by Mitchell Cuevas on July 7, 2021

At just over a year into the life of the Stacks Foundation, I thought it would be a great time to share how we’re approaching our work. As one player in a decentralized ecosystem, it’s important for us to articulate what others, especially the community and other entities, can expect from us. We believe that if we each share our intentions, approaches, and goals, our ecosystem will be able to better self-organize as we pursue our mission of building a user-owned internet.

This post will highlight the rationale behind what we focus on and why, using some concrete examples. My hope is that it also gives you more insight into the culture of the team and a window into our vision as we go about our work.

The Stacks Foundation has a broad prerogative. For our small (but growing!) team, this is a source of excitement as well as a challenge — there are endless things that we could spend time on. For us, the challenge is making sure we’re picking the highest leverage activities and filtering for projects uniquely suited for or served by our position in the ecosystem.

One key thing to understand about the Foundation is that it is uniquely set up to take on risks. In addition to backing builders and projects where the community is "bullish," we also invest in experiments, early-stage ideas, and long-term research. Where other entities may be concerned about short-term returns, the Foundation will see long-term potential—for education, community-building, and protocol advancement. It is an exciting time to be building in this space. However, there are still so many unknowns regarding the social and economic implications of a user-owned internet, and we believe it is our mandate to take a long view. This means funding research or builders whose work may not guarantee a clear answer or an immediate return but will result in key learnings that can guide the ecosystem in the right direction.

It's worth noting that this is not a strategy that normalizes failure, but rather the Foundation's way of "hedging its bets". The Stacks Grants Program is a prime example of our approach to balancing risks with potential rewards. Instead of limiting ourselves to funding only a small number of projects that have clear paths to commercial success, we support a wide range of projects that demonstrate the potential to deliver value to the community, even if they are unable to reach 100% of what they initially set out to accomplish. We work closely with grantees to break down large, ambitious projects into smaller, more feasible milestones so that in the event that they cannot complete the final product, they will have still managed to deliver useful tools for the community (such as smart contracts and developer libraries) along the way.

This balance between short-term necessities and long-term sustainability is one we’re always revisiting. In doing so, we have naturally developed a set of values and an operating approach that can be summed up by the following statements:

Despite the sometimes frenzied, ‘can’t-miss-a-moment’ world in which we operate, the Stacks Foundation takes a decidedly long-term approach. We want to wield our resources in a way that will allow us to serve the Stacks Ecosystem for the next decade and beyond. To be clear, this does not mean we don’t work to achieve short-term objectives. It simply means that we at the Foundation gravitate toward taking on the efforts we see as paying off long-term and necessitates we operate carefully and at times, conservatively, with how we spend the treasury, our time, and other resources.

A few concrete examples here:

Wherever possible, the Stacks Foundation works to create the environment for others to be successful. We do this by finding, matching, incentivizing, and positioning others to create value in the ecosystem. It’s no secret there are millions of things that we can’t wait to see built on the Stacks blockchain, but, that doesn't mean we'll tackle these things 'in-house'.

We believe getting funding into builders hands and removing obstacles for entrepreneurs will ultimately allow for far more to be built than if we spent our time trying to do it. Not only that, fueling the builders creates stakeholders and reinforces community, making us stronger as a whole.

Practically speaking, this approach allows our small team to fund the best people and organizations for the need. This allows our team to ‘punch above its weight' and increase the surface area of the things we can positively impact and support.

Good examples of our efforts to be a force multiplier include:

• We provide free consulting to other ecosystem players (exchanges, entities, developers), to help them make the best use of the tech available to them.
• We run the grants program, which empowers community members to work on projects they care about.
• We provide Stacks Chapter leads with the resources they need to develop their regional communities and ultimately help grow the global Stacks community.
• We steward ecosystem governance, in which people collectively work out the best standards and practices for participating in the ecosystem.

Note on growing our team: Operating like a small team, doesn’t always mean we’ll literally stay a small team. We’re definitely looking to grow the team the caveat is you’re not going to see us hiring absurdly fast or simply for the sake of headcount. We’re taking a methodical, measured approach, giving a lot of thought to each new role and committing fully to each hiring process.

Decentralization, ‘Can’t Be Evil’, non-custodial, user-owned. All are phrases and values that we firmly believe in and work to proliferate. They are also terms that will occasionally be used as something of a war cry to question an effort or decision. Why are you working with evil centralized exchanges? Why did you help market a custodial Stacking pool? And so on. These are fair questions and we’re thankful to have a community that asks them — it means the moral compass is properly calibrated. When these types of decisions come up, we should think about them hard. However, the Stacks Foundation has a duty to do what it can to help the ecosystem grow. This is where being practical comes in.

