It started like any other Tuesday at WeWork. I wasn’t there to meet anyone, I wasn’t there to brainstorm, and I definitely wasn’t there to overhear someone’s next big idea. I was there because the coffee was free, my WiFi at home was being weird, and I needed a change of scenery.
I grabbed a desk near the window, cracked open my laptop, and let the low hum of startup chatter blend into the background. But not for long.
Two desks down, an IT guy—the kind with a laptop covered in stickers and a voice that ignored the whole “indoor voice” concept—was deep in conversation. He wasn’t pitching to investors, and he didn’t have the smooth arrogance of a finance bro. This was different. He was explaining his personal project to someone—a side hustle he couldn’t let go of.
He wanted to build an algorithm to trade volatility in ETFs.
That got my attention. Not because it was revolutionary (it wasn’t), but because of the way he talked about it. Like it was a code challenge, not a market strategy. He wasn’t thinking about macro trends, implied vol, or the Fed—he was thinking about pattern recognition and backtesting speeds. To him, volatility was just messy data waiting to be cleaned up.
And that’s when my brain flipped the script.
I wasn’t thinking about ETFs. I was thinking about crypto—where volatility doesn’t just live in the data. Volatility is the data. In crypto, there’s no cleaning it up. No smoothing the curve. You ride the chaos, or the chaos rides you. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, whatever’s trending that week—these aren’t assets you “manage volatility” on. These are assets where volatility is the whole point.
While this guy was talking about making his algo predict VIX swings in neat little packages, I was thinking about how impossible that would be in crypto. The pumps aren’t logical. The dumps aren’t clean. One tweet can flip an entire market, and no backtest in the world can account for it.
I stared into my free coffee, half-smiling at the contrast. This IT guy was treating volatility like a glitch in the system, something to be optimized away. But in crypto, volatility is the system. It’s the product. It’s what we’re here for.
I didn’t get much work done that day. Instead, I filled a page in my notebook with random ideas:
- Could you build an algo that thrives on crypto’s chaos instead of trying to avoid it?
- What if you trained a model not to smooth volatility, but to surf it?
- What if the real opportunity wasn’t in controlling volatility, but in understanding that it’s the feature, not the bug?
That’s the thing about WeWork. You go for the free coffee and the faster WiFi. But you leave with some random overheard conversation stuck in your head—and sometimes, that’s exactly the spark you needed.
