Why I Joined Atani
A personal take on why I decided to join crypto startup Atani back in 2020. And on why I love to be part of this project.
TL; DR
Try to join:
· High-growth companies in high-growth categories.
· Projects that you think the world needs (today and in a decade from now).
· Top teams with the right kind of ambition.
· Organisations where you are trusted and can accomplish challenging goals.
1. Crypto is a hyper-growth category
The total market cap of crypto went up from $780 billion to 2.3 trillion and hit a peak of over $3 trillion in 2021. That is roughly 3x in one year. And this is not a one-off event. The crypto market has grown sustainably at a compound annual growth rate of over 230% for the last decade. Crypto is growing at “triple-digits” and has now reached escape velocity.
In an industry that grows at “triple-digits” every year, you can find plenty of opportunities to build businesses that grow exponentially. If your business grows exponentially, your organization is being constantly multiplied. Every time your organization is multiplied, your job is also multiplied and it becomes a brand-new job. You need to requalify for the job over and over again. That means that you have endless room for growing, for challenging yourself, for learning, for taking ownership, for building and for delivering.
Obviously, building a hyper-growth business is never an easy task. But you are way more likely to succeed if you try to do it in a hyper-growth category than in a stagnant or declining one.
2. Crypto is inevitable
Cryptographic technology is the natural next step in the evolution of the Internet as a platform that enables (i) more efficient economic coordination and (ii) deeper and richer social interactions online.
From networks to markets
Crypto transforms informal networks into markets. Blockchain technology enables the evolution of the Internet from a primitive “Gift and Barter Economy” (think of TCP/IP, Wikipedia, Linux, Google Search) to a “Market Economy” where the native digital commodities of attention, content, code and computing power are tokenized, owned, priced and traded (think of Bitcoin, NFTs or smart contract platforms like Ethereum or Solana).
Markets enable true reciprocity and have thus proven over and over again to be superior to gift-giving or barter as a form of economic coordination. Decisions regarding investment, production and distribution of goods and services are just way more efficient when guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand interacting in a free market. Crypto enables precisely that on the Internet (think of all things hardware infrastructure, open source software or user generated content).
Social interactions go online
Crypto also further develops online relationships. You can now go beyond the well-known Post, Read, Like, Comment, Share or Follow and add a whole new array of verbs to the “dictionary of the Internet” as crypto technology enables to also Tokenize, Own, Buy, Sell, Transfer, Trade, Swap, Lend, Borrow, Mine, Mint, Stake, Earn, Propose, Vote, Delegate or Claim. The more “verbs” you can use natively on the Internet the deeper and richer the possibilities for online social interaction and coordination.
Human societies that are more efficient in their capital allocation and that can structure themselves into more complex and specialised forms of organisation will always outperform the inefficient and the unspecialised ones.
It is true that an ever increasing part of our life happens in the digital realm. And it is also true that online communities that are powered by crypto will just outperform those that are not (and, maybe, they will even outperform offline communities in many dimensions). One way or the other, crypto is inevitable.
For me, not being in this industry full-time was equivalent to career suicide (or, at least, to missing the personal and professional development opportunity of a lifetime).
3. Atani has to exist
We will live in The (DeFi) Matrix
Tokenization enables market creation, and markets enable price discovery. Digitally native goods that we could not price before like a minute of your attention, a post you wrote, a .jpeg you collected, a super-power you unlocked in a video game, a script you coded, a gigabyte in your hard-drive, etc. all become priceable.
As tokenization eats the digital world, anyone can hold virtually any type of digital asset and, what is more important, every tokenized good becomes liquid. Every token can be traded against every other token in the so-called “DeFi Matrix”, and you can constantly get a quote to mark-to-market every possession you have. Therefore, there is always a price at which you could sell your digital assets. With crypto, liquidity becomes orders of magnitude more accessible, as liquidity events are not rare events anymore.
Everything becomes priceable and liquid all the time. That upends our current understanding of how capital flows, and opens a new era of opportunity. We are talking about a truly open, global, transparent and real-time financial market for virtually any digital good you can think of.
Fragmentation is a barrier to crypto adoption
User experience is already challenging in crypto. And will become meaningfully more as (nearly) everything is digitalized, everything digital is tokenized and both centralized and decentralized financial applications proliferate.
Even today, investors in crypto assets are forced to onboard to and juggle between multiple interfaces and re-learn over and over again how to perform the very same actions using heterogeneous tooling. In fact, answering apparently basic questions like, “what is my balance?”, “what is the price of a token?” or, “how much is my profit?” can get stupidly complex.
The friction to manage this growing “DeFi Matrix” increases switching costs, slows down the rate of adoption of crypto, and frustrates a lot of potential users who just do not care enough to spend the amount of time and effort required to overcome those pains.
Underwrite execution risk in a fair game
The crypto market is exploding and rapidly becoming huge. The user experience is poor and is only getting worse as the ecosystem grows in sophistication and utility. Atani was born precisely to solve that.
That is why I like to say that Atani “has to exist”. The problem and the market demand are clearly there, and will only grow over time. That does not mean that Atani will necessarily succeed. What it means is that I see no market risk, only execution risk. We may not be the best at solving the problem, or at connecting our solution with users. But whoever nails it, will generate a ton of value for the ecosystem and be in a position to reap the rewards.
