Head of Institutional Growth

About the role

This role will be the first BD and Growth hire at Whetstone Research.

Responsibilities

• Lead institutional growth for Doppler - sales, BD, and the strategic relationships that turn warm intros into bespoke production deployments
• Build Whetstone's institutional surface: funds, asset managers, banks, fintechs, and corporates that want to bring or use assets onchain.
• Be the translation layer between institutional buyers and our protocol teams - feeding product, integration, and regulatory signals back so we build what the market actually needs
• Help us know what we don't know. Which institutional segments are shipping next, which are noise, and where should we be skating to?

What we're looking for

• We believe that the time for Institutions to come onchain is here.
• After a decade of whitepapers and pilots, institutions are finally getting serious.
• BlackRock, Apollo, Franklin Templeton, JPM, Fidelity, and dozens of others have moved from "exploring" to live deployments.
• Within the next 24 months many of these organizations will decide which protocols and infra the billions or even trillions behind them actually settle on.
• We want someone who already lives at that intersection and wants to own Doppler's seat at the table.

You probably have a warm rolodex inside one or more of: the digital assets desks at major banks (JPM, GS, BNY, Citi), crypto-native institutional players (Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, BitGo, Anchorage, Coinbase Institutional), the tokenization teams at TradFi asset managers (Apollo, Hamilton Lane, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree), or the new infra layer (Securitize, Ondo, Superstate, Figure).

You understand why Doppler's novel approach to protocol design matters to a treasurer thinking about a tokenized bond just as much as to a coin launch on Zora - and ideally, you can hold a credible conversation about settlement risk with a CIO in the morning and MEV with a protocol team in the afternoon.

Even better if you've previously built an institutional book from zero at another crypto-native company, or led the digital assets push inside a TradFi institution and are now ready to do it onchain for real. You're comfortable being a player-coach for the first 6 months - running the meetings, writing the memos, closing the deals yourself - before building the team around you.

Generally, we hope that you love this industry as much as we do, that you've been watching tokenization mature long enough to know the difference between the real deals and the theater, and that you're as terminally online as we are.