Spinning Out

As many know, Grid+ is the first internally incubated venture to spin out of ConsenSys. This is exciting and daunting and has given our team the opportunity to help pave a path forward for many of the other teams within the ConsenSys mesh that plan to spin out in 2018. My guess is anywhere from five to ten teams will follow our lead in the next twelve months. As such, building a streamlined process is something our team desires to give to our ConsenSys cohort.

Spinning out of ConsenSys does not mean leaving entirely, but it does mean standing on own feet as a separate entity. All of the shared services that have been invaluable to Grid+ and other spokes need to be built internally. Finance, HR, Legal and Operational functions are all being formed for Grid+, many with the help and input from members of the ConsenSys mesh.

Finance

Companies in the blockchain space are likely to encounter challenges when searching for banking relationships. There are many forward thinking commercial banks that have provided these necessary services to startups for more than a decade — but only a handful that are interested in dealing with the ambiguity brought on by a blockchain company. I’m happy to report that Grid+ has been banked for the past few weeks and the customer service we’ve received to date has been world class.

Selling GRID tokens

Our token sale brought in USD, BTC and ETH (read a previous update for more insight). Nearly all of our costs are paid in fiat currencies, thus we need a way to sell a portion of our crypto holdings for fiat. As a team, we have no desire or bandwidth to actively manage these holdings through day trading, and thus do not need account on a large exchange such as Coinbase. Instead we’ve been on-boarded as a client to a very reputable OTC desk. I felt comfortable going this route as I’ve known one of their core team members from the early days of the NYC bitcoin community scene. Again, customer service was exemplary. We sold about 50% of the BTC raised for USD. We have sold zero ETH to date and have no plans to do so until required for scaling. We have a low current burn rate, but that will grow quickly as we onboard additional team members in Q1.

Growing the Team

Our current team consists of five core members:

Mark D’Agostino — Chief Executive Officer

Alex Miller — Chief Technology Officer

Karl Kreder — Chief Security Officer

Matt Walters — Vice President of Engineering

Cole D’Ambrosio — Controller

We have had quite a few ConsenSys team members help us get to where we are — one notable mention goes to Yunyun Chen. She devoted a great deal of time and effort to ensure our materials were all beautifully designed. The plan going forward is for Yunyun to help us find a full-time designer and to lend her talents as needed on a go forward basis. She will remain a full-time employee of ConsenSys but we all very much consider her an honorary team member and she is welcome to spend time with us whenever she desires.

Technical Hires

We recognize that Grid+ will not be able to achieve its many ambitious goals with only the current team, thus scaling the team to bring on the talent we need has been a priority. Karl is leading our efforts on the agent buildout and Matt has been interviewing candidates for the following three positions:

Embedded Hardware Engineer

Embedded Firmware Engineer

Embedded Linux Engineer

These will likely be our first three technical hires in Q1. We are looking for our hardware team to all be physically located in Austin, TX. If you have recommendations — please do not hesitate to reach out to us at careers@gridplus.io.

Non-Technical Hires

Outside of all the complexity of paving a path for spincos at ConsenSys, my main focus has been on scaling up the non-technical team members. The first hire we brought on was Cole who had been second in command at ConsenSys in the Finance group. Cole is a CPA based in Florida, has an MBA from UF, and has been integral in helping internal finance operations flourish as ConsenSys grew from 150 people to ~500 over the past 9 months. Cole will be in a transitional role, helping bring up to speed four new finance hires for the ConsenSys mesh before being able to devote 100% of his bandwidth to Grid+. As an aside, I went to undergrad with Cole and he is one of the hardest workers I have ever met.

