a16z Discusses Hiring: How to Choose Between Crypto-Native and Traditional Talent?

Author | Ian Dutra, Craig Naylor, a16z Crypto

Translation | Deep潮 TechFlow

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As the development of the crypto industry has created a huge demand for talent, crypto founders need to know how to find and recruit excellent talent — including native crypto industry professionals and those with traditional technical experience. However, one of the biggest questions is: should you hire someone with crypto industry experience, or someone who can learn the industry knowledge? This has sparked endless debates within companies.

The good news is that the crypto industry is not the first to encounter difficulties in talent sourcing. This means you can draw on some established practices to find the right people with the right skills. The purpose of this guide is to help founders and recruiters determine when crypto industry experience is crucial, when other types of experience can have the greatest impact, and what challenges and considerations need to be addressed during recruitment.

To simplify the thinking process, it can be understood as follows: crypto companies do have some differences from traditional tech companies, but in terms of the process and best practices for sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding talent, you are not building a “crypto company,” but a tech company. Therefore, it’s essential to apply those mature best practices to find talent with the right skills.

You Need Talent with Both Native Crypto and Traditional Skills

The rule of thumb is that native crypto professionals have a critical advantage: they can jump into work immediately. High-risk projects are often time-sensitive, and every day counts. Sometimes, native crypto expertise is essential. This is especially true for positions involving blockchain technology and its underlying infrastructure, where even the most skilled professionals may face a steep learning curve.

Smart contract development is a good example. These self-executing protocols are coded directly on the blockchain, requiring precision and an understanding of decentralized logic, which is very different from traditional programming. A bug in a smart contract can lead to catastrophic consequences, even millions of dollars in losses, making this a high-risk area where understanding the rules is vital.

Bringing talent into an industry with such a steep learning curve can be challenging because candidates may need time to adapt to the nuances of blockchain technology — decentralization versus centralization, more open-source approaches, etc. — as well as the “cultural spirit” of crypto, which includes everything from different terminologies to ways of thinking. However, non-crypto company talent can drive crypto industry growth in many areas, especially as companies begin to scale. For example, traditional professionals with backgrounds in software engineering or operations can bring diverse skills and rich experience often honed at large software firms. These professionals are usually versatile, capable of navigating internal bureaucratic complexities and obstacles to push projects forward. In rapidly growing multidisciplinary crypto teams, this operational flexibility becomes a powerful asset.

Scaling experience is also crucial. Traditional candidates often have experience developing products used by millions of users and solving challenges that come with success: ensuring systems remain operational under extreme infrastructure loads, optimizing large-scale performance, and handling unpredictable surges in demand. This experience directly applies to Web3 products, which are transitioning from niche crypto audiences to more mainstream markets.

For example, candidates from fintech companies may have significant relevant experience in payment technologies or financial regulations, which could also be valuable in your business. If you are developing infrastructure or consumer-facing applications, a large pool of talent has accumulated years of scaling experience in these areas. Consider the overlaps in these experiences and evaluate how to quickly bring them up to speed with specific crypto technologies to build your ideal team. More broadly, candidates with experience in design, user experience, scalability, security, and leadership can accelerate innovation in crypto, as these skills often involve domain expertise and may even make them more suitable than those without such experience.

Once you’ve identified the skills and personnel needed (including whether they truly need native crypto experience), the next step is to go out and recruit them.

Recruiting Top Talent from Any Background

The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity are two sides of the same coin: you are a crypto company.

For some candidates from traditional companies, the volatility of the crypto industry, recent regulatory uncertainties, industry jargon, and decentralized products may seem too unfamiliar or unappealing, or both. But for others, the same unfamiliarity and occasional instability can be exciting — not a flaw, but a feature of the company. During recruitment conversations, deeply understand how candidates view the stability and comfort of large corporations, as well as the opportunities and challenges of rapid growth. Share a recent challenge your team faced, explain how it was addressed, and emphasize that, given the company’s size and stage, each team member’s responsibilities are clear. Their reactions can tell you how they might respond in similar situations, and at least, it will let them know what the company expects from everyone when the next situation arises.

