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# System prepended metadata

title: Themes From User Interviews So Far

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# Themes From User Interviews So Far

## Funders

So far we have completed 4 different full user interviews with orgs that we considered to be prospective "funders". These were:
* Protocol Labs
* The Ethereum Foundation (ESP branch)
* Polygon
* Uniswap

We have also had more limited conversations with several other prospective funder orgs -- for example, The Graph and Ceramic -- all of which indicated early on in the discussion that they were either not doing grant fundign at all, or were not interested in dependency funding, so we did not proceed to a full user interview.

We have also had conversations with several "funder adjacent" orgs, which participate in the funding ecosystem in a signficant way, but which we did not think were necessarily likely to want to participate in dependency funding. Examples of such conversations include:

* The Maker Foundation
* Endaoment
* Lifespan.io

This section attemts to aggregate the themes and learnings from all of these conversations, but with an emphasis on the responses from the funding orgs with whom we completed entire interviews.

### Funder Theme 1 -- Future of Grants Programs is Uncertain

Most of the orgs we spoke with (the exceptions were Maker and Lifespan) said that they were either uncertain about the future of their grants programs and other public goods funding programs, or had already decided to pause or wind down those programs. This is somewhat to be expected in the current "crypto winter" environment and could probably change quickly if the investment environment changes. However, nonetheless, it is notable that few of these orgs currently have large amounts of funds pre-allocated for supporting public goods.

### Funder Theme 2 -- Interested In Funding New Ecosystem Development

Most of the past funding that has been deployed by these orgs -- mostly in the form of grants -- has been deployed towards funding builders who are *doing new development work and working directly in the ecosystem of the project*. This includes tools and code that either directly contribute to the project, or which directly build on the project (similar to Yorgos' work on IDE plugins for Radicle, for instance). While roughly speaking it seems that there is less grant funding for this sort of ecosystem work than there was in the past, many or most of the orgs we spoke with are still funding this sort of work in some form.

### Funder Theme 3 -- Often Hard to Find the Decision Maker

An interesting theme that Ele has pointed out is that it is often surprisingly hard to find the key decision maker for funding at these orgs, even in cases where the org has a grants or public goods funding program. It's hard to know exactly why this is, but my best guess would be that it mostly has to do with the orgs wanting there to be both a perception and a reality of the grant funding decisions being inclusive and community-driven, while also having a practical need for someone, or some small group, to be able to take final decisions.

## FOSS Developers

So far we have completed 5 different full developer interviews with FOSS devs. All of these developers are working in crypto/web3:

* Ansh of Free Web3 Resources
* Richard Moore of Ethers.js (Audio Recording)
* Lefteris from Rotki (Sembly Transcript)
* Rosco Kalis from Revoke.cash
* Andrei from Whatsabi (and many other FOSS projects)

### Dev Theme 1 -- Skeptical of New Funding Solutions

In many cases it was hard to even ask the questions from our interview script, because these developers were almost falling over themselves to tell us all the reasons that a new funding solution cannot work. There have been quite a few solutions pitched to these devs over recent years and after trying many of them out, these devs have become skeptical. Interestingly, desipite what they say, I suspect that they will be likely to continue trying out any new solutions that emerge anyhow, because they are still looking for more funding and because they are the type of people who like to try new things out.

### Dev Theme 2 -- Had Success With Gitcoin

Most of these devs have had huge success -- raising 10s of thousands of dollars or more -- with Gitcoin. Because of this, they have a strong belief in the Gitcoin model and positive associations with Gitcoin. I think we should probably take this with a big grain of salt, since this is likely only true of web3 devs and I suspect that we would find the opposite if we interviewed FOSS devs not working in web3. But nonetheless it is interesting to see how fast the skepticism of new funding mechanisms turns to optimism as soon as devs are getting paid.

### Dev Theme 3 -- Did Not Have Success With Github Sponsors

None of the devs we interviewed has raised significant funds through Github Sponsors, despite the fact that they have all tried it. Again here, it's possible that this would be different if we were interviewing devs from prominent web2 where there are less novel sources of funding (like Gitcoin) available. Some of the devs also expressed annoyance with the some of the "busy work" aspects of dealing with Sponsors, such as providing up-to-date identification and completing tax-related forms.

### Dev Theme 4 -- Agnostic to Crypto VS Fiat

Pretty much all of these devs said that they were open to receive funds in either fiat or crypto. Really the amount matters much more to them than the rails. The one slight exception is cases where they are receiving native tokens from projects rather than stable coins. In these cases, the devs note that for tax reasons it is important  for them to be able to sell at least some of the tokens quickly to cover tax obligations and reduce volatility risk. This is somewhat of an operational annoyance. But here again, they are totally willing to do it if the amount of funds is significant.

### Dev Theme 5 -- Benefits Functionality Is Nice-To-Have

Most of the devs had experimented with offering benefits in some form, but none of them considered it to be a critical feature of a funding platform. All of them expressed ideological concerns with leaning too hard into benefits as being antithetical to the idea of open source and said that whatever benefits are offered should clearly be "extras" and that it's important that all core functionality and documentation be free and open. For this reason, they all consider benefits-related functionality to be a "nice-to-have" feature set for a funding platform, rather than something that should be central to the value proposition. 




