After three and a half years with the Zcash Foundation, Antonie Hodge is leaving her position as Director and moving on to do more of what she does best: bootstrapping brand new crypto non-profits for the public good. We’ll all miss Antonie very much but her departure signals the Foundation’s relative maturity in the world of cryptocurrency organizations and the value of Antonie’s rather unique skills.
Antonie was the second hire of the Foundation’s Board three years ago, at a point when the Foundation was little more than an idea. Perhaps more than anyone else, she made that idea into a real thing: a vibrant and well-functioning non-profit with payroll, accounting, tax-status, audits, handbooks, contracts, websites, software repositories, conferences (live and online), and all the other seemingly endless organizational details that fall somewhere between zero (no foundation) and one (the Zcash Foundation we know today).
Before the Zcash Foundation, there was no such thing as a 501(c)(3) public charity focused on cryptocurrency development. There was no roadmap to follow. As our first Operations Director, Antonie bore the brunt of that uncertainty. Going from zero to one in this case was truly entrepreneurial. How do you explain to an accountant that much of the organization’s finances may be denominated in a brand new currency? How do you secure an institution’s endowment when it’s virtual? How do you bring a community of otherwise strangers together in real life to discuss their common dedication to a decentralized computing protocol?
In a typical non-profit, “operations” might be somewhat mundane. An important job, no doubt, but not always the sort of work that demands deep creative thinking and an unusual mind. At Zcash Foundation, we quickly learned how unconventional Antonie’s role actually was, and, by extension, how extraordinary Antonie was (and is) for succeeding in it.
This very peculiar expertise, “takes crypto non-profits from zero to one” doesn’t have a name. Whatever it’s called, though, Antonie is the best at it, probably in the whole world. Yes, she’s a one-woman monopoly. It should therefore come as no surprise that she’s moving on to help other important crypto non-profit organizations take that first step. We will miss her (particularly the next time we gather at Zcon) but her path is clear.