Challenges of Running a DAO

Transcript

now hello and welcome to this panel about the challenges of running a dao and before we start it would be super interesting to know who of you have ever worked for a dao a couple of hands and i think many of you guys know the everyday challenges of running a dao for example coordinational challenges but also strategic challenges and in today's panel we will discuss how to fix these problems and before we dive deeper my name is yuri meibom i'm the co-founder of d5 times and the host of the d5 times podcast i'm also working as

a strategic advisor for mjh dao and today i have the pleasure to host this panel with matteo pandorfi and dennis de vicis from idle finance hey guys so beautiful to have this panel with you today um yeah yeah so uh hi everybody i'm matteo i'm from idol finance i'm the ceo and founder of idol labs he's a company that initially founded and released the idol protocol now and now i'm working with the treasury league at idle finance now and i'm dennis i'm working in a marketing communication league as a product manager i have a long history of working with various types of organizations from small agencies to big

agencies have my own brick and mortar business and now working in the dao as well so as we can see you're both very experienced with daos and with that being said it would be super awesome if you could give us an introduction to the benefits of dao so why does it make make it sense to integrate a dao into a project so a pretty obvious first benefit of the dao is having human efficiency because you have a lot of different people with different skill sets and those people communicate in coordinates like between each other and we have a cool quote by valhalla here is

one of my favorite authors he is like a pretty famous historian has a cool book called 2021 lessons for the 21st century you should check it out so the quote is sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers i will highlight here the strangers right and that's why sapiens rule the world whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories and to kind of highlight this point we have an example straight up from idle since idle was actually founded by a bunch of developers and they have this they basically had this tunnel vision and it was actually recognized in the community as idle was basically very focused on building a product with

a brilliant team of developers but still marketing was obviously missing as a lot of people pointed out and we did solve that with you can switch it up with one of the more active members actually posted a proposal on our governance forum and she proposed okay guys we're missing marketing here's an official proposal let's make a communication to the marketing league right but um that's just one of the benefits there are some other benefits as well yeah exactly so human efficiency is one definitely one of the benefits that dao gives us and you can see that's a clear example how the community can be beneficial to bring forth to move forward with different initiatives dao there is also a capital efficiency side

so the dow hive mind helps us understanding multiple paths where we can reach this kind of efficiency and you know when you form a dao initially you have a treasury and the treasury is basically uh formed by native tokens and you gotta find a way in a decentralized way to manage these tokens so initially what we thought and we wanted to implement was a sort of way of thinking to manage this kind of tragedy a part of them so money should never sit still was that the actual party that we started to implement and that's where defy actually come into place so difa gives us a dao he gives a tool to the dowels in order to manage those treasuries so you can start by

just diversifying your treasuries and stable coins as i said those treasuries are composed mainly by native tokens so first thing first you diversify your treasury into stable coins in order to stabilize it but then what you do with those table coins you have guild aggregators that helps you put those table cans at works and they're not sitting still anymore other examples of tools that defy is currently giving to daos are d2d on chain agreements so token exchange between different dials in order to solidify their relationship and their code their cooperation and as well as also rewarding value creation from the contribution

treasuries are made up especially also to reward the value contribution the value creation from the contributors of the dao of course skies is the limit here so if anybody here from the austrians would like to talk about and brainstorm about possible tools that can make a treasury more efficient way we would be definitely happy to do that indeed d5 improves the efficiency of every organization of the world or it can at least because defy is so if we just look at these examples we see that also centralized organizations could profit from these kinds of tools significantly nonetheless we talked about the benefits still we

are not overtaking the world yet there are still a lot of problems that we are facing day by day so with that being said could you name us some challenges you have to face day by day yeah that's definitely true and basically tied next to the human efficiency we have very obvious problem which is cooperation right since you have a lot of different parties in the dao so this is actually one minute one minute long video of my chat with one of the more active community members right and he has a bunch of like very good proposals but also how to filter this like this is

just one person on one channel you have a lot of different person people then you have very like many channels just telegram discord twitter whatever and then you have people with different backgrounds somebody's from marketing has this perspective somebody's from development somebody's from finance and then how do you prioritize all those proposals uh do you use like something like a project management tool it is kind of hard for somebody who's not native to a project management management tool right so it's kind of hard to coordinate and they're actually like even more problems than just simple coordination yeah exactly other than coordination which is one of the main challenges there are also the leadership we have a

