Why did Jed McCaleb leave Ripple to start Stellar

[Brokedownpalace]

40 minutes ago, Max Entropy said:

@JoelKatz

Money and control is a funny thing. Funny for the investors and funny for the companies employees.

By funny... I mean, people/humans behave very differently. Investors may play games with the co-founders, and with the tech people who have defacto control over the companies' products. The implications for the technical co-founder may be to... "knife the baby". This is seen by everyone in the company and by the investors as a terrible thing. However, the technical co-founder may see this as a control issue. Meaning that the employees and the investors should/could have behaved differently with regard to the technical co-founder that is being/ seen to be disadvantaged. Did 'they' really think the technical people would roll over?

The issue is control... founders believe that they know where they are going and believe that the employees and investors should follow the founder. This is at adds with investors goal to seek more control. The money guys can always influence the equation to the disadvantage of the technical co-founder, as this founder is not motivated by money. Employees, executives and investors - are definition - solely motivated by the money.

--

So, the proper thing for Ripple would have been to:

• be upfront and honest with their methods of achieving control, and
• If there were differences in strategic direction, Ripple should have spun Jed and some number of employees out into a separate company, thus avoiding the attendant downstream drama.

I am consistently critical of Ripple management.

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I have not followed the details of Ripple and Jed, but the way Ripple managed the situation was not helpful then, and is not helpful today. It is still possible that Stellar can eat of, or some of Ripple's lunch. IBM is very strategic in the banking sector. Ripple without a Microsoft partner is now vulnerable. Ripple is not nimble, as it must be committed to Ripple existing products for existing reasons. Ripple can no longer pivot.

Recall, that Ripple is :

• a closed system... think Ripple cloud and all the x-Product instances... closed
• no Eco-system... Ripple is on its own
• no wallet... gee how can that be?? The only crypto with no wallet.
• no real tech partners
• no research connections, and 
• Ripple has baggage in the crypto space, and
• Ripple could be acquired.

Ripple senior management and specifically Larson did not handle this well. Ripple needs to partner with Microsoft, else it will become irrelevant.

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I am reminded of Steve Job's running up a pirate flag on a small campus building, and then developing products that would change the world, while John Sculley fiddled away the company... with the existing investors... in control.

Interesting times...

Well I don't know bout all this high falutin' negative talk but I do know you've been misspelling the name of the RIpple chairman and chief visionary. Someone on his third consecutive successful fintech startup. Let that sink in. THIRD CONSECUTIVE SUCCESSFUL fintech startup. THE adult in the room. The one who knew the route to success was through boring, slow, frustrating, regulatory compliance. Wisdom baby, pragmatic wisdom. The province of adults. There is no greater individual reason why Ripple is where it is, still poised to do insanely great ****. Yeah, I'm saying that: insanely great ****. He is our ace in the hole.....My two bits, back to dirty pictures.

Edited October 28, 2017 by Brokedownpalace
Spelling

[nikb]

@Max Entropy, the only response I can muster is in the form of an emoticon:

[Morty]

[Guest]

@nikb

If Jed was as evil as Ripple says, then the IBM folks would not be doing business with Stellar... so I remain confident, without details, that Ripple mis-managed the situation.

I will leave it there. The folks here do not understand either the simplisities or the complexities of this type of business relationship.

:-)

Edited October 28, 2017 by Guest

[Nobre]

Bye

[JoelKatz]

1 hour ago, Max Entropy said:

@JoelKatz

The issue is control... founders believe that they know where they are going and believe that the employees and investors should follow the founder. This is at odds with investors' goals to seek more control. The money guys can always influence the equation to the disadvantage of the technical co-founder, as the tech founder is not motivated by money. Employees, executives and investors - are - by definition, solely motivated by the money.

I can't disagree with this more strongly. I disagree on every level in every possible way. People are people. There aren't "founders" and "investors", there are just people.

Sometimes founders have bad ideas. You don't have to be a saint to be founder. Sometimes investors want to change the world.

We have rules for how people come together in a common enterprise. We elect Directors, the Directors choose the CEO. Investors get board seats. We all know these rules and agree to them. If you're a founder who thinks he knows how to do everything right, then keep 51% of the stock and/or don't give investors Board seats.

