Business In:Brief with Jonathon Miller (Kraken)
Jonathon Miller
Managing Director of Kraken Australia, 2020 – present
Prior to Kraken, Jonathon founded Australia's longest running digital currency exchange, Bit Trade, in 2013. Bit Trade was acquired by Kraken in January this year, and since then Jonathon has been with Kraken and overseen a series of milestones as it has increased its presence in Australia. Find out more about Jonathon, who he admires, his achievements and his advice on the importance of creating a work-life balance, below.
What was your first job?
My first non-hospitality job was working one day a week for an Internet advertising startup during university just post the dot-com boom… this was well before Google dominance. It was a super vibrant place with a whole bunch of young people wanting to make a mark.
What's your proudest achievement?
Other than raising two amazing kids, it would have to be collaborating with a group of diverse people to build a business and mould it into a shape that was robust and transparent enough for a global enterprise to acquire it.
What's something that you have learned in business that took you by surprise?
That sometimes the most direct way of achieving a goal is to take the long way around.
How do you plan on growing your business in the near future?
By working with amazing people and bringing exciting, innovative and fundamentally unique products to the market.
What other business leader do you most admire and why?
He's super controversial and it remains to be seen as to whether he will be a once in a century genius or leave a trail of destruction in his wake, but Elon Musk is a person just crazy enough to try and make the future happen.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
To hang in there, grind away and make sure that creating a work-life balance is a part of your routine; this is because more often than not it is not a blitz, but a war of attrition.
What advice would you pass on to someone starting out in your area?
This is true for entrepreneurs in all fields but especially true in a highly evolving landscape of crypto and blockchain: never assume that you think differently. If you've thought of it, someone else has probably already had that thought, done a risk analysis and turned it into a product. The most important thing to do is execute your ideas well!
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