The Quidli Story So Far

What We’ve Been Able to Accomplish in Six Months

We reached a small yet major milestone at Quidli today: launching an internal working version of our work-for-equity application (off-chain). This means all the respective work and contributions by our team, Squidcore and Squiddites alike, are no longer being tracked by spreadsheet but by software we’re now directly testing and debugging. And as we sprint towards the next milestone of onboarding our early partners/clients, I want to take a moment to share some thoughts on the progress we’ve made in the past six months.

Work For Equity Works

When Florent and I first discussed work for equity and building an application around it, we started with a strong vision for the future of work — companies where all doers are empowered to become owners in what they produce, via equity. Startups today do offer some equity in addition to salary to key talents in order to save money and compensate for risk, but could we build a company where all workers are paid 100% in equity?

Quidli team meeting up over the summer to engage in a development sprint while sporting the new shirts

Despite having no money or workforce, we started preaching the work for equity gospel to whoever would listen, and slowly but surely we found believers who agreed to work entirely in exchange for future shares in our venture. Quidli has recruited more than 20 people to meaningfully contribute, 11 of whom remain regular and active contributors. These include:

the CEO of a Y Combinator backed company

a former legal associate at Goldman Sachs

five full-stack developers

two corporate lawyers

a successful freelance designer

To be fair, not everyone shares our vision, and many have turned us down due to reasons such as requiring a salary or being unable to commit time to a freelance job. But with each person we do successfully connect with, we grow more confident in our belief that equity as compensation can be a tool for motivation, more powerful than money. There’s no other explanation for how we still continue to grow while also maintaining a burn rate of nearly nothing.

Quidli the Product

Now after six months of hard work, we have a strong core team and committed contributors to accelerate into the next phase of the roadmap: shipping product.

As proof of our dedication, we’ve actually managed to stay on track with our road map fairly well, up to the top of Q3.

We’ve followed our roadmap fairly well to the top of Q3 2018

We released an initial white paper;

recruited necessary talents;

established credible advisers;

and built a shortlist of early partners/clients to use and experiment with our first product.

And while there’s still significantly more work to do in fully realizing our goals, having an MVP that all of our contributors are helping to test and improve on together is an exciting indicator of our success so far.

Quidli Going Forward

One thing I imagine nobody in blockchain/crypto expected (but we all knew deep down would happen) is the current state of the crypto market. This will be a major challenge for all of us in the space to overcome, particularly those who intend to ICO. However, at Quidli we’re fortunate to have made the decision to build based on the idea o work for equity, and we are weathering this storm for now without too much impact.

In any case, I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short period of time. This journey has certainly had its challenges, but the incredible level of alignment in our team has brought us far. I’m excited about how much further we’re going to get in the next six months, all while still compensating work with equity!

Let’s rework work together! Follow us to learn more about the future of work, equity-for-labor, blockchain protocols, and to stay updated on Quidli’s progress.

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