There’s an acronym in cryptoland, “ngmi”, that means “not gonna make it.” You can say a lot about how volatile this space is that there's a shorthand for things that will burn up in flames, but you could also argue that that’s part of its charm.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into back in September of ‘22, coming on board after having spent six months fucking around NYC during a particularly blissful stretch of unemployment. It was impulsive, a little bit desperate, and just like every career move I’ve made so far, motivated in part by the fact that it sounded like it would make for a good story.
I watched the FTX collapse happen over slack sitting on the rooftop of our Tel Aviv office a couple of months later, chainsmoking weak Marlboro Lights I bummed off one of our co-founders. That kicked off a year-long winter of industry-wide anxiety and rolling layoffs, a year I’ve spent perfecting my playbook for involuntary terminations. Gen Z open-sourcing “what not to do in HR” without even charging me for a subscription to their TikTok is one of the silver linings of whatever this economy is.
The flipside to ngmi is of course wagmi, “we are gonna make it,” a deliciously delusional optimism for the climb back up. It’s the feeling of sitting in a half empty sublet office in FiDi in front of a row of monitors with a group of finance-adjacent bros (my favorite kind) watching in shock as the SEC fumbles the approval of the Bitcoin ETF. It’s when something deflated starts to grow again unexpectedly, when the energy you’ve been desperately craving starts to build.
It’s those climbs that are the addictive part of working at start-ups, cryptoland or not. You have to suspend a lot of logic and ignore a lot of other people’s advice when you’re riding the 4 back to Brooklyn at the end of the day with an executive team of backpack-wearing 35 year olds. Sure this could all fall apart, but... what if it doesn’t? How cool would that be?
