Shala Burroughs ~ The Big Autocorrect: Leading in Times of Ambiguity Panel

[Music] look okay i think we're ready to start uh the big autocorrect leading in times of ambiguity huge thank you to our panelists for being here my name is shayla burrows and i am the ceo of status group and i think we're just going to go down the line and if everyone can introduce themselves by your name your company and we're going to do something a little bit different for this panel which is each of the panelists are going to introduce themselves by citing one of the hardest decisions they've made in their current business i think you know it's very easy to think that those who have the branding and the cash behind them have this very easy life and my hope is that you can see um into a few of the tougher decisions that our panelists have had to make to really grow their business and to keep them on the straight and narrow so with that i'll hand it to you arthur thanks shayla my name's arthur brock and i'm with holochain which is one of the coolest crypto projects you've never heard of um and uh we we're based all over the world where we operate out of gibraltar and in terms of hard decisions actually one of them had came right on the heels of our ico where there was a miscommunication between one of the people marketing and producing the ico and a big supporter who was drumming up lots of interest and who had done a lot of blockchain projects and thought that they could do the kind of wheeling dealing backroom deals but ours was like just a smart contract you could only get get stuff out of it in the ico and they sent us 3000 eth after the ico thinking that they'd had an arrangement to buy our token and we had to confront do we take a huge chunk of our pool of the token you know and pay them out of the expectations that they had from the miscommunications that occurred with one of our people and things lost in spam filters and stuff uh and we ended up really you know standing behind our employee that made the the mistake but uh it was a really tough financial decision to make i can imagine thank you um i'm uh lilly dew uh i'm an angel investor advisor largely in the crypto space these days um we had a company called earn.com which we sold to coinbase last year uh and so i was with 21 earned for a total of about three years uh and 21 um uh was so we kind of inherited uh this company called 21 which was very well funded uh and one of the largest fully integrated bitcoin miners at the time uh until the last crypto winter struck and really just sort of obliterated the uh the economics of being really a minor outside of china um and certainly being a full stack miner unless you were either in china or bit fury um so you know we inherited this company in may of 2015 that had done very well and raised a whole lot of money before the economics of bitcoin mining became clear and before sort of the price started to go through the floor while the while the hash rate went through the ceiling uh and you know we had the situation where we had about negative 80 in long-term liabilities about 30 in cash the negative 50 no working product and about 69 months of runway um so that was um it was not uh the clearest choice to make to even elect to inherit that um but uh you know we're able to um we're able to get ourselves out of that situation um you know the company was sort of like the cessian ship where was you know hardcore bitcoin miner and then we pivoted entirely into a software company um that was basically you know initially like a paid linkedin and then really a way that you could sort of sell and monetize minutes of your time and then we're able to exit that so uh everything kind of changed in the intervening three years um but uh for a long period of that time it wasn't uh very clear exactly how it was going to turn out but for some reason we just kind of had faith that that we could we could do it and we're going to kind of make it work somehow and it turned out okay in the end hi um my name is sam cassette uh i'm chief strategy officer at consensus which i think you all know um and consensus obviously is a is an anchor of the ethereum ecosystem and we have to make decisions that are in line with that viewpoint right and so you know one of the questions that we talked about on this panel and i'll show i'll talk about it more later is um how do you deal with uncertainty and you know it relates to the hardest decisions right but i actually think in the beginning of consensus things were a lot harder in uncertainty terms than they are now right like like we weren't sure if we would all go to jail even for for even writing smart contracts and deploying things that we did um and so you know the market shape always needs to dictate what it what a company like consensus looks like right because we we do take up and fill out and support broad swathes of the market and so you know when the market changes shape uh sometimes it changes shape in a good way sometimes uh you know the 2017 happens there's so much excitement um you know people are willing to explore a lot of avenues but sometimes you know markets contract um some people decide that you know certain things like token launches aren't as interesting etcetera so and meanwhile you devoted all these resources to going down those those avenues and making sure that you know we're doing r d and developing ips and giving all that to the market so you know when the market changes shape what do you do right you don't want to cut muscle that you've built in this big organization that's important to the ecosystem and at the same time you need to double down on what is important right and so there's this really fit i won't go too into boring stuff like this but there's a really famous harvard business review article from like 1997 about leading in uncertainty that's really famous and you know what some managers do is they and we don't have managers per se in consensus but what some people do is they double down they get scared and they don't make any decision right and that that will kill you right and and so and also assuming you know exactly what's going to happen will kill you um because you could be wrong if you bet everything you bet the farm on on one avenue so figuring out how to reshape yourself which we just did at consensus we you know we've been making a bunch of announcements about consensus 2.0 um figuring out exactly how to shape that organization such that it rises up to meet the tremendous