Others may be smarter or faster, and just execute better. But that is a risk I am willing to underwrite. I am willing to compete in a race to (i) build a superior product that solves a real problem and (ii) get superior distribution to bring that solution to billions of users worldwide. It is a fair game, where only time and merit will tell the results.
4. Atani has the right kind of ambition
Product founders
Atani is led by product founders, which as Ben Horowitz said, are the best people to run tech companies. And I could not agree more. For me, being a product-founder boils down to being primarily driven by empathy with users. A product founder has that ability to read where the market is going and predict how users will most likely react to a certain change in the product. Product founders have that “sixth sense” that can tell what will make users happy.
I do not mean that product founders are any sort of demi-gods or foretellers. Nothing further than that. Product founders must be down-to-earth, detail-oriented, sober, skeptical, rational, must see how things fit in the grander scheme of things, and must have this rare ability to process incomplete and even contradictory information ultra-fast and be right in understanding user behavior and market dynamics more often than not. And in Atani we are lucky to have two of the best.
Playing the long game
Atani is not a project launched to make someone rich quick by riding the latest bubble or today’s dominant narrative in the market. Atani is driven by a deep understanding of the crypto markets and a long-term product vision. Atani is a project built to make sense both today and in 5, 10 or 20 years from now. We are playing a multi-decade game.
At Atani, we always take the long-term perspective and avoid shortcuts. We critically think about how to structure the product, the technology and the distribution to provide value to users and be relevant in the ecosystem in the long run. We face reality, deal with problems and take action fast, driven by a sense of urgency, but with the conviction that doing the right thing everyday compounds over time.
A-team focused on hardcore execution
As I said, we do not take shortcuts. Our playbook is to (i) build a better product and (ii) build a better distribution. Just that. No uninspired copycats. No fancy hacks. No back door. We go through the front door and deal with the harsh reality, which in a startup is that (i) you start with no product and (ii) no one has ever heard of you.
Dealing with the “existential risk” inherent to an early stage startup may sound scary, but it is not when you do that together with an A-team. And Atani is lucky to have one of the best teams out there. No matter where you look, everyone in the team is incredibly talented, ready to roll up their sleeves and go beyond the fiction of role descriptions to better serve users, deal with whatever random problem comes up, get things done and improve Atani day in and day out.
Need for achievement
All of the above: a product-led team, playing the long game and focused on execution trickles down from what for me is what truly defines Atani: a wild (yet soberingly humble) ambition to deliver, perform and achieve.
Individuals can be mostly driven by either affiliation (the need to be loved by others), power (the need to control and have authority over others) or achievement (the need to accomplish challenging goals). Organizations can be also driven by either of these forces.
Organizations driven by affiliation struggle to make trade-offs, to compromise, to take hard decisions and end up paralyzed by consensus-building. Organizations driven by power nurture status-seeking monkeys and end up torn apart by infighting, turf wars and a suicidal race between low self-esteem individuals for reputation.
At Atani, we avoid being paralyzed by consensus-building and make no room for selfishness. We look at the “existential risk” of being a startup in the eyes, and every day face the challenge of building a superior product and a superior distribution. Viewed in the light of “existential risks”, the niceties of consensus and the paranoia of egotistic career managers soon fall apart.
5. At Atani you are trusted to accomplish
All of the above makes Atani a unique place to work, and the decision to join Atani, a quite easy one. But on top of that, there is a thing that stands out for me: Atani is a place where you can get things accomplished, and are trusted to do so.
Mission accomplished
A place where you can get things accomplished is a place where nothing happens unless you make it happen. Everything is yet to be done. Everything is yet to be built. In a company at our stage, you have plenty of opportunities to:
- Be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.
- Design, launch and scale processes from scratch.
- Learn a ton and develop deep domain expertise.
- Assemble and work with top-performing teams.
- Build real stuff and deliver tangible results.
What is more important, you can see how you specifically contributed. If something happens, you know how you contributed to make it happen. The flip side of that is that, if something does not happen, there are no excuses. You cannot hide yourself behind an organizational chart or a bureaucratic process. It is obvious that you failed, and this can be psychologically exhausting. But the opportunity to learn to control your own mind and constantly improve in such situations is also a very unique learning opportunity, and well worth the ride.
Trust and be trusted
The achievement-oriented culture of Atani, makes everyone tell things as they are. We clearly state facts and honestly share our thoughts and decision process. If something does not work, if there is a problem, we get it into the open and share it so it can be solved as fast and efficiently as possible. Everyone focuses on coming up with the best solution and getting the work done, not on making excuses or talking about what could have been done.
And that builds a ton of trust. You trust everyone will do their best, and you are trusted to do your absolute best. And that trust makes everyone’s life easier (as it is said, in any human interaction the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust).
At Atani, all the mental energy of a talented team is laser focused on building a great product, a great distribution, and a great company. And that is unstoppable.
Feel like Atani could be a good fit for you?
Explore the job openings or write to careers@atani.com and come join us to build the future of crypto!
