Hi,
thanks for the thoughtful post,
a few comments from my side to try to make Polkadot a better place:
Polkadot is famously “the best technology”
This is I think an over statement that we have a hard time to prove. We definitively have good technology but not necessary for all use cases. Some introspection would help us to focus better on our weaknesses. Also, even if it was true, it does not mean that it will stay true.
Today the ecosystem is in a state where more attention is paid to the present (e.g. “what should we spend money on”) and the past (“what crazy things have we spent money on”), rather than on the future.
I believe in the vision! That does not means we should not have plans for the near future. The vision is critical but having a business view is also necessary. That’s one of the many polarity that we should manage. One does not work without the other.
In the words of John Doerr, we need to create “missionaries not mercenaries.”
It is a catchy sentence and I think I get the meaning. At the same time, missionaries carries their own history and I would prefer another term, maybe dedicated. One way to prevent too many mercenaries is to have people fairly compensated with a stable environment. Another is to interview for the trait. At the same time we are not a church and a good engineer doing his work well is also welcome in my opinion.
Polkadot’s success over a ten year horizon is not going to be because of just the technology
This I fully agree with: we need business acumen, product owners, b2b and b2c strategies, investment etc
Success in the market and in the grander scheme of real-world adoption will come from the heroic efforts of many people – in fact many people who haven’t yet joined the ecosystem – and it’s the job of leaders in Polkadot to foster an environment where these contributors can be welcomed and supported. For leaders, this involves ensuring the vision can flow outward via communication pathways and the environment leads to execution
First I do not like this hero persona (see here for example). We are here for a marathon (10y) and we cannot rely on heroics. We need a plan. We have enough money to staff what needs to be staffed.
On the fostering part, I think we can be more friendly toward outsiders esp. on the missionary part. If we restrict hiring to missionary people, we cut ourselves from most of the talent pool. We can convince people over time. Some openness on our side would help to bring more people in. If you don’t know Solidity you can learn it, that’s no big deal.
We could also possibly make the system less transactional. You do one thing and you will be paid for this one thing (bounty for ex). That’s fair but most people are uncomfortable with it. That adds a lot of uncertainty in the day to day : some people thrive with the freedom and pressure, some prefer a more corporate environment. That’s fine.
It’s important to focus on differences
Yes and no. As you pointed out, it depends a lot on what customers may want now. Many services, platforms, ecosystems died because they didn’t listen enough to their potential customers and too much to their own ideas.
Solana, Base or Arbitrum have low latency block time and market it as a strength. Should we have low blocktime solutions? Note that we are very performant on throughput and finality but customers care a lot less about it: throughput because nobody can use all the available capacity (except Solana) and finality because most transactions can go on without it. We should communicate a lot more around our strength be be aware that may not resonate with most builders.
At the same time we figure out where we might want to allocate resources, we should think about the return on investment,
Fully agree. And again we should balance short term and long term ROIs.
I agree with the other part of the post. One possible way to improve would be to spend more time on the strategy upfront and get to a consensus. Then decentralized the work. We should strive to partition the work such that we limit competition internally. Do we need N block explorers? one day sure. But if I have the choice between 2 block explorers and 0 front end library or 1 block explorer and 1 front end library, I would love the consensus on the strategy to converge on the 1 and 1. We do not really need to compute much inside the ecosystem and should focus on competing against the Ethereum L2, L1 and a few others. If we are successful, then internal competition will be welcome to lower prices and improve resilience but I think that it too early.