Core Team Compensation (September)

[glennaustin]

Dash Core Group September 1st Funding Proposals
DCG is submitting 3 funding proposals for the September 1st budget cycle:
1) DCG Compensation: $600,000 (current proposal)
2) DCG Taxes: $210,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-taxes-part-2-of-3-september.39898/#post-194035)
3) DCG Legal: $125,000 (https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/core-team-legal-september.39899/)

This Proposal
This is a cross-posted at https://www.dashcentral.org/p/coreteamcomp0918

Background
We expect proposing a funding request related to compensation to the Dash network every month for the foreseeable future until DCG has a buffer in place equal to 2-3 months of compensation expense.

We currently have a hiring freeze in place. The team has 70 paid team members, and we have 1 critical open position that will further expand this over the coming month to ~71. The current run-rate is ~$452,000 monthly, which includes benefits for a limited number of contributors and some administrative and payroll costs associated with our employment administrator. This is an average of ~$6,500 / month / contributor.

As of end of July, the breakdown of the number of staff we have working in each department is almost identical to the breakdown at the end of June and is as follows:
- Development - 30 staff
- Leadership and Admin - 10 staff
- Project Management - 4 staff
- Strategy - 4 staff
- Quality Assurance - 4 staff
- Business Development - 3 staff
- Marketing - 3 staff
- Infrastructure - 2 staff
- Support - 1 staff
- Human Resources - 1 staff
- International Outreach - 8 staff (part-time)

We expect to be more exposed to currency fluctuation risk than in the past since we are now submitting our proposals at the beginning of the budget cycle (instead of the middle or latter half of a budget cycle) to provide the rest of the Dash community earlier visibility into our funding requests. This month we are requesting $600,000 again. As previously communicated, the need for this specific amount is three-fold:

1) Our current run-rate including benefits is ~ $452,000 monthly.

2) To rebuild a buffer in the Core Team Compensation budget to account for potential Dash volatility. This is the third consecutive month we have requested additional Dash to rebuild the buffer. Our current buffer is estimated to be ~$80,000 assuming a $210 Dash / USD price at the time of the superblock. This entire amount will be held in fiat once the August 2nd budget payout is converted to USD.

3) One-time deposits to initiate conversion of international subcontractors to full-time status. The international professional employer organization (PEO) requires a first month and last month deposit of employee’s salary and benefits to initiate the conversion. We are asking for $80,000 to onboard a second group to employee status. This will provide the following professional management services to Dash core employees outside of the U.S.: employee benefits, payroll and workers' compensation, and risk/safety management. This is the third consecutive month we have requested funding for this, yet we haven’t been able to convert any employees given the decrease in the price of Dash during each of the last 3 budget cycles from when the proposal was posted to the ultimate payout date.

What does this proposal fund?
This proposal funds Dash Core Group's ongoing compensation costs - including all developers, administrative, and support staff - at market rates for base pay, including some benefits which we are being rolled out as a subset of contractors are converted to employee status.

If you have any questions, please direct them to @glennaustin in this Dash Forum post to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the September 1st budget cycle:
· 2,864.00 Dash for core team compensation ($600,000 USD @ $209.525 per Dash)
· 5.00 Dash proposal reimbursement
Total: 2,869.00 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future compensation expenses.

Manually vote YES on this proposal:
dash-cli gobject vote-many a8a92af0362c0d7f42d47e78cce8917d6ab55da00d29cf3fc60012ecb77b917d funding yes
OR from the qt console:
gobject vote-many a8a92af0362c0d7f42d47e78cce8917d6ab55da00d29cf3fc60012ecb77b917d funding yes

Manually vote NO on this proposal:
dash-cli gobject vote-many a8a92af0362c0d7f42d47e78cce8917d6ab55da00d29cf3fc60012ecb77b917d funding no
OR from the qt console:
gobject vote-many a8a92af0362c0d7f42d47e78cce8917d6ab55da00d29cf3fc60012ecb77b917d funding no

 

[billyjoeallen]

It must be deeply offensive to other contributors who aren't getting paid at all due to treasury constraints in a bear market that Core is asking for more than they need to build a safety buffer. A cushion is wise, but they should have thought of that earlier. It's too late to save for a rainy day when it's coming down in buckets.

