Wanna be a Crypto CEO - Read This

Charles Hoskinson of IOHK published an interesting piece looking at the crypto space (like all of it) from the perspective of CEO.

There are a ton of irresolvable conflicts and tensions that any crypto CEO needs to be aware of and make tradeoffs that they may not feel 100% comfortable making, just because they may be put in a lose-lose situations from time to time.

You should all check it out [here] but I will share some of my favorite quotes from it below.

"The point of our movement has been to develop better tools to identify when and how we can remove middlemen we don't want; not to blindly kill all middlemen for the sake of killing them. Centralization or federation can dramatically reduce costs, improve efficiency and sometimes is necessary to improve privacy.

For example, Lastpass [a centralized product] provides a great solution for me to manage my many, many password, but doesn't actually have access to my passwords. I'm sure such a solution could be decentralized, but I don't see a point. Replicating an encrypted dataset, which I could already store locally anyway doesn't improve my security. It just seems to drive up costs and reduce user experience.

And frankly there are hundreds more examples. Abstracting my point, it's not about decentralization; it's about control. People want more control over their data, identity, reputation, assets and commercial relationships. Decentralization is a tool that can be used- with other tools- to achieve these ends, but isn't an end in itself."

"Modern communication tools are incredibly good at keeping us all connected and informed, but they are useless for promoting empathy, building real relationships or proactively communicating implicit concerns."

"In a way, I think this gives some justification to the enormous market capitalization we [crypto] are seeing alongside the cult like enthusiasm. From a practical sense nothing has been produced by Bitcoin or any other project to justify a cumulative valuation greater than some of the world's largest companies and even countries. From a social view, how much is the freedom to re-imagine the entire fabric of the world's marketplaces worth?

Money and governments are artifacts of promises and future commitments. They don't actually exist, but the belief in their power is what actually gives them power. It seems the belief that Bitcoin is worth a 100 billion dollars or that one social contract is superior to another is all that is really needed to actually realize it.

Thus to all future leaders of our space, I'd like to say separate your objective from subjective, clarify relationships as well as understand conflicts of interest and stick to your principles even in the face of conflict. And try to have fun while riding the roller coaster, it's sure to be an exciting journey."