Mission: DeFi Ep 4 - Maki from Sushiswap
Primer: Brad Nickel from Mission: DeFi podcast interviews 0xMaki, the cofounder of Sushiswap. Learn more about the Sushiswap style of decentralised leadership and how their active engagement with their community makes the whole organisation very adaptable and highly motivated.
Co-founder of Sushiswap - Maki
Who is Maki?
Is a crypto native and had always been passionate about crypto
Explored Ethereum when gas was exceptionally cheap and started going into the DeFi space
Started with dYdX and is a power user of Ethereum and DeFi since day 1
Wanted to contribute in some ways to the space
Started with Yearn and wanted to get involved with Uniswap but the Uniswap team is quite inaccessible
Moved on to Sushiswap and grew the team from 4 to 22 people
"What are our objectives and goals? We listed them all up in the 2021 medium article, which was our roadmap for the year. Right? And you know, like, you would pull up this list, and you would literally be able to checkmark everything on it, I think 85% right now, this is like the year is not even over, right? We're just halfway there. Yeah. And that, to me is fucking insane."
- Maki
Staying Anon
He works in finance and that's all that he will share
He never talks about crypto but okay to share the gospel of crypto in general
Initially, at the beginning of Sushiswap, the other two co-founders, Chef Nomi and sushiswap, are fully anonymous and are reluctant to reveal anything about themselves
But it was hard to get the trust of audit firms like this, so someone had to put some skin in the game - that would be Maki
He regretted it because he had to put his reputation on the line
Chef Nomi removed some $13 million in funds from a pool in Uniswap meant for Sushiswap and people thought that he had absconded off the funds. Chef Nomi later gave control of Sushiswap to Sam Bankman-Fried - the head of cryptocurrencies derivatives trading firm Alameda Research. A few days later, Chef Nomi returned the liquidated funds to the pool and apologized.
Thankfully it turned out well and they are able to come back from the mistake but he felt very stupid
Had to work with people that you can trust and not dox yourself
Had to make sure that the project does not have any kind of God mode where one has access to everything, and there is a time lock in place.
In retrospect, he now understands why Chef Nomi was reluctant to reveal details about himself but all these are in the past and had been sorted out, so he's not worried about it now
A day with Maki
2 meetings per week - one for the design and the other for the front end
Tends to give as much autonomy as possible and tries not to push his vision
He will just review things and give pointers, at the same time making sure that the product is in line with what the community wants
One project that Maki admires
Ribbon finance
Product is built on top of options on autopilot that basically simplifies a lot of complex stuff for users
Going to be important in the next wave
Sushiswap
Very meritocratic and decentralised
They have a very open way of doing things
If anyone wants to contribute, they just have to come into their Discord and just do it
As long as it is reasonable and under a certain dollar amount, the team will usually give a grant for the contributors to reward them for their output
The developers are autonomous and the core team trusts the judgement of the developers to push Sushiswap in any direction with very little oversight
Never looked at a person's CV or resume because it is all about the output and how they got into crypto
Some of the contributors are not even from DeFi so Sushiswap is also like a bridge to attract talent into the ecosystem
Even if they are not in Sushiswap, they will stay in Defi and contribute to the space in their own ways
Leaderless organisation
A lot of these protocols have no inputs from Maki because he does not want anyone to be entirely reliant on him
Maki does not want to be seen as the leader
The leader should be made up of an assembly of people and not all of them necessarily has to be working for Sushiswap
E.g. some DAOs have people holding a massive amount of delegated votes and they are not even part of the protocol's team
Striving towards a leaderless organisation
This new way of organization is going to be transferred over to the non-crypto world, especially with the success of those that made it
It will totally transform how we function as a society
Making what the community wants
Will do interview with users to find out where the pain points are for people using it
Could be very small things like simple UI changes but had been requested a lot
Reworking the UI for the onsen so that it becomes easier to display a user's positions
Analytics is next in line - working on a centralised place where the user can see how much Sushiswap is earning and how much in proportion is coming from the different chains, and which is the most traded pair across all the networks
"Make something people want" - slogan from Y combinator on their webpage
Needs to combine that with "Don't make me think" - relates to the idea of putting the UI so simple and intuitive that people do not have to think about what they are supposed to do in the next step
Miso - a digital asset launchpad
A place where anyone, regardless of whether they have skills as a developer, can launch and tokenise
It is a project incubator that is very flexible and modular so that projects can key in their own parameters
Allows creative money lego builders to do anything
The pipeline is to start off at Miso first, then go on to swaps with Sushi, then Kashi
The projects chosen are mostly from trial and error
Similar to the Y combinator, they are taking a portion of the tokens supply before launch, so they are working for the whole Sushi community
If the projects are not good, they will receive feedback from the community
By always listening to the feedback from the community, even if you are not interested in pursuing further, you engage your community to bring more people to share more things with you
"And we're kind of in the same bath. And you know, like the industry is so small right now, it's ridiculous to just entertain rivalry. I think it's more about Yeah, growing everyone, and making sure that there's room for all the experiments."
- Maki
Maki's motto is always to seek a win-win situation in partnership
And because of that, the team is always talking to everyone in the DeFi space to see if they can partner up
Open system in DeFi attracts talent
New talents coming into the space
A lot of stuff in DeFi is happening in the Ethereum blockchain
Might be in other blockchains like Solana but they are not there yet
Hard to compete with an open system like Ethereum
There's a lot of talents coming from the top tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc
The learning curve for them is not steep, and it's just a matter of catching up to everything
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