I originally started this as a comment on Fred Ehrsam's similarly themed post, there were too many comments, and since I'm having a giant cup of coffee, I'm breaking it out into its own post. Enjoy!

Many in the blockchain industry would like to see faster R&D progress in blockchain performance, capacity (scaling), privacy, governance, and secure “stable value” tokens. The question naturally arises as to which funding and team models would best achieve this.

Clearly, the problem extends beyond funding. The Ethereum Foundation holds around $200 million in donations, and Tezos and EOS raised even more from public investors in their recent ICOs.

The leaders of these projects can invest significant amounts of money in engineering and research efforts. The interesting question is how best to direct such resources toward developing blockchain protocols.

Fred believes that R&D efforts should be open to the market, with large rewards for teams that can add features such as sharding to allow blockchain networks to scale capacity (sharding increases capacity by dividing computing responsibilities and storage across the network).

Tezos plans to take a similar approach and explicitly states that it will promote the formation of decentralized teams that will compete for a large portion of the funding.

The idea is that competition between teams and more ideas on core problems and code will drive faster progress. There should be at least some merit to this idea.

However, in my opinion, this approach is not entirely practical for two main reasons:

1) Creating new decentralized protocols and crypto technologies often requires years of thought and skills that are rare, so these technologies cannot be conceived solely by those who need them, hope to get a bounty, or even those who have just run an ICO;

2) While such fundamental science can often be described in isolation, introducing them into the decentralized web stack often involves far-reaching technological changes, which makes it very difficult for teams to work independently and build key pieces incrementally.

For these reasons, I think a better approach is to create a "Google-style" team to develop the stack. The problem here is that if you really want to build a team of similar quality to the early days of Google, you need to start with extreme true raw science, otherwise you won't be able to attract an initial core team of superstar talent.

They will easily read through white papers that are actually ICO marketing documents, of course, the beautiful technical designs in these white papers are the work of those technicians, not marketing. Google's business is built on technology, not marketing.

Once you have meaningful novel science backed by such a superstar team, you then need to add more superstar layers to that team in the form of an onion, where the quality of each new layer will determine the quality of later layers because superstars strongly desire to join other superstars.

This is a very difficult thing to do, especially in a hurry, and requires compound talents with both technical and entrepreneurial experience, which is extremely scarce in the blockchain industry.

The amount of money raised helps hide the problem from the masses. Tezos may have raised $350 million in ICO funds following the cryptocurrency’s price surge, but in their latest update, they’ve only just announced their first hire, a San Francisco-based head of business development (when Tezos was running its ICO, its team page showed a software developer working for a French company called OCaml, who had agreed to do some contract work for them, rather than being their own full-time employee).

There are many questions yet to be answered: Will their initial technical work be enough to build a superstar core? And, if so, can they somehow attract and motivate talent with some generous salaries, will they be able to gradually build the team and create the culture they need to win the technical race?

Only time will tell if they can, but what is certain is that their path does not reflect the more efficient ways in the past that incredible technology organizations like Google have risen and developed their systems.

While I sincerely wish the best of luck to the Tezos and EOS teams, I think they will have their work cut out for them whether they pursue the Google or decentralized team model and use ICO funds to their advantage.

But again, the evidence doesn’t entirely hold up, and of course I’m biased because I’m heavily invested in how DFINITY operates, and we prioritize a top-notch team and science, while mostly ignoring chasing ICO money and media coverage.

Our philosophy and proposition is that we can win, simply by releasing a world-changing network in the form of a high-performance blockchain computer, with unlimited capacity, through which new applications and systems can be easily developed.

Anyone interested in what we do should first check out our team page. If you're impressed, you'll also be interested to know that we have a ton of talent in the pipeline that's set to shake up the tech world.

Superstars are now joining us in droves because of our solid novel science and the team we already have in place. That’s the real momentum, and I think it’s really necessary to accelerate the development of blockchain networks.

For me personally, it was defined by my switch to the Google search engine in the early 2000s. I remember being an "AltaVista head" until someone told me to try Google and I officially typed in http://google.com.

I did the search and immediately saw that the results were much better and coming in much faster. However, as the head of AltaVista, I went back to AltaVista feeling a little angry that my beliefs were challenged. However, I still became a full-time Google user within two days.

DFINITY plans to win in a similar way, with an obsession with product/market fit, industry technology change, superstar techies, and engineering culture. Given what our team is doing, I expect the upcoming release of the DFINITY network to bring about a significant change in the speed of blockchain development.



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