 

[Arthyron]

It must be deeply offensive to other contributors who aren't getting paid at all due to treasury constraints in a bear market that Core is asking for more than they need to build a safety buffer. A cushion is wise, but they should have thought of that earlier. It's too late to save for a rainy day when it's coming down in buckets.

This has to do with tax cycles and planning, and not to do with poor planning or malfeasance on the part of DCG. Please read the previous Core financial planning proposals and pre-proposals in the announcement section, it was explained in depth, it's really not a bad strategy. It's just unfortunate that tax season coincided with a bear market, but them's the breaks.

 

[billyjoeallen]

This has to do with tax cycles and planning, and not to do with poor planning or malfeasance on the part of DCG. Please read the previous Core financial planning proposals and pre-proposals in the announcement section, it was explained in depth, it's really not a bad strategy. It's just unfortunate that tax season coincided with a bear market, but them's the breaks.

It has to do with planning and not poor planning? What does that even mean? I understand you are arguing that Core management was unlucky and not selfish or incompetent. I even think you are very likely at least mostly correct, but those explanations are not mutually exclusive. A good strategy is one that works, not just for the captain but the whole team. We have key players getting carried out on stretchers and it's nowhere near final quarter. If this isn't a time for the coaching staff to step in, then does such a time even exist?

[edit] in retrospect I think I might be being a bit too unfair to Core. The point is that it doesn't matter if the outcome is the result of malfeasance, incompetence or bad luck if the result is the same. Core needs to adapt it's strategy and tactics to meet changing conditions and MNOs need to do the same.

 

[Unstoppable]

As dashbreaker suggests, can you group essential personnel and non-essential personnel?
Admittedly sitting outside of core as we are, it appears to me anyone who is not a dev, or directly involved in managing and serving them would be considered non-essential, such as Business Development, Marketing, and International Outreach. In the future, it may be good to have two separate compensation proposals: one for essential, and one for non-essential.

This would also help define what is truly core and what is not. I'm aware this is not a fun exercise, but may have to be prepared to cut nearly to the bone, should this bear market continue and/or worsen.

The treasury system provides plenty of opportunity for passionate people to present themselves as business developers, marketers, and representatives globally. No need to duplicate those efforts in DCG. The treasury system has even given birth to dashboost and crowdfunding methods to assist those with sufficient passion yet without the funds to submit a proposal.

edit: I see @billyjoeallen beat me to it on dashcentral. It appears there is some support for this.

 

[DeepBlue]

Hello @glennaustin I have some questions in order to more clearly understand the basic functions of core, interactions between core members and how the funding is being allocated.

1. Leadership and Admin - can you be more specific about what they mean. Leadership of what? Admin for what? How many are leadership and how many are admin and what specifically are their roles?

2. Project management - for what? Is this project management for core development? Core marketing? Core business development? What?

3. Strategy - 4 staff. Strategy for what exactly? Development? Marketing? Business Development? Are the Strategy people working full time on strategy? That seems a lot to me - what exactly are these people doing?

4. Marketing: What has marketing specifically achieved with our last funds which we gave 1200 DASH? What projects exactly are marketing working on? How is that funding being used? What are the proposed strategies for marketing? What role does Marketing have with Wachsman PR?

5. How much money is going to each function of core e.g. for Marketing? Development? Project management etc. Provide a breakdown of funds for each.

6. How do each of the individual roles of core interact with each other? What are the dependencies of one function of core compared to another function of core? We need to know this so that we can determine what would happen if we wanted to replace or improve a function of core and what the knock on effects would have.

7. International outreach - where are these people situated? What are they doing? How much money are they receiving? How is compensation calculated for each of these people? When they say part time how much time is being spent? Is compensation calculate on an hourly rate? What criteria determine the amount of funding for each outreach person? What have the outreach people achieved? How is ROI determined on these outreach projects. Who does outreach report to in core? Who co-ordinates their activities?

