so no major revamp was necessary. The main benefits for captainpearson were the increased agency and empowerment afforded to Decent DAO contributors.

“I think the similarities [between working for Decent Labs LLC and Decent DAO] are the sense that you're taking on work to drive the mission forward and taking ownership of the ‘why’ behind the work that you're doing. But behind the DAO, there's more responsibility and more accountability in your ownership, as opposed to [a corporate setting]. People taking ownership of their work in their workstreams was something that changed more.”

Web3 is, of course, all about individual and communal ownership. And the shift captainpearson mentions emphasizes the way ownership and agency can make a DAO contributor’s work far more fulfilling.

DAOs could be a viable solution to the scaling problem of startups, where significant growth irreparably shifts the atmosphere that appealed to employees in the first place. Couple that with a remote-first culture that opens up a global talent pool, and you can start to see the revolution that Decent and other DAOs envision—one where employees become contributors and stakeholders, independence is encouraged, and corporate ladders are obsolete.

Not to mention the wonderfully fun, sarcastic, pseudonymous, and avatar-filled social landscape of Web3, where working towards the vision of your DAO and developing your own personal brand need not be mutually exclusive.

“I couldn't make captainpearson a thing if I still worked for Tesla, that’s for sure.”

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