Catching butterflies
“Catching butterflies” – a cartoon that illustrates how attracting and retaining developers is one of the most important jobs for open platform companies.
Many companies now build open ecosystems allowing developers to build applications on top of them.
However, the key assumption is that there is a sufficient number of developers willing to learn the programming language and keep updated so that applications can be built.
As an illustration of this, following the collapse of Terra (whose blockchain stablecoin blew up last year) only 9% of the original Terra developers stuck around for Terra 2.0 while 42% of their developers called it quits and migrated to other ecosystems.
To attract and retain developers, open platforms need to develop an almost religious fervor for the underlying technology (e.g. despite the crypto winter, the number of web3 developers has increased 5.4% in the last 12 months).
For example, Brock Pierce, an early trumpeter of blockchain remarked, “the right way to think about the blockchain is that it’s going to replace the entire Internet.”
Whether you believe this or not, it’s a good rallying cry to galvanize a young developer whether the time he or she takes to learn a new language will make a difference in the world.
