Scan 4,000 resumes at Binance: It was found that most employees are located in Singapore, and there is a preference for hiring former Amazon employees

Original Title: "Who is Behind Binance: A Stateless Company in 4000 Resumes"
Author: Wang Hanyang, Special Contributor for LastPost
Editor: Cheng Manqi, LastPost

Two years ago, at the end of the last cryptocurrency bull market, LatePost had a conversation with Zhao Changpeng, the founder of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. This is a founder and company shrouded in the cryptic fog of blockchain, composed of 0s and 1s. It has attracted attention and discussion due to its massive wealth effect, the founder's erratic whereabouts, and the mystery surrounding its thousands of employees distributed around the globe, but it has never been fully restored.

In 2022, which has gradually entered a bear market, Binance's average daily trading volume was also $65 billion, about half of the average daily trading volume of A-shares in 2022 and over four times that of Hong Kong stocks. According to CoinGecko data, on one day last November, Binance's daily trading volume reached $136.7 billion. An industry insider stated that even after waiving some fees last year, Binance's profit was still about 0.04% of the trading volume. In just 24 hours, Binance earned over $50 million in profit from trading alone. "What does it mean to have a 'casino' that everyone in the world participates in?"

The ability to make money like a printing press, along with Binance's unique position in the cryptocurrency world, which is largely outside of regulation, has also pushed it into the vortex. In June of this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officially sued Zhao Changpeng and the Binance he founded, alleging that Binance profited "through an extensive web of deception," placing investors at significant risk, and helped U.S. customers evade regulation. The 136-page lawsuit outlines 13 charges.

The SEC's lawsuit against Zhao Changpeng and Binance is still ongoing. The story of Binance and Zhao Changpeng is intertwined with new elements of this era: cutting-edge computer technology, decentralized organizational change; it also mixes with the long-standing human desire for wealth and the philosophical musings on the boundaries of freedom and rules. From a business perspective alone, Binance's unusual speed of rise and new organizational methods make it one of the most worthy companies to study today.

Restoring the story of this company and "finding Zhao Changpeng" is a monumental task. Today's article is a small beginning: it comes from our special contributor Wang Hanyang, who, along with friends, has sorted through over 4000 resumes found on the internet, from people claiming to have worked or interned full-time at Binance. Their backgrounds and experiences piece together a small part of the iceberg of this mysterious company.

Here is the original text, which is also published in the newsletter "https://crypto4.wtf/" and the English version is published in the newsletter "https://picapica.wtf/".

For most people who are not concerned with blockchain, Binance may just be a company that occasionally appears in tech news. But today, Binance has become one of the most unique and important companies in both finance and technology: according to reports, Binance has around 8,000 employees (recent news suggests Binance is laying off staff), yet this company has no headquarters, with employees remotely scattered around the world, many of whom may never meet their colleagues from the time they join until they leave. Binance may become the largest distributed company in history. If people studying the history of the internet 30 years from now (about the time from the birth of the internet to today) look back, Binance's organizational form will undoubtedly be an unavoidable chapter.

From the perspective of business influence and profitability, Binance is also very important. It can be compared to Apple, the leader in the smartphone industry: according to Tokeninsight data, in Q2 2023, Binance held a 50.6% market share among cryptocurrency exchanges, while according to StrategyAnalytics data, Apple had a 24% market share in the smartphone market in Q4 2022, the highest in the world and Apple's highest Q4 market share ever—though this figure pales in comparison to Binance's share. Even in the winter of cryptocurrency in 2022, according to CoinDesk data, Binance's spot trading volume reached $5.29 trillion. The operating and sales revenue of Apple's App Store ecosystem in 2022 was $1.1 trillion, over 90% of which was zero commission. In contrast, Binance's trading has fees most of the time. So if Apple is the king of smartphones, then Binance is the absolute king of the cryptocurrency market at this moment.

The absolute dominance of the entire industry, combined with its pioneering work model, makes Binance one of the most important companies of our time.

On the other hand, Binance is also a mystery. In fact, Binance is the biggest mystery on the internet today: few companies are as important to the industry, yet we know so little about it.

On the 42nd day after Binance launched its product, its trading volume ranked tenth in the world; on the 92nd day, it was fifth; on the 156th day, it was third; and on the 165th day, it became first in the world—and it has remained there ever since. How did it achieve all this?

