 Hi everyone, it's MJ the fellow actuary and welcome to the second vlog on the actuarial career. So the idea was to make one of these 30 minute videos every every month on the actuarial career path and as you can tell it is almost the end of March and we only have one of them out. Well this is the second one. This is now the second one. So I don't know if this is March, February, could even be April. But what we discussed in or maybe I should tell you guys why yeah it's been it's been a crazy couple of months. Essentially what happened and seeing that this is the career vlog is I left Polygon in November last year, joined the startup. The startup has run out of money and it's like yeah haven't really even been paid for for February. But still kind of like hanging in there and and seeing what we can do the company's hoping to launch its product at the end of this month. So a little bit of crazy crazy also was a little bit under the weather for a week so a lot has been happening. But now you're probably saying Michael why why did you leave Polygon a company that is like one of the I mean probably the biggest crypto company in the world. Although maybe is Binance bigger. I don't know Polygon one of the biggest crypto companies in the world to go in and join a little startup. So like what were you thinking with with doing that and I mean I went in full you know absolutely full knowledge knowing that nine out of ten startups fail that the chance of this startup succeeding was very very low. But in a weird way it was almost like a little bit of a what I say a bit of a backup plan for a long time I've been wanting to to do a specific project and I keep telling myself you know I'll do the project later I'll do the project later. Let me first work because when you're working as an actually there's a little bit of a curse and that is that you get a very generous salary. So getting a very generous salary and the reason why I say that's a that's a curse is because when you want to do your own thing will be an entrepreneur or do your own kind of business there's a very big opportunity cost and you're like oh you know maybe I should just do one more yeah or one more this and and that was the whole thing is that I was gonna start this project as soon as I hit 30 that was my my idea was I was gonna hit 30 and I was gonna push three years into this project and that was always kind of like the life goal and then towards the end of 2021 I told myself okay not taking on any more clients I was doing actuarial consultancy work I'm not gonna take any more clients I'm gonna see my actuarial work with the asset society actuarial society of South Africa I was doing some educational content for them and it was like okay once that work is done I'm going to stop taking on any clients and I'm going to do my my project and that was when I was invited to a party I got actually invited to this party as as an artist because for those of you know on my channel I also do NFT art been doing art since I think my first exhibition was back in 2016 and the idea was to do just one exhibition every single year COVID hit so I thought you know it why don't I go online I'd already been using the blockchain to digitally sign my art pieces because my art pieces are a digital medium print them on perspex and would use the Bitcoin blockchain a website called ascribe where I would sign create these like basically before NFTs or even a thing create these cryptographic signatures to prove that this was a one-of-one kind of piece and then my dear was that whenever you sold the piece the physical piece you also transferred this digital ownership along with them and if you couldn't do the digital ownership then you knew that that item was a was a fake not the best user experience and of course that website would eventually go go down but what it did do was that it made me very familiar with art being on the blockchain and I joined this website called super rare I remember it was so weird for me to try even though I was making digital art I still felt like I had to print it on to perspex it still needed to have a physical manifestation in order for it to be art and now on super rare we're selling them purely as these digital assets NFTs and they started selling really well so I even wrote an article which I think it's like in the September 2020 edition of the actuarial magazine I had just sold 10 pieces and I was like this is crazy people are actually buying my my art of course you'll know from my other NFT videos for me now I actually see that this is the future of art not just a little side thing because of you know a lot of the friction and logistic burdens that that it removes so NFT and art very very powerful doing very very well with that so fast forward to this is what September 2020 like a year later I've just done a whole bunch of NFTs with some Instagram models the one was in that Netflix show too hot to handle they were selling really well and I was just thinking you know Instagram NFTs this is this is just the future of content and I'm at a party being introduced as the NFT artist get speaking to these guys who've got so I think the one guy had a PhD in economics other guy to PhD and something else and then there was this other gentleman who had worked at Deutsche Bank for a couple of years so these three Spanish guys they're at this party and they're talking about how the American economy is gonna crumble due to due to COVID and me just wanting just you know a little bit of you know stimulating conversation I go up to them and and I drop a little bomb shell I say to them now of course this was just for the sake of making conversation which is what I do I sometimes say things to say more things I'm not necessarily you know attached personal belief behind it but the statement I throw throw to them is is I say to them COVID is gonna strengthen the American economy boom okay they look at me they like what is this crazy artist