Day in the life at UMA | Clayton Roche, Community and Communications lead
The photos in this piece were all taken while in my employ at UMA. I’m sharing them as if to say: Look at the lifestyle I’m able to live while still working! During my employ I’ve lived in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, USA, Costa Rica, Germany, and Portugal.
My tenure at UMA started shortly after the “Black Thursday” Covid market crash but before the COMP launch that kicked off yield farming. It was a special time in history and the right time to buckle in.
I had just wrapped up a year working on a product called Mosendo, which was meant to be like Venmo but for DAI. My focus was on community and communications, with an emphasis on informal finance and how a tool like this could benefit people living in poverty. I ran a DeFi community where we interviewed DeFi founders, which was how I got introduced to the UMA team in the first place.
It was a natural transition to my role at UMA.
The first week
I was nervous as hell when I joined. I was joining a team of ex-Google, ex-Goldman, ex-This-and-That. And they were all so nice. I was treated like I knew my stuff from day 1, but I sure didn’t feel like I did. The first couple months at UMA were stressful for me. Imposter syndrome go up.
I have since learned that having imposter syndrome is nearly a prerequisite for joining. I have also learned that if you show up and do your best work, you can just trust that you were selected for a reason. Imposter syndrome no longer haunts me as it once did, in part because I’ve had some warm conversations with my teammates about it.
(This is a good place to remind people that UMA is hiring for a variety of roles, so embrace that imposter syndrome and come join us. People with a positive, energetic and collaborative attitude will always thrive on our team.)
As the head of community and communications I split my time between Discord communities, written pieces, and calls. When I joined the team, I was doing most of the writing for a single product. Now, I lead several writers across three products. I get the honor of upskilling other imposters like myself. It’s a joy!
I could opine at length about the impact this job has had on my own life. I feel like I’ve been able to access strengths I wasn’t aware that I had, ones I wasn’t able to express until I was connected to such a highly skilled and high EQ group of individuals. The compensation is great, but it’s not the thing that keeps me inspired. It’s the people.
No Compromise
I’m the most likely person to join a call while in a hammock with goats or roosters chiming in. I’m a nomad and have, while working at UMA, taken calls from a yurt in Kyrgyzstan, a tent in the Philippines, my dad’s house in Colorado, and a treehouse in Costa Rica. UMA’s policy as it relates to nomads is this:
Solid internet connection
Available daily from 9am to noon EST
Take calls in quiet places
That last rule had to be codified because I was taking calls in noisy cafes too often. When I was in Kyrgyzstan, I took my calls from 9pm to midnight. It’s actually really nice to work the first half of your day while all your teammates sleep.
Memories
We’re living in incredible times, and our team cultivates a value of gratitude. No matter what is happening in the market or with our products, Hart Lambur (the co-founder) and I often take a step back and just appreciate this wacky adventure we’re on. It sounds something like this:
I’m in Canada by a fireplace, and you’re in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan also by a fire, and we’re on a video call discussing financial engineering with input from an anon named after a piece of fish. We are winning at life.
In my role at UMA, I had the honor of sparking the SuperUMAn community and watching it grow. One of my fondest memories was meeting several of them in person at ETH Denver. I got to stand around a fire and chat with Poopster, Deadcoin, and Crush. Timigraphics came all the way from Nigeria. And EA Sports arrived in Denver and joined me on stage to present a mere 90 minutes after meeting in person for the first time. Incredible.
The intellectual adventures are equally thrilling. Recently, UMA’s optimistic oracle received four consecutive disputes from Polymarket, which is an information market that relies on our oracle. These disputes were based on a certain amount of ambiguity baked into those markets. There really was not an obvious answer to these questions.
These disputes spanned for two days each, and over those eight days we saw over 10,000 messages sent in Discord debating the topics. Imagine 50 people suddenly becoming amateur and passionate contract lawyers, arguing their case and asking questions about the nature of language and if there is such a thing as objective truth. (Aside: I have degrees in philosophy and in economics–people thought that was a strange combination, but it couldn’t have been more perfect.)
After the dust settled, I left with a much refined sense of how our oracle will handle ambiguity. I can describe it better now. Because of this, I know better now the kinds of questions our oracle can handle and the ways we can (and shouldn’t) approach them. What is happening here is not merely “I’m learning a thing,” but “I’m treading on new ground with real outcomes.” Optimistic oracles have been theorized for some time, but UMA’s is the first construction of its kind. We’re on new ground.
And to that point, I always tell the members of the communications team that we are not merely “reporting on stuff that the programmers built or our partners integrated.” No, our framing and conceptualizations of these products actually impacts how they can be thought of and used in the world. I would not even say that calling this role “non-technical” is accurate for that reason. The things I learned during those disputes make me more confident when parameterizing future products that interact with the oracle. This was genuine research worthy of academic consideration.
I found a team that I could thrive with
Working with this talented team has been the highlight of my career. Granted, I didn’t have much of a career up to this point — I have always been a lifestyle-first kind of person. Hanging out with these inspiring folks is the lifestyle I choose!
If you think this sounds like the kind of place you would vibe with, consider joining us.