I have read almost all the articles about Binance on both Chinese and English internet, but I still cannot answer my questions about Binance; I cannot even formulate key questions based on the information available online. Therefore, I plan to fill in the gaps about Binance through extensive research and interviews, analyzing and organizing the information.

Researching and accessing information about Binance is not easy. I hope to utilize every opportunity and every piece of information available, focusing on the details to develop this project. Through a series of articles, I aim to tell the story of Binance in a way that is interesting, comprehensive, and, more importantly, encourages more friends to study and analyze this unavoidable company of our time.

In the first article, let's talk about what kind of people created Binance. Thanks to @paincompiler for his help in collecting information on over 4,000 people who have worked or previously worked at Binance, which he meticulously transcribed onto paper.

Please note: The information we collected may not all be accurate, and it cannot cover the entirety of Binance's situation.

The data in this article is based on 4,182 individuals who "claim" to have worked at Binance, Binance US, or previously worked there. Many of the individuals' information is incomplete. Among them, 3,714 individuals have relatively complete data; of these, 1,624 should have worked or currently work full-time at Binance, while the others are interns, part-time workers, or freelancers who have collaborated with Binance. Unless otherwise specified, the following data will use the 1,624 full-time workers as the denominator.

"Stateless" Company: Most Employees are Distributed in Singapore and the Middle East

Although blockchain has no borders, blockchain companies do. However, Binance seems to be closer to being "stateless" than any other company: in our sample, the people who created Binance come from 69 different countries or regions. Among them:

Singapore: 176 people

United Kingdom: 78 people

United Arab Emirates: 75 people

United States: 27 people

India: 24 people

As is commonly perceived, Binance has a large number of employees in Singapore. The notes also indicate that there is one employee working in the Cayman Islands—I thought this archipelago was only used for company registrations.

You might ask, what about Dubai? After all, founders Zhao Changpeng and He Yi are both in Dubai—Dubai is the economic center of the UAE, but it is a city, not a country. If we rank by city, Dubai would come first. There are 65 people in Dubai, 64 in London, and 16 in Amsterdam. These employees are distributed across 86 cities.

As a company born in China, there are still people working here at Binance—but we only collected data on one person. It is possible that Binance employees working in mainland China deliberately hide their company.

Before Binance, the largest remote working company was probably GitLab. GitLab is an open-source software company that claims to be the world's largest remote work organization: 2,038 full-time employees and their 358 pets are distributed across 65 different countries or regions.

If we had more precise data, I believe this title of "the world's largest remote work organization" should be transferred to Binance. However, I am not just looking to compare size; I want to demonstrate through comparison with GitLab that Binance is indeed a remote working company. Many people do not believe Binance operates remotely; they somewhat think that Binance claims to have no headquarters and operates remotely simply to avoid regulation. Others believe that Binance's so-called remote work is just a common state for multinational companies—but the reality is likely not so. Both Binance and GitLab should be regarded as the largest remote organizations on the planet.

If we expand our focus beyond full-time work, then the 3,714 individuals in our notes who have collaborated with Binance come from a total of 114 countries. This is much broader than the reach of Apple Stores, which only exist in 26 countries or regions worldwide. However, Apple Music is available in 167 countries or regions, but Binance explicitly supports only 47 countries or regions on its official website.

Although geographically, Binance employees are very diverse, when looking at the schools, three of the top five universities attended by Binance employees are located in Singapore, indicating that Singapore is indeed one of the centers of the crypto world.

National University of Singapore: 54 people

Nanyang Technological University: 47 people

University of London: 25 people

Singapore Management University: 24 people

National Taiwan University: 23 people

If we broaden the criteria to include all 3,714 individuals who have collaborated with Binance, there are quite a few with educational experience in the UK:

University of Cambridge: 219 people

National University of Singapore: 179 people

Nanyang Technological University: 128 people

Singapore Management University: 90 people

University of London: 90 people

One speculation is that, as a rapidly growing company, Binance likely has a significant demand for interns. As a Chinese-led company, Chinese individuals who speak English are very ideal recruitment choices. However, recruiting within China is not easy, making overseas Chinese students very suitable.

