ETHDay - Learn from the serial DAOists - panel

[Music] so the way that we're going to start this is if each of you could give a very short introduction of yourself and uh what you do with dowels and then we'll basically go from there in the discussion does it does one of them work one thing that i've learned at dallas is that technology never works you always you always need a little help so hello everyone my name is rolf the main dow that i work with is called metacartel ventures dao probably the longest running surviving investment dow after the dao personally european kids studying the us ran a bunch of a bunch of ventures did a phd in organizational theory in 2011 which is when i came across bitcoin and my dissertation was around how do organizations with tokens differ from organizations without tokens so this is really all i do i think dows are the most exciting instantiation of that kind of framework and i'll be happy to chat about my experience with these fine gentlemen and this fine lady thank you oh mine's working all right hi guys i'm lenka or lenkla on twitter or telegram etc either work just call me either one i'm mostly involved with maker and that's the place where i feel safe comfortable and really passionate about i've been in crypto industry for almost eight years started in a bitcoin startup discovered ether discovered stablecoins join maker foundation worked in marcoms did all kinds of marketing comes and then the foundation dissolved and instead of looking for another marketing job i decided i want to give it a try with dao and i joined really cool team that is actually mandated by the dao in our language we call it core unit we're focusing on scaling the ecosystem around maker protocol and it's a lot of exciting work and i get to do project management there we did exciting research on decentralized workforce we have a gigantic survey on developer research so happy to share any links after and now we're building a transparency dashboard for the ecosystem so that we can have better data-driven based on some insights so i'm quite new to this dow part but i'm really diving into it uh anything about onboarding and educating and dowse is exciting and maybe you have noticed i have a couple of people around here with camera so i'm also making sure that danish radio and television gets to learn about crypto i brought them to def connect so i hope everyone will learn something about this crazy community we are here so yeah sorry for a long intro you don't need to apologize i think that's one of the great things about the work that we're doing is that we don't really need to apologize and i like what you i like what you said about how um you feel safe in your your current community i see that as like one of my primary goals for for our members is making developer dow a place that feels like home um so i'm i'm ryan i go by ryan coordinator i work with developer dow and if you haven't heard about developer dow it's okay it's still early days we're not we're not as big of a deal but that's all right give us a couple of years uh we're uh we train web3 builders and we build public goods and we train builders of public goods so we're pretty focused you should join us if you want to get into web 3 or you care about public goods so i think my title is operations lead but coordinator is is more accurate uh i make sure that i collect context and i share it because the space is just crazy and there's a million different things going on uh all at once and the most important thing i do is i host our vibes call every day where new people come in and they say this is really scary and confusing and why is discord got so many channels and i say like yeah it's like always like that just like get used to being confused and i help them find projects and mentors and peers and help them help them feel at home and if we can all help each other out and find a way to feel at home then we'll be able to build a better world which is what i'm all about and i hope i address the question for a better world for sure nice yeah i'm for those of you who haven't seen my talk i'm andre i built a design studio over the last three years that's focused on web3 and to the outside it looks like an actual design studio so it has a very high quality standard of work but on the inside it resembles these principles that we kind of try to see from what we call daos at the moment so everybody's a con independent contractor everything is project based um and everybody feels like part of a nice community and yeah i also always like i it's really delightful to see people i know from online and then meet them in real life um which we met before cool we're doing a little bit of work with developer down now right yeah right well yeah how much shilling are we allowed to do like well now we're going to get into it so i think that is where rolf i'd like to start with you um going into the question of you know dows have been around for quite a while now you know a couple of years and more recently there's been a huge explosion of doubt so where do you think dals are at today and maybe you can look at it from an investment perspective and then we'll go through um yeah we're at dao's today i think we're probably the beginning of dow's really exploding so i think what we've seen in the last two three months is when you look at the numbers of new dows being created um every week there's probably hundreds of them right there's a number of platforms who make it easier dao house is one of them syndicate dao in particular for investment hours is another one there are other ones that haven't really launched but are somehow onboarding a lot of people i'm not going to name names i don't know about those but i think dowers are really coming from a moment of youth into a moment of adolescence and everyone's trying to figure out like what's really different about dao's right so i think at this point in time we really have to articulate what is a da and what is not a dao and i think people are not fully clear about that um i think that's an opportunity right so there's a tremendous amount of experimentation happen happening not a lot of people know what is happening people are very confused when they join community calls other people have uh are moving fluidly in and out of organizations which ties in with what angie was saying very well but i think so that's where we are today right in terms of where dials are going i obviously think that taos are going to be much much bigger than nfts