What a DAO is and how to structure one

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm what's up web3 academy i am jaybird it is the weekly doer spotlight as always joined by my co-host kyle read head what's up kai what's up friends i feel like i need a nickname like you do jaybird i just don't have it yet i'm experimenting with that with my my digital identity as well as person identity oh gosh we just we just said we weren't going to talk about it on this podcast today

super super stoked to have with us brian peters brian is the co-founder of sobel which actually spun out of consensus mesh which is their incubation and investment arm he was also an early bankless dow contributor part of season zero there he's a city dow core team member and contributor polygon dow genesis squad dow punk's nft early holder and instigator of their grant program uh brian is just like aware of many hats and an absolute enthusiast of decentralized work uh brian welcome to the show thanks so much for joining us today

yeah and jim thanks for uh thanks for having me on um yeah yeah i had a lot of fun particularly last year [Laughter] i got me a dow punk as well i didn't realize you were a part of that i got the t-shirt at home yeah i still got one i wanna i should claim before uh before the year's up but yeah yeah i think it was an excellent experiment sinjin and bushi did an awesome job yeah they did all right well let's uh let's begin as we always do brian we always like to start by uh asking what your rabbit hole story is how did you first fall down the rabbit hole uh what's uh take us back to the to the origins of uh you you getting

involved in web 3 and decentralized work yeah yeah so uh i mean i i i was pretty disillusioned during 2008 in the financial crisis and you know i i one of although i was an engineer in school um one of my favorite uh courses was macroeconomics an econ 101 course done by a really charismatic um prof and uh i just i became fascinated with it and in 2008 i was quite disillusioned that i'd heard about um bitcoin at that point in time in satoshi and the the white paper and uh you know i feel like that was one of

those you know moments in time where i missed something um and so that wasn't my rabbit hole moment but in many ways it possibly could have been there should have been um but uh but what it was was actually more around um work so less about money less about markets although that was something that i watched and was interested in and felt tension around but it was actually work because you know um that's a much more visceral experience you know what i spend my time doing um during the day and how i earn you know um my living um and provide and support my life and and my my family's lifestyle and and that that experience um was something that i was always kind

of chasing like how do i do this and meet those needs whilst actually having a good experience i'm a bit of a hedonist at heart um and i think that work shouldn't be this you know thing i do so that i can go and you know use my money to to purchase joy i i kind of want that that joy there and um and so i uh i started out you know in enterprise you know consulting um in the passenger rail industry that was very definitely not it um i then started to to chase it in the the silicon valley you know startup model um in the tech ecosystem in waterloo and you know i'm certain that was it right and it wasn't so much about ping pong tables you know i didn't need a

ping pong table at work to enjoy my work it was the fact that they were selling this scrappy fast agile flat non-hierarchical way of organizing and i was like yeah yeah that's it like we're we're going to take ideas and we're actually going to build those ideas and not shelve them or um you know use safety regulations as a reason you know it's a big thing in the rail industry a lot of innovation is compressed by like you know the code of federal regulations from some accident that happened you know at the turn of the century and so you know the innovation was really stuck and i was like oh it's gotta be over here and then i'm gonna have a great work experience because we're gonna be able to express our ideas and that it's not gonna be suppressed by industry and politics or um you know the airline

lobby shutting down uh uh you know high-speed rail innovation in the u.s or or these days like there's there's something happening here with the silicon valley model but like as it scaled and it hits you know sort of about 60 people and it's in that scale-up phase and you know definitely through to the 120 mark um as it's growing it starts to erode all of that brings in this managerial hierarchy and then we were starting to play these like really icky games it started to feel like as it as i became a manager i was having relationships and relationship dynamics with my peers with this power over you know almost like they literally used you know militaristic metaphors or parent-child metaphors and i'm like i'm not parenting my peers this feels

awkward and weird and gross and similarly i started to watch the social games i was playing in this power structure as it emerged um and uh how it suppressed you know good ideas and just squandered the money um and resources in the system as well as like the human potential and there's tons written about that but like i i i became pretty obsessed with like like how does that get better and so this is where my rabbit hole moment actually happens sorry for the ramble um and as i'm starting to you know look into this like first it was agile you know software teams and how they operate with a you know sort of more autonomous way of working um you know they have much more autonomy within the scrum to

make decisions and to carve out roles and then it was like okay well this isn't scaling like that's not what's happening up in the boardroom as i started to participate in that you know uh shenanigans um and so i was like okay so what's what's going on here so we're looking to scale that agile theory and organization i just become like a massive organizational um design nerd basically at this point i'm less engineering you know um technological things and more like you know trying to understand the architecture of teams so that it actually feels good and it's rather selfish my whole point on this and then you know it starts to catch limits of that and i'm like okay so i need to be an entrepreneur myself right because that's that's what's gonna you know remove this power over relationship then i start to recognize the

relationship that exists um you know with venture capital and i'm like starting to realize that the this this silicon valley media engine that sold me on the vision of what all this was that i was watching a road as it started to scale up is like there's something distorted and wrong about that like you know we're the mark as the innovator we're the one in ten in the portfolio who's all in and they're not all in on us we're one in ten we're a number to them you know uh what is weird and then the informational asymmetries and the same relationships existed there and the same games existed there was like oh money's the manager um and so you know that brought me full circle back um eventually uh as i'm looking into things

like holacracy sociocracy and like how do you how do you change all of this and like you know conscious capital or purpose-driven you know investing and like still the system is not designed quite right to solve for this and eventually um i stumbled upon across daos on the ethereum dot org um uh uh you know uh site had this page around daos and had like pseudo code of you know different ways to run a governance contract and you know ethereum bitcoin interesting you know that portion of me that knew that macro markets were kind of messy and not quite right um for um and squandering our human potential um you know the ethereum

was like oh this shapes work this changes how we work because it changes the entire value network not just you know a store of value and transactions it's like this this thing can make decisions about how we move together towards a mission or a purpose you know using funds and i was like that's that was mind-blowing and so that was my rabbit hole moment and it happened to coincide with um you know meeting uh uh joe lubin uh at consensus via um you know one of sobel's co-founders on the venture that i work on now who um you know don introduced us to joe and you know it's it's been a game of like what is a dao and

