Season 6 Nominations: Grants Council

Elected Representatives 💼 Elections
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7

Michael Vander Meiden Self-Nomination

Hey Everyone! It’s Michael, excited to nominate myself for grants council S6.

Council sub-committee: Mission Reviewer

If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate profile: https://vote.optimism.io/delegates/opmichael.eth

If you are a delegate, please indicate what % of votable supply is delegated to you: 1.40%

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

Please link to your voting history and any voting rationale you’ve shared: https://vote.optimism.io/delegates/opmichael.eth

Do you have a technical background?: Yes.

  • Masters of Science degree in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University
  • I worked as a machine learning engineer and have been coding smart contracts for 4 years.
  • I’ve placed in multiple web3 hackathons, including 1st out of 27+ teams (this was the Arbitrum hackathon at Devcon Bogota, lol)
  • Code contributor to Optimism (link to pull request)

I think this is important, as my technical background has allowed me to dive into the smart contracts of projects applying for grants, and in Season 5 this allowed me to discover a scam LST project that otherwise seemed legitimate.

Please demonstrate any non-Optimism experience you believe is relevant to this role and/or your sub-committee:

  • I believe the technical experience above is very relevant
  • I served as a product manager at a venture-funded consumer-facing startup for 2 years
  • In my machine learning role, I led the data collection efforts, which involved designing non-gameable incentive systems for accurate labeling (which is surprisingly very similar to non-gameable grant incentives for DeFi protocols)
  • I have a crypto-focused YouTube channel with 375,000+ views where I did deep technical explanations on a variety of different protocols

Have you previously served in a representative (appointed or elected) role in the Collective? Yes, in the grants council as a Growth Experiments reviewer, S3, S4 & S5. Also in the NFT committee in Season 2.

Please outline your contributions, and their impact, to the Optimism ecosystem to date:

  • Host of Token House & Joint House community calls, providing a synchronous place for delegates and governance members to discuss relevant events in governance
  • Organized and hosted a variety of other events, including networking for badgeholders & delegates, Mission Proposal showcases, and Governance AMAs
  • Created guide videos for Optimism Governance (Season 5 Guide)
  • Consistent evangelist for Optimism and Optimism Grants, participating in Twitter spaces, creating tweet threads, and personally onboarding a number of people to the Optimism ecosystem.

Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Mission Application: Guiding Principle: Grants should be an efficient use of funds to drive us closer to the Optimistic Vision and the S6 intents

  • Good Applications:
    • Accomplishes something that would be difficult to accomplish without the grant
      • Positive-feedback loop on a user base
      • Bootstrapping new ecosystem primitives
    • Traction-based milestones (the grant should be working before more is distributed)
    • Teams committed to Optimism
    • Detailed distribution plans
  • Bad Applications:
    • Completion-based milestones
    • Teams extracting grants from every ecosystem they can
    • Vague distribution plans
    • Mercenary-focused incentives

What types of Mission Requests do you think will help achieve the Season 6 Intents?:

  • One specific mission request I will introduce if elected to the grants council is a “micro-grants” mission request specifically for smaller and first-time applicants. The goal of this would be to encourage a wide variety of more experimental projects to apply and to make sure that the budget is not completely eaten up by large protocols that have already received multiple grants in the past.
  • I am excited by the opportunity to help other Superchain chains develop their own grants programs and help them take the best practices that we have developed at Optimism over the last few seasons.
  • Mission requests that encourage the best-in-class DeFi protocols to deploy and focus on Optimism and to make Optimism the premiere place for liquidity from the mainnet.
  • Mission requests that encourage novel use cases to develop on Optimism (Social, Gaming, Identity, AI/ML, onramps, user-friendly wallets, and RWAs).

Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest: I am not associated with any other protocols or DAOs. The success of Optimism is my one and only interest.

Please verify that you understand you may be removed from this role via the Representative Removal proposal type in the Operating Manual: Yes.

Please verify that you understand KYC will be required to receive Council rewards at the end of Season 6: Yes.

Please verify that you are able to commit ~20 hours / week to reviewing grant applications and other Council operations: Yes, and willing to commit much more if needed.

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