The UK has 170,000 Chinese students, the largest source of students. Binance can provide these students with suitable internship opportunities. From my observations, Chinese students studying in the UK find it more challenging to secure internships and jobs locally compared to their counterparts in North America, leading to more of them flocking to blockchain companies that can recruit globally. Singapore only has 50,000 international students, with Chinese students making up one-third. Therefore, the number of interns is unlikely to be particularly high.

Zhao Changpeng, Who Loves Uber, Hired the Most Former Amazon Employees and Adjusts Layout Like an Internet CEO

A former executive at Binance told me that Zhao Changpeng is a person who loves to read. In the early days, there was a core management group of over 40 people at Binance, and Zhao Changpeng would often share books he had read for everyone to think about together, jokingly "threatening" that those who didn't read would be kicked out.

Most of these books are about management and company biographies. Among many companies, Zhao Changpeng particularly enjoys biographies about Uber and Netflix. Especially Uber, as this ride-hailing giant faced regulatory challenges similar to those of Binance in its early days.

Zhao Changpeng not only reads but also applies what he learns, later hiring many people from Uber. This is supported by our sample of full-time employees: 110 individuals have work experience at Uber, ranking sixth in our data. The top five are:

Amazon: 204 people

Shopee: 153 people

Citibank: 134 people

Agoda: 119 people (an online hotel booking site)

Coinbase: 111 people (an American cryptocurrency exchange)

So what roles do these individuals hold at Binance?

Business-related: 761 people (46.86% of the total)

Technical-related: 329 people (20.26% of the total)

Operations-related: 243 people (14.96% of the total)

Uncertain: 291 people (17.92% of the total)

We cannot determine the positions of many individuals because the collected data may not be accurate and lacks many key pieces of information. In this limited dataset, nearly half of the positions are related to business, which may reflect Binance's emphasis on business development, sales, marketing, and strategy—essentially a pursuit of growth and market share expansion.

This reminds me of a story shared by one interviewee: this interviewee participated in the redesign of CMC (CoinMarketCap), a cryptocurrency price tracking and data provider, after Binance acquired it. In the meetings discussing the redesign, Zhao Changpeng would check whether different placements were suitable for advertisements one by one. Ultimately, Zhao Changpeng requested to remove all prominent advertisements from the homepage, leaving only small spots for ads, and suggested the team add ads in places that users would not notice, prioritizing user experience.

The removed ads accounted for a significant portion of CMC's revenue, but Zhao Changpeng believed that "if the user experience is worse than that of competitors, users will ultimately leave; no matter how high the current revenue is, it is meaningless." The final outcome was to keep only small ad placements and insert some very smooth ads in places that users would not notice. However, since the major source of ad revenue was removed, Zhao Changpeng adjusted the employees' KPIs accordingly. This interviewee evaluated Zhao Changpeng as having a broad perspective and focusing on key points.

Over a Quarter of the Sample Received Promotions at Binance

I attempted to determine the industries from which Binance tends to recruit talent through data, and unsurprisingly, technology and finance are the primary sectors. An interesting finding is that, based on our small sample data, the internal promotion rate among Binance employees is approximately 26.46%. This may indicate that Binance places great importance on promoting from within the organization or transferring employees between different branches or subsidiaries.

From the descriptions of their positions, it appears that Binance's skill requirements primarily focus on three areas: knowledge of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, customer service skills, and compliance and anti-money laundering expertise—Binance seems to place a strong emphasis on compliance.

Binance and compliance is a highly controversial topic; in most countries, Binance is non-compliant. Especially in the dispute between Binance and the SEC. Although Binance has been sued by the SEC, most observers believe this is just a prelude to a more intense struggle, with the real battle still ahead. Moreover, Binance's efforts to pursue compliance can essentially weave through the entire history of the company, which is worth detailing later.

This article is merely a basic analysis of Binance, leaving far more questions than answers.

From the limited data, Binance is a globally distributed exchange that is growing extremely rapidly. How are its employees organized and collaborate? What kind of people manage it, and through what specific methods? How does it face increasingly severe challenges? Where might its potential problems lie? These questions await further exploration.

Binance is like a map filled with the fog of war; I hope that through our efforts, we can gradually uncover its full picture. Because Binance is destined to become one of the most important companies of this era.