Uprooting My Life To Work In Crypto Has Been Incredible, I'd Like To Share My Story

Since late 2012 my interest and obsession with bitcoin had begun, it was another interest of mine where I knew absolutely no one who knew about it IRL. My mom routinely would tell me that I have mental issues because of my obsession with "internet funny money", this only increased after her financial advisor told her bitcoin was a scam. Unfortunately I wasn't one of those who made a ton of money during the price peak in 2013, but my passion and interest in the technology continued to grow.

In February of 2014, I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn about a marketing position at an undisclosed "bitcoin company" in Atlanta. At the time I was working at a college career center in Metro-Detroit, a job that I loathed. Helping people find jobs was rewarding, but I had little passion for what I did and the bureaucratic nature of a community college created an environment that wore me down. My first contact with the recruiter was actually during a shift at this job......no one suspects you are job hunting for yourself in a career center, it was a perfect cover!

The words bitcoin and cryptocurrency were in my profile, but my background was drastically different from what a tech startup would usually consider. The few interviews I had with startups around 2010 proved to be fruitless, looking back this was mostly my fault as I really didn't care about the jobs. The recruiter wouldn't say the startup until a phone call was made, but my knowledge of the space helped me figure out it was BitPay quite quickly. Having this information helped me to prepare for the first job that I put my absolute everything into pursuing.

During the interview process, I prepared two 25 page marketing proposals highlighting current issues, marketing ideas and quite honestly a ton more that I just can't remember. There had never been a job I wanted this bad, the opportunity was too incredible to not go all out. Both of my video interviews went well and I was never more confident about a job in my life.

About one nervous week later I received a call while at a shift at the college, it was the recruiter with a job offer! Needless to say I immediately accepted.

This time was the most exciting and heartbreaking at the same time. It was heartbreaking because I had to move from my hometown of Detroit, a city I had lived in for all 29 years of my life. My mom has medical issues and it was only after many conversations with her encouraging me to take the job that I knew it was what I had to do. The past decade was horrible for employment in Metro-Detroit and there is no way an opportunity like this would happen there, so I packed up my car as full as I could and in one month I moved to Atlanta to work at BitPay!

I've been someone who loved the open source ideology since I was 13 years old....I also had loved reading about mesh-networks and the idea of decentralization for almost a decade. These are both areas where I knew no one who knew what they even meant IRL, so being thrown in an environment like BitPay had me fairly nervous. The fact this was my first job at a startup lead to one of the few regrets I have since I've been in this space. My attitude of "eyes and ears wide open, mouth shut" that I had during my first few months had lasted too long, there were issues I was very opinionated about but neglected to speak on. Regardless of regrets, I did learn a ton while I was there.

Being around new friends that shared the love for something that I had was incredible. Hanging out with the developers and getting involved with conversations were some of the most educational conversations I've had in my life. I've never worked with a cooler bunch of people than I did at BitPay, not to mention the people I met through BitPay like Shooter Jennings, Andreas Antonopoulos, Jon Fitch and a ton more!

With Mastodon for BitPay's Warner Bros. Partnership

Most importantly, it was because of BitPay that I became involved with Augur. I was a part of the core-team and began in January 2015. During this first month I flew out to San Francisco for the first time to meet the team and attend two blockchain conferences. Being in SF meant I finally got to meet people I had worked with in person, most notably Andreas Antonopoulos and Victoria Van Eyk, of which I worked on an amazing campaign with in the past. Meeting with Joey, Jack and Jeremy helped solidify the project in my mind....even if it was a project I still had a ton of reading to do in order to understand it enough to market it.

There is no doubt in my mind that my time at BitPay was perfect in preparing me for Augur. At BitPay I handled digital marketing, which meant I didn't call any shots and had drastically differing opinions from my supervisor. The end of my tenure at was not pleasant; as my confidence grew, I became more outspoken (perhaps too outspoken). Thankfully something important happened that resulted in the team really going to bat for me. It wasn't people who worked with me in marketing too, it was developers, the compliance team and client-ops that really made me feel important. To this day I am so thankful I got to work with Gentry, Charles, Julia, James, Emily, Jason, Chaz, Eric, Kell, Andy G, Andy P and SO many more.

My talk on Ethereum & Augur at Oakland University in November 2015

Because Augur is a distributed team, I work from home. What's notable is that I decided to stay in Atlanta and not move back to Detroit. I love living down here and met an amazing person that I fell in love with. I've had some cool accomplishments in 2.5 years; my favorite being the talk I gave at Oakland University and being named a Finalist in the MAX Marketing Awards for the Augur campaign against Coca-Cola, The Atlanta Hawks, Cricket Wireless and other Fortune 500 companies with huge marketing teams.

MAX Marketing Award Finalist Coverage From Atlanta Business Chronicle

The truth is, I am not able to publish technical content that I wish I could.....but I love sharing personal stories, even if they never get the likes or retweets that many other topics would get. One of the first questions I ask when meeting someone in crypto is how they got into the technology, the answers are usually interesting and I learn about the person. Hopefully, some who reply will share their experiences, who knows it may inspire someone to pursue a career in a field that we're also passionate about!

-Follow me on Twitter @TonySwish, check out TonySakich.com and Augur.net