Four ways DAOs will change the way we work

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 academy this is the weekly deep dive this is a place for entrepreneurs creators and businesses to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and to build thriving communities i'm jay bird and i'm here to keep you on the forefront of technology so that you don't fall behind i want to make sure you know what's going on in dallas what's going on in crypto what's going on in the nfts what's going on in blockchain this is the stuff that you need to know so you can stay on top of your business stay on top of building in web3

on today's deep dive we're going to focus on the four ways that dows are going to revolutionize the way we work let me tell you quickly what these four ways are number one true ownership and project alignment we'll talk about how dows enable ownership in an enable alignment that we really haven't seen before because of the addition of tokens we're talking about the freedom that dao is enabled freedom to work when where how and on what you want we're going to talk about increased transparency accountability and fairness that results from the ways in which dows manage their treasury and the ways in which taos manage their governance and finally we're going to talk about the ways in

which experience matters so differently endows dows open up a great opportunity for those with a lot of experience but also those with not a lot of experience to get involved to contribute and to be compensated for doing so okay so what are the four ways the dows are going to revolutionize work let's talk about that working in a traditional office setting has been the main and sometimes only option for most people worldwide but thanks to technological advancements and efforts to cope with covet 19 pandemic we've seen how flexible our work lives can be

no more traffic filled commutes no more office politics no more sunday night blues before you go back to the office living the dream right well not quite the transition back to working processes is already underway a microsoft report found that in the near future 50 percent of companies will require workers to be back in the office full time on the other hand 52 percent of workers planned to switch to flexible full-time remote or hybrid employment in 2022. so there's a little bit of a mismatch there so it's no surprise that 68 of us workers are quietly or actively disengaged in their work the

consequence is unhappy employees and low productivity instead let's imagine a working environment that's fair flexible and puts talent first one where contributors are engaged dedicated to an organization's goal and producing high quality work an environment of equality where everyone has a say in the direction of a company too good to be true hardly thanks to blockchain in cryptography anyone can build or contribute to a decentralized autonomous organization a dow and make this a reality if you're still new to the space and you're still trying to learn about dao's

i recommend you go back and check out our dao overview with brian peters so you can get up to speed on everything about what is a dao and how they work and really the pros and cons the challenges of dows a lot of challenges around working with a decentralized organization how that how that works and how people are doing that well and then also the opportunity of dowse if you head back in a few a few weeks in our podcast you'll be able to find that interview with brian peters but for today let's jump into the four ways the dows are going to revolutionize the way we work

first is ownership and project alignment so in most cases traditional employment pays you a salary and if you're lucky a performance bonus caveats to this scenario would be startups and fortune 500 executives which is a very small percentage of us who work in that manner but um startups you know that's the opportunity where you could you can often work for a small salary um with the promise of your shares being worth something after a funding round so you know high risk high reward um or uh you can you know if you're an executive

a fortune 500 company then you know you have lots of opportunities to get big bonuses and get big equity but not many of us are in that position obviously that requires decades of experience and you know some serious networking skills so and even then you're often at the mercy of a board or a higher level manager so while you get a slice of the pie it's monetary rather than governance ownership uh which is a big distinction to make you know sure uh at some of these companies you might get an opportunity to have ownership but you don't have governance ownership you just have shares that can get you monetary gain but not necessarily the ability to steer

the direction of the company uh in in the ways that you believe uh you still are at the mercy of somebody who makes those decisions is different there isn't a board of directors or an executive team running the show while there may be a leadership team decision making power is shared equally meaning everyone's opinion holds the same weight for example in the honey badges dow members vote to choose the leadership team every three months this process ensures that project leaders always act in members best interests additionally additionally leaders don't have absolute power to make project decisions since members still need to vote so rather than having a few heavyweight decision