coming up at and saying something as silly as as that so they like look at me and treating them like why do you say that I say well think about COVID is retracting the entire global economy we're now in this you know state of recession the state of fear people are gonna rush into a very safe asset the safest assets at the moment is the US dollar it's you know it's their cash so people are gonna flood in and buy the US dollar the US dollar is gonna appreciate and this is gonna allow the Americans to print more of it which means they just gonna have more money to do what they want to do with which of course the American economy did what I didn't foresee was you know the war in Russia and Ukraine which then hit the food and oil and inflation and you know was like another disaster on top of COVID but at the time you know this Russian thing hasn't hasn't happened yet and I come in and I start explaining my position we're having a little healthy debate when at the end of the conversation they kind of say to me they're like you know how do you know like so many I mean how do you know so much about the economy but like how are you you know able to talk so confidently about the economy and all of these different asset classes and everything like that if you're an artist remember I'd been invited to this party as an NFT artist and I tell them no I'm actually an actuary you know I just use NFTs for art but I'm like I think NFTs can be used for Instagram told them about the whole thing I'd done with the Instagram models and how successful that was I told them about this other art piece that I'd made that it told for like a stupid amount I was telling about how in the future I could see Netflix you know basically giving their content away for free and how they would make their money is selling of NFTs so you would watch let's say your your favorite show let's say Rick and Morty and then you could buy NFTs that relate to the show and that would be a way to fund the creators and the whole show because with piracy and everything like that these things are tending to you know basically you pay nothing to watch the content and I said Netflix will soon embrace that anyway whole long NFT discussion which I have chatted about in my other videos but they look at that and they say come work for us you know we year we're working at this company called called Polygon and I was like what what's a Polygon you know had never heard of it and it was weird because I mean I'm in the crypto space but I was kind of like very sheltered from from layer 2 so I was very much on Ethereum but these layer 2s at the time I wasn't like fully comprehending it which I know looking back end of 2021 not knowing what layer 2s were and yet you know having been in the crypto space I was definitely under under a rock so what happens is they offer me a job and turns out what had happened was that the Spanish guy was one of the founders of a blockchain called Hermes which was using zero knowledge proofs in order to do amazing things and there was another company called called Matic that decided to basically Matic combined with Hermes and Maiden an American blockchain also doing zero knowledge things and collectively they came all together to form Polygon hence the word poly meaning multiple Polygon it's multiple chains coming together you know to be like a layer 2 kind of solution although there was always an interesting thing when we're working at Polygon we were like what exactly are we are we a side chain or we are layer 2 you know then there was this whole thing of monolith block chains versus modular block chains and I realized in the crypto industry there isn't like a clear cut taxonomy on the various terms that can create a lot of confusion internally as well as I guess just communicating to to the general public anyway I joined I joined Polygon and wow what a what an awesome job it really really was was cool the first thing they got me to do was to create like a a mock presentation on on Ferrari I'm sure anything like am I to mention brand names and and all that kind of stuff well it was a mock exercise I can either confirm nor deny whether we actually spoke to Ferrari but at this time I was asked to to do a mock design for how I would create a whole thing for for Ferrari which was weird because I actually had a really thought of doing something like this before I thought imagine having a little lucky packet you might see in the background so we've got Pokemon cards so this is generally the idea the idea would be that you would buy like a lucky packet or a pack of NFTs and instead of getting you know Pokemon cards inside you'd get a bunch of random components and if you got random components you might get quite lucky and also get a blueprint if you have a blueprint and the components you can combine them together and create a car part and if you create all the car parts the idea was that you got an actual Ferrari to live it to you kind of like a scavenger hunt kind of kind of idea because I was playing a lot with NFTs I was doing my actuarial treasure map which I'm still in the progress of doing although I'm a little bit worried now with chat gpt being able to figure out all of the riddles so because each thing on that one had a riddle embedded but with chat gpt you can actually crack it quite quite easily so that's why I'm just back to the drawing board there I was thinking with chess and brilliant move so there's a whole bunch of NFT ideas and essentially that was how I started off at Polygon was just to come up with crazy NFT ideas for various companies and it was amazing because I got to do a lot of traveling went to New York you know the NFT NYC went to East Denver I even went to a conference in Malta but that was horrible because I got quarantined because they didn't accept the South African vaccine for COVID and I was kind of like fighting them in the airport so I was stuck in the airport for eight hours and then got