Hundreds of GAFAM executives quit their jobs to join cryptocurrency start-ups

They are hundreds, in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere, to abandon golden situations to join start-ups of the cryptocurrency. Are they releasing the prey for the shade? One cannot help drawing a parallel with what happened in 1999 when hundreds were already resigning from high-paying positions in well-established companies in the United States. Microsoft to join web start-ups. What some had bitterly regretted a year later following the stock market crash Internet in April 2000.

In the meantime, the fact is there: a movement analogous is happening now. If what Sandy Carter said to the New York Times, in the space of two days, more than 350 important personalities of theuniverse high-tech reportedly submitted their application to the start-up Unstoppable Domains – which provides permanent web addresses, based on a blockchain.

She herself quit her job as vice president of Amazon’s cloud division to join Unstoppable Domains, which allowed her to observe the phenomenon from within. The largest firms (Apple, Google and others) are currently subject to this drainage living forces.

Taste for risk?

How to understand such enthusiasm? Through a taste for risk, a desire to start from zero, to participate in a promising new adventure ? The prospect of getting rich is probably present in theequation except that some of those who let themselves be tempted are already receiving staggering salaries. In any case, many people believe that there is a moving train that you have to get on at all costs. It is true that the numbers are exploding: a ecosystem such as Ethereum saw its value increase fivefold during the year.

The example that spontaneously comes to mind when we talk about such an exodus is that of Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, who resigned from his post as president to devote himself to Block, a payment solution destined to become universal. And David Marcus, who oversaw digital currency at Facebook-Meta announced his departure at the end of the year to launch his own start-up.

Google, once talented vacuum cleaner, hit by the wave

Personalities less known but no less eminent have themselves taken the plunge. In 2003, Google could boast of poaching hundreds of executives from companies of Microsoft’s caliber. Now, the search giant is in turn affected by this phenomenon. In February 2020, Surojit Chatterjee left a vice president position at Google to join Coinbase, a crypto marketplace. When Coinbase went public last April, the shares it got – $ 180 million – increased 3.5 times.

Has his example inspired others? Still, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who headed the advertising unit at Google has joined Neeva, which manages a search engine devoid of … advertisements! However, Ramaswamy had been considered to take over the management of Google, no less. And he was joined in the Neeva adventure by another senior Google executive, Vivek Raghunathan, and several other employees of the Californian company. As a preventive measure, Google has started to offer its executives better participations in house shareholding. A sign of the times?