i think daos are the way to productively organize around these assets that we represent on chain so what we've really done over the last few years is how do we represent things on chain there's tokens there's different token standards and there's things like real estate and there's things like collective illusions like bitcoin which is great um and things like ethereum but we don't really know how to organize around that right we've organized in a very technical sense you know how do we run nodes and different types of nodes but we haven't figured out how to produce organizations and i think that's where we're going next and figuring that out is a humongous opportunity lenka yes that was a that was a really cool introduction i i agree a lot a couple of points i want to make is that i believe like maybe you saw this t-shirt we are also guilty of it we have a just daoist t-shirt that maker and i would say yes a lot of people just want to dow it but i want to add a little font there dao responsibly because if you just want to dial for the sake towing it's just the same blockchain everything stamped so we're at the stage where we're figuring it out i'm still very happy to see a lot of old timers in the dao space i also feel like i'm one of the boomer dow you can call it and i'm also very happy to see that a lot of tools and resources and technology supporting those have been developed since because when maker needed it there were no tools we had to build our own so i'm really happy to see that but i also want to warn against just having a multisig and a snapshot and no real vision agree we cannot come up with the definition what dao is yet because we are still forming it so so yeah this is still a journey where we're figuring out where exactly daos go and yeah i don't know how many years in a row this is the year of dow so let's see how much of a year of a dao 2023 is going to be but we're definitely making strides forward and i believe this will be big because it's a novel way to coordinate to achieve some goal and it's really really exciting and interesting so yeah just to add a couple of things one question you mentioned the transparency dashboard that you're now making like how did that conversation come about because make adele's been around for a long time now so i'm surprised to hear it's only coming yes uh currently the teams without them core units in some other dows you have work streams or guilds or whatever you name them these small smaller units that contribute to the dao we have at maker around 20 plus core units and it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with every single team in their own environment with their all ways of communicating and reporting on the progress or road maps so what we're trying to do here for instance the users could be our delegates um so that they can actually use this dashboard that feeds them all the data in a way that they can look at the ecosystem-wide protocol-wide or core unit specific and make a decision because they need to make decisions on behalf of people who trust them with their voting power and they have limited bandwidth to do this so we want to create tools for them to achieve more transparency to get more insights and of course as we grow the number of core units the protocol treasury is also like not infinite so we need to figure out what's the quality and what's the level we want these teams to live up to and we also want to check whether they deliver for that so we're basically creating this dashboard api that our users can use and hopefully we can also inspire this movement beyond maker because yeah we welcome adoption of things that people find useful nice thanks for sharing some of some of the themes in there transparency accountability uh delegation so in the same way that the defy space is doing a speed run of the entire history of financial fraud i think that the dao space is going to be doing a speed run of uh the history of governance i'm particularly excited about digital democracy i look forward to the day when i'm a canadian national so i'm looking forward to the day when we have a canada all hands meeting for the crypto elected prime minister and they're held accountable um i see dow's scaling to the community level the national level the international level the interplanetary level who hears from protocol labs um the current uh like year of the dao theme echoes like the year of linux on the desktop theme like how many linux users do we have in the house right okay how many years in a row has it been the year of linux on the desktop i think it's going to be the same thing with dows but uh one one thing that i really like to see is that um successful dows are spinning off sub dows and i think that uh that is really exciting and empowering them to like continue to participate at those different scales getting the tooling right for that is something that i'm really excited to see because when my block is able to coordinate with my city and my province and my nation um i think we're going to unlock a lot of very interesting potential so that's where i see dao's going nice yeah i think uh i i definitely agree i think we're still though in something like the wild west of daos where we're kind of experimenting a lot with things yeah well still alive um and i also wanted to kind of refer back to what ralph said because i think it's a very valuable point um that organizations need to well they exist because they revolve around solving a particular problem or like producing very specific value and that is still often or at least in my experience and i've been obviously also involved in kind of designing products designing organizations and i see that there's always this drive to experiment with tools and like the the things that we like have at hand um but not necessarily in order to solve a particular problem um so so that's kind of the where i think we're at right now as people are trying a lot of things out um but it it goes closer i think like through the like economic crisis it will weed out a lot of the kind of um less significant projects and kind of really solidify the use case of adele um but yeah i think that's like where it's still like the thing is everything is still like maturating so a lot of the tools and infrastructure is still not quite there yet it's like there is a lot of bugs like most of the organizations are very fragile a lot of really big mistakes happen like hacks or even like developers over promising something for months and