quarantined interesting experience then we also also did ETH Seoul in Korean blockchain week which is actually where I met this company here called called Aussies who actually recently they were recently in in Cape Town and are showing them around absolutely love their their set of technologies that they have in fact when it comes to decentralized finance DeFi it's an Aussie app called mesh swap that I use and it's cool because while working for Polygon I started branching out you know beyond NFTs starting looking at the metaverse started looking at DeFi I started looking at all these other you know dials other components and I was saying how you know Polygon we need a bunch of templates and airdrops and all these things to make it easier for people to deploy their projects and that's when these Aussie guys released that exact project I said hey I want to be part of the Telegram group then there was the Luna crash Polygon wants to get more exposure to Korea now that Luna is is gone they're like Michael you know you're really talking to to some of the teams there you know come on board met in their great group of people and even though I've left Polygon now when they came to Cape Town I showed them around the beautiful city they sponsor my go-karting now as as well you might have seen from the karting video that they they wanted my big sponsors for for karting this year and it was just really cool you know connecting them to the whole crypto community here in South Africa which is in a weird way kind of what I guess what my job started morphing into at Polygon I went from being this NFT subject matter expert to more of a business developer which is crazy because we did this internal reorganization they like Michael you know a business developer and I was like what what does a business developer do which I've always thought is an interesting thing you know getting a job that you don't even know what it does I remember having to Google like what exactly does a business developer do and essentially what it was it was you would try and approach companies and get them to build on on Polygon the problem is Polygon I mean one way of thinking about it is that it's it's the new internet it's the third internet you know we sometimes revert to it as as web 3 but it's very much the infrastructure so before you could build directly onto Polygon you would need some sort of app hence why I like the Aussie guys with with their apps because I could at least go to various customers and say okay if you want to get started you can use these guys as a launch pad they had a decentralized exchange so tokens could be swapped out you know they've got staking so you can do ad liquidity you know they had all that kind of infrastructure that was required and essentially that's what the business developer role essentially started to become a Polygon was unlike normal business developers who try and connect one company with one you know projects together like if you're working as a business developer for say PlayStation you go to a gaming company say hey be an exclusive we'll give you some money or we'll do this or whatever it is and boom you've got a relationship with Polygon we had to try and link three different things together of course started becoming really complicated because these different entities were in different countries there were different rules around tokens is the scene as a security if it's staking there's all that kind of stuff but essentially what was quite fun with the role is you know Polygon figured out that oh my Michael's an actually you know what what what is that and how is that useful they're like oh wow okay so you understand insurance and then so the role went from being NFT to business development just generally to kind of like honing in and focusing on on insurance companies it's going in there honing in on insurance companies trying to see how blockchain can revolutionize insurance companies within how it can kind of make fraud internal fraud less of a thing and other efficiencies and all these other wonderful things so at this time I'm busy giving talks that's one thing I did a lot for Polygon is I spoke at various events at East Denver I spoke in Cape Town there was an event called crypto face I spoke in Korean blockchain week I almost spoke I was I was on the because I was like like sometimes the backup speaker for some of the founders if they couldn't make it or if life was delayed then I kind of like you know went in last minute and at least spoke and said something about the stuff so I almost spoke at Korean blockchain week but I didn't the boss managed to arrive just just in time from the airport but essentially I would go in and give these talks and the one talk I did was to a bunch of actuaries and the one actually then reached out to me and actually went to the same university as me and they said hey I'm working for a crypto company that wants to build decentralized insurance do you want to come on on board and I was like wow this is really cool I'm now gonna be able to work as an actuary and in crypto so it's kind of like you know if you look at the the CV you know it's that double experience kind of kind of thing so of course back on my mind I still want to do my project but I'm also you know risk risk a verse at at heart and I'm like okay but you know you want your CV to at least look good and this is quite a nice role to come in as the senior actuary to build the capital model from from the ground up in fact so it being a lot more than that because I joined the company and enjoy they it was interesting they were like we reinvented insurance and I was like okay cool how have you done it like this is this is quite cool let's let's check it out and I was like this is horribly capital inefficient like it was it was bad I was like no no no no and it was the programmers I don't think I was their favorite person because I was like this this is like and and fortunately