Topic timeline
Company & Team over time
780 entries across all AMAs, in chronological order, showing the first 150.
14:04 After Ethereum, IOHK was founded to fix two deficits in the space: a peer review deficit and an engineering deficit.
19:39 IOHK started in 2015 with two people and now has a hundred across ten countries with nine figures of revenue, Cardano its largest project.
38:09 All the work is open source and peer reviewed, with research centers at Edinburgh, Tokyo Tech, and Athens, and one coming in the US.
52:41 On history, Cardano surprised North America because the initial token sale focused on Japan and Asia.
1:10:58 The external auditor FP Complete will start publishing reports in February on the good, bad, and ugly of the code.
4:08 The three way split between IOHK, the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo, comparing Emurgo to Ethereum's ConsenSys and describing the Foundation's auditing and trademark role.
17:47 Highlights the weekly public Grothendieck team meetings on YouTube as a transparency model.
1:36:34 Emphasize Cardano is a collective multi-company effort including PNSol, Well-Typed, Runtime Verification and the Foundation.
22:37 Confirms IOHK is fully funded through 2020 for the Cardano project thanks to smart divestment of its Bitcoin treasury.
44:56 Confirms IOHK's team size and monthly spend supporting Cardano development.
0:16 Introduction as CEO of IOHK, a 130 person crypto company across 10 countries with an engineering arm doing high assurance Haskell and a research arm.
0:59 Three research labs at the University of Edinburgh, Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Athens do peer reviewed work on consensus, incentives, privacy and policy.
10:11 Implementation uses Haskell and formal methods with FP Complete auditing, alongside other work on Ethereum Classic, Zencash and unannounced projects.
8:46 Explains why every entrepreneur needs people who can say no to them, contrasting Tesla's governance with his equal power co-founder Jeremy Wood at IOHK.
10:13 Takes a UK fan's question on whether peer review is too slow for a hyper competitive crypto space.
10:50 Argues protocol development must be judged differently than software development since protocols can last for decades.
11:23 Points to PGP's 27 year lifespan as proof that durable protocols justify a slower, more disciplined process than apps.
12:20 Admits IOHK's software release cycles and QA process are too slow and says fixing that is a focus for the second half of the year.
13:15 Lists the checkpoints good protocol teams use: peer review, formal specification, prototyping, and real world deployment.
14:28 Weighs the trade offs of running a 16 country, fully decentralized company against a tightly focused Silicon Valley startup.
17:50 Sums up his view: peer review does not slow Cardano down, but protocol work and software work need different processes.
18:42 Pure number theory has little to do with running Cardano, which is why the science is led by chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, Philip Wadler, and Duncan Coutts.
20:30 Cites Bram Cohen, the credential free inventor of BitTorrent, as proof domain expertise can matter more than a diploma.
51:27 Explains why IOHK funds a design and VR team alongside engineering and science instead of treating design as an afterthought.
52:36 Argues that raw code and academic papers mean nothing to most people until design makes them tangible and interactive.
53:47 Walks through Symphony of Blockchains, born from asking the odd question of what a blockchain should actually sound like.
55:30 Shared creative projects like the blockchain animations unify engineers, marketers, and scientists across the company.
56:41 Admits the design team is understaffed and slow to hire but expects a major AR push heading into 2019.
1:58 Addresses the Cardano Foundation dispute, insisting it will not slow protocol development though it has hurt community growth.
14:05 Defends the timing of the public break with the Foundation, describing two years of private diplomacy before going public.
24:36 Pass along thanks to CFO Geoff Bullock, praised as one of the best he's worked with, for offering help growing Cardano UK.
25:35 Denies that Michael Parsons is stealing ADA, noting the funds remain Foundation property that he would go to jail for misusing.
35:00 The Foundation's ADA simply sits unused if it never reforms, since Cardano is already decentralized enough not to depend on it.
