Note smooth appears to be a very talented developer, but he is anonymous (even to me). And he has his focus on Aeon/Monero. And he apparently hails from FinTech which is a quite different field from the consumer apps markets I want to address and where my past talent is. Also I never wanted to involve smooth in something that could fail, because he has already a community that he enjoys and that depends on him. And smooth is incredibly expensive to hire. Of course I don't even mention other Monero devs and Bitcoin core devs, as they are of course busy on their projects.
I understand you are looking for working with the best.
On the note of smooth, I understand he is brilliant, I read a few days ago his comment about the C compiler. He clearly knows what he is talking about. He is most likely in the top 5 developers of this crypto jamboree. He deserves every cents he earns, and not to talk about his money, but generally speaking, could you explain what is the business model of Monero? I understand it was a (sort of) fair distribution so I have no issue with the project, the aims of the project privacy - regardless whether it is feasible or not - make sense and I am asking in the sense of what is their business model to generate revenue? Smooth rate is - as I heard - $20-30K per month which is more than the top contactor developer salary in the UK (£600-700/day). How the monero project can come up with such development budget? Angel investment, VC funding, selling the coin?