Key takeaways from Chief People Officer Jason Wagner’s AMA (April 19th, 2019)
https://www.facebook.com/QUOINE.SG/videos/1487544144690830/
On expansion and deliverables
It’s an exciting time. I joined about 4 months ago. We have a lot of good people here. We are hiring a new person almost every day.
We’ve really put our heads down and have been developing everything we said we would: LIQUID and World Book. We’re making good progress against those deliverables.
The biggest burning issue when I joined the company was customer support. First order of business was to get our customer support functions going. Very quickly scaled up.
From an HR and people perspective, when I joined we had 98 staff across the company, since that time our head count is 220 staff
We are onboarding about 30–35 people before June. Our recruitment and acquisition team has been really busy, building a robust pipeline of talent.
We’ll probably be 500 people by the end of year.
Our recruiting efforts are doing pretty well. Please look at careers.quoine.com. We have more than 30 open roles, especially for programmers.
We’re also looking for young, bright passionate people to join as interns.
Jason’s background
My early career I was a practitioner in Japan then Singapore, then went into management consulting, and then into a Goldman Sachs GE capital commercial finance joint venture as chief information officer.
From there I went back to consulting during the first dot com and then to Europe working in acquisition integration.
On finding crypto and QUOINE
Got talked into headhunting and did it for past 10 years before I came across QUOINE.
I got into cyrptocurrency last summer, introduced to it by a friend of mine, Warren Goh from TenX, opened the wormhole for me.
I started trying to meet people in the market. Fintech and crypto was something exciting. Came across QUOINE in September and met Mike Kayamori in Singapore and had a really good discussion. I did a syndicate that raised a lot of money for the QASH ICO.
As I thought about it more or more, I decided to jump in with this group of people and get involved in something game changing.
The opportunity for blockchain, what’s going on is as important as the first dotcom and the dawn of the Internet.
Everyone can participate in this. It’s democratised finance for everyone. To be in with a company like QUOINE that’s putting in the plumbing for this new global asset class is incredibly exciting.
About QUOINE
I love the fact we are in Asia with 16 nationalities on the team — and growing.
We are about 59% male, 41% female, but we have a lot fo female engineers, particularly in Vietnam. We have some extremely talented female developers and QA.
Our average age is about 28.
Life is too short to work for assholes. A lot of big corporationss, you get in there and you get put in a role, and that’s who you have to work for.
We’re team driven and we have a really good team here.
New Tokyo office opens on June 1 and new one in Vietnam opens soon too. Cool, fun, engaging offices, like a Google or Airbnb type office.
How attractive is QUOINE to join?
You gotta believe in the blockchain and you gotta believe in cyrpto. Everybody here is really focussed on what the new world will look like.
We are looking for people who want to change the world. People with big visions.
Is everyone at QUOINE paid a salary in crypto?
We can’t be paid in QASH. We have to pay in the currency of the jurisdiction you work, but primary salary can’t be in crypto.
The move from a fintech to an established MNC
It’s just a matter of time. We have some very big visions of where we are going with this company.
We think we are going to be dominant globally. Everything the team said they were going to deliver in the whitepaper, is being religiously worked on. The world Book is real and it is game changing. The LIQUID network of exchanges too.
The World Book makes pairings agnostic. Anything can match to anything.
In terms of QASH and expectations, the problem is the curve of how quickly cryptos rose in December. But give us time. Our people are working really hard to get there.
In the next couple of months with the whole LIQUID platform, it’s going to be really exciting.
On building a QUOINE culture
Our product name is LIQUID. It’s such a fitting name. I was drinking a glass of wine when I came up with 6 things that describe how we work:
Lean
Innovative
Quick
United
Inclusive
Diverse
We are going to bring the best ideas into play and model our culture after the guys who are really doing it well. Companies like Netflix, places with high levels of staff engagement.
On withdrawal times
Before I joined QUOINE I was a hardcore day trader. But since I joined QUOINE and you’re seeing these exchanges getting hacked and information security breaches, I know it pisses people off, but do you want to risk putting your assets in a hot wallet?
We take that seriously. What this company is all about is being responsible for the services we provide to our customers.
On the price of QASH
I walked away from a successful search firm because I believe QASH is going to be exactly what Mike Kayamori says it’s going to be. I bought QASH and have continued to accumulate it because I believe in it. When Mike says top 3, I believe it.
A lot of my personal portfolio is in QASH. It’s my biggest holding in crypto.
On hiring in new countries
We’re looking at a lot of places, north America, Europe, and other places around the world.
On QUOINE’s exchange volume
Remember those exchanges with all the volume don’t do KYC and most of them don’t do fiat.
Finishing up
If you’re an investor, stick with us. We are real people, building some really, really cool stuff.
More and more countries will try and draw crypto in. We’re the shop that wants to be regulator friendly. We want a world with KYC and anti-money laundering measures. We’re the good guys and we say we are going to do it and we are doing it.