Grant Council Reviewer Nominations: Season 3

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Hey everyone!

The best way to get to know me without reading a wall of text is this 2-minute video I made for the grants council nomination: Michael | Grants Council Nomination Background - YouTube.

Council sub-committee: Growth Experiments

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate commitment: Delegate Commitments - #21 by Michael

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 0.23%

If you are a delegate, please indicate your voting participation rate in OP governance to date:
79% (100% participation since July 7, 2022)

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared:

Voting History via Boardroom

Videos explaining rational in various rounds.

Please outline any other contributions to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

Do you have a technical background? If so, please elaborate:

  • Yes, I worked as a machine learning engineer and have been coding smart contracts for 2.5 years.
  • I’ve placed in multiple web3 hackathons, including 1st out of 27+ teams.
  • Code contributor to Optimsm (link to pull request)
  • Master of Science in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, focus on machine learning & incentive systems.

Did you serve on a committee in Season 2? If so, please specify which: Yes, I served on the NFT committee with @Jrocki, @OPUser, @Luckyhooman.eth, and @FractalVisions.

Please demonstrate any experience you believe is relevant to this role:

  • Consumer facing product manager at high-growth tech startup, learned how to understand and capture users
  • Crypto educator. 300k+ views on YouTube, ability to communicate complex topics to a youtube audience
  • Technical ability: contributor to Optimism codebase, machine learning engineer, smart contract dev

Please demonstrate expertise relevant to your Council sub-committee:
In the process of making educational content for youtube, I’ve done smart-contract-level deep dives into the incentive systems and liquidity programs of tens of crypto protocols. This base of research has given me a wealth of knowledge of the different incentives being used across the Ethereum ecosystem. When evaluating grants, this knowledge allows me to detect grant requests that are made to

As a product manager focused on growth, I learned to think systematically about the process of transforming a potential user into a super-user.

The combination of my technical background with my background in user incentives & behaviour is what will make me a valuable contributor to growth experiments sub-committee.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Governance Fund grant:

Guiding Principle: Grants should use funds efficiently to drive us closer to the Optimistic Vision.

  • Specific things I’d like to see with grant proposals:
  • Clear milestones with milestone unlocks.
  • Definition of what “success” of grant use would be, with trackable metrics.
  • Accomplishes something that would be difficult to accomplish without the grant (bootstrapping liquidity, competitions, meetups, education)
  • Solid logic for why grant is needed and how it will to more sticky users making Optimism their L2 home.

What types of grant applications would you like to see or what RFPs would you create?

Guiding principle: Bias towards experimentation

Given the data we’ve received on past grants, we know that funding massive liquidity incentive programs doesn’t always yield the best results. As it stands right now, we don’t currently know which type of grants are best for Optimism’s growth. Because of this, our bias should be towards trying out new types of grant proposals and then being rigorous on judging how successful they were.

As far as specific grant types, I’ve already created a detailed thread here on why I believe competitions would be a great use of the grant funds. Some specific examples of grants that I’d like to see:

  • Education competitions to improve usability (tutorials, how L2s work, about Optimism)
  • Social media competitions to increase awareness
  • Sponsoring real-world events (optimism/crypto meetups)

It’s important to note that the size of these experimental grants will likely be much smaller than previous grants. As far as the traditional liquidity incentive grants that we saw so much of last year, I am still open to funding them given that they have strong logic behind why this grant will be effective vs some of the grants we saw last season.

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest: None

Please verify that you agree to abide by the delegate code of conduct : Yes

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 3: Yes

Please verify that you are able to commit 12 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes

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