Startup Operator - Public Goods Funding

The Network Research team at Protocol Labs is looking for builders who will develop new ways of incentivizing and supporting breakthrough research. This includes contributing to the design and deployment of mechanisms to create prototypes from research design sketches and guiding research projects through the transition to commercial or nonprofit projects with sustainable funding models. As part of our Network Research team, you'll be contributing directly to our mission of developing and guiding high-impact initiatives to build research public goods, with a particular focus on supporting research advancing decentralized knowledge production and dissemination, the development of Web3 technologies, and new incentive systems for open science and Web3 systems. As startup operator at Protocol Labs you will... Design, host, and guide research intensive workshops, hackathons, conferences, and other high-impact research events Experiment with new tools for decentralized knowledge production and new mechanisms for incentivizing high-impact research Build relationships with members of the academic and decentralized science communities, learning about their projects and connecting them with resources and potential collaborators Conduct internal and external research to understand best practices in research, research management, and research funding organizations, and synthesize this information into actionable recommendations Drive and track the execution of research initiatives, and develop metrics to evaluate the success of research initiatives against their stated objectives Identify opportunities for process improvements in research and research management practices Proactively identify and clear roadblocks impeding the success of research projects, such as engineering or developer support or other resource requirements Help research teams assess their next best move, including developing business and sustainability models, and locate available resources Assist in onboarding academic researchers to the Web3 research & development ecosystem

Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. Protocol Labs is a product-development lab, but behind the protocols and tools we build, behind the research and implementations, are passionate people, teammates, and community members. Most teams in the Protocol Labs Network are fully distributed and work remotely around the world. Engineers, researchers, and operators work in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances at the intersection of many exciting fields (web3, cryptography, networks, distributed systems) and cultures (startups, research, open-source, distributed work).