ZED Run development update #4 — July 2019.
As I sit here and begin writing the latest ZED development update (#4), I’m going to share something that I just happened to witness.
A monkey 🐒 stole a wallet from the lady sitting adjacent to me in a co-working space I’m working from, in Ubud, Bali. On committing the crime, the suspect monkey ran onto the roof of the building, showed the wallet to his monkey friends then unzipped the wallet, emptied the contents and threw the empty wallet back down. The contents of this wallet contained the lady’s only bank card available to her while travelling to Bali, so as you can imagine, some panic ensued. Luckily, one of the co-working staff traversed the roof and saved the card. A little added excitement to my morning.
What did we learn from that story;
- 1. That monkeys can be incredibly annoying (and quite entertaining if it’s not your wallet in jeopardy!). 🙈
- 2. One of the key team members, working on ZED is in Bali, Indonesia. You may be wondering why? 🌴
If you weren’t aware, which is likely the case because we haven’t discussed this before, the whole of the ZED team is fully distributed globally. This means it really doesn’t matter where I am as long as I have a laptop and a stable internet connection.
Our team has members from Venezuela, Australia, USA, India, Ukraine, China and more. P.S. I’m excited to introduce you to the team as we move forward, they don’t know it yet but I want to get them all contributing the blog. 😉
Another reason I was in Bali was that I was lucky enough to attend a conference which was being held in Bali called ‘Running Remote’ over the weekend. This had some amazing speakers from internationally renowned companies such as:
- ANDREAS KLINGER — Head of Remote @ AngelList
- ANTHONY POMPLIANO — Managing Partner @ Morgan Creek Digital
- ZACK ONISKO — CEO @ Dribbble
There are some incredible advantages to operating a distributed team:
- Access to the global talent pool.
- Increased productivity for our developers through fewer distractions from the open office.
- Smaller cost base due to minimal infrastructure requirements.
- Employees put more in because they value the flexibility remote work affords them.
There, of course, are some downsides to remote work but I’ll leave you with the positives for now.
Another cool thing about attending this conference is that I got to speak to a bunch of fellow entrepreneurs about ZED Run, they were all fascinated, had 100s of questions and could not wait to see us take it forward. They all saw the potential we all see.
Racing is the focus
Anyway, now you know more about the team and the way we operate, I want to address the elephant in the room. Unlike the monkey in my previous story, we really care about your investment and we do want to give that back and more. Sales have slowed down, more than we would like and I’m sure more than you’d like. So, while outwardly you would think we’d be super concerned about that, we are not, at all.
WHY? All we have been talking about internally for the past few weeks with incredible intensity is racing and how we can accelerate the delivery of that to you, the ZED community.
Now, we’ve been devising a strategy on how to get something out for racing much sooner than expected. I’m incredibly excited about this, as I know is the rest of the team.
We have some awesome updates coming out over the next few weeks in regards to racing.
We listen
The survey was conducted a few weeks ago did not fall on deaf ears, we heard loud and clear that racing was most important (we already knew that!) however we wanted to get some smaller runs on the table before we launched it to show you we are working hard here at ZED.
Quick updates on other features:
Filters
These will be released imminently! For your stable, the roster and stud pages!!!
Auctions
Development is still in progress however it takes a backseat to racing. We are also exploring strategic partnerships to reduce the development load here.
Stall management
Almost complete, we want you to be able to organise your horses while we get out racing, so this should be released in the next week or so.
P.s. Just wanted to say again, I’m really really really excited about racing!!
Thanks for reading!
Till next time,
P.S. We are hiring! We are looking for skilled front-end, back-end and blockchain (smart contract & web3) developers. Get in touch at hello@zed.run
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