I'm not going to say that Ripple made all perfect decision. But that has absolutely nothing to do with what Jed did. Jed brought on Chris as CEO. Jed and Chris brought on investors together, took their money, and ceded some control to them. It doesn't matter how much Jed thinks he was right, or even if he was 100% right, he made binding agreements to cede control to other people. Smart people. People he chose. And then he betrayed them.

I am an employee and executive of Ripple. I am not at all solely motivated by money. I can get money almost anywhere. I work at Ripple because I believe in what I'm doing.

I spoke to a lot of our investors in the early days. A lot of them invested in Ripple because the thought we might make the world a better place. I mean, do you really think that Google Ventures invested in Ripple to make money?

How good or how bad a job you think we did or have been doing doesn't change any of that.

[Malloy]

Inspired the Song of the Day...enjoy! 

 

[MyXRPie]

25 minutes ago, Max Entropy said:

@nikb

If Jed was as evil as Ripple says, then the IBM folks would not be doing business with Stellar... so I remain confident, without details, that Ripple mis-managed the situation.

I will leave it there. The folks here do not understand either the simplisities or the complexities of this type of business relationship.

:-)

Max, in the past I have let your eccentricities go as passion, but in this one post you have managed to denigrate every other member of this forum. I have been around since well before the Jedpocalypse and am very clear on one thing. Jed is a self-serving, ego driven individual who has nothing but malice on his mind when it comes to Ripple, and our entire community. I have seen this type of individual before, and it is no surprise that he has the charisma to pull the wool over a few IBM executives’ eyes.

I have no problem with you being critical of Ripple, but in this case you are just wrong. I have never put someone on ignore in any forum, but you sir have made me want to investigate that function.

Oh and by the way… its simplicities with a c

[Guest]

@JoelKatz

Well, if you have met 'investors' then you will know they are a different bred of animal. Not all, but most from my experience you would not take home to meet the family. I have experience with Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and others. 

I think we will agree, that given the concerns that I itemized in my post, that Ripple now has a problem. In my opinion, and I have clearly stated this many times... Ripple is eating nobodies lunch today. Ripple has pivoted several times because of this. Stellar, I hope, will bring pressure to bear on the banks.

Centralized banking is a relatively new phenomenon. Hopefully, their role will be diminished - globally. Peer to peer money, like Napster, is now possible. BitTorrent is now a commonly accepted protocol. Banks will need to accept this and play a different role.

--

I will return - when Stellar XLM/STR challenges XRP's valuation. Who could have foreseen this.

 If Stellar enables peer to peer, then they will win.

[nvok]

5 hours ago, invest2lose said:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Jed-McCaleb-leave-Ripple-to-start-Stellar

what are your thoughts on this discussion? i always assumed that jed was a scummy guy, but reading his response here makes me think otherwise. i guess there's always 2 sides to a story.

Where's Jed's response? It's not on Quora

[Brokedownpalace]

4 hours ago, kenrino said:

no, nothing I guess the cms cloud (or whatever it is called) is not up to date in my region.

Anyway I agree about the title of the topic it's not a war, I wish they work all together finally. They're doing the exact same thing, just let the egos behind.

No, they're not doing the same thang

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, nvok said:

Where's Jed's response? It's not on Quora

I could not find it either.

[RLP18PharmD]

@Max Entropy As far as the Stellar/IBM thing is concerned, competition is good because it brings out the best within the community itself so, I tip my hat off to the folks behind Stellar. However, IMO, I don't think they are a serious threat at all to Ripple, barring some complete and catastrophic meltdown. That's not to say that Stellar won't have a seat at the table, but competing toe-to-toe with Ripple, not likely.  As I have posted elsewhere......

