Why I Just Quit My High-Paying Job at Google to Work In Crypto
A brief 5-year history of crypto and where we are now.
Last month, I quit my job as a Software Engineer at Google, packed up my apartment in Canada, gave up the right to live in North America, and moved 7,500 miles across the world to India.
All just so I could work in the Cryptocurrency industry.
Days after returning, amidst the sweltering heat, the non-stop noise and the various forms of chaos that one finds in India, I found myself wondering if I made a crazy decision.
I wasn’t the only one. Swarms of relatives — another characteristic feature of India — asked me the same question over and over. As did my friends.
“Willingly?”
“Voluntarily?”
“You… chose to?”
For these no-coiners, the thought that I would choose to give up a life in North America, where I had been living for the last eight years — successfully, in their eyes — was unfathomable.
… It also didn’t help that I had returned with no job in hand and no family business to run. My only plan was to work in an industry that — to their knowledge — was only associated with gamblers and money launderers.
I can only imagine that they assumed I had lost my marbles in the west.
I don’t blame them. It feels crazy to me as well.
- I had spent the last eight years becoming a self-taught immigration expert trying to figure out all the ways for me to stay in North America.
- I quit a job at a company that is widely considered one of the best places to work, and one of the hardest companies to get a job at.
- I gave up a great six-figure income that most people aspire towards.
- Oh, and I have virtually all of my savings in magic internet money.
But I’m absolutely convinced that now is the best time to work in crypto.
My journey and how I came to this decision
My journey into crypto began in 2017. I was majoring in computer science and economics at Columbia University at the time. I was also an avid poker player.
At the time, crypto was already being used as a deposit and withdrawal method on online poker sites and clubs. My poker buddies and I had all been banned from Venmo (gambling is apparently against the ToS), and so, I automatically drifted to crypto for convenience of payments.
As I read more about cryptocurrency and blockchain, I found the concept absolutely fascinating. Decentralized money, eliminating the middleman, tokenization of assets, creating trustless systems… all of it sat squarely at the intersection of my purpose in my undergraduate studies.
So much so that I decided to write my senior year economics thesis on how real-world assets can get tokenized. My professor really liked this, and asked me to guest lecture at one of her classes.
Through all of this, I found myself journeying deeper into the world of crypto. And yet, I was still very much a newbie with a very shallow understanding. But newbie or not, I was converted.
I ended up taking a job at a SaaS startup called Troops after graduating, but I had already been orange-pilled back in 2017.
So what’s so special about the timing now?
The 2020 Effect — Institutional Adoption
Over the years, I maintained an active interest in crypto, continuing to invest in coins (some great, some garbage), and kept reading and learning more.
In 2019, I switched jobs and joined Google (primarily for immigration reasons) as a Software Engineer.
In 2020, the world changed dramatically. Not only did we get a global pandemic, but the pandemic also brought with it a money printing bonanza and consequently, a euphoric market for speculative investors.
In the risk-on environment of 2020–21, I turned to my favorite asset class — cryptocurrency. But the deeper I looked, the more things had changed. It wasn’t just the speculative casino I was used to.
Crypto had now become — or was in the process of becoming — an institutional-grade asset.
Companies like Microstrategy were investing large portions of their treasuries in Bitcoin. ARK’s innovation fund had stated that they believed Bitcoin could hit $500k in the next five years. There were rumors of central banks accumulating Bitcoin. In early 2021, Tesla also announced their own investment into Bitcoin.
In the excitement of all the money printing, one word became key to Bitcoin’s narrative: “inflation.”
Everyone felt the inflation incoming. It would be hard not to with such massive amounts of capital injections into the economy.
Gold — the people’s choice for inflation protection for centuries — had been underperforming relative to inflation and expectations.
Bitcoin’s narrative as a store of value, or an inflation hedge became its defining characteristic: “Digital Gold.”
Bitcoin was built on the same sound money principles as gold. And it had been programmed to excel at being sound money — more so than gold.
Bitcoin is fungible, durable, and scarce like gold, but is also portable, divisible, and easily measurable. This appealed to institutions — they could understand it, and it fit the requirements of what they had been looking for as an inflation hedge.
And there were a lot of announcements that followed:
- JP Morgan set a long-term price target of $150k for Bitcoin
- Goldman Sachs offers cryptocurrency investment services for HNWI
- Citibank, UBS, Morgan Stanley, GS, JPM all have made investments in cryptocurrency in some form or the other
- El Salvador becomes the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender
- In 2021, the SEC announced that they had no intention of banning Bitcoin.