1:29:55 Jeremy Wood's behind the scenes co-founder role handling the company's highest stakes, least visible problems.
1:31:51 Clarifies IOHK does not work directly with DARPA, though its researchers sometimes receive joint NSF and DARPA funding for papers.
6:28 The Rust team is expanding with new hires and steady daily code output.
9:20 Lists the Plutus team attending Plutus Fest, including Michael Peyton Jones, Simon Thompson, Phil Wadler and Duncan Coutts.
14:12 Hiring open source project manager Robin and moving issue tracking from JIRA to GitHub for full transparency.
25:36 Outlines plans to grow in Brazil and Latin America, pointing to Brazilian and Argentine team members already on staff.
1:22:08 Haskell was chosen to attract top researchers like Duncan Coutts, Phil Wadler, Michael Peyton Jones and John Hughes to hard problems.
1:23:42 Admits early hires were too junior or too academically idealistic, making it hard to inject pragmatism into the Haskell codebase.
2:24 Reviews 2018 lessons learned in QA and support, with the helpdesk handling over 10,000 tickets and test coverage improving across four major releases.
7:54 Reflects on the difficulty of onboarding exchanges in 2018 due to language and cultural barriers alongside a still maturing product.
10:16 Blames a second factor in the Ledger delay on a tripartite arrangement between IOHK, a third party developer called Meta Legend, and the Cardano Foundation.
14:29 Reports steadily improving engineering metrics month over month, including faster development time, better testing, and higher code quality.
28:10 Recalls personally funding and building the Mantis client from scratch to give the Ethereum Classic minority chain a real chance to survive.
30:07 Credits building Mantis from scratch in Scala with training developers deeply in the Ethereum ecosystem, but flags that IOHK has spent its own money on it with no revenue from Digital Asset, DCG, or ETC Labs to date.
34:02 Without a funding arrangement from the Ethereum Classic community, the Mantis team will be retired and moved to other projects, though the Hyperledger version continues.
37:48 Contrasts Cardano's continued hiring and funding with competitors laying staff off, crediting the specification driven approach with giving engineers, scientists, and lawyers a shared language and organizational clarity that competitors lack.
6:08 The work was de-risked by running two competing teams: a pragmatic Silicon-Valley-style Rust team moving fast and a larger specification-driven team moving more slowly.
9:55 Reflects that 2018's troubles came from an undocumented, technical-debt-laden codebase whose original engineers had left IOHK, forcing a halfway-house cleanup across 1.1 to 1.4.
26:41 2019 warrants a dedicated product experience officer to work backward from user experience to improve startup time, UI, UX, and multisig, a role heading into the HR queue.
1:11 Announces the IOHK Case Summit moves from a private January event to a public gathering in early Q2 2019, with special announcements planned.
1:06:01 Introduces the Cardano Foundation's new interim board under chairman Nathan Kaiser, alongside financial expert Domingo.
1:07:26 The interim board's first job is cleaning up past mistakes and rebuilding community programs like ambassadors, meetups, and podcasts.
1:25 Clarifies that the Berlin gathering was an internal formal methods workshop, not a public event, addressing Twitter criticism about attendance.
10:01 Calls the workshop a major milestone as the first company-wide formal review across multiple teams, noting only minor changes were needed afterward.
26:36 Points to the company's track record in its first year: over 100,000 users, listings on more than 25 exchanges, no major security incident, and over 50,000 support tickets resolved.
49:01 Reflects on the shift from old technical debt heavy code to a fully specification driven codebase, with about half the system already replaced.
1:26:03 Congratulates graduate student Dionysis Zindros for getting his first paper accepted at the Oakland security and privacy symposium.
9:46 The Rust team's self organized Hong Kong codeathon, hosted by Emurgo, to finish testnet features.
18:04 Announces organizational moves: promote Bruno Paleo to director of engineering, shift Duncan Coutts into a lead technical architect role, and hire David Sier as product manager.
