S2 Finale: The Next Evolution for DAOs

Transcript

thank you all right everyone before we jump into this episode super excited about our newest sponsor Reserve big shout out to reserve they are the easiest way to design deploy and govern stable coins backed by a diverse set of assets with access to defy yield and insurance if you don't know Reserve we're super excited about them here at bell curve you'll hear more about them later in the show Welcome to the last episode of season two of belker folks uh this is the episode where you get to hear Mike and my unfiltered thoughts on the season and these episodes so Mike you look you look surprisingly warm for it being negative 40 degrees where you are well I am inside but yeah it is it is extremely cold in in uh in Big Sky actually Montana right now move from Bozeman to

Big Sky and yeah it is it's a fun fact they actually won't fly at this temperature because the jet fuel freezes so that happens at negative 30 degrees I didn't think that was a threshold that I was necessarily going to cross but there you go I'm trying to remember who's whose call is on yesterday but someone had uh oh Sam Martin who leads our research team he had gloves on inside because his heat broke so at least you're not at the at the gloves on stage devastating no no you can see my these 10 beautiful babies here yeah I never need to see your wiggling hands again so uh with that let's uh let's let's get into the finale huh yeah let's let's talk about the season I thought I thought this like let's you know to

briefly do a retrospective on the first two seasons that we've done I think what we concluded going into season one or at the end of season one which was the Advent of uh defy native bar fixed lending uh fixed London borrow markets we thought that that thesis was right but too early in in this I think when doing the retrospective on this past season and what did we learn about governance I think it ended up less about being a specific thesis and more of a sort of an exploration of a lot of different ideas and narratives that you hear forming around governance and honestly I mean this this will be the devil's in the

details but I think I kind of came away believing in some of them more strongly albeit with a bit more nuance and ultimately a lot of the things that you hear are valuable about Dao's and decentralized governance I think we did a pretty good job of debunking in this season so I thought overall I think I learned a lot yeah yeah it felt different from season one and that the season one was really going up against like testing this thesis that we had this really was and I I think because Dows and like this just Explorations on governance it's still so early this was more of an exploration at least that's how I realized like a couple episodes in that we were treating it and that's uh I found it really interesting and we went down some like pretty weird rabbit holes that I liked

and it did I was outside I learned some new things which we should talk about and I it also confirmed some of the things I was thinking about going in going into this about Taos so yeah I agree well how do you want to do this do you have any big like themes that you want to talk about do you have any do you want to go like Episode by yeah I'd love to talk about the big themes and some of your takeaways I'd like to start with big themes so just a really important refresher and we kicked this this entire season off of this idea of business uh product governance fit and that is the episode that we did with haasu and Chris and the idea there being that in addition to the pretty familiar concept of product Market fit uh in crypto there's an added layer there which is

the the governance needs to fit the type of product that you're trying to create so big takeaway number one from the season is I think that I think that we're generally trying to extrapolate one particular form of decentralized governance to a bunch of protocols that it doesn't necessarily apply to that's what I think I think you probably can root that in a lot of ways you know we've talked in in these episodes about taking ideas from Bitcoin just because Bitcoin was the first that don't necessarily make sense like the fixed token Supply cap we talked about then the episode with Chris and and Fernando and I think we sort of borrowed a very similar Rule and lesson from Bitcoin governance and ethereum

governance and we're trying to blanket have that apply to basically every crypto protocol and the answer is I don't think it applies um yeah I mean the two so the haasu and Chris episode was such a good episode of set up the season because there were these two big tensions that were outlined in that episode that then persisted throughout the entire season and it made me realize even even in that last episode talking with them with Nick from ens it was the same tensions that existed that Chris and hasu brought up uh on episode one which was one like governance Fit versus maturity of the Dao right like Bitcoin and eth can have these kind of like slow governance systems because they're super mature

um and we can't just take those like really slow governance systems and replicate them into new startups right so there's this like governance fit on a on a maturity timeline or a maturity Spectrum so that was one thing that like came through in the entire season and the next was another theme that was in episode one and in episode seven with Nick which was public goods versus expectation of return and um that persisted through that that's the probably the biggest thing that I've been thinking about is like what form of governance you should have is often should should probably be predicated on how like deep down in the stack you are and like how much of a public good you are in a sense yeah I think I actually

