On Jan 17th, the community member Balazsk (@balazsk) asked the DAOstack team about the status of the project Backfeed.

A synthesis of the answer provided by DAOstack’s architect Matan Field is that with Backfeed he had taken too much on himself as at some point he was effective the CEO, CTO, chief scientist, and chief product. Besides, in his words, the project lacked focus overall. Due to the many questions regarding function and design of decentralized collaborative platforms, during 18 months of work, Backfeed circled through 5 different products in search of the ultimate one that would materialize the vision and bring it into reality. Thus, it became clear that the team should stop and really specify the product it needs/wants to develop, before jumping again into further development.

So in some way DAOstack is an incarnation of Backfeed, definitely in vision and concept, as well as in Matan and Primavera. Though the strategy is a bit different (e.g. less focused on protocols — though they are present as well, and more on the all-purpose governance framework and the entire DAO stack), as well as the core partners, code base, and other details.

In addition, DAOstack already started with more hands for each of its efforts. An example of that is Adam Levi, the team’s stellar CTO partner. When he joined around Jan-Feb 2017, it was already 7 months after the official inactivation of Backfeed (May-June 2016). So although the vision remained the same, the partners structure was new, the product and strategy was quite different, and the code base was written from scratch (now with @matan more involved with the code itself). It seemed that too much time had passed, and too much of the team was replaced to remain with the same company, business wise. Practically, it means that there was a solid impression that new investors/partners would not invest/join a new company with the (equity) debts of an old one. Putting off Backfeed was an emotionally painful decision, but it seemed (at least back then) pretty much inevitable.