The RV Ethos
The post is written by Everett Hildenbrandt, current CEO and 8 year-employee of Runtime Verification.
There's been a lot of buzz about open-source software, security tooling, developer tooling, and generally a revival of the crypto-native ethos in the cryptosphere over the past few weeks. This seems to happen when markets are down, when those chasing the price leave and we get to hear from those chasing ideas.
I welcome these wilder times wholeheartedly. I'm reminded of the earlier crypto days when people had big social ideas and believed in them. Despite the instability, something just feels more wholesome; people are actually making posts that say something in these moments.
I guess it's my turn.
The social layer
Part of a good engineer's job is to examine the social consequences of their work. Fortunately, there are many people in the Ethereum ecosystem willing to steer the conversation towards politics, sustainability, community outside of the internet/crypto, and people over profit. This seems unique to Ethereum and I attribute it to the attitudes of the founders and the initial momentum of the culture they fostered. The ever-present hordes of people looking to decentral-wash their profit schemes remain, but so is the consistent undercurrent of folks who are still after social decentralization.
Decentralization is a vibe that grows from and permeates the relationships between people and the way they treat each other; it's not a corporate structure or a series of tubes between nodes running on a network. The most decentralized on-chain corporate structures can end up being totally centralized because of the inclination of a small handful of people to dominate the conversation and set the tone, to control the majority of the voting tokens in the governance protocol, or to be slaves to the idea of the "tech meritocracy" being the only way to approach relating to each other.
On the other hand, even a traditional Delaware corporation (one of the most top-down corporate structures you can have) can lend itself to an inclusive community nature that allows egalitarian sharing of ideas, responsibility, and of course profits. In the distinction between culture and structure and infrastructure, true decentralization starts at culture, is made robust against attack by infrastructure, and the structure that it takes eventually follows both.
Because we're all tech nerds, we get excited about the infrastructure component and often forget that cool infrastructure without the community backing it up and giving it meaning doesn't actually achieve any decentralization. Yes, having and using robust decentralized infrastructure is important, but without the cultural component you will still end up in some centralized structure anyway.
Proof of culture
I didn't understand this from the start, it took years of participating in the industry coupled with experiences outside the industry. My crypto journey started at the end of 2013 when I had my parents send me 4 BTC so I could pay rent in Germany where I was studying abroad. That dabbling morphed into a career in 2017 when I won the IC3 hackathon at Cornell with KEVM and received 1 ETH and a ticket to DevCon Cancun for it.
Following DevCon, I had to take a semester off of graduate school to help care for my dying father, so I joined RV as an intern because I could work remotely. At the same time, I also worked at the Ethereum Foundation on the eWasm team, which was rewarding and helped shape a lot of my ethos around how crypto communities "should" be.
About a year later I decided I wasn't going back to graduate school and approached the then-RV CEO, Grigore Rosu about becoming the CTO and left the EF. On the eWasm team (and later as the CTO of RV) I travelled around the world, hacked on code, discussed mathematics and programming languages, went to parties, and we all watched as an entire industrial machine rose around us.
Conferences became more corporate (even if the clothes did not) and the old guard stopped going to as many of them.
Between 2020 and early 2022, Runtime Verification grew to 60 people, mostly from performing audits. We hired based on cultural fit, believing that it's more important to get the right person and mindset than to get a specific skill; once we knew someone had the technical chops it was more important that we felt good about working with the person than what they knew.
Everyone coming in was trained in program analysis and formal methods, so learning the specifics of different blockchains and smart contracts was comparatively easy. I worked ridiculous hours to onboard a new person every few weeks, with two big group training meetings a day, having new members shadow existing audits, and constant check-ins and bidirectional feedback about how training was going. I believe this communal training process in which every new member participated is where the RV team cohesion started, which would be important for later chapters.
Radical transparency
2022 was a rough year for crypto. UST depegging and the FTX embezzlement shook out all the speculative investment. RV had made good money from 2020 to 2022 so we decided to focus on using that money to build out our open-source tools, to do some R&D into new ones, and to wait for market conditions to improve. I pushed hard for this approach, because I knew that competing for diminishing prices on audits in that time would only burn out our engineers and I valued the people at RV way more than any money we could have made in that time.
Out of that effort came some of the best tools and open-source contributions we've made as a company; a modern extensible K framework, Kontrol, Simbolik, and the zk tech that enabled spinning out PiSquared, would not have happened without that dedicated development time.