To date, we’ve been extremely scrappy — as is consistent with most startups. We’ve hit the inflection point where everyone picking up slack during fire drills is fine, but not ideal when attempting to efficiently scale. We will likely bring on two additional team members by mid January for the following roles:

Business Analyst

Business Development

Outside of these two roles, we have been making progress on two senior positions as well:

Legal

Manager of Utility Operations

To date, we’ve relied heavily on ConsenSys’ Legal team. I’ve now been with ConsenSys for two years and I firmly believe building out our legal capabilities was one of the best investments ConsenSys has made thus far. The Grid+ team has great amounts of gratitude for what Matt Corva and Pat Berarducci have done for ConsenSys, Grid+ and the broader Ethereum community. While they are very open to helping us on an ad hoc basis, we need to on-board a legal expert who is well versed in various US energy regulations.

The lead of our utility operations will be integral to our success in Texas. There are many requirements for this position that are placed upon us by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). We have found an individual we plan to move forward with and will share details on that once official, likely in the first half of Q1.

Operations

As of last week, we’ve completed our full application into Justworks and will have our team on Grid+ paper starting Jan 1, 2018. This has been a surprisingly lengthy process, as we needed to request quotes for healthcare, dental, disability, worker’s comp, etc. All plans are now selected and all team members are now fully on-boarded (big thanks to Cole for driving this).

We identified two small offices to rent in Austin. They are ~$2k / month and we will likely sign a lease for one of them next week. This is where the hardware team will work. Software development and operations will be remote for now, but the goal is to slowly bring all team members to work together in Austin, TX. In the meantime, we plan to have monthly in person working sessions with the full team.

REP Tech Stack

From a technical standpoint, our team has been interviewing and demoing many of the off the shelf software products used by Retail Electricity Providers, or REPs. We’ve been looking for the most modular solutions as we need our agent platform to seamlessly integrate with other components to create a fully functioning REP in the state of Texas. Some of the offerings we’ve seen have been monolithic that are non-desirable, but we’ve found two potential offerings that we are diving into further before making a decision. We will continue to schedule meetings to speak with representatives after we’ve fully gone through the available documentation.

Agent Device

Karl has narrowed down the chipset we desire to use for our secure enclave. As we are in the middle of negotiations, few details can be provided at this time. We will have a thorough write up once the design components are finalized. We have been meeting with hardware experts from many well-known firms to discuss pros and cons of various methods used when building secure IoT products. If you want to read more on some of Karl’s thoughts on current hardware wallets that exist, see his blog post.

Research and Development

The past few weeks have been interesting for the Ethereum ecosystem, especially due to the rabid rise in popularity of crypto kitties. As four of our five team members have a pet cat, we were obviously interested in this new application that had the community enamored.

Maximus — Mark’s new kitten

Although Alex loved this new application, the aspect he struggled to come to terms with was that his transactions were now costing 50 GWEI rather that the 0.1 GWEI from only a few days before crypto kitties went viral. Our team has a Grid+ specific need for scalability, and thus Alex began researching how one could off load some network congestion for applications that rarely left their own environment (i.e. didn’t need to cross over to other on-chain smart contracts). Alex has spent the past two weeks writing a short white paper titled Relay Networks which we will release next week. It is currently being reviewed by some internal ConsenSys team members, including those on the protocol engineering team known as Pegasys. The goal is to not only release this research next week, but to also completely open source the specification. That’s right, not only did Alex find a neat way to simply scale now, he also created a demo implementation that can be used by anyone. He will likely release a video next week along with the paper to demo his findings.

This Relay Network design is something we are investigating to use for Grid+ in early 2018. More details will follow in coming posts.

Community

A community member named Banan reached out to me on Telegram and mentioned that he would be visiting NYC as Central Park was the setting for an integral scene in a science fiction novel he is writing. I hosted him for coffee in Brooklyn one morning this week and we had a very fruitful conversation about Grid+, ConsenSys, Cellarius and the Ethereum ecosystem. I connected him to a few community members who are doing artistic work that may be of interest to him. It’s great to meet enthusiasts when they are in town and to hear their thoughts on the future of Ethereum + Energy.