Ben O'Hanlon 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇯🇵

Worked on a similar project at Uber. A great case study of how big companies build things no one wants because they develop "main character syndrome" — thinking too much about themselves and not enough about the customer. From the company's standpoint, this makes perfect sense: Doordash's business is very spiky (around lunch and dinner time), Dashers have empty time to fill up, wouldn't it be nice if we used this under-utilized asset we acquired at great expense? Clearer why it doesn't work once you take the customer's POV. E.g. at Uber we tried to sell this to an empanada's store in Chicago, which spent 1h every morning filling out these little plastic sauce containers they hand out to people. "Hire a temp worker!", you could say. But then, it's only a one-hour task. The worker would have to commute ~10min to you, each way, and you'll pay for that one way or the other, on top of the platform fees (which are huge). Then, he doesn't know your process. So you'll spend another 10min from one hour task explaining to them, and maybe another 10min catching mistakes / asking them to re-do things. Finally — even assuming none of this was the case, why *would* you want to hire a worker? You're gonna be at the empanada stand anyway, which doesn't get busy til noon. You have time until then to fill out the sauce containers. So, the reason these things never work is that they only work for tasks: 1. Requiring 0 context (right here you took 98% of the market out) 2. In high margin / low cost sensitivity businesses (brick and mortar / service-heavy businesses are not high margin!) 3. Where every worker is already near 100% utilization OR that need done immediately (it's a rare task that's so sensitive it needs done immediately but not so sensitive that you can give it to a rando off the street)

Hyper conservative policy is a losing strategy when the game is growth. If you look around Web3, it is obvious that revenue is the best marketing there is. Not deploying capital does not protect the treasury. If the price of $ADA drops, you are spending it anyway through lost purchasing power. The only question is whether the productive potential of the treasury is realised or wasted. Without productivity, the treasury leaks value through price decline. Deployment is not the only risk. Slower OODA loops are a risk. If others learn, decide, and deploy faster, they compound while we freefall into higher entropy. The treasury loses value as its productive potential declines. On the other hand, when capital is deployed productively, faster loops compound outcomes, entropy decreases, and the productive potential of the treasury increases.

Ok but that’s the wider market. The Cardano treasury is only regenerative via tx fees. And we have limitations on how much money/ada can be dispersed in any given period for the express reason of protecting the health of the treasury. To ‘deploy’ that ‘capital’ is to throw our savings on the market to the wolves. A truly ridiculous idea