Please don’t post on my behalf because your sentiments aren’t the same as mine.
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Danke for stating this. Folks who are new don’t know this is all old news. Issues endemic to harmony because of Tse crazy and incompetent leadership.
How do you call yourself a fast, cheap and secure blockchain when you have been hacked, had extremely practices and have taken to jacking up your gas fare prices with extremely lousy service?
100-1000 gwei (RPC issues that have been on-going for a year plus).
Gazillion daos which are bleeding more and more importantly doing nothing for the blockchain.
A dearth in communication - failure in this. Tse won’t talk to community or the projects that pay its bills.
How do you not have a dedicated relationship with the project that provides ~98% of all your transactions. Let that sink in. 98%.
Insensitivity and tone deaf - displaying poor judgement having APES being hawked on officially team member social media?
A rather draconian approach to leadership. You can’t tell him nothing.
Yet, this is the person who is to lead this project? To where the abyss and implosion?
Tse - walk away. Show you are better than ego. Harmony should be more than you and Li.
Cowardness in this space never stops to amaze me. Between all the fuck-ups and wrongs from Harmony’s side, we are imposed to this timeline where larps with QANON vibes and people that lost millions out of stupidity are posting literal dogshit to rile up the community, at a time of major distress.
Assuming you both are insiders @OgreAbroad1 and @concernedprsn, you had your chances to bring all this up to management, p2p style, but you choose to do this via a forum post? Don’t you think that pandering to distressed people, like proper manipulators, is not obvious?
Both of you get a life. You have no right speaking FOR other people in a cryptic way while having zero proof of them backing you.
I’ll honestly and blatantly reiterate that this post is a load of shit, made by cowards and for cowards.
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Baffling in my humblest opinion that nobody dares to speak up. Shows how harmonious the team truly is and what core values the employees (including the leaking team members) deem most important.
I have been working in the startup scene in EU for a couple of years (since 2012). Mainly startups looking for product-market fit and later-stage companies moving towards scaling (Series B & C) in difficult/novel markets (tech/hardware).
The main lesson learned from the successful teams/companies?
Employees dare (and are encouraged) to speak towards their leadership and give feedback. Most of this is done internally for a reason.
Therefore I’m quite curious about any tangible complaints from core team members as of right now. While I strongly believe that Ogre has all the best intentions for h1, this methodology seems to be quite threatening and aggressive, something no mature person should be doing if they truly like to improve / create a meaningful pivot.
Example:
What I have shared above is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be more to follow… if necessary
It might be a difference (culture-wise) in the Bay Area / US style of building up / scaling up company XYZ contrary to how I’m used to these situations in the EU… However, this does not seem the right path to take nor the most constructive one.
Looking at reactions (with the exception of some excellent posts), most of the sentiment is focused on being unprofitable and overinvested into a risky asset class that didn’t hold up to its expected value. Welcome to investing in startups, it is freaking risky and yes the leadership makes mistakes. There is a core reason why 0.01% of USA-based startups/scaleups make it.
I agree with Alexander his take below, It feels quite weird that people keep speaking for other people, while we have a still working snapshot system that is there in place to measure community sentiment, shouldnt we utilise it?
Last edit and observation from my side and experience from these kinds of environments:
There are so so many people/community members that I would NEVER hire for my own company… (fill them for yourself in here based upon forum reactions)
- Looking at the CV’s/LinkedIns of some of the important mods and members.
- People who are not there to build a product but mainly to protect their investments.
- Validators being below-average entrepreneurs (read taking on way too many risks)
- Validators not understanding the L1 thesis
- Community leaders feasting on woke niches
Web 3 / Blockchain people relatively feel entitled to a lot of things and shout that they know their stuff. Meanwhile, most of these people shouting out the loudest are not that well qualified to actually move forward with the company nor have they the experience to understand and solve these problems.
Your Startup / Scaleup is only as good as its teammembers
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It was attempted to be done internally. The team fears reprisal, so they don’t speak. I was asked to start the conversation, and I have. I’ve been supporting this chain for years. If you cant see that the approach I took with gradual elevation was in an attempt to minimize the impact, that is fine. All I can do is share my intent, then you get to judge.