would separate those I think those are two sort of different ideas so the the one thing that again came from the Chris hasu episode was depending on where you are in relation to the base layer infrastructure of everything that we're building in crypto probably as a general rule of thumb the better it is to have decentralized governance the best two examples that I can point to there are ethereum and crypt and Bitcoin which are at the very base layer and that's where you start to get some of these benefits of decentralized governance this is basically the most compelling Pro in the decentralized governance Camp which is if the government decides that they don't like Bitcoin they can't haul up the CEO of Bitcoin and demand that they stop it it is a much more it's still possible to do but it's much more

difficult to stamp out and then you can kind of move one layer up and you can look at okay on top of these very base money protocols or you know smart contract layers then you have one layer above which is basic Financial infrastructure and that could be your compound so your aves that is somewhat more consumer facing but it's also still very base and foundational to like basic Financial functions so you probably don't want something that's necessarily as decentralized as Bitcoin or each governance but like you start to kind of layer up and ultimately at the top of that Stacks means very consumer facing that doesn't sit at the very base layer of infrastructure something like a game I don't know like games don't need to have super decentralized governance I

don't think I I think through the game it's like you're directing a movie you need like one person with a vision who can create a world like Tolkien or James Cameron even though I heard Avatar 2 kind of sucked but you need one person with a vision who can create that and it's not ultimately that important because if the game isn't good the game's not good it doesn't really matter whereas base layer Financial infrastructure is deeply important and foundational to how people live their lives so I think that's a real that was a really important Point let me let me ask you this now having done these seven seven interviews or seven episodes do you why does the base layer need to be more why like have have that slower governance feature and like be a Dao is it because it needs to be is like resilience the

key thing that you're fighting against there or fighting I think I think this is where the the vitalik paper that we also referenced earlier in the season concave decisions yeah there's like a couple there's like convex versus concave decisions I personally think that actually will get into this into a second but the maturity of an organization and then there's um you know censorship resistance which I think is kind of you ultimately want those things at the at the base layer of society to be not able to you know you don't want big centralized powers to be able to corrupt that and then there's also this idea of credible neutrality as well which is you want everyone to basically believe that it's operating in a fair way

like you don't want the things that you and I need and rely on to to be influenced by uh you know a small a small outsized group of people so that's why I sort of think that it's kind of like I actually thought this was a really apt analogy I've never heard anyone talk about but Halsey referenced this he when he brought up utility companies because you and I said well this doesn't really exist in Corporate America right absolutely not there's different layers of Regulation you can look at utility companies where utility company you and I need it dude totally inelastic good right where it doesn't really matter how much power costs I'm in negative 42 degree temperatures right now I'm gonna pay whatever it is right and the

government and Society writ large has said yeah I know that you would pay that but we don't want you to be able to charge that because ultimately like we all want power we all want to live our lives so the government literally steps in and said you know you are allowed to invest this much in capex as a utility and you're allowed to earn this much as a return on that capex and they regulate that and I think that's a there's going to be a similar decision that happens around the the more base layer infrastructure and I don't really know how that ends up getting addicted I think we all as a community have to make a decision for what we think is how do you tie together how do you tie together that thought that you just had Mike about the utility companies um and not act like the utility company

there is not maximizing the value that they could kind of pull out of society right how do you uh it reminds me of what Nick said which is like lower level infrastructure as public goods and he made this he had that statement right he's like I'm not maximizing value capture for the shareholders because it doesn't have anything so how do you mirror those two thoughts together okay so two big takeaways just to review is that we're generalizing a form of governance which applies to a very small subset of protocols to like all protocols and that that's creating tension then there's this idea of the way that we think about decentralized government governance popularly only applies to those base layer infrastructure type protocols

