Updated on:12/01/2025 05:00 PM 
Silicon Valley and its major tech firms are increasingly losing top-tier talent and visionary individuals to the burgeoning crypto industry. Driven by the sector's vitality, its expansive opportunities, and of course, the significant financial upside, a major career shift is underway.
As CryptoSlate reported last month, it's becoming starkly evident that Web3 and the broader crypto and blockchain space is progressively attracting elite talent. Not long ago, securing a position at a FAANG company was the pinnacle of achievement for many, and while it still holds prestige, there's now an equally compelling alternative career path in the decentralized world.
Numerous high-profile examples illustrate this trend: Meta's (formerly Facebook) Novi wallet division lost its CMO to the fintech company Block in January; Block's former GM of AWS Edge Services transitioned to the role of CTO at the exchange FTX.
Meanwhile, both the former CFO of Lyft and Uber's ex-head of platform development moved to the NFT marketplace OpenSea. Additionally, the former Head of Gaming at YouTube, Ryan Wyatt, left the tech giant to become the CEO of Polygon Studios.
Adding to this growing list of high-profile departures from big tech is Yuxiang Zhang, who left positions at Uber and Facebook to join as CTO at Magic Eden, the premier NFT marketplace on Solana (SOL).
In an interview with CryptoSlate, Zhang shares his personal story of why and how he left presumably lucrative jobs and clear-cut career paths in big tech for a far more dynamic and high-risk venture in the crypto space.
Zhang's journey into the big tech world began around 2013. He mentored a San Francisco bitcoin developer meetup group, which inspired him to build an API for crypto developers.
“While the timing wasn't quite right to start a crypto company then as it is today, it gave me the valuable experience I would later need to take on other tech projects. I then took a brief break from crypto and joined UberEats,” Zhang says.
Zhang spent a few years at UberEats where he focused primarily on user acquisition, search recommendations, and forecasting.
“Then I transitioned to being a Research Scientist at the Uber Self-Driving Research Lab, focusing on computer vision/perception. After that, I left Uber to work at Facebook in AI.”
At the same time Zhang joined UberEats, he had already developed a passion for crypto. Zhang learned about crypto in 2013 and was “immediately fascinated.”
“At that time, I embraced a Libertarian belief system and just really identified with the principles of crypto and its advocacy of fixed supply schedules,” Zhang says
Initially, Zhang wanted to build consumer apps – he experimented with NFTs, such as embedding love letters on the blockchain.
“I think at the time, the line was, 'diamonds are forever, but blockchain is forever-er.' I was also the first to do a Twitter tipping bot for Bitcoin, but it didn't quite land, and worked on a project where you could hash an image and store it on the blockchain for you to claim ownership,” Zhang says.
Not long after his initial foray into the NFT space, Zhang came up with a “great idea” to build a Bitcoin Developer API that enabled other developers to build consumer crypto apps.
“Instead of not being able to get traction with consumer crypto apps, I had a bunch of developer customers that also weren't able to get traction. The API company eventually failed. And I went to work for Uber. But I continued to pay attention to crypto,” Zhang says.
What finally made Zhang take the leap and join the NFT marketplace Magic Eden on Solana was crypto gaming, a concept which had been percolating in the back of his mind for years.
“Personally I've been thinking about crypto gaming since 2014. That was when people started talking about smart contracts right before Ethereum came out and people spent a long time thinking about it.”
“I was thinking a lot about how in-game assets could be crypto assets. When it did actually happen I was still astonished and fascinated. And obviously, things still happen in ways that are different from how I imagined,” Zhang says.
When NFTs as a use case started to gain major traction, for Zhang, it was a very long time coming. Together with a group of co-founders who, like him, had long considered starting something in crypto, the group began brainstorming and eventually started Magic Eden.
“What I find promising about NFTs is that ownership of these digital assets now belongs to the user. Open protocols always disrupt closed protocols. NFTs as a concept within the broader metaverse, and the interoperability of digital assets is incredible.”
“A game used to be: the game was built and there was a certain player base. Now the game can become a developer platform and the game can support the developer assets. I think the ability to do that is very cool,” Zhang says.
According to Zhang, this opens up a vast number of primitives and opportunities. Digital assets belong to the user rather than the platform, which is also truly revolutionary.
“It's an exciting time, and there's a number of stories I can share from Magic Eden in terms of how awesome it is that the user owns the asset. The user isn't tied to any platform. They can take it to any platform they want. It prevents platform lock-in. That space is what creates a vibrant ecosystem.”
To Zhang, and many others leaving big tech for crypto, the prospect of true user ownership of assets, and the paradigm-shifting opportunities this can unlock, appears to be a primary driver for their interest in the crypto space. Crypto is also highly multidisciplinary, which also makes the sector so attractive to many.
The financial upside is certainly a factor, but these individuals usually don't lack money. They miss the intellectual challenge, they see a new paradigm for asset ownership, and want to move to build the world for the better.