If you choose to read a few words, interpret them as you are, instead of as they were intended… without asking for any clarifications or even attempting to speak to me, well… that is your right.
I will sleep just fine tonight, knowing that when I shared the concerns that myself and other members of the community had expressed, several members of the team agreed, to include ones high up the chain. They asked me to act, and I have. For better or worse, this has begun. I took the information available to me, and acted. As time goes on… and team members (hopefully) share their concerns, we might see some change.
Without action, we will never see change.
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TIL that coming to one’s property asking for them to forfeit it via blackmail tactics and “dirty laundry” airing is a conversation starter in good faith.
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Very well written, always able to show a different insight to each sensitive issue that arises. In which case I tend to agree with in this instance.
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@OgreAbroad1 I don’t know you well but would love to talk publicly about all of this on Twitter Spaces or some other forum sometime. One of the issues I have with the strategy here is the “I’ll share more … if necessary…” It’s counterproductive and reads like blackmail. There are many issues briefly mentioned but no specifics. Could we be less cryptic here? Where are the details? That goes for @concernedprsn too, if not a LARP.
Harmony Core’s communication issues have been around since the beginning. The BBQ incident. April fool’s incident last year. The wasteful spending of DAO money as community pleaded them to stop. Lack of action on RPCs, Explorer, etc. And now almost 2 weeks with little communication regarding the path forward post-hack. Horrible team/community comms are nothing new to Harmony. They may do well for a 1-2 week span but it always reverts back to radio silence. @stse has rarely spoken to any of us in a format that isn’t a YouTube video and unfortunately I don’t see that changing now.
That said, this is his startup company. I don’t see how removing him would help. Who will replace? What good would that do?
These forum posts too often become diaries where community vents to each other, no one from core team chimes in, and no action is taken. Will this post end the same?
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100% agree with everything you said.
@OgreAbroad1 if there is anything hidden to be told, has to be told. Once you know it is your responsibility to make the others aware, otherwise you become an accomplice. This is not about being kind to them keeping dirty secrets or being smart and using it as a negotiation tactics. This is only about truth and transparency. As an investors and users we have the right to know what’s behind the product we consume. Whether it goes against our interests or not, we each one, individually, will decide if we want to take part of it or not, but in order to be fair we need to have all the deck facing up. I’m sick of secrets and lack of communication on this blockchain, it’s always the same. I still want to see responsibilities for the Horizon stolen funds. Silence will not make me forget about the fishy poor security measures and the wallets involved. No one apologized, no one was pointed out, no one resigned, no one got fired, no one got prosecuted,…
Ogre I trust you and I love the wide open and community engaging approach you always show (totally opposite of Tse’s way), thus I will follow you on your initiative of overthrow the old regime and build up a new bright one, but in the same way I criticize Tse for never telling the plan ahead, I would like to know what’s the plan after Tse step back?
Is the team ready to set up a new hierarchy straightaway?
If he doesn’t resign and we have to hard fork, will enough part of core team and key workers follow to keep the project development running?
I know you are wise and you want the best for Harmony so I’ll vote in favor of any of your proposals but please share as much as you can to keep us fully aware and up to date.
Everyone, just remember, Harmony is not a one man project anymore. Don’t let a single individual harm the project to the point of no return, even if is the founder.
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Have you read what you posted? Blackmail??? Someone else could have communicated their sentiment much better and try to open a bridge of communication. You sound overinvested and over emotional. This post IS NOT Representative of WHAT and HOW a community should be
as for You are surrounded by incredibly successful, brilliant people. Many of them have wanted to say these things to you also but have not for fear of being fired while trying to help. - those sound like yes people, they are part of the problem, why don’t they quit - scared of being fired? weak
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Cutting one head doesn’t mean it’s the only one did wrong but this is how hierarchies work, the ones at the top assume both credits and responsibilities from the ones below. When businesses and companies don’t work properly in general and don’t achieve goals they don’t sack half of the staff, they just replace one piece, the one at the very top, the CEO. If a ship sinks it’s not only captain’s fault, it’s always a sum of mistakes and incidents in a sequence but by law all the casualties will be charged to him.
