Too Long

and yet not enough fish

My dear Subteros,

Rabbit Rabbit. Happy 2011-11-01.

I whole heartedly apologize for the extremely long silence. Many things have been getting in the way of me driving Subter forward and for this I am sorry. I’ve been meaning to “build in the open” but finding the time to document that process has been very difficult for me.

One major change recently for me is that I’ve left my day job at Topcoder as the Director of Innovation. This was a big shift. Working at Topcoder was pretty life changing experience and thus a hard move for me. I’ve made any friends there that have enriched me and changed my thinking significantly. Leaving, though, has afforded me the space needed to really dig deep on Subter, the technology behind it, what it should be, competitors in the space, and ultimately how to move the ball forward in general for secure communications.

My line of thinking, after the close of the crowdsourcing campaigns, was that I needed to then raise some significant capital through the traditional venture capital track. I had used the crowd funds, so generously contributed, to develop the alpha app. So a traditional capital raise was, to me, the logical next step. My thinking was to to raise pre-seed money based on the alpha of the mobile app, some diligent analysis, and a stellar presentation of the market opportunity of Subter.

As I started in my diligence in this space though, it became more clear to me how amazingly wild the space is for startup capital. Despite having spent many years in the finserv space as a technologist I did not, as a “geek”, ever really have to think about the funding side very often. At least not in a way where my skin was heavily involved. There be dragons. Tread carefully.

There is, and let no one fool you, an amazingly rich and deep ecosystem out there for startups. Some of it very good and some of it dangerously bad. There are many levels of funds, angels, and individuals that will give you connections, mentorship, and opportunity in addition to their capital. There is a dilution of ownership and loss of control as the cost to all this. There is certainly a wicked ton of money. You just have to decide what you willing to give up for it.

Simultaneously to what I’ve described, there is an amazing, exploding, creator economy that is being fueled by Web3 and decentralized technologies. Individuals are gathering together and building systems of equitable value distribution based upon contribution and utility. This in contrast to the value inflation of a business in a greater fool model. This is what I think many of us have grown to expect and understand but not say anything about in the sheer hopes of a great fool coming along. And they often do… So we bite our tongues and hope…

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are driving a model of value that is less extractive and has better incentives, in my opinion, than the traditional corporate share holder model than we’ve experienced since the VOC. DAOs have a prescribed and transparent explantation of the rules of ownership and rewards and are programmatically enforced. The fact that the rules of a DAO are now in code appeals to me on so many levels.

The loss of control and possible the loss of mission has what has lead me to rethink my initial approach to funding Subter. If I am to be true to my mission of fighting surveillance capitalism, to provide a means of secure communications to all, and to do it it with the social currency of memes then…

I think I need to really start Subter as a DAO. In order to ensure that the core functions of Subter are not subverted I think that I need to build the key management infrastructure out with a utility tokenomic system that will reward the participants while enabling an identity anchoring system and means of secure cryptographic key exchange.

Subter is about people being able to communicate in the clear; Free of worry that some one is listening. And about memes. Let’s not forget the memes. The messages in the message are what we need to listen for.

The key to all this is good cryptography. Subter can enable this but only if we work together. Subter is actually a system of secure key exchange, underneath the hood. A means to identify someone securely. But that should be enabled and controlled by its participants. In a distributed model, Subter can actually be “uncontrolled” and “uncensored” as no one service would be in control. This, IMO, is the only way to combat surveillance capitalism.

In closing, I’m sorry it has taken me so long to reach out to you. However, there are many great things ahead. Decentralized technology is the way of the future and it plays right into what will be a sustainable model for secure communications. If you’re as crazy as me and have the coding chops, feel free to reach out and join me in developing this future.

Yours in code,

-CWD