Community Empowerment Organisers
The new CEOs empower & organise communities of people to get results. It is a very different model to being a top-down executive where you control everything centrally.
If I die today, let my tombstone read: “Here lies a man who got to see Patrick Collison in the early days of Stripe and Vitalik Buterin in the early days of Ethereum”
Two people. Two movements. Two very different styles of operating.
Chief : Community
Executive : Empowerment
Officer: Organiser
CEO
Patrick was the ultimate startup company CEO. Erudite (that means well-read), totally focused & incredibly fast.
His homepage even has a section dedicated to speed:
Vitalik was the ultimate startup protocol CEO. He could context-switch between Mandarin lessons on his phone, protocol implementation details, and the future vision of the project like it was nothing.
His homepage is a reflection of his varied interests:
Companies, Communities, Cults & Care
Stripe is a company with a developer community.
Ethereum is a protocol with a developer community.
Stripe is owned by ~3,000 people and used by billions of people.
Ethereum is owned by ~100,000,000 people and used by millions of people.
Stripe has top-down management which is based in California and Dublin.
Ethereum has bottom-up engagement which is distributed across the planet.
Stripe ships software run on carefully managed private infrastructure.
Ethereum ships software that is run by anyone who chooses to run it.
Stripe is largely closed source and built engineers who are employees.
Ethereum is totally open source and built by anyone who chooses to help.
Stripe will go public in 2022 on an American stock exchange after 10 years.
Ethereum went public in 2015 on cryptocurrency exchanges after 1 year.
Stripethereum
Stripe has been on a Collison course with Ethereum for half a decade. The dollar-based stablecoin volumes have been too incredible to ignore:
When you look at Stripe as a system for helping entrepeneurs on the Internet, you start to see the strategy taking shape.
Patrick and Vitalik care deeply about empowering people to build.
Both of them had one key insight which might have looked like this:
If I make it easier for engineers to create economic code. I can change things.
Products for Protocols
I am trying to triangulate how I should approach Balance. I don’t think either approach is quite right. Total centralisation & closed source development alienates the protocol community. Total decentralisation & leaderless, asynchronous work results in terrible products.
It is a hard Balance to strike.
Want to help me?