Charles Hoskinson Interview 2018 What is your role as CEO at the

Ethereum Foundation? And why did you come out?


Just as my cryptocurrency career started by accident, Ethereum was a cryptocurrency created by accident.

In the early days of Ethereum, there were two main groups. One is business people like me and Joseph Lubin, Anthony Di Iorio and Mihai Alisie.

And another one from the tech side was JEFFREY WILCKE, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin. Developers did not think too much about the 'token economy', such as how to issue and distribute (cryptocurrency) and ICO.

I only thought, 'how can we develop this cool idea we have?' However, if you have started a business and have hired employees and developers, you need a long-term and short-term business strategy. So I (as CEO) acted as a coordinator between these two groups.

In the early days when there was no money, no one had a strong opinion, so it was okay. But that changed as the Ethereum project grew and became famous. When hundreds to tens of millions of dollars were available, everyone's arguments began to get stronger.

Developers said, 'Business people create no value and should be kicked out.' We're smart and our business is easy, so we just need developers.

Conversely, business people saw that developers would never be able to create the right product for the rest of their lives. He predicted that he would not be able to build a complete business structure by spending all his investment and doing drugs.

Another key issue was the hundreds of participants surrounding the Ethereum project. It was a community that gave opinions through Skype, and even though there was no clear contractual relationship, they thought they were the founders or key figures of the Ethereum project.

The business side saw them as troublesome. In some cases, the opinions of some of them were reported directly in the media. Conversely, the developers saw them as an asset of our project, saying that they would create something with an open source project.

The two groups were thus markedly different philosophically. So, in the end, in April 2014, I proposed to vote, 'Let's decide if we'll be Crypto Mozilla or Crypto Google'. It was a choice between a for-profit company and a non-profit company.

In this case, we chose Crypto Google (for-profit company). Slightly similar to Ripple, it tried to build a venture company by receiving capital investment, recruiting start-ups, and creating a board of directors. Business people were excited about how it could grow into a trillion-dollar company.

But Vitalik (even though he voted for Crypto Google) was not fully in agreement. In the end, two months later, all the co-founders met again in Switzerland for reconsideration, and Crypto Mozilla was the final decision.

In the process of being pushed out, we had a huge fight. After me, Anthony Di Iorio left, and Joseph Rubin and Michael Allicy all left the Ethereum Foundation one after another. So, Ethereum has turned into a developer-oriented project.

A year after we left, the developers spent most of their budget, and that's when they started taking their business a little more seriously. Anyway, I eventually created Ethereum and raised a lot of money, but a lot of issues arose in operating the community ecosystem.

This is what I learned from my Ethereum experience. You can't have 8 founders. Apple has Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and Google has Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Founders should be few.

Ethereum founders were divided into two groups, and we all tried to put our own philosophy and vision into Ethereum. In the end, I have the Ethereum I wanted in IOHK, Joseph in ConsenSys, Anthony in Decentral, and Gavin in Parity. And now Vitalik has taken over the project and has become the CEO, and Ethereum is being built around him.

Source: Coindesk Korea (http://www.coindeskkorea.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=29519)

Know your history, or be doomed to repeat it