Doubled Our Rooks
It's a great pleasure to announce the hire of 8 new team members to KeeperDAO! These individuals have been contributing to KeeperDAO for months and have shown a steadfast dedication, industry-leading talent, and a vision for KeeperDAO that we're thrilled to formalize today with full-time roles.
KeeperDAO Labs Full-Time Hires
Rama: Designer
One of the biggest walls to broad adoption of cryptocurrencies and DeFi is poor UX. Rama is passionate about setting KeeperDAO on a path that will lead us toward industry-leading user experience. A professional designer with a love for DeFi and expertise to match, Rama is largely responsible for the new visual style and layout of our apps, which he created in just a few weeks. He has big plans for the future, and is now joining to see those plans through, full-time.
WhatsTheDeetz: External Affairs Lead
Better communication is vital for our project, and something we've worked hard to improve. Much of that has been driven by WhatsTheDeetz, a professional communications strategist who has dedicated himself to the process of revamping our external relations, community engagement, media relations, and much more. He is leading the charge with the new Community Calls series and has been helping with outreach to potential partners. He'll be taking the role of External Affairs Lead.
Tommy: Brand & Marketing Lead
Over the past months, professional marketing strategist Tommy has been immersed in developing, refining, and implementing an ecosystem-wide brand and marketing strategy. "Technology can't always speak for itself," he says, noting that KeeperDAO is new, complex undertaking that needs to attract all kinds of participants in an industry full of choices. His goal is to position KeeperDAO as an attractive project for potential partners, contributors, and users, while establishing KeeperDAO as the decentralised protocol for Keepers.
0xlapras: Laboratory Wires
One of the very first community members, and one of the first community ambassadors, Lapras was also the originator of the ideas that would eventually become KeeperDAO Labs. A dedicated organizer and technician, this plesiosaur will connect the modular pieces from inside and outside of Labs, with full-time responsibilities encompassing project management and organization, engineering management, scaling team operations, and ice beaming.
Watts: Creative Lead
It's hard not to notice the amazing work that Watts has been contributing the past couple months. A professional creative director with a knack for bringing abstract concepts to life, Watts' distinct visuals have brought our communications and the recent launch of Hiding Vaults to a new level. His goal is to help KeeperDAO reach a higher and more cohesive standard for visual content that best conveys the project's values and resonates with key audiences and the crypto community at large. He'll be joining KeeperDAO Labs as a full-time Creative Lead.
KeeperDAO Core Full-Time Hires
Exeggcute: Engineer
Exeggcute is an early community contributor, and one of the two co-winners of the kAave solidity challenge. After his successful submission, he completed a lengthy technical interview and was chosen to join the KeeperDAO Core team as a full-time Python x Solidity Engineer, where he will work on design and development of new smart contracts to support KeeperDAO products. Most importantly, he helps fill out our Pokedex!
Pai-Sho: Code Keeper
An early community contributor, Pai-Sho started out by building software to monitor KeeperDAO's on-chain activities and analyze the behaviors of the arbitrage bot. He next began working on a grant initiative around metrics, before turning down a job at NASA to spearhead the revamp of the KeeperDAO app front-end and development of the Hiding Vault client. Now he is joining full-time, and leads a growing web development team to create better clients, microservices, and APIs to power our products.
Hazard: MEV Engineer, Ambassador
One of our original community ambassadors, Hazard has been contributing in countless ways, leading the vision for DAO governance, tackling the complex Uniswap v3 integration for our arbitrage bot, and helping to organize project development. An experienced software engineer and mathematician, he is joining KeeperDAO full-time, to continue his role in community development while creating new algorithms and technology to support KeeperDAO's products and infrastructure.
To reiterate other writings, both the Core and Labs entities are collaborative forces building this ecosystem with different but complimenting focuses. The strengths of all the team members reach across the aisle to shape the project in the healthiest of fashions.
Compensation
The above hires will be compensated in a combination of ROOK and USDC. Buybacks completed between June and July have been allocated for three years of runway for the team.
Note: New hires had the opportunity to take compensation in a mix of USDC and ROOK; the team as a whole chose to take the majority of their pay in ROOK, which does not begin vesting for six months. This decision underscores the confidence these hires have in the future of the project, each other, and their collective commitment to realizing the vision of KeeperDAO.
Ratification
We believe going forward that some decision making should be left up to governance, while also maintain that ICs can be trusted to make decisions. As seen by the initial governance model, we are not asking for a vote on day to day operations - this can be counterproductive and add friction for tasks that should be seamless. While we aren't going to ask for review on small things, we look forward to the community ratifying the People Operations KIP as well as confirming these ICs.
It's not a stretch to say that KD's future will largely be shaped by the talent that has been brought on today. It's a pivotal time for DeFi and the project itself, and we now have the infrastructure and team to scale the organization to new heights. We are stoked to now have the formal structure to enable us to work at a full-time capacity - and can't wait to move quickly, elegantly, and help build the future of KeeperDAO.
For those counting at home, with the addition of eight new team members, we just doubled our Rooks.