Hey team,
It's been a great week. Sorry this update ended up a little long, lots of great stuff happening. Sending a little early since I'm heading on vacay :)
We have 2 offers 1 offer out to candidates (woo hoo for Saul accepting!), 4-5 conversations ongoing (with lots more intros happening), and we sent our first message using XMTP this week!
It's so great to see the progress. I want to personally say thanks to all of you for doing the hard work that is being so early at a startup. There's a lot of things we all have to push forward in the early days that can seem like a lot (hiring, documentation and questions, protocol and product definition, research, etc) while also feeling like nothing is really happening yet. Both are true. It's one of the hardest parts about the early days of a startup.
One value I wanted to remind us all of in these early days is this: Assume goodwill.
This value is so important when we all are pushing so many different balls up a hill. Everyone is here because we are incredible at what we do. I've personally found that it can feel like people aren't sharing enough or might be doing things without letting others know and sometimes it can feel like we are out of the loop. When in reality, most people are heads-down focused and pushing their hardest to get things done.
Instead of feeling like someone isn't keeping you in the loop, assume they are just working really hard to make things happen for all of us. Which is almost always true. When we assume goodwill, we simply reach out and ask to understand what others are doing and how we can help vs think people are intentionally leaving us out. Be proactive, ask questions and get up to speed and be helpful to others.
I remind myself of this because in a culture with a bias towards action, it can sometimes feel like trains are leaving the station without us. I feel it too sometimes. Let's assume goodwill, run and hop on the train, and figure out what else needs to be done to make the train go faster. As long as we are on the same train, going the same direction, we can all push together to go as fast as we can.
🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂
Here's to another great week!
I'm on vacation Oct 18th - Oct 22nd. Everyone have a great week!
Before I go, I'd love to hear from you in the comments:
How are you feeling about the weekly dispatch?
How could it be better?
What is it missing? What else might we not see?
Shane Mac
This is our first dispatch including goals. Weekly goals. We will have our big mission and quarterly goals but I love the idea of feeling progress weekly. Small steps add up to big leaps. I'd love feedback on the best way to have teams provide input into this dispatch. How should we show weekly goals across our company in the simplest way?
Last week goals
Oct 11th
- Send a message with a client via protocol
- Write a plan for growth and BD to share with team
Next week goals
Oct 18th
- Share expected product deliverable for Nov 1st
- Decide what we want to show at NFT NYC
- Invite partners, investors, and developers to NFT NYC
- Decide on initial partners based on network growth plan
XMTP & Crypto industry news
- Emre let us know that he's debating between 5+ offers but still very excited about XMTP. Matt has been really helpful in helping him think through the role
- We made an offer to Saul for the Product Manager role
- @snormore shared the first-ever message sent! Should we send a "thank you" to Satoshi's wallet address soon? @mg inspired that idea :)
- We are in final conversations with Ashish, Jason, and Martin for engineering (we are aware and working on outbound for more diversity. Also going to ask our investors for help here as well. Also up to us internally)
- Met with Guild.xyz and it was a really great use case + team that could integrate our protocol asap. Here's a video clip from the call of them talking about the 3 use cases they'd love to use XMTP for
- I added everyone to our Partnerships Coda CRM. This is where we are tracking all partners, events, use cases, and status of our integrations with them. Mostly for visibility to all this will be managed mostly by BD & Growth.
- @petermdenton Published a really powerful piece that needs feedback from everyone on the team around how we should think about the product roadmap and how it aligns to our network growth and goals. I encourage everyone to read and join the conversation.
- Swag v1 is ordered! thanks, @darick for the design help and also the design assets for NFT NYC
- We published our first draft of our XMTP Values for all to read, share feedback, and contribute to
- @flora introduced a great post about how we think about making decisions in engineering that is worth reading and joining the conversation
- Shane thought: I feel like we should keep pushing to add more clarity to how we introduce, think through, and make decisions at XMTP. Would love more thoughts here to find what works for us. There's no right or wrong answer, but having a consistent way that we all think about this is important. Here's an article from the Coinbase COO on how they make decisions which @mg shared that I found very simple and clear
- How do we want to make decisions at XMTP that is simple, clear and can be used across the entire company?
- @petermdenton and I met with Graham about our meme artists role (he's meeting with @mg this week) He has one of the most unique backgrounds of Dev Rel + Community + Creating Unique Content & Creativity. Could be a really interesting fit.
What we are reading/listening to
Matt and I had the honor to join a meeting last week with the former SEC director and senior staffer of the Biden administration. Our main investor a16z invited us to the meeting to discuss regulations that will be coming and how we as an industry can be aligned to help move web3 forward in a positive direction. I would say the call was both optimistic and a very serious sense of urgency + change is coming. We are very lucky to have a16z behind us. The main highlight from the call was how we as builders and companies in web3 can have an aligned voice around 3 specific areas:
- Crypto is the antidote to Big Tech. We need to separate ourselves from the monopolies of web2 and show how web3 can share more opportunity and control to everyone vs centralized power under a few dictators.
- Crypto is needed to compete globally. We need pro-crypto support from the Government to be able to compete with China and other superpowers on a global scale. Without support, we can be severely left behind in both jobs and economic upside.
- Crypto is about jobs and economic upside for all. Inclusion, equity, and opportunity.
This week they published something that I think is worth all of us reading and I've shared the main highlights and links to the materials below.
The a16z policy framework is phenomenal.
- build a better-decentralized internet
- tailor regulations to specific activities
- harmonize oversight rules
- modernize disclosures norms
- clarify tax reporting rules
- introduce DAOs as a new org structure
- tackle the ESG challenge
Read more about what this all means here: