Reminiscences of a Startup Operator: Part 2 - Having High Agency and Leverage in 0-1 Environments
The story of finding the highest-leverage work when everything was undefined
Foreword
Most strategy advice is written by people who've never had to do all the grunt work of having a thousand interactions with different customers while sitting on a mattress next to their desk.
This isn't that. This is what building 0 to 1 actually looks like when you're responsible for an entire ecosystem and nobody knows what success even means yet.
I joined EigenLayer as Strategy Lead in summer 2023. No funnel. No strategy. No ecosystem. Just a two-sided marketplace that existed mostly in whitepapers.
6 months later: I became the Head of Ecosystem. One year later: we launched 30 partners live and reached $10B in full valuation. Two years later: 100+ partners published and close to 40 live on mainnet.
Here's how I found the highest-leverage work when everything was undefined.
Table of Contents
Lesson 1: Map the System First - Define strategy before tactics
Step 1: Define your system & ecosystem
Step 2: Understand product & customer segments
Step 3: Build execution framework ("Trident Strategy")
Lesson 2: Make Yourself Critical - Gain leverage inside the org
Lesson 3: Re-examine Constantly - What got you here won't get you there
Lesson 4: Build Unstoppable Tribes - Deep relationships across multiple alignment types
Lesson 5: Find Your Ikigai - When work charges instead of drains you
Note: this three-part series is dense—it's a condensed version of a 2-year journey. Skim for the big ideas, or revisit when you need the details.
Gratitude to Sreeram, CL, Owen, Skyler, Dabing & Namik for feedback on this piece.
The Real Challenge: Finding What Matters When Everything is Chaos
The situation: You're at an early-stage company. Your role is vague. Success metrics don't exist. Everyone is figuring it out as they go. You could literally work on anything, but most of it won't matter, and everyone was figuring it out as they went.
But here's what I discovered: in chaos, whoever brings clarity and systems gets influence. Most people wait for someone else to define their role. I decided to define mine.
Lesson 1: To find leverage, first map the entire system—then attack where it matters most
The mistake most people make: They start with tactics—events, content, partnerships—without understanding the machine they're trying to build. That's like optimizing the paint job on a car with no engine.
Step 1: Understanding the machine we were building
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about individual partnerships and started thinking about the system. What were we actually building? What were the leading indicators versus the lagging ones? What enables X and triggers Y?
We framed it as a two-sided marketplace:
Supply: Stakers and operators providing stake and compute
Demand: Protocols needing those machines and stake for verifiable computation
My focus became the demand side—identifying which networks and protocols would actually use our service and how to continuously propel this system forward with momentum.
But understanding the system was just the beginning. I needed to map all the parties in our ecosystem. Who were the key players? What roles did they play? Why might they need our system? How do they interact and create mutual value?
What I discovered was fascinating: few people, either internally or externally, had a complete view of what was happening due to the complexity of the marketplace we were building. Providing this holistic perspective became incredibly valuable.
Step 2: The month that changed everything: learning from the smartest people on your team
There are two ways to figure out our customer types:
Bottom up: by looking at all the possible customers and then craft these categories.
Top down: what are the types of customers we want and go find people to plug into the top categories.
I started with bottom up.
To understand what we could even build with our product, I made a decision that would accelerate my learning more than anything else: I flew to our Seattle office and spent a month whiteboarding with our Head of Research.
This was one of my fastest learning periods and sharpened my technical thinking significantly. I learned the architectures of products that could be built.
I realized we were building infrastructure across 5 key areas: Ethereum rollup enhancement with inherited security, threshold cryptographic systems and TEE committees, bootstrapping of prover, relayer, and monitoring markets, enhanced proposer commitments for block inclusion and ordering, and secure, private, cost-effective program integrity for AI inference.
Together, we wrote some of the earliest educational material: Programmable Trust & Ideas for Building the Next 15 Unicorns. This got me technically confident fast.
Then came the natural questions to observe from the top down view. I was obsessed with three things:
What's the metric that quantifies success?
Which project categories had the most desire, need, and impact on our ecosystem?
How do we reach them?
Some categories exist already today, we can reach them through various contacts
Other categories don’t exist, and need us to find ways to incubate/hand hold
Step 3: Further deepening your thoughts on the product & customer categories
Through 100+ conversations, patterns emerged. I coined these customer categories and some of their characteristics:
High potential/highly aligned customers - Always curate across all time horizons
Meta customers - Customers who generate more sub-customers at quantity
Horizontal customers - Customers that simultaneously serve other customers symbiotically, creating network effects and winner-takes-all dynamics. Optimize for quality here.
