Status is a Superapp.
For those who forget the model and why it’s designed to do so in a privacy preserving and p2p manner. Please re-watch this New York Times video on WeChat, this video explains the concept, why its powerful and the problem with the implementations (as any centralised Big Tech company becomes extensions of the dominant authority), moreover you don’t have to take it from me.
If you want to see a better example of a Superapp, I recommend going to Tokyo or Thailand and using LINE, infact most contributors at Status should make this trip and immerse themselves in how LINE functions in Tokyo - I have also provided maps of the app flows that describe the functionality (as well as many others).
WeChat was instrumental in developing Small to Medium enterprise economy in China it allowed small business to sustain themselves by connecting directly with their customers. I view Crypto as an analogous developing economy - I believe the model will be instrumental in developing a circular crypto economy (a goal that has yet to be achieved by the entire Crypto industry, a reminder for those who are impatient).
Most Westerners struggle with the concept of a Superapp. Another way to think about a Superapp is to imagine a digital convenience store, like 7-Eleven.
Here is a quick breakdown, again, nothing I will say here is new.
The pillars are three core verticals or “businesses”.
- Chat / Social
- Financial Services
- Lifestyle Services
They all provide different functions, and each of them build on the previous, and is more capital intensive than the last. Moreover all 3 pillars have synergies which amplifies each other.
Chat / Socials is primarily about retention. Messaging applications have the highest retention rates, approximately 35% Day 30 Retention Rates. Contrast this with Payments which is closer to 5-10% D30, and Browsers which are 25% D30.
This is primarily through user-generated content and most importantly, notifications that re-engage the user. The content and notifications are highly relevant to the user as they from friends, family, and topics of interest, and the content is ever evolving.
Financial Services are about revenue, I find it pretty self explanatory, revenue is important for continuation of development, to subsidize the costs of Chat / Socials, and build a treasury capable of catalysing user growth and moving into Lifestyle Services. Paths to revenue in Crypto Wallets is now well understood, and we can leverage p2p payments similar to Cash.App or Venmo ( the original point of projects like Hashcash and Bitcoin)
ANT Group nearly did the world’s largest IPO based on the following:
- Payments (Status Wallet, Status Network, Status Pay & Keycard)
- Lending
- Wealth Management (Status Wallet / Portfolio)
- Insurance
So we need to design and implement p2p versions of these.
Specific to Crypto is the Trader market, this is not a fad, its a fact of life. We know that centralised exchanges dwarve users of any other DApp or Crypto project but orders of magnitude (Binance and Coinbase receive 20-35m unique visits, monthly), Ethereum.org gets about 500k visitors, and your favourite dapps are lucky to get 10k-100k visits per month. Outliers to this pattern that are crypto-native are Brave(20m/month unique visits) and Metamask(2m/month unique visits). For sake of simplicity I am not including the stats for how those visits translate into installs, but this data is also available. Not catering to the core of the crypto economy is dumb, having that said I will readily admit that I have, in the past, held a “holier than thou” attitude, but again I have not held this position for years. I viewed Defi as reckless, and whether I like it or not, this is human nature and I recognise where the Crypto economy is at in its maturation, you should too.
Lifestyle Services this is where the circular economy really starts to come to fruition. The users, capital and tooling from previous pillars enable you to bootstrap IRL economy and cross the digital divide, the “low hanging fruit” here are gig economy services, like courier services, food delivery, ride sharing, etc. As well as expanding the p2p payments to have storefronts for small to medium enterprises. That way retail shops (online or offline) can have communities, an online storefront and accept crypto payments easily through the app (and keycard).
The lifestyle services is by far the most capital intensive and difficult to pull off, today there are places that accept crypto but they are sparse, they leverage a diaspora of crypto users rather than cultivate the social and upsignal places to buy. Most of you have forgotten or unaware, that Coinhero (Bitcoin SPV Wallet) & Syng (Ethereum’s “Mist for Mobile”) - both predecessors to Status I built on my own, without a team, had maps of physical places to support crypto economy.
Again, the Crypto industry as a whole has largely not yet managed to cross the digital divide, with the exception of Latin America, and that has been driven due to institutional instability of state run fiat currencies. Even then El Salvador is having issues with its adoption. Argentina was forced to adopt it due to its Bitcoin “Black Market” and I’m sure people are aware of the recent news around Libra and how thats going.
Superapp Lifecycle
The primary pillars of a Superapp also resemble the lifecycle of a Superapp.
You get users, you get the revenue, this allows you to scale up user growth, and
then and these allow you to cross the digital divide, building Lifestyle Services.
That’s exactly what we’re doing, have done, and will continue to do.
This is exactly the path other Superapps have taken.
