Joseph Lubin Wants ConsenSys to Become a “Streamlined Rocket”

ConsenSys, the company set up to develop businesses on the Ethereum blockchain, has upgraded itself to ConsenSys 2.0, according to Breaker Magazine.

Lean and gritty and rigorous

CEO Joseph Lubin sent a letter to all employees of the company on Friday, which Breaker had access to (Lubin is a co-founder of the magazine’s parent company). In the letter, he says that the company will be made more efficient by being more strict when it comes to selecting projects to support, and by axing the less profitable ones.

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From now, says the letter, projects will be judged in terms of return on investment, their benefit to the Ethereum network, and social good. The means of assessment of this last criterion are yet to be determined.

Lubin told Breaker: “We’re going to get a lot more rigorous in terms of milestones and timetables…dissolving projects if we’ve come to the conclusion that our earlier assumptions were incorrect.”

This seems to be a reaction to the fact that the market value of Ethereum is less than a quarter of what it was six months ago. Said Lubin: “We must retain, and in some cases regain, the lean and gritty startup mindset that made us who we are.”

Proof is in the landing

New York-based ConsenSys was created by the Canadian entrepreneur in early 2015, and now has offices in San Francisco, Toronto, Dubai, Singapore, and Brisbane. It employs around 450 people in total.

Finance Magnates has been to a couple of ConsenSys conferences in Tel Aviv and can confirm that they were well-attended. At one, developers worked on blockchain applications overnight for the chance to pitch an idea to Lubin.

The CEO, who has an estimated net worth of over $1 billion, met 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 and helped fund the development of Ethereum. ConsenSys came about because Buterin wanted the network to be a non-profit organisation, and Lubin disagreed.

In October, Lubin invested $6.4 million in a startup called DrumG, which is some kind of consultancy firm set up in Bermuda by a collection of ex-employees of major financial corporations. In its own words: “DrumG is here to introduce the post-blockchain practice of employing informatics as a strategic control to achieve our resonance…We’re here to break down silos. We are here to be enablers, facilitators and drivers of business value in a convergent world.”

In keeping with this tradition of business-people expressing themselves with clear language, Lubin now tells the ConsenSys team: “In ConsenSys 1.0, we built a laboratory instrumented to prove the moon existed, using complex engineering and math and creative philosophical arguments. Now we need a streamlined rocket ship to get us there, since the actual proof, ultimately, is in the landing.”