These don’t even scratch the surface. Every financial services company in the world had their eyes on this asset class now. This was unthinkable a few years ago.
Now with big banks, corporations, and governments on board, Bitcoin and — by extension, cryptocurrency — had been stamped as an institutional grade investment.
With cryptocurrency now recognized by institutions, it felt like a lot of the risk had been taken off.
2017 versus 2020: Live Use Cases
Everything was looking very different from the 2017 bull market.
The year 2017 was filled with promises — ETH killers, BTC killers and all kinds of other projects with lofty promises and ambitious roadmaps to build better blockchains than the incumbents.
At that point, I had only ever sent or received coins. Even if I wanted to, there wasn’t much else I could do. In spite of all the talk, there were virtually no functional decentralized applications (or “dapps”). Even the few that did exist weren’t at all practical.
The 2017 bull market was defined by billion dollar projects without any working applications.
By 2020–2021, things started to look very different.
The biggest change? You could actually use cryptocurrency now — many of the things we had been imagining for years actually exist now. It isn’t all talk anymore.
To me, decentralized finance or “DeFi” is the most fascinating part of the cryptocurrency space today.
DeFi is about all providing financial services without a middleman.
There are markets for lending and borrowing crypto, projects trying to tokenize equity markets, decentralized stablecoins, derivatives, insurance, and a whole lot more.
Today, I’ve used over 100 decentralized application or “protocols” myself.
And there are thousands more that I haven’t had the chance to try yet.
Here are 6 things you can do with DeFi Today
- Buy tokenized equities, or provide liquidity for traders to earn interest on them. Here’s why that’s better than simply buying stocks on Robinhood.
- Borrow within seconds at very low interest rates on centralized platforms like Celsius, or decentralized platforms like Aave.
- Use decentralized derivatives from anywhere in the world to make bets on crypto without giving your personal details on all kinds of sketchy trading platforms.
- Borrow millions of dollars risk-free without any collateral or KYC — you don’t even need to give your name.
- Bet on who will win the Superbowl through prediction markets.
- Earn 20% on US dollars without any price exposure to crypto.
- Participate in a no-loss lottery
The list goes on, but the takeaway is that you could actually use decentralized applications for useful purposes at this point.
The decentralized, trustless, permissionless narrative was more than just a narrative now. There were real decentralized applications built using smart contracts that actually worked (pretty well).
If you were in the know, decentralized exchanges like Uniswap replaced dodgy centralized exchanges as the go-to places to buy new altcoins before they blew up.
Aave and Compound let you borrow cryptocurrency or lend it out to earn interest.
Mirror Protocol lets you buy, sell or borrow US equities. You can also provide liquidity for traders, and earn interest by collecting their trading fees.
Anchor Protocol lets you earn 19.5% on US dollars — slightly better than your bank savings account, eh?
Stablecoins might not sound like a big deal to you, but access to US dollars becomes a whole lot more valuable if you live in a country with hyperinflation like Argentina or Venezuela.
DeFi is still a really young space. Two years ago, there was around $500 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) in the DeFi space.
Today, there’s $250 billion. That’s a 500x growth in two years.
DeFi’s biggest strength is its composability. Applications can be built on top of each other.
Smart contracts can plug into one another like legos, to create a rapidly evolving ecosystem of financial products, that hasn’t been possible in traditional finance.
Every protocol adds value to other protocols in the ecosystem.
Crypto’s Mainstream Moment in 2021
Practical applications like DeFi, and institutional adoption aside, I believe 2021 was an inflection point for one key reason: NFTs.
Yes, I just went from talking about sound money principles and inflation, to ape JPEGs, and they’re both equally important for the industry.
NFTs are great because they made crypto mainstream. Normal people (or “normies” as we call them) understand the value of collectibles.
Brands understand this, too.
- NBA’s collection of epic moments in NBA history “Top Shots” — sells tens of millions of dollars worth of NFT collectibles every month. In February and March of 2021, they had sales of $400 million in just those two months.
- Lamborghini sold space-themed NFTs of a Lamborghini Ultimae being launched into space.
- Visa bought a cryptopunk to get a “firsthand understanding of the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to purchase, store, and leverage an NFT.”