While there is always more work and ongoing maintenance, the Chat side of Status is largely “done” so we are now building out the Financial Services phase, this is not a pivot, this is the progression.
I can appreciate if you are working on one of these pillars, you may not recognise the need or importance of others, nor the phases in which they should be built.
On Flat Organisation
It is true when I started Status I naively believed in the ideas put forward by The Pirate Party & and I was influenced by the idea in Rick Falkvinge’s book, Swarmwise, as well as the book The Starfish and the Spider, which outlines a hybrid model, one we still resemble. These models work up to an organisational size of around 70-100 contributors, after which this model breaks down, the model can also work when people are voluntarily contributing or the costs are externalised, in other words the model is more suitable for movement building that are populist in nature. Note that the Pirate Party lost all their traction and failed to put forward any real policy platform due to internal discord from trying these ideas. Occupy was also easily dismantled for similar reasons. Github started flat and also transitioned at similar organisational sizes. In reality teams can be approximately 8 people in size before they are partitioned and management put in place to facilitate coordination and cross-communication.
The idea of a completely flat organisation has not existed in Status and nor in IFT for years now, and is only professed by those who have yet to meet the harsh realities themselves. Hierarchies are natural to any complex system (read Principles of Systems Science) and IFT is structured this way.
IFT is structured like a venture studio with portfolio management to manage the timelines and execution of multiple projects over heterogeneous teams. The edges between projects are real and require interfaces. You need accountability otherwise you suffer from the diffusion of responsibility.
On Leadership
Having that said, I am still believer in majority of decisions being made by the people being closest to the problem, and as a good leader, I delegate to the leadership of the project leads. I interface with the leadership and advise them, offer suggestions but ultimately trust in their judgement, sometimes that goes well, sometimes it leads to less than ideal outcomes. I provide information for informed decision making and sometimes I have to make interventions, which I do in several phases of “heavy handedness”, with the expectation that the leadership responds sooner rather than later. I believe this allows for more ownership in the projects, I won’t apologise for placing trust in the teams and their leadership, and like everything, I readily admit that no system is perfect.
My function in this regard has also been in the process of being delegated to the IFT board, and more specifically Corey for Portfolio Management and Leonard for Engineering Management, this is because the practice is becoming more formalised and we have the organisational capacity to do so. This also allows the IFT Board to have more say in the direction and management of steering the organisation. It also takes time for them to learn how to do this - transitional phases are necessary.
This does naturally put my role into more of an Executive Chairman, and this is what I am working towards for myself although this will probably take at least another year to come to fruition, we’ve already hired a Chief of Staff, and with the aforementioned roles - allows me to be less involved in the engineering and spend more time on other issues of the organisation.
Having said that, I do miss programming, the last real attempt I had was a sabbatical where I implemented a R1CS and beginning Groth16 in Nim - I spent the time understanding how Zero Knowledge actually works, and now I have worked on the Logos requirements and am building out the microkernel architecture for Logos. I am looking forward to coding on that for abit, but yes it is true, I will work with engineers to build these systems out, that shouldn’t be a surprise. I also look forward to spending more time getting up to speed in the recent advances of FHE and MPC.
On Philosophy
Being involved in any IFT project, you should care about Financial Freedom, Privacy, Sovereignty (of Distributed Systems), Sound Money, CBDCs, KYC, Surveillance & PsyOp Capitalism - the machinery of Tyranny. You should care about the intentional erosion of Western Society and Global Communications and Financial integration and capture. If you don’t then you likely need education or are a Glowie intentionally trying to undermine the project.
I find people do care about these topics, but often do not have the time to articulate it or fully understand them themselves. People are also at different phases of their understanding. This is why education is a service I provide and I view is necessary to shortcut the time for knowledge acquisition and create alignment in world view.
A great example of this is called “the privacy paradox” representing the disconnect between individuals’ concerns about privacy and their actual decisions regarding personal information. People care about privacy but over-discount privacy until blackswan events impact them. By then it is too late, and it is only then that those who advance these technologies are appreciated.
The software is a material manifestation of ideas and heavily impact design decisions which have huge downstream consequences. “The Medium is the Message”.
This kind of education is certainly important to new entrants into Crypto, starting with Defi, each bull cycle results in an influx of people who are even less acquainted with why Crypto matters. In turn those who become builders make design decisions that detract rather than strengthen the utility of Crypto.
I will continue to educate, if anything, expect more of it.
, he’s a CEO, he gets things done. He makes decisions and tells people to do things different if they do them wrong. Sam is a busy CEO.
Buzz to make decisions about things. It is ok though, because the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. Sam says bye and is busy for 10 years. Good luck Sam!
