Updated on:12/01/2025 05:03 PM 
Silicon Valley and major tech companies are increasingly finding it challenging to retain their high-profile and ambitious talent. It has become unmistakably clear that Web3 and the broader cryptocurrency and blockchain sectors are evolving into highly attractive destinations for top-tier professionals. While securing a position at a leading tech firm was once considered the ultimate career aspiration—and it still holds prestige for many—a compelling alternative career path in the decentralized world of crypto is now capturing the imagination of the industry's best and brightest.
According to a report by Business Insider, recruiters are observing a significant trend of prominent executives and skilled developers departing from established firms to join crypto, blockchain, and other decentralized technology projects.
"We are definitely seeing some of the best and brightest from Silicon Valley, or tech in general, move over to crypto. I've been in this field a long time, and I've never seen a talent shift happen this quickly," states one recruiter who successfully recruited several "very senior folks" away from Amazon, Meta, and Google.
There are numerous concrete examples that support this trend: In January, Meta's (Facebook) digital wallet division, Novi, lost its Chief Marketing Officer to the financial technology company Stripe; Amazon's General Manager of AWS Edge Services transitioned to the role of CTO at the exchange FTX; and both the former CFO of Lyft and Uber's ex-head of product development moved to NFT marketplace OpenSea. Additionally, the former Head of Gaming at YouTube, Ryan Wyatt, left the tech giant to become the CEO of Polygon Studios.
Some observers believe that crypto exchange Coinbase pioneered this trend when it went public, an event that may have signaled to other talents that a move to the company was viable. Coinbase became one of the first crypto firms to aggressively recruit executives from major tech companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Lyft.
One fascinating aspect of this emerging movement is the potential for a snowball effect, where early movers inspire others to follow, as these pioneers actively recruit more colleagues to their new workplaces.
Given that major tech companies are far from financially struggling—on the contrary, they are among the wealthiest enterprises globally—there must be more than just substantial compensation luring talent into the crypto space.
Sriram Krishnan, formerly of Twitter where he led consumer product teams, is now a General Partner at the top-tier venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In a tweet from early February, Krishnan highlights protocol design, tokenomics, wallet sign-ons, governance mechanisms, and the nuances of on-chain development as "deeply interesting" technical aspects that make crypto an compelling field.
Krishnan tweets:
"This novelty [Krishnan's emphasis] and frontier-like feeling energizes builders. It follows that smart and ambitious people want to go where the growth and excitement are headed."
Others hold a strong conviction in the concept of broad technological change:
"We have had the same centralized companies dominate the tech landscape for over a decade. There's a strong desire to find a new playbook or a space that can challenge that, or where the existing companies don't have a presence."
Krishnan concludes:
"I must have personally had at least a dozen conversations over the last week with FAANG and Web2 talent at all levels looking to make a move. This is just the beginning, in my opinion."
The push for a new paradigm is appealing. There are fundamental philosophical differences between working for an established tech conglomerate and a futuristic movement that empowers individuals. For better or worse, major tech companies have been around for a long time and have established an internal culture. It's no secret that many of these giants and their employees have cultivated a reputation for having centralized control.
Web3, with its ethos of trying to empower the individual as opposed to centralized authority, might be particularly attractive to some in the tech world, especially as these companies increasingly engage in content moderation and deplatforming users.
Another example of a high-profile individual leaving big tech for crypto is John deVadoss, a former Managing Director at Microsoft, where he spent about 16 years in various roles, including General Manager overseeing the developer platform Microsoft.NET and helping build Microsoft Digital from the ground up to half a billion dollars in business worldwide.
"I built and led the .NET strategy at Microsoft; I built the first application frameworks and tools for Visual Basic .NET; I led Microsoft's first application platform product line and strategy, and I also worked on the Azure developer experience, long before it was called Microsoft Azure," says deVadoss in an interview with CryptoSlate.
After all his years at Microsoft, deVadoss moved to Neo – a blockchain often dubbed the "Ethereum of China" with significant ambitions. While Neo might not be a household name in the broader crypto space, it is undoubtedly a major blockchain in Asia.