then it just doesn't happen and like the entire project just like fails because one person said yeah i can do that and yeah but but i'm very very excited about the future of dells because the ability that i can see like people coordinating and like especially when i meet people from from deep work like we had a retreat the other month like three weeks ago that was completely self-organized uh so it was an autonomous project nobody told anyone to do it um people organized and in in real life and their way to organize in real life resembles so closely this extremely structured way of organizing online it was just remarkable like it was extremely focused on like people just being really independent in what they want to do and solve problems together negotiate and yeah it was just it it makes you really excited of what that would look like if we actually start seeing society slowly build up these principles i think that's the most exciting thing where this is going to go you said also like a nation in a way right with the dalles so rolf said earlier that dals are going to be more valued more than nft so i made a poll so i'd love as many people of you to vote because maybe to prove him right or prove him wrong we'll see um with a paul with a poll paul is going to prove him right well we'll see we'll see what the audience thinks um i actually think so based off of this i'm very interested in hearing from from from our panelists you know maybe what is the best thing about dalles that you've experienced very very short but also what's the worst thing about dao's that you've experienced any of you can go first for this wow um from the heart what's the best things about taos i think it's the ability to find like-minded people and i think the mechanism for why that is so is that before you were geographically constrained so if i'm in amsterdam i live here where are my friends how do i meet people simply going to be geographically constrained right now it's like via the internet which is one but now unlike before where you have money at stake um people don't just talk anymore they have to put their money where the mouth is right they have to do that over the internet and that becomes a very useful way of filtering people that you interact with so to make it really simple the most useful thing has been finding amazing friends um doesn't mean i didn't have friends before but you know no i have more friends um that's number one number two sorry um is i think what's great about dao taos and even though we're in the experimentation phase today at the individual level you're able to build a history of things that you cannot build otherwise and this is why you should participate today as opposed to in a year and what i mean is this some of the actions that you're taking will be tokenized and put on chain why because instead of sending a cv that's a two-page pdf with where you have worked the future cv will be the things that you have done right so you haven't worked in a two billion dollar acquisition project with some kind of company that no one knows what you actually did but we will actually know the very actions that you've taken some of it through structures like andre was was laying um was outlining on his powerpoint the second thing is not just the actions that you've taken but it's also the value of the outcomes of those actions right and now it's not just a single boss that determines that but through mechanisms like coordinate which aren't perfect but you know there's a way for people that you work with in a dao to say how valuable were you over the last two weeks how much value did you actually deliver and that's a socially assigned value and you can build a history of that over time right and if you start in a year you you miss out on a year's worth of value that will remain hidden from everyone unless you participate today in dials so the great thing is about taos build a bunch of friends and show how valuable you actually are because no one knows there's no bad things about the house we have to power through this question quickly so worst thing best thing okay well a lot of really cool points have been made i believe that in daos you get your true yourself shine not where you come from not what degree you had not how many people you delegated work to you have your values reflect your contributions and you can actually see impact of your work straight up friends of course like if i didn't like this space i would probably consider changing but i cannot see myself leaving because there's some really important connections one makes and a lot of people that are most of the time smarter than you and you feel the most stupid in the room but you have a lot to learn from and you each other benefit from each other's collaboration and presence negative things well they're always negative things like there is some sort of uncertainty level there is some sort of very disciplined approach you need to have to have to your work because it's so unstructured and there are of course collaboration difficulties which centralized traditional organizations solve for in a very prescriptive and limiting way so you need to overcome a lot of challenges but i would flip it on the positive side that also brings you further to happier and more beneficial contributions so it could be thought of as a plus side every time you overcome some issue and you can share it and you can create the value i think that's a plus in the end so yeah a lot of self-control discipline and a little bit of appetite for risk because else we couldn't move as fast as we do now cool risk yes lots of risk risk of working through lunch and working through your weekends the the best thing about dao is like we're talking about friends and like yes i've made some amazing friends um but it goes beyond friends for me it's like changed lives improved lives people join developer dow and they're like i don't know where to start and i get a chance to help them and connect them with friends and then in a couple weeks they're saying i got the the highest paying job i've ever gotten and it makes a huge difference to me and my family i'm like that's awesome you know we uh we're we're throwing uh parties around the world and we're flying people out of their home countries for the first time ever in east dubai we had something like 10 members who had never left their home country but they got to fly out of their home country and not just to go on a tourist thing but to go to a crypto conference like for