Pinterest’s Ex-Revenue Chief Joins Crypto Unicon FalconX

FalconX, a digital assets and cryptocurrency platform, has lured Pinterest’s Jon Kaplan to be the unicorn’s Head of Revenue.

At FalconX, the former Pinterest executive will scale the company’s revenue function and build a high-performing go-to-market engine across sales, marketing, client coverage and revenue operations.

To do so, he will draw on his previous six years at Pinterest, where he grew revenue from $100 million to more than $2.5 billion. Before that, he spent 12 years at Google, including a period as the tech giant’s VP of U.S. Sales.

"Crypto passed the tipping point of mass adoption, and the industry is well funded with more capital eager to engage," CEO Raghu Yarlagadda said in a press release. "The opportunity to be involved in the early stages of the evolving crypto industry is alluring for exceptional talent like Jon."

FalconX has been on a hiring spree since its $210 million Series C funding round in August 2021, which valued the startup at $3.75 billion. The crypto venture wields a sizable war chest to secure talent, and just this month, FalconX revealed that it had acqui-hired software development acceleration platform YourBase.

Alongside the acquisition announcement, the startup also named ex-Carta Chief People Officer Suzy Walther as its Head of People and selected former Gusto Chief Information Security Officer Sujay Jaladi as its new VP of Security.

By hiring Kaplan, Walther and Jaladi, FalconX is establishing leaders for its soon-to-be fastest growing teams as it aims to fill hundreds of marketing, customer support, HR and engineering roles in the first half of 2022.

Crypto startups as a whole are poised for a hiring boom as a growing general interest in the industry is being met by talent-hungry startups that are fresh off of a record year for crypto funding. Over $30 billion was invested in cryptocurrency projects in 2021, more than the 12 years since blockchain’s creation combined.