I’ve been working for a startup in the crypto space for one month now. I could not be more excited and passionate about the work I am doing and that is a great feeling.
Before this past month, although I was crypto-native (late 2016), I was not an expert or enthusiast in the fashion or gaming space. I’ve been blown away by how fast-paced these sectors move, and it's been a welcomed challenge to throw myself into the metaverse we are building.
Here are some things I’ve learned in the past month that are helping me in my journey.
Digest What You Can
The past month has been challenging, but I did my best to get up to speed as fast as I could and start delivering value. The truth is that sometimes you have to work longer than the average day, and put in the sometimes tedious effort of really understanding the things you are working on conceptually.
A big revelation for me has been to realize that I am not expected to know everything or excel at every task in the first 4 weeks. What is expected of me is execution, progress, and taking high agency of my tasks.
Read The Whitepaper
This one is a big one for me. Time and time again some of my favorite AH-HA moments where concepts start to click and make sense is when I print out a whitepaper and dissect it. By no means am I a developer or a technical wizard but this has really helped me build a strong foundation in my first month with the team.
I’ve come to learn that while the process is difficult, the reward is exponentially more satisfying.
Networking
Everyone in a startup environment should be building their network in my humble opinion.
I don’t need to preach the value of networking, we can all agree that your network should be meaningful and relevant. Being a part of the crypto world, it is very easy to lose sight of what is relevant.
People are constantly being indoctrinated into the crypto space, now more than ever, and I am constantly fielding questions from people and taking time out of my day to spend an extra minute helping people and pointing them in the right direction for information.
One month in, making a conscious effort to nurture questions and engage with people has become paramount to my progress. It’s also a great way to see how much you really understand certain topics.
Transparency is beautiful.
Transparency. Working with Emma and DIGITALAX, the transparency has been amazing. I can go on and on about this but the short version is, the example is set by DIGITALAX and being transparent is part of the culture here, and it gives us quite the competitive advantage.
I have worked in a bunch of different settings where perception and other ‘office politics’ seem to come before execution. With DIGITALAX at the forefront of transparency, it makes the execution part a lot easier, at least for me.
Ask Dumb Questions
A lot of my breakthroughs the past month have mostly come from asking questions that initially sounded ‘too dumb’ in my own mind. So my advice is JUST ASK THE QUESTION. Most of the time if it happens to be a simple question, there is a quick response and then life moves on.
When I googled more about dumb questions this Carl Sagan quote popped up and resonated with me:
“There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.” — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
In my case, all of these questions I ask are to understand the metaverse we are building, and when it comes to building the metaverse, there are definitely a lot of questions that arise.
I am going to do this on a monthly or as the deemed fit basis and I hope this provided some insight you might’ve previously have overlooked in your own journey.