um how is this all going to like reshape everything and in particular how we work and how we collaborate how we coordinate and um that was that was the moment for me it's just like this this changes everything you've got to be the first one i think that's been on our show that dao was the thing that got you in yeah usually it's bitcoin or like i don't know nfts is very popular as well but dao i feel like this is the first one uh which is super cool i love it um i'm curious what daos were well two questions one what dials were around when you first saw this like was there ones that were actually like launched and like you went in and checked them out and we're learning from them and then two what is it about dao and maybe this is

the what is a dao you can go into but like what is it about the dao where you were like oh this is it this makes sense this changes everything like can you just walk us through sort of what that was yeah totally so no uh there weren't really any practical taos i mean the dao hack had happened recently i mean 2017 when i stumbled into the concept of dao's and so um so we had we had the promise of daoist we had the theory of dowse and we had a technology that made dao's possible so that they could yeah and so when i was looking at it to sort of the second part of your question and then i met joe and what consensus was doing was what i would classify as a proto-dow they they recognized the potential of the technology and we're

building the infra and they were doing a lot of what i've seen dows do in 2021 way back then which is like you know the tooling wasn't quite there yet it was even more so not quite there yet 2017 and consensus uh as the consensus mesh was trying to uh figure out how they socially organize like a dow while they wait for sort of as they were building the tooling that that matures the space into a dao i mean you know gnosis was a part of the portfolio bitcoin was a part of the portfolio like there's you know uh lots and lots of folks who were the identity place many of them came from that consensus portfolio initially it was a u-port but today it's you know all of these plays like ceramic and disco and many others are

are influenced or were a part of directly that you poor team and so i think you know there was there was a proto-dow happening there and that's why i was so excited about um you know going to consensus and being able to immersively get in to something that was you know seeing the potential of doubts um and uh and trying to build that whilst doing off chain the behavioral components as to the best of their abilities and that's messy that's what we've seen recently that's messy and that doesn't quite work so then that brings me to the second part of your question which is like what's what is the potential of a dao like why was i so excited it's because i had seen as part of my research and interest in like how you do scaled up agile or how you do this

holacracy sociocracy or how you like get more conscious um in your investing and the relationships with your investors as innovators and like you know get more decentralized behaviorally in how you move power and authority within your organization instead of concentrating it into these power over coercive relationships that are the managerial hierarchy um and as i was researching that i was like that always falls down um when you get closer and closer to the to the sort of the money and the flow of the money and the decisions related to that and that you know accidentally you know meaningfully or or not meaning to it starts to become kind of like the culture was declared and put on posters

on the wall but we couldn't actually enact it when like the rubber hit the road in the really really existentially threatening moment and i saw it even in some organizations that did so well socially you know with these you know these practices and protocols that were behaviorally reinforced um like the holocracy type movement and they they could hold on to it um until that like really strong monetary threat emerged and you know like the down market or something like this is actually half the consensus in the first phase of what they were doing right the down market of crypto winter emerges and implies enough of the threat that we have challenges allowing that distributed authority decision making we have a like a rapid you know

re-centralization and so what i loved about um the blockchain and particularly the ethereum smart contracts and what i was seeing there was like you can't break the rules even under that like existentially threatening situation if you've codified certain aspects of your power and decision making into these contracts um whether that's you know you did the right program or not you know one uh one token one vote we've had lots of discussions about how that can go wrong and the plutocracy and the takeovers getting it right is challenging but the fact that it's immutable um or or or the rules have to be followed if you want to change it um that i thought that was just

so magical and so underappreciated i think and i think that's the same magic that exists in terms of the the the ledger um and you know the innovation that was bitcoin um uh and and so i think yeah i think that that to me is like okay well certain threatening situation emerges and i can't all of a sudden grab control um and and erode what we declared was gonna happen because it was only reinforced socially like if i want to change that i have to go through the voting mechanic um i have to um you know make the change and the more and more stuff that goes on chain the i think the more reinforced and hardened that is and therefore it got back to this root of like what i saw was all about organizations like

organizations were great when we trusted one another and when a threatening situation emerged if we couldn't sustain that trust because we were afraid that somebody was just going to grab control because they could theoretically you know it didn't matter that they were you know a good person and they weren't going to do it the fact that they theoretically could would start to change the behaviors of the people in the system and we would we would start to not trust one another and it got so gross so fast and i think that's the dysfunction of all organizations and our work and like the magic of the of the smart contract as a means of governing the things that usually start to feel the most threatening like how is the money going to flow um and who gets to decide stuff around here particularly

the most important thing like me getting paid or not um or being able to participate or not um and so the more permissionless that became and where it's permission the more um auditable and you know immutable the the code that is that's that's running that that the more security i get may not be the ideal system but at least i can trust that it's going to behave the way i think it's going to it's very interesting to place the benefits of a dow in the lens of under stress i hadn't i hadn't even really thought about that that that is actually the why of dao's is that they thrive in those moments when as you said under

stress particularly financial is when organizations break down power gets centralized and that's when work sucks and bad decisions get made and people get fired or lose relationships or lose companies and those are the moments when actually code can help us so much by keeping it simple and reminding us of what actually matters which we at one point as an organization as a dow probably set and we're very intentional about it's very it's very interesting look at it from that lens i just want to come back to one thing you said because you mentioned the dow hack and i don't think a lot of people know about the dow hack i think that that is actually if you're an og you

know about that if you're around back in 2016 uh but i just want to touch on that quickly because i do think it's an interesting story is uh so the dow hack was back in 2016. i believe it was maker dao am i correct that it was maker dough to be honest it's it's yeah i don't think it was make her down it was no doubt it was just that now yeah okay that was the first dow made on ethereum yeah okay so it's the first elevator ethereum and they did a they they basically 150 million for from tokens right 150 million for tokens and then they were hacked and that hack led to i think a lot of bad media around daos which is why essentially there was like a dow winter

almost for a few years where nobody was wanting to get involved taos because there was so much bad press because of this hack and it also didn't also lead to the fork between ethereum and ethereum classic yeah yeah yes it did yeah it did so right yeah it did yeah because they made the decision to reverse history and they they effectively socially governed the the chain and so this thing that i'm saying is one of the most beautiful things about um a blockchain um is that uh in this in this particular case um yeah they the they came together um there is always a social component i think that's like the you know the the

the naive utopia is that like it'll all be coded um and it can't be changed but the problem is there is always a human element in the human layer and like in this particular case for better or for worse i'd argue you know hindsight 2020 for better they made the decision to reverse this out but it's also been sort of the thorn in their side in the sense that you know at the end of the day the validators um decide and so in a lot of cases it's not that the code starts to it's not like ai in the sense that like you code it and then it runs stuff um there is one of the cool things about crypto and you know is yes we encode it and therefore we can have a higher degree of trust in it but we we've encoded the rules and the rules

included that validators can fork and that's actually a feature not a bug you know that they can form consensus um or they can disagree and under disagreement they can't be coerced and so i think the other gift of this space is can be analyzed in this dow hack and the fork of ethereum and ethereum classic is because they made a decision socially the ballot sorry the not the um the miners um saying validators like it's already in 2023. september 19th baby september 19th that's right i'm already you know post merged here the miners effectively get to you know make a decision and those are those are effectively human governed still but

they have to play by the rules which is you know uh like the ethereum classic crew couldn't violently overtake you know ethereum is a minority you know they had to play by the rules and the rules were if you're really really disagreeing with this and you can we can't form consensus then we will fork and so they did and so i think this is another sort of important element relative to like what i like about dials and also the limits of dallas is that i don't think that dows stop some of the nasty horrible things that occur that make work suck for people you could make a dao that really really sucks um uh and you can have existential it's not like they're they're completely

um all dows are going to be able to be resilient in the face of existential threat and not have icky social things occur no we've seen already that like you know uh that that happens you know but i think what's what the fundamental difference is is that the we can't stop that from happening but we can stop people from you know um manipulating the system because you know i at least go into it eyes wide open i'm like you know if we fast forward to the future and you know there's a disagreement i understand as a minor on a chain that we theoretically could fork and that was designed as a mechanism um you know the idea of the mallet contract in daos as a

governance contract um you know has the right to exit in the form of a rage quit it's built in and i know that and this is the magic of it is i know that you know i can put my money in and we might form you know we might get icky with one another we may disagree but it is superior um to being like a limited partner who's investing by a traditional venture capital i give my money to the venture you know um group and they've got a general partner who manages the funds once i've deployed my funds in like i don't have the right to exit if i think that they're doing a bad job in the first few deals that they've done the mallet contract and the way it was used by groups like um uh the lao um as their early experimenters that you know

they're doing these investment things or meta cartel ventures they they the folks can come in with the money and you know get to know each other as they're doing deals and it's the limited partners who put the money in who are making the decisions about what deals we're going to do and if we don't like the direction it's going we can rage quit quit and you know if i went into that thinking that we were all going to go on like a good adventure together and it was going to work out um and then a bunch of people rage quit and we disagree and we have some icky emotional feelings about that with one another that still sucks on a sort of human emotions level but what doesn't suck is somebody didn't go and pull some sort of backwards maneuver to capture my funds you know even though they said they were

going to do something on paper they went and actually did something completely different we're now in like you know a protracted legal battle and i'm having to understand like emotionally i'm already a little bit burned by this experience that i'm having do i really want to embark on continuing that emotional journey on the emotional exhaust of like having to go through you know um uh a court based system and a legal system to try and you know deal with this situation it's like no no in this particular case i know that if this goes sour and we have icky moments i have still the right to remove my funds as for the rage quit thing and nobody's going to be able to like you know play with me and say oh yeah your check's coming soon no you check check's coming you know actually it's not coming

we've all decided that you know you you're a problem and so you know we found our lawyer found this little thing and then we decided we decided exactly you have no option exactly and so i think that you know i don't want to oversell the idea that is like it removes the icky things it's that right it removes the surprise icky things and the manipulative disgusting things that people do when there's a gray area in something and it's not just executing brian you've just um we've talked about a few different uh dows here already right we're kind of diving deep into the wheats here we've talked about you know the dao which was kind of an investment pool

right uh where everyone just put a bunch of money and then they were gonna go invest it we talked about like the ethereum protocol like from a from a like a blockchain standpoint and how like the miners is kind of forming a dao but then there's like we we brought up bankless dow which is neither of those it's not investment pool it's not a layer blockchain it's more of like a community that was kind of incentivized by a token they started building actual products they're more of like a business you could think of them than like an investment firm or a blockchain can you just step back and give us like the 101 of like how do we understand what a dao is for any of the listeners and then maybe talk about the different the different types of daos you've seen are like the different use cases of

dowels like why do we even need this like you've talked a lot about how you want things to be like a decentralized sort of hierarchy i guess um and so like let's just talk a little bit through like what what that provides like what benefits we have from that as well uh and then we can kind of i don't know we'll expand out from there yeah okay so this is uh uh yeah i mean this is an interesting one because this you know this this definition of a dow can be like heavily contested and like i don't have my boilerplate version like at my fingertips right now so i'm going to do my best gotta get it but you need to get it i'm gonna get it wrong here um you know because of the the question but i think you know the acronym right

decentralized autonomous organization and so um i think uh the decentralized component we've been discussing it you know i've talked about how effectively what drew me to daos is that decentralization because i was kind of sick of some of the silliness that was occurring by over centralizing power into the managerial hierarchy where the manager at the end of the day they can benevolently you know this is that that word empowerment that has become so distorted and disgusting is like i bestow power on to you but i can actually take it away at any moment um you know and that there aren't any rules that govern when i get to take it away i can just take it away so that that

centralization of that power despite the fact that they try to decentralize it benevolently every once in a while but can take it away when they want when you when you have a truly decentralized system or a more decentralized system the the that power is um is far more um decentralized uh you know definition distributed word but whatever yeah yeah and so you know as it's um as it is uh is more decentralized this is why they talk about you know the minor pools right because it's a form of centralization relative to the root layer you know settlement that is the chain so you know they talk about what you know how uh you know how where are the geographic

concentrations and the economic concentrations like these you know publicly traded minor pools for things like you know bitcoin it's like you know is is the network being captured subtly or re-centralized subtly um in that way and so i feel like yeah decentralization is really important because um i believe that uh in this d by decentralizing we actually can get better decisions now there are a lot of reasons why that may actually not be true but i think that's just more on the governance mechanics when we when we hyper centralize we might be able to move fast but we aren't resilient and i will trade you know resiliency for moving fast and i think that when there's the opportunity for um more um voice to be

heard and contribute to making a decision that we are likely to make a better decision it's the trade-offs are basically um for you know that speed um and resiliency thing and so i think yeah decentralized autonomous organizations have swung more towards decentralization but that doesn't mean that centralization is bad it's it's strategically used at various points in time and it's just bad when it becomes calcified that's the managerial hierarchy's bad because it's slow moving like you appoint a manager but like it's actually kind of difficult to like demote fire um etc and so there's friction in the system reorienting or adjusting to the to the environment so that's where decentralization i think scores some points the next one is autonomy um we autonomous and now a lot of people talk about this one and this

is probably one of the more contested ones in the definition of what is a dao is like i believe a dao is more about the um uh this stuff we've been talking about in terms of like um i have the ability to operate with my own free will inside the rules and so i have autonomy the dow itself has autonomy because it it it's pretty much designed to in many ways and this is you know creating tons of friction in the world it's in many ways capable of operating regardless of what a state nation says about it um and so now trying to understand how it merges into this regulatory environment well it's like it's kind of designed to be orthogonal to it it's supposed to be autonomous it's capable of operating even if somebody says it shouldn't be because

it's you know the substrate that it's using is is pretty uninterruptable and so that autonomy i think starts you know at that base layer but it flows all the way through you know i have the autonomy to ragequit you know um i have the autonomy to choose to do this bounty or not um within a doubt um i have the autonomy to decide to quit i have the autonomy to decide to join like there's a as a sub unit in a dow often the treasury moves from one gnosis safe to another it's like moving the funds imagine if you're like team at work you know which is like some functional unit um or scrum team actually had its own bank account and the funds moved and they won't move back once you have them you're working them that's what happens

in the dow and that that's another form of autonomy and so there's tons and tons of forms of autonomy and that autonomous nature of a doubt and i think some people take this autonomous and think that it's more about the fact that the dao runs the code and the code is law and like it that it's like automated you know a bit more um and i don't know like sure blur that in there if you wish i think that's another superpower of daos and might be mixed in with that autonomous component you know it like the code runs um and uh you know so that if this vote passes you know like a more you know those who are more using the a and the autonomous in this nature will say oh as soon as this vote passes if it's wired up to actually deploy something you know

um on chain and that's uninterruptable or doesn't have human signers you know between the vote and the and the execution um that that that they'd like to think of that as like a more enhanced you know autonomous component of dao so i don't know i see some debate there it's basically do you have the autonomy to act within the rules or are the rules self-executing blur those two together and you're getting a beautiful a in the middle of the daf so decentralized autonomous and then organization's pretty straightforward it's like you know we're we're using these mechanisms um in this decentralization and autonomy not to do d5 you know not to you know um have immutable transactions um we're using this to create a human organization that can do anything that human organizations try to do

very very good uh explanation by the way i really like definition you did great yeah we'll record that yeah we actually are recording that we're gonna we're gonna cut it for you and give it back to you and now you have your boilerplate yeah let's talk about the organization side of things you talk a lot about hierarchy um and if you've been in dallas now i mean the whole idea is like you said decentralize it don't have this hierarchy anymore where you have the managers or the leaders up top and all that kind of stuff yet i noticed in a lot of dows we still sort of have that now not necessarily because like you said there are things where power is distributed and you can't you can't take that power back because it's written in the code right whether that's via nft or a token or whatever so that is cool but

i do find in the in the way that people work in dows especially in larger dials there's still sort of a hierarchy so um is that the way that it should be or like how do you how would you organize or structure a dao in terms of like is there hierarchy is there not hierarchy what do you think is the best way to actually be able to get done but keep it sort of decentralized like you're saying like what do you think is the best sort of setup here if there is one so yeah yeah i mean i i love this question and um yeah i think i pick on traditional hierarchies um in the managerial hierarchy and i label it as such either a traditional or traditional corporate you know managerial hierarchy

and the reason is because i don't think hierarchies are bad i think that that is an inferior form of hierarchy um and it's an over centralized form of hierarchy and it's extremely calcified it doesn't it's not very dynamic it doesn't change and so i've been picking on those things along the way and that that is very you know purposeful i think dao's will have many hierarchies and i think that they will be very dynamic if the dow is sensing and responding correctly to you know what they're trying to achieve and how the you know the markets external to them or the forces external to the dow um wherever that boundary is uh that if they're not adjusting to that um then then that's the problem it's not that hierarchy hierarchies are natural um but they're it's weird and unnatural to hyper

centralize them um and uh and and try to draw a traditional org chart we love it our brains love the simplicity of it but it's like linearizing a non-linear thing like you know feels better when we linearize it um or it feels better when we fit something to a gaussian curve you know and do a mean distribution on it but it doesn't mean it's correct um and it i believe that a traditional hierarchy um functions as a simplification that was good enough under some circumstances and maybe is still good enough under some circumstances um uh it was invented um because you know it was required and so i would argue that daos are are rediscovering that anyone who declares

always is flat you know got stuck on a monolithic governance you know and they get made fun of in in the you know mainstream media or even within the conference circuit you know where we joke about ridiculous proposals being voted on by all token holders you know like should the color be red or blue kind of thing and we immediately look at these types of scenarios and think that seems silly you know and well if you truly remain flat that is the silliness that ensues and so i think really functional downs actually start to naturally create hierarchy so they have this simple mechanic of like everybody gets to vote on things and the very first things they start to vote on typically is spawning their structure they they start to create hierarchy

naturally because they start to try and do stuff people propose to do stuff they get funds funds being distributed into an autonomously controlled you know wallet um in the form of a gnosis safe or a multi-sig you've immediately spawned structure that unit now has autonomy and it exists and it is doing something different um on its own that is in service to this thing um that we all are beholden to but is separate and different and and that is you know starting to produce structure um you know and i think but what's what's neat about that is that it's dynamic another form of structure that can exist is if you have a delegation um mechanism in your governance you know they have the more liquid democracies like uh um bitcoin and their stewards or many of the recent

air drops being ems et cetera they you have the ability to delegate the tokens and stewards who would then participate in governance you have effectively now created a naturally forming you know hierarchy the stewards get to make decisions and i move my tokens but i have the right to revoke my token so i still have that autonomy in the system um and that that you know that that's very real um so i think yeah but i think hierarchies naturally emerge and and so what's more important is that the we don't get stuck with something that is incorrect relative to the mission or the purpose of the dow um and uh so we might centralize into a grants committee you can see dows do this as well another mechanism of centralization to be

functional is like oh we want things to go faster we want to make some quick investment decisions so we're going to create like a scouting or a grants committee or something like that and we're going to elect the people into that and they will have a term um so therefore it's not static you know they're not definitely you know sort of elected um and uh or until we fire them and run a proposal to fire them it's less calcified than a traditional managerial hierarchy and then they have you know the ability to make these decisions um and then we'll reevaluate whether those were you know whether first of all those were the right people and second of all was that the right structure for us making decisions where we've arrived at now and in many daos you start to recognize oh okay and so it's really about this evolution of the

hierarchy and there being lots of different hierarchies and then being emergent um in nature whether it's even down more at the micro level because i've been concentrating more on the hierarchies and how they merge at the net like a macro level of a dollar or the root of the organization but like even within a pod scrum you know guild whatever you want to call it work stream project uh it's it's better when there's a naturally emerging you know sort of hierarchy there and that often comes in the form of role crafting um and you know first people start doing stuff and we just coordinate you know which is like a peer-based remuneration or we you know retroactively air drop like that's a pattern in dallas but once but structure does naturally start to emerge and we start to go oh okay well you know this

is actually like you're doing this role and you're doing this role and we start to form agreements around that and we start to harden that structure a little bit whether it's through you know elections role appointments or um you know a mechanism for you do some bounties and then you're a part of this team and then you can be you you earn this role of team membership and like i think dows are just starting to understand okay this stuff is supposed to come back in but it's supposed to come in naturally and it's supposed to be dynamic and be capable of responding um to problems and change um so i i think hierarchies and taos uh are going to be a thing and we're just like in the early phases of figuring that out because most owls are like have barely gotten past the hey let's pull a bunch

of capital on this really cool new thing make some decisions to distribute it and then they like spawn structure and they're like oh what is this thing what do we do [Laughter] you mentioned a couple a couple things i want to touch on bounty and compensation and a doubt i think are big topics but before we do i just want a context set here and i'm curious if you know a number how many people do you think are involved in dao's right now do you have any any number on that any estimate i've never seen anybody take a guess i'm just curious and and then i think where i'm curious is like where do you see that going do you see a world where we all work in daos uh will we work in one

dow will we work in many daos uh just curious to know like yeah context and then maybe like where where you see this whole thing going and then we'll get back more into like the tactical side yeah okay i love this i have no clue how many people are in dallas and you've got me curious because i i recently saw some stats around like nfts like you know the number of wallets that you know unique wallets that hold an nft you know stat and i did you know world population relative to that stat um and came back with like whoa it is like a fraction of a percent so small and and it was like this this was like one of my like numbers for early and i think dao's would be just as astonishing if not more so because i think nft's got

substantially more attraction in this cycle than daos did i think dao's were a product of you know the nft thing there's a strong interrelationship there of like we start with an nft drop and then all of a sudden we congregated socially and we were like what do we have to do with it and let's down you know i i just looked up oh i just looked up the a16z report on state of crypto i knew they had some numbers on dows here's this doesn't give us the number you look for but active voters in proposal makers all time is 657 000 now that's wall addresses that have voted or made a proposal so like who knows you can have multiple wallets obviously inside of a one dow or multiple dowels so i got three or four

yeah exactly so like let's say a few hundred thousand max so far if that honestly that's probably stretching it so so there you go so that the number is really really uh really really small i think i think the other one the question that i that i heard in there was like okay so like fast forward to the future you know is it all daos and like that's an interesting one i think i think yes but not in the way we think so um i think i think that uh i think that basically we're what we're doing now is uh is basically figuring out how to remix

everything that we've played with previously um in terms of like governance and value networks and that dao and the acronym and these games that we're playing and the new patterns we're playing with right now and how we're mashing up things we used to do um with with these new technologies like we're in the early phases of just discovering how these technologies influence our coordination collaboration um uh and work general work compensation etc related behaviors decision making behaviors etc and so like we're refactoring all of that and i think you know first of all i think the acronym dies um

at some point i think that yes all work starts to use these mechanisms in the same way that the internet kind of create the world and we don't really talk about it as the internet you know every once in a while we pause and say it was the internet that ate the world you know but really what was happening in the early phases of the internet is kind of instructive i think to what might be happening right now in the early faces of the internet we were recognizing that most of the things that were done on paper you know because it was mostly about information you know the that was the the technological um you know uh you know revolution there was information based and i think the one that's happening right now is more like value um network based so those were the information networks and like

what's gonna happen when you totally refactor the information networks like the telegram did way back in the last major change then the other one was the steam engine and i think the blockchain is synonymous with steam engine some people like to use that kind of analogy but like i think if we look back at that and say okay well if that's what that was the information transformation then you know in the early days of the internet what we did was we digitized our paper practices and it was kind of like web 1.0 was like we did this thing on paper and so now i'm going to have a blog or a zine you know um and so uh i'm going to i'm going to do the thing on the website i will have my storefront you know on my website you know in the