Growth on the scale we want to see, in the environment we’re in, requires a balanced approach that meets people where they are. 99.9% of the people that will have heard about Stacks in 5 years from now, know nothing about it today. They are all starting journeys at various places and we want to be in as many of those places offering a helping hand into our world as possible. It’s worth noting here that one of the key ways this manifests is in our work to expand access to and increase the utility of Stacks. This means we have and will continue to spend time supporting centralized players to integrate Stacks and again, finding ways where Stacks can be useful directly to consumers even if that means access doesn’t happen through a 100% decentralized offering. All this said, you can rest assured that we will always thoroughly vet every single entity we may work with; we won't compromise a safe and secure experience for users.

We believe the decentralization and education that needs to take place to actually accomplish our mission is a monumental task that will happen along a messy spectrum. Decentralization and the change to a user-owned internet won’t look like a light switch that one day clicks over, but a deliberate and continuous movement over time that redirects the flow of the internet and reshapes the landscape to our vision. We take this to heart and try to be practical with the opportunities in front of us, balancing a purist mindset against a need to move the needle, get Stacks into the world, and keep the ecosystem fueled.

Everything we do comes back to supporting our builders. At various times this takes different forms: It means working on partnerships that result in more tools or better infrastructure. It means sourcing talent for teams in the grant or accelerator programs. It means educating more developers. It means creating more Stacks holders. Whatever it is, our primary operating mode will always be to clear the way for the builders. We know that if we create the conditions for valuable things to built on the network, Stacks will become a valuable piece of internet architecture.

I think it would be relatively easy to spend way too much on ads, memes, influencers, speaking slots, and general clout-chasing as is all-too-common in crypto and go home each day feeling like we’ve done our part to help $STX keep up with the industry. In fact, I mention this specifically because we field one or two complaints a quarter that we ‘don’t do enough marketing’ and it’s almost always in reference to doing more of the aforementioned activities for the token. Listen, I totally get it. If you’re a Stacks supporter, you want to see Stacks everywhere and you want your favorite project to be at the top of every page and on top of every chart.

Further, it’s no secret that a big part of crypto is dealing with a sentiment driven market, so the visibility factor of the asset cannot be ignored. What this notion comes down to is simply our role in the ecosystem. Hype and virality are wonderful tools, but they are also unpredictable and temporary by nature, so they are not tools we choose often or a primary lens with which we look at driving outcomes.

Instead, here’s how we think about our role in getting the word out about Stacks:

So, while it’s admittedly hard to see memecoins come out of nowhere and suck up eyeballs and value we’d certainly love to have on Stacks, we do our best to stay away from short-term traps and focus on fueling projects and partners that build long-term value for Stacks.

While on the surface, there are projects we could work with that may seem competitive to Stacks, we operate from a place of trying to be supportive of and collaborative with others in our industry. Crypto is a very small industry and we all stand to benefit as the use of this technology grows. We prioritize bringing value and possibility to our builders over trying to silo ourselves off on a technological or cultural level.

It might be cliché, but the truth is we think long and hard about how we spend and deploy the treasury. We’re an extension of the community and we see our responsibility here as simply maximizing that treasury in your interest. Either through Grants or the new Advocates program, we are managing the Foundation’s STX to fuel efforts with long-term benefit to the community. We are doing so in a manner that balances short-term growth needs with long-term service to the ecosystem for the next decade or more. Medium-term plans being discussed by working groups include DAOs and similar structures so the community can more directly manage these resources too.

So, I’ve given you an idea of how we operate and why, now I want to give you some insight into what we’ve been prioritizing this quarter so you can see how themes map to real work. We operate using OKRs (objectives and key results) and take on an ambitious plate - success looks like accomplishing 50-70% of work for the quarter. We don’t always stick to the letter of OKR model (you'll see not everything is precisely measurable), but the exercise focuses our efforts each quarter at the highest level.

In future quarters, something we'll be focusing on as part of the OKR process is how best to include the community more formally. Right now there are various ways we ensure your needs are working their way into these priorities, but I think everyone would benefit from a process as we scale.

Thank you for your time and the work you do as a member of the community. I know there’s a lot going on not just in Stacks world, but in yours, and in the world at large. We have an amazing community that fuels our pursuit of an audacious mission. Stepping back, it’s incredible how patient and supportive everyone is while we figure this out together. It’s clear the best practices for collaborating as a network of independent entities and people are still being developed, but my hope is this post can play a part in starting a habit of over-communicating that enables us to activate the advantages our decentralized structure affords us.

Communities like ours are the change vehicles of our time and we get better at driving together every day.

In closing, I want to stress that we’re all honored to be here at the Stacks Foundation and in a position to serve this community — I hope this helps you see a little more clearly into our logic, rationale, and hearts as we do our best to do right by you and by our shared mission.