Around when PiSquared finished spinning out (early-mid 2024) I stepped into the CEO role. RV's cash reserves were dangerously low; everyone knows that developing and contributing to OSS for 2 years is not going to make you a lot of money. Our engineers were fatigued from all the details and confusion of spinning out a company. This was the hardest moment at RV for me; I was losing sleep.
Layoffs to extend the runway seemed like the only option, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was the wrong thing to do for my employees (and friends) and that it would just delay the inevitable. I cut my salary in half, and approached a few other high earners about reducing their salary a bit too. It wasn't enough though, no matter how I cut it, we needed to save more money. I even reached out to former investors and asked them what to do; the advice was always layoffs. VCs steeped in big-tech couldn't imagine another way.
The moment I had to open up the financial situation to the whole company was incredibly scary; I was convinced everyone would leave the next week (a handful did). I remember taking the rest of the day off after answering questions at the all-hands, relieved of the burden of sole knowledge of our financial predicament. Finally I was able to relax, my sleep improved, and my fear evaporated almost overnight. I knew, at the very least, that I had been honest with everyone at RV who I called friend and could not be accused of risking their livelihoods.
What happened at RV though was something else, and this became a defining moment for the company. The team cohesion and friendship born out of how we treated each other blossomed into solidarity. Everyone jumped in with suggestions about how to address the problem. Not only was my personal anxiety gone, we were empowered and ready to take on the future of RV as a team.
It became clear that everyone wanted to work at RV because of the culture and transparency, and they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of their own compensation to make that possible. This shared risk and responsibility is a cornerstone of true decentralization, whether you're a network or a company or a community practicing mutual aid.
A plan emerged: rather than singling out individuals for layoffs, we all agreed collectively to take significantly lower base pay, and if we made more money in a given month, people would get paid more as bonuses. This wasn't the first version of the plan, but a result of many rounds of feedback collected from the team to make sure we landed on a plan that worked for everyone. We went into the planning process with financial details laid bare so that everyone had full knowledge and consent about what they were agreeing to.
Now, over a year later, I can't imagine operating a company any other way. What a weird world it would be to work for a company that did not give you a report on their financial status every month? A company where you had no idea about your job security or financial status?
That weird world is most people's normal.
Two things became clear to me: (i) everyone deserves to know the risks they are taking in being employed, which requires financial transparency from the employer at a minimum, and (ii) most people are willing to make a little less money if it means sustainability at a company with good culture. We continue at RV to be open and transparent internally with financials and are stronger than ever for it now.
This strength was not achieved by taking on additional investment or deploying a new product, but through embracing solidarity. In the face of uncertain crypto markets I'm sure we will find a way through as a team of friends continuing to provide high-quality audits for teams that care.
Going beyond security
This story about the RV ethos and decentralization has focused on the people much more than on the tech. This is on purpose, because ultimately embracing transparency, decentralization, and sustainability is a cultural phenomenon that can grow out of any structure.
Of course we're going to develop as much of our software in open source as possible.
Of course we upstream fixes into other open source projects that we use, love, and even compete with.
Of course we are all shifting away from big tech platforms to ones that respect our data and privacy, both for our personal accounts and as a company.
And of course we are doing all this with sustainability and long-term maintenance in mind. All of these decisions follow naturally from the cultural context of our little RV community.
Ultimately, no one can control the actions of others; we can only control (and take responsibility for) our own actions. This is the fundamental flaw of focusing on infrastructure or a tool first before community; just like "building a solution without a problem" or "building a product without a market" it's making an implicit assumption that you'll be able to tell people that they should use it and they'll listen.
Ethereum didn't set out to capture a market, it evolved out of a community of like-minded people building software that met their cultural standards, and more importantly building it in a way that met their cultural standards. If you want to join in on that cultural journey, the bad news is you don't get to tell everyone else to do it with/for you, but the good news is that you just have to decide for yourself to start!
Why am I telling you this?
It's not for some effort towards external transparency, but rather to provide inspiration for those out there that might think "there must be a better way to do business with each other!". If this story of sustainability, transparency, and ultimately decentralization excites you, you might be one of those in the space that maintains a similar ethos to us.
Reach out, let's work together, we're always looking for good partners, clients, and friends!