The first hire
Biconomy hired me as their first business person. I was not hired to write the protocol. I was hired because the protocol needed people using it, and that work had no owner.
I came from JPMorgan. I knew how to sit in a process and make it less stupid. I did not know how to sell a developer tool to a wallet, a bank, and a car company in the same week. I learned by doing it badly, then less badly.
The job split into ugly pieces. Partnerships: who will put this in their docs. Grants: who should get money to build on it, and how we stopped that turning into friends funding friends. Developer relations: can a stranger read the docs and ship. Monetization: will anyone pay, or is this a feature we give away to get the next integration.
We ended up with more than two hundred integrations. JPMorgan and Mercedes-Benz were in that set. I still flinch when those names get used as trophies. A logo in a deck is not the same as a team that kept the integration alive after the announcement. Some did. Some did not. I was slow to admit the difference.
The grants programme was the part I am most mixed about. We had a real budget and a real process, and we also had the usual DAO theatre: proposals, votes, a treasury. Some grants produced software that got used. Some produced a thread and a ghost repo. I was proud of the ones that shipped. I was responsible for the ones that did not, even when a committee had voted.
What I did not understand at the start, and do now, is that infrastructure companies die of politeness. Everyone is “exploring.” Nobody is in production. A week of work from their side looks like a quarter from yours, because they have a product and you are a line in their backlog. The useful skill was not charm. It was sitting in the integration until it compiled, then asking for the next one.
I left having built functions that did not exist when I arrived. I also left knowing I had confused motion with adoption more than once. If I am honest, that is the main thing I took to Aarc.