2019-12-05 · timestamps by ADAtainment
UPD 12/05/2019
- IOHK is an engineering company and was never built to do marketing, community management, exchange relations or lobbying, yet it has been doing all of it unfunded because the Cardano Foundation under Michael Parsons ignored its mandate.
- The Foundation is being restored in three phases: a legal and financial cleanup, then building the capabilities it should already have, then diversification into a genuinely community run organization.
- Tamara Haasen and Nico join the Governing Council to build HR, operational and technical capability, including starting the Cardano Improvement Proposal process and a solutions group that feeds requirements into the roadmap and the treasury.
- The current board is explicitly interim: within 12 to 24 months every IOHK and Emurgo linked member should resign and be replaced by independent people, and as CEO he will write the letters if they overstay.
- 2020 is the make or break year for Cardano, so criticism of the Foundation is welcome but it has to come with empathy and a willingness to work on the problem.
20 entries
A dedicated video on the Cardano Foundation, prompted by a Crypto Wiser video and Reddit and Twitter comments about the Governing Council and the independence of the board.
IOHK is at its core a software engineering and science company, not built for marketing, community management, exchange relationships or a floor of lawyers writing about regulation.
Building a cryptocurrency has four dimensions, operations, delivery, commercialization and capitalization, and Cardano's magic is that it started as a collection of entities rather than one.
The Cardano Foundation is the single most important entity for long term decentralization: it shepherds community management, market liquidity relationships, adoption and the Cardano Improvement Proposal process until it makes itself obsolete.
IOHK does a long list of unfunded work it never wanted, supporting exchange wallets, running a helpdesk with thousands of support tickets, and doing press releases, comms and marketing that belong to the Foundation.
The prior chairman Michael Parsons made a strategic decision to ignore his mandate and squandered the community's time, resources, faith, trust and money, and the tripartite structure let the other two pillars compensate.
Phase one of the restoration was technical and legal: no proper internal control system, badly kept books and an ESA complaint, cleared with Grant Thornton for a fraction of what other foundations spent.
Phase two is doing the work Michael Parsons was supposed to do: talking to exchanges, community management, branding Cardano and finding the elevator pitch.
IOHK writes software for a client and needs a product owner to set the backlog and priorities, for example whether Ledger support comes before multisig, and in the absence of one has had to be its own product owner.
The second wave of people, Tamara Haasen and Nico, is about building capability so functions can be handed back from IOHK and Emurgo to the Foundation, the same people who grew IOHK into a 230 person company and built Yoroi.
Phase three is diversification: involve democracy, create groups people can join, expand the Ambassador Program, diversify funding and build a Governing Council of independent experts, which is why Tamara, who ran IOHK's HR department, is there to install control systems and recruit.
Nico is a strong CTO who ran the handoff of Icarus to Yoroi, the most successful product in the ecosystem for user experience, and as the first technical expert on the Foundation board should open the Cardano Improvement Proposal conversation with Sebastien.
The Foundation needs a solutions group that talks to solutions architects building real applications on Cardano, turns improvement proposals into RFPs with budgets and brings them to a treasury system for the community to vote on, which by 2020 becomes the business and technical requirements for Voltaire.
The Foundation was a mess a year ago with books that were not even kept correctly and now has proper processes and personnel, but this is an interim board that should be gone within one to two years and replaced by people independent of IOHK.
The lost years cost millions of dollars and missed windows, leaving two options, hire complete strangers and hope they are not another Michael Parsons, or install trusted long term colleagues who can get the work done.
2020 is the make or break year for Cardano, with engineers working seven days a week, more than 50 Jormungandr releases shipped and good progress on the Haskell side, while the Foundation has to do three to four years of work in one.
Nico is a top five percent programmer and CTO in New York City who is undercompensated and could join any financial firm, and Tamara trained at law school and as chief of staff and HR and culture officer understands the social dynamics and incentive schemes of distributed systems.
IOHK linked members should not sit on that board long term and as CEO he will write letters instructing them to resign, expecting Emurgo to do the same, with the whole board replaced within 12 to 24 months, because these operations are public goods that belong at the Foundation where they run more transparently.
Credits to the existing council for thankless bureaucratic work: preserving bank accounts that would have been closed, dealing with auditors and regulators, restoring the Foundation's commercial reputation in the Swiss jurisdiction and convincing staff to stay.
The Foundation was intended to be a sponge for criticism, so be vocal about concerns, but have empathy for the situation and choose working together over bringing people down.