Three Months on Verge Core Team — Reflections

Today is an important day, almost 3 months ago I was brought on board the Verge Core team. This happened as a result of a on a side project collaboration with CryptoRekt. For some of my peers, this was a very odd decision; as I am almost a 40 year old professional working as a CIO of a successful medium/large Managed Service provider that I founded. Most of my associations in real life are institutional investors, while my friend roster includes bankers, a wall street guy and a handful of accountant types.

Why would a successful business owner like myself, contribute my valuable time to help along a cryptocurrency project without pay?

Due to being an IT nerd, I have a completely different perspective; plus having seen how the internet changed the world. This has given me a great deal of hope that crypto will change the landscape of payments, investment, banking and the entire financial industry. I remember when Video rental stores weren’t concerned about on-demand videos; Or when AOL wasn’t concerned about Yahoo which in turn wasn’t concerned about Google. Another relevant example is dial-up internet providers who didn’t care about cable and DSL. In the beginning my peers had no use for the internet beyond looking at Geocity pages and downloading music from Napster; while i was an early adopter of using Google search and any other interesting new tech I could use or research. I remember watching a dial up internet provider for whom I worked for fail completely not even three years after a 12 million dollar buyout offer. Dial-up was a business model completely rendered useless by high speed internet.

I truly believe that we are currently at the front end of a movement that will completely change the world. I want my foot in the door! Actually, I want to be completely inside the building looking out of the penthouse this time around! I believe in the very nature and ideal of Verge, and I’m more than willing to contribute for free to see that goal through.

With all that said, let’s dig into what I’ve witnessed in my 3 months behind the curtain at Verge:

Behind the Curtain:

Growth of the team — We keep adding new team members, and the work ethic and drive of all the team members is quite impressive. More on this below.

Focus on communication — We all know that the Verge team wasn’t the best at communication in the past. And now we have grown by leaps and bounds! This applies to both the external and internal communications. When I first joined the team, they didn’t have conference calls. Since then, every Wednesday we get on a conference call; on many occasions we will be more than 15 team members! Which is highly impressive considering the fact that this diverse team is volunteers spread throughout different locations and time zones!

Strength of our partnership process — anyone can integrate or use Verge freely, sometimes with a little troubleshooting; but some partners including payment processors, exchanges and larger companies need to communicate with us before they implement Verge. That process has grown stronger and faster by magnitudes!! All this because of great team members who handle things from the front to back, organizing their hard work with better communication tools and project management software! Bringing on a new exchange or a payment processor can take weeks of heavy back and forth communication, contract negotiations, non-disclosure agreements. These amount to lots of paperwork in the front, and coordination of press releases and announcements in the back.

Camaraderie of the team — Everyone is getting familiar with one another, and the friendly banter both in closed channels as well as on public channels like Twitter, really builds the bonds of our team. This is an important thing for any team to have familiarity and feel comfortable with everyone else so that when they need help or have a question there is no holding back to seek out the right answer.

Diversity — The Verge Core Team has members from all over the world, of all different colors, who believe in different religions, and are from very different socioeconomic backgrounds coming together, aligned by one great project and goal. Expansion, adoption, and ease of use of Verge. Every time we have a conference call and I hear 15 different accents, it makes me smile.

The Development Team — going back to the growth of the team, I have to mention the additions to the Dev Team: Marvin, Swen & Manuel are great guys with a real passion for what they do. What I find impressive, is that none of them had blockchain based experience coming into the team, and it really makes me proud of those guys to stumble into the development channels and see them having deep conversations about back end blockchain development and code where it wasn’t something they talked about 3 months ago. These guys are all committed, do great work, build amazing user interfaces, and the community is just going to be blown away when all the new wallets come out. They’ve given me the privileged of running Alpha versions of the desktop and iOS wallets and it’s some of the best work I’ve seen in crypto, hands down. I can’t say more about how much value these guys bring to the project.

The Brain Trust — CryptoRekt, Dini, Mihael, Han & Kris are the rockstars right below our lead developer Justin, keeping everyone on track, tackling the tough issues, answering the hard questions, and pointing us all in the right direction, should we need guidance. We wouldn’t be where we are without this team of dedicated individuals. Which are not afraid to make the tough calls or having those difficult conversations.

Those are some of the main points that stick out in my mind, but there are hosts of smaller things like streamlining our proofreading and approval process (shout out to Alex & Birb here), many improvements to our support processes and documentation along with many other internal processes that we have changed or have been improved.

Final Thoughts:

We are improving daily; and we all strive for excellence. Sure there was a few rough patches along the way. But we are a few volunteers that have grown extraordinarily fast, on top of being new to this crypto space so we are all learning as we go. I like where we have been. But what excites me beyond my ability to express myself properly is where we are going! If I didn’t believe that, I would not be where I am today, on the Verge Core Team.

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