Candidates may initially know little about crypto, but their natural curiosity and interest in the benefits of decentralization are key. During recruitment, an important signal is whether their knowledge and engagement deepen over time: Are they researching related topics on their own? Do they ask more specific questions after learning new information? Etc.

To distinguish between two types of candidates — those skeptical of crypto and those interested — and to avoid wasting your time and money, it’s crucial to understand their motivations early on to ensure alignment with your company’s direction. This is a fundamental principle of recruiting, but it’s worth emphasizing because it’s very important, especially in the crypto industry.

Every recruitment conversation should be tailored to the specific candidate: What drives their choice of current job? What keeps them committed to past roles? These factors are likely to be key in their decision-making process this time. From the first phone call with a candidate, start exploring these questions.

At the end of the recruitment process, you want to hire someone who aligns with your company’s vision and is passionate about your product. Meanwhile, your team should also be excited about the new hire; this will help you judge whether the candidate is a good fit for your company, regardless of their crypto experience. This always guides your decision.

Since you’re targeting highly curious candidates, you need to tailor your recruitment messaging to their characteristics. You can start by explaining the two cultural differences in crypto: one is “computer culture,” viewing blockchain as a tool to build new networks and drive a new computing movement; the other is “casino culture,” mainly focused on speculation, trading, and gambling. Then, share how this emerging industry offers a unique opportunity for candidates to reshape the future of technology, similar to the early days of the internet.

A useful mental exercise is to try talking about your product and company without mentioning crypto technology. What problems does your company solve? What motivates you to start it? Why will it make the world a better place? This approach helps convey your company’s philosophy and vision without distracting the audience with technical details.

Another good entry point is simply asking: “How much do you know about the crypto industry?” Even if the answer is skepticism or negative — such as stories in the news or casino culture narratives — it can open a dialogue and let you listen to their real concerns: external factors (policies), internal factors (technical complexity), personal factors (risk tolerance), etc. You can share that many people in crypto share some of these doubts and steer the conversation toward the cool technical problems your project is solving.

Not everyone’s main motivation is money, but you should also be prepared to emphasize the financial rewards of crypto. Historically, top talent has often declined early-stage opportunities for three reasons: (1) intense work culture; (2) poor work-life balance; (3) lack of liquidity compensation. Even if you address the first two, the third can cause you to lose many potential candidates.

Compared to rare liquidity events like IPOs or acquisitions in the Web2 era, innovations in compensation such as token-based pay structures can provide financial benefits and liquidity for early-stage companies. Be sure to implement vesting or token grant plans that lock in long-term goals, aligning employees’ interests with the company’s long-term success. Compensation is a complex topic and is obviously what candidates care most about, so make sure you’re well prepared to discuss it.

If you can execute these steps well, you will have a great chance to attract top talent from outside the industry to your company. Next, you need to help them understand how to contribute their best in daily work.

Onboarding Considerations

Integrating new talent into a Web3 company requires education to shorten their adaptation period. You’ve already identified each person’s knowledge gaps during interviews. Use this information to design onboarding experiences that quickly fill those gaps.

For example, new employees may need help moving beyond the technical details of blockchain and decentralized systems to understand the real-world problems they will solve and to build confidence in their roles.

Regular knowledge-sharing sessions, where new hires interact with more experienced crypto professionals, can promote teamwork and allow team members to learn from each other’s strengths. Mentored projects can pair new members with seasoned Web3 experts, providing valuable hands-on learning opportunities. Better yet, structure projects so that “unicorn” talent in crypto (those with all the skills, knowledge, and background) are paired with new hires, helping them develop into their own crypto unicorns over time.

Skill development and education are also essential and will continue to be important as the industry evolves. Resources such as blockchain blogs, podcasts, and educational courses — on topics like how to use smart wallets, staking, tokenomics, smart contract design, or fundamental concepts of blockchain in different scenarios — are good starting points for continuous learning. Collaborating with mentors in established crypto organizations can provide practical experience, and thought leaders in the industry can offer deep insights through reports.

The key is that whatever skills your new hires need to stand out, your job is to help them learn, find, or access those resources from day one.