Origin Protocol Team July 2018, Photo by Cuong Do

The entire Origin Protocol core team got together in San Francisco last week! It was an amazing chance to bond and really develop some of our product offerings. We had a blast and I think it is a good time to reflect on what we are working on and why it is working so well.

Here are my big takeaways:

When They Say Team Matters, They Mean It

I love working with this team, but until working with them for the week I didn’t understand just why. We hired Yu Pan (read the post here) which made a huge splash in the industry. Little did I know that the first experiments on PayPal were to get payments to work on Palm Pilots, and when that wasn’t going so well he included a way to pay for email… which turned into one of the most well know product growth campaigns of all-time. Same thing happened at YouTube but those early experiments resulted in a true team taking his coding strategy of ‘launch, even if it starts a fire’ and had a team that would take that fire and make it production ready. Yu Pan recently demo’ed a decentralized messaging platform (a jaw dropping moment for most in the Engineering Call) and the path to get that into production is going to mimic what that group of friends has already done. The team that helped him prototype and launch so effectively is now at Origin. This was my first time meeting Cuong (read about him joining Origin here). What an absolute delight.

Keep calm and HODL, Photo by Stan James

It Matters What You Love Outside Work

Stan James, our first hire (read about him here), is a brilliant adventurer and calligraphist (as you can see by his beach art pictured here). A team outing to the beach talking about art makes us better than a coffee or virtual hangout. Building a company is super hard, especially in the blockchain space, and perspective always helps. If you are running a company it is important to celebrate the passions of your talented employees.

Teach Fast, Together

I took part in a few conversations that took a really complex issue that had been a mystery for me for months and turned it into something I could teach. There is something about in person meetups that will add to the speed in which you can teach and learn.

Decentralization Will Add To Our Lives

As often as we use centralized services (Uber, Airbnb, and Bike Sharing) we kept on feeling bad with how poorly the services treat their ‘employees.’ It seemed every driver complained about how they felt shorted by the central company or that they felt like they were not treated fairly. We can’t wait for our protocols to help get that driver as close to 100% as possible.

Everyone Is Our Investor

One of our earliest supporters is Pantera Capital and we had dinner with them on our first night. Thanks for joining to Lauren Stephanian, Paul Veradittakit, and Joey Krug. In non-crypto startup projects you have your investors who you have certain information and treatment for and then you have your customers who you might have different communications with. With how we have chosen to run the company everyone is our investor and we need to treat them with the same level of respect and candor. Token economics are more than just code, it is how you connect with your community.

Dinner with Pantera Capital, Photo by Cuong Do

Do It The Hard Way

Time after time when we have seen the easy way or the hard way that would benefit more people we have chosen the hard way. We do almost all of our meetings in public, we write and publish our code open source not being afraid to be the first project to try to get something to work, and we build our community authentically and one on one. We could take shortcuts, but we don’t.

One Final Point

There is always something more to do and we are all doing the best we can. If you need something from us and have not received it, please feel free to reach out!

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