late 90s it was like okay how do i move all my brick and mortar into this storefront and we over compensate too because there's some things that should maintain a storefront when we watch what like you know appa apple you know has done with their you know sort of uh their experiences and physical locations and you know their digital like you know extremely digital company still has a storefront why you know um and uh and and so i think i think that that same thing is occurring and then we fast forward you know and we start to like play with like remixing things we start messing with like how we um how we work with information and what we can do with this and you know and i think we and we start to move away from websites looking particularly like the

b2b ones in the really early days we're just like the paperwork processes of the office um you know digitized and then we watch these things become something completely different like you know what salesforce did uh you know to to the uh to the sales process and and the marketing automation systems that plugged into that it was like that is so substantially different than like you know what it meant to maintain your paper rolodex um and your your customer relations you know um bookkeeping that you would do and um and so i think but it took them a long time to get there and the interfaces you know shifted and they became more about you know solving the problem and less about just like you know digitizing the paper process and i think daos are in

this phase where we're like digitizing prior work behaviors you know using smart contracts and these governance mechanics we're just like we're borrowing from like past patterns in like organizations whether it's from like some of the more interesting ones that are under explored like holacracy sociocracy but like what would happen when you add smart contracts to that um as well as like you know historical patterns of like governance and like maybe accidentally like rediscovering some of the things that maybe the um uh those who were you know the founders of state nations in their current form um might have come to understand over time uh organically like we're maybe rediscovering some of that and then we're also playing with things like if

you look at glenn whale um uh and radical markets um you know they're looking at things that were hypothetical i think dows are also really good at this they're like good at starting to create experiments around things that we thought were interesting wrote some papers about but never actually found a test bed for because there was too much friction relative to the existing system that you couldn't try and launch that test you know in your local government and but you can launch it um inside of dao you know that says hey let's go buy a constitution it's delightfully adjacent right to this storyline but i think honestly if we fast forward all the way to you know to conclude on this question is is that it just it eats the way we work and it's

some crazy mashup of under explored experiments in governance and economics and work behavior psychology you know sort of stuff um totally mashed up with you know some of the lindy you know things that have really stuck over time because they were good innovations that we need to build upon but digitize and we'll find that balance point um with all the experimentation as long as the experimentation is not limited um uh in these early to mid phases then i believe that you know similar to the internet you end up with like something on the other side where it's like oh that's just work that's just that's just how i go to work that's just

how that's just governance that's just how we make decisions and you know the fact that it's over top of you know these protocols that we like to talk a lot about today and proof of stake versus proof of work and like you know um etc etc or these primitives like you know wallets and multi-cigs and like we're we're way too low level and yeah this stuff gets so abstracted it's like this is how i go to work you used to work like that that's so weird you used to go into the office and write things on paper [Laughter] and you mean like you had to give two weeks notice you weren't really sure whether uh oh and they could fire you and you weren't

really sure if they were going to honor their agreements um about you know severance and like you know they paid you in paper why did they give you paper what did you do with the paper yeah wait a second so there was this guy in the middle when you were buying a house it's gonna be hilarious to think back on the future to be honest um but question what do you think like right now as you said dows are very new and until we get to the point where we're like yeah it's so obvious that we're all going to work endows we won't even call them that like what are the challenges in the way right now like what are we not doing right or what are the things we need to fix now you've built a company sobel around fixing a problem in in um in the dao

space part of dow tooling so maybe you could talk about like what that problem you solved there or attempting to solve uh and then maybe just touch on what other problems or challenges are we facing in this space right now yeah i think i think the one i'm pretty passionate about is like usability accessibility um so we need more people experimenting you know we need more dowels um we need more people with ideas coming in um and and thinking of a new remix or mash up um and so we actually have to like decentralize that and and so uh because right now uh the barriers to entry are pretty high and uh

one of the challenges with usability um is that it is a path often to centralization um and capture um you know one of the beautiful things about web2 is that they are extremely usable um the experience is extremely tuned and it's because they've sort of hyper-centralized certain things to control that experience and um so i think the challenge that we're facing right now particularly in dow's and dow tooling stacks is that there's one heck of a hurdle to get you know get involved um the hurdles that we used to talk about in terms of usability have been compounded like the original hurdles back in 2017 that we were talking about like is it's too hard to figure out how to buy your tokens move

them you know get a wallet you know what is this seed phrase thing um you know and so that's now been compounded by all the protocols related to work and decision making and compensation that are existing in dallas and you know just a part of normal operations of a doubt like we talk about this onboarding challenge and really what i think it comes back to is the the usability of things and so uh i would like to see consolidated experiences that do not sacrifice um on the autonomy of the dow tooling stack that is one of the fundamental problems of like b2b tools you know it's centralized around you know workday sales force suite you know these are you know

netsuite um you know on the crm sorry on the erp side and they just basically through m a you know brought everything under their marketplace you know and so the way they what they provided was like a one-stop shop and a an interface if i go as a salesperson from one location to the next i now have a ubiquitous experience and i can transition easily and so we need to get there without doing what they did to get there and so one one of the things i'm really passionate about with sobel is how do we create that beautiful experience of a consolidated sort of like map of your dao especially because we talk about all of these things too like daos are messy in the sense that they have these very organic and emerging hierarchies that are constantly changing

through the governance systems and as these you know they as the dow scales up it actually becomes more and more complex so sobel's first thing that we you know concentrated on was like we need a visual map people are visual and like discord channels as your organ chart um or you know somebody who's benevolently drawing circles and figma um to show what the org structure has become is not a sustainable approach to really scaling up doubts and so sobel first trick was to concentrate on creating a visual map with the least amount um of overhead to maintain that map because it's rapidly changing and if it becomes bankrupt it's like you know those those wikis sites you know where someone was dumping great information that's useless