me it's a really big deal that i i like i can say with a straight face like we're changing lives like i feel really good about it oh we're getting some you get socks i get merch make sure find me at the back i have like 80 pair of the socks and the merch are a nice touch but they're actually changing lives is what what gets me up in the morning nice yeah uh i i agree with everything that you have said so i can keep myself short um i think to expand on what you said it i think relationships and friendships are focused around doing things together and um or they form through doing things together and then exchanging kind of how you feel and then helping each other grow and for the first time in history we can kind of do that on a planetary scale like it's a cliche word but yeah we can we can scale that up and i think it's a good thing um i think it helps humanity solve really big problems on a global scale um i also think that's a good thing but i also think that it can also be a bad thing because as we've seen with how information is distributed over social networks and can be something that can be detrimental or even spark wars in in places um i think there's a huge kind of danger in that with the distribution of value and distribution of labor i i i kind of think so and it also depends on how we develop tools and how we govern about like the technologies that we evolve how we involve ai into this whole system so these things can really go i think in a bad place if they're if there's some kind of mistake that happens and someone like writes the wrong type of code and then it like weaponizes the civilization to kill itself but your friends are there for a code review [Laughter] you said cliche i actually there was a cliche that i should have said when i had my turn it's that the technology comes and goes but the real treasure is the friends we make along the way oh beautiful cool well look we have 10 minutes left and i actually want to focus on the audience questions so um please upvote and all of that and i will ask a question and if one of you can maybe volunteer and take that question and then we'll we'll do it that way um so the first question from anonymous is how much of a dow do you think should be on chain you said almost everything um and how much should be off-chain it depends in the microphone it depends what you're trying to accomplish yeah it does i think the exact amount is not clear but some amount is clear meaning if there's nothing on chain i have trouble to see how it's a dao so to me you know we're interested in dao's because there's something new about it that emerged right now right and there's a fundamental technology that's linked to it which is consensus making distributed architecture and so if there's nothing related to an organization that is on chain to me it's not really a dao number one number two i think there's many very established organizations now that are trying to do some kind of dao experiment as long as that dow component that is on chain is not core to the organization then it's not a dao right so there's really two things i want to say i don't know how much needs to be unchained something must be on chain and that which is on chain must be core to the organization for it to be a dao cool thanks a lot i i have something to add because i believe that dao should not be only defined what is on chain and off chain of course like in terms of governance it doesn't make sense to put every single vote for on chain voting so there should be a kind of balance between that but also like to me maybe completely like destroying the question but the social element is very important it's not just the code on a blockchain it's the people too and you cannot you know you can have them online but they're real people they're real tangible assets inside so it's very important to think of does it have a community does it have these people around it that actually make sure that it's functioning and it's not just something you deploy and leave out to die i feel like i need to respond so i agree with that in fact some people technically define bitcoin as a dao and intuitively that sounds kind of weird right because i don't know if there's a lot of people stuff involved in it so i think i would agree with you that there needs to be people so in other words it's not sufficient to have something on chain that's central but it's necessary and you definitely need a lot of the people stuff in there cool the next question is traditional companies can offer a lot of benefits healthcare maternity leave etc to their employees do you see a path forward for daos to offer something similar have you seen anything like this or we're supposed to give a shout out to opolis right waiting for them to deploy in canada and germany anywhere else uh like yeah and i think i should also be plugging that uh we've got a platform where we're aiming to do that too called benz shout out to camp uh yes all of those things are definitely coming and it's just a question of when and uh when is a function of how well they'll be delivered so like the first wave of like dental benefits through dows are is like not gonna be great but eventually we're gonna be in a situation where there are dows that that function competently for all of our collective bargaining needs so there's going to be a developer's labor union that negotiates directly against bad actors like microsoft for concessions for our governments um direct uh work on behalf of individuals for the necessities of life clean water housing all that good stuff like it's coming it's just a question of when yeah i also just really quick want to add on that i think with uh daos because the infrastructure is kind of almost free um you can diverge the profits of the dao to basically any purpose you like which then becomes the attractor for certain people to just join your organization as opposed to another so for example in deep work we have a profit share so if you join deep work you do work then on a given month you would receive part of the profits as part of being part of it so and that could be like you know maybe not profits but we're actually like partnering up with a medical institution and now you get free dental health care or like you know we have four hour work days like that's the condition that we've created because we can afford that and so i think there's going to be a lot of different opportunities and a lot of organizations that will choose their own kind of social and health