Meet the Team — Adam & Farrah
After the successful Radix Betanet launch, the team has been charging forward in high spirits. Squashing bugs, bringing in new hires, delivering updates, you name it. The quote of the week is “If it bleeds, we can kill it” from the classic movie Predator (1987).
In this blog series, we present members of the Radix team to the community (Check out the previous post with Jacob & Sergiy).
Today we had the pleasure to meet up with Adam & Farrah!
Adam Simmons — Head of Strategy — Radix DLT
Adam started his career in the online video space, working on his own content creation and management company before becoming the first business-side employee at a video platform start-up. Adam’s role was to spearhead the platform’s launch, growth, and leading the rapidly expanding marketing, content, and audience engagement teams, as well as a global array of agencies and partners. In the years that followed, the platform experienced rapid growth to over 350m video views per month across their global network of both owned & operated publishers and third-party syndicators.
Adam’s journey in Crypto started in early 2016 when introduced by investors in his current role, and turned his personal interest professional in 2018 when he co-founded a project where he led the strategy and marketing teams through a successful launch, fundraising, and scale-up phase.
A fun fact about Adam’s career is while working in video content, he was also a member of the UK Paralympic sprint kayaking team and competed in multiple World and European championships for TeamGB!
We asked Adam a little more about his role below:
My role at Radix DLT is Head of Strategy. Day to day, much of my time is spent managing the marketing and community teams to ensure Radix is continuing to hit our growth objectives both per quarter and per year. In practice, this means making sure both teams are working holistically to increase awareness of Radix, that our data and analytics are going in the right direction (up!) and we are allocating resources to the places that have the most impact on our KPIs.
Alongside leading the teams, I am also responsible for many of the non-development mid and long-term projects and goals. Most recently this was running the refinement of the Radix messaging and rollout of the new Radix Website, and prior to that, a lot of my focus was ensuring the eXRD token sale and launch were successful. The exciting part of this is that I often need to be in sync with the other team/project leads, as well as a range of partners, agencies, and of course the Radix Community efforts!
Outside of those core responsibilities, I’m also a firm believer in getting stuck in myself! Therefore, it’s not uncommon for me to pop into our telegram, check out our social channels and make the odd post, fire up Google Analytics to dig into the data, or even read up the latest news about DeFi/crypto to ensure we have a good pulse on the industry.
While not a developer, I am a geek at heart. I was (ok, am) the kind of person who makes a spreadsheet to plan how to maximize my character in a video game and to organize my gym routine. When I see something exciting and get involved, I want to make it the best it can be, which is very aligned with what everyone is doing at Radix — making DeFi the best it can be.
When I found Radix, I was already very aware of both how revolutionary blockchain technology could be and how many issues were already getting in the way and would continue to be barriers to adoption. Once I started looking into Radix, it immediately stood out how both the technology and the vision of Dan and the team could be truly game-changing both for the crypto/blockchain industry and global finance as a whole.
Even at that early stage, it seemed great, but it became truly perfect once I started to speak with the Piers and the wider team. Everyone was aligned in the vision. Everyone was incredibly intelligent and passionate about delivering on the goal. It’s fantastic to be able to say since joining the team, that opinion has only got more deeply ingrained, and it is exciting to work in a team where we are all pulling in the same direction to make something the best it can be.
In short, I am excited about Radix because I believe that DeFi will meaningfully improve the world. And I believe that Radix is the technology that will enable this revolution.
Farrah Ather — Talent Acquisition Lead — Radix DLT
Farrah has worked in talent acquisition since 2014. Starting in agency recruitment in Edinburgh, she focused on building her knowledge within the IT industry and really understanding the intricacies of software development, and how it is used to build products and applications we all use on a daily basis.
Her initial candidate network was focussed on .NET and Java developers, then moving into more of a mixture of technologies depending on client requirements.
After 5 years, she moved from agency recruitment to freelancing directly with smaller businesses that required a full overhaul of their recruitment processes, looking at their interview structure, onboarding, attrition, and current employee retention.
She mentions that the best thing about her job is that she is directly involved with bringing great talent into the business, and actually supporting their development and seeing them grow within a business — those are the best results for any recruiter!
Fun facts about Farrah: She loves exploring new areas and visiting obscure places in whatever city she’s living in. Most recently, she visited the Sikh temple in North London which she says has been beautifully architected and should be on more visiting guides! Apart from that, she is a part-time runner with 1 half marathon under her belt, aiming for a full one in 2022.
We asked Farrah a little more about her role below:
I have been brought into Radix as Talent Acquisition Lead to help grow both technical and operational teams and actively attract the best talent the market has to offer. My day consists of having numerous calls with people who may be aware of the business, educating them to the best of my ability about our core mission, and generally assessing their suitability for the role in question.
I am also looking at how we can continue to empower our current staff and build on the current great working culture. Over the coming weeks, my main goal is to get to know the full team more and understand what they are looking to achieve in their careers at Radix, and implement a plan to enable them to do this.
Before Radix, I found myself looking for opportunities, and realized that I had never truly felt challenged in my past roles. I then set about looking for a new industry that was completely out of my comfort zone and would really allow me to put my stamp on not only the recruitment process, but the wider business functions as well.
When I learned about Radix, I knew this would be the ideal opportunity for me to not only maximize on my technical recruitment skills, but to be an integral part of a growing team that is working on groundbreaking technology — I am now 5 weeks in and can say I have not been disappointed.
Since joining, I have been given the ideal amount of support and autonomy and have already taken over core recruitment responsibilities. I have also been given so much support from the wider team as they understand I am new to the industry and freely offer up the little time they have.
I learn more and more about DeFi every day, not only from the team, but also the wider network and the candidates I speak with on a daily basis. I truly see the industry becoming more stable and predict that cryptocurrency becomes a household norm and used much more casually in the future.
Join the fight at Radix — The Layer 1 DeFi done right!
You can find open positions on our careers page: https://www.radixdlt.com/careers/.
