The Chief Operating Officer Role
- Develop strategy and roadmap. Your first order of business will be to work with the Founder to define the roadmap and the strategy for the entire organization. This will require you to quickly get up to speed on a decade of crypto innovation, which the existing team will help you with. You will then need to effectively combine your newfound knowledge with existing experience to "play out the chess" on how to grow DeSo.
- Execute on roadmap and manage people. As the Founder's partner, you will be responsible for managing various groups of people at different times, and executing on strategic initiatives that are determined to be a top priority.
- Build out marketing and business development strategy. The DeSo Foundation has historically underinvested in marketing and business development, spending virtually no time there. As a result, even though DeSo’s technology and products are superior to virtually all alternatives on the market, it remains the case that few have heard about DeSo. Increasing awareness through marketing and business development functions, which could include building significant organizations there, will be a top priority for the COO.
- Help set culture and engage with key stakeholders. People in the organization will look to you and the Founder to set a culture underpinned by passion and excellence. In addition, DeSo also has hundreds of extremely influential and thoughtful investors and partners that are excited to see it grow. All of these connections have been historically under-utilized, and the COO will be responsible for engaging with all of DeSo’s major partners, and figuring out how to incorporate them into DeSo’s high-level roadmap and strategy.
- Manage day to day operations. This person will be responsible for handling a lot of the day to day operations of running the business. The COO needs to be someone who’s willing to get their hands dirty, and be unafraid to do a wide range of things from editing copy to managing spreadsheets of tasks to setting strategy to managing a large organization.
Bring a deep executive network. The DeSo Foundation has an extremely high bar for talent at the executive level, and the COO will be responsible for coming equipped with a deep network of respected former colleagues who can be pulled into the DeSo organization. The few key hires we make after bringing on the COO will define the organization, and so we expect at least two subsequent executive or senior hires of extremely high caliber to come directly from this person’s network.
Preferred Experience
- Experience with technical concepts, ideally via a technical undergraduate degree.
- Experience defining a high-level strategy and roadmap, and executing on it.
- Prior experience at a successful startup during its "zero to one" phase is ideal for this.
- Experience building out and managing an organization of 10-100 people (or more). Ideal candidates will have had experience running a smaller execution-focused team directly as "the spreadsheet person," as well as experience building out and running a larger organization.
- Experience setting culture and inspiring others.
- Experience mapping out the full "game tree" of possibilities for a space to stay ahead of where things are going to evolve.
- Experience public speaking and acting as the face of a large mission-driven organization. - Ideal candidates have been on panels or given public talks.
- Exposure to crypto concepts. Ideal candidates will have been in the crypto space since 2017 or earlier.