makers an organization has the has many small shareholders and put shareholders in quotes this structure results in better contributor engagement since they have skin in the game so you have this opportunity in a dow where not only do you have more ownership in the form of tokens but you also use those tokens for governance you use those tokens for voting now there's different structures for how the taos do voting but the point is when you are working at a dao you have a say in the direction now daos do have challenges with voter engagement and that's a whole other topic but the point is when you are in a dow and you are being compensated in tokens with those tokens you often get

governance you get voting rights which allows you ownership in a new way that's not seen in existing companies since since members own part of the project they receive a share of project revenue so no more busting your ass to climb the corporate ladder for the executive team to claim most of the rewards instead rememberation is bait instead of remuneration being based off of office politics seniority and power plays it's about how much you contribute to the dow and its level of success a dow's decentralization also means anyone can take the initiative to propose changes this feature is valuable since members involved in the day-to-day

running of the dao have a better understanding of how to improve it so tons of opportunity endows and opportunity to be compensated for what you work on now i just want to highlight um you know that there's always going to be two sides to every story and i don't want to think that we're all we're sitting here looking through rose-colored glasses always one of the challenges of of dows is the nature of decentralization you don't have a boss telling you what to do you need to be more of a self-starter so dows work really well for people that are self-starters they're harder for people that rely on clear direction now

that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for everybody within a dow i'm just pointing out uh the the nature of a decentralized organization means that there might be less clear direction especially in the early stages of the dao the more form daos the dows that have been around for a couple of years they have great processes and systems in place that ensure that the ship is steering in the right direction that everybody knows what they're doing that everyone has clear accountability but that takes time okay second thing we want to look at is freedom we'll talk about the freedom that dows give you they give you freedom to work when where how and on what you want i think that we all value freedom

often more than anything else in life freedom might be the most valuable thing to us in life i mean we value financial freedom uh and we value freedom of our time and freedom of how we decide what to do with with that time and so whether or not a dow is going to give you financial freedom that is there's a huge range of that you know and i'm not going to discuss the uh the the deep inner workings of the financial opportunity that come from endow certainly a lot of dao's have a lot of opportunity to give you an opportunity to make a lot of money a lot of dials also give the opportunity to make more freelance level salary and

make make money be compensated always for what you do but perhaps not you know give you the financial freedom that you're rich right um there's a range there but what those do certainly give you is the freedom for your work for your time they definitely give you that and let's face it most jobs these days don't require people to share a specific location you can chat a cert asynchronously or collaborate through cloud software and those meetings that need needed to be face to face well now we've got microsoft teams zoom discord we've got all these platforms that allow us to meet online

in the metaverse or what will someday be the metaverse uh we we have all we all have the necessary tools to work however suits us best so why should we be confined to the office just because we've worked this way for decades doesn't mean it's the best option instead val dao's value autonomy i mean hence it's it's in the name right besides actual automation through smart contracts in the blockchain each member is an autonomous contributor that decides how they work when they work all that matters is that you produce results now autonomy doesn't mean it's a free-for-all members still need to meet deadlines and produce quality work but

as long as you deliver no one cares if you did it in your pajamas after chores or in the shower you know however you work best you want to do it down at the beach you want to do it somewhere else in the world you want to be traveling and nomadic throughout your you know throughout the month that's fine you have that freedom and flexibility dallas also don't expect you to dedicate your life to one project sure most dows will have a core full-time team that purchases the project forward but they'll also have many one-off and part-time contributors these contributors will complete ad hoc tasks often called bounties for the dow in return for a fee like a freelancer but why is that this important research

researchers have found that intrinsic factors such as interest in a project are the biggest drivers of worker happiness even beating pay levels and since dows are autonomous no one expects you to cover tasks you don't choose for example projects like wonderverse allow dows and contributors to connect what whether for long-term projects or for one-off tasks like creating a gif or a youtube video or making an image or writing a blog post and you can't see my screen right now if you're listening to the podcast but i have up here a photo of an example contributor dashboard and what this contributor dashboard shows is it shows um work that is available you know it

