Growing as a DAO - MakerDAO Lessons Learned

Transcript

again this is not for people of my size like this happens in all conferences like something to think for future conferences please so i'm nadia i'm going to talk about a maker dao governance but especially my experience in the growth career unit so just like a for a little bit of context for the ones who don't know so maker tao used to be run by the maker foundation but the maker foundation was created to bootstrap the community that in the future i mean now will

manage the protocol so after the foundation got dissolved everyone in the community uh could propose a core unit that's what we call like these groups of people that have a mandate and a budget associated to them to that mandate to be able to fulfill it so i presented a proposal in the forum and the community voted me in so i can i could like provide these services of growth that includes ecosystem partnerships bd marketing branding and that that kind of stuff to the protocol so that's like the

context so this will be my experiences as a facilitator of the growth career unit and the interaction that i have with other koreans and the dao in general so how it started as i said it started as a proposal that we came from some members of the community and the maker foundation because the idea was okay we have a foundation that is a central entity that is helping to develop the protocol from different aspects but we don't want that centralized point of failure because that's what a company is we want the

community to run the protocol so um the community and the foundation they created a framework to propose core units that was last year when the career units started and this is how it's going now which is awesome it's like if you want to be if you want to see a doubt in action you have to go to the maker dial forum because it's it's crazy right now we are more than 20 core units each car unit has between five and ten contributors in average i will say that it is it is about eight contributors per per unit of

course you can you can find court units with two contributors or core units with 15 contributors i think that's the maximum uh of contributors that we have but we really don't know because we are a dao and each career unit is completely independent and then they can decide how they want to run that group of people so we have core units each career unit has a mandate as i said and a budget associated to that mandate and we have delegates delegates was another thing that maker dao thought okay we need to do this i think we did it after other protocols decided to go in that direction

and it took time for us which was bad but it was the solution that we found to increase the participation of maker holders because as you all know if you are involved in those holders like they don't have the time to be committed to the development of a protocol so what they do is or what usually what protocols are doing is they create a layer of delegates who represent uh the decision of maker holders so now we have delegates and core units which are contributors doing things for the protocol so coordinates what what we are doing is

helping to go grow the protocol from different perspectives there's a protocol engineering career in it they are in charge of maintaining the protocol the smart contracts uh the core of the protocol there's there is korean it they are constantly doing risk assessments to maintain the peg uh to analyze uh the different collateral types crypto collateral types to onboarding the protocol there's the oracles korean which well they maintain the oracles and also we as growth we help the protocol to increase the demand and supply this is just an example because as i said we are more than 20 koreans

and each courier has its own mandate its own perspective on how to help the protocol and then it's up to the delegates to decide and represent the maker holders decision and accept or not the proposals to create a new core unit that will help to grow the protocol from a different perspective this started as a good idea i if you're in a dao and if you're thinking how to evolve your doubt actually like the three talks before mine someone was saying that oh it's good to have like one layer of contributors and one layer of of delegates or i i don't remember

how he called it this doesn't scale and we are we are seeing the consequences of this model it is good for the first months maybe but with more than 20 career nets it's crazy because just imagine yourself we are a flat organization because we are now like even inside the core unit we don't have a clear hierarchy so coordinate between all the all the coronets delegates like it's crazy it's it's it's very very difficult so this is the future we think because again we're we are tao so no one really knows uh because there's like no

you you like in a doubt there's no one who can like say okay guys this is how we are going to do things just build it because we have to make that decision all together it's a doll so this is and this is also like a interesting reading if you have time go to the forum and uh roon posted the endgame plan and the idea of the end game plan is to reduce the complexity of a dao because after the coordinate model we we saw that doesn't scale too much people it's hard to coordinate you have to trust in that people because you don't have a legal enforcement to

