Introduction
In a recent article, I briefly discussed the difference between finite and infinite games within game theory. We identified that businesses (and in the NFT context, projects) fall into the category of playing the infinite game, but very few understand this and therefore play it correctly.
One major perspective I now analyse projects and individuals through, is how they are making their decisions. Are they driven by some fundamental values that buttress who they are and what they do? Or are they guided by their interests? To help you understand the distinction between the two, I will use to context of a dental practice since this is my real-life background.
The Dental Example
In my home country at least, dentistry can be a very brutal and highly demanding industry with expectations on the parts of both your employers and your patients.
I entered the industry expecting to be met with regular targets and cut-throat consequences if I didn’t hit them. Instead, my first employer surprised me. He encouraged me to take my time with my clients so that I could build both my skills and my rapport with them. I did not have any targets and I was paid on a salary basis as opposed to commission which is common in the industry. His rationale was to allow his rookie dentists to hone their skills and their ability to attract more clients without financial pressures or incentives influencing them negatively. By the time we were ready to move onto a commission basis, we would be able to hit the ground running with well-established appointment books and the skills to back it. In my eyes, these were very healthy values.
This was a huge contrast to other jobs I’ve had and seen in the industry where you are expected to hit arbitrarily financial targets. It always upset me that a healthcare industry was so heavily centred around making profit, but that’s a rant for another day. What ends up happening is dentists and practices cut corners. They rush their procedures, skip steps to save time and most shockingly, prescribe treatments that aren’t necessary. By acting purely through our interests, these practices started to burn out their patients due to poor quality work and eventually suffer.
Now I’m not going to be naïve enough to say that we shouldn’t be acting in the interests of making money. Whatever my reservations about it, these are still fundamentally businesses and all businesses operate to make money. The distinction I would make is between acting purely on interests alone as opposed to having those interests founded on core values that prevent us from making unethical decisions.
What I have found during my time in dentistry is that whilst I wasn’t necessarily profitable at the start working for that first practice, patients quickly recognised and appreciated the values that underlaid how we worked. We were able to charge a premium for our services because people were willing to pay that to keep seeing us and that was how we remained profitable. Meanwhile practices operating purely out of their interests would undercut their competitors in a race to the bottom that is disastrous for everybody involved.
Shitfluencers
So my point is that when evaluating people and projects in the space, I think a fantastic filtration system is to assess whether their actions are purely based on their interests or hidden agendas, or if they are founded in strong values that determine what they are willing to do in order to satisfy those interests.
Influencers are the perfect example here. I look at so many people trying to ‘build their following’ or ‘their platform’ in the space and I have to ask the question ‘why’?
So they can leverage that to start charging projects to shill them? And then generate their own exit liquidity?
To satisfy their own egos and need for attention?
Or is it because they want to bring some change to the space and set an example for how they believe the space can grow in a health way?
When you pay attention, you can spot from a mile away those that are looking to pump their own bags and have few limitations on what they are willing to do in the process. The memecoin wave was a fantastic example of this. I personally cannot see what set of positive values can motivate a person to shill a memecoin. Their motivations are usually either:
- They hold a bag of it and want it to pump so they can take profits and run
- They don’t hold a bag in which case they’re just jumping on the bandwagon and trying to garner attention.
Neither action is founded in a value set that I want to give any air to.
I would credit people such as @MarcColcer, @TurntUpDylan and @CyronicaNFT as good examples of people with strong moral principles underpinning how they engage in the space.
Projects
The same scope can be used to look at projects. Which projects have a strong set of values that then drive their interests? Which projects are acting exclusively out of their interests?
The latter tend to spend a lot of timing focussing on what the rest of the space is doing. They will regularly talk about how they will be number one and ‘beat’ everybody else. They will chase whatever is the newest meta to try and make sure they stay in the spotlight. At some point you will pull back, look at the project and go ‘what on earth is going on here’ and you cannot identify what the core values or belief systems were.
A project I love so dearly, Jelly, fell into the latter category for a moment there. Launchpads and incubators were becoming popular. SolSuite was brought to life. The Infected Mob were producing some (admittedly awesome) collab collections with various projects. Infected Rascals burst onto the scene. Eventually the infographic listing out the project’s utilities was ludicrously long and it became very difficult for both outsiders and insiders to say ‘what is Jelly about’. Fortunately, Carlos recognised this and has stripped the project back to the fundamentals centred around Rascals and bringing value to $JELLY. As the great Ron Swanson once said, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
Okay Bears is a project that I can confidently say is backed on a strong set of values and principles guiding their decisions. Their initial hype run was enormous and left an even larger set of bag holders down bad from buying the top. It would have been so easy for the project to start pivoting at any opportunity to try and appease their holders. Instead, they stuck to their guns and their core beliefs in fostering a positive community and a brand that would appeal to Web2 audiences.
If you can’t clearly identify the values of a project, the next best bet is to look at the Founders as ultimately they will channel their value systems into the work that they do.
Conclusion
To be clear, none of this is to say that all values-driven projects will moon and succeed. Most will still fail and that’s just the nature of the game and business. I know many dental practices My point is that those who don’t are almost destined to fail and once you learn to look, you can spot it from a mile away.
Aligning interests only works as long as those interests remain the same. Aligning values will almost never change.
This article was inspired by the following speech given by Simon Sinek: Link Here
I also briefly talked about this topic on a recent episode of Philosophical Investing, the recording for which can be found here.