Dan Conway still drove a minivan after making millions in crypto. He made dinner and did jobs around the house. He and his wife, Eileen, also paid off their $950,000 mortgage.
In his account for The Hustle, the Bay Area father of three described life after selling his holdings in early 2018. The couple booked a trip to Africa and bought a second home in Ireland. Back home, there was still a household to run.
He published his memoir, Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape from Corporate America, in 2019. The subtitle points to what the windfall had made possible: staying out of a working life he’d grown to hate. Getting out had been another matter.
The job he had once wanted
Conway had worked toward the career he eventually wanted to escape. According to Kirkus’s 2019 review of his memoir, around 2010 he landed a job at a major media company with a six-figure salary, his own team and a budget to manage.
He’d reached a professional milestone and remained unhappy. The company culture frustrated him, and he wasn’t advancing as quickly as he’d hoped. His account of office life could be harsh: Kirkus praised his critique of bureaucracy while taking issue with his caricatures of former colleagues.
In The Hustle, Conway wrote that he was fired from the job he’d held for six years, before his early 2018 sales.
And the mortgage payoff followed a decision that had put the house at risk. His book announcement said he committed the family’s savings to Ether, the cryptocurrency behind his windfall, and borrowed another $200,000 against their home.
Those savings had been intended for college, retirement, and emergencies, he wrote in The Hustle. Had things gone badly, the family could have faced depleted savings in addition to that extra debt. The eventual payoff doesn’t make the original decision any less precarious.
Writing took over
By September 2019, Conway had spent roughly two years absorbed in crypto and another two writing about the experience, he told writer Mark Helfman.
The work meant revisiting a period he was glad to have left behind. He recalled elation, fears about losing the money and disagreements with his wife. Even knowing how it ended, he said he wouldn’t want to live through it again.
He wanted to reach readers outside crypto, people who might recognize the career frustrations he described.
Writing also brought a smaller, more familiar problem: finding a title other people understood. He worked with a firm to test possibilities. His first choice, Decent Money, hadn’t landed, he told Helfman. He had several meanings in mind, but others missed them. Another candidate, Corporate Hack, combined a reference to his office career with his hopes that crypto could change how companies work.
By the time of the memoir’s publication, his writing had extended beyond crypto. The book announcement listed work on technology, family, and culture, with bylines in Business Insider and Fatherly. He’d spent most of his career in corporate America. Now the office years and family life supplied subjects he could write about on his own terms.
His 2019 author bio still listed him as being in Northern California with his family.
The pull of his old preoccupation hadn’t entirely faded, either. In The Hustle, he admitted that after the kids were asleep, he sometimes lay awake missing the excitement of the market.
He wanted to write more books, he told Helfman, and get involved with nonprofits and his community. After four years focused so closely on his own experience, he was also getting tired of himself.
“I want to hang out with more friends,” he said.
Sources
- Dan Conway’s firsthand account in The Hustle
- Mark Helfman’s September 2019 interview with Conway
- Conway’s 2019 memoir announcement via PR Newswire
- Kirkus’s 2019 review of Conway’s memoir
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