Job Description

Develop strategy and roadmap. Your first order of business will be to work with the Founder to define the roadmap and the strategy for the entire organization. This will require you to quickly get up to speed on a decade of crypto innovation, which the existing team will help you with. You will then need to effectively combine your newfound knowledge with existing experience to "play out the chess" on how to grow DeSo.

Execute on roadmap and manage people. As the Founder's partner, you will be responsible for managing various groups of people at different times, and executing on strategic initiatives that are determined to be a top priority.

Build out marketing and business development strategy. The DeSo Foundation has historically underinvested in marketing and business development, spending virtually no time there. As a result, even though DeSo’s technology and products are superior to virtually all alternatives on the market, it remains the case that few have heard about DeSo. Increasing awareness through marketing and business development functions, which could include building significant organizations there, will be a top priority for the COO.

Help set culture and engage with key stakeholders. People in the organization will look to you and the Founder to set a culture underpinned by passion and excellence. In addition, DeSo also has hundreds of extremely influential and thoughtful investors and partners that are excited to see it grow. All of these connections have been historically under-utilized, and the COO will be responsible for engaging with all of DeSo’s major partners, and figuring out how to incorporate them into DeSo’s high-level roadmap and strategy.

Manage day to day operations. This person will be responsible for handling a lot of the day to day operations of running the business. The COO needs to be someone who’s willing to get their hands dirty, and be unafraid to do a wide range of things from editing copy to managing spreadsheets of tasks to setting strategy to managing a large organization.

Bring a deep executive network. The DeSo Foundation has an extremely high bar for talent at the executive level, and the COO will be responsible for coming equipped with a deep network of respected former colleagues who can be pulled into the DeSo organization. The few key hires we make after bringing on the COO will define the organization, and so we expect at least two subsequent executive or senior hires of extremely high caliber to come directly from this person’s network. ### ### Preferred Experience

Experience with technical concepts, ideally via a technical undergraduate degree.

Experience defining a high-level strategy and roadmap, and executing on it.

Prior experience at a successful startup during its "zero to one" phase is ideal for this.

Experience building out and managing an organization of 10-100 people (or more). Ideal candidates will have had experience running a smaller execution-focused team directly as "the spreadsheet person," as well as experience building out and running a larger organization.

Experience setting culture and inspiring others.

Experience mapping out the full "game tree" of possibilities for a space to stay ahead of where things are going to evolve.

Experience public speaking and acting as the face of a large mission-driven organization. Ideal candidates have been on panels or given public talks.

Exposure to crypto concepts. Ideal candidates will have been in the crypto space since 2017 or earlier.

About DeSo

Website

DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that recently listed on Coinbase, has accumulated over 1.5 million accounts, and just crossed over $1B in volume transacted on-chain. DeSo is backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and many others (full list on deso.org).

Our mission is to decentralize social media the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralizing the financial system.

As a layer-1 blockchain, DeSo can be compared to other blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, etc... However, DeSo has several major advantages over these platforms, the largest being that it is designed to power storage-heavy applications (like social applications and marketplaces). To put it in perspective, storing just a 200-character "Tweet" on Ethereum costs ~$80, and costs ~$0.25-$1.00+ on Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and virtually all other smart contract chains. In contrast, it costs 1/1,000th of a penny on DeSo, which is why breakthrough apps like Diamond, Cloutfeed, Pearl, OpenProsper, NFTz, Entre, Cloutavista, and DAODAO are now possible exclusively on DeSo.

DeSo’s Mission

Today, social media is even more centralized than the financial industry was prior to the creation of Bitcoin. A handful of private entities effectively control public discourse, and earn monopoly profits off of content that they don't even create. Society’s answer to financial centralization was not to put Warren Buffett in charge of money, it was to use technology, namely Bitcoin, so we could have nobody in charge.

We believe the same type of technology will cause this conclusion to ultimately play out in social. DeSo’s advantages make it capable of breaking this status quo for the first time, and bringing competition and innovation back to social in much the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum have done for our financial system. Moreover, if DeSo succeeds, we will no longer need individual "dictators" to set a homogenous moderation policy for hundreds of millions of people.

DeSo's Potential

You may notice that crypto has disrupted finance, but not yet social media or marketplaces. This is actually a tech scaling problem, not a product problem. DeFi apps are "finite state," meaning they have very light storage requirements, which makes them possible within the limitations of existing blockchains. As an example, you could send funds back and forth between two people a million times, and all you’d need to store on-chain is two account balances (a few bytes). In contrast, with social apps, every post, follow, like, etc... generates new data that needs to be stored and indexed potentially forever (these are "infinite state" applications). Infinite state apps weren't possible before DeSo, and DeSo is now the only blockchain on the market capable of powering infinite state applications. This makes DeSo the first platform capable of building a network effect around open social content.

DeSo’s potential is especially exciting when one considers that content network effects have the potential to be much stronger than any of the network effects we’ve seen in DeFi (switching banks or exchanges is much easier than switching social networks).

Want to go deep? Check out this deep dive video from the founder himself to understand DeSo’s strategy, and how we go from where we are today to becoming the dominant social platform.

The Organization

People: We have ~15 people total. Roughly half are engineers. Nader Al-Naji is the Founder.

Nader is a technical founder, formerly the founder of Basis, a pioneer in the algorithmic stablecoin space that raised $133 million from prominent investors. Nader started DeSo in early 2019, developed all of the early technology behind DeSo, and has since raised over $200 million for the project as a solo founder. Before Basis, Nader worked as a quant at D. E. Shaw and an engineer in ads and search at Google. Nader studied computer science at Princeton where he graduated summa cum laude one year early in 2013, and where he also managed to mine 23 Bitcoin on free campus electricity.

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Chief Operating Officer

DeSo

Job Description

About DeSo

DeSo’s Mission

DeSo's Potential

The Organization

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