three months from now it's like you know not maintained and so silva works first on that problem but the second is like you know discovering the dow tooling and wiring it up there are amazing things similar to what happened in d5 there was this composability of like i can use all these different things in these legos in interesting ways and really helpful solutions emerged in the d5 space like uh zapper xerion um where they have a consolidated dashboard um that is a view into your total portfolio by just like connecting your wallet or multiple wallets into a bundle and i can see everything that's going on in my portfolio and it's my first landing spot and zapper also has the ability to discover things like bridging

um swapping in their interface but they're actually you know using the composability of you know sort of the underlying protocols like one inch unit swap hop protocol etc and so i think something similar has to happen in the dow space because now it's like quite usable it's like that is a that is a uh i don't have a million tabs open trying to understand what's going on um or a crummy interface in the primitive thing that is my wallet which is primitive for the reasons of security like my metamask and my gnosis safe multisig should look a little bit like i'm a pseudo-reading code because it's a it's a it's a secure it's an environment where like what what i'm seeing here is what's going to execute it hasn't been abstracted and i don't have to trust them but layers of abstraction are super helpful

in terms of accessibility and so sobo's also working on this idea of like how do you how do you discover these things and wire them up um and an example would be like hey you want to spawn a team what if you were able to create a proposal route it to the correct governance mechanic because there might be multiple in place request funding um if the proposal is successful the funding comes in and instantiates a gnosis safe um for that sub team and so now they have their own gnosis safe and who the signers are going to be was a part of the proposal um you know maybe that that they were going to have a red share agreement on that that was the agreement they were forming with the dao as they built up this new project was like hey whatever we're able to earn you know in the future on this

will come to this contract that address will be split by the xerox splits protocol automatically back to the dao and some of the early wallet addresses that were participating as per the agreement and like you you start to need some sort of consolidated front-end interface i think for dow tooling stacks you know oh and there's going to be these roles and these roles are going to receive these nft hats that denote that these roles exist and that they're holders so they're going to use hats protocol to do a somewhat soul bound token for that um or maybe it's a did then a verifiable claim like you can start to see that dow tooling is sort of maturing a lot of primitives and technologies but there isn't like an interface there like there is you know for d5 and so sobel would really like to

be that visual map of what's going on and a place where you can more easily discover and quickly wire up um the changes that you'd like to make to it leveraging all the awesomeness of these protocols and for a new dow participant this is a place to discover what's going on and start to participate it in at first an abstract fairly usable way and then as you go deeper into sort of specialist roles within the dow you might actually want to spend more time inside your parcel hq or utopia interface if you're a part of the finance guild but if you're you know uh just uh someone who uh wants to request um being able to participate in this role and therefore receive the recurring compensation that's coming from say

utopia they really just want to be in an interface where they see the role see what the role would be comped if they think apply and then if they're given the role uh they know that the compensation is going to run and they never really had to open another tab and learn a new tool or put a request in you know to a nosy state for for a transaction or which we can't do if you're not a signer and like you know there's just there's just so much there um and that burden also exists for the people who are in those deeper positions the specialist positions they're running around they're the automation layer endows a lot in a lot of the case right now and so sobel sees that it sees these these folks who are like exporting the csv um from the you know uh from the coordinate

results um and then tuning up things and then putting them through uh the gnosis a csv airdrop transaction so that you can do a multi-send um and then they're all like pinging each other on discord like it's time to sign or if they're trying to do a swap as you know treasury managers they're there's very early days in that regard and there's these like you know these hero roles of like uh doubt deep down operators um who are doing the legwork of gluing this stuff together and i think that um sobel's vision is that you know we can see what's going on and we can automate more of this and we can do it in a way where we don't take away the sovereignty of the dow tooling stack and re replicate the mistakes of the dow in a box we're

totally destroyed the the beautiful decentralized autonomous vibrant stack of you know dow tooling legos that we should see if we do this right so is it is it meant to be just to kind of summarize i guess it's meant to be the home page of the dow essentially it's like you come into the dow and you go into this page and now you can see what proposals are there what you know voting that you need to do and what is going on with the treasury and who's in what guild and it's like everything you need in this dial right now we you have some really cool tools that we're using for all the different dowels we actually have this problem right now we just uh are launching in the process of launching web through academy dao with that with our community and we have all

these tools and it's like to find these tools it's like going to notion go to that discord channel that says like you know important links and it's just like it's crazy and so sobel's trying to be like that that home page i guess but then another layer it's also trying to automate a lot of the things and connect them all together so that it's not just hey here's where you find the things it's actually doing a lot of things for you as well is that correct yeah yeah you got it because in order to be that map of what's going on um you have to be aware of the change and so some of that you can just like read um from connecting you know um to sdks or the blockchain itself and reading the data and and and monitor the change but um yeah i think it's also best if we

provide that service of making it easier to wire this up so that you don't have to be like you know hardcore dev um to to do it uh and and uh and in the as a part of that the benefit is is that that also keeps the map up to date because if you're proposing a new unit um uh and and instantiating its its gnosis and you know um any of the other stuff like the compensation model for that new unit as it's spinning up and being funded um yeah if we can make that easier but also capture the change as it's happening we're reducing the overhead of maintaining these maps these maps we understand the value of them and some people go out there you know and are like the the wikipedia um you know uh one percenters who are maintaining that

thing and same thing's happening in taos in terms of knowledge um but i think you know at sobel we want to make that easier for them and get in line to the change and get things more automated so you finally get this yeah like home page for dialops or your dow operational hub i love it i have two questions for you first actually before i even ask these questions i love the comparison to zapper that's there's april whatever it is that's the that's the best way that was oh that clicked for me because like that is your defy or your like your your money kind of home page we can see it all and i didn't realize you're like yeah we do need that for a dao of course there's so many tools and we need something that kind of aggregates it all in sorts at all so question for you for

new dows or new people who want to enter daoz a lot of our audience is this right they want to be a part of a dow they're trying to learn web3 so two questions one um what's your advice to someone who wants to enter a dow right is looking down to her dad like what advice should they have as they're getting started what should they be thinking about what should they be doing if you have any advice specific to someone who's joining in new dao it's a very especially if it's a bigger doubt it can be very um overwhelming so uh for some people that's very difficult so anyway just looking for some advice there and then two you mentioned so many tools as you were explaining here what sobel does maybe give us your like top whatever but like if you're a dao what are the must