43:37 Admits the hardest part of running a decentralized company is rarely seeing coworkers in person, last all together in Portugal in January 2018.
1:46:45 Own being blunt running a 160 person, 16 country decentralized company through liars, competitor FUD, and the 2017 crash that Consensys answered with layoffs while Cardano kept hiring.
1:47:27 Takes pride that a fully remote team delivers formal methods rigor, Haskell, and model checking all the way into a consumer mobile product, something even big companies do not attempt.
1:42 An international effort with multiple companies, more than 10 universities, over 40 white papers with 20 peer reviewed, a community grown to a hundred thousand and listings on more than 25 exchanges.
3:04 The hard part of a first cryptocurrency launch was the basics: exchange integrations, a help desk, QA and release cycles that get shorter and more customer focused each time.
10:17 The staking task force is asking hundreds of questions before a command line testnet, the whole Rust team is in Hong Kong for a month long hackathon, and stress tests will make nodes Byzantine and DDoS pools to validate the theory.
20:41 Asks to be judged on process instead: a Haskell code base, formal specifications, peer reviewed research validated by third parties with no monetary incentive, and number one in GitHub commits.
29:56 If somebody outbids IOHK after 2020 and does a better job they beat IOHK, since he is a service provider and not a king, and larger companies like IBM or Microsoft could take over in a multi client world like Ethereum with Parity Technologies.
2:09 Praises Vincent and his team for a month of near nonstop work getting the Rust testnet ready.
49:45 Expects to deliver the full 2020 contract scope within its original budget despite a slow start.
1:06:20 Sarcastically deflects questions about IOHK's revenue and his personal income.
4:01 Plans to hire most or all 23 class members into IOHK in technical and business roles, with HR director Tamara Haasen, and teases a three-hour Cardano Effect episode on Africa.
10:49 The stake pool task force question and answer set is being turned into public content once the summit marketing crunch eases.
24:40 Hiring more engineers will not speed research up, citing the classic critical mass problem and IOHK's move away from waterfall processes.
30:23 Is scaling up the team compiling Haskell to JavaScript and WebAssembly to make Plutus contracts easier to deploy everywhere.
0:21 Recaps summit logistics: gathering the whole company and a two day public event with about 750 attendees.
1:37 The summit's goal of showing the human side of IOHK, not just the technology, including its enterprise consulting and research work.
14:47 The outside contractor's code quality was deplorable and had to be replaced, prompting new engineering hires.
15:26 Details bringing on Tweag, Vacuum Labs, and Emurgo as partners while rebuilding a new Cardano wallet from scratch.
17:57 Insists he loses money from delays since his ADA hasn't moved from its address, rejecting claims he's enriching himself.
18:33 The project management overhaul: demos, weekly reports, and bringing in Bruno Paletta as internal director of engineering.
25:22 IOHK has never sold its ADA and isn't a publicly traded company or the product of an ICO, so it doesn't profit from price appreciation.
44:25 Atala gives IOHK a second revenue line and funnels new users into the Cardano wallet ecosystem, like an app store.
47:56 Confirms he isn't leaving IOHK, calling it the company he wants to run for the rest of his life.
5:40 Denies working for a rival exchange founder or that Cardano is dead, pointing to record development velocity.
6:13 Commits to being more aggressive about releasing internal reports and documentation publicly.
28:50 Recalls a conference pitch that turned out to be a $25,000 ask for a consensus meeting slot.
3:28 More than 50 full time engineers are on Cardano and anyone can verify it in the GitHub repositories, so read the actual commits before calling them meaningless.
4:10 Atala is written in Scala while Cardano is written in Rust and Haskell: no Cardano developers work on Atala, and the flow of people has gone from Atala to Cardano, including the former Atala lead who is now IOHK director of engineering.
0:45 Running two companies: IOHK as the full time job, plus Hoskinson Consulting Group, a small Colorado LLC that is the consulting arm.