clear example we had a clear example in the idle doubts as well so the community was actually pointing out the problem the website needed uh to be renewed we needed to be upgraded but all the community was pointing out a problem without finding a way to lead the initiative in order to solve that problem so leadership actually is one of the challenges but it's still in a gray area for a doll a leader in our opinion is not a manager he's not someone that is evaluating what you do and evaluating your results leadership is in our opinion someone that knows what to do next for a certain for a specific initiative so in a doubt anybody can be

a leader this is a concept that does not be really defined it's something that comes in natural figure out the governance flow so with this challenge you know you can think about like adult as a chicken coop so you know there's a lot of people that are trying to find problems that are finding actual problem without finding a direction in order to solve that problem so those are the main challenges that we we're facing right now for dials yeah i think everybody who ever have worked for dao knows these kinds of problems and still we are here to talk about solutions and you came up with a pretty interesting solution in order to

tackle these kinds of problems so could you tell us more about your solution for this absolutely so with idle dial we introduced the concept of leaks leaks are operational units that pull people together on the same area of expertise but all work together toward the same goals making the prodigal and that's sustainable in the long term these operational units are elected by the community on a three-month mandate basis and in this way you can see that you can have the community acting as a sort of board of directors for the dow so the thesis that we started from in order to implement this concept is that we think that most of the token holders

will tend to be passive and that's totally fine for us and that's why we wanted to give them a way to for active community members to self-organize themselves into teams and to move forward in a more quick way different initiatives of course to do that we needed to first define a governance process to do that so we find it clearly defined at the beginning with our community what was the process to propose a new idea so create a new idea and then move it forward through different phases in order to then execute it and implement it on chain and then we needed to find a connection between this governance process the leaks and the community so in this

process there is no hierarchical structure the leaks and the community are on the same level basically but you can see the leagues as executors for the ideas that are coming from the feedback that the our community is giving us so in this way you can keep up with the development especially in a market that is highly growing like defy with these teams that are specialized and helps move forward initiatives that comes from actual community feedback so of course this kind of structure allow different degrees of participation so if you want to start with the dao you

can just open into different communication channels discord governance forum and being a community members which means that you just uh giving your opinion giving your feedback regarding different initiatives either even if it just thumbs up in discord even if it's just a liking in the governance forum that's enough to start off with the dow next level would be to become a commenter and a casual contributor so you're not only expressing your opinion you're not only giving your feedback but you're actually structuring answers and actually giving more a more structured feedback to all the other members the more active

members that are participating in the dow and then the third level would be an ambassador i'm more like a recurrent contributor so now you're actually getting more specialized you're getting more uh you're structuring your answers and your answers actually help shaping up the proposals that the dao is making up last level would be to become an actual league member which means that are now you're working every day on the maintenance and growth of the protocol you're leading the initiatives you are proposing new initiative and that would be the last level in order to get into our workflow yeah exactly that's uh that's actually how i started a lot of people asked me how to get into dao how

to start working in d5 and that's basically how you start that's i'm a real life example of that as well since i started as a community member and i grew more and more invested i had more proposals than when i wanted to make more deep deeper uh like proposals i started participating more and more using governance forum and now i'm a part of i'm a league member yeah i mean what i love about this concept is the following that this concept doesn't um only unleash the true potential of taos but also of people because the people can choose how where they participate in the dao so which problems they want to solve do they want to become just a community member or do they or are they so

motivated that they want to become a team member so everybody can look can can look up to a dow and sees um and can seek for problems that he or she wants to solve so i think this is a very very interesting concept and i guess if there's any project in the room that is interested in this concept or interested in implementing this uh concept into its project i think um you're here to help yeah exactly we're we're all innovators here like we don't have a perfect formula like this is not perfect formula this is something that works for us i'm sure there's going to be like more challenges i'm sure you guys are going to have more challenges as well so just reach out

and we can connect ask a secondary panel reach out like discord or whatever yeah totally so if you wanna uh either jump on our dial and start looking at starting from a community member and then incrementally become a more active contributor until you get into the leagues uh we will we are looking forward to seeing you jumping on our communication channel like discord and our governance forum so definitely happy and keen to see more people uh talking about those with that thanks guys [Applause]