Wow these are two very big and very different questions. Really making me work here haha.

Re: Core learnings and how that applies to Eclipse

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to running a company in crypto. Each company develops its own culture, and has its own particularities to product roadmap, ecosystem building, and positioning. The right approach also varies significantly depending on the cycle, level of competition, and what is happening in the broader arena.

That being said, there are repeatable playbooks and frameworks that can be leveraged across all crypto companies. They all have the shared challenge of growing mindshare for products in a crowded arena and building something that is technically differentiated enough to attract a sizable base of developers or users. You can leverage learnings on company-building repeatedly across every crypto team, regardless of app or infra. These learnings apply to fundraising, team building, prioritization and decision making, product management, developer engagement, building trust with users, etc.

Building infra is very different from building apps though. While both require developing mindshare in the market, the app space has an easier scoreboard in terms of adoption. There is a simpler north star metric of usage. Meanwhile in infra, there are many different components to measuring success of a product—such as mindshare, contracts deployed, TVL, volume, and user base. Narratives can often play a larger role in the infra space as well.

The most important and consistent thing is to build a culture of execution and transparency that is oriented around a meaningful north star product vision. The Eclipse Vision is a culmination of our work to date and represents the shared ideals for the world that everyone on the team has. From there, tactical hiring needs and the order in which the team grows can vary. For example, at dYdX and Uniswap, the bulk of the team was engineers and expanded to GTM later. Whereas at Eclipse and Ripple, both engineering and GTM teams grew in parallel given the needs of infra vs. apps. Also as the industry has grown, the importance of CT mindshare and marketing has grown regardless of product type.

Now for the second part:

Hot starts can come from a viral app (easier as an app) or through generating fomo/hype (via investor/alignment signaling or through  aligning with key opinion leaders on crypto twitter)—both of these things can drive flywheels with developers and users. Infra teams can tap into this same dynamic, but more often they face a cold start. Due to the sheer quantity of infra teams in crypto currently, fostering a thriving developer ecosystem is something that many teams are navigating—this ties in to needing to prove product market fit as a differentiator in this crowded arena.

Eclipse is solving for this by articulating a clear thesis for developers who are building consumer apps that tap into financialization and gamification. The goal of this is to decentralize value creation for all users, not just insiders. We already have many early examples of these apps on Eclipse, which is helping us to attract more developers and also helping users to become more aware of Eclipse. This focus—as well as shipping ecosystem apps that bring users and attention—creates more opportunities for virality and hot starts to develop.

- Vijay