SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
On the heels of Newsweek naming Chainlink Labs to its 100 Most Loved Workplaces in America® and U.K.’s 100 Most Loved Workplaces® lists for 2023, Chainlink Labs’ Chief People Officer, Giovana Totini, sat down with Malandrino to share her advice for those aspiring to a career in web3 and more specifically at Chainlink Labs.
“We try to cultivate winning teams that are mission-driven, but they’re also filled with smart, talented, and kind individuals,” Totini told Malandrino.
She said Chainlink Labs’ three key operating principles – true ownership, prioritized focus, and constructive dialogue – are intended to be easily, intuitively, and universally integrated into the remote-first company’s international workflow, creating a strong, unified ethos.
“If you think about the fact that we’re distributed in over 45 countries in a remote company, it’s strongly felt because of that simplicity,” she explained. “And I really do think that our people believe in them and really embrace them in showing up to work.”
Beyond a fully remote team environment that fosters personal growth and work-life balance, Totini believes Chainlink Labs is beloved because employees are working toward a shared vision for a better, blockchain-enabled world.
“When I learned about the power of blockchain and what it’s going to do to be able to, through decentralization, solve things like privacy, trust, control, ownership – it’s incredibly exciting to see that there are short-term answers to some of these really big problems that I think centralized tech has really struggled to solve for,” she explained.
In Totini’s view, immersion is the best way to launch a career in web3.
“The industry is moving really fast, so curiosity is incredibly important,” she advised. She recommends exploring as many web3 use cases as possible across finance, social media, and gaming to gain firsthand experience with how decentralization is already manifesting a paradigm shift around ownership and trust in real-world applications.
“I think with that curiosity, if somebody’s really mission-driven and really wants to be involved in building this new space, you know there’s no better place to do that than at Chainlink Labs,” she said.