# Day Five: Diving into DeFi

By [Alan Gou](https://paragraph.com/@9981) · 2021-11-15

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DeFi is interesting. Suddenly, any joe-schmoe can participate in exchanges that previously would have required you to work at Morgan Stanley or a high-frequency trading firm in New York. It’s likely you would have an Ivy League or engineering school degree, and your team would stream into work starting at 9am and huddle in your cubicles, perpetually connected in a conference call that functions more like a continual football team huddle.

I’ve spent the day reading about Uniswap and filling out my personal dictionary’s entries for **liquidity pools** and **automated market makers**. There’s some serious energy in this space, surely due in no small part to the amount of money flowing through these cryptocurrency exchanges, but also due to sheer developer interest and drive. This stuff is _Fun_, with a capital _F_. I’ve never had this much fun diving into the weeds and making a fool of myself, not for anything in my past Web2 life. The energy on Twitter is infectious. The quality of the sites I’ve sampled are astoundingly good.

I hypothesize it’s because of passion of the individuals working on these things. These projects are labors of love, instead of a sad accumulation of “features” spat out from the conveyor belt factories of many Web2 startups. I see it myself. I was there not so long ago. Go on **teamblind.com** and see the posts asking for the companies that provide optimal work-life-balance (WLB) and total compensation (TC).

For some people, that is what’s best for them. For me, it always felt like I was forcing myself to play a game I hated. At various times in the past three years, I’ve thought I was in need of better WLB, or was dissatisfied because of a lack of pay, or disconnected and disengaged because of the nature of remote work. Really, though, it was a lack of interest. There is no spark being asked to build something you are bored to tears building, in which the only north star is an expected payout when the company IPOs or gets bought, and the only metric by which to assess where to join is its growth potential and expected value.

There are definitely other ways to find enjoyment in work—some of my best memories have taken place at Affirm’s company events or in the hallways chatting up teammates and downing beers at All-Hands. Take away that, though, and the emperor has no clothes.

So, in summary, I am thankful I finally have found the right path to go down.

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*Originally published on [Alan Gou](https://paragraph.com/@9981/day-five-diving-into-defi)*