Emergent / Qenta

The Origin (Spring 2018)

Second semester at Duke. I was among the last four or five people in a program of eighty without an internship. Pallavi, now my wife, found a post on a random job board: Victor Vilmont, formerly of Western Union, was at a crypto startup and looking for an intern. I sent an application and forgot about it. A few weeks later, at 8pm on a Friday, I got an email: "Are you still interested?" We had a 20-minute call. Good energy. He said: "I'll see you Monday."

It was Friday. Monday meant in-person. Bay Area. I spent everything I had saved from a desk job at Duke on a last-minute flight and hotel to Santa Clara. The first person I met at the office, Stephen Grinalds, showed me a physical cryptographic seal and explained the mission: track gold from mine to market, make responsible sourcing verifiable, build something that works in countries where the currency cannot be trusted. I was sold before I even walked into Victor's office. He hired me on the spot.

I had no money for the return flight. My sister lived in Los Angeles. I took a bus. My roommate at Duke, Prarthana Hegde, packed my suitcase and mailed it to California because I had left everything behind in North Carolina. Her send-off: "I hope I don't see you back this summer." She didn't.

Internship to Sole PM (2018 - 2020)

The internship ran June through August 2018. Kevin Cussen taught me flow diagrams and how to communicate requirements to engineers. Daniel Goldstein and Eddie Ponce taught me KYC, AML, CIP compliance, and what a money services business actually is. I built the full KYC workflow in Lucidchart and helped stand up our first transaction monitoring system on Acuant and IdentityMind. I helped file some of the company's early SARs. The entire foundation of what I would spend the next five years building at Unit21 was laid in those rooms.

I got a return offer, finished my Duke semester, and came back full-time in February 2019. Kevin eventually left. I became the sole PM for both GCoin (consumer crypto wallet) and Responsible Gold Supply Chain (blockchain provenance for gold from mine to vault). By mid-2020, payroll started getting delayed. Bay Area rent on a startup salary with delayed payments is its own education.

Interlude: Cred (Oct 2020 - Jan 2021)

Cred was a San Francisco crypto lending platform that had raised $125M and built partnerships with over 100 crypto wallet and exchange providers worldwide. It was, briefly, one of the more ambitious attempts to make crypto yield mainstream. In November 2020, it filed for Chapter 11. Creditors alleged fraud. The CEO was later indicted. The company rebranded as Earnity and tried to pivot. I turned down the offer to rejoin.

I was there for three months as their first formal PM. Long enough to watch a company implode from the inside.

The Final Chapter (2021)

Emergent brought me back January through April 2021. Unit21 had passed on me once for insufficient PM experience. They called back that spring. That was the right call.