Harmony should become an open source project governed by a DAO of ONE holders. Having a council of wise individuals among the community of users and devs to push new proposals and run the DAO administration tasks. The development team, coders, marketing agencies, auditors,… everything would be contracted by DAO and payed from treasury.
Keep the chain but fork away from the org. Save the gems within the team, throw away the bad eggs.
The community needs to step up to run nodes.
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To be honest… a 7 hour old account… formatting like some sort of kidnapping letter or something. If you don’t have the guts to come out, show us who you really are in the community, I fail to believe or trust a thing you post in this thread.
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Thank you for contribution Ogre, it is very much appreciated.
I think some are missing the point - it’s not about Stephen Tse or his vision or his technical skillset which are without a doubt outstanding.
It’s about his lack of leadership and project management.
Harmony is more than its amazing tech, it’s about the community and the ecosystem. And within there, there has been so many missteps and mispriotizations.
@concernedprsn listed them off very nicely.
How come that after a year of RPC issues those issues are still not fixed? It’s a ridiculous statement to the prioritizations that the RPC issues pop up over and over and over again to the point that it is unusable to users. Every day I see people join the blockchain and they are like “wtf is this, nothing works?!”
The elastic RPC was supposed to improve RPC things but it made things even worse, and it also broke the multisig for weeks. How is projects not being able to access their funds for weeks not a top priority?! No acknowledgement was made, nothing was communicated with the community.
Even before that, back in November I think we had weeks of RPC issues that rendered the blockchain near unusable. There was no communication whatsoever with the community, it took them weeks to bandaid fix the issue, and then after two weeks or so they posted a post-mortem about how bad they handled the situation, but nothing improved after that. RPC issues were back in January again.
Speaking of band-aid solutions, the recent minimum gas fee increase was another terrible decisions. It happened before, when they increased the gas fees to battle what they say are bot attacks, and it happened again (though the transaction amounts really doesn’t support those claims). Gas fee increase was not communicated with the community at all. Suddenly all over the ecosystem transactions were stuck pending because projects overwrite the MetaMask transaction fees due to another issue that has never been really tackled or fixed (fluctuating recommended gas). Sure, compared to January dollarwise the new gas fees are still lower, but within the ecosystem everything is pegged to the ONE/TOKEN ratio, and gas changes like this can potentially severely impact dapps tokenomics - yet nothing was communicated to the dapps leaders.
BAYC? Blue Metaverse was a terrible, terrible decision. I don’t know how or who this approved - from any angle it looks like an absolute terrible thing to do - and then even show off those apes bought with investor money on Twitter, even after the bridge incident shows a concerning disconnect with the community.
Testnet? Having the projects build on testnet for over a year, and then out of nowhere tell your dapps “nah, we use Testnet now for our infrastructure testing, you all have to start from scratch on Devnet, good luck” is just another unnecessary punch in the face for builders in the ecosystem.
Grants were being handed out like flyers in front of a Walmart. Some to projects that don’t need to grants, some to projects that don’t deserve the grants because they are the 511th low effort viper fork.
While the explorer slightly improved over the last few months, it’s still absolutely terrible and has waaay to many outages.
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It is just a roadmap of terrible decisions and very bad prioritization, sprinkled with absolute lack of communication with both community and builders.
It’s the leaderships job to make sure the priorities are straight and correct decisions are made. If asking Stephen Tse to step down is the right move, I don’t know. But things in leadership have to change for things to improve. It can be by asking Stephen Tse to step down, it can be by appointing a project lead that is empowered to veto bad decisions and move things into the right decision, it could be by establishing a board etc - that’s not up to me.
But something has to change.
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That is fine… but many COMMUNITY members such as myself and others I know do feel the same as OGRE. SO DO POST on my behalf. <3
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You do know what blackmail means right? I don’t think thats the correct term…Ogre has been here since beta testing. Hes been involved with daos, community calls, community moderating, validator services and much more. There is a big difference between blackmail and an ultimatum. TSE is a horrible leader. I have been involved even longer than OGRE and I feel the same…many of my people ALSO feel the same. I have ALSO been in contact with CURRENT team members that hold high position and THOSE WHO LEFT…and somehow they all agree on a few things…TSE IS A EGOCENTRIC, megalomaniac and one WHO lacks management qualities needed for success of HARMONY. “HE STANDS IN THE WAY” think about that…
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I have mostly said my piece about DAO’s in the link below, so here’s my opinion on this subject matter with few brief points:
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I DO NOT think Stephen Tse should leave the project he started with other team members atm. However, I also understand that being a CEO requires an entirely different toolset of skills & understanding, especially if there is lack of clarity at the senior most levels of leadership.