make them do what they promise in their mandate so it's all about trusting people and that's not blockchain blockchain is about being permissionless and being able of not trusting people so roone's proposal is okay let's like try to go to the basic let's try to like keep it small at least at the maker core a having a small protocol the most permission is possible like uh everything managed by smart contracts and after we have this small maker core we can start building an ecosystem of methadone that's that's the name he's

using so like these happy faces you see uh in their right i think uh are the metadows that will be creating products services communities that will be using the maker core which will be small and completely permissionless managed by smart contracts and that's that's the dream so this is in work in progress we have i think we have a vision but we need a plan it has been like a long debate in in the maker community because uh of course like this this would be like a huge disruption to what we have been doing

because i mean we have it has been a year with corey on its development now we have over i don't know i think it's more than a hundred people working for career units so rethinking again the structure of how the dao should be well it is it is it is a challenge so again if you're interested in those this is this is your opportunity because it is like a a very interesting conversation and and as in all those i think it's always good to have new people thinking about how to do this so now i want to like go into what is the growth career unit what we

do and how we organize ourselves i think this is interesting for everyone who is thinking about contributing in any dow because this is what i have learned about okay i was part of the maker foundation we used to do things in one way which is the known way because like anyone who has worked in a in a company that's that that is how the foundation used to work but now we are in nadal and we have to like rethink a lot of the processes and structures and try to like uh think about new things of of of how to

collaborate present information and how to be transparent so first of all and and i think that's important for each contributor is to set up to set up a plan to have a strategy okay you want to do something for the dao what's that that you're going to do and this is interesting because every time you present a proposal in the forum you have to convince the community that you that they need you first and that you are capable of helping the protocol to growth in that aspect that you you think you are good so this is this is the plan of the growth

career unit remember that i told you that we want to help the protocol to grow the diet demand and diet supply so this is how we envision the protocol uh this is how we from like a business development perspective on a branding perspective we think we can help the protocol to grow so i think this is not particular for the growth coordinate i think all koreans or any contributor er and any dow should have a strategy like okay this is my mission and this is what i want to do to achieve that objective after having a strategy you need metrics this is super important and i've seen

other core units struggling with the community because they don't have metrics and without metrics you you don't know if you are doing the right thing you don't know if you are like if you have a plan but if you are not following it with metrics you don't know if you are doing it right and you don't have enough information to explain to the community why you did the things the way you did it so you always need metrics internal metrics to like understand okay um if my strategy goes in this direction uh then it has an impact this way in in the protocol and i'm really helping to grow or not i'm just like wasting money

and the wasting money part is something that we have to be conscious because in the bull market the house have like a lot of money and they don't care but in a bear market they are like trying to understand what's happening how you're spending the money and i think we should be accountable all the time not just under like bear market circumstances but all the time so that's what when metrics matter and this this should be how you you guide everything then it's transparency and this is something interesting because doesn't exist in a regular company

you don't think about okay how i'm going to tell everyone like the consumers the outsiders what is my company doing you don't think about that really but in a korean era nina it's it's super important because you need to coordinate with other career needs and you need to show to delegates and maker holders holders what you're doing so this is like a plan we have how we can improve the way how we communicate to the community what we are doing because the problem with transparency is that at some point if you want to be super transparent you will have

infinite amount of information and that's useless like if you have a lot of information and if you don't have a good way to present it no well no one will consume it so we are constantly thinking okay what's the best way to present useful information to the community so this is something we are creating that instead of posting the information in the forum every week every month we could like maybe have a website with some dashboards that can give information to the community in an easy way maybe why not like thinking about a newsletter that we can just send every

month to people who are interested to know learn about what the growth coordinate is doing and and and use these dashboards to explain what's the current situation what we are doing and what is what are the plans for the future so this is just like a work in progress of how to increase transparency but i think that it's important that if you're a contributor in adult you always have to be thinking on how to improve the way you communicate how we you improved like your transparency levels because that's that has to be a core value and because transparency is a core value you have to