8. Business development. What have their achieved since Bradley Zastro took over? What is BD strategy? What inroads and where are they going? What new and future business partnerships are planned that they can disclose. If they cannot disclose details can they disclose generic details so we have enough information to determine the efficiency of this team?

9. Are core prepared to split up each core function into separate funding proposals so that we can better ask more focused questions regarding that function? If not why not?

10. There was mention of "benefits" being given out to core. How much in benefits to each person? What are these benefits and how much will these benefits be worth per year?

 

[Arthyron]

It has to do with planning and not poor planning? What does that even mean? I understand you are arguing that Core management was unlucky and not selfish or incompetent. I even think you are very likely at least mostly correct, but those explanations are not mutually exclusive. A good strategy is one that works, not just for the captain but the whole team. We have key players getting carried out on stretchers and it's nowhere near final quarter. If this isn't a time for the coaching staff to step in, then does such a time even exist?

[edit] in retrospect I think I might be being a bit too unfair to Core. The point is that it doesn't matter if the outcome is the result of malfeasance, incompetence or bad luck if the result is the same. Core needs to adapt it's strategy and tactics to meet changing conditions and MNOs need to do the same.

It means that the strategy they've adopted is by design and taking in to consideration the present or projected circumstances. I don't discount the argument that it might benefit the network for Core to make more drastic changes to their plans for the sake of other aspects of the Dash ecosystem inherently, but I want it to be very clear that it's not a matter of incompetence or malfeasance, and moreso to do with differences in priorities between what Core is trying to accomplish on their end vs. what the MNOs want to accomplish on our end. I resist and in most cases outright reject imposing other hierarchical relationships--even as metaphors--like bosses/coaches/etc because that's not how I view our respective roles. Many MNOs are not experts or professionals in these fields as many members of Core or other Proposal Owners are, so many of us end up speaking beyond our means or the weight of our expertise (or lack thereof). We serve a very important role in the ecosystem and often have to make hard calls, but I feel that asserting or imposing these top-down hierarchical relationships on what is in reality a novel, unprecedented system does a disservice to the DAO and leads systemically to many undesirable attitudes and behaviors, if for no other reason than that they are superfluous and at cross-purposes to the tasks before us.

 

[Unstoppable]

@glennaustin, @Ryan Taylor, the questions posed above by @DeepBlue are basic, clear, and reasonable.
I imagine it wouldn't take more than an hour of your time to address them. Please do so. Your answers would be greatly appreciated, and help provide a lot of clarity for the MNOs.
Thank you in advance.

 

[Unstoppable]

@kot, kindly take a moment to answer @DeepBlue's questions. Thank you.

 

[glennaustin]

Hello @glennaustin I have some questions in order to more clearly understand the basic functions of core, interactions between core members and how the funding is being allocated.

1. Leadership and Admin - can you be more specific about what they mean. Leadership of what? Admin for what? How many are leadership and how many are admin and what specifically are their roles?

2. Project management - for what? Is this project management for core development? Core marketing? Core business development? What?

3. Strategy - 4 staff. Strategy for what exactly? Development? Marketing? Business Development? Are the Strategy people working full time on strategy? That seems a lot to me - what exactly are these people doing?

4. Marketing: What has marketing specifically achieved with our last funds which we gave 1200 DASH? What projects exactly are marketing working on? How is that funding being used? What are the proposed strategies for marketing? What role does Marketing have with Wachsman PR?

5. How much money is going to each function of core e.g. for Marketing? Development? Project management etc. Provide a breakdown of funds for each.

6. How do each of the individual roles of core interact with each other? What are the dependencies of one function of core compared to another function of core? We need to know this so that we can determine what would happen if we wanted to replace or improve a function of core and what the knock on effects would have.

7. International outreach - where are these people situated? What are they doing? How much money are they receiving? How is compensation calculated for each of these people? When they say part time how much time is being spent? Is compensation calculate on an hourly rate? What criteria determine the amount of funding for each outreach person? What have the outreach people achieved? How is ROI determined on these outreach projects. Who does outreach report to in core? Who co-ordinates their activities?

