Purpose: Brand Evolution

Objectives for the interviews

• Understand personal perspectives of individual stakeholders and thought leaders
• Uncover key strategic opportunities
• Understand the internal culture at Gitcoin
• Understand the past-present-future vision narrative
• Flag key challenges or possible stumbling blocks
• Include the team as an essential voice in the brand strategy (/rebrand) process
• Help us help you!

Preamble

• Please be candid / nothing will be attributed
• Any shared discovery notes will be anonymized
• Any questions before we start?

Questions

1. Intro & Role

• Can you tell us a bit about your role at Gitcoin?
  • I’m a co-founder of Gitcoin and originally got involved since I was building a similar company in the space focused on helping open source developers build their own digitally local community currencies
  • Originally I was leading growth for the bounties product which was our first shot at trying to help Ethereum devs, and eventually led the charge on a hackathons business to help us bring in more consistent revenue by “bundling” bounties together
  • As we realized maintainers / core folks were more important to support (often, OSS devs didn’t want to deal with the complexity of paying individual contributors) I started to play with the idea of a grants concept, and Kevin started thinking about building out a subscription services model from there
  • In 2018 Vitalik launched his paper on QF and I surfaced it with Vivek suggesting it was something we should push forward, and so we quickly moved away from subscriptions to focus on just the quadratic funding model itself
• How and why did you come to join Gitcoin/the Gitcoin founding team
  • As I was working on the competing project above I decided I needed to figure out a way to work more closely together with users and iterate with them, and bounties were a much easier way to do that than the “boil the ocean” deploy your own currency model I had been thinking about
  • Mark Beylin introduced Kevin and I at a hackathon and I joined shortly after
• What are your main areas of focus in the short term (3-6 months?)
  • Right now I’m focused on getting PGF in shape to ensure we have a plan for a) scaling up the grants program itself b) moving it successfully to the protocol c) implementing a services model such that we can achieve sustainability
    • For the services model right now my view is that we should work with UNI, MATIC, AAVE, and other ecosystems and take a portion of their ecosystem value
• What else should we know about you and your team/workstream to set us up for success? (And how would you define success for this project?)
  • I think success here would be really ensuring we’re able to build a consistent brand that stakeholders in the protocol (partners, developers), the program (matching funders, public goodsTM grantees), and the broader community (DAO, Ethereum OGs, KERNEL Fellows) resonate with

1. Mission, Vision & Values