DIALECTIC

As we celebrate our 5th anniversary, I thought it pertinent to consolidate our views on what makes working at Dialectic special. I often describe Dialectic as a compounding machine. But it isn’t just an on-chain machine for compounding capital. The core mechanisms in place are designed to allow great people to compound on their personal development and entrepreneurial skills, seek truth together, and build the Dialectic compounding machine as a cohesive, high-performance team.

At this stage of our evolution, I observe 6 primary categories that make working at Dialectic quite unique:

Dialectic was built by crypto-natives for crypto-natives. Our core team members were the first primary investors in our suite of funds and the industry-leading products and reporting that we’ve built were largely born out of a desire and need to have superior risk-adjusted compounding on our own crypto assets. We built Dialectic for ourselves and discovered along the way that there are other crypto-natives who value what we do. Everyone at the company approaches their work with an entrepreneurial mindset and takes on a significant level of ownership and responsibility. Everyone participates in developing our strategy as we genuinely take a dialectic process to arriving at truth, getting in sync, and orienting our compass for the journey ahead.

Intellectual curiosity, experimentation, and debate in the pursuit of truth is foundational to building the inspiring future we want to live in. Embedded in our daily work is what we refer to as the Dialectic Process, a commitment to objectively seek truth in this rapidly evolving landscape. We achieve this through thoughtful debate and open-minded intellectual experimentation. I am consistently impressed by how our participatory approach to strategy, whether at offsites or during regular sync meetings, lead us to arrive at nuanced, often previously unexpected realizations. I frequently walk into a meeting with one assumed perspective and leave aligned with the team around something richer and more evolved, shaped by the collective insights and diversity of thought in our group. There is a deep amount of mutual trust and understanding that has been built up by compounding on credibility and the relationships in this group over time.

Deeply connected to our culture is a structured programme of self-reflection and commitment to personal development, both from the perspective of mental health and self-awareness, but also skills and abilities which then feed into the machine that is Dialectic. Twice per year we conduct offsites that start with lessons learned sessions over the previous semester and culminate in strategies and goals at the corporate level distilled down to each individual. Annually, we all individually compose a deep dive personal journal that covers all corners of one’s life. This intense journaling process has driven incredible growth in our young staff members and as a result we take these reflective activities seriously and give time off to staff to allow for focus on this deep personal work. Further, everyone undertakes a personal development journey parallel to their work. That may be exploring mental health strategies, learning novel AI tools, emerging adjacent fields such as quantum or new technical skills. Each employee chooses their own adventure for each year. This is paired with regular iterative coaching and feedback sessions with peers which allows the team to learn from each other. Overall, the Dialectic Programme is designed to allow great people to compound on lessons learned and intellectual curiosity.

I often say ‘it is way more fun to get rich with your friends’. I have designed a compensation framework that has 4 pillars and allows employees a path to become meaningful owners of the business and build life-changing wealth along the way. We work really hard and building durable value is difficult. So it is important to me that there is a clear path for great contributors to build ownership in what they’re working so hard on. The 4 pillars of compensation are:

1. Salary - our baseline compensation alone is competitive with the industry and takes into account the cost of living in wherever team members are based

2. Discretionary annual bonus - we share a significant component of annual cash flows based on how the company has performed and how individuals have contributed to that performance in the given year. Annual bonus is composed and reviewed by the board and senior staff for fairness and uses objective metrics

3. Equity - people who are successful at Dialectic build ownership over time based on a specific framework in which our team is committed to and very happy with. I don’t want employees. I want committed partners and entrepreneurs around me because that makes business building more fun and accelerates growth for all of us

4. Entrepreneurship & Intrapreneurship - at times employees will want to start something new, either within Dialectic or beyond. Since it is important to me to walk the talk of being a platform for entrepreneurship, we take an open-minded view towards experimentation in this regard and often are the first investor and collaborator when employees transparently present new and exciting projects. 1OF1, our industry-leading art collective and Makina are good examples of this fourth pillar.

My favourite characteristic about Dialectic is that we have a remarkably talented team of people that bring a lot of fun to their work, derive meaning from what we’re building and care for each other.

We work with the best. Our group is composed of wicked-smart professionals, who are intellectually curious about the world, open-minded builders in crypto, future-forward and ultimately self-reflective. Humour is a core part of our values and every day I find myself laughing out loud. Inside Dialectic the learning curve is really steep and we work really hard, but what we do is really fun and everyone is passionate about it. Who wouldn’t be passionate about building a machine that literally makes money? We also derive great meaning from the impact that we have. The Dialectic Reciprocity Pledge is a good example of this. Finally, we take care of our group – Dialectic supports personal fitness training for every employee, we provide an amazing set of travel experiences that we share together and enjoy the relationships that we have with hilarious team dinners and regular social events. We remember to mix in epicurean delights with the stoic path of building and entrepreneurship. ‘Meaningful work and meaningful relationships’ is a Dalio principle that we apply within our organization.

Our founding thesis is that compound returns are the strongest force in the universe. We know this is true in nature with the golden ratio, we know it is true in finance with compound interest. But Dialectic has also shown that this is also true in relationships, skill development and code. Our core founding team remains intact, developing at a remarkable rate both personally and professionally and the trust we have in each other has grown incredibly strong as a result. We have also observed that our codebase continues to build on itself and all of this has led to the best yielding shop in crypto.

If this sounds awesome to you and you think you have what it takes, please apply via our jobs board or reach out to our team to get involved.

Ryan Zurrer,

Founder