Full Article:  http://fortune.com/2017/10/16/ibm-blockchain-stellar/

Even Jesse Lund, IBM’s VP of Blockchain said that Stellar's digital asset use will be of limited duration in their joint venture:

"The new blockchain banking process is also notable because the banks will initially rely on a bitcoin-like digital currency, known as Lumens, to facilitate the cross border payments. Currently, banks arrange such payments by maintaining foreign accounts in a local currency (so-called nostro accounts), and then debiting the accounts as required—a process that is both slow and ties up capital. Under the new blockchain arrangement, banks will conduct the transactions using Lumens, and then rely on local market makers to convert the Lumens into local fiat currency. The Lumens are created by a non-profit company called Stellar, founded a Jed McCaleb, a well known figure in the payments and crypto-currency world. Both Stellar and IBM are part of a project called Hyperledger Fabric, which is building open source blockchain tools to support payment infrastructures. According to Lund, though, the banks use of Stellar’s digital currency is likely to be temporary. He predicts that, in the next year, central banks will begin issuing digital currencies of their own, and that these will become an integral part of blockchain-based money transfers."

I think it speaks volumes when Stellar's most prominent partner in essences says, "You're just a temporary fix to a problem until a more permanent solution is in place." Compare this to what Microsoft's director of technology strategy for financial services Marley Gray had to say about Ripple.

Full Article: https://ripple.com/insights/microsofts-marley-gray-ripple-and-ilp-will-be-the-fabric-of-multi-chain-future/

"We actually went to Ripple first early on in the process but we weren’t sure at the time how payments fit into our model. But as we started learning more about how all these different pieces fit together in the ecosystem, Ripple starts to make a lot of sense especially when you throw the Interledger Protocol into the mix. At the end of the day, the thing underlying all of these applications and smart contracts is payments.

"In financial services, I think we’re going to see a mixture of different blockchain technologies. There will be many, many chains—chains for swaps, chains for bonds. They’ll each have different characteristics. We’ll see chain patterns evolve. You could plug and play various consensus algorithms based on the products that exist on that chain."

"Given this multi-chain vision, we see smart contracts as a key piece. Then you need ILP, which is the glue in the system that holds everything together, so that different chains can interoperate. That means a derivatives chain can interact with the securities chain it’s derived from. In all of these interactions, you’ll have to move money around. So you will need Ripple for that."

"We want to be the premier validating node on the Ripple network. We believe in Ripple so we want to put our full weight behind it so that the ecosystem develops in the right direction. We’re really excited about the partnership. I have a bunch of meetings scheduled with the rest of the team to dive deeper into the different kinds of stuff we can do with Ripple and ILP."

I have yet to hear of this level or vote of confidence from any of Stellar's partners, just my opinion.

Edited October 28, 2017 by RLP18PharmD

[Morty]

1 hour ago, nvok said:

Where's Jed's response? It's not on Quora

For those having trouble finding Jeds comment... 

@Sebastian

Quote

 

David I always enjoyed working with you and I thought we had a degree of respect for each other so I'm pretty disappointed in your tone here. I don't really want to get into a big back and forth about this but this just isn't correct. When I left ripple the board was 2 people; myself and Chris.

I left because I made the mistake of bringing Chris on as CEO and it ended up being untenable to work with him for a variety of reasons.

I feel like I've been extremely restrained in my criticism of ripple despite the frivolous lawsuits from you guys the constant attacks on my character and my family. I know you are actually a good person but I think you are in too deep to see how horrible Chris has acted toward me.

Stellar hasn't abandoned the idea of distributing the lumens widely and the original facebook distribution was actually a success but the software/ecosystem wasn't ready for it at the time so we stopped it. We will do something similar in the future. I don't think any attempt at an internet level protocol like stellar or ripple can be widely adopted with a for profit company owning the majority of the tokens.

Stellar has always been focused on cross border payments so the IBM announcement isn't a pivot by any means.

Stellar and ripple are going after two completely different use cases as far as I can tell so I don't understand the continued hostility

 

 

[Ripple-n-Time]

I've been reading on this forum for a long time.  Call it crawling before walking.   Max Entropy has a distinct "connection" to Jed, if it's not him directly, he's not far removed.  He has way too much knowledge of the past inner workings of Ripple to not be.  That being said, great thread.  I'd like to see continued dialogue between Joelkatz and Max Enteopy going forward.  And Mercury, I'd take you up on your whale challenge but the member that said "for the same reason whales don't drive their lambos thru the ghetto".......he's spot on...?

Cheers all and best to Ripple