Crypto Startup School: How to build companies by building communities
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Editor’s note: Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas during a seven-week course to find out the way to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the web version of the course over the subsequent few weeks.
In week four of a16z’s Crypto Startup School, the spotlight shifts to putting together companies by growing communities of users, developers, and employees during a decentralized context.
In a virtual fireside chat, 16z General Partner Chris Dixon and GitHub and Chatterbug Co-founder Tom Preston-Werner discuss “Building Companies and Developer Communities.”
Preston-Werner explains how the open-source ethos may be a good way to create social virality among developers, and the way the clean, developer-focused interface of GitHub led to its wide adoption and caused developers to demand it within their own organizations.
He also offers marketing lessons from the first days of GitHub, when the corporate used informal methods of building community during a bid to make “superfans.”
He urges founders to look at a company’s brand as an expression of its core beliefs, with attention on how it helps its users succeed. the rationale people would put a sticker on their laptop or wear a corporation tee-shirt is due to “what they believe they're communicating to others thereupon sticker or shirt … it’s a shortcut for communicating values.”
In the second video, Jesse Walden, a former a16z investment partner, and Mediachain co-founder, and Robert Leshner, founder, and CEO of Compound, do a “Deep Dive on Decentralization.”
Walden starts with a playbook for progressive decentralization — the method by which crypto project creators build a useful product, create a community around that product, then gradually fork over control of the maturing network to the community. This process is keeping with the cooperative model of crypto networks, which drives rapid, compounding innovation through better alignment of incentives and open participation.
Leshner follows with a case study of his experiences at Compound, an automatic market for crypto assets during which lenders and borrowers can close to transact without the involvement of third parties. The compound, one among the primary crypto projects to maneuver through the complete progressive decentralization model, built a thriving community of third-party application developers, who have found out the shop on top of Compound’s smart-contract protocol.
The Compound team has gradually brought this community further into the protocol’s inner workings; within the final stages before handoff to the community, the founding team made changes transparently, with greater reliance on the community’s input, and created a sandbox for experimentation to check governance mechanisms. Decentralizing “allows the protocol to measure forever,” Leshner says, which fosters innovation because developers can trust the protocol with their businesses and livelihood.
In the final video of week four, Tina Ferguson of a16z’s Tech Talent and other people Practices team offers guidance on “Managing a Distributed Workforce.” due to the decentralized mindset and evolving business models at the guts of crypto, founders and managers face unique challenges. In such a fast-moving space, for instance, it’s important to rent someone who has the proper skills now and can also adapt to what’s required in 12-18 months.
Compensation, which could include the allocation of tokens instead of more-traditional shares, also requires close attention. When hiring in other countries, teams must consider employment laws, also as to whether to use Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs) to maneuver quickly via local contacts on important hires. Finally, real-time feedback is particularly crucial during a distributed workforce, as it may be a clear and timely dissemination of data.