8. Business development. What have their achieved since Bradley Zastro took over? What is BD strategy? What inroads and where are they going? What new and future business partnerships are planned that they can disclose. If they cannot disclose details can they disclose generic details so we have enough information to determine the efficiency of this team?

9. Are core prepared to split up each core function into separate funding proposals so that we can better ask more focused questions regarding that function? If not why not?

10. There was mention of "benefits" being given out to core. How much in benefits to each person? What are these benefits and how much will these benefits be worth per year?

1. Leadership and Admin - can you be more specific about what they mean. Leadership of what? Admin for what? How many are leadership and how many are admin and what specifically are their roles?
Leadership and Admin (most of the people who actually spoke on the 2Q call):
Glenn Austin
Bob Carroll
Alex Chopan
Executive Assistant
Andy Freer
Fernando Gutierrez
Kelly Kopp-Schuetz
Ryan Taylor
Robert Wiecko
Bradley Zastrow

2. Project management - for what? Is this project management for core development? Core marketing? Core business development? What?
“Project Management” is a term we use to describe broader service provided by the PM team to the organization - Scrum Masters and Project Managers are part of this team. They support developers and business functions in the following areas:

• Technical Development and Delivery (something you probably describe as “core development”) - these are Scrum Masters who are part of the development teams and work on daily basis on our products (DAPI, DashDrive etc...)
• Business Development - these are Project Managers, who support escrow, integration, PR and marketing projects (including our website development)
• Corporate Development - all of the projects that are being driven for internal, corporate needs, e.g. security (currently driven project to define, create and deploy policies and tools to protect company, employees and our assets), policies, internal processes, legal projects (e.g. work on the legal response to JFSA issue), support to strategic initiatives (Agile implementation, company re-structure, tools selection).

3. Strategy - 4 staff. Strategy for what exactly? Development? Marketing? Business Development? Are the Strategy people working full time on strategy? That seems a lot to me - what exactly are these people doing?
Strategy is an umbrella term. We have a strategy Director who is responsible for Product Management, Business Intelligence, and strategic initiatives (Quarterly plans, management meetings, special projects, and group efforts). His team has 3 people besides the department head: a business intelligence analyst, a product manager (90% of time is spent on work related to Evolution development - the roadmap and product strategy we outlined in the 2nd Quarter call) and an intern who support strategy, business development, and finance on miscellaneous tasks. At the time of the proposal there were 2 interns with one moving on to a different role outside of Dash recently.

4. Marketing: What has marketing specifically achieved with our last funds which we gave 1200 DASH? What projects exactly are marketing working on? How is that funding being used? What are the proposed strategies for marketing? What role does Marketing have with Wachsman PR?
Those funds were approved to be used for advertising and are mostly untouched. A previous campaign was delayed because of ad bans and we didn’t want to start without the results of that previous one. Also, the market situation advised being very conservative with the funds. In the end, despite good results of the previous campaign, we decided to cancel plans and we’re proposing the network to re-assign those funds for other marketing expenses, both in DCG and in the community. More details in the forum. https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/advertising-proposals.40044/#post-194605

The projects that marketing is currently working on are:
-Updates to the current website
-Wiki (docs.dash.org)
-Translations of product and channels
-Design of new website
-Rebranding
-Marketing support to business development when there is such component in the agreements with partners
-Social media
-Events and conferences
-Public relations

Regarding that last one, Wachsman is the firm working with us on public relations. They work on getting us opportunities to showcase Dash in the media, including written articles, podcasts and any other format that lets us push our message. They also help us to define our messaging, which is especially useful because they have daily feedback from journalists. Finally, they provide us with crisis management advice and support in our events.

5. How much money is going to each function of core e.g. for Marketing? Development? Project management etc. Provide a breakdown of funds for each.
We agreed to provide MNOs with an aggregate amount of funds unless more than 10% of the votes cast for core team salary are "no" at the end of a budget cycle. If that were to happen we can solicit feedback on what the network would like separately voted upon, and attempt to provide the requested additional granularity in future budget cycles.