find the contributors that have like a mindset that uh goes along with the values of the protocol or the dow or the community for me it's super important that people contributors in my career net accept payments and die because i mean we are maker if you don't want to die like it doesn't make sense incentives have to be aligned with the strategy like the house and blockchain are all about incentives it's important to think about that when you have a contributors when you have a dow you have to give them incentives and you have to have a strategy aligned with that everyone

in adult they are contributors not employees and that's super important to understand the difference because a contributor has like a an attachment in a sentimental way to the protocol that's super interesting because i think that that allows us to grow in a different way employees don't care they are just there for the paycheck like contributors care about the growth like the really growth of the protocol and they are passionate about what they do well people have to be self-started open-minded they have to be like capable of change every time they have to love to show what they're doing and

post in the forum everything that they're doing and their ideas and always be transparent this is interesting it's not for everyone um but um i think it it's not just for maker but i think all those have to like have a uh a description of the people the mindset that they want to have inside their contributors and i think this this could be aligned with with a lot of of the dolls out there so these are just like a couple of lessons that i i've learned uh growth career i think this is i uh we created growth career unit last year

in march i think so it has been a while as a career unit and well first of all coordination is is a must because you're in a dao but we also are working in a offline mode and like dao discord forum twitter so sometimes we have to go to real life to like humanize the people that interact with us that's important we need to attract more diverse people and talented people this is this is interesting because web 2 is looking at web 3 and and i think we we need new ideas uh

to help us to create this this new dow world scaling well you will scale if if you have success you will scale but uh scaling in a decentralized mindset is not efficient because coordination becomes harder and you will spend a lot of money because if you have uh these decentralized ethos inside your tao and you have like different core units doing the same that means you will have more people and you will spend more and unfortunately the burnout is there that was they don't have like uh

an office hours like you don't work from nine to six we're working all the time because we are global so that's good that that's super fun but it it also it's it's dangerous so you have to take care of your contributors and yeah that's pretty much it so that's the maker growth twitter the forum that if you're interested in those you should just you should visit the forum um yeah thank you [Applause] questions

hi thank you very much for the presentation i had one question regarding the team members like that one slide where you described what the team members should kind of be like um how do you in a dao how do you how do you attract and identify these team members and these characteristics how do you get them to join and not have like random people that actually don't really care that are not contributors but employees well good question um we we have core units so each coordinate attracts and hires hires the contributors they want this is just like uh my policy uh

so the contributors that i want first of all i want them to be happy about receiving their monthly salary on die and you you will think yeah but that's normal uh in blockchain but it's not uh it's not because this is like a full-time more than full-time job because as i said we are not working from nine to six like it's it's it's i mean i'm surprised when whenever i hear that there are people contributing to more than two or three dows and like how's that possible like i don't have enough time for maker and

my team people in in the growth career unit it's the same like they are fully dedicated to to maker because we we have a lot of things to do so for them is their full-time job and accepting a salary and die it's interesting because you i mean maybe this is more difficult for other dolls because for maker it's unique maker is generating dye so it creates an attachment to the protocol to the product and that's that's interesting like it makes you to understand what you're doing it makes you to value what you're doing it makes you like to to to create that network that's necessary so you can like pay for your coffee pay for your rent

uh pay for it like your everyday things because that's your salary so i think that's that creates a a special commitment and also i always encourage people not just like to do what they supposed to do but be involved in the community so what we call contributor is like someone who is paid by the doubt but i think you have to be a contributor and a community member so you have to have opinions you have to have a voice we also give compensations in mkr which i think like gives you like another vision because you are also like maker holder so you are interested about governance

you you you can vote you can delegate so it's like a it's completely different what you can do in a in a company and i think that people knows about that and yeah like the contributors that i have they they want to work for maker because of that then like the other is like they really yes of course like if they are good in marketing they want to work with us but it's mainly not not because they are good in marketing but because they care about maker and they are attracted to the fact that while being a contributor they can they can help to grow the protocol which is

incredible okay thank you [Applause] you