Someone privately asked me why I asked Scott/Kyle to be cofounders, noting that it is rare for new cofounders to join a project after it’s been alive for a few years. I’m answering here to daylight the thought process.
In general, I believe that projects (especially those whose starting market fit is different than their final market fit) evolve over time and that there are different phases of leadership throughout the growth/evolution of the project. Someone can be a leader in Phase 1 and not scale to Phase 2, likewise if you have someone who joins and is adept in a team of 50, they may not be adept at the phase in which there are 5 contributors. I expect cofounders to (0) have a foundational impact (1) persevere through tough times (2) scale from phase to phase, which is why the 4 year term was attached to the offers above.
Specifically to Kyle/Scott, my offer of the title of cofounder came at different times of existential crisis for Gitcoin, where they were well positioned to solve the existential crisis and followed through to get the project through the crisis (which is the literal definition of founding an adept organization: establishing or originating an institution or organization).
- Scott: During The Great Bear, the primary existential threat to Gitcoin was being shut down by our primary funder, Consensys. Dozens of projects were shut down by Consensys during this time. The way we stayed ahead of the great bear was to make sure we were generating revenue and market traction, and Scott was an integral part of this - taking us from $0/mo in revenue to around $100k/mo in revenue (depending on the month). I’ve been told that great founding teams are 1 part product, 1 part sales, and 1 part operations, and Scott was prettymuch the sales leg of that tripod in the 2019-2020 era.
- Kyle: Kyle joined at the end of The Great Bear, a time when morale was very very low, the product + operations teams were in shambles insofar as no forward progress could really get made. We were failing to iterate to keep up with the market, failing to spin out of Consensys, failing to raise money, and this meant that the status quo, current course & speed, was a slow death and fade into irrelevance. Previous leadership had either failed to scale or sometimes outright quiet quit their designated leadership role at Gitcoin, so I could not turn to them. In at least one case we had issues that were even deeper than that. Kyle joined in Q4 2020 in order to help solve some of these “morale” problems, but quickly grew into a leadership role, helped turn the team, hire new talent, and figure out “what would have to be true” for us to avoid the slow death and fade into irrelevance" course and figure out Gitcoin’s next chapter. Kyle was the “ops” part of the tripod.
Ultimately, these were judgement calls that were up to leadership and highly situational and contextual to Gitcoin’s history as a company from 2017-2021.
I hope this history/context is useful, and again - its up to the DAO governance to figure out what to do with this information in the future.
EDIT MAY 2025: This is a notice to the Gitcoin community that I am no longer am recognizing Scott Moore as a cofounder of Gitcoin due to the ongoing situation with Scott refusing to recognize Gitcoin’s ownership of PublicWorks.Fm