go the the next two fundamental tensions that I think came from this this series was one even in those cases where there's a big premium on immutability right like a premium on things not changing that still only applies to mature organizations whereas the vast majority of protocols endows today are immature so you're trying to apply a form of governance which makes sense at a very late stage of the organization to a very early stage organization that would be like with block works when we were six months old trying to basically adopt the governance of a full-scale public company you know where we have a board of directors and shareholders and they're all weighing in on decisions and realistically at that period of time you

know you and I were kind of driving a lot of the decisions and now we're decentralizing decision making even in Block works that's probably going to be the trend for hopefully block Works around for a long time but that'll be basically the trend so there's a big tension in between maturity of organization and the type of governance that people want to use second is this idea of public goods this one I don't have a great answer for you because the tension there is that Everyone likes the idea of a public good I want these things to just operate in a way that's free and provides a lot of value to me as a potential user but then most of these public goods have a token and they expect that token to go up and my point to you just would probably be that I

just don't see how those two things are necessarily compatible because right the token should go up because returns are being maximized right for the token holders right right it's like having a pub like uh if you think about public goods like a public park or something like you it's like public it would be like having a public park where you have to charge for entry or like you're there's a stock associated with the public park like those are directly at odds with each other or Street lighting like paying for the street it's directly at odds so right yeah so you know my sort of ultrasonical take on the way public goods are being uh are being touted right now is I do think a lot of these single play end up being public

goods but people are using like we asked we asked Nick this right well why do you have a token then he's like that's not a particularly good form it's not a particularly good end state right for public goods funding but there was a Mania in crypto and that Mania allowed us to fund a bunch of public goods basically because they issued the token people didn't question it they just bought it but eventually this is now playing out during the bear Market saying our heads are going to Prevail more probing questions are going to be asked protections are going to be demanded from investors they're going to want to understand hey I'm not buying this because so I have the right to make governance decisions here like there has to be something else that makes me buy this token and you know the good protocols will figure

that out and there'll be some sort of balance struck in between Returns on the token and public goodness basically you know what that reminds me of is I think it was either Larry or Derek brought this up on the second episode The reverie episode which is who your dad has to figure out who they're optimizing for right and a lot of optimizing for the wrong thing so and I think the point I think is maybe Larry brought up like token holders and users are often not the same person unlike this kind of original mental model that we had of like why are crypto networks valuable oh because it's like it really aligns the user and the and and the investor the user and the token holder that's actually that doesn't end up usually being true so someone like Nick at ens really has to think about

like are you optimizing for that token price here are you optimizing for the user and building up building the best platform possible yeah agreed yeah uh I also you know one of the other things while we're talking about that episode one of my favorite moments in the entire season was when we quoted from Wikipedia the definition of sabotage and Derek said that he had actually cut that printed that out and hung it above his desk at reverie which is so funny and I think one thing that thouser ultimately gonna have to fix is I think people who manage companies kind of know the game that everyone is playing at a high level is just trying to attack and attract and retain talent and right now Dows seem like they are

miserable to work for I the first half of the the season frankly was pretty negative we ended on a much more positive note but man it was really it was hostu's quote that summarized the first half of the season right Austin just saying after working with maker I don't want to work with a dow ever again or I will never work for Adele ever yeah because a players want to work with other people you want to solve problems so you don't want to be do inevitably some level of politics is is gonna happen at every organization but you don't want to spend the majority of your time navigating internal Politics as opposed to solving real problems so that's you know Dows are ultimately gonna have to fix that and I did unfortunately have a takeaway this season where I was like man I don't

really know how much I would want to get throw my hat in the ring for a lot of these a lot of these downs but I think there are there is there's definitely light at the end of the tunnel there's a lot of potential foreign yeah what did you think of okay so episode three it was Mika and treas I was not on that episode um but there was one thing when I I listened to it about like Dows are an extension of social networks that that thought made me think of um what Jules brought up about like trust layer or social layer and um I don't know I'm just I'm curious to that because that was the one episode I wasn't a part of with Mika and Trey so I'm curious if you had any takeaways from that episode specifically yeah I mean I think the basically I think that

