TC - 120k Current role - Commercial Account Manager Warning**long post** and **blockchain focused**TLDR at the end Here it goes: I’m currently a sales rep at VMware (3 months), and before that I was at Oracle selling CX SaaS for a year out of college. While I don’t mind sales, I care about what I’m selling. The current products I sell are front-end SaaS and cloud, both of which don’t inspire me to learn more about on my own. What I’m really passionate about is blockchain technology, and a lot of the big tech companies have permissioned blockchain networks that are constantly expanding their core product offerings. While I was at Oracle, I started networking with their blockchain team, and got in contact with a leader within that pillar. With this leader, I’ve demonstrated that I am extremely passionate about blockchain through personal projects (I’m an ethereum miner and working on an NFT collection), doing research on my own time, and going to blockchain conferences (Austin, Miami, SF). When I met with this blockchain leader virtually, I demonstrated this passion, gave him ideas about improving Oracle Blockchain’s GTM strategy, and ultimately how I would be able help him make Oracle Blockchain an industry leader by going to in person conferences, writing industry content, and selling the blockchain platform to enterprises. I asked him for a job, and he said they were only hiring engineers at the time. I can’t code, so my potential job would have to be customer-facing. I also wrote a blog post on NFTs in enterprise blockchain with the intention that he would post it to the blockchain blog - he read it several times (I could see he opened it 10 times with internal tools…I am in sales after all) but never got back to me. Then I met the one of the leaders of VMware’s enterprise blockchain at a blockchain conference here in Austin, but didn’t ask about job openings mostly because I was at Oracle at the time and he didn’t want to tell me what they were doing. I was pretty discouraged after my attempt at Oracle, but now I’m ready to try again at VMware now that I’m here as a sales rep. What could I have done differently at Oracle so that I don’t make the same mistake at VMware? I’m also going to SF in October specifically for another blockchain conference and my plan is to meet with both the leader of Oracle blockchain and the leader of VMware blockchain. I was planning on emailing both to let them know I would like to speak with them in person. Getting paid to learn more about what I love would be awesome, and I know my performance would 10x whatever I’m doing right now in SaaS and cloud. Any advice on how to best position myself to get a job in this industry would be greatly appreciated. I should also note that yes, I’m under qualified experience-wise (23yo 1.2yr experience) and I don’t have a prior track record in blockchain other than my personal endeavors. TLDR: I want to pursue a career in Blockchain/web3 instead of SaaS/cloud/web2 and am having trouble doing so because I don’t have much experience in that field and feel like I’m not being taken seriously. #tech #blockchain #web3 #career #advice
Why enterprise web3? It sounds like you’d be a good fit working at a large tech experimenting with NFTs or crypto infra (Ie meta, microsoft, youtube, stripe, etc). And below that there’s plenty other options
DM if you wanna chat, I’m working in crypto, but to answer your q it’s all about networking and reaching out to projects you think are interesting
I’m taking the enterprise blockchain route because I’ve read into permissioned blockchain networks and I believe they are a much more viable and stable option for blockchain adoption, especially for large enterprises that can’t have all their transactions available to the public. I’ve looked into a lot of the web3 startups, but the failure rate is so high it’s almost like wearing a blindfold and hoping that the company I choose to work for doesn’t go bankrupt in the next 6 months. (Ex. Celsius) To your point, I think being on an experimental team at a large tech company working on NFTs or DeFi would be a great opportunity, but my biggest challenge there comes with getting a shot to begin with
What does the guy leading the blockchain pillar do? Isn't he supposed to be more listening to new ideas coming from proactive employees like OP?
He’s a product management lead, so he oversees pretty much everything. You would think he’d be interested in hearing about new ideas, especially from the customer-facing side, but it didn’t seem like he was all too interested. For ex., I went to a blockchain expo and Oracle didn’t have a booth so I suggested I’d be able to help w that and explain what oracle was doing w blockchain, but he didn’t give it much thought tbh
Setting up conference presence is typically a marketing function. He’s likely got much higher priorities he needs to be thinking about than that.
This is going to sound harsh but you need to hear it. You’re not being taken seriously because Web3 and Blockchain is a joke and a job dedicated to speculating and selling this “tech” to other companies is an even bigger joke. Enterprise companies investing in this domain are simply hedging their bets and these departments will be the first to go when push comes to shove. They probably only want to hire engineers because they can prototype and fail fast. Do yourself a favor and learn the fundamentals of “Web2” software engineering - it’s literally the easiest thing to pick up online without having an educational background. Then if you really feel like joining “Web3” scams you’ll at least have a solid foundation to fall back on.
Truth hurts and that’s ok; thanks for the feedback. Yes, I would agree that it is very early stage and that’s why they’re mostly hiring engineers, but I will say that these permissioned networks offer real value (inc traceability, security, transaction speeds) beyond the degen NFT stuff that’s mainstream.
Good luck!