The Next Chapter: Operations at Protocols

I am most intrigued with answering one question: How can we focus on, and scale, culture in decentralized ecosystems?

Although largely invisible, culture, and the organizational structure it relies on, is far-reaching. Culture informs who joins the team, how they behave, what product they build, and how they treat others. When I joined Coinbase in 2014, culture was a vital attribute.

There is a lot of literature that describes how organizational practices are evolving. The two that have influenced me are Team of Teams and Reinventing Organizations. These books describe that organizational practices are shifting into a new paradigm; instead of hierarchies that create machines of people focused on profit and power, the next iteration of organizations will be self-managed living systems focused on realizing their potential (more on how humans organize here). I believe crypto has the conditions to bring this organizational evolution to reality.

I chose to start Iris Alignment, a team that cares about creating human-oriented organizations while ambitiously driving forward Web3. My role in Iris is to discover and support efficient operations at protocols. It is a large aim but my core commitment is to ensure the well-being of ecosystems in the world of Web3.

Together with the broader community, I plan to discover, design, and open-source common practices to bring a new paradigm of organizational processes to crypto protocols.