Joining Plutus.it and a Happy New Year 2017
Dear Plutoneers,
It gives me great pleasure to introduce myself as the CTO of Plutus.it, and as you might expect, my background is in technology. In previous roles I have worked for the fastest growing SaaS start-up in Europe, a HFT hedge fund in London, and a crypto start-up building a fully bespoke blockchain solution for tier-1 banks. In my spare time I run a blockchain meetup in London with over 300 members, I’m writing a book for developers who want to learn how to write Ethereum Dapps, and I’m also speaking at various conferences about the technology behind blockchain and how to apply it to industry use-cases.
You may ask why I have chosen to join this early-stage start-up, and for me it couldn’t be simpler; I believe Plutus.it is a very special company. Like our supporters, I see enormous ambition, great talent, a team hungry for success, and to me it doesn’t take much to see the potential, so of course I leapt at the opportunity. I have been enlisted by the company directors to get development (back) on the fast-track, so over the coming days, weeks and months you’re going to notice a few changes around the Plutus.it camp.
The first thing on my agenda is is to bring all development in-house. In the past we’ve tried outsourcing some of the development work under the watchful eye of Gerbrand — our frankly brilliant lead developer, who has been with the company from the beginning — but the output from our outsource developers has on occasion failed to meet our quality expectations. We’re on a mission to revolutionise the payments industry by bringing Bitcoin payments to the mass market, and we need a in-house team made up of people who share the company vision, and are invested in our success.
The next thing you’re going to notice is increased transparency about what we’re doing. I’m going to be posting regular engineering updates to keep everyone informed about the latest progress, and I’m going to be working closely with our CCO Filip to address questions from the community because we’re on a journey, and I want to bring you all on the journey with us, with all the highs and lows along the way. We’re only a small team, attempting something that nobody has done before, and I want to share and celebrate our successes with you, no matter how big or small.
The other thing you’re going to notice is more frequent, incremental releases. We’ve promised to deliver a lot, and what the team has learned is that it’s much harder going from a working prototype to a production system in one big jump. Part of this means reevaluating which problems we need to solve today, and which problems we can delay until a later time.
My top priority over the coming weeks is to structure our roadmap to make sure we that can deliver on our promises, in an order that gives our supporters the maximum value in the shortest amount of time. The vision for Plutus.it is huge, and I am impressed by how much the team has achieved so far, but we have a long road ahead, and to deliver our true MVP is going to require carefully balancing priorities.
I would like to personally thank the community behind Plutus.it, without your support we would not have gotten this far. In 2016 alone we have grown from humble beginnings, to publishing a whitepaper, to successfully hosting the fastest token sale in history, and since then the team has taken huge strides in platform and development, and even secured physical cards and NFC stickers in our product range.
This is going to be an incredibly exciting year for the Plutus.it team, and I am looking forward to the challenges ahead. Please feed back your thoughts to me on Slack, help us spread the word on Twitter, and thank you for your continued support as we move closer to our MVP.
