Hello Gitcoin! I am Vivek Singh — and I am excited today to say that I am joining Gitcoin as a Content & Customer Experience Engineer.
My background is in a combination of management consulting and startups, where I’ve spent time working on growth, content, and product. In the blockchain world, I am editor of Kryptos Studio, where I write about cryptoeconomics, blockchain’s impact on productivity, and interview leaders in the cryptocurrency world.
As 2017 ends, price speculation had led me personally to a larger degree of distraction than I’d like. Speculation overwhelmed building, in the ‘boom’ portion of the hype curve. While history never repeats itself, it does rhyme.
I am excited to start 2018 firmly on the side of building. I accepted a position to join ConsenSys as the first business hire on the Gitcoin team.
I met Kevin Owocki, Gitcoin founder and CTO/founder veteran, at ETHWaterloo, where he was hacking on the product aiming to make it easier to fund Open Source technology projects. I enjoyed seeing his energy, sense of humor, intellectual curiosity and technical skills first hand. But perhaps importantly: his deep, mission driven approach to building a company:
Our mission is to “Push Open Source Forward”.
Open Source projects bring billions of dollar of value to the world, but have traditionally lacked mechanisms for funding. We’ll be testing a few hypotheses to make that easier, starting with a marketplace where repo-owners, developers, and funders can interact to build open source software. A number of early Web3 projects have posted tasks on Gitcoin already, including MetaMask, Truffle, and ETH GasStation.
As Gitcoin’s third employee, I’ll be focusing on content, community, and product experience for all aspects of the Gitcoin marketplace as we get going. As an early hire, it’ll be curious to see how the role evolves over time.
Simultaneously, I will continue blockchain research as an employee of the ConsenSys Mesh. The company has fully embraced decentralization, where spokes are fully autonomous, yet supported by the ConsenSys Hub.
“Meshocracy”, from ConsenSys:
Teams are defined as either a Circle or a Spoke. Circles are long-standing teams which are part of the Hub, and provide services to ConsenSys spokes. Spokes are small start-ups or businesses that utilize Consensys resources. The circles within the Consensys Hub speak to the needs of the Spokes and the various circles make-up the Mesh.
ConsenSys strives to be a flat organization, and draw on some methodology from holacracy. Authority is distributed rather than hierarchical, and we believe in rapid organizational iteration and transparent rules and policies.
Excited to join this rapidly growing organization, experimental company — both in blockchain and in organizational governance. Again, a hypothesis worth testing. If interested, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn on Twitter or check out Gitcoin below!