Being part of the PoolGrants Committee for the past two quarters has been a great pleasure and I am really proud about what the team has achieved so far. We have established effective and efficient processes and to my mind at least some continuity would be highly beneficial for the future development of grants. Therefore I am also stepping up and would be thrilled to continue working in the grants committee for the next term, preferably in my current role as deputy lead (and preferably with @Torgin as lead!).
During my involvement, the focus areas of my work have been around marketing campaigns and research initiatives. Notable projects with external parties have been the Bankless media campaigns as well as the Layer3 campaign around the v4 launch; on the research side the extensive research activities performed by Llama and otherinter.net. In these grants I have taken an active role in terms of negotiating, getting the deal closed and follow up closely to make the projects a success. Some grant applications can be controversial for various reasons, such as price expectations or scope, and I am convinced that I have in many cases facilitated alignment among parties in order to get things done fast by being a pragmatic negotiator/project manager.
To me it has also been of utmost importance to proactively identify opportunities and active community members and pull them into a grants-related project. I am of the opinion that grants is an essential element to create stickiness with community contributors and is an integral part of compensation of them alongside coordinape. Being a scout for talent thus is crucial and I consider myself to having excelled in this.
Besides grants, I have been a long-term community member and am according to Tally (withtally.com/governance/pooltogether) the governance delegate with the most on-chain votes overall - only missed 1 out of 24 on-chain votes! Participating actively in PoolTogether governance is very important to me and gas prices have so far not managed to stop me.
Outside of PoolTogether, I have been working in investment banking for 10 years at daytime with responsibility for investments and active committee participation. The type of work is very similar to PoolGrants. At night, I turn into a defi degen and I am an active contributor to Maple.finance in capacity of being a Pool Delegate with Maven11. This collaboration was actually born during the PoolTogether treasury diversification initiative where I reached out to them to table an improved offer to the community that ultimately even got featured in the Financial Times.
In terms of time, there clearly have been weeks where my bandwidth was limited and I was not able to listen in to the richard show or attend every community call which I regret. However, I have always prioritised grants work and will continue to be able to allocate any amount of time that may be required. In fact, the hours logged have for most of the time been significantly below the initial budget. I am against changing the budget actually and think that there should be boundaries that allow billing more if there is more work; I believe that any grants community member has a duty towards the community to treat the trusted funds with respect and humility. I personally have had the tendency to underestimate logged hours.
I want to see PoolTogether to grow to more than one million users and am highly motivated and committed to support achievement of this goal by contributing to PoolGrants.