episode sort of confirmed a a sort of mental model that I had for Taos which is one of the reasons I'm even though I understand there are so many problems with them I'm still very bullish it's kind of the Dows are sort of the continuation of this trend that's already been happening for a long period of time where you have Global workforces as opposed to localized workforces you have to be honest they're pros and cons to this but relationship between employers employees that feel much more transactional as opposed to long-term relationship based you know my grandpa worked for Wurlitzer from the day he graduated high school then they gave him a gold watch whatever at 50 years and then he retired from that com I mean that is a completely Antiquated concept

and I think Dows are just the most logical extension of that right it's even one more than from from gig work so and then the other thing is frankly that covid you know shown pretty harsh relief on is that you know where there's going to be some hybrid going to the future of in person versus uh not in person and I think dials are kind of optimized for that so I sort of came away from that episode you know thinking that dials with a logical extension of a trend that's already happened anyways and there's a lot of stuff that needs to be worked out in the interim and some pretty core foundational Concepts need to get questioned but I that's there an extension of what's already

happening in the sense that the world's already going global going remote going in right yeah right the one thing that were Dows maybe do something too soon there is so so I agree with that that's a good take is um like Jules brought up trust where we're social aware and like one thing Dows do is they try to codify everything real really early on and oftentimes because it's a bunch of Engineers right and Engineers like famously try to codify everything very very early um and like that's just I I don't think you can do that like when you think again when you think about block works if we try to codify things that we're working in 2018 by 2019 we would have to blow the place up and if we try to codify what happened in 2020 like that

wouldn't work today you know yeah it's so funny I you know one of our mutual friends who works pretty closely on Lido I remember him describing this to me about six months ago this idea that you're going to ossify you know certain parts of that of that protocol and that was going to be a huge advantage to something you couldn't do in the real world I remember thinking that's a negative yeah that it is a negative but at the same time in these last couple weeks I don't want to make this about something that it's not but I've been watching what elon's been doing with Twitter and to see it get proposed that Twitter was going to limit you know the mentions of other social platforms it was like that is such a radical

departure from the promise that Twitter made to its early users that I actually kind of do think putting something like that in stone could actually be an enormous benefit you literally can't do that in in any other oh that's interesting yeah I sort of I sort of am looking forward to see it oh so I I don't think so like I think decisions like that end up that that decision is going to get reversed because the Twitter will just really quickly realize that that was a bad decision and they'll just reverse it so it's like yeah I've got another one for you uh so Google like take a look at Google the product as it exists today unbelievable money printing machine right it's hard to really pick too many problems with that product I for a long

time have like started to feel like Google doesn't do a particularly good job for me anymore like when I Google something I basically get six ads right in the form of AdWords at the top and then I just get a bunch of SEO optimized blog posts and I for a while I've been feeling like actually I get a much better ironic I know I just picked on Twitter but I get a lot better and I've started to search things on Twitter because I get better answers than I do on Google like I started to sort of find Google it's helpful for using websites but it's not it had departed from originally the way it successfully competed against Yahoo is Yahoo wanted to be the internet and Google said no we actually just want to direct you to where you want to go on the internet and

ultimately like Google out competed Yahoo but then it became Yahoo in a way like you can see it with those amp sites you know when you click the first couple things you're not actually going off Google the platform you're staying on Google and I don't know if there are ways that where they could have ossified some of the core tenants of their promise yeah they would have had to find alternative ways to monetize I bet they probably could have figured that out I you know it's hard it's hard to put counter factuals here I disagree yeah I disagree I disagree like I uh okay so you're talking about okay so now on Google it's a crappy experience because they've got like five sponsored things that pop up yeah it's not that big you are in the severe like the I think hey you're in the like

severe minority that you go to somewhere like Twitter like most people don't go to Twitter the the other thing is uh it's just so much easier to use than like searching on Twitter if at some point that experience gets worse uh using to use Google than something else Google will change that so it's just letting the free market decide so like the first time I like I mean this is like this overhype thing at this point already like chat gbt uh I feel like like everyone's talking about obviously that's the first like I I've searched on Twitter I use Reddit all the time for search actually like I love Reddit for search it's still much craftier than Google though chat gbt was the first time you get like one really really concise answer but it's uh so like but

