iExec

When I told my parents I would not want to go to university, as I could well enough earn a great salary with my position, my mother told me:

Ok bet, if you can show me a payslip with 30k gross on it, then you won't have to go to university. I don't believe a company can pay an 18 year old 30k gross.

Well, great challenge. I'll skip how I actually got the role², you can see more of that on the Ko Social Network page. Enough for the context.2I got 50k gross as a salary. Well over expectations.

My Role at iExec

iExec is a 60 employee company based in Lyon, France. They have a couple of hundred thousand followers on social media, and their token launched in 2017 with an all time high around 2B$ of capitalization.

They recruited me via a headhunter to manage their entire communication department on the Web3 side. I had to look after external communications, community managers, as well as a bit of internal communication with the HR department.

iExec performs confidential computing on their blockchain. Basically, the machines on the network can compute code, without knowing the code or its secrets. One example is newsletter service, that does not know the emails it sends to so data does not leak up.

I joined in early November, right in time for the first off-site of the company.

Remember, you are still young

When I was recruited I was 18 years old. Did a couple of great parties with previous companies, but I only worked at small scale where everyone knows each other.

The first day of the off-site, everyone went for a beer. I politely declined. On the second day, they handed out tickets for drinks at the club they booked out.

My goal was to get as many tickets as possible. So I made bets with everyone for their tickets. One bet was that I was 18 years old. I did this one with the sales manager. He lost. I won all his tickets.

One hour after, the intern of the research department comes congratulating me for my age. Not that it should be a secret, but it's best to not get attention on that sort of things in a mid scale company.

Came the night; long story short we ended up at 7am with the C-suite and a couple of colleagues going club after club. I did not wake up in the morning. The same morning was our last day at the offsite.

Talk about an entry.

Oscar? What happened this Friday?

On the evening my headhunter calls me, saying my manager is very embarrassed. She will test my professional capabilities on the next week. On Monday, all the tasks where I'd been in support became mine to own.

At the end of the week, I had remodeled the content planning, social channels usage, and created a calendar of all the internal stuff we could talk about publicly by going from manager to manager of each department.

At the end of the week came the 1-1 meeting with the manager. Visibly pissed. When I showed her the work, her face lit up: she said we never had such a thing as a complete view of the projects inside the company! Praised my work.

But then, her face closed up again and she said we needed to talk about the offsite. Of course, I've made apologies countless times. It went this way for a couple of months. My work was praised, but slippery social "misconducts¹" chipped away at my reputation in the company.1I did tell some colleagues my salary or that my corporate airbnb had a steam room.

But in the meantime we also had great campaigns and results, notably the campaign targeted at developer where we produced introducing videos for the companies building on our infrastructure.

Make sure to bring back your laptop and AirPods

The week my trial period ended, my tasks got reassigned. The 1-1 meeting with the manager was pushed end of week. And when I opened the door, HR was sitting next to her.

I showed my mother the payslip. I never went to university. I had won the bet, and lost the room. The salary turned out to be the easiest thing to earn in a company; the hardest is making people want you to win.

At my next company, the first thing I did was find someone to cover that blind spot.