1:13 Consulting is mostly for teams building blockchains or needing strategic technology advice on things like zero knowledge proofs and multi party computation, always with approval from the other IOHK principals.
1:00 Plans to stop traveling to conferences after July to focus on closing IOHK's backlog of deals instead of building new relationships.
6:40 Praises the engineering team and previews monthly public feature demos once product marketing figures out the format.
8:10 Introduces David Siegel, the product consultant behind the new roadmap, and thanks the Cardano Effect hosts for having him on.
24:51 Explains why most academic partnerships ended up in the UK, Switzerland, and Greece instead of the US, citing Edinburgh's much lower overhead than the Ivy League schools IOHK approached.
45:07 IOHK's Scala development is centered in its Buenos Aires and Poland offices, with roots also in Chile.
46:10 Confirms hardware engineering runs out of Israel and previews a Tel Aviv community meetup during his June visit.
0:54 The Haskell team works the slow scientific way, spec then reference code then refinements, and has now moved to demo driven development, while the Rust team runs a classic agile sprint backlog.
20:50 Manuel Chakravarty leads a very strong Plutus team, and although Plutus could be integrated at any time it stays a post Shelley activity because decentralization comes before smart contracts.
25:02 Success comes from listening, business intelligence and reading the thousands of pages from RAND Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations and other think tanks to build a risk profile per country, then getting paid up front where certainty is low.
30:43 Then funding, scientists and engineers materialized and the project earned the right to try, with more than 40 papers, products in market, liquidity and a community all visible publicly.
36:42 There is no kill switch in Cardano, but the IOHK ADA is deliberately unspendable, which is why claims that he sells ADA to fund his lifestyle are absurd.
46:52 A CEO's job is to know where to go and rally people, not clear the brush; engineers in power often demote themselves to lead engineer and fail.
47:49 Having David as senior product manager on Cardano cuts his meetings from seven a week to two, freeing five hours for partnerships, products and revenue.
50:58 Works 80 to 100 hours a week in intermittent intervals, and nothing he does can make developers write code faster or ship a day sooner.
1:38:12 Visited the University of Wyoming, its computer science chair and math department, and it is nice to spend time at an American university again.
1:47:05 He is not on a month off, he is running IOHK from home and the Longmont office with several hours of meetings every day including weekends.
1:49:25 Shelley development costs millions every month, it is really expensive to keep everybody going.
1:51:56 Yes there will be a team in Wyoming, which is why he visited the university, because a jurisdiction that passes a law deserves real substance not a shingle.
5:55 Contrasts the roadmap's new realistic design with the original attempt to force research into traditional Gantt-chart project management.
6:24 Explains why a waterfall approach failed for research-driven crypto development, pushing the formal methods and research teams toward agility.
6:51 Revisits the 2017 vision of small, competing, focused agile teams whose work emergently builds up the whole ecosystem.
38:43 Expresses pride in IOHK's roughly 200-person team and in keeping principles intact despite 2017 to 2018 hype pressure.
12:15 Running competing Rust and Haskell teams in parallel, one formal methods driven and one agile, and credits small resilient teams with weekly releases for the organizational turnaround.
5:10 Reflects on the arc of building software from whiteboard idea to shipped product and the surprises that come from community feedback.
14:26 He hasn't met the new Cardano Foundation executive director yet but has calls scheduled to discuss strategy.
9:33 The Cardano Foundation's new executive director Heinrich comes from UBS with a law and mergers background and is aligned on transparency, a diverse board and operations, so the community finally has a person to talk to about the foundation being more proactive.
11:10 Despite the markets and the sentiment, 200 people at IOHK and its partners do hard work every day, and it now shows in installable releases through Chocolatey on Windows, Homebrew and Snapcraft.
1:45 No date set for returning to Twitter, but coming back means far less travel and being in the office every day micromanaging the details so Shelley ships as soon as possible.
