Meet Ian Brunner: Web3's ecosystem talent strategist
When FTX crashed at the end of 2022, instead of layoffs, he pivoted his 30-person team to support hundreds of ecosystem partners. Now as CEO of Interplanetary Talent Services (IPTS), he builds collaborative talent systems across Web3, AI safety, and frontier tech.
Key Takeaways
The Web3 talent dynamic is collaborative, not competitive
Traditional tech treats recruiting as a zero-sum battle—your gain is another company's loss. Brunner flipped this model, creating systems that keep talent within the Web3 ecosystem even when candidates don't join Protocol Labs directly.
"Legacy web2 is much more about competition and winners and losers... Whereas web3 is all about collaboration and working together to drive forward."
This approach led Protocol Labs to develop a shared job board featuring 200+ partner companies, redirecting candidates who weren't the right fit to other opportunities within their network.
Fail fast and iterate instead of waiting for perfection
At Facebook, Brunner spent months designing and launching hiring systems. At Protocol Labs, the standard became: ship something usable now, prove it works, and improve later.
"Get something out the door. That's sort of the equivalent of 'fail fast,' but on steroids. It literally would be like, 'okay, we need interview training, cobble together something we can use next week.'"
"Building the car while driving it... We needed to keep hiring going while also building out all these processes and tools and fine-tuning systems."
This approach extends to all talent processes, from sourcing to onboarding, where speed of implementation trumps polish.
Multi-faceted skills trump specialization
When building a recruitment team, Brunner values versatility over specialization. The traditional model of having dedicated sourcers, tech recruiters, or executive recruiters breaks down in fast-moving environments.
"I value recruiters that can work on any type of role. Every single person on my team, I want to be able to throw them anything from a carpet salesman to a very challenging technical leader."
Versatility meant fewer silos, faster execution, and fewer blockers as hiring priorities shifted.
"You need to not just be able to find hundreds of thousands of people. We went through 200,000 profiles in just 2022. But you need to be able to have everyone trained to be able to assess and get people through the process efficiently while not lowering your hiring bar."
Protocol Labs' ecosystem partnerships keep talent flowing during downturns
When market conditions changed rapidly after the FTX crash, traditional recruiting teams got cut. Brunner instead restructured the entire Protocol Labs recruiting function to support their partner network with dramatically reduced fees.
"We weren't charging agency rates because this was basically a way to help the investments out."
This approach kept Protocol Labs' talent team intact while providing value to their broader ecosystem of 300-400 partner companies. This ecosystem-first strategy became a foundational principle for Brunner's work at IPTS (Interplanetary Talent Services), building relationships that would pay dividends when the market recovered.
Ecosystem talent model in action
Protocol Labs built a multi-faceted approach to keep talent in their ecosystem:
- Partner job board showcasing 400+ roles across 200+ companies
- Talent redirection system for qualified candidates who weren't right for PL
- Cross-company networking events connecting talent with opportunities
- Launchpad program to transition Web2 talent into the Web3 space
This ecosystem approach works because it creates multiple entry points for talent and keeps strong candidates within the network instead of losing them to competitors.
Recruiting infrastructure built for rapid scaling
When Brunner joined Protocol Labs, he inherited a broken talent acquisition function with poor candidate experiences, insufficient tooling, and no structured processes. His team built an entirely new infrastructure while continuing to hire at pace:
- Team expansion from 1 to 30 recruiting team members
- Process overhaul for all stages from sourcing to onboarding
- New ATS implementation and training program
- Interview training to scale hiring capacity alongside team growth
This approach of "building the car while driving it" enabled Protocol Labs to hire 300 people in 2022 alone while reviewing more than 200,000 candidate profiles.
Hedging talent strategy with adjacent industries
To insulate against crypto market volatility, Brunner diversified IPTS's talent partnerships beyond pure Web3:
- AI safety
- Robotics
- Neuroscience
- Biotech
These adjacent spaces share talent pools with Web3 but operate on different market cycles, allowing the IPTS recruiting team to maintain stability through crypto winters.
Hard Lessons
Early pushback without data doesn't work with founders
When Brunner first joined Protocol Labs, he found himself disagreeing with certain practices based on his experience at Facebook. However, simply stating his objections proved ineffective.
