Spoiler alert: QBR doesn’t always mean Quarterback Rating.
It had been a few weeks into my new job back in June of last year and I was finally getting the hang of things. Going from the trading floor to my living room had been an experience in itself but the change was welcomed. There is something quite special about being able to roll out of bed, put on some shorts (or not), and be at work fifteen seconds later. No wonder nobody wanted to go back to the office at Barclays, even if they tried to force people. I didn’t really get to WFH much during the pandemic, I had enjoyed going to the office during that time as nobody cared what you wore and the vibes were much more chill.
Through my career, I always found it funny how people in Sales and Trading tried to act all fancy, wearing suits and ties daily only to seat on their ass for 12 hour days. You eat your breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner, on the desk hunched over your keyboard and hoping no trade comes in during those 15-20mins when you’re eating. God forbid you take a longer time to go get food, or even think of eating somewhere else. Yes, it is as miserable as it sounds, but hey! They get to wear one of the five Ferragamo ties they own each day… fancy. So yeah, I didn’t miss any of that as I settled into my new gig in tech. Even if it would still take me another month and a half for me to let myself eat lunch away from my desk at home 😅.
[As you can see I’m still suffering from TradFi PTSD]
Working in finance had been fun, don’t get me wrong. Can’t complain about weekly Nobu57 dinners and some very fancy stays while traveling to see South American clients. Nothing beats the banter of a trading floor, or at least the one we used to have “back in the day”. While “finance dudes” are a dime a dozen in NYC, there is a reason for it, they are the original degens and they live up to the expectation. But I had been ready for a change for a while and was excited to learn more about my new industry. Honestly I didn’t really think much about how different things would be once I made the change. I figured I was an OK sales guy and, how hard could selling the best crypto self-custody platform in the world be?
One thing that always stuck with me from my early GS days was how the phone would always ring on some desks. You could sit a monkey on the Rates Sales desk at 200 West and it would still print $10mm in revenue a year. People had to call Goldman, if anything just to check pricing. I got the same impression at Fireblocks. It was clear we had a front-row seat at everything that was coming to the blockchain space. Everyone had to call us, even if they didn’t need us just yet. That was a lot of fun, the days flew by and I got a lot of reps doing demos and talking to new clients early on. Trial by fire, sink or swim, whatever you wanted to call it, it was just like my first year on a trading desk. Nothing beats hands-on learning, and having personal experience degening NFTs had given me a small-but-good understanding of the need for good crypto security so I was able to draw from those experiences during client calls. I was also using my CryptoPunk as profile picture on Zoom, email, etc. I didn’t realize it then but this had become the equivalent of having a GS business card, people just assumed I really knew what I was talking about even if it was just my third week on the job.
In reality though, I had no idea what doing Tech Sales entailed. It is such a different world from Wall Street! Being in my mid-thirties I think I’m past my hubris face, so I knew I didn’t know everything, but oh man was I totally ignorant about this industry. There were a lot of new terms: “OTE”, “MSA”, “SLA”. Six weeks into the gig we had our next “QBR”…
“what the f*ck is a QBR?” I thought to myself every time my new boss said it in the weeks leading up to it.
Little did I know my assumptions about what I thought I knew coming in were completely wrong. At times I even felt very small, I had traded billions of risk in options and ETFs yet there I was unable to correctly “qualify a lead” on Hubspot or find the correct board on Monday. At first, I didn’t think there was a lesson to be learned here other than I had limited experience with these new processes. However, as I think back now it is clear that my approach to the new job has a lot of parallels to what a lot of TradFi firms and folks experience when they start looking at blockchain and digital assets for the first time.
We are human, we spend our life building mental models and frameworks that we later use and refine as we navigate life. This process iterates on itself for most people. Practice makes perfect, as the Care Bears used to say (or at least they did say that in the Mexican dubbed version). We are shaped by our experiences and so, when presented with new paradigms, we tend to struggle to fully grasp the new concepts. For some it’s learning terms like “KPIs” and “OKRs”, for others it is the AMM models powering decentralized exchanges and cc0 licensing being used for the hottest NFT projects.
If we are to bridge these gaps (in both directions) we should approach things with a bit more education. Imagine how much of a shock it was for people to learn that Earth was, in fact, not flat? As we on-ramp more and more retail and institutional users, let’s keep in mind that decentralization is a complete 180-degree turn of what the majority of our internet and personal finance experience has been. We should seek to educate folks as we on-ramp them, provide them the tools to understand the how’s and why’s of crypto so that they can be more effective participants in it. Let’s share the roadmaps, our vision for what the future might bring, and how we are going to get there.
And so, that is what a QBR pretty much is. A set of meetings where the company’s leadership team shares their vision alongside a progress report of what the previous quarter was like. Folks review their group’s performance and discuss their plans for the new few months. For me, my first QBR became an integral part of my onboarding as it gave me a holistic view of the business and where we were going. Funny to think now that I had thought QBR stood for “quarterback rating” the first time I heard it, but how would this TradFi guy had known better?