"I have worked on developer platforms and tools for over 25 years, and it was a natural move to build the blockchain industry's best developer tools and experience for Neo N3, the first native blockchain framework in the industry and one of the most developer-friendly," deVadoss says.
"My team and I have built out the first mainstream debugger, the first single-step developer experience, the first and still the most productive full-stack developer toolset across any of the blockchain platforms."
One of the high-profile hires that raised industry eyebrows was Evan Cheng, who left a top job as Director of R&D at Novi, Meta's digital wallet project, to co-found Mysten Labs. Cheng has a long history in big tech, including ten years as Senior Manager, Low-Level Tools at Apple, and nearly three years as Director of Engineering, Programming Languages & Runtimes at Facebook (now Meta).
In an interview with CryptoSlate, Cheng says that what draws so many to the crypto space is its potential, but also the inherent problems and how they can be solved. Cheng says:
"If we can solve these kinds of fundamental problems, we can attract more and more builders into this space. We want to build applications that don't need to make sacrifices to the limitations of the underlying blockchain technology."
Once those limitations are removed or at least significantly reduced, that's where "the magic happens." Only then can crypto applications reach billions of people who will be using their apps and benefiting from the technology without even realizing they are using it. That's the Holy Grail, according to Cheng.
Cheng also added:
"Moving from one domain to another isn't that big of a leap when you have a lot of technology to figure out, and we know there is a lot of potential here. Plus, there's a lot of upside in the space, so funding, while not trivial, is pretty straightforward."
As mentioned, big tech companies don't lack the funds to handsomely pay engineers, but the incentive structure is fundamentally different.
"The strategic incentive structure here is radically aligned. We are building infrastructure that will directly create value, which is very different from many other spaces. That's one of the magic things that makes people come here. The technical challenge of building this is insane; it's a great playground for experiments."
As a co-founder of a crypto project, Evan Cheng is looking to expand the team at Mysten Labs.
"We're looking for people with transferable skills; they don't have to be crypto natives or understand the full picture, because crypto is highly multidisciplinary. Building applications in crypto is a combination of distributed systems design, mechanism design, data structure design, and also cryptography and security practices. There are very few people who can master the full spectrum of these things," Cheng says.
According to Cheng, the key is to build teams where people complement each other's skills. This creates a great opportunity for people who are already domain experts but want to broaden their horizons.
On a personal level, what drove Evan Cheng to crypto is a belief in the vision and potential of the decentralized internet, Web3, and cryptocurrency. Cheng has a strong belief in the potential of technology to change the world for the better. In his view, there are three dimensions to crypto technology that make it so attractive to talent and the core reasons why people are joining this movement.
First, crypto and blockchain are highly efficient ways to verify and transfer assets. In the world today, people can transfer money, but it's an arcane and very slow process. To Cheng, any real-world asset can be a blockchain asset, and that has enormous potential.
He added:
"It really, fundamentally changes how you can build products, and when you think that the asset is in the control of the keyholder—which could be the user themselves or a trusted third party—you unlock the concept of ownership itself. It's about who owns the product, eliminating intermediaries, and changing the cost of everything in our daily lives."
"Number two is the technical challenge. I've been around a while and built a lot of technologies, but there's nothing quite like this, nothing that excites me in the same way. It's the combination of all these different pieces of technology coming together. It's like building a very intricate 3D puzzle, with everything working together in a fine balance."
"Number three is the ethos and culture of the space. People are collaborative, and we're all mavericks and pioneers in some way. The energy is intoxicating. It's like-minded people gathering to push technology forward, and potentially change behaviors and society."
At Mysten Labs, Cheng and his team are trying to solve the "hard problems" at the infrastructure layer and then provide easy-to-use tools so that other product developers can build the applications they want to bring to the world.
"We want to abstract away what are currently very complex systems like blockchains, layer-1s and layer-2s, off-chain decentralized storage, and so on. You have to know how to use all these things to build your product today. We want to make it simple," Cheng concludes.