Google so Google Google will launch a chat gbt thing in in 2023 like I'm I'm sure of it because it's just a better product than Google so you let the free market decide just like Twitter's gonna let the free market decide about their bad decision yeah I it just scares me having built a not a big a huge company but like you know block works like it just scares me to put anything in stone that early on I hear you but honestly like let's be a little critical and be like okay is there anything that I would feel ossifying that I would be comfortable ossifying to the promises that we made to our customers I've got I actually have one I would ossify in If This Were possible to do uh that

we're going to continue to put out good content like that's a promise that we're going to keep to our the people that keep consuming block work stuff like I'll Pro I would go and just like promise that because if block works if we broke that promise I don't know we'd be I I would feel I think it would be such a different company at that point then I think that's a foundational foundational sort of thing so that's something that I would actually feel comfortable I'd I'd put my stake in the ground and I'd say yeah we are going to continue to crank out good content what I promise our business model is going to stay the same I'm not going to promise our business model where I promise that a certain amount of Revenue is going to come from here but I even promise that we're going

to continue to do events or I mean I I know my heart of hearts I will always do podcasts but like what I promise like the continuation of any specific product line no I wouldn't but I could promise good content creation and I actually think like like so to your point about Google Google doesn't seem like they're it doesn't seem like they're at risk right now but I as a user of Google I I've seen the quality of their product degrade it's because they have a monopoly and they're probably being extracted for that Monopoly at this point so you know it will I guess we'll have to check back in 10 years to see if they're still uh Top Dog and still and still winning or if ultimately there's been someone assumes the promise that Google broke which was I'm gonna help

users people find information in the best way uh you know that they want to find it where I don't feel like Google's doing that anymore but let's let's let's let's move past this um and and talk about because this sort of also does get into jules's discussion about trustwear versus social wear and again this kind of plays at that maturity versus a mature like an immature versus a mature company and immature companies like uh startups it makes sense to use social wear to bootstrap which is you have a couple people at the top and you have all these like so like social contracts and promises that you use to build trust in the beginning and get people rowing in the same direction and that's the quickest easiest way to do it that it

makes sense in the beginning over periods of time you know that that should be more sort of sentenced uh it should be harder to break those promises and that's what trustwear ultimately is I think issue is describing it and the example that she used was the governor contract right for voting right so you sort of enshrine this uh this sense of decentralization and this idea that you'll have a right in governance and if that's something that you can't break that's not a social thing that's uh it's coded in so I thought that was a really interesting idea hmm did we talk about multi-cigs on that podcast is a multi-siga would you say that a multi-sig is a trust or a social

work um probably more probably we didn't I don't think we discussed it but I'd probably put that more into trustwear I think that's a pretty good example like no so safe and what what they do you ever tried wrangling people though to sign a multi-sig because that's trustworth that's for sure anyway that's so sure let's talk about one of the other big conclu this was something that I actually frankly came into the season thinking I exited the season thinking totally opposite I've changed my view over the course of the Season which is the value of community we asked a couple of different uh a couple of different people this and I think it was Jules who actually came out with her flaming hot take said Community is Community the me

and my community is blaming hot take but yeah she said it was she said it was BS what did you think about that I mean I said it on the show I was like I agree that Community is but I think that there's something deeper than everyone says they want to build a community um this was when I went on that little rant about like I think there are I think communities are dime a dozen these days whereas communities used to it used to be like part of one or two communities right you used to be part of like I will get get into examples of old school communities because I think you made fun of me when I said that you know you're softball your softball league and your church uh you weren't happy with me with those examples so uh that's just funny to

those are the first two that popped into your head uh sorry continue yeah but like now now people are used to be part of two social or like two social communities now you're now people jump from a community they're part of three communities on on a Sunday and by by the next Saturday they're part of like six other communities and they drop the other ones right because when the going gets tough the tough get going with communities and so I would I would agree with Jules in that sense where I do think that um it's really valuable is like when you can somehow figure out how to build a cult around your brand which is like one layer deeper than community and um because that's when you basically like that's when you basically have this like die hard cohort of people who rally around your brand just because they love

