In a press release on BusinessWire Chia Network has detailed 5 key executive hires, 4 Vice Presidents and 1 Senior Director, to run Sales, Sales Engineering, Product, Ecosystems Operations and Professional Services/Customer Success. While these are only titles, and who actually knows what they will be doing, we can actually learn quite a lot about Chia’s near term strategy from them.
First the 3 positions that light the brightest beacon, VP Sales, VP Sales Engineering and SD Professional Services indicate that Chia Networks is going to build a real consulting business on top of their blockchain. The separation of Sales and Sales Engineering right off the bat indicates they are serious about doing it properly from day one with account teams reporting separately from the architects. The focus on Professional Services right off the bat cements that.
The VP of Product hire also tells a story, but more in who they hired than the position itself. Paul Hainsworth is coming from Amazon, Alexa division in particular, which tells me that Chia Network is making a play at broad industry adoption rather than just in the cryptocurrency space. The Alexa division at Amazon successfully took a product that was weird and people didn’t trust and integrated into their day to day lives. Sounds like the perfect fit to sell a blockchain product.
And finally the VP Ecosystem Operations tells me that they are hoping to contain their community engagement and open source engineering into a single column of their business. This would allow them to keep the ecosystem at arm’s length from their consulting business, which is how a lot of successful open-source firms operate.
All together this set of executive hires tells me that Chia Network is serious about building their business along traditional enterprise software services companies and less like a Silicon Valley startup. They still seem to be hiring from the Silicon Valley talent pool, which makes sense obviously, but their strategic direction seems a lot more in line with my world than I was expecting so quickly.
