A Reset for Focus & Delivery

Leadership & Org Update 17

Holo is a startup, a community, in part, an open source project, and we are inspiring a movement for change. Today we are sharing about changes we are making to both drive our operations with focus and to deliver on our mission of creating a truly distributed Internet.

As we approached our sprint to year-end and shipping HoloPorts, our executive team pulled together into a process of reflection and accountability. While evaluating our progress relative to original external promises and operational robustness, we saw that we needed to rethink our structure. We were clear to not do so would be to risk failure on our original vision.

The decisions we made were important for ensuring two things: 1) that we responsibly and effectively manage our organization’s burn rate to reach our Beta release and beyond and 2) that we enable a laser focus on delivering product and catalysing the initial apps that will run on Holo when we launch Beta. Apart from decreasing expenses, this reset called for a reduction in the size of our team. Twenty out of 58 team members have left Holo this past month. This was a painful change we did not take lightly. We are parting with friends and talented professionals that brought us this far, and we want to publicly express our gratitude to each and every one of them.

For the community members and supporters following our progress up close, this communication may feel untimely, given the recent shipment of HoloPorts, the engagement in closed Alpha testing, and an experience of our team beginning to deliver releases and provide direct support every day. But we’ve realized that we needed to shift even further into new patterns that will make us a more nimble and effective delivery organization. For example, we have enabled a new customer facing team that is responsible both for facilitating the regular release-based flows of information to our customers while listening deeply for the critical feedback and detail that will enable us to improve our software with each successive release.

More than 1500 HoloPorts were shipped during January even if it was almost a year behind schedule. The fact is we’ve begun delivering to our enthusiastic backers and so far more than 700 HoloPorts have been registered on the network from 56 countries. We also have over 200 people registered for this month’s DevCamp and, for the first time in January, our community members completely self-organized and delivered a hAppathon. The last few months have demonstrated our commitment to delivery and given us a realistic look at what will best serve our stakeholders in 2020.

Beyond being accountable to our stakeholders, at Holo we are also aware of various shifts taking place in the world today, and seek to create solutions quickly as trust in the current infrastructure erodes. Holo and by extension Holochain remains one of the most active DLT and ICO-funded projects on GitHub. As one of the leading distributed crypto projects, we take seriously the incredible urgency for Holochain and Holo to deliver on the promise of true decentralization by providing a sustainable and scalable architecture. There is no time to lose.

So in the spirit of a practical revolution — and in collaboration with our stakeholders and community — this reset will enable us to more effectively build from the inside out the infrastructure and services needed for a free, open, and distributed Internet of people. At Holo, we are dedicated to making distributed, peer-to-peer computing accessible to everyone.

Our deepest appreciation for the continued support and engagement goes out to all of our customers and communities who share our vision.

– Mary Camacho

Executive Director