"I remember being in meetings and pushing back and being like, 'we can't be doing this.' And I just realized that it was a dead point for me to just push back on it unless I brought data or concrete counter-examples to the discussion."
"Push back on founders but back it with data. The best ammunition is obviously data, but if you don't have that, you need to have concrete experience or trials to be able to showcase."
He learned founders don't want opinions—they want data, examples, and evidence. The better approach: test hypotheses, gather evidence, then present a case for change.
"Founders often get their initial round of funding and feel an urgency to hire without actually putting the time into figuring out what they need."
The Web2-to-Web3 transition
Moving from Facebook's methodical, polished approach to Protocol Labs' "constant insanity" required a complete mentality shift:
"When I was at Facebook, I wanted everything to sort of be perfect and show up in my performance review... but in Web3, it's like, 'okay, fail, I don't care, learn and move on to the next thing.'"
This cultural clash caused significant turnover when Brunner had to transition his team from in-house recruiting to an agency model. Half embraced the change while others struggled with the new dynamic.
Challenging the "founder discount" bias
Founders often hesitate on candidates with failed startups—or overvalue ones with founder titles. Brunner looks beyond labels:
“Execution > narrative. What did they learn? Can they operate at scale? What will they bring to your team?”
The opposite bias also exists—founders sometimes overvalue entrepreneurial experience when what they really need is execution skills. Brunner advocates for deeper context in evaluating founder candidates beyond "success or failure" labels.
Frameworks & Processes
Protocol Labs' three-phase ecosystem allocation model
At Protocol Labs, Brunner implemented a three-tier system for candidate allocation throughout their partner network:
- Direct placement - Candidate fits current Protocol Labs openings
- Network referral - Candidate would excel at a Protocol Labs partner company
- PL Launchpad program - Candidate needs development but shows potential
This framework, now enhanced at IPTS (Interplanetary Talent Services), ensures no strong candidate falls through the cracks and maximizes the ROI on sourcing efforts across the entire Web3 ecosystem.
Protocol Labs' Web2-to-Web3 transition training
The PL Launchpad program Brunner helped create at Protocol Labs serves as a structured onramp for talent from traditional tech to Web3:
- Six-week curriculum on Protocol Labs' ecosystem, community, and open-source technologies
- Interactive programming and networking opportunities with Protocol Labs teams
- Integration with Protocol Labs' broader partner ecosystem
- Exploration of opportunities across Protocol Labs' network of partner companies post-completion
This format, which has influenced IPTS's talent development strategies, creates a reliable pipeline of qualified candidates who understand the unique demands of decentralized environments.
IPTS's VC-backed resident program
For harder-to-fill roles at partner companies, Brunner developed a "success-based model" at IPTS (Interplanetary Talent Services) where compensation was tied to successful placements rather than traditional agency fees:
"We're willing to do these hard things that other agencies don't want to touch on that type of model. A huge limitation of most agency models is that they only tend to work for well-funded startups with attractive businesses. We wanted to turn that on its head because, in Web3 specifically, smaller companies with one or two people and $500k in funding might be just as important as companies with 100s of people and millions in funding. We created our model to be mission-aligned with Web3 and help out startups of all sizes."
This approach, building on lessons from Protocol Labs' ecosystem-first hiring strategy, allows VCs to staff challenging but potentially high-impact roles without significant upfront talent acquisition costs. IPTS now partners with multiple VCs on cutting-edge roles in AI safety, robotics, neuroscience, and other frontier tech areas.
Action checklists:
For Founders
✅ Ship at 70%: Launch recruiting processes before they're perfect. Protocol Labs built while scaling—you should too.
✅ Partner strategically: Build your talent ecosystem before you need it. Protocol Labs' network became their lifeline during market downturns.
✅ Split complex roles: Reject "Frankenstein" job descriptions that combine multiple positions. Define focused roles that real humans can fill.
For Talent Leaders
✅ Hire a coordinator now: Push for this headcount before you're drowning in admin. A great coordinator immediately uplevels your entire function.
✅ Test, don't argue: When founders push questionable ideas, gather data instead of saying no. Run small experiments, then present evidence.
✅ Ask about failures: When interviewing recruiters, focus on challenging searches that failed—their lessons reveal more than their wins.
✅ Share rejected talent: Create systems to redirect promising candidates to partners. Protocol Labs kept talent in their ecosystem even when they couldn't hire directly.
