Startups on Steroids

Into the Chaos: My Pillar Project Initiation

Part 4: Where blockchain idealism meets organizational reality in ways no one could have predicted

Looking back, Pillar Project was a fascinating case study in organizational emergence and what happens when ambitious technical goals meet the realities of startup dynamics. The company was attempting to build something genuinely novel - a personal data locker using blockchain technology - while navigating the challenges of a rapidly evolving crypto landscape.

The experience provided invaluable insights into how teams form, adapt, and deliver results under conditions of high uncertainty. While the environment was demanding - it created opportunities for rapid learning and cross-functional skill development that wouldn’t have been possible in more structured organizations. Navigating Organizational Complexity

What became clear during this period is that humans struggle with high levels of uncertainty, particularly in early-stage organizations where roles and processes are still being defined. Like a jazz ensemble, success depends on individual competence enabling collective improvisation.

I observed patterns that I’ve since recognized in other early-stage ventures. Teams naturally seek structure and hierarchy when facing ambiguous goals. The challenge lies in building legitimate organizational frameworks while maintaining the agility needed for innovation.

At Pillar, this dynamic played out through competing visions of how to organize the work and allocate resources. While tensions sometimes emerged from these different approaches, the diversity of perspectives ultimately strengthened our problem-solving capacity.

Comprehensive Product Development Experience

The dynamic environment at Pillar created opportunities to contribute across the entire product lifecycle: from initial concept and mechanism design through system architecture and development, to go-to-market strategy, user acquisition, and ongoing product iteration based on market feedback and user testing. Given the complexity of building a personal data platform, the work spanned multiple specialized domains:

Cryptographic Systems: Proxy key management, account abstraction, messaging protocols, and distributed identity infrastructure

Regulatory Compliance: KYC/AML implementation, GDPR compliance frameworks, and emerging data protection regulations

Product & User Experience: Persona development, user story creation, simplifying complex cryptographic operations into intuitive user flows, wireframing, and creating screens for development handoff. Development teams would implement these designs, then products would return for user testing and iteration.

Market Intelligence: Competitive landscape mapping, integration partner analysis, and regulatory environment monitoring

Growth & Communications: Marketing strategy based on the SoundCloud growth stack using Snowplow as a metrics multiplexer, though with trade-offs balanced against privacy concerns. This infrastructure supported A/B testing and other strategies needed for user testing and growth optimization, alongside stakeholder communications.

Working across disciplines revealed dependencies and feedback loops that aren’t always visible from within specialized roles. The rapid iteration cycles required quick learning, practical problem-solving, and the ability to maintain quality standards under pressure.

The core technical vision was compelling: inverting the internet from data-centric design to human-centric design by building a “personal data locker” that gave individuals control over their own data. The wallet would act as the “mother app” - a unified interface through which users could manage their digital identity, data sharing permissions, and application interactions using blockchain technology.

Transition and Market Dynamics

When the ETH crash of 2018 led to company-wide restructuring, I found myself among those affected by the downsizing. Rather than viewing this as a setback, I saw it as a natural transition point after an intensive learning period.

The market downturn provided an opportunity to step back, consolidate the knowledge gained, and consider how to apply these insights to the next phase of the blockchain industry’s evolution. The timing aligned well with my readiness to take on new challenges in the space.

Patterns in the Chaos

Looking back, the Pillar experience was invaluable precisely because it was so chaotic. In more structured environments, you learn specific skills within defined roles. In chaos, you learn about fundamental human dynamics, organizational emergence, and how complex systems actually behave under stress - I’d never have encountered a need to study the Peter Principle or ‘hierarcheology’ without it.

The technical learning was significant; I gained hands-on experience with blockchain protocols, cryptographic key management, and distributed systems architecture. But the social learning was even more profound. I witnessed how power dynamics emerge in the absence of formal structure, how narratives become reality through collective acceptance, and how individual psychology shapes organizational outcomes.

Myths, Fiction, and Reality

One of the most important insights from Pillar was understanding how fictional constructs become real through collective belief. Since everyone started as a volunteer, leadership authority emerged through various mechanisms - sometimes given, sometimes taken, other times simply emergent from group dynamics. But once the group accepted these claims to authority, they became functionally real.

This is the same mechanism by which money works, legal entities exist, and nations maintain sovereignty - collective agreement to treat fictional constructs as a kind of social contract. Once you see this pattern, you can’t unsee it everywhere.

The experience highlighted how complex the challenge really was: we were building technology for individual data sovereignty while learning firsthand how collective coordination actually happens through informal agreements and emergent hierarchies.

Foundations for Future Work

The Pillar experience provided essential preparation for everything that followed. The chaos had been my education, the dysfunction had been my laboratory, and the crash had been my graduation ceremony. I left with hands-on experience building blockchain systems and deeper insights into how teams actually coordinate under pressure.

Armed with this hard-won knowledge about both technology and human nature, what came next would be less DeFi-focused and more oriented towards a growing field of ‘ergodic economics’ with the Commons Stack - but that’s a story for the next post.

Next in the series: “From Pillar to Commons: Giveth and The Meta-Hack” - where hard lessons meet hopeful visions and lead to new forms of coordination.