We Hire Smart People. Then We Tell Them to Argue.
"Why is this a bad idea?"
The first time I heard it, I did a double take. We were in a meeting and our CTO, Rahul Raina, went around the room asking everyone to brainstorm why his idea was wrong.
In every company I'd previously worked for, speaking up was encouraged. But I'd never seen a leader actively solicit criticism of their own thinking, let alone seen it codified as a cultural practice. At TRM, this behavior has a name: farming for dissent. And it’s one of the clearest signals of talent density we have.
What “farming for dissent” really means
Farming for dissent isn’t debate theater. It isn’t about endlessly re-litigating every decision. And it isn’t designed to create a culture where being contrarian is mistaken for being smart (is there anything worse?). But it is about building the conditions where the best idea wins.
Bryce McPhail, a senior product manager at TRM, describes how the practice actually shows up in his team's work:
"Farming for dissent isn't something that we have to try to do. It's known that it's part of your job to challenge each other. And it starts with a culture. You can't really challenge people and have it be received the right way if you don't do so in a culture that already has trust and respect built in."
In most organizations, dissent requires courage because the default behavior is silence. At TRM, staying quiet when you have a better idea goes against our cultural norms.
The practice was established by Esteban Castaño, TRM's CEO and co-founder, who built it into our operating principles from the start. The original motivation was practical: in the blockchain intelligence space, the threat landscape evolves faster than any single person's mental model can track — and it requires a diversity of perspectives to get right.
Why talent density requires dissent
Here’s our working hypothesis: Smart people want to work somewhere where their ideas are heard. When the best ideas win (regardless of timing or seniority), the work gets better. When the work gets better, more smart people want to be part of it.
Consensus-seeking cultures quietly filter for agreeable talent, where the people who go along to get along stay. But the people who need intellectual engagement — the ones who want their thinking tested and their arguments stress-tested — either leave or never apply in the first place.
Adam Williams, VP of product at TRM, draws an important distinction: "Dissent is ‘I have a different point of view, and I want to share it.’ Insubordination is ‘I'm not going to do what you've asked us to do.’"
Dissent is about ideas, and it happens before a decision is final. Once a decision is made, we "disagree and commit." We challenge ideas upstream of the commitment — a structure that gives our people agency without creating organizational chaos.
How farming for dissent works in practice
Farming for dissent is a cultural expectation, built into how work gets done across TRM.
Product teams
In product, farming for dissent looks like a product manager owning their vertical with the expectation that they can fully defend it. Bryce explains:
"You’re expected to run your vertical as if you own the business. And as part of owning a business, you should be able to answer questions, accept feedback, and accept challenges — and thoughtfully respond to them and defend your opinion. But it's not about being right, it's about getting it right.”
Bryce describes what this looks like in practice as “coming in with an idea that you fervently believe we need to do and presenting it with your whole heart and mind, while also being open and aware.” He continues, “If somebody says, ‘I have different data or a different viewpoint; let me tell you about it,’ you should take that in and be able to steelman the argument — or you don't really know why you believe what you believe."
Engineering teams
In engineering, farming for dissent looks like knowing when a decision is reversible — and when it’s not — and calibrating accordingly.
Sepandar Sepehr, a senior software engineer at TRM, describes a recent code review where a colleague used AI to propose a technically functional — but architecturally complex — solution to a memory issue in our blockchain data ingestion pipeline. The solution worked. But Sepandar pushed back:
"We needed to add some judgment to take it a step further and have a cleaner solution. So I used AI to come up with a better solution that was more generalizable and easily applicable to a lot of different chains with minimal impact to how we operate." Ultimately, the team agreed, iterated, and shipped something more maintainable. The dissent made the work better.
Go-to-market teams
Kinsey Cronin, strategic account director at TRM, has a method for selling into markets where customers may not yet be able to fully describe what they need — demonstrating how farming for dissent externally is just as important as farming for dissent internally.
As a sales veteran on our private sector team, she works with organizations still figuring out what AI intelligence tools can do for them. So she comes prepared with a working hypothesis — a starting point for discussion — and then listens for where it doesn’t land. Proposing an idea and expecting to get corrected requires and openness to being wrong, and a willingness to hear dissent.
"Being at a company like this means that you're not just given solutions and then expected to go sell them,” Kinsey explains. “You are creating solutions by helping understand what the customers’ needs are, and brainstorming to build those solutions together."
When farming for dissent is politically challenging
The real test of practicing dissent happens when the disagreement is uncomfortable — or when the person you’re pushing back on has more authority, tenure, or proximity to the final call.
Bryce describes a moment when he believed TRM needed to make a big investment to update a core product. He had customer conversations, data, and cross-functional alignment. He brought the idea to Rahul, TRM's CTO. Rahul dissented, pushing back on whether the economics would scale to justify the investment.
In reflecting on how he processed Rahul’s feedback, Bryce says, "One of the things Esteban said in an all-hands that stuck with me was something like, ‘Do you want to be liked or do you want to be better?’ Now, every time I go into a meeting and present an opinion, I'm actively looking for ‘Did I get better?’."
Kinsey experienced a similar challenge when TRM heavily pivoted resourcing to public sector growth. But her customers — on the private sector side — still had needs. So she kept advocating for product resources to support them.
Reflecting on what that experience taught her, Kinsey says, "The most important thing for me was knowing that I had done my job in communicating the need and collecting the necessary feedback so that if the answer was no — which it often was — I felt like I had made the case internally and given all the information I could to the decision makers to help them make the most informed decisions possible."
How we encourage productive dissent
"If I ultimately disagree but feel confident that I've sufficiently communicated my perspective to somebody else who is the decision maker, then I disagree and commit,” Kinsey explains. “I move forward and make the best of it — something I think we all do really well here at TRM."
This healthy tension requires three things:
- Psychological safety (so people actually speak up)
- Clear decision authority (so someone can call it when debate has run its course)
- Timely resolution (so disagreement does not stall execution)
Bryce notes, "TRM is awesome in the sense that you have the ability to disagree. And you're expected to disagree and own outcomes and push back if you believe something is wrong anywhere that you see it. But you better have a reason for it, because somebody's going to ask you why you believe what you believe."
What farming for dissent signals if you’re thinking about joining TRM
When TRM talks about farming for dissent in a hiring conversation, we’re making two implicit claims:
- The people we hire are worth listening to. An organization that institutionalizes dissent is betting its employees have something valuable to say — signal about our hiring bar.
- We believe the best outcomes come from rigorous debate, not from anyone at the top having the right answer first — signal about our culture.
"I always want and always invite disagreement,” says Adam. “It doesn't mean that I'll always agree with it or accept it in terms of making a change. But I very much try to create a culture of ‘Tell me what you think.’"
Very few organizations institutionalize dissent at scale. It requires leaders who believe it produces better outcomes, for everyone in the organization to trust that disagreement will not be quietly held against them, and for clear decision frameworks to be in place so that that challenges and commitments don’t get tangled.
Our space is not a domain where we can afford to miss the counterargument. The problems are too complex, the stakes are too high, and the threat landscape moves too fast for any single perspective to get right consistently.
Farming for dissent makes our work better — and it makes TRM a place where ambitious, intellectually confident people want to build their careers.
If that sounds like the environment you’ve been looking for, we’re hiring.
