Influential bitcoin investor Anthony Pompliano has raised $12.6 million in Series A funding for Inflection Points, a crypto-focused recruitment and corporate training company he co-owns.
The company has been profitable since its inception, raising its capital from Thiel Capital, Fifth Down Capital, XYZ Fund, Rose Park Advisors, Blockchange, ThirdPrime, and various angel investors.
Pompliano said he had received requests from founders to connect them to industry talent. He founded the new company in partnership with former baseball player Colton Sakamoto to bridge the gap.
Pompliano met Sakamoto through an interesting exchange of memes on social media. Pompliano had sent out a message that if anyone sent him a fire meme, he would have to retweet it.
Sakamoto, then working a 40-hour job and coaching baseball, sent Pompliano memes in his spare time. The exchange of memes piqued the bitcoin investor’s interest in the sender, and the two talked.
Pompliano had been receiving many direct messages from people interested in crypto jobs and came up with the idea of a job board to consolidate the jobs in the top companies in one place.
Recruiters at large companies began contacting the duo. Recruitment agencies had said that many candidates had shown promise regarding accounting and marketing, but were clueless about crypto.
That was when the duo launched a training program and a crypto course to get jobseekers in front of the right people, who then landed jobs at Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and embattled lender BlockFi.
Pompliano bullish on hiring
Famous for his $500 million investments in over 100 companies, Pompliano has amassed 1.6 million followers on Twitter. He has come under criticism for lending credence to projects like the failed TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin.
The bitcoin bull said the funding was less about the money and more about attracting helpful investors. He believes that Silicon Valley and Wall Street are losing talent to cryptocurrency.
With companies like Google and Amazon offering blockchain-as-a-service, Pompliano believes demand for talent in the crypto sector will skyrocket, especially as traditional professional service firms like lawyers and accountants look to take advantage of blockchain.
Inflection Points has already placed 1,000 people in jobs in the crypto sector and has trained over 4,000.
The company has also acquired Proof of Talent, the leading recruitment agency for crypto jobs.
How the bear market is influencing hiring
The current bear market may prove challenging for hiring. Yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed employees saying that the company would pull back on its hiring after awarding 10,000 new jobs in the second quarter.
At the same time, Microsoft announced a slight staff reduction as part of adjustments made at the start of its fiscal year. Earlier this year, Coinbase cut its staff by about 20%, with the possibility of more retrenchments. It has also suspended hiring and rescinded job offers.
Today, the Consumer Price Index report revealed a 9.1% increase in inflation for the twelve months ending in June 2022, putting pressure on riskier assets like bitcoin, whose value went down by about 3% in the 10 minutes following the inflation announcement to $19,180, briefly recovering to $19,357 according to Coingecko data.
But all is not doom and gloom on the hiring front. Crypto exchange LBank announced in late June that it would continue hiring at all company levels. Binance and Kraken have also announced hiring plans. Binance is looking for 2,000 new staff, while Kraken has 500 open positions as of late June.
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