Some other beginning’s end

As with all good, passionate, (and maybe cheesy) love stories, mine begins with a breakup.

I’m not usually one to make New Year’s resolutions, but on the verge of 2014 I determined I’d breakup with Washington DC and the life it contained for me by the time my lease ended: June. I don’t entirely know why I gave my DC life a six-month expiration date, but I do know I had talked about leaving for five of the six years I lived there. It was time.

If every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, I should back up to why I went to DC in the first place. Many people start law school with dreams of changing the Constitution or fighting crime, but not me. My aspirations to join the world of barristers stemmed from a passion for economics and making entrepreneurship easier for the underdog. I wanted to see a world where startups, family businesses, and the people overseas who make my coffee or my clothes experience sustainable success from their efforts. Instead I observed a legal and regulatory landscape that created complicated and expensive barriers to success, so I embarked on a DC law school adventure, intending to change what I observed into what I wanted to see. Then the economy tanked during my first year of law school, producing a shortage of work for almost all industries except financial services. So I did the economically rational thing and spent a few years litigating on behalf of financial institutions.

Now the list of things I cared and/or knew about included: law; entrepreneurship; international business; finance; economics; marketing; places other than DC. As I tried to decide what to do next (and where to do it), I took a nerd-like interest in this technology called Bitcoin. Bitcoin could give women in the middle east, who are forbidden from opening traditional bank accounts, access to a global financial network. Bitcoin could provide a stable currency to the people of Argentina who have had their life savings eroded by gross inflation. Bitcoin could make it possible for my favorite (cash-only) bagel place to accept payments without having to fork over a 4% cut to credit card companies.

I went to Bitcoin meet-ups, attended conferences, engaged on Twitter, and before long, I realized most of the Bitcoin people I met were entrepreneurs who wanted legal advice. Bonus: most of these entrepreneurs were based in my favorite city — San Francisco. Joining the world of entrepreneurs, I set up a solo-practice firm, and in keeping with my resolution I moved to the Bay Area in June.

I won’t pretend to have a deep technical knowledge of how Bitcoin works, but I also won’t pretend to have a deep technical knowledge of how my iPhone and the internet work. As with most modern tech marvels, I’m excited about Bitcoin because I understand enough of the benefits it can offer to me and to the world to want to work on sharing it every day.

Shortly after my migration west, I landed in-house at a job of my dreams with the rockstar team at Coinbase, and I haven’t looked back once.