Today I announced that I was stepping away from my role at Celestia and joining AAVE and Lens Protocol to lead their Developer Relations team. I’m grateful, humbled, and excited to again be having the opportunity to work on something I’m passionate about, and with a team that is world class.
I still believe in Celestia's vision of modular blockchains, but plan to contribute to this vision from a different capacity that fits my strengths and passion in the future.
Because I spent only a short time at Celestia I wanted to share my thoughts to explain what made me shift directions again in my career.
After 1 year or so in the industry working at The Graph and Edge & Node, I began to really understand the areas that I was the most passionate about, and that I believed held the most opportunity for improvement - accessibility and scalability.
I therefore began searching for the right place for me to have the most impact in these areas, and hopefully on a team that was fairly early stage with opportunity to grow. I was looking for the right place that I could spend at least the next 2-4 years.
After talking to literally dozens of teams, Celestia stuck out to me in that they had a powerful combination of all of the things that make a team and technology great, and importantly for me they had unlocked a new paradigm in blockchain scalability.
At the same time, in May 2022 and before joining Celestia, I started experimenting with Lens Protocol, creating a tutorial video and starter project that received solid feedback from quite a few people, and led to the creation of a few projects from others in the Lens ecosystem.
In working with Celestia and playing around with Lens on the side, I was pretty happy because I was working on things that I care about - scalability with Celestia, and with Lens - accessibility to web3 for the masses (more on that later).
Celestia has gained tremendous momentum over the past year. It went from a fairly unknown protocol to being top of mind with many people. Everywhere I go and everyone I talk to now at least knows of it, or has a host of questions ready to throw at me about it. Last week traveling to NYC for Smartcon I even heard people discussing it in passing conversations more than once.
After joining, I dived into everything that I could find, from blog posts, to podcasts, to conference talks and have been infatuated with the opportunities this approach and architecture unlocks. Not long afterward joining Celestia, my good friend Cami joined Fuel Labs who are building a Modular execution layer, and we even had the opportunity to again work with each other which was really exciting.
The leadership and engineering team at Celestia are the best I’ve ever worked with. They have a deep understanding of the complexity and nuance of decentralized protocols, combined with being comfortable innovating and building something that did not exist before. It was incredible to see some of the conversations happening in real time in the company Slack (many of which went way over my head). Yaz was an amazing mentor and leader with so much knowledge and experience in blockchain and specifically blockchain devrel. One thing I am grateful for is how much I learned over that time not only about Modular Blockchains, but about early stage DevRel and my own strengths and weaknesses.
What I realized though fairly quickly when joining was that my personal skillset and interests did not align very well with what they currently needed.
My time, and the things I feel that I’m best at, in DevRel has mainly been working with technologies that were at the application level. I like creating teaching in the form of demos, open source projects, full stack applications, and these days even writing smart contracts.
While in the future there will be a ton of surface area of various VMs and for application developers to build on, today Celestia is more of a groundwork protocol that is in its early stages. There is work to be done in getting the documentation and various testnet and mainnet networks ready to go, and therefore not a lot of opportunities to build and take part in these type of activities today. There is zero doubt that having this work done should be of the highest priority for any developer-facing project, but as an individual contributor, I am just not happy doing that as the main focus of my day to day at this point in my career.
In addition to that, I moved from a Senior → Principal level position at AWS leading DevRel there, to working in a more junior position that I was in previously. While I don’t care about titles, I realized quickly that I actually really enjoyed leading and mentoring a team.
It’s very tough making a big career decision and realizing that it was not the right one, but in my experience it’s better to move on and try something new than stay somewhere that was not the right fit.
With these things in mind, I realized I was open to another change. In my head I had two main options on the table: open my own consulting company, or take an incredible opportunity that had recently been extended to me to continue doing what I love and was already doing on the side, while also moving back into a leadership role.
After building on Lens over the past 6 months, meeting many people on the AAVE and Lens teams, and learning about some of the future plans rolling out over the next 12 months, I became more and more excited, and the answer became obvious to me.
AAVE is uniquely positioned in that it touches on so many areas today, from DeFi, to stablecoins, to social networks, while having bold and exciting plans for the future. They have a track record of success, incredible people and products, and a really cool design culture among many other things.
I’ve talked quite a bit about how I see mass adoption happening in web3. The excitement from Lens users and developers and the explosion of growth happening within the ecosystem is proof that they have built something exceptional and are on the right track in innovating and actually pushing these ideas forward. Having the opportunity to be part of that and personally make an impact excites me to no end.
Along with the rest of the team, I’ll be working closely with two very talented DevRel engineers - Jessica Glover and Fabrizio Guespe (Fabri) who I recommend following!
If you’re an engineer looking for your next opportunity or you are a developer looking to build on AAVE or Lens, please reach out to me any time I’d love to talk to you and discuss many of the opportunities on our team or see how we can help make you successful.