allows you to discover work or discover dows and so on this current photo that i'm looking at it's showing uh let's just see there's a bunch of bounties up here bounty is like the dow term for freelance work essentially that you get a bounty to do a task right um and so here we've got uh create a gif create a long youtube video uh create a meme write an article attend a twitter space or a discord stage or an ama all of these things are currently up and available for bounty so for a freelance worker or particular for a junior level worker

it's a great way to come in a lot of bounties are no skill required and i'm going to talk about that in a second and really the great thing about this is it allows you to come in and work on different things it allows you to test different things out it allows you to dip your toes into a different down now obviously there is a lot of work to manage freelance and there is that side of things and you know i would never recommend we actually talked a lot about brian peters with this one of the challenges that a lot of people in dallas face is burnout because you can find yourself working on so many projects because you don't have anybody you don't have a

manager or a friend or a colleague nobody at your work knows how much you are doing because if you're working on different bounties especially if you're working on different dows which a lot of peop contributors do then it's on you to manage your schedule it's on you to manage your capacity and your workload so you have to be very careful and don't take on too much if you take on too much you'll burn out and you won't enjoy it at all so make sure that you're very cognizant with how you manage your time okay number three the other thing that dows really are going to revolutionize for work is increase transparency accountability and fairness so it's fair for traditional

companies to practice to trend it's sorry it's rare it's fair it's rare for traditional companies to practice to transparency and openness sure they may say they're transparent but the average employee will never have access to information that isn't necessary for their role but how can workers know they're receiving fair treatment if managers don't disclose salary workload and performance data how do they know their company is acting in their best interests the truth is they don't and in often cases companies take advantage of this don't get me wrong many companies are very well run but we've seen both sides of this coin and that's how we end up with black swan events like enron or terra luna

so there's there's there's bad actors and they take advantage of the closed operating system of closed books uh to you know take advantage of their people and take advantage of their label late labor instead taos use blockchain and because it does use blockchain it's transparent it's immutable and it's it's accessible by everyone um now i'm not going to get into uh the details of blockchain we've done many episodes on that um but i want to talk about operating as a dow what does that ensure uh so one operating is now ensures no corporate red tape uh if you have a great idea in a traditional company and need quick funding to make it happen

like there's just there's just no process in most companies right no way for you to get approval uh for you to get funding for you to get a team behind this um not to mention the decision maker is probably your manager so that can often be a roadblock because your manager wants you focused on other things your manager has other priorities for you and your manager has their own objectives which might not align with what you think is a good idea even if it really is a good idea that might be the best thing for the company uh their the setup and the processes systems and the way that they work might not allow it

whereas in a dow processes are coded into the blockchain removing the need for middle management so all voting happens on chain everyone can see it it's all transparent um democratic decision making is different in the dow so in the case where your manager doesn't want you to do something or even worse let's say your manager doesn't like you then their opinion is just one of many in a dow rather than their opinion this one person being the only opinion so instead of hoping that your manager makes a fair decision about a new project you want to do you can rely on the hive mind to make the right choice for the organization not one person to make a bias choice based upon your

relationship transparent financials this is a big part about dallas is if you have equity in a company it's vital to understand its performance and you'll likely get updates but you're relying on the party delivering the information uh to be truthful and how often they update it in a dow all this information is on chain and it's immutable meaning you can gauge a project's health anytime you can see the value of your tokens you can see how many people are buying and selling it means that you have also means you have access to remuneration data on all members of the dow ensuring fair distribution you can see how much every member of the data was paid in the last season you can see all this on the

blockchain and the final thing is performance visibility in traditional companies it's easy for managers to gloss over the achievements of quiet contributors it's often the loud the social people the charmers that that excel in traditional companies because relationships is such a big part uh often a bigger part than the actual work that you do whereas in the open transparent nature of a dao are celebrated and noticed for their actual contribution not just by being the most social person so performance visibility changes the final thing uh

that is a big part of how does change work is the manner in which it opens up opportunity for those who do not necessarily have experience particularly right now as we are developing all these dows there's just so much opportunity for new new minds and just people who want to hustle and get work done but maybe don't necessarily have a ton of experience if you want to apply for a traditional job that's not the case the chances are you'll need years of experience you'll need references you'll you'll need to meet that company's needs in your skills in your experience so it's hard