your brand and I think the only way to do that is when your brand represents a bigger idea that's outside of your brand so that's what I think about community yeah I so I think there were basically the problem with Community for me is it's not a defined stakeholder and what I mean by that is like if you think about what the different sets of stakeholders are in corporate governance very clear well understood relationships there are the shareholders which are there the principals they're the owners of the company there are managers and they they're supposed to operate the company on behalf of the shareholders and then there's the board of directors which sort of sits in between and is supposed to look out and interface and make

important decisions on for the Opera for the managers on behalf of the the shareholders and I just don't understand where Community fits into that like what are their responsibilities right what are they supposed to get and what are they supposed to give in return it's just this weird nebulous mob that you sort of make yourself accountable to for some reason and it's unclear what you really get in exchange and I think that's my problem with them where I would maybe quibble with you a little bit is on the Colts thing is I don't know I I sort of think about communities as in like Cults have reflexivity right Bitcoin reflexive Tesla reflexive it's we're like playing this experiment out in real

time right like how good that is over a very long period of time I will say to maybe Counterpoint my own point there Apple's got a cult and they've been very long lasting and that's been great for them the the other way that I sort of think about Community though and this is where I want to transition to talking to like yield farming and incentives we had a really great conversation with Fernando and Chris about this but the the thing about community that I think would be really powerful and I can't tell if I'm just looking at something that's way too small of a use case but I'll give you the example of people that have created forums for Excel tricks right so yeah the the Microsoft Office Suite is probably the best most profitable software product in the history of

business maybe rivaling Bloomberg's product and probably better better and one of the big challenges right of selling this this software is Excel PowerPoint those are sort of difficult those are difficult right so you so Microsoft could have tried to do a bunch of trainings and I'm sure they probably did the bootstrap that in the early days but what they did sort of do was there's this online community if you Google like how to do this thing in Excel there's like a lot you get an enormous amount of responses right from just this Grassroots community of people who are there are these forums and there are even competitions and I think Microsoft sort of encourages this is actually an Excel competition every year which is pretty funny but so I think Microsoft kind of encourages it but

really it's this Grassroots Community thing which saves them an enormous amount of cost and complexity and that I feel like if you were able to combine that with token incentives in some way that would be extremely powerful but no one's really cracked that nut so I don't know that's that's what I think about community you want to hear something interesting about that Microsoft strategy though yeah they are they are changing their strategy and they're like they're uh no I mean it was a good example but they are buying up and or or launching their own they're either buying up or buying or or building their own for communities so for example like there are Microsoft conferences all over the world like big group you know Gatherings of like 10 000 people or it's a bunch of like Microsoft

power users they are now telling those groups we're going to launch our those conference businesses we're going to launch our own Microsoft events or or just sell to us so same same with the Excel groups I think that is a short I think that is short-sighted I understand why they're doing that no I think it's a poor decision I just think it's a bad decision like you and I've talked I mean one of the successful things that you can see happen in real time around like ethereum as a community for instance and Bitcoin they've it has spawned and indirectly created and encouraged these strong media evangelists right in the form of podcasts or Twitter people or whatever and it carries more weight because you know as a consumer of that

information that these people just love this product or this community or this idea or this set of values in this ethos that align with ethereum or Bitcoin and to have that directly come I think from like Microsoft and this totally Waters down the messaging and the heft and power of it I just think it is a as a poor decision I think short term good because I get it they're like vertically integrating but long-term bad in my opinion by the way first brand that I think is going to have this like cult following in crypto is um is lens lens protocol I think they represent like a bigger

idea than just something in crypto which I think yeah and honestly I used lens I do like the team so really annoying experience it was like not nearly as good as using web 2 social but yeah they have this like cult following of thousands of people who are gonna push this thing into into work so yeah I agree all right look let's talk about the the big the big conclusion from the Chris berninski Fernando episode was there was there was a there was an enormous amount there but you know we were just talking about community and we talked about yield farming because yield farming is one of the things that it was