This information was communicated in the following proposal: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/coreteam-salaries-201706

6. How do each of the individual roles of core interact with each other? What are the dependencies of one function of core compared to another function of core? We need to know this so that we can determine what would happen if we wanted to replace or improve a function of core and what the knock on effects would have.
I am not sure how to answer this question. There are both formal and informal avenues through which work and communication gets done at an organization. What type of knock on effect would you be looking to optimize for?

7. International outreach - where are these people situated? What are they doing? How much money are they receiving? How is compensation calculated for each of these people? When they say part time how much time is being spent? Is compensation calculate on an hourly rate? What criteria determine the amount of funding for each outreach person? What have the outreach people achieved? How is ROI determined on these outreach projects. Who does outreach report to in core? Who co-ordinates their activities?

The international outreach people are located around the globe.

The function they perform is varied and ranges from representing Dash as unofficial country managers, manning the support desk, providing valuable service to Dash by running dashninja.pl, providing translations into other languages, etc.

8. Business development. What have their achieved since Bradley Zastro took over? What is BD strategy? What inroads and where are they going? What new and future business partnerships are planned that they can disclose. If they cannot disclose details can they disclose generic details so we have enough information to determine the efficiency of this team?
The work business development has been doing over the past 8 months can be summarised into the following areas: Team build/infrastructure, new partnership onboarding and account management for partners (new+existing).

Team build/infrastructure: There was no dedicated business development efforts post Daniel Diaz leaving in 2017. Focus therefore on building: Strategy design/research/align (2Q review), Team design (writing job descriptions, hiring, interviewing, onboarding), support systems (i.e. CRM) required to be identified, implemented and used, and additional processes designed or reengineered. Jon came on board full time as integration engineer in January, Omar came onboard as BD US/Canada in February and Ernesto came on board as BD LATAM in May. Omar and Ernesto were external hires.

New Partnership onboard: These have always been historically communicated within the Quarterly reviews as well as through various social channels such as @Dashpay Twitter as well as Wachsman - which we’ll continue to do. Additionally, a complete listing of integrated partners, will be posted on the Dash Forum, as communicated within the 2Q review. Almost always, BD announces partnerships to align with the go-live date of the integration, and not the signing of the agreement, to maximise impact and provide an immediate call to action.

Account Management (new+existing): Verbatim feedback we’ve received is that the value that DCG brings to the network is unique amongst other major cryptocurrencies: ongoing relationships with our partners and working with them to find new opportunities. We meet regularly with our key partners, and we are working to further segment our partner base to ensure we have coverage for account management activity with a growing partnership portfolio and a static BD resource base. This is critical for channel partners like BlockCypher and has resulted in a 3-party partnership to be launched at the end of August.

9. Are core prepared to split up each core function into separate funding proposals so that we can better ask more focused questions regarding that function? If not why not?
Please refer to the answer under question #5

10. There was mention of "benefits" being given out to core. How much in benefits to each person? What are these benefits and how much will these benefits be worth per year?
Benefits include what most people internationally would consider basic benefits. Access to health benefits, vision and dental insurance. The employee has to pay monthly premiums to access this. It is mostly provided in the US and covers ~7 US based employees. Additionally, we have 1 employee located internationally who also receives benefits. There were plans to further expand this program but that expansion has been on hold.

 

[DeepBlue]

@glennaustin
This is part 1 of my reply. I will post Part 2 shortly. This reply is making clear why we need the details on DCG funding. I am doing this to benefit the network. We need to take action now to improve DASH's market value so we can fund all our projects.