market demand from enterprises governments central banks like fortune 500 companies um that stuff that is is helping the ecosystem move forward but also things that don't fit the shape of the market anymore getting rid of those things those are really hard decisions but you know that's pretty normal to do in a company and i think any leader always has that decision on their plate absolutely hi everyone my name is eric voris and i'm the founder and ceo of shapeshift my little three-year-old athena is here so i'm gonna say hi athena real quick um so hardest thing that that i've had to do in my career and maybe one of the hardest things in my life was the imposition of kyc on shapeshift so um when shapeshift started we we're a digital asset exchange and we allow people to convert one kind of digital asset into another uh quickly and easily and safely safely meaning that we protect the actual users of the platform so we don't take custody of their funds and when we started we didn't take their personal information either both of which were important to actually protect people that we care about and it was always a legal gray area of how possible it was for us to do that kind of thing and as most of you probably know in the in the fall we imposed kyc on shape shift so now everyone that uses it needs to give us their personal private details the reason that this was the hardest thing i've ever had to do was because i am ethically opposed to doing that so i was essentially put in a position where i felt that i needed to do something morally wrong in order to allow the company to persist in order to prevent myself from going to jail um it's a really awful position to be in and um i think as we as we build this industry and as we build this ecosystem we always have to be figuring out which fights we want to fight because we need to be fighting this over the long term and that was that was a big challenge and it's been a challenge additionally because i can't really talk about it as much as i want to even talking about it adds legal risk and adds problems maybe someday i'll be able to do that um but that makes it even harder and i think there are a lot of people in the ecosystem that were very disappointed and upset with me for making that decision and i can't even explain to them really why it happened so that's been rough so eric you hit on something which i think is really abundant in this industry which is uh developers especially come and are it'll ideologically passionate about a certain vision that they have uh and so one of the questions i have um you know arthur you're dealing with this too which is how do you um how do you reconcile uh the ultimate expiration or uh uh sorry the ultimate expression of that ideology with reality and the practicality of actually going towards um that particular vision with your developers yeah this has actually been a significant challenge for us in our own organization and company culture um if you sort of consider a spectrum of projects that are sort of oriented focused on you know revenue business get get rich you know type of opportunity of the market versus sort of uh we're in it for the social impact and change holochain is way over on the social impact and change end of that spectrum and we attract a lot of people with very strong ideologies about what it is to you know run an organization like that like it should be completely flat and you know everybody should have an equal voice and you know like those kinds of things which make it rather difficult to actually run a business be accountable for funds that we raised in an ico you know things like that and some of these people were able to recontextualize those those ideals in a context of sort of a growth curve like we are where we are at this stage part of where we want to be requires the tools we're building and you know we can't already be there yet and you know people who are kind of able to to take that in as a growth trajectory as opposed to like a standard that we can measure ourselves against already at day one um we're really able to stay in the organization and we actually had to let some people go who who we're not and um but the other thing that we also find is that there's there's a whole there's a there's kind of an ideological minefield in the space there's people that come in with very strong kind of anarchist ideals or libertarian ideals or and um i feel like we end up you know running into those mines in our community chats and stuff quite a bit so you know arthur mentioned that to realize that vision you know you had to let a few people go to actually get there consensus similarly is going through consensus 2.0 and moving into you know the next stage of your evolution so sam i'd love to hear from you um what you had to think through as you shifted your business and let some teammates go who had been with you since the very beginning sure so i think it's a little bit related to the last question actually and um consensus has room for all kinds of things in it because we're a very broad organization right we have fortune 500 companies we have you know projects that we're doing for central banks uh implementing you know trading systems for them and uh it takes a certain kind of person to do that it also takes a certain kind of person to make like a tcr party or you know some of the weird more cutting-edge kind of stuff that that i think is more in line with the denver vibe um and and so i think there is room for all of that um for us it's really more of a strategic decision about what lines of business what we want the shape of consensus to look like going forward and we want both of those things right we want we want you know at the risk of sounding too crazy we want normal people right we want we want incumbents to start using this technology because we think it'll benefit the world and we think this is the way everything's going and and someone needs to help them do it and at the same time we don't want to lose our identity of being on the bleeding edge of um of you know um decentralized finance for instance things that you know wouldn't have been imaginable even a few years ago um and a lot of the stuff i've seen here for instance um and so what we've really done in consensus 2.0 is kind of doubled down on both of those like we have we have this notion that i don't know how many people have seen like the enterprise ethereum alliance and and consensus enterprise we've released this idea of an ethereum 2.

0 stack right and this is representative of our work with web3 cloud with in partnership with amd um it also is representative of our work with pegasus and our own ethereum client that we're building the idea is there's a there's a vision for the future where the ethereum 2.0 client with all of the sharding and scalability and et cetera that is planned for that simultaneously this client can sit and do all that stuff and it can also sit behind a firewall or aim behind the firewall and do kind of internal network private blockchains private all kinds of topologies that look like crypto finance stuff um behind there and so we're really doubling down on making sure that we're the canonical stack of that you can almost think of it like you know like oracle right in the early days they're the only ones who have a really good relational database they're really good at selling it we can sell um services around that and make that the standard that everyone uses right and so that's that's our our satisfaction of that avenue and also at the same time we're doubling down on the highest quality best projects that that are going to push the decentralization angle forward and we do that through labs and we do that through our our venture investments as well so i think we get to do the best of both worlds but figuring out exactly what the shape of that was was really hard it was literally you know dozens of people in a room arguing with each other for days um trying to figure that out and we do that on a periodic basis but that's kind of what it looks like so on the other side of the technological decisions there there are as you mentioned people who are going to either fit into that or not and so eric my question for you you know you had to say goodbye to about a third of the shapeshift staff and i would say that cut heavily into muscle and from a people perspective as a leader of that organization what are some of the things that you learned and some of the takeaways from having to do that with with so many people who are really dedicated to the vision yeah so um yeah we lead off about a third of the company in early january that came after about a month of planning and orchestration and trying to figure out how to do that and and when and in what manner and all those kind of logistics um and ultimately if you're going to be a if you're going to be a company in the crypto industry you are attached to the severe market cycles of this industry and that is full of good and bad right we reap the rewards of the crazy bubble in 2017 and we've had to deal with the declines of of 2018. we have to navigate both of those without letting it get to our head too much um but i think what it what it's what it's taught me as with much in business is that ideas that you have about what to do as a business are not nearly as important as the organization of people that you're able to build business is probably 90 just about the organization of people that you build around you and how you how you plan that how you communicate within it and my understanding of the importance of that as a entrepreneur i think has really become a lot more profound going through these kind of cycles and realizing that the the exciting ideas that happen all the time are really not what matters it's really about the people that you that you build around you and so yeah the layoff was extremely difficult um you know we wrote we wrote a blog post to try to convey sort of why it happened um what we did that we could have done differently and also we wrote that post to help the people that we had to let go understand what happened and so that they could point to that and you know understand that it wasn't necessarily that they were a bad person or something but that um to just give context to the organization so that was uh that was a rough start to the year but there's much to come there's hope uh lily you had to make such a stark change from literally hardware to software which is just a mind-blowing um you know uh 180 to actually usher a team through that what are some of the lessons learned that you took away what might you have done differently now that you've actually been through you know steering a ship in a very different direction um well uh it was a it was um a task of necessity at the time uh because you know clearly the market for being this kind of full stack minor was just wasn't there anymore and it wasn't going to be because the chinese would come online and throw the entire muscle of uh you know the electronics manufacturing supply chain um into mining and that was basically that right um so uh so you know what was tough during that time is we basically had um we had kind of two battles that we had to fight um and we had to do it all very quietly right so one was you know somehow all of the news had gotten now that a lot of a lot of money had been raised and at the same time i mean things just really didn't look good from a financial standpoint um so we had to go through you know a series of negotiations basically do a workout which is the skill set which is very well practiced and sort of you know the world of lbos and sort of that that end of the uh that end of kind of business spectrum but it's not a skill set which is as sort of practice in the venture world so we had to do that recap the company and sort of try to do right to the extent that we could by our investors and at the same time think of a completely new product um that uh that would actually be relevant in the market right so it was kind of like starting a new company but starting from negative 50 rather than zero and kind of having to deal with two very complex situations at the same time um so uh so i think that looking back it was not really an easy easy time it didn't really have very clear answers i think that the team actually did a pretty good job of uh of navigating that and we were lucky enough to have you know had a number of really great people on the team that really came in at clutch moments in order to sort of get that next product across the line right um and sort of you know have that kind of neck stretch of mile in the tunnel um as we are sort of searching for an exit from uh from that experience um and so uh i thought that was done uh really well and i think that um you know generally uh the the team was really actually fairly positive surprisingly um when uh when you know there are plenty of reasons uh not to be um and so you know and then i actually think that um for the for the situation we were in it was um one of the sort of best teams uh really positive attitude and really well uh in you know credit to biology for having uh managed that very well yeah so my follow-on question to that is how did you keep uh yourself and others positive how did how and more broadly you know after lily's given her perspective i'd love to hear from you all about how how you're keeping yourself um emotionally grounded during an extremely volatile period of time um well um we we just knew that it was kind of do or die right we just had to get it done and we had to find a path there was really no other option and so you know actually um interestingly you sometimes have greater solidarity during those moments because um you're you as the team you really just have to figure it out um and uh and so some of the more sort of corporate stuff um was really the focus of a smaller group of people um and uh and we literally would you know sit in uh a war room for like hours every day um and just try to find a solution right and we i mean to spend hours um you know each other's homes and you know early in the morning late at night i'm trying to find a solution and what we also did is we kind of segregated that kind of the corporate stuff from the product side um and so we did our best to kind of shield the you know the vagaries and the ins and outs what might what might not happen on the corporate side from everyone else so they could really focus on product uh and really focus on sort of trying to build something great and realizing the product vision that we wanted to have as a company which is equally important because that's kind of meant that that was a momentum that kept us forward and and that was pretty important with kind of managing how people spent their time in energy as well are there any other tips from other panelists about how they thought about kind of shielding parts of the organization or leading them through times like this i just want to point out that pretty much all indicators except the wildly fluctuating crypto market price are great yeah like like we have more ethereum developers than ever like it you know it's a it's an up and to the right graph um we have more governments and big companies taking us seriously than ever before right it's um you can talk to a random person on the street i bet they've heard the word ethereum that wasn't the case like a year ago and it definitely wasn't the case two years ago um you know the customers the quality of entrepreneurs that we see that we invest in uh throughout consensus business are all increasingly getting better and higher and and the level of professionalism is increasing this market is like maturing and i think operationally there's really not that much different for us uh than there was a year ago um and in fact you know the i think market cycles tend to generate news which brings even more people to come look at what we're doing and realize that it's amazing so except for that one number like everything's great and i think it's it's easy to lose sight of that if people feel all depressed but everything's good one of the things i've learned in life is that if something looks messy or difficult you can almost always zoom out from that far enough and things will start to look peaceful and so that principle i think is really important in business and especially in crypto if you look at the market cycle that you're in it can be very difficult and stressful but if you zoom out you see unmitigated success there and i think for a company that has to deal with all that the way you zoom out is you remind the people that you're with why you're doing it you remind them of the global and the historical context in which this entire ecosystem has developed why it's important to have an open financial system for the planet and you remind people the the importance of that if you do that well enough i think it starts helping people understand that the day-to-day struggle even if they're really severe are really nothing compared to the stakes that we have to get this right and and to do an important job with it so zooming out and reminding people of that context uh something i found to be useful so you know it seems like down the line everyone's really positive as am i i'm biased though um about where the industry is actually going um what are the two to three things as you think about uh bringing normal normal people in right like um you know the the crypto equivalent of a starbucks on every corner what are the two to three things that you all want to see in the industry that will actually open it open it up and bring a new section of people into it for holochain we actually have a pretty aggressive strategy around that um we have another project called hullo that's the project that actually did the ico holochain has no currency it's it doesn't need one it's efficient enough you don't need to pay people to run it um the what what holo is is a basically airbnb of the cloud hosting space like we're basically trying to make it be that you can run crypto apps and serve straight out to web browsers without running into the issues of gas and that type of thing um and uh being able to actually get the efficiency of this onto the scales of cloud computing so that we can have the hosting compete with that price as opposed to you know computation and storage on ethereum for example is very expensive um and so that for us this is part of a strategy of really being able to take this mainstream and let grandma use crypto apps um i'm excited about um i think there's a couple of things within sort of broadly this category of decentralized finance which i think would be interesting to see and i think that will probably take take root more in developed economies um and so i'm i'm excited to see some of those applications um uh take root here in you know america europe um i'm also excited to see a number of ways to make crypto sort of readily accessible to um folks who live in economies where money doesn't work very well um i've heard of a number of efforts to make that happen but when you think about sort of you know this fundamentally is about money and it's fundamentally about your ability to sort of control your money and have agency and and i would like to see that happen more broadly because that's you know those are the more simple applications when it comes to when it comes to cryptocurrency um in those economies where sort of the everyday applications of this detail work very well so i've got a few um one is amanda gutterman who's sitting in the audience our chief marketing officer when she first started working in consensus one of the things that she said was i want to see ethereum in mlb and starbucks right because that that's how you know it's it's gone mainstream and i think backed is somehow doing it with starbucks now um and and also um you know there are lots of sports teams working on on things that we've worked on some i don't want to divulge but um that's happening as well um so that's one milestone right it's it's already hit the mainstream and and the gears are turning up for for kids i saw a viral tweet the other day of a it was from like a 13 year old who said you know actually going to a bank is way more complicated to me than using like smart contracts right and and uh uh there was i believe was a goldman sachs study like couple years ago showed that 70 of millennials would rather go to a dentist than to a bank so to a physical banking location so you know when that generation that feels that yeah starts using these tools and like using it using using a divi application getting you know getting something on compound finance getting a loan from maker like when that says normal um and digitally native as going to a bank is to like my parents um i i think that'll be a milestone and i think we're getting there um and then i also think one big marker that i think we're pretty close to that i would love to see is a central bank issuing a cryptocurrency i think depending on whether you view like the petro is technically you know one but i would love to see like a mainstream i would love to see like a g20 uh central bank issue a crypto token i think then we'll be like well on our way uh to realizing the vision um i think it i think a central bank releasing a digital currency will be really funny to watch because it will end up looking exactly like the fiat currency that we already have which is already digital um it will certainly get headlines and it'll certainly bring a lot of attention but it's not really going to be innovative or change anything i think it's a capitulation it's more of what yeah that's it's a it's a sign that it's working um probably what i want to see most is is a and this might be just like idealistic and ridiculous but for for normal people to start seeing the ability to transact between any two people freely and without centralized censorship as being as important and as justified and as ethical as the ability for any two people to to speak to each other and um popular society is very comfortable with this idea that any two people should be able to talk openly and that that no one should be able to get in the way of that and no one should have to license you to talk or should have the ability to prevent that communication from happening the fact that money is treated differently is a is a huge injustice and i i'm hoping that crypto breaks that that discrepancy and allows people to realize that communicating um through financial interaction is as important at least and is as worthy of that same that same protection and that same sanctity as communicating through through words well thank you a huge thank you to all of our panelists so much for your insights and thank you all for coming [Applause] you