It started with a video of LATOKEN zoom meetings where the CEO is shouting, cursing at and publicly humiliating company employees [1]. The video is mostly in Russian but auto-subtitles in English provide a good representation with all expletives replaced with "[__]".

The video also alleges that the CEO takes away employee stock options for things like missing meetings or deadlines and provides a screenshot from company Slack for proof, because allegedly all of this is done in public.

In the last day or two CEO wrote public posts to defend his approach. Here is a translation of the beginning of one of the posts [2]:

BE PARANOIC - YOUR BUSINESS IS STEALING RIGHT NOW ON ZOOM Or how to survive in crypto and create a scalable product with an effective team of 100-300 people remotely?

Upd. The video can be compared to a torture tape from someone's bedroom. Well, ok, this is "bdsm" with the rules that everyone agreed on and the zoom out button. You need olympic-level bdsm in a startup, that's your only advantage over legacy companies that they can't copy. Did you see the reaction to the video? They cannot copy that.

Briefly: New rounds of evolution and products are created by non-standard individuals under the pressure of a threat to survival - open the eyes of the team to it. Build the culture of Olympic athletes with automatic up or out. Describe it and reward with options those who identify free riders who break your rules. Hire and train athletes with case studies, bringing problems and even spanking to the general discussion. Teach them to conflict openly in order to achieve a result. As long as your up or out doesn't work automatically, push as hard as you can to get the result or out so that the free riders don't decompose the athletes. But at the same time, guarantee the execution of contracts, and allow employees to swear at you, but in front of you, and not in the locker room behind the back of a “coach”.

You have to and you can afford it: in web3 channels this is a constant background - in any case, you will be attacked by free riders and thieves, and the public likes it. Think of these attacks as a publicity stunt to magnetize like-minded people who can create the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3bKjgspTFk

[2] https://www.facebook.com/valentin.preobrazhenskiy/posts/pfbid02a1fTaakmSLia9mU3AP1C9e8eVhNy7qndbUnjEU33qvCMrpwGfXtt2QnzFLxoc1Zal