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A moment of self evaluation is required by Stephen & the team members themselves - If Stephens’ skillsets to the team are more useful as a researcher instead of CEO. As a leader, there should be no shame in rising to occasion, whatever the ask is (as the skillset matures). Switching to an advisory position as would help focus each individual on their specific skillset, than being a cross domain generalist (which is the ask for CEO’s).
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This hack has expedited the journey where Li’s core skillset & value addition to the team would be put to the test, in terms of capital injection & operations management responsibilities. Capital injection is dependent on investor relationships, but due diligence scrutiny at this time of the hour would definitely increase. On the operations part, the team would have a better understanding on how good or bad it has been, or in terms of revisiting responsibilities (eg: transitioning to the role of investor relations lead instead of COO).
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The second founder (Sahil Dewan, the team’s chief product officer) must rise to occassion for stabilizing the ship atm. Additionally, his inclusion to the performance roadmap & the team’s ongoing strategic decision making should play a decisive role here.
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HR transformation : I had emphasised in Reddit & Discord forums months ago that the team many possessed operational deficiencies (in terms of absence of key leadership & staff roles, such CFO, CISO, Head of Defi Research, Moderators, Crypto Ecosystem Spotlight Host…) that they should have patched months ago.
It brings me little satisfaction in terms of pointing those details out again, but existing efforts have fallen quite short of the mark - Which goes back to the question of timely fundraising again, that should have happened in January or February.
I have much more to say, but I cannot contribute anymore to the discussion in a public capacity, because it would require having a deeper evaluation of their product, knowledge management & people workflows, brick by brick to understand the projects issues & fix the bloat, despite Harmony One being a lean team.
I highly suspect that it is due to shortage of specialized & “boots on the ground” manpower, rather than just a failure to efficiently scale. Harmony isn’t the only investment I hold, therefore, it’s quite easy to do basic apples to apples & oranges comparision with work going on within the crypto-currency ecosystem as a whole.
- Harmony One blockchain, is in fact, a great product by all means. However, a myriad of working issues & slow reactive thinking has led to all of this.
@OgreAbroad1 While your intentions are appropriate, an immediate ask of founder ejection is extremely premature - Unless, you are privy to internal details we are unaware about. There is room for middle ground here.
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Just because someone has been around long doesn’t mean they are correct - I think Harmony is a great example of that. Blackmail or Ultimatum, whichever you prefer (i think you understand the point but choose to focus on wording)… The oP comes across as a child spitting out their dummy. Backing someone into a corner will never render the same results as open communication. I’m not talking about TSE as a leader here, I am merely a token holder, neither a shareholder nor someone who feels they’ve relinquished control of which projects to invest in and support (or not). I’m simply talking about the OP and their attitude who is somewhat attention seeking.
Again, as for those surrounding this individual, if they fear speaking up that speaks volumes about them. As for a leader being EGOCENTRIC - LOL what’s new? Its a common personality trait at the top
Funfact, i also think Harmony is a shambles
You and concerned person keep stating that team members have said these things but are to scared to lose their job, I personally think that is a pile of crap. Of they are as concerned about the blockchain as you guys are saying they should have no problem stepping forward and voicing their concerns. I find it very childish that we the investors have to go off a promise that what you are saying core members have said is true. Enough with the hiding behind @OgreAbroad1 and come out and be adults and speak for yourselves. Until that happens no one is going to believe the play ground rhetoric of “This anonymous person said something”.
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Dude we have been in open communication with TSE give it a rest already…you know nothing…he doesn’t budge…and when he does he just empowers another crony/igor to do his bidding…until you actually know whats going on, on the inside…shhhhhh
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