hey everybody this is Charles Hoskinson again real briefly I just wanted to make a dedicated video about the Cardinal foundation I saw a video recently from crypto Weiser and there's been some comps on reddit Twitter about the foundation the Governing Council the Independence of the board and basically where is the foundation going in 2020 you see I'm a software development company I which K and it's an aggregation of great engineers solutions providers and people who are incredibly talented at thinking about how to write good software and how to do good science we are not built as an organization for marketing we're not built as an organization for community management we're not built as an organization to manage relationships with cryptocurrency exchanges we don't have a whole pot of lawyers who sit down all day and write things about how regulations should be or how cryptocurrency should be regulated we're an engineering company at our core and I didn't sign up to do that collection of activities I felt that those are activities that ought to be done by those who evangelize a particular protocol whether it be Bitcoin or aetherium or Cardinal so when you build a cryptocurrency you have really four dimensions that you look at the ODC see you look at the operations you look at the delivery of the underlying technology you look at how the technology is commercialized in the capitalization so where do you get the value from how do you get enough funds to actually build things so the magic of cardano's is actually in the beginning instead of starting as one entity it was actually constructed from a large collection of entities and people there were lots of people involved at the beginning the single most important entity for the long-term decentralisation of Cardno has always been the Cardinal foundation and that's because that's the entity that will Shepherd the process upon which community management is done that's the entity that's going to Shepherd the meaningful relationships that are required for liquidity in the markets it's the entity that's going to Shepherd adoption it's the entity that's going to Shepherd the Cardinal improvement proposal process and the gradual to centralization cata to a point where it makes itself obsolete it's one of the things that we kind of have to build the technology to get to a point where these things are relevant so I which K's role in the beginning is certainly much more important the long-term armor go in the foundation are really going to be the big value drivers for Carnival we're of course going to participate and we certainly have set ups to do so but there's a large list of things that I do at i/o HK I don't want to do but I have to do for the benefit of the ecosystem for example we work very closely with exchanges to help them with their wallets and support and we get business and technical requirements from them all the time we aren't funded to do this work but we do it as voluntary contributions we run a helpdesk for the software me answer thousands of support tickets were not funded to do this work but we do it we do a lot of marketing we do a lot of press releases we do a lot of comms and marketing work that traditionally should be reserved for the Cardinal foundation and we're not paid for this stuff but we do it the historical reason why was that the prior chairman of the Cardinal foundation mr. Parsons made a strategic decision to basically ignore his mandate and ignore the work that the foundation was paid to do so in many words he squandered the community's time resources faith trust and money so the great part of a true invert structure is that if one of the pillars collapses the other two pillars can step in and compensate for that and eventually restore the entity and there's really a three phase plan for restoration of the Cardinal foundation the first phase was strictly technical in that there was a lot of just mess there wasn't a proper internal control system really the books weren't well kept there was an essay complaint there was a litany of problems that had to be cleared and the foundation had to get a regulatory and legal clean bill of health so domain experts were brought in to specifically accommodate that and they have done an admirable job appointing Grant Thornton and others to work with them and they've cleared a mess that other foundations have spent tens millions of dollars of money to clean up and they've done it for significantly significantly less a fraction of a percent of that so I'm very proud of that the second phase is to do the work that Michael Parsons was supposed to do which basically meant building out a large amount of surfaces and utilities for example the ability to actually talk to the exchanges the ability to do community management the ability to actually talk about market the protocol for example how do we brand card out what's the elevator pitch these types of things also a discussion around how do we make Cardno useful as software see it is the writer of software typically write it for a client and so I need a product owner to tell me the backlog to tell me the features and functionality the product priorities to say feature a is worth more than feature B for example should we get ledger support first or multis sake or hundreds of little decisions like that in the absence of product owner we have to be our own product owner it's just kind of figure it out we'd love a counterparty to work with us and be able to tell us these things so the second part of the restoration of the foundation is building up the infrastructure in capabilities that the foundation should have already had to serve you the community