One thing that’s becoming increasingly clear is that the reason why Bitcoin works as a decentralized technology is because it has a special mission of not achieving anything. It’s an anti-mission, it’s like the eye of the hurricane, it adapts only to remain the same as everything around it changes. It’s a fulcrum.
These types of fulcrum-like missions are very rare in economics, usually tech companies are meant to innovate as fast as possible. This means that things have to happen blazingly fast. If you look at companies like Tesla, the shareholder meetings are largely theatrics. There’s a board of directors which basically advises shareholders how to vote, and the shareholders, because they believe in the directors, will overwhelmingly just follow the lead the directors give them. This means that even though shareholders can in practice vote and influence outcomes, they don’t want to go against the core leadership, because they trust the core contributors, who are “in the details” to know what needs to be done better, and rightly so.
Unfortunately if I am right, this means that the decentralized tech meme is dead and we need a hard pivot. Many people will be irked by this. “You promised us DeFi, you claimed you had no CEO and now you want to go centralized and get a CEO, wtf man?”
It’s a pickle, no doubt about it. The intellectually honest thing is to explain that our assumptions were incorrect. That while our idea was noble, reality rejected it. And yes it does look like a scam, but you gotta ask yourself, what’s the alternative? Double down on a concept even though no one knows how to make it work just for the sake of it? This is the woke thing where you can never move on from being wrong and you commit to being wrong and to endlessly victimize the victimizers.
We all gotta make our own minds in regards to whether @yago is honest or not. If you believe he’s a scammer, then sell. If you believe he’s honest then let go of the old concept and support Sovryn’s pivot.
Personally I am leaning towards more integration, more centralization, less tokens, less committees and more focus for things that need to innovate fast. A lot of things need to be garbage collected. Sovryn is a jumbled mess of protocols, tokens and projects. It’s like a company where everyone’s kinda doing something on their own, but not really.
I am fine with decentralization and stagnation in regards to layers that are soil-like - you use them as a fulcrum, but don’t really need to change them much.
As for where the CEO should come from. This is important. Typically external CEOs have almost always been a mistake in corporate history. This is because they don’t get the culture, they don’t get the product, they are not necessarily a culture fit and all they want to do is apply their short-term thinking and MBA-ize a project. There are countless examples of great projects becoming glorified consulting companies when something like this happens. And conversely almost all great CEOs have come from the inside. Particularly people who have grown through the ranks, have understood the product and have demonstrated an affinity to it, and have earned the right and the privilege to call the shots.
Unfortunately Sovryn’s in a bit of tough spot because as far as I can tell it hasn’t really started yet so there are no people who’ve climbed the ladder that can be called to action in this manner. My understanding is that Yago is the founder of Sovryn (correct me if I am wrong) and the fact that he’s saying that he’s not interested is definitely a red flag. This means that he basically no longer believes in the project. It’s well known in the Silicon Valley that the best VC funds prefer founder-led companies. It’s also well known that the #1 reason for the failure of a company is people. One of the worst red flags is when the founders don’t know each other very well (e.g. “We met at a Bitcoin conference last week and thought this would be cool.”). That’s terrible - these people don’t know each other, they don’t know each other’s weaknesses or strengths, they are operating purely on hype and they are most likely going to fall apart at the first sign of trouble. VCs like stories like “we met in college 10 years ago, we’ve been best friends ever since, both of us really like Star Trek, we started one company that failed, and now we are building together this new company. We have the same values, but we have different strengths and that makes us complementary to each other.” These guys know each other, have proven to be resilient and compatible and will handle difficulties together.
This is why I think @yago has to step up and can’t simply say he’s not interested. He should be interested if he’s still interested in Sovryn, if not the intellectually honest thing is to say he no longer believes in the mission and he’s abandoning his own project. But that’s very problematic because he did convince Sovryn to use our funds to build his next project.
@yago the ball’s in your court.
