I believe it is a relevant question because it contradicts the current narrative which deflects all responsibility for delays away from the IOTA Foundation.
After years without shipping a working decentralised Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the IOTA Foundation has successfully pushed the following narrative to the market:
Innovation is unpredictable!
Blame Sergey Ivancheglo!
Delays are normal in software!
Nobody seems to take into account the fact that none of the current members of the Board of Directors (BoD) of the IF has never managed a company with real customers for more than 5 months. If we exclude mini-startups and solopreneur projects, none has managed a company ever. Ralf Rottmann was the only member with previous management experience.
On
13 August 2018, after the Board leak, the Board of Directors signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) where Ralf Rottmann tried, among other things, to stop the members of the Board from interfering in day-to-day operations. Presumably, to prevent them from managing the IOTA Foundation with zero management experience as well as from using the IOTA Foundation for personal profit (
David using the BoD to advance Jinn, his own private company). The MoU included a whole section about this topic (section 2 titled "*Role of the Board of Directors and Organizational Development*"), which reads as follows:
1.c. The BoD's primary roles and responsibilities are: [...] Setting goals for the Executive Team.
2.f. The Executive Team will run day-to-day operations of IOTA Foundation as the BoD members gradually step back from all operational tasks.
On
14 August 2018, one day after signing the MoU, Ralf Rottmann was visibly excited:
Good evening! We’ve reached a milestone and I couldn’t be more happy! — We are currently discussing to release a part of the MoU that describes in detail, how we envision the interaction between the BoD and the (new) Executive Team. I am actually working on a blog post detailing the IF organization and making it a lot more transparent. One key change: The Executive Team will be empowered to run the day-to-day operation, while the Board will focus on setting direction, strategy and budget.
On
29 March 2019 Ralf Rottmann left the Board and insisted at the time:
IOTA Foundation succeeded to build and grow a super capable Executive Leadership team and I am a huge advocate for Governing Boards to not interfere with day-to-day operations.
On
30 March 2019, one day later, Ralf Rottmann insisted again on the same idea:
As I outlined in my medium post: IF has managed to hire an awesome executive leadership team. One, that I don’t need to “govern” anymore. In fact, I haven’t added a lot of value for a longer period now, apart from representing IOTA Foundation with my name and evangelizing it to people in the industry.
One year after Ralf Rottmann left the IOTA Foundation, and despite their absolute lack of management experience, the members of the Board of Directors are still involved in day-to-day operations of the IOTA Foundation, from software through marketing to sales and partnerships projects.
The IOTA Foundation claims that the constant delays in shipping working decentralised DLT are due to a variety of reasons. When they were working on cutting edge concepts, they placed the blame on the unpredictability of innovative projects. When they stopped working on cutting edge concepts, they placed the blame on Sergey Ivancheglo. Now that Sergey is gone, they blame the intrinsic nature of software development.
Lack of business management experience should also be taken into account when analysing the reasons behind the dismal performance of the IOTA Foundation.