this is the nice thing is an actuary is you can build a model you can come with a lot of empirical analysis to show how inefficient it is and I redesigned and completely new system and said look how capital efficient this is so to have the same coverage you know this you needed like $10 million here you need like $1 million it was like a no-brainer to go with this alternative route but of course a little bit of pushback from the developers because they had already developed you know a lot of it and they don't want to sell from the scratch so kind of like learn to a little bit on that that compromise like okay we can't have this purely efficient thing that Michael's designed from the ground up has to kind of incorporate a little bit of their fragmented pieces and try to join it together and maybe compromise a little bit of efficiency so that we can still come in and and deploy but that was actually a lot of fun was building up this capital model in fact beyond just the capital model building the capital structure and you know kind of like figuring out how to do decentralized insurance and it's quite a cool thing because why you want decentralized insurance is a lot of protocols are getting hacked and it's like okay is there a safety net and this can be a system that actually provides that safety net and the other thing with insurance is that we know it provides value provides peace of mind and so there is that inherent value generation which can be translated to the liquidity providers in the form of return and that's why I think they call it decentralized insurance because the capital coming in was basically crowdfunded and the insurance also coming in that the eventual idea was that anyone would be able to come up create their own risk pool create their own product and essentially be like a Lloyd's of London for crypto of course you know Lloyd's of London can talk or have a home video on on that and how difficult it is to to replicate something like that and of course it was it was a big salary boost as well I mean polygon paid paid very well this new company paid even even more so for me it was and also like I guess what was happening at polygon was was quite a big structural change so when I joined I think polygon had like 170 people and it was very much like part of the company was that you got to know everyone you would play these little computers going off the black screen powers running out should probably have charged my my laptop before I did this which I when I joined polygon the culture was very much everybody's gonna get to know everybody else we played these online games it was kind of I joined towards you know end of the year so there's Christmas there's a lot of fun things and was a really cool environment where I mean there was even a chess tournament those of you know I love chess recently got back into the 1700s on chess.com so being very very proud and chuffed about that but it was a very fun environment and then what happened was I mean and I was I think I was the first employee for the polygon enterprise team and then what happened is they went on like a hiring spree and they just started hiring a lot of people and I think polygon went almost up to 800 900 kind of people I kind of like just saw on the slack channel the slack channel was just growing and I think there were some non-employees or consultants so maybe that numbers a little bit inflated but a lot of new people started joining I mean my team when we went to Istanbul for like the team off-site it was like what was it 34 people which is crazy because before we were gonna do a whole company off-site in Dubai now we did a whole company just our team and it was 34 people and it grown really big and with that came a lot of and I guess it has to be when I come to guess that size a lot of employment policies and procedures and this and that and you had to disclose what you were doing and what this and then they were reviews and essentially became a lot of admin for those of you who know me I don't like admin so I was kind of like oh this is losing its losing its fun and also once the team became that big before I mean I was the guy who was traveling everywhere all over the world it was a lot of fun now that the team was so much bigger it was like okay we've got to give other people a chance got to do this got to do that or we had such a big thing now we got to look at budgets got to scale back so we're from flying business class to you know not business class which once you fly business class you it's really difficult it really is difficult to kind of go back so there was a whole bunch of these things that were kind of tainting I guess the experience at Polygon Polygon amazing company it was just personally personally I enjoy more of the startup culture I'm enjoying more of that kind of vibe rather than the corporate corporate setting and so with Polygon very quickly turning into this corporate you know giant I mean it's one of the biggest crypto companies out there now with big investors and you know it was it was also like we started hiring a lot of Americans and that also came in with the you know big different culture before it was the Spanish and the Indian teams and it's where like India the culture is very similar to I guess to South Africa we both love cricket you know got on really well with the team in India the Europeans was also kind of like very easy to get on with same time zone all of that but then the Americans it was I don't know it was difficult for me to kind of I guess connect due to maybe the time zones were just different it was just quite a big cultural cultural change so all those things said I kind of left end of November I mean I still hold all my Polygon tokens I kind of took all the tokens I got from Polygon my entire salary and just bought the Matic token which you know when I started buying it was at like two dollars and then it went down to 30 cents and now I think it's at