5:34 IOHK has not sold any of the ADA it received as compensation for its contract, the address and a blog statement prove it, and the lifestyle behind the criticism comes from being in Bitcoin early, not from selling ADA.
4:04 Teams are flying into the Colorado office to plan what comes after Shelley, plus a big University of Wyoming hackathon in September.
10:32 The real 2019 to 2020 challenge is bridging the gap after Shelley, with hackathons in Ethiopia, Mongolia, Israel and now Wyoming proving developer demand.
1:22:28 Addresses key man risk by naming that three people are being groomed within the company to be able to replace him.
0:05 Broadcasts live from IOHK's brand new Colorado office, the company's first physical headquarters despite staff spread across roughly 20 countries.
1:24 Each team runs its own agile cadence, from weekly extreme programming sprints to the formal methods team's much longer research cycles.
14:54 Expresses pride in the roughly 200 person IOHK team and the commercial and academic partners who helped deliver the work.
27:11 Confirms Phil Wadler is still at IOHK training graduate students and writing papers, and recommends Okasaki's book on functional data structures.
48:22 Credits better estimation and steadier weekly delivery over the past year after an early period of unpredictable timelines.
49:59 Names the Cardano Foundation under Michael Parsons as the single greatest frustration of the past four years for failing its contractual responsibilities.
5:22 Working on Cardano since 2015 without golden handcuffs, with 200 people at IOHK and a hundred of them on Cardano every day.
18:25 When the IOHK contract ends in 2020 the work continues until the scope is done, then the community, not a single entity, decides on a new contract.
32:12 The big mistake was overemphasizing the science division and formal methods while lacking a strong product and development focus, then patching it with heavy project management.
34:48 Research driven development has a waterfall shape: papers, prototypes, then back up the waterfall, and even a six month conference cycle is too slow for an entrepreneurial product culture.
38:10 The Cardano Foundation relationship under Michael Parsons is a real regret, and the delay to Goguen and Shelley is why people can say nothing is deployed on Cardano yet.
40:40 No, the IOHK contract to build Cardano cannot be published: it is a standard software development contract with a scope of work, and any overruns are his responsibility, not the funding entity's.
54:32 Not shipping eats at his soul, but there is no manual for building protocols this hard, only risk and execution.
55:39 Atala has no public GitHub or documentation because it is an IOHK product built with his money, not Cardano funds, and there is no moral obligation to disclose it.
56:49 Atala started 18 months ago, is entering pilots, is written in Scala with a full product team, and may be spun out as an IOHK subsidiary doing enterprise blockchain work or joined to a consortium.
1:01:28 What has been delivered since 2015: more than 40 scientific papers, roughly a million lines of code and a product in the top 20 on CoinMarketCap.
1:06:25 Wolfram is obsessed with cellular automata and wrote A New Kind of Science, and Steve Jobs needed the NeXT years to find his way, so issuing IOHK equity on Cardano one day would be very cool.
1:07:41 Turnover at IOHK is one of the lowest in the industry despite how unstable the space is.
1:16:06 The snapshot date will be announced in the blog post, and if the Haskell client turns out to be less relevant IOHK simply takes the loss on the contract.
1:39:28 A trip to the People's Republic of California might happen, and the Hong Kong situation does not affect the organization at all because it is in Wyoming.
11:47 Points a viewer to newly hired commercial directors Michael McDonald and Jerry for pitching killer app ideas.
24:44 Wanting to visit Brazil and Argentina, home to several IOHK researchers and developers.
43:42 Reveals IOHK's new legal name, Input Output Global, though everyone will keep calling it IOHK.
13:56 Expresses pride in the team's pace of at least three releases a week and commits roughly every 30 minutes, plus the nearly 3000 community members testing alongside them.
7:03 Looks past the testnet toward a mainnet productization push, scaling the rest team and bridging the feature backlog gap.