I’ve read again his post, I’m withdrawing mine for I think it was a bit of a needle VS the rest of his resume.
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Folks, my interest in diversity has everything to do with maximizing the perspective, skillset and effectiveness of the Committee, and nothing to do with supporting the SJW/politically correct movement.
DC
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I want to push back a little on the “it will settle into a lower-workload steady state” idea, that I am hearing a lot of.
If I Understand Correctly, that idea is that once the MGRC is “set up” the burden on members will drop, since the necessary processes will be stream-lined and efficient.
That certainly seems like it might happen! I don’t have a lot of experience that is directly relevant, but it also seems plausible to me that it won’t happen.
For example, you’ve mentioned mentoring startups (the techstars model), and @sarahjamielewis put it pretty well (I thought) when she said (paraphrasing):
It’s when things go wrong that the real work begins.
So I can imagine a scenario where an MGRC member does a great job of mentoring a project, which contributes to its success, which means that (paradoxically) there’s more to go wrong with it.
I’m not predicting that this will happen, nor is this an explicit question.
This is me calling out an assumption/prediction that I’ve heard here and elsewhere, and “Hmmmmmm-ing” it. (“Hmmmmmm-ing” goes with this face: 
.)
But, since I’m here, I do have an explicit question for you.
How should will the MGRC respond to this development:
?
As a Candidate do you have any ideas or proposals to float/commit to you that are related to this new development?
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Hey Za,
I replied to your question about the new Rust foundation here.
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You 100% have my support after hearing your comments on accountability as well as “letting the MGRC spread their wings” They should feel free to push their agenda to the limits as long as it accountable to Zcash.
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Hello @alchemydc For my vote, please answer my questions frankly:
- Are you pro BTC? If yes, Why? If not, Why?
- What is the largest account size you’ve handled in USD? How many end users did it impact?
- MGRC will control 8640 ZEC per month or 25920 per quarter, how will this be roughly spent? (provide napkin calculation).
- MGRC announcement attracts 100s of applicants from all over the world with all random ideas, all matching your goals, how would you evaluate them?
- KPIs aren’t entirely possible on a privacy preserving payments protocol project’s level, it’s all z2z, how will you evaluate funded team’s impact?
- DeFi fever made ETH run 2x compared to every cryptocurrency this year, thoughts?
- What locals, regions, languages, ethnicities, educational backgrounds of people have you worked with? What are your preferences of assembling teams that deliver?
- We live in a remote world now, how do you evaluate applicants for grants?
- Projects in Zcash are going to go through a huge change beyond the handful, driven teams funded via Zcash Foundation, thoughts?
- Zcash is a protocol at its core, ZEC price is volatile. How will you handle a single digit ZEC? ($9 x 8640/month = $77,760) How will you handle a 5 digit ZEC? ($21,000 x 8640/month = $181.44MM) Thoughts…
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Hi @aiyadt. Answers inline.
Yes. I started mining BTC in 2011, and helped launch Bridge21 (cross border remittances using BTC as the payment rail) in 2016. BTC is my second largest crypto position behind ZEC. I’m long BTC because it’s the original, and I believe it will remain a good SoV even as alts like Ethereum and Zcash rise to prominence in areas that BTC isn’t suited for.
Not sure what you mean by account size, but I’m a four time startup founder and served as the CISO for a $2B public company prior to joining ECC.
Ideally as a combination of grants, prizes and investments. Grants for ‘public good projects’, prizes to provide economic benefit for outstanding work done by community members, and investments in projects that are adjacent or built-upon Zcash, but that have a for-profit dynamic.
The same way I’ve helped Techstars vet applicants to its global accelerator/incubator. My primary filter is team. A strong team can deliver considerable value regardless of what tech or market they’re targeting.
Disagree. While the on-chain privacy afforded by Zcash tech may make some metrics difficult or impossible to track, I think that it is possible for applicants to define other metrics that they will use to measure their impact. Anything that isn’t measured, isn’t managed.
I’ve been long Ethereum for a very long time, and have watched with interest as the Defi fever has built over time. I’m primarily interested not in tapping into the Defi hype machine, but instead focusing on Zcash’s potential to be collateral for lower-cost-capital than is presently available to individuals and small businesses in the developing world.
I am also keeping a close eye on the Ren project, which has a mainnet “trustless” two way peg between Zcash and Ethereum that makes it possible to use renZEC in Defi. The Ren project is young and has work to do to improve its security and decentralization, but it’s showing a lot of promise.
At ECC, I’m responsible for Operations, and our team spans several continents and time zones, and our people come from a fairly diverse set of backgrounds. Prior to ECC I was CISO at SendGrid, and was one of the primary sponsors of our Diversity and Inclusion initiative, which helped to strengthen our team by focusing on increasing the diversity of candidates at the “top of the recruiting funnel”, as well as making employees from underrepresented backgrounds feel comfortable doing their best work.
See answer above. Techstars is a global accelerator, and has successfully transitioned to a ‘full remote’ program since Covid lockdowns began.
I am not sure I understand your question, but I do believe that since MGRC will be entirely focused on expanding the Zcash ecosystem, I believe that it will represent a big step function up, over and above the ZF’s prior grants program.
See this post where I unpack some of my thoughts on the ‘investment’ angle of MGRC. Investments in other projects could provide some diversification for the MGRC funds, and provide a mechanism to help the MGRC weather volatility.
Longer term, I’m interested in seeing Major Grants become a legal entity that is autonomous, and no longer part of the ZF. Once that happens, MG could actively work to diversify the treasury in such a way to better manage volatility.
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