Growth: New Blessings & New Challenges

Hey,

So, like the vast majority of new enterprises, the vast majority of the projects I've launched have failed. About 90%, if we're keeping score.

But recently, this summer, I began to validate Osmosis, and well, wouldn't you know that was a winning move, and it just kept winning? Notional labs now runs 16 Cosmos Ecosystem validators, on fully open infrastructure, and is now a team of eight engineers.

There are more requrests for our work than there are brains, keyboards, and chairs for butts. And to me, this has been a totally new kind of challenge:

How do we build an organization that could work well, even in my absence, when that org depends on arcane configurations, and cryptographic private keys that are not meant to be shared?

I've got ideas, but they're cryptographically challenging.

In the meantime, we're launching a series of chains -- so far only in Cosmos -- that all give a portion of their supply to staked blurt.

We're blessed to have gotten so far. This lil thang that @thecryptodrive and I spun up around blurt, well, it now occupies a four story office building, 90 square meters per floor.

We've brought in dedicated fiber lines to replace the rickety internet connections in my "secret laboratory". We are finally shipping a single board computer-- the deposit on that was paid a week ago. Revenue is robust.

And all of that, of course is awesome.

So, what is the challenge?

If you haven't been in this place, you probably don't really know the set of challenges. Each day there's more work to do than our team can possibly complete. I've elected to continue to be a hands-on engineer, and I've made nearly 3000 git commits over the course of 2021.

Stuff I talked about -- like "baby blockchains" -- have come to fruition; including Blurt.

I had to quit discord, because it was going to consume all of the time I had for engineering.

Management and teambuilding were totally new skills for me because I'd never ever had a chance to grow the way that Notional is currently growing. Honestly, ever stat that we have as an organization is up and to the right. Our customers have dug deep with us, to the degree of helping to codesign projects, and our work got some recognition.

So now I am practicing a new set of skills, and really, really pushing myself on time management.

I wanna take a second and say that none of this would have been possible without the blurt community, and the lessons that I learned -- both engineering-wise and management-wise, by executing blurt.

On July 4, 2022, the regent account expires. Blurt will finally be freed from the lil cage that we put it in at genesis, thinking that we could keep it safe that way.

To those of you with the time and the desire, I do request that you consider contributing to Blurt, the open source project.

I will do a little code maitenance tonight, but I will try and do so with a much lighter hand than I did in the past.

I sincerely appreciate every blurt user making original content and using blurt as their "digital home". Your words and thoughts are the most powerful force known to man, and I implore you to please find your own little piece of blurt, and push it forward.

Unless my circumstances change drastically, I never intend to sell even 1 BLURT, or to leave the community. I'll try my best, as I do with every blockchain community, to make decisions that benefit the whole community and ensure that blurt remains a healthy chain and community for decades to come.

Thank you

-Jacob