40 days since Supernova and DFINITY still has not paid prizes to any of the winners (Edit: Resolved as of late August)

[justmythoughts]

Edit: As of mid-late August (2022), the majority of Supernova award winners have now been paid.

Original post below
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A team who wishes not to be named has reached out to me to complain that it is now August 10th, 40 days since Supernova and not a single winning team has been awarded their Supernova prize money.

Many teams spent months working on their Supernova projects and have financial obligations to meet with team members and other bills to pay.

DFINITY says one of their top growth goals is to bring new developers to the platform with awards and grants.

@saone-pt Chief Growth Officer at DFINITY

@saone-pt

In short, at the current stage, we mainly focus on bringing new devs in

@ld-dfn1 VP of Growth at DFINITY

@ld-dfn1

Here is one core growth flywheel we are chasing right now:

1. Attract Entrepreneurs/Developers —>
2. Help them become successful (technical support, grants/funding, UI/UX, PR, marketing, etc.) i.e. help them get to a point that they can build a vibrant user community around their product (and eventually becomes a self sustaining economy) —>
3. Showcase their success stories (social, press, interviews, community) i.e help the teams attract more users and help IC attract more Entrepreneurs/Developers —>

If you want to grow the developer ecosystem and for developers to spread the word, then pay them ON TIME. This means at the very least within a two-week window. No “next couple of weeks” vagueness, or “sometime next month”.

To DFINITY employees reading this: imagine if you were held up waiting for a paycheck for over a month and treated the same way with no firm answer of when you’d be paid?

DFINITY,

If you want to open the funnel to bring more developers to the IC and are “eager” to fund promising projects, then make sure you have your financial house in order, so that developers will speak highly not just of the IC, but of the grant program and the reputation of the foundation.

Tagging communications guru @diegop as well to hopefully figure out what is going on and eliminate the bottleneck in getting these talented developers their funds.

P.S. - If I had been a finalist, I wouldn’t have waited 40 days to post this. DFINITY had 4+ months to get ready for prize payments while planning Supernova, so the fact that it’s been at least 40 days and no one has been paid is rediculous.

To top it all off, still none of the finalists have been given a firm date on when they will be paid.

[saone-pt]

First of all, thank you @justmythoughts for volunteering to speak on behalf of the winners. As Andrew says, we apologize for the delay. I can confirm that all approvals are gone through and the payouts are underway.

I also feel obligated to protect my team. We went every extra mile to make sure the participants and Supernova as a whole were successful. And we’re still doing that: In the Twitter Spaces starting this week, we’re giving winners a platform to showcase their projects to the community and get feedback. In addition, we invited our PR partner to get inspired for new stories. We also took into account several extra requests when handing out prizes, which led to extra work and new approvals in Finance. I mention this so that you see our continued efforts and understand the background.

I can assure you that we take this matter very seriously. We do our best every day and strive to learn and improve as we grow.

[justmythoughts]

Thanks for your response, Eva.

@saone-pt

We also took into account several extra requests when handing out prizes, which led to extra work and new approvals in Finance.

From my reading of this, it sounds like there were a few edge cases, but why did that that hold things up for everyone?

I appreciate you standing up for your team, as it sounds like the bottleneck was in Finance.

Maybe it’s a good idea to loop them in and have them publicly comment as to what the hold up was - were they not ready/did not anticipate these requests?

Also, does it really take that much time to process a different type of payment? Are there any specifics you can give as to why this takes so long? Surely new hires at DFINITY don’t wait over a month before their first paycheck, right?

@saone-pt/finance team - I’m curious about your response to the following two questions.

How much time do you think is acceptable for prize award winners/grantees to wait for before receiving payment?

How much time is a realistic goal to shoot for in terms of improving time to payment going forward?

@saone-pt

I can confirm that all approvals are gone through and the payouts are underway.

I still didn’t hear a date - does this mean that the payouts will be disbursed within the coming week? Can you commit to any firm dates with respect to payments?

[Chloros88]

relax everyone just two more weeks

[Denis]

Someone in the Finance team should be fired for this. “We have been trying pushing the finance team, however as you might imagine they are busy”. No, I can’t and won’t imagine. They had months of lead time before prizes had to be handed out and weeks have passed since Supernova ended.
I bet Dfinity staff get paid on time.

[Tony89]

That’s right I also don’t understand why the prize payouts are not prepared before the supernova starts??? Prizes and bonuses should have been prepared in advance. After the winner is announced, the prize money will be disbursed soon so that the projects can have resources to build.

[ld-dfn1]

Update: Most prizes have already been distributed. There are a small number of teams that had some documentation missing and we are actively in touch with them to ensure they are paid at the earliest.

We sincerely apologize for the delay in processing at our end.