Hey team,
We are so stoked to have this crew on board. Considering the speed at which this came together and the people that are behind us, we feel both humbled and amazed. We are so fired up to build this company and protocol with you.
We wanted to share a few important things and how we could use your help:
- We are staying quiet and stealth for the time being about XMTP. Please do not share any details about what we are working on, or who is involved.
This is a network play and we need to have both a great product and the partners out of the gate, which will take a bit of time. What we don’t need is early, unnecessary attention, nor triggering competition prematurely right now. - We need your help finding the very best people.
Here’s the ask: “Who are the 1-2 people that you'd tell your best friends to go work for?” That’s who we want to meet.
Job descriptions are here: careers.xmtp.com
Here are the key roles (4-5) we are looking to hire, all of which can be senior:
- Full Stack Engineers
- Software Engineers with Protocol, Cryptography, and/or Distributed Systems experience (bonus points for consensus mechanisms)
We’re just getting started and could really use your help behind the scenes with hiring since we’re not going to make a public statement.
Also it’s just a suggestion but here’s maybe an idea of some things you could say when talking to people about this, to ensure we keep things under wraps for now:
“We just invested in XMTP and they’re building a messaging protocol for web3 and crypto networks.”
“It was started by experienced founders and a team that’s built startups in the crypto and messaging space for longer than a decade. They’ve also got a syndicate of some great investors with deep strategic ties throughout the space.”
Last note, I wanted to make sure everyone is aware that I brought on a co-founder,Shane Mac, who I’ve known and worked with for the last 10 years, and also lived next to each other in SF for a long time. Shane’s first startup, Gist.com (a social CRM) was acquired by BlackBerry in 2009 after which he worked on their Messenger product (BBM). His last startup, Assist, was the leading business messaging and bot platform that built on top of Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Apple Business Chat, and other major messaging platforms and was acquired in 2019 by Conversocial. He brings tons of leadership, operational, recruiting, sales, and messaging infrastructure background and I’m so stoked to have him on board.
Outside of the immediate ask I’d love to invite you to join our investor Telegram. Just click and you’ll be able to join:
- Telegram (Investors only, we will be chatting and also doing Clubhouse-like discussions here)
Thanks again for your support, we’re so excited to work with you.
P.S. Just so everyone is aware of everyone else, here is the amazing syndicate who we are lucky enough to have backing and supporting us with this round. Leads are in bold. Some participated directly, many via a custom AngelList Rollup Vehicle:
- Alexis Ohanian
- Anthony Pompliano
- Ben Huh
- Betaworks
- Bryan Irace
- Cooper Turley
- Courtney Guertin
- Dan Romero (Coinbase)
- Diogo Monica (Anchorage)
- Eric Arsenault (Rarible DAO)
- Ethan Beard
- Fernando Martinelli (Balancer)
- Fiona Kelly & Eamon Leonard
- Form Capital (Josh Williams & Bobby Goodlatte)
- IDEO CoLab
- Hawktail (Michael Polansky & Robert Pollak)
- Leyden.vc
- Jason Warner (Github)
- Jesse Pollak (Coinbase)
- Joe Stump
- Jordan Messina
- Josh Fraser (Origin Protocol)
- Kain Warwick (Synthetix)
- Maaria Bajwa (Sound Ventures)
- Martin Green (Cambrian Asset Management)
- Matthew Liu (Origin Protocol)
- Meltem Demirors
- Michael Dunworth (Wyre)
- Narendra Rocherolle
- Nascent
- Offline Ventures (Brit & Dave Morin, Nate Bosshard, James Higa)
- Ricky Engelberg
- Robert Leshner (Compound)
- Roham Gharegozlou (Dapper Labs)
- Ryan Selkis (Messari)
- Scott Belsky
- Semantic Ventures
- SK Ventures
- Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary)
- Stani Kulechov (Aave)