My First Bit of TaxBit: 30 Days Down

To say it's been a fast-paced, immersive experience only scratches the surface.

On my first day at TaxBit, I knew I joined something special. I had been talking to the team for several months and felt at ease with my choice. The crypto space had captured my imagination for years, and the opportunity for me to contribute was here and now. 

I’m now a little over 30 days in. It has felt as fast as a day, and as eventful as a year, all in one. At my previous gig at Facebook, I would say that you become ‘legit’ at your first anniversary— here it felt true within a month.

While I’ve always appreciated TaxBit’s mission, the opportunity is bigger than I had imagined. TaxBit always struck me as the Goldilocks of my search; not too big, not too small, but just in the sweet spot of a steep, rapidly accelerating growth curve. 

I can reaffirm what I said in my initial announcement — TaxBit has a great product-market fit with a great set of folks, and a strong desire to build a world-class engineering team capable of realizing the opportunity in front of them. Founders, investors, and the team are ready and armed to bring their vision to the masses. 

Our current path is loud and clear: enable the regulatory trust into the broader digital assets ecosystem that is accessible to all — a calling that is more important than ever right now.

The Current Market Trends 📈

We’re seeing tightening rates, money drying up, valuations plummeting, the destruction of Terra/Luna, and the impending crypto winter. While market trends are volatile (and unpredictable at best), we firmly believe that regulation will bring trust and grow digital assets. I recommend reading this current state of crypto newsletter from MilkRoad that talks about this 4th crypto winter and how overall volume is up if you zoom out etc, etc.

The reality is that we have a bunch of tailwinds behind our business, such as the increasing need for regulation, transaction volume, and adoption. It’s hard to find a major financial institution that doesn’t offer, or plans to offer, some kind of crypto product. As long as transactions take place — no matter their value, accounting, or taxes — TaxBit matters.

I anticipate our current market trends to continue. Demand for our platform will increase as well. The problems we need to solve and the volume and scale we need to handle requires us to build even faster; we need to put our heads down and build. And THIS here right now is the best time to build with the mission-aligned folks.

On a Lighter Note, Onboarding! 

Startups run at a breakneck speed. When you join, you need to accelerate twice hard to meet their speed if you want to hit the ground running. The first 30 days at TaxBit were exactly that. Time flies when you’re having fun, but moves at light speed when you’re building the core infrastructure for digital assets. Chains, protocols, and tokens are moving fast.

A snapshot of the first 30 days behind the scenes: 

• Day 1-3 | Onboarding: TaxBit is a newer company that is hiring quickly and building processes to scale its hiring. Getting new hires up to speed is a 3-day process, and my onboarding was part of the first-ever boot camp class. We’re now starting new people in groups, in order to make these days as efficient, and connective, as possible. 

• Day 5 | Beer pong/Fridays: TaxBit’s Seattle Engineering office was a speakeasy (see walkthrough), which adds a fun element to all of our team get-togethers. If you’re local, stop by to hang with us.

• Day 6 | Company-wide OKR presentation: On my third day, I was told to be ready to present the following Monday to the entire company. It was a blast diving into the deep end.

• Day 10 | Utah visit to meet more folks: TaxBit has a strong presence in Salt Lake City (HQ1). Meeting with some of the earliest TaxBit employees helped me develop a stronger appreciation and understanding of how far we’ve come. I was impressed by the humility, drive, and persistence of the whole team. 

• Day 18 | Board meeting: The board is accountable, pragmatic, and challenges itself on the best path to move forward. I presented some of our engineering plans going forward. It was great meeting and learning from our investors.

• Day 21 | Leadership offsite in Phoenix: 3-day leadership offsite that brought together all leads. I’m impressed by how much the TaxBit team values team relationships, and how connections are the foundation for everything we’re building. Building a startup is hard, so the more robust the foundation, the better chance of building something that lasts — I’m excited to be a part of it.

• Day 21-25 | TaxBit Spring Break: We also gave the rest of the staff a well-deserved ‘Spring Break’ week following tax season, the first of many cultural traditions we’ve begun.

Until Next Time

While I’ve made it to the end of the first 30 days, we’re still very much at the starting line of what we are building at TaxBit. My next post will include further reflections as I hit the 60 and 90-day marks and continue to share the hyper-growth stories.

Thanks - Vivek

PS: I am bad at this game.