like one dollar ten so I was doing what they call the dollar averaging but that just shows how much I believe in the Polygon project so kind of took that entire year's salary and and put it into the Matic token it's kind of like how do you sell well like use up a little bit just to kind of pay taxes because taxes was was quite a lot last year but like the majority just like I said what I could kept into to Matic to have that exposure because really do believe in their their project and your love Polygon over stuff like Solana and and other stuff might regret that one day saying that if Solana is like hey we're looking for business developers and see if you've got experience with Polygon doing come work then they watch this video and I'm like yeah Polygon way better than Solana but yeah essentially that was the situation where what I did is I decided okay not happy well not not that I wasn't happy it was just that I was getting I guess y'all what's the word frustrated or just it wasn't as good as it was so I thought you know what I want to do my own project already I've joined Polygon as like for like a whole year just to see what it's like I've kind of learnt a lot kind of felt like you know the team is big enough that if I do leave it's not like I'm dropping any you know responsibilities on anybody else's lap and that the team will fall there was a lot of people around I was able to stay on a little bit while they hide the replacement got them up to speed lovely guy we still even chat so I was able like okay cool I'm leaving the company on good terms I'll join the startup if the startup fails we go and we do we do our own project and that looks like the come the company that have joined I mean like I say they they're hanging on they're hanging on they're trying to find more funding the team has basically half from 20 to 10 people you're just going through a bit of like a rocky path and I wouldn't be surprised if any day I've got the email saying hey we're we're shutting the door but at the moment we're still trying to to stay on board but essentially I now have my my one eye on on the project that I'm gonna be doing I think I should keep the project as maybe a bit of a mystery for for now you guys can comment in the yeah the section down below what you think the project is but yeah it's it's essentially it's like you know let me go try to do my own thing this was always the plan crypto distracted me the whole bull run you know I think it hired a lot of people who weren't in crypto or working in crypto got into crypto bull runs kind of ended you know we're in a bit of a weird state now with whole Silicon Valley Bank and still the war in Russia and inflation and you know the economy is a little bit uncertain as well as the regulation that was also another thing with crypto which was super annoying was all the regulation because like which regulator are we are we talking to you know it's like the Americans the Europeans you know it was like what's happening but essentially yeah I'm not yeah don't have any regrets I mean like I say some people think I was very very silly to to leave polygon and join a little startup that has now now failed and you know in hindsight that does look like a silly silly thing to have done but very grateful for the experience was very happy with the capital structure that I that I built and I think if the company ever does you know get completely wiped out I might make a video explaining how the capital structure works why I think it's quite efficient and just put it out there on the internet and then maybe you know another group of entrepreneurs pick it up and say hey let's let's run with this of course regulation and insurance it was it was also thing like when I joined they were it was kind of implied that they really had the licensing and then when I joined and I saw that no they're on the process I was like oh that's also like two very very different things it's like saying to someone oh we're married to oh I really like I'm gonna you know maybe Oscar out one day and and hope hope she remembers who I am you know it's like two very different I guess you've both got the same intentions but yeah the actual state is is different anyway these videos ideas to keep them to 230 minutes battery is running down low I want to finish the rest of my coffee so I know we we've still got two minutes left but in the philosophy video we went like five minutes over time so I think it's all cool to to wrap it up there although I guess yeah maybe what are no chance for the next lecture I think I'll save it for the next lecture because I guess lecture vlog podcast whatever we're calling these things I know I ended that last one saying hey I'm gonna continue my my own career journey you know what was I doing and now I know I've jumped I've jumped so I think I did in the first vlog from like when I started to where I you know left thought express was building back-end systems for insurance companies and then I've left out a couple of years and I've jumped into how I'm like redesigning building capital structures for insurance companies which is weird I didn't do my fellowship in insurance I did it in finance finance the thing that I would love to to redesign but finance it's it's such a systemic thing you know that's all over that to redesign a financial system it's exhilarating but it's kind of like boiling the ocean very difficult whereas insurance companies are kind of like siloed they're their own little corporations it's a lot easier to be innovative there you know you can't design it from the ground up where finance is kind of like you just plug into the existing system but like I say we'll maybe save that for the next video which will maybe be sometime in April who knows but as always thank you so much for watching keep well and enjoy the weekend if you're watching this on a Friday or the week ahead if you're watching this yeah any other day keep well everyone cheers