Joining Chapter One as Head of Community and Growth

### From Chapter Zero to Chapter One

**I am thrilled to be joining Chapter One, a crypto native fund, leading initiatives in and around community and growth for portfolio companies and beyond.**

Chapter One, helmed by a fantastic group of [people](http://chapterone.com/team), gives me the environment and opportunity to tackle complex problems related to community, growth, and business development within the crypto ecosystem in fun and unique ways.

I’m excited to find a crossroads where I can focus on people, data, and products on a daily whilst creating memes that delight each step of the way.

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/kWf05RWyk6obv5UryYy5d.png?height=499&width=524)

**What makes Chapter One special?**

Chapter One’s values have always aligned with my perspective on crypto in a uniquely personal way. We believe in building a “multi-chapter story” with the founders we invest in. We strive to become a venture contributor fund — getting our hands dirty helping on multiple fronts such as Founder Experience, Talent and Education, or Product with founders when they need us.

Jeff and Mene have assembled a fantastic group of immensely talented individuals who come from diverse backgrounds — bringing with them an arsenal of incredible experiences that can be immediately applied to the day-to-day work that we do regardless of the scenario thrown at us.

I’m so excited to dive into the themes that Chapter One believes in:

* **Multiplayer Money**: crypto being the foundation of unlocking group coordination
* **Next Billion Owners:** onboarding the next generation of crypto users
* **Cult Communities:** a focus point for helping unlock radical thinkers to manifest their ideas

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/YFoFewVthgf2WPNL5PTXM.png?height=348&width=717)

**WHY Community and Growth?**

Fundamentally, there will come a time when yields taper and the world of crypto no longer flouts outrageous APY's or gains to entice newcomers. Those that continue to evangelize crypto and its community will do it, not because of speculative monetary gains, but because of the right onboarding experience.

I believe that communities that border on cults will help onboard, lock-in, and engage the next generation of crypto natives. Protocols and products that create advocates who bring in others because they are convicted will create an essential flywheel of onboarding with a positive feedback loop.

Community and in conjunction growth are now an integral part of the fabric of culture in general and in crypto especially. It creates an infinitely scalable opportunity that encompasses anything from marketing activations to technical breakthroughs on a grassroots level.

This has been my primary focus and a nascent point of excitement since I entered crypto in 2020 and I aim to have the privilege of working on it as long as I can.

![(ignore the above meme - I actually do stuff outside of making memes) ](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/vrOr0vJUWjjDe8V_H4p00.png?height=499&width=517)

**So, what does my role look like?**

As Head of Community and Growth, I’ll be working directly with portfolio companies to create uniquely personalized journeys for the founders we work with.

I’ll be doing this by examining what the founders want for their community of users, brainstorming what long term growth might look like with each company, and working with other parts of Chapter One (Founder Experience, Talent and Education, Research and Experiments) to create the most holistic experience for Chapter One’s portfolio.

In addition, I’m excited to dive into developing and curating resources surrounding community, growth, and business development and open-sourcing anything I find for the public good. Long term, I hope to build robust connections within the space to generate content that helps surface best practices for decentralized communities, internal and external, as well as scalable GTM playbooks f

In Search of the "Perfect Yield"

The "Perfect Yield" is a golden opportunity, a risk appetite decided opportunity to multiply and compound your money without having to touch a single button apart from depositing and withdrawing your wealth. It can provide a stable monthly income for some, a small meal's worth for others, and for an unlucky few create a crushing story of a yield farm gone wrong.

This will be a mixed post with a few different viewpoints looking at my personal journey in search of the "perfect yield". I won't be diving into super technical details as the rabbit-hole is quite deep although I'll do my best to link helpful resources that I've found useful or that I think will be interesting for those who are reading.

I'll split this up into a few sections:

1. How do you generate yield?
2. What is my experience with generating yield?
3. Tutorial: Earning Yield on staked ETH

Let's dive in.


***

## How do you generate Yield?

For the purpose of this article, yield will simply be defined as accruing additional money utilizing your existing capital. I'll go over a few that immediately come to mind in little blurbs below!

**Yield Farming/Liquidity Mining** - In short, yield farming deposits their crypto into a lending protocol where they can then earn interest from trading fees. Sometimes, these platforms also award additional yield with the protocol's native governance token.

This all comes down to the core principle that a DEX (Decentralized Exchange) requires liquidity in order to make trades.

Yield farming works with people who provide liquidity into pools. In short, a liquidity provider is an investor who deposits funds into a smart contract while the liquidity pool represents the smart contract that the liquidity providers deposit funds into.

Yield farming functions based on the automated market maker (AMM) model. Automated Market Making helps eliminate buy and sell order-books that you see on more centralized exchanges. Instead of seeing the price that the asset will be trading at, the AMM looks to pools that will execute trades based on algorithms.

These AMM's rely heavily on LP's who deposit their funds to provide liquidity - usually in equal parts (e.g. half ETH/half DAI). When trading DeFi users are then paying an additional trading fee to the market place, usually a very small amount (0.05% or less) which is the marketplace then shares back to the LP's based on their percentage share of the pool's liquidity.

**Staking** - With EIP-1559 ETH will join the ranks of Proof of Stake bringing about the necessity for staking. Staking is where the user sets aside a required balance (usually not necessary with pools) in order to "stake" and validate transactions thereby earning staking rewards.

Staking rewards are usually achieved through a successful validation of a block, where each block contains a set amount of rewards determined by the protocol which is then distributed to the staker.

Staking is also quite interesting as it also punishes those who try to negatively influence the network, whether this be through slashing rewards or removing them thereby keeping the proof of stake network consensus driven and safe.


***

## What is my experience with yield?

Over the past year and change I've had some great, okay, and downright terrible experiences. (Make sure to do research on your own before hopping into any of these projects!)

I've used some protocols because of the outrageous return, these are usually not sustainable as these returns can just as quickly disappear as more people join and per person rewards are diluted. As the ETH mainnet has calmed down and is sometimes considered prohibitive with high fees, most of the high return farms are on Polygon, an ETH compatible sidechain.

One such example is dinoswap.exchange - when they first launched their ETH/USDC pool in the Fossil Farms product it was emitting 1,000% APY but as their TVL (total value locked) has grown the APY has shrank to 600% still an incredibly respectable retur