by Mitchell Cuevas on February 18, 2021

Stackers, we’re back with another release of the Stacks Foundation quarterly board report and a review of our performance against our Q4 goals. We do this after each quarter to provide visibility into our operations and to make it easy for other players in the ecosystem to understand our current objectives.

Below you’ll find the OKR summary, a quicker read, and the full line-item breakdown of our OKRs.

The Stacks Foundation board assists in corporate governance, provides support on navigating priorities and challenges, and serves the nonprofit’s mission which serves the larger ecosystem and community. The Q3 board meeting took place Wednesday, February 2 at 2:00pm ET and included the following attendees:

• Brittany Laughlin - Executive Director, Stacks Foundation [Board Member]
• Mitchell Cuevas - Head of Growth, Stacks Foundation
• Rodolfo Gonzalez - Partner, Foundation Capital [Board Member]
• Zavain Dar - Partner, Lux Capital [Board Member]
• Meltem Demirors - Chief Strategy Officer, CoinShares [Board Member]
• Jenny Mith - Ecosystem Development Lead, Stacks Foundation
• Jude Nelson - Research Scientist, Stacks Foundation
• Nick Cooper - Finance & Operations, Stacks Foundation

Takeaways:
The Foundation’s mission is to enable a user-owned internet. Building on top of bitcoin, the most secure and largest chain by market cap, creates an incredible opportunity to deliver on that promise. We’re here to fuel education, research, and infrastructure to build that future, and given the ecosystem’s current growth, we are off to a great start.

Organic, community-led growth can be hard to find in the tech industry, especially crypto, but we’re seeing it in Stacks. The board is excited to see so many community-led programs--CityCoins, DeFi, NFTs—and original initiatives to support our mission: Mintery for creative builders, Stacking for Causes, Grants for builders, Blockchain Governance, Blockchain technical upgrades, Clarity education, and public awareness through press. They encouraged continued support of these key programs and efforts and not to focus on other protocols progress or worry about duplicating louder strategies. We’re here for our mission, and our growth will be a different path than others, by design.

Where to focus:

• Continue to focus on unlocking trillions in BTC. That’s the bet. That’s the game. We’re successful when the network delivers that promise. We want to capture liquidity from Bitcoin. We want to turn a passive asset into active access. We want to make it easier for everyone to own and utilize value they create.
• Continue to play a ‘different game’ when it comes to overall growth strategies. Avoid copycat tactics from other chains. Board believes the methodical and intentional approach to community building and growth is paying off - spending money quickly doesn’t result in faster/better results, especially with products and community.

Possible experiments and open questions:

• Stacking for Causes is an experiment worth leaning into, should experiment with charitable outcomes and work toward a more complete funding platform.
• Look for more places with existing users, keep bringing in integrations and possibly now turn focus away from access-oriented (exchanges) moves to integrations that bring in users.

The Stacks Foundation works off the OKR model (Objectives and Key Results). These are meant to be ambitious and difficult to achieve in the time allotted; completing ~75% of the total work is considered successful in this model.

Thank you to all the folks that make this possible, we’re honored to be working to support you and this mission. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions about these updates, want to get involved, or just want to say hello.