We left yesterday’s org. call energized by the hard truths we discussed as a community, as well as excited by the communal resolve to take them on together.
We spent time afterwards reflecting on what led us to this point, and how we need to move forward.
In the spirit of communication and growth & improvement we are sharing our reflection here.
Situation
There are a lot of great things happening in the Coop
- Increasing success with DPI
- CGI launched as our second product
- New products in the pipeline (MVI, TTI, BED)
- Our community is growing
- Expertise is growing within our community
This has been matched with growing challenges
- Frustration around lack of clarity and communication
- Confusion as to what is prioritized and why
- A feeling of being blocked & limited at the last minute, without knowing why
In addition to those challenges, Set didn’t adjust quickly enough
- Trust eroded as Set shifted away from it’s early-days approach: being overly communicative and building hyper-collaboratively.
- Communication largely broke down between Index Coop <> Set
- Too much focus on quality led to a lack of speed & learning; a feeling of stagnation
- We took the wrong approach when trying to allow more community autonomy by trying to go totally hands off.
Intentions
Let’s make some basics clear:
- We are committed to the success of Index Coop
- We are deeply invested to the success of the community
- We are committed to the success of the individuals within the community
We are blown away by what you all have achieved in the Coop’s short existence, and know that we can make something huge together.
4 Shifts You Will See
We believe in:
- Building and maintaining trust: To rebuild trust, we believe that Set needs to collaborate more closely with you all on important issues. We need to communicate our perspectives early and often. We like the idea of a trust battery and we need to charge ours up with you.
- Making speed a habit: Given that things are still so early, it is important to rapidly iterate and learn. Not all decisions can be made rapidly, but our default needs to be executing a good plan right now vs. a perfect plan next week.
- Growing the pool of shared understanding: Our community is bubbling with excitement, talent, and capability. One ingredient, that is still coming along, is a shared understanding of values and technical / domain knowledge. Set has this understanding in spades from launching and building Set Protocol, and we need to share that understanding with you.
- Laying strong foundations: We need to operate scalably and one of the best ways to do that is to focus on imparting our expertise to individuals. To date, we’ve relied on group calls, which have failed to allow that expertise to really be shared in a way that is useful.
Next Steps
Here’s what we can think of so far that we’re committed to:
- Focused small group & 1:1 calls to ensure Coop community members have context and information they need to be successful [In progress]
- Co-create the working group organization structure to enable more autonomy [3/12/21]
- Co-create a plan for long-term / high-impact contributor rewards [3/19/21]
- Co-create a plan for increasing community governance power [3/31/21]
We hope this post helps shed some light on how our thinking has shifted over the recent days and weeks.
Our door is open and we are excited to rapidly communicate, build, and grow together 
@setoshi & @gdocter & @dylan & @puniaviision