I’ve been interviewing a lot lately: ~35 this week. The most frequent question I get is, “What do you look for in teammates?” Here’s my answer: Traits: I look for five traits: Integrity, intelligence, work ethic, teamwork, and pride (more here). I have found those five traits are foundational for both a team that is […]
In my first year or two as CEO, I made a lot of mistakes. One that caused persistent pain, and was avoidable, was how we decided on compensation and leveling (titles, responsibilities, etc). Each hire we made in the beginning was fairly ad hoc. We didn’t have an org chart plan for the subsequent 12-18 […]
While there are good board members and bad board members, in general I loved having a board of directors. I found board interactions to be a great opportunity to bring in valuable insights and questions from smart, experienced people who were (largely) similarly incentivized to grow the business. It was an opportunity to pull at […]
That was something that I Googled. Likely more than once because I probably forgot that I searched and found nothing. When I was trying to write the mission statement of my last company I felt frustrated and incompetent. My co-founder and I thought we knew our mission in our head, but getting it onto paper […]
The COO role, more than most positions at a startup, appears ambiguous to many people. That’s partly because the role changes depending on a company’s size, industry, stage, CEO, and many other factors. My friend Emma says, and I agree, that the COO is like the CPO, but the product is the company. The COO […]
The role of leadership– I am curious to find out if leadership changes in web3. With DAOs specifically, is leadership purely informal? Is there a collection of leaders of SubDAOs? In some ways I see the importance of a leader only increasing. In web2 I believe a CEO has three responsibilities. I find that clarity […]
One of the tricky things about web3 is that the subcomponents are vast and overlapping. By overlapping I mean the concepts meld into one another and build off of each other. With that in mind, lets dive into some more concepts I’ve found really interesting as an operator. Smart Contracts- Smart contracts are “self-executing contracts […]
I took the Red Pill. This is the first of several posts laying out my journey down the Rabbit Hole. These are directed predominantly at operators who, like me, are interested in leaning into web3. They focus on fundamental concepts, with sources, that I found helpful for builders.1 It is such a massive and ever-expanding […]
Someone said web2 was about product, web3 is about community. A lot of someones have said that. Some have argued that possibilities of collaboration and organization of communities are greater than the impact purely from the technological advancements in web3. The word “community” in web3 excites me. I’m using community here to mean a few […]
Trust has been an important word throughout my life. Many that know me well would say trust plays a bigger role in my worldview than for anyone else they have met. At the core of web3 is a belief that trust is no longer conferred by a centralized intermediary. Using the same framework that I […]