[marcell]

(fetchfox CEO here)

I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.

The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.

Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.

I have a long article at https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for... about why I think crypto rails are fundamentally better than the current banking system, from a computer science perspective.

The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.

Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.

FetchFox as a company has two goals:

(1) Make the best possible AI scraper (2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures

It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.

[martinsnow]

Why does your employees need to gamble on crypto assets when stock options are better understood and covered by law frameworks in all countries?

[marcell]

Well, they don't have to be employees. It's not for everyone, if you don't want a crypto token compensation, Fetchfox is not the right company for you to work for.

[martinsnow]

I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company. For me it looks like you want to skirt regulations and not pay developers for what they're worth.

[marcell]

We pay very competitive on the cash side (over 200k for exceptional engineers), and have offer options that are 10x more competitive on company stake side than other companies (up to 20% for exceptional engineers, but with lower cash as a tradeoff).

I challenge anyone to find better founding engineer compensation. Comparisons from YC: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/l/software-engineer

[martinsnow]

That is indeed very good compensation. How do you evaluate who gets 20%? That's not something you can afford giving out to many.

[marcell]

Our founding engineering team is going to be capped at 3 or 4 max engineers, and to get 20% you need to take a pay cut. So far people have generally taken the higher cash offers. The token grants on those translate to 4-8%, which is still more than typical.

It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...

[rachofsunshine]

> I find your answer incredibly arrogant as a developer because you don't have a successful product so it's a gamble for anyone choosing to join your company.

To be fair, this is true of any equity model, which is precisely why most engineers (at least in our data set) place very little weight on equity.

[iandanforth]

"FetchFox as a company has two goals:

(1) Make the best possible AI scraper (2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures"

For everyone watching this is the opposite of pragmatism. This is idealism. Your company will succeed or fail based on your ability to execute on your primary mission. Here it should be (1). If you're labouring under a (2) then you have an idealistic company, which is fine, but don't pretend that (1) is your primary mission.