A big round of applause for the seven people who took half an hour and did the survey that was disseminated on Keybase. Nobody is in a position to reprimand those who didn’t do it, after all it was clearly voluntary, and people could have been busy, may have forgotten about it, or even just hadn’t seen it in the first place. Still, those who did it really deserve a good tap on the shoulder. Personally, whoever you are, you’re one of the reasons I’m not dropping out.
“To maintain life on the edge, on the cusp of the phase transition, you need to be constantly probing your system.” - Safi Bahcall
First, the ‘easier’ batch of questions with abstracts of their answers:
Do we have clear objectives:
- Yes.
How do collaborators find communication:
- Sufficient, of good quality.
Pain points:
- Not enough time, and not enough people. /Good problems to have, and most impotantly the team has made great effort to address that./
Highlight of one’s day:
- Solving problems with like-minded individuals.
Here’s Steve Jobs making a great case for DAOs ahead of their time:
“The greatest people are self-managing - they don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it. What they need is a common vision. And that’s what leadership is: having a vision; being able to articulate that, so the people around you can understand it; and getting a consensus on a common vision.” - Steve Jobs
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Now, a summary of the answers to the ‘tougher’ and less tangible /ethereal :D/ batch of questions:
Key trend moving DeFi forward:
- Growing awareness of the importance of transparency and decentralization.
Are we fully utilizing our potential?
- Still early-stage, industry is missing robust scaling, composable and interoperable solutions.
What are we disrupting?
- Investing, ownership, governance.
What’s an economic value proposition which makes users’ lives better?
- Lower entry barrier; being permissionless; transparent operations.
Who is our customer:
- Crypto savvy users, defi enthusiasts.
Where do our customers come from:
- Ethereum community, DeFi.
Are we ready for a wider audience:
- At this point, not really.
In ‘Loonshots’ Safi Bahcall proposes that phase-transition physics can illuminate human organizations. Companies that are “crystalline” may be efficiently run but don’t innovate, and those that are “liquid” produce floods of ideas but no discipline. The best companies are disciplined and innovative at the same time.
“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” - Steve Jobs
In conclusion, any feedback welcome, as it helps us grow, so I propose that we have a shared document where collaborators can freely share any thoughts they may have, and do so anonymously. We could peek inside that document once a week to see whether anyone has shared anything, it will serve as a sort of a suggestion box.
