This was an actual letter that was sent to Golix investors, friends and family regarding the political situation in Zimbabwe.
I know that you’ve seen in the news that there is a “not a coup” happening in Zimbabwe right now. I’ve been inundated by WhatsApp messages from most of you (and I know more are coming) and I can tell from your messages that you were deeply concerned about my personal safety as well as that of my colleagues.
I appreciate your concern.
I will start by saying that I am safe and that I believe that everyone in Zimbabwe is safe right now. Even the politicians. We’re running into a few more soldiers on the street than we usually do, but when we meet them, we smile and for almost all of us, it’s just business as usual.
There is no violence, there are no gunshots, there is no-one being harassed by soldiers and because at Golix we’re too busy trying to clear our ‘Support Ticket backlog’ to check our Twitter feeds, you probably have more information about what’s really happening that we do.
What’s really happening in Zimbabwe right now can be likened to cryptocurrency in that there is a good chance that our government may have a ‘soft fork’ in the next few days.
In the cryptocurrency world, a hard fork usually results in two different versions of the same currency and it results in two broad groups fighting for control of one country.
In real-world politics, a hard fork is a called a coup.
Similarly in the cryptocurrency world, a soft for also means that there are 2 different versions but every user just switches to the second latest version.
In real-world politics, a soft fork is called a “not a coup”.
I believe Zimbabwe is the first country in the world to attempt to do a “not a coup” but I’m not 100% confident about my assertion here so I stand to be schooled.
Like most soft forks, how this soft fork will play out is difficult to predict with absolute certainty right now. Especially for those of us that are not politicians (add to this that I’ve been ‘margin called’ every time I tried to predict how a cryptocurrency soft fork would turn out — and I’m a cryptocurrency expert”.) However, everyone I have talked to so far is confident that everything will turn out OK and that this will be a friendly ‘soft fork’. I think so too.
On the up-side, the price of bitcoin is at an all-time high (it will probably be $8k by the time you read this letter).
At Golix we like to count our blessings and for us, it’s easy because, for the 2 years that we’ve been around, we’ve had significant growth every single month. We’re just in the middle of the month, this November but we’ve already exceeded our last month’s volume.
Even in the face of our ‘Government soft fork uncertainty’, we continually choose to not be distracted and focus on growth. In the last 48 hours we have made over 5 times the revenue we used to make a few months ago;
However, for any startup, growth comes with growing pains. For the last few months, we have been getting hundreds of support tickets every day and we are grappling with a huge backlog of Customer Support tickets.
One way you can help us (and I would owe you a huge debt of gratitude if you can) is to introduce us to or encourage candidates who would be a good fit for the Customer Support positions we have to fill to apply.
I strongly believe that this is a good opportunity for anyone, firstly because working to help people in Sub-Saharan Africa is very fulfilling work. Plus, people working in this department will be spending 10% of their time researching and solving difficult Machine Learning problems — believe you me, this a very exciting work.
More information on the other perks for this role and other positions we have open are on our careers site: https://golix.com/careers.
I would like to close this letter by reminding you to verify before forwarding WhatsApp messages regarding this soft fork (so that you don’t become part of the problem). Too many people are retweeting and/or forwarding near factual messages (and press statements) on Whatsapp and making things look worse than they actually are. And the mainstream media are building their stories based on these rumours.
Most of our team is working from the office (and our office is right in the CBD of Harare) and the rest is attending the Computer Society Summer School in Vic Falls. Both towns are quieter than mainstream media makes them out to be.
Again, I appreciate your concern,
Tawanda