and this is going to require a lot more people so the first wave of people that were brought in or strictly to clean up the mess that was created by the prior administration the second wave of people that are being brought in tomorrow Haas and Nico are specifically about aiding the existing group in building up capabilities so I can take things that are currently at Iowa --jq a and hand them back to the foundation where they should belong and they should be independent of us and so that's underway and it's a deeply technical process there's a lot of administrative and operational things HR things that are required and we have trust faith and confidence in these people because they've done things like build AI ohk to a 230 person company and allow us to hire some of the best people in the world and they've done things in the emerges I'd like build your ROI so if you're happy with the work that they've done there and the contributions that they've made over a multi year period then you should be definitely happy with the fact that they're now working for you the community and trying to take necessary infrastructure that's currently being serviced by American Iowa JH k and bring it back from those entities into the Carter foundation now the third pillar the third phase of this restoration plan is diversification basically saying okay let's now make this a true community organization let's involve democracy let's create groups that people can join let's expand the Ambassador Program which diversify funding let's get a truly independent diverse board made up of members in the community and outside of the community one of the reasons in particular why Tamara's there is she is an expert in recruitment in HR and we very very very much want to see a governing council be made up of experts in and outside of the community who are completely independent of IOH k and emerge oh there is no desire in my company for my company to have anything to do with the operations and management of the Cardinal foundation and I don't feel comfortable even considering that long term so we brought an HR expert who ran our HR department helped me staff my own company to help the foundation establish those control systems and recruit great people in addition to the operational improvements that need to be made in addition to the strategic alliances that need to be constructed addition to installing could checks and balances now Nikko is an expert on technology he's a great CTO I've worked with him personally we've had an amazing time with the handoff of Icarus to you Roy and it is the most successful product in our ecosystem in terms of user experience and feedback and as a technical expert in the first technical expert to join the Cardinal foundation board he's in a very good position to start the conversation about what should the Cardinal improvement proposal process be like again this is something we could definitely develop at i/o HK but this is the core duty of the Cardinal foundation to talk about how do we improve the protocol how do we improve the infrastructure how do we improve the marketing how do we prove adoption all of these things there needs to be a Solutions Group within the foundation that interfaces with the solutions architects and providers who want to use Cardno to build real life applications and have a dialogue about capabilities and have a dialogue about what priorities should we have in the development roadmap for Cardona both in 2020 and beyond and then to be able to take those improvement proposals write RFPs get budgets behind them and then bring them to a Treasury system then you guys can vote on them and pick the priorities and decide as a community where do you want Cardona to be there needs to be a gatekeeper a curator to start this process and that's always been the Cardinal foundation Nico is a great CTO and working with Sebastian and both of which have been great members of the open-source community throughout their careers are uniquely well-suited to begin this process but by no means close or finish this process in many ways just start it and then we can collaborate you the community can collaborate and as we enter into 2020 we'll be in a very good position to have great business and technical requirements for Volterra again I have a clear idea what I'd like to see but I'm not in charge here and I don't want to be in charge here you're in charge the community so I appreciate the concerns and I appreciate the fact that there are people who serve dual roles there are checks and balances that have been installed there is oversight it is a regulated entity but at the end of the day we all have to work together to correct the problems ecosystems have and all things being considered I'm very proud of the progress that's been made when they stepped into the foundation last year it was a mess the books weren't even kept correctly and now we've gotten to a point where things have been cleaned up and we're getting to a point where the foundations really starting to get proper infrastructure it's starting to get proper processes starting to get proper people and personnel behind it to augment the existing personnel who were both demoralized and overworked because of a lack of care and focus and attention and I have the utmost confidence in trust and faith the people there and I know that these people care about Cardno and have the requisite skills necessary to be able to complete that second phase and then Shepherd the creation of the third phase and then of course resign the entire board my preference would be within a year to two years should not be there there an interim board they're there to fix