it was a mechanism for getting tokens out into the hands of people it also I think ended up being a mechanism that encouraged some form of equity financing tokens could bootstrap the growth right of the protocol by giving out tokens slash equity in the in the protocol and uh yeah it was a very powerful growth mechanism that has there are enormous problems with that there was mercenary liquidity where people would just take the tokens say thanks very much and dump them and then remove their liquidity so it ended up not really doing that much good for the for the protocols and then also if you think about it they're just handing out tokens to people that are going to dump them on

the open market so it's consistent cell pressure on those tokens it's just a nightmare so they're reworking that Chris laid out what he what I've heard other people on on Twitter referred to as governance farming but basically that really what people wanted before was liquidity bootstrapping liquidity now the much more important thing for these protocols is actually people right getting labor actually to contribute to these protocols as opposed to just capital um did you I have I had some thoughts on that I mean we talked about it on the episode but yeah keep going my I'm really divided on that because I deeply believe in it but I see an enormous amount of problems the problem being yield farming for all the Flack that it got was very simple

and capital is very fungible it had the advantage that capitals fungible so when you're trying to attract Capital all capitals equal when you're out there just trying to attract labor labor is not equal it has to be compensated very differently and you have to underwrite that later labor that's what companies do and you need an enormous infrastructure to underwrite that labor to the point where it becomes effective so that's my question and what I start to see forming is Dows are basically at the stage where they're like hey we've got these grants protocols uh and we we've got delegate but people aren't making very good decisions we need a more professionalized set of delegates and they're going to be like we need more professional type of Labor and I just see that as like this weird

mix of like Consulting slash Professional Service businesses and guilds and I'm I like I'm not really sure what that end state looks like if you really play that out very forward because then it's like everyone's working basically for a glorified temp agency that's temping them out into these protocols and I don't know I'm just putting myself in the shoes of someone who's doing that and I'm like what the does anyone want to do this I this is the most talented people won't want to do that because I think the most talented people get passionate about building building something like being a part of something big not going and doing a 12-week Consulting project yeah but I mean geez you you do see that right in it's it's a it's kind of in the

Zeitgeist of like hey I want to contribute to multiple different projects and I want to you know consult around and have my flexibility and be able to travel so maybe it's not like but maybe it just ends up carving off a big portion of society where there are actually these people who are willing to make that trade-off right because you don't really build much Equity value doing that unless I guess you did tokens and you don't have that sense of like I'm taking something from zero to X but maybe you're willing to accept that as a trade-off and really what we get is these sets of guilds of professionalized Labor and they're the ones where that could play it out though like play that out okay someone does a 12-week Consulting project for someone and it goes Super well what do you try to do if

you are the person hiring that person you try to hire them full-time and that's like let's use let's use hostu as an example hasued kind of bounced around did some work with like three three protocols or doubts maker Lido and flashbots and then had a huge impact on flashbots really like working with that team so now he's basically like full-time at flashbots now I'm watching what's like happening and what people are saying and there are many things that frankly I see happening that I don't necessarily agree with there are just a couple more things I wanted to conclude on the the Chris and Fernando episode and then we can leave it you know he was talking about inside around like Insider rounds and the ability to like one of one of these one of the craziest things

remember we used to talk about this at one point it which in retrospect was a screaming Mark of the top was anyone can get capital capital is meaningless remember people used to say this right not 12 months ago right and and uh instead it's all about like differentiation XYZ and people if you view Capital as meaningless then VCS are basically predatory in that Paradigm whereas right now what people don't see you know is during a bear Market when valuations collapse and no one wants to spend VCS fund the companies so that they can keep going and Chris's point was like Hey guys those same people basically who are yelling that VCS don't add any value in our predatory are the same ones not

buying right now on the top next time yeah so and he made the point that it's cheaper to buy on the public market right now for for tokens than it is to do like traditional VC for crypto companies so I kind of agreed with him on that I was like that's a super Fair valid point yeah um and I say there's a non-vc funded company but I still see the value for sure you just say to someone who's behind the Bottom Buying the bottom baby behind the bottom um last point maybe this is a good point to even just end on for the wrap up is I had actually dropped for this but basically the value of just sticking around just because you and I got this advice early on from someone that we