Vertical customers - Customers creating niche use cases. Lower effort to replicate, bigger surface area, but fewer network effects. Often smaller use cases. Optimize for quantity.
External service providers - Partners that help our customers build faster, cheaper, safer—ecosystem resources we can introduce.
Understanding your customer types from a ecosystem enablement perspective gives you who to look for in the near, medium and long term.
With that, I was able to dissect our product advantage vs status quo for each segment. This became crucial material for aligning the BD team and clarifying value props on first calls. Some materials I made:
Step 4: Building your execution framework - the "Trident Strategy"
With the system mapped and customers categorized, I needed an execution framework. I built three parallel approaches that I called the "Trident Strategy":
Spear-fishing: Hyper-targeted outreach to highest-leverage segments—using metrics like market cap, timing, and VC connections to pinpoint where to strike first.
Net-fishing: Thought-leadership content, community research, and events that pull developers in—an inbound approach versus cold outbound.
Closing the net: Once interest peaked, two onboarding modes:
Low-Touch: Open-source repos, AVS sandboxes, SDK samples, docs, FAQs, auto-deploy testnets—so builders could self-serve
High-Touch: Nerd-snipe top talent, refine their DevEx, offer bespoke architecture reviews, co-marketing, fundraising intros, partner matchmaking, on-chain contracts, security audits, economics design, roadshows, and media support
Lesson 2: How to make yourself critical to the company
As I started having traction with execution, I realized I needed more resources from the company. But how do you gain leverage? How do you align stakeholders when everyone's still figuring things out?
The answer came through what I call "working with vertical teams horizontally."
Vertical teams are teams with specific functions: research, engineering, product, BD, marketing, etc. Working with them horizontally means cross-functionally coordinating them to work on initiatives and drive results.
The art of claiming critical gaps
It started with a simple realization: when you spot something broken but essential—a process, relationship, or initiative—don't wait for someone else to fix it. Step up and own it end-to-end.
I began proactively claiming these gaps. I'd propose solutions, create frameworks, and position myself as the coordinator. This wasn't just about filling gaps; it was about demonstrating leadership instincts and becoming the person others turned to when critical issues arose. The company learned to depend on my judgment.
Building knowledge others depend on
By this point, I'd built up so much ecosystem knowledge that product and engineering needed me for roadmap priorities, research needed me to dig deeper into certain areas that customers were most interested in, and marketing needed me for narrative. I had become indispensable.
But knowledge alone wasn't enough. I learned that physical presence matters. I flew to the office and stayed for extended durations. There's something about debugging a problem together at 11pm or grabbing impromptu coffee that Zoom can't replicate. I built trust with 1-2 members from every team—these became my allies.
The documentation strategy
I created exhaustive docs and excalidraw graphics about our strategy, pipeline, and insights. Initially it felt like oversharing, but it became my leverage. When leadership wanted updates, they could always check my docs. Public, succinct & fun documentation became passive influence building.
I also maintained weekly 1:1 recurring syncs with my manager and key stakeholders. Not just status updates—strategic questions, getting their input, making them invested in ecosystem success. Lines, not dots.
Takeaways for gaining leverage for high-leverage work
Looking back, I realized there were two key components to gaining leverage for high-leverage work:
First, you need high awareness. Many people don't think about what's high leverage—they're heads-down on assigned tasks, missing the big picture. They haven't dug deep enough into the system. Being highly aware means figuring out not just what's in front of you, but what's around and ahead of you.
Second, with high awareness, you need compounding through high agency. It looks like this: You start with one thing, realize something slightly outside your scope is important and related, make the argument to incorporate it. One thing after another, you create more high-leverage scope. Eventually, you need a team to run it all.
Lesson 3: Re-examine constantly—what got you here won't get you there
After conversations with 150+ potential partners, I had a humbling realization: many of my pre-assumptions needed to be improved or revised. I wrote a 15-page analysis describing our landscape and scope, with directional change recommendations.
The truth hit me: change happens faster than OKRs. Every week I'd keep a doc and reflect: What's the high-leverage thing I'm doing? Am I even doing the right thing? What higher-leverage things could I try?
The moonshot moments
This constant re-examination led me to think of out-of-box moonshot projects:
Proof of Liquidity - other ways to utilize our inventory
Taking other forms of stake - creating customer lock-in
Ecosystem alliance - increasing alignment between partners
Strategic intel - prioritizing partnerships accordingly
Fees & payments - starting the fee flywheel
$10k for 1k customers - blitzscaling developers
Important: I didn't conceive everything at once. The need to strategize emerged through daily execution, hitting roadblocks, re-evaluating how to become more high-leverage than yesterday. Rome wasn't built in a day, our ecosystem wasn’t built in a day.