things that should have been fixed should have been running a long time ago and after they've served their time they'll move on to brighter pastures and the entire Foundation's end will be run by others who are totally independent I which K and other entities in the ecosystem but these things do take time these things do take effort and they do take some degree of patience and I am right there with you guys about how frustrating this experience has been there was a lot of things that could have been done differently that would have made my life a lot easier it saved me literally millions of dollars and helped our community tremendously that just simply were not done and we missed a lot of great windows as a consequence of that lack of progress but you know you can't complain about the past you can just look to the future and either I hire completely new people and hope to god that they're not like Michael Parsons and say good luck everybody or I take people I've worked with for years whom I trust who have done great things for my company and have great partners and put them into a position of authority so that they can get the damn work done those are the two options you know and right now we don't have a lot of time there's tough competition and 2020 is gonna be the make-or-break year for car da I want it to be the make year and so that means on my end the delivery end I have to have my engineers work seven days a week a lot of times and work real hard and we've had to do a lot of things to push ourselves to the limit and we are performing admirably with more than 50 releases with Jormungandr and great progress on the Haskell side and that means all the foundations and good people have to wake up every day and do three to four years worth of work in a year that's their real reality because they're behind so let's have good people do that who've been tested and true I've worked with before no can get the job done and furthermore signed up a long time ago to be part of this ecosystem Nikko is top 5% programmer and CTO living in New York City he's underpaid for the work he does and Nikko could certainly join any startup or any company or anybody in the financial world and has done great work throughout his career he's well more than qualified to do these things to take on additional responsibilities under compensated just shows you his dedication in belief in the Cardo no ecosystem and I have the utmost confidence in his ability to represent you from a technical perspective and tomorrow she's done everything she's also trained at a law school and has demonstrated both as my chief of staff and historically other HR culture officer of really keen understanding for the social dynamics of distributive systems it is incredibly difficult to get people from all across the world different cultures different languages to work well together and execute together and to build proper incentive schemes these are by definition necessary for the success of our cryptocurrency and if we don't get it right you might as well have not even tried so I need people in those positions who know and understand these things are capable of doing these things and I'm seeding Lee glad that they're there and again at least on the I which case I'd my intent is for the I which came members not to be on that board long term and if they tend to stay longer than they should I will as a CEO write them a letter instructing them to resign from the board so and I suspect a mergo will do exactly the same then the entire board should be replaced with an until 12 to 24 month period after phase two is done and after phase three has taken some legs we cannot allow another Michael Parsons incident to occur and we cannot allow ourselves to be slowed down by a necessary to centralization in this particular case we have to win and that's what we're gonna do and furthermore I have to get operations that are not meant for AI which K out of IOH K we as company were never built for this we don't perform well doing these things we're not funded to do these things and we don't want to do them so they belong to the foundation because they are public goods there are public infrastructure they can be done in a much better more efficient more decentralized and transparent way there so that's all I'll say about that I have tremendous faith in Nikko and Tamara I have tremendous faith an existing council they've done very good work this year it's been very hard work it's thankless work very bureaucratic work from preserving bank accounts that would have been closed from dealing with auditors from dealing with regulators and restoring the commercial reputation of the foundation within the Swiss jurisdiction to Remora lysing and reinvigorating the existing staff and convincing them to stay instead of quit because nobody wants to work for a broken organization to build in a proper internal control system to building out the HR systems to building out the operational systems this was not easy and they continued to behave and conduct themselves with full professionalism efficiency and demonstrate that they're in it to win it so that's all I'll say about this and if you guys have a difference of opinion I understand there are a lot of frustrations and the foundation was intended to be a sponge for criticism so please do when you see things that are right or you have concerns be vocal about them but do have some empathy for the situation that we are in as an ecosystem and realize that we can either complain about things or we can work together to solve things and I'd rather work with people than bring people down so thank you for your time and talk to you guys later
