Hi all,
I’ve been thinking about transparency with the community a lot, and what that means to myself personally, what it means to the DAO, and what it means for Bamboo Asset Management as a company.
Let me start by giving some examples of questions I’ve received, and why I think these are issues of transparency that are something I don’t want to answer, and the “why”.
Question: “What is Bamboo’s runway ($ available verses projected budget)”
This is a question that the answer is is 1) proprietary to the company 2) is not a constant 3) a bit invasive.
Think of it this way. What if I asked one of you “How much do you make, how much do you have in savings, and if you got fired - how many months could you survive before you got evicted from your home all things being the same. What about if you had a pay cut? What about if you had unexpected expenses?” Is this a question you’d be willing to answer? I’d think the answer is no.
So - this is a topic that only I would discuss with our board, or with a potential accredited investor (and not even every accredited investor - again for the reasons listed above). You might be wiling to discuss the above with a Loan officer who is willing to give you a home equity loan - but not a credit card company willing to give you a 0% loan based on your credit.
This also - in a publicly traded company - would likely be considered insider information. This information might only be available to the C-suite of the company or other insiders, and this is why the SEC requires disclosures for insider holdings/sales/etc. of equity of a publicly traded company and why there are laws around insider trading/trading on information not known to the public.
Question: Why did this date not occur? What’s slowing you down? What’s coming next and when
Companies run on people. People are human beings, and human beings have lives. Sometimes, things happen in our lives that create conflict with our work lives. People get sick, people take vacations, people get depressed, people quit jobs, people sometimes are destructive and cause problems.
This is the function of myself as CEO to manage. But think of it this way.
Let’s assume you have children. What if one of your children has mental illness, and they tried to hurt themselves. You go into work and say “I have a personal problem inside my family, I need to take a leave of absence”. Your company doesn’t get to say “why? What happened?”. That’s your own personal business. Things like this happen in companies as well, and so sometimes a key resource has something they have to deal with which moves dates.
This is something that as a CEO - I would not share with the community in general. Imagine if I said “hey - we missed this date because my operations manager’s child was in the psych ward”. Or even “we missed this date because one of my staff had personal problems”. What you need to know is we missed a date, not the juicy details behind it.
Also consider your sense of urgency behind knowing dates. Dates can mean a few things to different people. but almost always it’s a sense of desire of wanting to know if/when an asset may appreciate in value. And so in crypto - especially during a bull market - crypto teams have used dates/influencers/roadmaps to drive expectations and often times to illegally or at least unethically drive the assets price.
Now - all this being said, dates, roadmaps, timelines are a choice for a company or project to make. The problem with them is - it creates a sense of anxiety in communities, and it also potentially creates a conflict where people seek inside information. We often call this “alpha” in crypto - but let’s be real - it’s insider information much of the time. I’ve personally stepped away from projects where I felt like the “alpha” being shared was actually insider information, because I felt it to be unethical. Just because crypto isn’t regulated doesn’t mean that I don’t have a moral sense of ethics, but I am also doubly bound by a code of conduct Bamboo must adhere to as being a member of the Global DCA, a signed document I have agreed to. This is about what Bamboo being a member of a self regulatory body is.
Lastly, consider a few other topics.
- Bamboo is still a small start up company - it means many of us also have “day jobs” or other means to fulfill our obligations in life, or many of us work on more than one project at a time. So
- What we are building requires a fairly large number of people to coordinate, at times can be technically complex, requires a lot of brain cycles as well as blood sweat and tears to deliver, and we also strive to deliver a very high quality product that is as regulatory compliant as we can be given the data
*This is also a rapidly shifting environment. The technology changes, the sentiment changes, understanding and information changes, strategy and tactics change - many of this can shift on a daily basis.
So - given all of this, I can also ask the question - which would you rather have the team focused on - telling the community every nuance of what’s happening, when, why it is or isn’t happening (much of it for human/$/tech/other factors that can be sensitive/private/proprietary)…etc.
Or would you rather have us focused on solving problems, building, strategizing, networking, raising capital, etc., while also managing our own personal lives.
There’s a balance to be made in delivery of information and transparency to be certain. But you can be assured that when I have to balance all of the above factors, sometimes “silence” is what you are going to get from me - because I’m focused on things that are more important than all the gory details of what’s happening. This balance I have to choose is mine and mine alone, the buck stops with the CEO. Yes - I can and would desire to be more communicative, perhaps give more frequent updates, but when your sleeves are rolled up and you’re managing a certain level of chaos, I always will default to the side of executing, as well as taking care of myself, my family/friends, and my teams needs, over communication.
Community is critical - don’t get me wrong. I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again - I’m also a part of this community, as are all of the team members, moderators/admins, and all of you. A community is an aggregation of opinions. Consensus is hard to form - but that’s where a DAO comes into play, so I encourage everyone to participate more via the DAO and constructive conversation - especially via this forum - rather than asking general “when/why/why not” questions in telegram. But we are keeping telegram open because many prefer that as a method of communication. I generally do not prefer telegram for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. I see this forum as a way to get more insight and have semi-public conversation, and medium and other social media as a way to “bullhorn” information more to the public at large or people who do not frequent this forum.
Make no mistake - we are in a bear market - and so the sands are shifting in other ways now. It’s my job to navigate us through this bear market, and we’ve even taken on a motto that I overheard from a 2018 crypto survivor. Their mantra was “Survive”. Well ours goes beyond that - it’s “Survive. Then Thrive.”
We have lots of things in the pipeline, and will deliver more information when we feel the timing is right. But I feel a strategic shift is necessary - in more that instead of hyping what we are going to deliver, we deliver, then we show you what we’ve done. Trust is built on transparency as well as on execution, so I always welcome your questions around transparency, and I will strive to be transparent in a way that is balanced with what I’ve discussed here, as well as focus on execution.
And I can’t wait to introduce you more to the DAO Lama - a very wise pink panda who is grown up, the avatar of who we collectively are and/or want to be - full of wisdom and insight, humble but confident, patient and educational, compassionate for all of life, kind and gentle but fierce when necessary, playful and humorous, and always willing to grow, learn, evolve and adapt.
I as always welcome any questions/comments/concerns/criticism on this or any topic either publicly posted or directed to me in private, and there are also members of the team and moderators/admins you can ask questions of as well.
Have a fantastic weekend.
I wouldn’t mind another face on the team public facing - but again, we’re small and we have to take things one day at a time and use the resources we have.
(seriously)