Hi David, thank you for the invitation to share few thoughts with the Hacker Noon community!
When I was doing research in Pasadena, we were 3 people in the lab and our instruments were taking the entire last floor of the building. So even though I loved the daily challenge and long term goal, it felt too lonely (I’m an extravert) so I was looking for a more social environment. It appears that management consulting is a very rational field and suited well my way of thinking so I joined Capgemini in Paris. There, I was assessing the payment’s system of a European bank and how to re-build from scratch a state-of-the-art system. Capgemini is a leader in payments so I had access to the best solution at that time. At the same moment (early 2017), my best friend from San Francisco showed me the Bitcoin whitepaper when he was visiting me. We spent the whole week-end reading it and making sense of it. So when I compared both reports, it was very clear to me that Bitcoin was far superior, and a disruption as massive as Internet was on-going. So I dedicated 1y of reading and talking to people about it, up to the point where I was comfortable going full-time into the industry. I quit my job, and later on, the same friend introduced me to Max Galka, my cofounder and CEO of Elementus, who was looking for a partner to build the company. Cryptoassets has the potential to improve the life of people in third world countries in so many drastic ways that I felt I needed to contribute how I could.
On your second question, I think there are no similarities from a tech perspective between both worlds so it’s more about having a broad interest in so many things that could lead to a shift. In my case, it really feels like serendipity.
