💠 Talent, Time, Timing & Tokens 💠
The compensation competition for the most talented people in the world is heating up. Teams that think carefully about their token compensation plans will attract the best & most ethical people 🥰
Capitalism is a giant compensation competition. The projects that can attract, manage & reward the most talented people in the world win. You see this all the time in Silicon Valley, the coliseum of capital allocation:
🔍 Google was able to use its liquid gold stock options to absorb a huge amount of the intellectual capital and stop many of them starting startups.
🥽 Facekook is desperately changing its name to Meta because no one with ethics wants to work there any more.
💳 Stripe is growing faster than PayPal because it has a CEO who cares deeply about helping entrepreneurs on the internet instead of selling advertising.
All of these companies are now losing the compensation competition to one thing:
Tokens
📜 Shares are not shared 📜
Complicated stock options with insane tax implications are losing to tokens
At its core, I believe that Silicon Valley has won the global compensation competition. If you want to get rich but don’t want to start a company, this is the best place on earth to do it. Restricted Stock Units in large technology companies and vesting stock options in startups can set your family up for life if you know how to pick great places to work.
Ethereum has beaten Silicon Valley in 5 years.
The smartest kids from the best engineering schools on the planet do not want stock or options: they want tokens.
I have met multiple Stanford and Berkeley graduates who have made 7 to 9-figure sums in the last 2-5 years. Big tech and small startups simply cannot compete. The old compensation technology:
Fiat - Countries - $, €, £
Stock - Companies - $GOOG, $FB, $SNAP
Options - Startups - Stripe, SpaceX, Notion
The new technology is the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum. If you are a brilliant technologist and not earning tokens today, you will regret it in 2-20 years.
Now, tokens are still rife with abuse and issues. I wrote about that here:
However, it is really becoming clear that the best people on the planet far prefer vesting liquid tokens to illiquid options in some future event. It is just too alluring.
⚔️ Divide & Conquer ⚔️
The Ethereum Foundation & Consensys spread the Ether far and wide
One of the things I think the Ethereum community did so well was spreading the Ether around far and wide. Joe Lubin realised he had too much of it so he spent it on a few thousand people at Consensys. The Ethereum foundation allocated small sums to a vast number of people who did everything from human interface design to plastering the walls in Zug.
Even better, millions of people around the world have been able to buy $ETH before it started to rise. Over the years, this has lead to an incredible number of people becoming independently wealthy from Ether. We now have a capitalised community.
⏳ Timing & Time In ⌛️
Did you help create the prototype, the product or the pride?
I know several people who helped Ethereum for ~1 year and received 250,000 Ether. Sadly, many of the them have lost their minds or are total drug addicts. They helped build the prototype protocol but left the community due to their inability to stomach unfathomable levels of wealth.
My heart does not bleed for them. They should get help.
Their timing was impeccable. They helped Ethereum launch. But they stopped contributing and made far too much money.
I have written about projects’ stages before. In short, I think great projects progress from prototype, to product, to pride. The team who really cares knows when pride is appropriate. I have seen this magic at work with my friends who work at Stripe. Well placed pride is a powerful force:
My gut feeling is that people should be rewarded most when they have committed to a project for 3-6 years. The first 1-2 years are where you are getting familiar with the innards and the potential. Everyone I know who has done great work really starts to enter their stride when they hit the third year. Things just click.
🥰 Attracting, Empowering & Inspiring 🥰
Vitalik Buterin is the best recruiter the planet has ever seen. No one even comes close.
The magical thing about open source community projects is that everyone can come and go as they please. The Ethereum community has seen an incredible influx of geniuses and charlatans. People come and go all the time. It is like a fluid group of people gathering digitally and physically all aligned around a protocol.
Vitalik is at the centre of this group but he does not put himself above anyone. He seeks to empower everyone instead of overpowering anyone. It is amazing to watch.
No one is being hired or fired by the Safari Wallet community. We just hope people want to come and help us make an amazing wallet for Apple’s ecosystem.
With that said, we recognise that Ethereum did pay people who helped. We are thinking carefully about how to manage this respectfully.
🍲 Survival Salaries Until It Thrives 🍲
Communities should make sure their members are not worrying about rent
Worrying about rent has ruined many creative flows for me. For a few years, I refused to get a job so that I could focus on kitesurfing and designing things I wanted.
One of the most destructive things to my creativity has been the financial anxiety this induced. I am a big believer that having 12 months of savings increased my brain’s capacity more than almost any other productivity hack.
Now that I am inviting people to contribute to the Safari Wallet. I want to make sure no one is worrying about making rent. That will allow them to focus.
Wallets are social 🫂, cultural 🖼, financial 🏦 & political 🗳
The tool you will open on iPhone later this year will be a totally new class of product
The product we have designed is trying to bring the best of Ethereum to people’s pockets. At its finest, Ethereum creates new social bonds, inspires cultural moments, helps people with their finances, and allows them to express their opinions clearly.
The tools that people use to access the magical protocol are terrible. They are poorly designed, slowly engineered, financed by the old Paradigm, or just totally careless.
Want to work on mobile wallets?
If you are interested in exploring the perimeter of wallet technology in the Ethereum community, we would love to welcome you to the Safari Wallet project.
We are a group of engineers, designers, organisers, creators & explorers: