Team Proposal: Jacob Blish

[kethfinex]

Summary

A proposal to engage Jacob Blish as a Business Development Leader for Lido, including proposed duties, compensation and incentive awards.

Motivation

As Lido grows (increasing TVL, validator set and developing staking solutions for new networks), there are increasing challenges of coordinating current Lido community participants with one another and with new prospective partners and helping set and implement strategic priorities. Thus, a Business Development Leader role is needed for the Lido DAO.

Jacob Blish is a highly qualified candidate who we believe would excel in this role.

Qualifications & Experience

We believe Jacob Blish’s qualifications and qualifications make him an ideal candidate for the role of Business Development Lead of the Lido DAO.

Jacob served as founder and Chief Operations Officer of Spruce Systems (YC W’21), where he distinguished himself with an analytics-based focus on driving revenue and meaningful customer adoption. Previously, he had started, sold and worked for a number of startups with a focus on user acquisition and retention before spending time with J.P. Morgan where his capstone involved reevaluating how the retail bank identifies and communicates with their customer. During his 2 years at ConsenSys, he helped manage business opportunities and strategy for various teams at ConsenSys, to help ship products based on extensive market research and user feedback.

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobblish

Oversight; Nature of Service

Jacob will provide periodic updates to the DAO through posts in the forum. Jacob’s service as Business Development Lead will be ‘at will’ and may be terminated by the DAO at any time, with or without cause. Jacob may also resign from the DAO at any time, with or without good reason.

[JK_stakefish]

Just so that I understand this, is this proposal an extension to this other proposal? Business Development Proposal

[metaperuzzi]

The job description and Jacob’s past journey sound more like an Ops role, and maybe that’s what Lido really needs. Someone that keeps track of all the moving pieces throughout this phase of rapid growth.

In my humble experience, two key metrics usually define business development roles:

1. new business or how much new revenues (in terms of $$$) are you bringing on board, and
2. how much additional revenues are you able to extract from existing relationships/partners.

Translated into Lido’s setup, the BD role should focus on growing the size/volume of the assets staked with Lido. I don’t see any such metrics in the JD, so how do we measure the role’s success?

Furthermore, more and more TradFi players are looking into digital asset staking as a form of investment. I suggest Lido’s BD role should also cover an engagement with these new actors and explore partnerships for institutional clients to stake with Lido.

Just my two cents.

[timbeiko]

I think the role makes sense to have as part of the DAO. A few questions:

• Who has been part of the hiring process for Jacob? Could they share what they liked about the candidate? It would be nice if Jacob could also write a small blurb about how he sees his role and why he’s excited about it.
• What are the success metrics for the role (even if rough)? IMO this is pretty useful when it comes time for the DAO to decide whether to renew / stop the engagement?
• On that last part, how does the DAO allocate the funds? Is it a 1 year decision (e.g. put aside salary + LDO) and then renewed each year? Is it a 3 year decision that only gets reversed in case of something going wrong? etc.

[jbeezy]

Hi @metaperuzzi and @timbeiko,

As a new user here I am limited by @ and links so I worked around it.

Great comments / questions and I will attempt to address them all. I wholeheartedly agree that increasing % of assets staked with Lido is the number one priority in the role. This, and expanding across networks.

My background is peppered with operations due to being early in start ups where a traditional, singularly focused role doesn’t have to also build out the infrastructure to support that role. I am comfortable with the phrase ‘wearing many hats’ and have managed business development in almost every previous role I have been in. In the case of Lido, in my opinion, this is compounded with the lack of clear organizational structure and working in a DAO.

Lido doesn’t currently have formal hiring processes now, so the next goal is, I believe, to hire an Operational Manager for Lido who will help to set up the base process for the DAO. I have been speaking primarily with arjunblj and klomashek to date.

I see the BD role as having a focus on expanding LIDO to new networks, deepening the integrations across CeFi, DeFi and partners on existing networks (wallets for example). This increases the availability, liquidity and ease of use for both st-assets and the LDO token. To the comment around tradeFi, I couldn’t agree more and would love to partner on an initiative similar to that of Compound’s Treasury and Aave Pro.

This is why I am excited about what LIDO and the community are building. These tokens can become a unit of account for all bonded assets. Blue sky would have all ETH staked and stETH used in its place. Also, working with a DAO is a new paradigm in the future of work and working with other teams building out a similar process (Maker, Alchemix, Yearn, etc).

Having not yet onboarded, I have an idea in my head of OKRs to track my performance by quarter/year going forward. There are many questions around budget, tech/dev resources for Lido, bandwidth for each project and more that make these difficult to scope right now. If I am selected, getting community feedback on OKRs for year one is my first priority. As mentioned above however, new protocol expansion, new integrations with CeFi, DeFi and infrastructure providers driving towards a higher % of assets staked with LIDO is the mission.

I will let klomashek speak to the last point about allocation of funds. I do know that at any point however, the DAO may vote to terminate the engagement and that I may terminate it on my behalf for any reason.

[frontalpha]

I have some questions for Jacob Blish:

-Have you been hanging out in the telegram/discord?
-Have you staked ETH in Lido?
-Have you tried using stETH/bLUNA on other DeFi protocols?
-Do you shit-post on twitter?
-Have you ever lost money in an un-audited smart contract?
-Do you reply to people with “ser”, “gm”, “NGMI”, “WAGMI”?

[jbeezy]

@frontalpha,

-Yes, but in a creeping capacity
-Yes, want to make sure I know how the sausage is made
-What protocols? :kek: In the Curve pool for stETH. That is why they are looking to fill this gap or else ngmi.
-I am consistently inconsistent
-Unfortunately more than I should have due to my primate ancestry, both hard and the softer more luxurious rugs
-Ser, do you have to ask? Mi familia knows wagmi. Although if I must act according to web 2 standards I will don a fedora and tie for the occasion

[frontalpha]

haha thanks for being a good sport

[kadmil]

Oh my, sounds more like a true wagmi-officer-speak! Looking forward for new sausages to be made, haha =)

[metaperuzzi]

Thanks, @jbeezy! Go! Make it happen!

[kagan]

Hey @kethfinex and @jbeezy,

Some feedback on this process for you to trash or treasure at your discretion.

Was there an application process here? Any other candidates? Interview process?

If you’re going to be an actual decentralized organization, then transparency and fairness in processes like this will be vital.

This was 16 people voting to pay someone $300k+/year for a role that sounds highly desirable with minimal public vetting. I’d bet a ton of people would want this role.

It also sounds like an Operations Manager role more than a Business Development role. And it sounds like a really important role to the DAO.

@kethfinex proposed the role and proposed the candidate on the same day. Then held a vote a week later and by 8/18, it was all over. Did @kethfinex know @jbeezy before this? That kind of relationship and potential conflict should be disclosed as part of this process.

Maybe this is an important role and maybe @jbeezy is the perfect person, but this was not the perfect process.

Maybe as part of this role, @jbeezy can solve this for you going forward by building an Operating System and creating rules about how you spend your treasury.

Just one person’s opinion, but I wanted to call it out.

“If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.”

Thanks for listening.

[frontalpha]

Yeah, I don’t have anything against jbeezy but the process didn’t feel very open. Maybe jbeezy can fix that now that he is one the team lol

[ViktorBunin]

Hey folks, Viktor from Bison Trails here. For context: I invested in Lido as part of the Paradigm round, Jacob and I worked on the same team at ConsenSys, and I referred him to this role.

One nice thing that Lido has done well is that it optimizes for getting in proposals and deciding on them individually, rather than doing lengthy RFP processes. For example, there’s only one proposal for Polkadot/Kusama staking that will almost certainly pass as opposed to having several proposals and selecting among them. This has been the case for most proposals that I’ve seen. This dynamic is best explained by the fact that there’s really not that many people/teams that have the skillset, interest, and time to work on this stuff, so there’s little competition. But the “bias for action” dynamic is also frankly largely responsible for the progress Lido has made to become the pooled liquid staking industry leader.

I think the process in hiring Jacob was similar to the process for getting everything else done at Lido - a need was identified, work was put in to figure out how to do it, a proposal was submitted for consideration and voting, and was decided. So in that context, I think this was done appropriately.

However, I do also think @kagan and @frontalpha feedback is valid in that over time, process will become more important! I don’t think any DAO has really identified the perfect process for how to hire (and fire!) people, and that’s going to be one of Jacob’s responsibilities. So please keep sharing your feedback and recommendations - it’s crucial that we get these so that as these processes start to come together, they can leverage all our learnings.

Thanks y’all, and welcome to the team Jacob <3

[kagan]

Thanks, @ViktorBunin, I appreciate the response and points.

Obviously, we’re early in crypto times, and DAO governance is a fundamental problem to solve if DAOs are going to succeed.

We’re seeing this play out live right now, with the Sushi investment proposal and the Uniswap Flipside Proposal.

How do DAOs make decisions like this? Did the Sushi proposal process work or not? Can you be a true DAO and move as fast as a well-run centralized organization with a CEO? And if you can’t, then can you be a true DAO and compete with a centralized organization? I think the answers are No and Yes. But we’ll see. Exciting times!

[vsh]

The simple fact is that long, fully transparent and community-engaged processes are difficult to build, and expensive (in terms of focus, mostly) to maintain; Lido needs help with this. More good heads to do it than what we have now, if we want it to be perfect.

[0xIgor]

Hello, everyone! Where can I find the snapshot of this proposal?

Thanks!

[0xIgor]

Never mind, I found it.

[jbeezy]

With sadness I’m sharing that last week marked the end of my time as a BD contributor. Due to a number of factors, now is the time to step back.

It has been a real genuine pleasure working with the DAO and on the protocol the past 2 years. I will still be a staunch supporter as a community member. No other liquid staking protocol has my conviction.

Feel free to reach out my DMs are open.
https://twitter.com/chaingenius

[praneet]

All the best for your future endeavours