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Engineers are leaving their jobs in Silicon Valley to join cryptocurrency startups. Silicon Valley executives are looking for ways to retain their talent.
According to a recent report from The New York Times, the speed with which the crypto industry is poaching talent from tech companies has made even the CEO of Google worry. Companies are forced to offer additional incentives to employees to keep them from firing.
Sridhar Ramaswami, CEO of startup Neeva and former head of Google, said:
“It’s like the 1990s and the rebirth of the internet. It’s so early, so chaotic, and so many possibilities.”
This month, Lyft CFO Brian Roberts left the company to join OpenSea, saying he has seen enough to know when “something this big” is coming up. Jack Dorsey has stepped down as CEO of Twitter to focus more on cryptocurrencies and Square.
Sandy Carter, vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing division, also left the company this month to join Unstoppable Domains. Since she announced her arrival at the company in a LinkedIn post, more than 350 people have applied to work at Web3.
David Marcus, head of cryptocurrency at Facebook Meta, announced that he will be leaving Facebook by the end of the year. While he said he would follow his “entrepreneurial DNA”, sources close to him said he plans to work on his own cryptocurrency project.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is concerned about the attractiveness of the crypto industry for talent. Employee retention is now on the agenda of the company’s executives.
Last year, the company’s vice president, Surojit Chatterjee, left the company to become Coinbase’s chief product officer. After Coinbase’s IPO in April this year, Chatterjee’s stake in the company was $ 600 million.
However, rewarding employees with salary increments may not be sufficient to retain them.
Evan Cheng, founder and CEO of MystenLabs, left Facebook Novi this September. His blockchain startup now has 20 employees, 16 of whom are from Facebook, Google and Netflix. He believes that most of those who move into this industry do not do it for the money, but for the sake of freedom.
“In 2017 or so, people were mainly doing this for investment opportunities. Now these are people who really want to create worthwhile things.”
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