- It’s not just NBA — other sports organizations are getting into the game too. Like FC Barcelona, who announced plans to launch its own cryptocurrency and NFT to raise revenues.
- Dolce & Gabbana sold a 9-piece NFT collection for nearly $6 million.
- An artist named “Beeple” sold a piece of digital art for $69 million, making him one of the top three most valuable living artists.
I could go on, but you get the point. Paying millions for digital artwork might not make sense to a lot of people, but shelling out large sums for status symbols is nothing new for the elite.
It also helps that some of these status symbols (e.g., Bored Apes) come with access to an exclusive group of famous people like Mark Cuban, Jimmy Fallon, Eminem, Steph Curry, Post Malone, and hundreds of other big names.
It’s not about the ape art — it’s about being a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
And while million-dollar apes might sound like a passing fad, NFTs have onboarded regular users onto crypto.
Five years ago, the only crypto users were nerds and cypherpunks. Today, the biggest celebrities have joined the crypto club as well.
Neymar Jr, Paris Hilton, Serena Williams, and Steph Curry now have cryptocurrency wallets. Which means they have paid gas fees and used the Ethereum network.
Over time, NFTs will come to represent a lot more than just digital art — identity, voting, real estate, tickets, receipts, music rights, medical records — there are all kinds of real-world use cases for NFTs.
The space is still far from mature. The world is changing, and it’s a really exciting time.
Not too early, not too late
Everything above might have (hopefully) convinced you that it’s not too early to be in crypto. Crypto isn’t just for the “cypherpunks” anymore.
But don’t worry — you’re not too late either.
In fact, from an adoption perspective, it’s still ridiculously early — less than 5% of the world owns crypto.
Less than 0.5% of the world has a MetaMask wallet. A wallet is your gateway into the cryptocurrency world, and MetaMask is the defacto standard wallet in the industry.
With only ~30M MetaMask users, it’s safe to say that this space is still very nascent.
Crypto adoption is growing at more than 100% a year. Faster than the internet in the late 1990s.
It’s early now, but a few years down the line, we’ll have billions of users transacting in crypto every day.
In summary, it was this confluence of factors that convinced me that this was the right time to make the switch to work in web3 full time:
- Institutional adoption has de-risked crypto.
- NFTs have taken crypto mainstream.
- DeFi has given crypto some real, live practical applications.
- It’s still super early.
So how can you get started?
The first step is to learn.
Learn about Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, NFTs, … build a solid foundation of knowledge to understand the space — that in itself will put you far ahead of the crowd.
This YouTube playlist of animated explainers I made might help if you prefer videos.
Then read this Twitter thread— it highlights the various ways that people make money in crypto, along with the pros and cons of each.
Next, set up a MetaMask wallet. There are other wallet apps which may have nicer UIs, but they won’t necessarily work as well with web3 dapps. For now, MetaMask is your best bet.
Most people never go through with setting up a wallet, and their crypto journey reaches a plateau.
A wallet is your gateway into crypto.
Here are some of the doors that will unlock when you set up a MetaMask Wallet
- Access the majority of blockchains. There are some blockchains which require specialized wallets, but a MetaMask wallet will let you access lots of major blockchains — like Ethereum.
- Get access to newer coins that aren’t yet listed on centralized exchanges.
- Buy and sell NFTs.
- Earn interest on stablecoins at 20%.
- Instant 0% APR loans.
- Borrow against interest-bearing assets.
- Participate in new token launches.
- Stake (lock) your crypto to help secure the network and earn interest.
- Earn high yields on your crypto assets through staking, lending or liquidity farms.
- Tokenize and trade on future DeFi income.
- Buy and sell options on crypto.
- Trade crypto futures contracts.
- Get tokenized leverage.
- Take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.
- Employ other advanced strategies to earn yield.
- Borrow millions of dollars with no KYC or collateral (i.e., “flash loans”).
- Buy, sell, farm, lend and borrow stocks 24/7 from anywhere in the world.
If you really want to experience crypto, you need a wallet.
Here’s a guide on how to set up a MetaMask wallet.
Finally, I post helpful content about cryptocurrency and DeFi virtually every day, so you can follow along on my Twitter @ shivsakhuja and hopefully you’ll find my content valuable.
I’ve made a lot of my personal life decisions based on my conviction that crypto is here to stay and I really believe we’re at an inflection point now.
If I achieve nothing else through this post, I hope my story at least motivates you to explore the space a little bit more.
