With our reorganization and repositioning underway, we, the founders and contributors of KeeperDAO, wanted to offer our thoughts about the leadership roles proposed in the new structure.
We believe that social groups benefit from leaders. Contributors in a fully "flat" organization are limited in the work they can do, and struggle to scale their impact. Leaders develop better lines of communication, delegation, accountability, and DAO oversight that we don't have today.
Both the DAO and our technology demand a visionary leader, so we support an initial leadership team consisting of a co-equal CEO and CTO, with different roles but working together to set a unified course.
The team at KeeperDAO would like to propose Joey Zacherl (JZ) as CTO, and Hazard as CEO.
Joey is a founding member of KeeperDAO, founder of trailblazing market maker VolleyFire, architect of one of the world's most advanced Keeper bots (Ninja), and the mastermind behind the Hiding Game and upcoming Coordination Game.
Few people with Joey's skills would risk the opportunity cost of a new project like KeeperDAO, but Joey is obsessed with building systems that make the pie bigger for everyone. For a whole year, he has even run Ninja for the DAO's benefit, depositing all profits — nearly a hundred million dollars — directly into the DAO treasury. He thinks it's "cool".
Joey has been overseeing protocol development and engineering at KeeperDAO from day one, and has been functioning as our de facto CTO all along. We'd like to have him continue his work while formalizing his role as CTO.
Joey will be tasked with the following:
Normally, finding the right individual to take on this role would be very hard. Being a good CEO in DeFi takes the right combination of engineering, finance, business and showmanship. Luckily for us, Hazard fits the bill.
A "full-stack mathematician", his unique style has helped him build a career growing an enterprise startup, working in academic research, and steering engineering programs at a top-10 website, before helping to kick-start transformation at KeeperDAO.
Hazard emerged from our own community as one of the masterminds behind the formation of KeeperDAO Labs, then joined the team as a MEV engineer before laying the groundwork for KeeperDAO's transition to decentralized governance and now, our much-needed reorganization. We want to see his full energy behind that effort, by formalizing his role as CEO.