Best practices to onboard employees that understand DeFi
Archimedes Finance’s secret onboarding process
At Archimedes, our team is our top priority and finding the best possible talent is one of our strategies for a successful project. This sounds simple, but it wasn’t an easy conclusion as with this comes a problem: how could we hire marketing, design or engineering people that are great in what they do, but understand little about DeFi?
One of our values as a team is: “We don’t expect you to be an expert upon entry, but you can’t stay noob for long”. But we all know getting out of the “noob zone” isn’t an easy task in Defi, even for the brightest minds, DeFi is complex and it is hard for someone to make the leap.
At the same time we want new hires to ramp up quickly, we need to ensure their success in coming up to speed and learning as much as possible about crypto investment strategies, leverage strategies, and the existing user experience early on.
Getting hands-on with DeFi
The best way to make this happen is to get their hands dirty. The team curated materials about: what is DeFi, glossary, key protocols, strategies and the main leverage protocols. This ensures the new hire understands what the options are for investments out there, and starts going deeper into investment strategies within crypto.
Then we created a learning program where new hires can participate in an investment exercise to get exposure to the investment strategies, leverage, and user experience.
In their first 4 weeks, we encourage our team members to dive into the optional investment exercise sponsored by us:
- We provide the new team member with $5K worth of ETH
- New hire decides where and how they will invest those ETH
- Profit? Split 50/50 with the company and, bonus, our new hire learned something! :)
- Loss? Archimedes takes the loss: we’re investing in our new hires.
Let’s dive into #2. Yes, we ask the employee to make their own decisions.
Well, we won’t let them be helpless. We give them some tips and directions as part of the exercise prompt, but not all of the information. We want to make sure they ask questions (highly encouraged),research on their own too, and potentially make some mistakes - those are great learning tools. :)
The new hire will then create an investment journal on what they are doing and share with the team. The team may provide feedback on the journal and help with the exercise as they see need. We also couple the new hire with an experienced team member for support as needed, some sort of “onboarding buddy”.
Structured reflection
After the 4 weeks, they then unwind their position(s) and compare the ETH in vs. ETH out amount. Then comes the post-mortem, in which we encourage the new team member to reflect about:
- How much did the gas fee eat from your proceeds? Was there any specific investment with a very high gas fee as a percentage of the investment?
- How did you think about liquidation in this process? How did that impact your decisions and results?
- How did they feel about the user experience with the projects they used? What could improve?
- What are the unanswered questions you have about this exercise and the experience overall?
- What went well? What did not go well?
And obviously, we also ask for the fun part: How much has the team made and what was the one single key takeaway they took from it?
- Team member 1:
a.) Result: No gains b.) Takeaway: “When you account for gas fees it's tough to make money in crypto … unless you use leverage and you stay in longer” - Team member 2: a.) Result: loss of -50% b.) Takeaway: “I was liquidated from my largest position, which was supposedly the least risky. The incentives from the protocols out there are not helping their customers and liquidations seem to happen more than I had thought. This gave me more motivation to see us solving that for our users. Was a great learning experience for me and now I understand much better leveraged positions and its risks”
With this onboarding exercise, we ensure everyone has exposure to the DeFi investment journey without risking their own money if they don’t want to. This gives a good basis for everyone in the team to keep learning. It also baselines our team at the top of the population in crypto, because most users simply don't invest or invest very little. This is one of the ways we guarantee all of us are well positioned to do our jobs well and best serve our community.
Stay tuned for other tips on how to improve your or your employees’ DeFi mastership.
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