The Messari Community Analyst Program Returns

"Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” - Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer

It’s been nearly three years since I wrote a call to action for young, scrappy analysts to join our volunteer army at Messari, in a post titled: The Apprentice: Crypto. It was, quite literally, the first order of business for us at Messari, as we had just formally founded the company earlier that week. I wrote:

"I’m looking for a small army of volunteer analyst contributors / collaborators who will work with Messari on cryptoasset research and analysis as we boot up the industry’s “EDGAR database.” The best contributors will be hired full time as our lead analysts. If you are somewhat CS literate, have 2–4 years of experience in a consulting/banking/investments role, and think you’ve got an eye for good crypto projects because you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, email your resume, linkedin, twitter and best token investment pitch to [email protected]."

I encourage you to read the original post because a carbon copy of it applies today: we’re relaunching the Messari Community Analyst program, arguably the best crypto career accelerator that’s been built in the past several years.

The analyst program in a nutshell looks like this:

1) The Humility Test: When you’re just starting out your career, don’t know how to code, and are just breaking into crypto for the first time (no network), you'll have basically no value to most crypto companies. Sorry for being blunt, but let’s level set. You might have raw and undervalued talent, though! How badly do you want to move up the professional ranks?

2) The Hunger Test: Since you have no (perceived) value, you need to work on fixing that. As a non-coder, one proven way to do that is to outwork others and communicate incredibly well online. Good communicators parse complex information, relay their analysis effectively (via their online networks especially), and are relentless producers. Here’s a short list of 20 something “names” within crypto who broke in via prolific writing vs. coding: Nic Carter (Coin Metrics, Castle Island Ventures), Kyle Samani (Multicoin Capital), Chris Burniske (Placeholder), Arianna Simpson (a16z), Spencer Noon (DTC Capital), Arjun Balaji (Paradigm), Teo Leibowitz (Uniswap), Anthony Pompliano (Morgan Creek) and the idiot who runs Messari.

3) The Status Trade: We wanted to offer a platform that would accelerate more analysts and help hard workers bootstrap their personal brands and get attention from top crypto companies and investors. We had a megaphone that could juice the ROI of any up-and-coming analyst’s work. They had excess bandwidth to help us bootstrap our research library. Perfect match.

4) The Interview: We needed to incentivize the creation and curation of *exceptional* community content. A “Wikipedia for crypto” would be sub-optimal. We needed to create a status game, and ensure that our research library was full of professional grade profiles as a backbone for early Messari.

We would go to bat for anyone humble enough to embrace our unsexy call to action; hungry enough to work relentlessly at upping their research game despite the unclear tangible rewards; eager enough to accept our proposed status trade; and diligent enough to treat the volunteer initiative as a professional program.

We ended up working with ~75 community analysts out of 200 who applied (we literally had to turn down volunteers), of which we ultimately hired three full-time analysts (their stories are available below). We also helped place dozens of others at blue chip crypto companies and funds like Coinbase, Delphi Research, Grayscale, Multicoin, ConsenSys, TheBlock, and more.

Based on Messari’s growth, the industry’s resurgence, and the success we had with the 1.0 program, we expect this revamped program will be even more powerful. If you’d like to join our crew and become a Community Analyst, drop an application here: Messari Community Analyst Application.

More from three of our top analysts who came through the program:

• Ryan Watkins: Exiting the High Finance Rat-Race for Crypto
• Jack Purdy: A Crypto Analyst's Hero's Journey
• Mason Nystrom: How To Get A Job in Crypto

- TBI

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