DASH has fallen significantly compared to other lesser crypto coins. In order for DASH to regain its rightful position we need this information to be made public and not only this but to have it broadcast through PR channels. We all know there is a bear market however DASH's fall is greater in this bear market than other lesser coins. Here are the reasons I'm asking for this basic information on DCG:

1. Investors need to have confidence in what they are investing in.

We are investing in our code and business development through hiring staff in the DCG. It is therefore only reasonable for an investor to understand how that money is being invested in order to feel confident that it is being invested wisely. If the information is kept vague then investors simply will not have confidence to invest. We have 19 full time developers and 6 part time developers that are also paid a full time competitive salary. This is a *huge* advantage over other crypto currencies that have a fraction of the number of developers of DASH and they are not on a steady salary. Now we know how many actual full time developers there why are we not mentioning this in our PR appearances? I've seen interviews with Ryan Taylor and this has not been mentioned. This is a major KPI for investors to have confidence investing in DASH.

Has Ryan received formal media training? If he had, he would know how to formulate the key selling features of DASH and to weave these into any interview he is involved with. Ryan could be an important spokesperson for DASH however currently he has made very few public appearances and the one's that he has made honestly I don't feel he made the most of them. We need Ryan to be out there more highlighting the key benefits of DASH that attract investors and not allowing the interviewer to totally control the interview.

Investors also look at the activity reports in the GitHub development repositories to get an idea of how much development work is going on but DCG are keeping the coding activity stats private. At the moment there is very low activity on the DASH repositories. This is most definitely putting investors off. We need all repositories to be identified and we need all private repositories to have the coding statistics made publicly available. You are currently keeping the statistics also private for the private repositories which makes it impossible for anyone to see how much coding activity is taking place. Secrecy like this raises red flags to investors. We need those stats made public right away. If DCG is really working as hard as you say you are then you would have no problem making these stats available.

The information supplied by DCG currently is vague and it is not broadcast out via PR channels yet . This is the type of information that big time investors need in order to invest.

2. We need to know precisely what core team working on and what they are not working on so we can plug holes.

If we do not know what DCG are working on exactly then how can the network know what areas need to be filled?

e.g. We had a big debate on what exactly is Wachsman PR doing and what they have achieved. What we learned from this debate was that Wachsman PR is mainly taking away tasks from the core team, dealing with "crisis" situations e.g Ryan's twitter account hacking, assisting in conferences. We saw a list of their PR activities and I went through their press releases and I have to say they were really poor in terms of achieving the objective of raising DASH's profile. Wachsman may be very useful to the core team in helping with conferences and doing day to day PR related tasks however they have not done a good job in highlighting the world media about DASH's greatest selling points. Their role is important for DCG but they are not doing such a great job for highlighting the network. Before the debate we did not know this however and we thought that Wachsman was the PR company for the DASH network. It turns out that really is not their focus. They work for DCG and fulfil your needs first. It was only through my questions that initially sparked this debate did we learn all this however. This is why it is so important MNOs enter into debate with DCG.

These are just a few of the important benefits that make DASH stand out amongst the rest and have not yet been adequately dealt with by Wachsman PR.

1. Governance structure, no forks, just progress - that no other crypto yet has.

2. Instant send feature (less than 1 second). - making it a functional currency e.g. to buy a coffee without waiting for confirmations to clear - which can take anything from 10 minutes to 2 hours for Bitcoin.

3. Optional privacy making DASH truly a fungible currency: The importance of optional private send - a working currency must be private but still be accountable. It has to be private to ensure fungibility which is an essential property of any currency. Privacy is important for fungibility because a unit of money must be valued as the same unit of money irrespective of its history. If somehow the history has some activity that can be tracked to illicit activity people may not be willing to accept that currency and therefore it is not worth the same as one with a history. In addition companies will not use a currency if they know there competitors can simply look up all their transactions on the blockchain. In addition although DASH has optional privacy we also have accountability because addresses are still visible on the blockchain and therefore accountable. Unlike other coins like Monero in which even a wallet address itself is scrambled. This means that Monero and other such coins are not accountable to tax authorities, unlike DASH. In addition totally scrambled data of a blockchain make it impossible to be certain how many coins are actually minted - which opens the door to possible corruption. Therefore visibility of the coin balance on an address at least is essential. This is just one example that Wachsman has not done a very good job in getting these messages across and these are major selling points for DASH.

