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 Wilmot, 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 Cusson taught me flow diagrams and how to communicate requirements to engineers. Danny 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.

Cred and the Final Chapter (2020 - 2021)

In October 2020 I followed Danny Goldstein to a crypto lending startup called Cred. First formal PM on their B2B-to-consumer application. Three months later, Cred filed for Chapter 11. I was laid off in January 2021. They later rebranded as Earnity. I turned down the offer to rejoin.

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