This is long overdue — we deeply apologize for the dearth of public communication. It’s no hyperbole to say that the past several months have unequivocally comprised the busiest — yet most fulfilling — time of my entire life, and I know the same goes for much of the team.
That’s a good segue into a quick update as to what we’ve been up to here at Stream. Please don’t mistake our public silence for lack of progress and stagnation— it’s precisely because we’ve been so busy heads down working that we’ve been so publicly quiet.
Moving to a Marathon, Not a Sprint
We came into this project sprinting at 1000 miles an hour, and we haven’t stopped since. Every single one of us has been burning the midnight oil for months now — I can’t even begin to count the all-nighters we’ve collectively pulled. Hell, I’m writing this as we speak at 4 AM.
To an extent, this was good and perhaps even necessary. Looking back, I’m astonished at the progress we’ve made and how far we’ve come. At the same time, it’s also become starkly clear that this is not remotely sustainable, nor even the most effective or productive path forward.
While we’ve accomplished an immense amount — we have a fully functioning first product in beta right now, ready to be pushed to production very shortly, have garnered the support of some of the biggest names in the space, have been invited to speak/present at over a dozen conferences and other events all over the world, are working with some of the most well known content creators with hundreds of millions of viewers, and most importantly have assembled hands down the greatest team I’ve ever had the privilege of working with — as our momentum has built, we’ve found it increasingly hard to keep pace with inbound interest without dropping balls along the way.
I’m personally sitting on a backlog of over a thousand emails and other messages, and have found it an increasingly insurmountable task to keep on top of everything going on while at the same time charging forward at full speed. (I’ll take this opportunity to also apologize to anyone I’ve been slow or absent in responding to. I deeply apologize for this, and fully intend to catch up on as much communication as I can once we’ve had a chance to implement all our processes to ensure minimal balls get dropped going forward.)
This is a company we want to see last the test of time over decades, not months. We’re excited about the cryptocurrency and blockchain space not merely because we see what incredible things are possible in the near future, but twenty years out — if the analogy to the internet holds true and this is somewhere between 1993 and 1995, what we’re most excited about is what 2017 looks like.
As such, it’s become clear to us that sprinting is no longer the right path forward, and that it is time for us to take the appropriate time to build an incredibly deliberate, very long-term foundation that can both propel us forward in the short term effectively, productively, and without dropping balls, and more importantly, withstand the test of time in the coming decades.
Presale and Token Sale Update
To this end, we’re taking a few weeks to fully implement the processes that will allow us to 1. catch up on everything currently in progress, and 2. ensure that we can move forward in a manner that allows us to efficiently and effectively manage all aspects of our token sale, product launch, and general communication as our momentum scales in a way that minimizes our likelihood of making a misstep or falling short in any way.
We believe firmly in taking the time to do things correctly, and it’s become clear that our extraordinarily aggressive token sale timeline was coming at the cost of making sure every part of the process was as polished and well-executed as possible. As a result, we’ve decided to push back the token sale until early next year, likely January or February, to give ourselves a little breathing room to do everything to the level of quality we expect of ourselves.
In the meantime, the pre-sale will remain open as we’ve already begun that process, but there may be a delay in processing further inbound requests for the next week or two as we focus on ramping up our process to appropriately scale to meet the demand.
As a final clarification and demonstration of the missteps we hope to avoid in the future, we mistakenly announced that ZhenFund was a constituent member of our advisor round. In reality, they were not. I was introduced to ZhenFund by Pantera extremely last minute the day before our advisor round closed, and despite being severely oversubscribed by over $5 million, decided to offer ZhenFund a token sum of $10,000, or 0.2% of the total raise, on the strength of Pantera’s recommendation.
That day, Simar, COO at Stream, and myself, spent a full 13 hours in back to back meetings and phone calls with last minute candidates for our advisor round. I had a call with ZhenFund at 7pm that night, during which I believed we had agreed to have ZhenFund enter the round, and accordingly sent them the SAFT to complete the transaction. Promptly being overwhelmed with everything else on our plates, we assumed ZhenFund had completed the transaction and entered the round, and the nominal contribution we had allocated for them meant that the fact that they in actuality did not complete the SAFT entirely slipped our notice.
This was a huge oversight on our part, and we unfortunately didn’t have the structure and process in place at the time to identify this lapse and correct the issue. It was only recently that it came to our attention that ZhenFund had not in fact managed to participate in the round, and we have consequently removed their name from our list of backers. We deeply apologize for any misunderstanding caused.
On a final note: from all of us at Stream, thank you for the immense support and encouragement you’ve shown us. It means the world to us, and we can’t wait to see what we can do together.
Okay, that’s it for now. We’re going to get a lot better at these updates too in the next few weeks — stay tuned shortly for the next update!
