I just read about the origins of Decentraland, and it's really interesting how everything started. Basically, it was co-founded by Ariel Meilich and Esteban Ordano, two guys with quite diverse backgrounds before getting into this.

Ariel Meilich comes from the startup world; he founded several companies before ( an online translation agency, a CRM platform ), and even worked at Charles River Ventures, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He was the project leader from 2017 to 2020, so he basically had to build everything from scratch.

On the other hand, Esteban Ordano has a more technical background. He worked as an engineer at BitPay, was an advisor to Matic Network, and interestingly, he co-founded Zeppelin Solutions, a blockchain infrastructure company. So, he really knows about smart contracts and blockchain development.

Now, they no longer lead the project directly, but they remain as advisors. The development is managed by the Decentraland Foundation they created. It's interesting to see how these two stepped down from their positions but continued to stay involved in the ecosystem.