12/24/21: Friday Note to Flipside

Nick Francis, remote CEO extraordinaire, suggested I write a Friday Note to employees — an idea stimulated by Scott Dorsey from ExactTarget. I’ve been doing that since Oct 22nd; two months in and it’s starting to have rhythm.

12/24/21: Friday Note to Flipside

2021, you’ve been a thing.

You created complete mayhem with your damn, overly dramatic drawn-out pandemic.

F Delta

F Omicron

FU Covid. Just. F. U. Ok?

And. And yet. Somehow, Flipside Crypto persisted. No. That’s not it. Flipside did more than that. It crushed. It sucker-punched and flipped 2021 onto its ass and taught it a few lessons.

A serious moment of reflection here:

In Feb of 2021, we were cornered, frightened jackrabbits. Sure, we had a business and it was growing, but it was like being on a never-ending treadmill doing 30 MPH; the pads on our little rabbit feet were getting a wee bit worn. The more business we landed, the more challenging it got. Scaling meant burnout.

Burnout is not a good look on a rabbit.

But we’re no stranger to startup chutzpah. So, we took a massive leap in March. We tightened our rabbit skin belts and performed the classic startup counterbalance: the pivot.

“Hey, what if we made our data free — instead of keeping it to ourselves?”

“Hey, what if we paid analytical minds to make dashboards at scale?”

It seems obvious in retrospect, but back then, it was intimidating as hell. With heavy hearts, we let go of our awesome enterprise sales team. We created an Innovation Lab to explore this new model. We experimented. We learned. We changed by the hour.

Now, 9 months later, we’re closing out 2021.We sit on a $100M [!] delegation of $LUNA from Terra. We have $1M+ grants with Algorand, Sushi and Solana. We are the key analytics provider on THORChain aligning around an“obsolescence” grant. More partners are just over the horizon.

We went from 0 discord members to 7,000.

We have gone from 2,500 bounty submissions a month in November to 7,500+ in December.

We have launched our *first* DAO in MetricsDAO

And we get to spend our waking hours (and some sleeping) in an industry that we always believed in, but now is on complete and utter fire, hazing the world with its innovation and transformation. Crypto is being validated at every turn. It is unstoppable.

And we get to be at the center of it.

Every. Single. One. of. You. Should be proud to be part of this moment.

I won’t lie.

2022 is going to be a ride. It’s going to be full of experimentation, learning, failures and successes. But we are going to continue to achieve like we’ve never achieved before.

So here’s to 2022.

May it break the back of Covid. May we fling our masks in the air like countless graduation caps.

And may Flipside do its thing.

My rabbit legs are ready. You with me? LFG.

Enjoy a week off; we’re all gonna make it — and we all deserve it.

Dave