Interview with Giant Founders
I — interviewer
P — Pavel
M — Mikhail
Hello Giant community! I’m sure that many readers of our blog are already familiar with the project and the technology. That’s why we are going to speak today with Pavel and Mikhail who are both responsible for Giant external communications. We’ll get to know more about the team, about the reasons behind their decisions and what brought them into this industry.
I: Guys, please, introduce yourself.
P: My name is Pavel Bulatov. I believe my main specialty is direct sales and external communications. I’ve got 5 years of experience in this field. While participating in various projects I’ve stumbled upon difficult marketing tasks related to product positioning, sales department organization and advertisement campaigns. During my work I’ve come to realize that the project team with a common goal makes all the difference in the world. This is exactly why I joined Giant.
М: My name is Mikhail Maximov. For the last 4 years, I’ve been conducting scientific research with the use of statistical analysis. I’ve worked on several topics including in the sports industry, regional development and international trade. Throughout the last 2 years I have also been participating in a large number of consulting projects and this helped me to learn to work under pressure.
I: Tell us briefly about the project CEO, Dmitry Filinberg. I believe he’s fully responsible for the technical part, isn’t he?
P: Yes, that’s correct. Dmitry is both the CEO and the Tech Lead of the project. When I personally made a decision to participate in the project his high competence in development was the main factor. Dmitry has been in programming for over 10 years. It didn’t take much time for him to comprehend the Blockchain technologies. Dmitry also possesses high leadership qualities and with a person like this, you can easily walk this difficult path until the very end.
M: I fully agree with Pavel. I would also like to add that Dmitry has an experience in many popular languages including Java, C++ and JavaScript. This allows him to see the bigger picture and choose the most efficient solutions. The understanding of all technological aspects is also raising the level of team coordination.
I: What made you come together and work on Giant?
М: We’re the ones you can call blockchain enthusiasts. All of us are interested in this technology in all its forms. When we first met, Dmitry has already done a great deal of blockchain code research. We have experimented with different mining algorithms, exchanged our experience and studied the market and projects that were present at the time.
Gradually, we’ve started to reach a united understanding of the situation: more and more projects are speculating on decentralization, manipulating the economy of their own coins. This distracts the blockchain community from the real problems which can be solved with the technology. We all saw these problems from our own point of view but all of us also understood that the real use case must be the foundation of any crypto project. This is why we’ve separated the areas of responsibility and started to develop the structure of our project.
P: We were very excited by the fact that we were using our own investments and the masternode technology to finance the project. This has made our motivation to match the interests of other Giant blockchain stakeholders. Meanwhile, there is a myriad of ICOs which attract millions of investment to create a centralized project that serves the interests of its founders alone.
I: You’ve mentioned your motivation — can you tell more about what’s boosting your productivity?
M: In the sphere of the corporate finance, there is a so-called ‘agency problem’. It’s basically when the interests of hired managers and stakeholders do not match. At the same time, managers are capable of financial manipulations because they know a lot more about the project. The same can be witnessed in the field of ICOs: the team attracts a huge budget and the following work depends solely on the honesty and reputation of the project members. From the very beginning, we understood all the malignancy of this scenario. This is why we’ve introduced masternodes into the system at the very beginning to exclude it completely. The financial interest towards Giant, the ability of the enterprise to grow and expand the team directly depends on our present work. We need to continuously demonstrate the results of our work and that we are able to achieve the previously set goals. This is how the interest towards the project is supported and possible partnerships are emerging.
P: I absolutely agree with Mikhail. The main motivation is understanding that everything is happening here and now. We declare our goals and their execution quality and achievement speed depend on community support. That’s why we want to stay in touch with all of those who believe in the project. Our goals are very ambitious, we are acting without the support of large investors or foundations. The project is absolutely independent and decentralized. For us, this serves as an unparalleled catalyst.
I: Don’t you think that you and your project are facing unreasonably high risks because you chose independence over the high capital? The crypto market is extremely volatile.
М: Since the earliest days of our project we were ready to face the fact that most crypto investors are swiftly transferring their funds from one coin economy to another and their behavior is dependant on the price of Bitcoin. Because of this, our goal was not to become yet another crypto project interesting only for its quick investment returns. Sometimes we are buying out the cheap sell orders because we know for certain that it’s underrated. We are disseminating the following idea: the project success depends exclusively on the efficiency of the existing architecture for well-defined tasks. Our coin doesn’t have a single emission center and must not be a speculative tool. It’s an inseparable component of the Giant infrastructure, an internal means of payment in the products which use our blockchain with smart contracts support. We deem important to bring this message to our community which is the main factor of the Giant blockchain success and reliability.
I: You seem to value you community. Can you tell more about how you established the current community relations strategy?
М: When we started as a masternode project, we had to play along with the rules of this market. One of such rules was to keep the Discord communication channel alive. At first, we were bad at comprehending all the opportunities it provides. Most projects are using Discord only to create an illusion of active work and big user base by using bots. Only after several months had passed, we then started to develop our own working transparency standards. The introduction of the Scrum methodology has considerably helped us. In compliance with Scrum, we are doing our tasks in two-week sprints. Each sprint is filled with goals based on the current priorities and capabilities of the team. The outcome of each sprint is a retrospective with a review on what has been achieved and where we should focus more. Quite naturally, we’ve begun to publish the sprint results together with the backlogs for the next sprint. In addition to this, a sophisticated and high-tech product like this made us to increase efforts to tell about all of its elements. By now, we’ve got 30+ unique articles on the Giant project with a first-hand info on its technology and the first one of its products — Giant.Exchange.
Over time, the team was growing, and we’ve been getting more information that would prove interesting for our users. Not so long ago, we’ve started to separate the news feed connected to Giant.Exchange, Giant Contracts Development Kit and Giant in general.
P: It’s also worth telling how we created a separate communication channel with the masternode owners. It was crucial for us to talk to people who are interested in the project success just as we are. They were ready to share their experience and expertise. About 10 of them have started to collaborate with our team on a daily basis, freeing us from some day-to-day tasks. This leaves us more time for other endeavors. This is extremely significant because it’s much harder to find an outsider cognizant enough of Giant technologies.
I: What can you tell about the growth of your team?
P: We deal with the problems as they occur. As the old goals are reached, new ones are set. If we can highlight a sphere that could be within the responsibility of a particular specialist, we are expanding the team. This is why all new specialists who arrive in Giant are quickly adapted to our work processes and start to demonstrate real results. This is, of course, an ongoing process and sometimes we had to part ways with some members of the team.
I: And the last question — why exactly did you choose blockchain?
P: As a phenomenon, blockchain has become a great opportunity to realize our ideas, both in the development and marketing areas. The crypto community is quite active and we’re now under conditions when we don’t have to dictate our product to the customers and engage in classic sales. Our task is to articulate a well-conceived agenda and broadcast the results of successful work. Those who see the big perspective in all this will win together with us.
М: It’s a new industry in which the major corporations have not yet established their dominance. A team of enthusiasts — the Giant team — has managed to launch the project and receive a support of a large number of people around the world. This is a format of investor relations nobody even considered possible before the dawn of the digital age. Of course, it’s hard to feel the pressure for results every day and to be open for all uncomfortable opponents but it’s a new viable standard of transparent work which we have understood and accepted before many other companies today.
If we have a chance to challenge the vast corporations in the age of change, why should we work on anything else?