4. Treasury to fund projects and pay developers
DASH has a treasury which funds projects and pays for developers. This is treasury is generated from the protocol level meaning it is not optional. Unlike other coins that rely on optional donations. Dash was the first to do this and we have the most advance functional treasury system out there.

5. Hundreds of community projects funded by DASH treasury.
e.g. Venezuela with DASH uptake of DASH with nearly 1000 merchants now accepting DASH. Wachsman has also not done much on this either.

6. Making crypto Grandma friendly (usable by everyone)
Evolution - again very little by Wachsman

7. DASH is going to be backed by real assets
Dash Ventures giving DASH solid value. A digital currency that is backed by real tangible assets. Anything by Wachsman? This will greatly reduce volatility for DASH and it will become much more valuable as a crypto.

8. DASH protection of IP rights
Dash legal structure - giving the network resilience and stability - what other crypto has done this?

9. Dash patents - ensuring our technology cannot be patented by another organization and therefore stopping us from developing our work in the future

10. Scaling easily to half the transaction volume of paypal with our existing infrastructure
Scaling of DASH - results from Arizona State University showing we can easily scale to half the size of Paypal without blinking an eye. Dash is scalable - this needs to be broadcast out across world media. It is currently perceived that blockchain technology is not currency scalable to the levels of visa or paypal. ASU showed that DASH is scaleable without breaking a sweat to half the transactions size of paypal - one of the largest online payment gateways in the world.

These are just a few of our major selling points. Yet Wachsman has done very little on making these topics known, and as a result DASH appears to be a boring, flat cryptocurrency like any other. A colleague recently described DASH as "white rice, or mashed potatoes" in other words boring as hell!

I looked through the long list of press releases by Wachsman and they were as boring as can be. No excitement, no zest and of very little interest. They were lacklustre PR articles at best and they have done very little for making investors interested in DASH. Sure, they have taken work away from core. But that is not the role of a PR company.

I was asking questions about Wachsman's in the core team funding proposal and this questioning sparked a heated debate. In this debate we found out what Wachsman real role was mainly to take work away from core and do basic corporate PR. We also found out Wachsman do next to nothing in social media marketing which is one of the most important areas to be working on in this day and age. This is a HUGE hole in our PR strategy for raising Dash's profile to investors.

After the debate MNOs realised for the first time we need another PR organization that can fulfil the roles of PR to boost Dash's network and highlight our amazing features that make DASH stand out from the other cryptos.

Dashforcenews are now rising to the challenge and are working to increase the profile of DASH by hiring another PR firm to highlight DASH amazing qualities and innovations that set us apart form every other crypto. This is the value DCG of answering our questions in your funding proposals. You are helping us. We want to work with you and we can help support you. But you have to give us the information we need to do this.

These are just a few examples where it is critical for us to know exactly what DCG are doing.

If DCG say you are doing "PR" and we don't have the details we don't know where the holes are. The same with marketing and with business development. What I've come to realise now is the DCG have a very different set of requirements for PR, Business Dev and Marketing from the DASH Network. In order for us (DASH Network) to know how to plug those holes we need to know in detail what DCG is doing in these areas. So can you please start answering our questions. Help us to help you! If we plug the holes DCG is missing then it makes your contribution look that much better.

The quarterly calls don't provide the level of detail we need - and many of the calls just give a summary.

The above is Part 1 of my reply. Part 2 will follow shortly.

 

[DeepBlue]

It looks like DASH PR is beginning to improve:

We need a lot more of this type of PR. I would advise to highlight more on the BENEFITS of DASH and not the features. People buy on benefits not features.

Would we have had this type of TV report if it was not highlighted in the DCG funding proposal that the Wachsman PR work was lacklustre? I don't think so!

To get the "Grandma friendly" phrase in was excellent! We could do with a collection of such phrases to get into these types of PR reports.

The value of MNO questions (and getting answers) in the DCG proposals is we can make DASH better, as this PR video above shows. But we need DCG to understand that answering MNO questions is an investment and of great value and not a "waste of time". We have real world business experience to bring to the table. Are DCG going to throw that away or are you going to realise that every MNO question is an opportunity for improvement?