if you're a low experienced person to get in the door on top of this hiring managers will subject you to rigid screens that don't consider the nature of real world skills for example if a job application says you need five years of experience but you put four and a half good luck getting to the next stage now that might be a little extreme but the idea is a lot of the way these companies the traditional companies hire is off of systems and processes that are really set dows are different they're new they're more fluid they're learning uh and that leads to more opportunity so

if you pass the initial screening of a company uh let's say you're interviewing for a job you pass an initial screening and you'll be lucky if you only have a few tedious interview rounds before they make their decision in contrast it's just a very different hiring process right um dows are reinventing the traditional hiring process most daos they don't care where you worked previously whether you worked at google or you worked at the your local supermarket as long as you have the skills you'll get rewarded for them on top of this you won't have to go through a lengthy hiring process in most case most cases you can actually just join a dao so it's completely different i've

heard the analogy that when you when you join a traditional company you they interview you whereas when you join a dao you interview them right it's kind of flipped on its head and the way you interview them is you can join a dow a few ways some dows require you to buy an nft or buy their token joints you might have to buy something to have access or you might have to buy a certain number of tokens to have access other dows don't require that you can join the discord and you can just be in you can just join you can see what it's like you can attend because of this nature of transparency that is such at the core of

taos for a lot of dows you can attend you can join their discord and you can attend their all hands meeting you can join meetings you can see what's going on so you get a chance to see what they're like you get a chance to interview them there's also the chance a lot of dows you can if you can't afford their token or their nft you can join and you can complete bounties in order to make tokens and make yourself a full member of the dow completing a task um maybe you a 10-day webinar or again you do something simple uh to receive a bounty or to receive a pull-up that can get you into the dow these low barriers make dallas excellent

for gaining practical web3 experience without taking on lengthy internships all you need to do is show up find a problem that needs solving and then deliver your solution in saying that not every dow can pay for your effort for example an early stage down may pay you with an initially valueless native token similar to startup equity but if you need experience and believe in the project contributing to these dows can pay off in the long run it also can get you a lot of relationships and a lot of opportunity let's not forget so much opportunity comes from relationships from meeting people and dao's are a great place to connect and to meet people and who knows maybe your

native token goes to the moon and the project succeeds and they offer you a full-time gig because your value that you're valuable and your contributions are great let's not guarantee that any token goes to the moon be aware whenever you are joining a dow and you are being compensated in their token that that has its own considerations to go with it to understand the tokenomics because that is an important factor and particularly if that token is not does not have liquidity yet meaning that token you cannot trade that token into another currency um such as getting it back into fiat uh

then keep that in mind that token at current state has no value it is only good for governance often and that's often the case in starter dallas and that's okay there's nothing wrong with that you just need to be aware of what you're signing up for and there's powerhouse dows already forming there's a lot of powerhouse dows and but those was also an evolving concept making now the perfect time to get in and shape the innovations of tomorrow and the choices are endless there's dows around media there's dowsing around investments in venture capital there's non-profit dials there's social network dows there is pretty much a dow for every thing um we even have you know some examples

recently ukraine dao which was a dow that popped up in order to support ukraine in the current war uh and they've i can't remember what their numbers are but they've raised millions um to put towards uh ukraine and support them uh in the war efforts and so many dows to participate in many opportunities and really the world's your oyster if you want to get inve involved in dao's there's no shortage of opportunities out there we'll make sure to link to a couple of uh options of where you can find dows in the show notes um but that's that's you know that's an

opportunity out there for you guys uh thanks for listening to the show today everybody good luck joining daoz if you do join it down uh let us know we'd love to hear where you join uh maybe we want to interview you get you on the podcast we're always interested in interviewing dow members and learning about the structures and the processes through which dows are operating thanks for listening in everybody have a fantastic week and we'll see you next time jay bird out thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you

can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one