You backed me, not Balance

Why 2019 was so hard & what I am planning for the 2020s

Dear Balance Community,

I took 3 months off last year to recover & reset. Balance as a company was not growing revenue fast enough. I could not raise more capital for the company & so I poured huge sums of my personal savings into it to keep it alive. I was also failing my team as a CEO. They got tired of my management style, which was erratic & irritating. My team forked away the open source code to start a new company called Rainbow.

All of you have supported Balance in different ways. Some of you paid for our products. Some of you retweeted my Tweets. Some of you invested in our crowdfunding campaign.

I feel an enormous sense of gratitude towards this community of people who have backed me with their time, energy & money.

I owe you all. A lot.

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A quick refresher:

2014: I helped out Ethereum for a couple months on some user interface concepts.

2015: I was paid a little bit of Ether from the foundation for the design work I did.

2016: I started Balance, a macOS app company with two friends on a pirate ship.

2017: The price of Ether sky-rocketed & I got sucked down the rabbit hole.

2018: Balance shipped 4 major releases & moved over $20,000,000+ on Ethereum.

2019: I lost both of my grandmothers, the faith of my team & the love of my partner.

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Please read this Twitter thread about why I shut down Balance’s products:

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Hey everyone, This is a hard thing to share but I have decided to shut down @Balance_io’s web & mobile apps. I want to give some context to the decision and what I’m looking for next. 5 years ago, I saw Gavin Wood speak in San Francisco and showed Vitalik around the Valley.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

I offered to help design some interfaces for the @ethereum project and chatted to @avsa on the early forums. I returned to the UK and made a bunch of mockups for Gavin’s presentations on Ethereum’s potential. I helped out for a couple months then moved on to some freelance gigs.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

3 years ago, the foundation was kind enough to pay me for that early help in Ether. At the time, Balance was a personal finance side project and it was just meant to be fun. When things exploded in 2017 I got sucked back into the Ethereum rabbit hole. It was a fascinating time.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

It felt like there had been lots of progress but that it was still really hard to use Ethereum. What was a token? How do I send one? What is my actual balance? What can I do with any of these tokens? I saw the amazing potential of the projects and the ugly side of the ICO hype.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

I wanted to try and give back to the Ethereum ecosystem but I didn’t want to sell a meaningless token as that felt dishonest to me. I decided that an equity crowdfund would be the way to go as it gave us a legal way to raise a sensible sum of capital.

medium.comWhy We Are Not Doing A Billion Dollar ICOWe are doing an Initial Crowd Offering. Crowd, not coin.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

I felt a huge amount of responsibility after taking investors’ capital and trying to deploy it in this very early space. I have done my best to try and support a team along the way. I have a lot to learn about how to manage projects. I am really grateful to everyone who helped.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

With all of this work, I have felt a strong desire to give back to the Ethereum community wherever I could. Gav & Vitalik took a risk on me in the early days. I have never paid myself and have always tried to make sure anyone working on the project was supported financially.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Ultimately, I have not figured out how to build a sustainable business at the interface layer on Ethereum. I have tried to support the project myself but could not keep doing that indefinitely. I feel a huge sense of guilt for letting down my investors who took a bet on me.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Along the way, certain projects offered me small sums of tokens to help them. Some of those offers would help Balance so I assigned them to the company. One thing I might experiment with is returning this capital & these tokens to investors through a DAO. I am looking into this.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

I want to get back to doing what has worked for me before. Finding promising people and projects where I can help out on product design and growth. Helping aliens out. I have built small profitable businesses in the past. Starting a startup in a new market is very different.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Trying to be a CEO of a company without a clear business model has taught me a lot. I have tried to act with the best of intentions but people have had to tolerate me pushing through a learning curve. Juggling all this while trying to get a visa definitely stretched me thin.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Now that I have decided to shut this project down and search for other projects where I can help, I am feeling a lot better. I am extremely grateful to the Ethereum community and all the people who have supported me and this project along the way. Thank you everyone. 🙏

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

PS: Heading to bed after a pretty overwhelming response to this thread. My inbox is full of kind messages & offers to look at interesting things. Balance Manager helped thousands of people move millions of dollars of tokens around the Ethereum system. It had a good run. Onwards.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

PPS: The existence of @argentHQ & @zerion_io made this decision much easier. We now have a mobile wallet that’s suitable for new users and a financial dashboard for advanced users. Both teams have created products that I love and recommend to others regularly. Amazing work. 🚀

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

PPS: The team contributed to an enormous number of Ethereum-based projects along the way. Highlights: The @WalletConnect protocol was built by @pedrouid. We worked on data ideas with @quickblocks & @graphprotocol. We hosted @haydenzadams while he built out @UniswapExchange V1.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Some rough data on @Balance_io: 💻 5 apps built across 3 platforms 💰 ~$2m monthly payments sent 💗 10 open source contributors 👫 ~20,000+ individual users 🌎 50+ countries accessed Building on an open source financial stack has taught me a lot about Ethereum’s potential.

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Things that have gone down: 📉 My savings account 📉 Balance’s bank balance 📉 My desire you travel a lot 📉 My belief in wallet startups 📉 My cofounder relationships 📉 My mental health & happiness 📉 My faith in many early Ethereans 📉 My trust in many thought leaders

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Things that have gone up: 📈 My Twitter following 📈 My focus on shipping 📈 My project advisor tokens 📈 My set of early investments 📈 My number of friends in crypto 📈 My understanding of Ethereum 📈 My appreciation for great CEOs 📈 My faith in open finance & #DeFi

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While Balance has not been a commercial success, the things it has taught me will contribute massively to my future financial success. It gave me:

• Access to the United States

• A huge presence on Twitter

• Time to study how Ethereum works

• Early access to incredible investments

• Offers to join the advisory boards of companies

• Access to huge amounts of confidential information

I am working on a way to give back to the people who have given so much to me.

I will share more with you later this year.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ricburton