One regret: despite knowing we had too much to do, I did it all myself for the longest time instead of scaling the team faster.
People also often ask how I got to do strategy when CEOs usually own it. I was lucky to join a team embracing exploration and autonomy, with vast scope and many unknowns. When the pie is big and expanding, no one has time to hold you back—it's an accelerated infinite-sum game.
Lesson 4: Deep relationships build unstoppable tribes
What I realized is that humans are highly tribal. Different projects have different VC backings, each with their own portfolios and incentives. To win, we needed multiple types of deep alignment spanning:
Product alignment: Your tech solves their problems
Incentive alignment: Success makes everyone money
Emotional alignment: They have deep personal connections with you
Tribal alignment: Your tribe proactively works with and help each other
The more our customers aligned with us across multiple angles, the stronger the partnership.
Think like a VC: find more ways to make your customers successful
I started thinking about it this way: you're a VC trying to get into a hot deal. Besides money (the product), what support can you provide to make the customer successful?
For example, some categories:
Product level: Whitelisting new features for clients, co-design on protocol, intros to priority security audits
Marketing level: Twitter/co-marketing announcements, product frontend featuring and ranking, website featuring, events co-hosting
Money/grant/credits level: Reimbursement/coverage of fees (freemium model), grants (later on)
General services: Intros to our network: VCs, KOLs, research firms, podcasts, branding/design agencies, marketing firms, recruiting
I noticed that many activities people immediately jump to (developer relations, events, marketing, fellowships, growth stunts) actually came last. Many start here because it's visible. But these are merely downstream of understanding the system itself.
Ultimately, the product is what moves the needle for customers, however, they were a lot more aligned and loyal to us as we were wholeheartedly trying to help them succeed in all ways we can.
One of my most memorable moments was hosting our first in-person partnership retreat
We invited our furthest-along customers to a house in Breckenridge, CO. A snowstorm trapped us together for three days—perfect for addressing every blocker, concern, and feedback in person.
Our team had a dedicated person showing up to help each of the steps that the partners needed, where partners could get any problems resolved right there: staker & operator relationships, intro to customers, strategy, marketing, smart contracts implementation, protocol design, security, etc.
Those intense days built real morale and tightness. Partners formed co-alliances that persist today. We weren't just building a product ecosystem; we were building a tribe.
Result: Those who were with us did launch with us. From that initiative alone, we propelled 15 customers to deploy on mainnet and 17 on testnet.
Side note: I've seen another group excel at this—the MegaMafias from MegaETH. Initially dismissed as "yet another L2," I witnessed their early growth as a group mentor for the Mafias in MegaZu. I haven't seen such a creative, original, strong-spirited bunch in this space for a long time. Time only proves this more true.
Lesson 5: Ikigai feels like cheating.
The most important lesson isn't tactical—it's existential.
I learned what it feels like when work doesn't drain you—it charges you. When you wake up excited and go to sleep reluctant. When colleagues have to tell you to take breaks because you've forgotten that work is supposed to require discipline.
My mattress was next to my desk. Wake up, work, gym, work, sleep, repeat. It sounds insane, but it felt like pure flow. 100% energy, 100% focus, 100% passion. I could do everything perfect, up to a high standard and everything my way. I wrote a post about this 100 days in.
Why this happened:
Right problem (massive, solvable, important)
Right timing (early in a major category defining moment)
Right team (autonomy, enablement, high-trust)
Right feedback loops (partners showing genuine appreciation and excitement)
Bottom line: Most startup advice focuses on tactics and frameworks. But the real secret is finding the intersection where your skills, interests, market needs, and team dynamics all align. When you find it, execution becomes effortless.
The Epilogue: what I'd tell my past self
Six months in, I was promoted to Head of Ecosystem. The machine we built now supports 150+ partners and growing.
If I could distill everything into three frameworks you can take away:
Map systems by leverage potential. Find force multipliers that beat ten linear wins.
Build horizontal influence through knowledge gaps. Become the person every team needs to talk to.
Re-examine weekly. What's the highest-leverage thing you could be doing? If you're not asking this, you're already behind.
The common thread: In 0-1 environments, whoever brings systematic thinking to chaos gets to write the rules.
The journey continues in Part 3: Bigger Lessons Come from Respecting the Market, Caring for Culture and Staying Humble.
Disclaimer — Personal Views and Informational Content Only
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