didn't end up working with but it was really good advice and it was maybe you guys just have to stick around and make it and damn if that didn't end up being the best advice we've gotten from this is funny yeah Chris said it then I said it and then Fernando's like yep I got the same advice just stick it out stick it out yeah I mean that is that that is the big takeaway though with Dows what we see right now with Dao's treasury manage we didn't even talk about terun's episode treasury management the governance systems that exist this isn't how it's gonna look in a couple of years but you just gotta survive as a protocol play around with governance figure out what works what doesn't work lean into the stuff that works chop the bad stuff pretty quickly move on

this is V1 I totally agree I I actually left the season I'm really glad we ended on the episode with Nick because it left me feeling uh just overwhelmingly positive I think and it really was it was pulling teeth to get anyone get anything uh you know nice to say about even for people who I know believe in this stuff deeply but the end of the season is with Nick and yeah I guessed it maybe makes sense to give you a little a little bit of a teaser for for the next season well let me let me let me ask one last question on Daz and then let's talk about the next season more or less optimistic on Dows going after this season um

more optimistic but I think almost doing a lot of research and having these conversations and talking to these people you know how sometimes when you get closer to the problem it made you like whoa I understand this problem a lot more and there's more to be worried about I think I sort of feel a little bit like that and I maybe I'll Focus that in one very specific lens which is it has definitely changed how I look at the short-term prospects of like you need the token as an investment because I don't mean to pick on you to swap I think this applies to a lot of frankly the dapps that are out there right now we didn't really talk about the regulatory component at all but I don't want to get into this point here but they're all it sort of made me feel

differently about those as an investment opportunity frankly you could be dead wrong about this but I think there are some short-term headwinds for that to figure out in terms of the ultimate future of daos it made me feel super positive I would agree with that I think that's a good takeaway it's a fun fun season next season next season's gonna be really fun um want to give folks preview I do want to get folks so first of all just just a preview uh we're actually experimenting with guest hosts for specific Seasons basically this is Jason's very polite way of saying uh I've dude I've had way more than enough of you this is my Mike's way of kicking me off the show oh yeah like politely but it's like dude I

talked to you at all the time this is a step too far but we're bringing on a guest house and actually I don't want to announce this person's name because I don't have a final confirmation on it yet but it would be great because not only is he super knowledgeable about the topic he's also one of Jason my best friends from college actually that ended up getting into this space and it's now you know extremely deep in the weeds but really really intelligent and there's just no one that I'd rather be exploring this thesis with which is basically we're going to be digging all into the app change thesis and app chain thesis sort of starts obviously we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about Cosmos in general but the app chain thesis is actually bigger than I think just Cosmos they're just kind of leading

the at the Vanguard of it but we're going to be talking basically about really what we want to talk about is how blockchains scale what is the business model that underlines blockchains how are blockchains going to scale and what is the interaction ultimately going to be in between some of the dominant l1s today and I think you know that it hasn't fully been formatted yet but I think exploring the relationship in between specifically Cosmos and eth is ecosystems is going to play a big part in the coming season so it's gonna be super super interesting super super interesting it will be super duper super duper duper interesting yeah actually just if um Mike I saw you sent out this tweet but and I've been digging into the app I know I know you kicked me off as the co-host but uh what's up but

uh you had that you had that nice tweet about um like resources for app chains so if folks have like pieces that they've read or ideas or like questions that you want us to dig into in the next season related to app chains go uh go find Mike's tweet and like comment on that also I just want to say this is I mean this has been such a fun season but this would not be possible if it weren't for the sponsors and I know people always give the sponsors a big plug at the end or at the beginning but like I really genuinely it's been awesome having reserve and Avalanche underwrite the show um this is a podcast so obviously it's free but this would not be free and we won't even be doing this if it weren't for the sponsors and they made all this

content possible so just a huge amount of respect and love for uh to Avalanche and reserve for for supporting this and you guys if you guys haven't checked them out if you weren't enticed by our our enticing ads already you should definitely go check out reserve and Avalanche because it's been uh yeah they've been building some really cool stuff this year totally I agree yeah awesome guys well this is uh again been a fun season thanks again to Avalanche in reserve and um yeah we'll take a couple weeks off and see on the other side cheers guys [Music]