I joined Coinhall as Chief of Staff less than 2 months ago and whenever I introduce myself at events, I get this question a lot. Depending on my mood, I might give a different answer each time. My favourite one is “everything my founder doesn’t like to do”, but even that answer ranges from operations, finance, to product. The closest description I can find is that of a gap filler. Today I can be wearing an HR hat to onboard new folks but tomorrow I may be preparing for a product meeting. But the purpose is always the same — how do I make my team’s lives easier?
The beauty of being in an early-stage startup: you grow with the company.
In my 7 weeks here, I have tried many functions within a company and people who have met me during this period would have known that I enjoy the rigour immensely. Hence, this post will show 2 learnings (for my almost 2 months) and give a taste to friends who wonder what it’s like to work for an early-stage startup.
#1 Get ‘technical’
In an early-stage company, the distinction between business and technical shouldn’t be an impermeable wall. Well-thought-out decisions are made quicker when business folks understand the technical front. This is all the more important in the web3 space where lots of information live on-chain. Diving into reading smart contracts, information on block explorers, and chart and graph analytics are part and parcel to be more technical.
You might be tempted to think ‘oh that’s not what I’m hired for’ or ‘I’ve never done this before’ But working in a small team means that there will be times your dev team is not available or has no bandwidth to perform certain tasks. In those cases, if you can chip in to help get things started or take over them, the whole company can move forward smoothly.
It can start with something small. One classic example of my people-pleasing tendencies: I got my founder to teach me how to add and remove ads on our website. I was already in contact with projects that are interested to advertise on Coinhall so it makes more sense to not add more people into the mix to accomplish the task. My first time using applications on my laptop that I would have never touched — Terminal, Visual Studio Code, Github. Got to admit it was quite a moment when I committed my code, did a pull request, and saw it live. By learning it, I can reduce the time taken and switching costs for any of my devs (even for 5 mins) to do it.
#2 Chat, observe and take what you like
One thing I feel blessed about working in web3 is that most people don’t look down on you just because you are young. Most people I’ve met are willing to extend that hand to help or chat if you asked. Talk to people — learn what they do and how they do it. Observe how they operate and take what you like. This doesn’t mean blindly including best practices but understanding why they worked for particular contexts and environments and seeing how to adjust that for your own team.
I love talking to operators who have been there done that because the wealth of knowledge that they possess is crazy (even if they don’t think so). You will come to realise that most operators do face similar issues to build up a company — bandwidth and headspace of founders, hiring, administrative nightmares, etc. Write down how they solve problems, how they think in frameworks, what works etc. Document everything. Trust me, your future self will thank you for this. Being early-stage means that things will fly your way and your brain isn’t sufficient to remember things. So write them down.
Templates will become your new best friend. Take whatever templates that make sense to you. Email templates, excel templates etc have saved me so much time.
Excited to see how my role will evolve as the company grows. Ask me again in 6 months’ time and I will have new stuff to share!
So what is this Coinhall company that I joined?
Coinhall is a community first platform providing real-time price charts & analytics, and aggregating swaps across all AMM DEXes within the Terra ecosystem.
If any of those words or the image below interest you in any way, let’s go for ☕🍵
