Are you working for a Sociopath?
I have worked two months for a sociopath who is currently in jail for scamming millions of bitcoins.
I quit my job because something felt fishy from the start.
Never took a dime or knew what was going on.
Only in hindsight, I feel ‘abused.’
Here is my story.
Failed Entrepreneurship
Before I joined that godforsaken cryptocurrency market, I was working 24/7 at my start-up.
Things were looking up, I was talking with venture capitalists, and the someone who specializes in applying for EU funding.
Like any new social network, mine had great potential.
The idea was to create a social network for Erasmus Exchange students in the EU.
On the platform called Digitalise EU, they could buy flight tickets, find rooms, create events, find courses, rate restaurants.
Local businesses could market directly to their customers. The EU would have had a digital system where they could track the exchange student’s process.
I was going strong but forget for two months to check the competition.
On the day, I froze my design for a Minimal Viable Product called the Online Learning Agreement(OLA), to start with the development.
My competitors, who were the official partners of the EU, launched their OLA version.
I was in shambles; I couldn’t understand how they pushed their agenda one year ahead.
Maybe my marketing on Facebook had inspired them to change gears to speed the process up.
At this point, I was fed up with spending all my precious hours in Google Spreadsheets.
I had to rewrite my business plan a gazillion times. Every time I delivered my strategy, I had to add some an extra risk assessment.
For a person as impatient as me, this was hell. I wanted to move FAST.
Joining the Crypto Industry
So during this time, all the prominent growth hackers became crypto marketers.
This movement made sense to me as blockchain technology has the power to revolutionize the world and is data-savvy.
So I took their advice and joined an Initial Coin Offering(ICO) marketing firm.
This company helped cryptocurrencies establish themselves in the market.
Similar to an Initial Public Offering, one can only make a profit, when you can trade publically a cryptocurrency on a digital exchange market.
Toxic Work
In retrospect, the red flags were there.
The site was unprofessional. Also, I promoted to a leadership position because of my entrepreneurial background of leading development teams, where you usually needed to have multiple years of experience.
I started working and would be paid in tokens or the modern equivalent of shares.
Only with shares, you get ownership and with tokens, you have nothing unless you sell them.
I thought this was strange, so I did not sign any contract.
Getting paid with promises is the first sign of sociopath at work.
I was working all the time and was waiting to get my team.
This delegation of work is a classical sociopath behavior, where others do all the work. They keep you in the loop by checking in, so you are to busy to notice what is going on.
My job was remote, so I thought he was working as hard as me.
Furthermore, it was silent in on Slack, and my first team member complained she never got paid.
After I went to a growth hackers convention about my ICO hacking,
I concluded that I could no longer work in an industry when I had my doubts about ethics.
The next day I resigned, my clients could understand me because they knew I never compromise on my values.
But my boss, made me feel like shit. He said that I should have come first to him with my doubts and that this looked bad on the company.
Another red flag of a sociopath, blaming others for the mess, instead of taking responsibility.
Aftermath
After this adventure of marketing, I decided I had to purify my soul.
And tried meditation, yoga, and ayahuasca to get some clue of my destination.
I knew my gift for marketing, but it six months I learned to despise it.
This work experience changed me profoundly.
In that decided never to work for a company anymore if their only goal was the optimization of profit.
Instead, I choose to market NGO’s, education developers, sustainable startups, etc.
Problems are the either do not see the value of growth hacking or they do not have the funds to pay me.
Depression
After trying everything in my power to get a conversation with God, I gave up on life.
I always thought that life was about self-manifestation.
Losing myself in the process of gaining success wasn’t worth it.
My life slowed down, and I spent my days only watching bad Netflix shows and eating cereal.
If success or spiritual enlightenment weren’t the goals of life, then nihilism had to be true.
The result was in the darkest days that I thought of killing myself.
Healing
Slowly I recovered myself of my dark space and learned to appreciate life as a gift.
I am now growth hacking a grassroots movement who modernizes politics on the local, national, and European level.
Working with people in a team helps.
But I still have problems with growth hacking.
To counter this, I reflect on the nature of ethics in my life.
This blog post is #28 of the 30 days blog challenge.