benefits for people yeah and and how do you see that kind of way up against also having like a regular salary because dowels are very much kind of project based right um so how do you see it for people that are looking for a normal salary and looking for these benefits well i mean i think the normal salary is something that's just not going to work anymore or like not going to exist in that same way but you can have like you know a ubi that the company is going to create so rather than giving you the instability of like project-based work so you can you have to like survive if you don't have work uh you'll just you know you have a ubi that's been provided by the organization because they want to keep you around i i like that vision i want that vision i'm trying to work to create vision uh i'm i'm there i'm i'm i'm there for it uh but like as a full-time dow employee it's not there yet and if you uh really need like certainty and stability i i remember austin griffith one time had a real heart-to-heart moment with me where he's like you just have to jump off the cliff like good luck and it all worked out but your your risk tolerance needs to be incredible today and we need we there's a lot of work to do before we get to a position where that's not true just one second the joint deport was a joke if you join deep work that's not going to solve your problem so um yeah but austin's definitely gonna make it like he's the guy yeah really for sure we all love austin yeah yeah yeah another bow tie gentlemen um but i wanted to add that uh at ses at our core unit we understand that it's really hard to make the real life work and we also try to offer like the ask that one should make for a full-time contribution should include these costs that are accrued from let's say being in a contractor agreement like accounting for the things for the extra risk for the extra costs so that we try to reflect that but of course we're super early and i love my people ops group where we discuss these things like how can we push the to the new level how do we do this better how do we take care of the more softer things rather than just like the essential hardcore did you deliver the value is your proposal accepted thing is that an open group or is that only for you you're invited yeah 20 socks 21 socks we need pairs of socks sold cool um another question is reputation is a big challenge do you know a good reputation scoring platform that helps down members to trust new members an active problem no there you go i mean reputation is a difficult thing it's like you can't really quantify it i mean there are a lot of really cool tools like i'm also like a big fan of of course nape and of colony and this missouri there's like there's a bunch of those like even poe apps in some way but also reputation is things like your cv uh or your like kind of i don't know and any attestation that you would receive from external maybe a civil i i mean i personally don't count that as reputation but um yeah there's a lot of different data it's more the question of how do we make sense of that data um that's that's an actual issue because there's so much of it yeah i think um i think a unique insight from whatever hotel ventures is that there's been a lot of projects in the last few years that have basically indexed data right so things like ether scan or smart contracts and how do you know what an address does how much does it interact with defy applications versus nft applications and then you generate some kind of score right degen scores are the most famous ones we are probably moving towards a stage where the problem of indexing data is more or less solved and it's really about now about saying well now we have this data set full of data of what this one address does how do we look over time what it actually means right so not just a bunch of rows and and columns but like how do you interpret that into a score like a credit score like a reputation score um these are still unsolved problems but probably one of the more exciting spaces today i have one very simple starting point for anyone interested to build a reputation in this space just collect pops show your pop wallet just start small don't invest too much to show that you have some history get poop can also help now that we're also shelling projects and uh and read science fiction read corey doctro make sure you don't build dystopias read charlie stress read excel rando the first chapter happens here uh so you know don't just read the news it's bad for you [Laughter] well there's one last question which ryan maybe is is for you is you know what about dalles to manage a country is that possible you know like yes yes like can you expand just a little bit on your vision of how you see where we are today i think that's hopefully that can inspire everyone here sure so um i'm i'm a democratically elected leader uh in our dao and uh so he says well like look look let's uh you know without without diving too deeply into it the process could be better um liquid democracy um better delegation tools these are very very active and so would i trust a nation state that decided to use crypto tooling to elect their prime minister today like uh you know go get em like give it a shot but like it probably it's not it's not there yet um but like once we get the fundamentals of democratic tooling in place uh like the secret ballot um we we're definitely on the way to getting there um liquid uh delegation liquid representation being able to select the realms for your representatives like today as a voter i choose a representative and they represent my interest in all spheres but it's ridiculous to me that i would trust the same person to rule on health policy and on intellectual property policy like it's nonsense um so we need to we're like very far away from it but once we get to a place where our interests can be represented i think that absolutely it can scale to a national and international level i like sociocracy as a model um that's how i built at least or like that's how i built organizations right now it's too difficult to explain in two words but uh you can read up on that it's um it's just kind of a good mix of like democratic systems and something that still have autonomous teams what's the call you say it again sociocracy sociocracy crazy whoa we'll finish on that look at circlocracy everyone i can't even say it myself could we all please give a round of applause to our panelists we hope you enjoyed it thank you thank you [Music]