have tools that you found anyway that can like really help you you know organize or get done inside of a dalek what are the big ones that you've you've seen or that you use yeah oh okay so uh for getting started um yeah these are great questions um and uh for getting started i would say uh there's kind of like two phases to getting started and people talk about the first phase a lot like with the friction of coming in and it being like really chaotic and you're like struggling to discover like how to contribute and you're kind of feeling disoriented if you're not somebody who's a gamer who hasn't participated in a social platform like discord um you know trying to navigate discord um or some random out of date you know notion page

that you know describes how to join the dao and that's not actually how you join the dow now when you find out when you jump into the discord so like persevering through that and bravely crashing meetings um you know is is really important so just recognize that that will be uncomfortable prepare for it up front and therefore pick a dow that the passion that you have for what mission they're on will will be strong enough to pull you past that hurdle um because just it's not gonna it's not great and some are better than others and they have techniques to do this um but yeah and then also double check so one the mission right it'll be strong enough to pull you past that um and prepare for it and then two um

is double check that like you know it's that passion likely will align to a skill that you have in some way you know and the more generalized the dial the better because you have a better shot at trying to find it this is why bankless um or most social media-oriented dows like bankless um education-oriented you know never-ending hack-a-thon like these very very broad um mission dows like bankless are great starting points for a lot of folks because you're sure to find something um somewhere in there that matches your skills and passions um and so that's often also pick one that uh either do your research that you've been passionate enough that you're gonna find something and overcome that hurdle or you pick one where you like probability is you'll

find something like a real broad doubt like bank list second part though is like watch out for the addiction on the other side um there's nobody you know creating balance for you and so once you get over that hurdle you had to work for it so much you had a bit of fomo leading into it that once you once you pick up on the other side you you will start to feel like all in and so those are you know folks who are participating in dao start to talk about the the the imbalance um the work life balance the mental health these things are real um they exist in any form of work but i think you know the frenetic fast-moving nature of dowse and the fact that they're always on there's no managers to tell you to slow

down and you're actually just having to manage your own emotions relative to your work um and find your own pace um just check in on that as you're going because i think the common story is i had to work so hard for this to get in and i'm so blinking excited about what i'm doing and so enthusiastic in a way that i haven't been before when that when that success hits that you you can be drawn too deeply and so watch for that um uh and yeah i think in terms of tools uh i'm a i'm a big fan of of the simple start like i do i do i've met rattle off some of the more advanced ones and some of the emerging ones like hats protocol and uh you know there's you know disco etc but the

i think the really basic stack um that can progress quite nicely is the you know sort of snapshot gnosis safe combo and the rest is kind of mostly social drop an nft you know when you're just getting started and then i think uh as uh as it starts to layer up there's beautiful ways to graduate that you can start to add in well first of all more notices say so the thing can kind of spiral outwards as you structure up um you can start to automate things more using the zodiac um the gnosis guild zodiac that is an under appreciated tool that i wish was easier to just you know discover and get get using because it can start to um make it such that the snapshot votes are automatically executing and you

don't have to have the signers in the loop uh to because one of the challenges you'll start to run into is is you know getting the signers together to you know have timely transactions occur um and so that starts to put more automation into the daf stack um i think that starting you know initially with something like coordinate because a lot of what you're doing is very uncertain in the early days and so having a retro a period of time where you're retroactively in small teams coordinating really large crews is fairly gameable doesn't work starts to become more of a popularity contest but these peer-based remuneration of giving each other tokens and then that's settling up a pro-rated like you know payroll that you're going to run i think that's a great way to get started when you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty um bounties are another you know great

onboarding trick so using tools like dework or um clarity uh for these types of things uh to just get some clear work and work structure up and going as a dow when you're starting these are sort of like this would be sort of my starter stack and then um it starts to get more advanced from there um you know maybe checking out dao house and the mallet contract there's some unique gifts to the mallet contract um you know out of the gate um in comparison to the very open free form um you know a snapshot gnosis combo and then yeah there's lots of great stuff after that like payroll um and enhancing automation there i think you know what parcel and utopia are doing and other ones that i mentioned they're effectively like nice sort of like

finance payroll automation tools that sit over top of your gnosis safe so again you can graduate like we were gnosis safe and we were signers and we were doing csv imports to run distributions well now we can start to have a tool that feels a little more like um defining wallets and putting recurring payments on those wallets or recurring payments from the main route treasury down into the um to the various guilds which are kind of like their seasonal um or you know the seasonally agreed to monthly amounts that they're going to receive and you can start to trickle in versus lump summing and you know there's there's lots of stuff that you can start to layer and there's more and more arriving i mean like what orca protocol is doing um with their pods you know is a neat um you know method of extending that

sort of gnosis uh the gnosis you know safe multi-sig um sorry i keep saying noise is safe but they're technically safe now i think yeah they rebranded it they rebranded this kind of spun out of it so but yeah anyways that's that's my my uh my advice is to start simple and kind of layer up and you know if you pick the right ones off the top they they are composable and they layer up versus like the the dow in a box solutions i personally would steer away from them because of the you know potential lack of flexibility and lock in down the road right makes sense thank you for that that's super super helpful you just were talking about payroll and one of the things i'm noticing in dallas especially in the

bigger dowels and there are daos like that have been around for a while that have sort of figured this out but i want to talk about how dows make this a profitable endeavor for everyone that's involved one of the things i notice in dallas right now is like you said people are working like crazy and often people are doing it like for free to just to try to get in or are doing it where they're being paid less than they probably should be now there are some people making a ton in doubt there's no doubt about that um but especially in a dow where you have a thousand people or whatever and they don't necessarily have a ton of revenues yet like how do you see this so whole like compensation and payroll and like how does this all work where it's actually

like because if these dials don't become profitable in the in the future and the people working in the dallas aren't making better money than they are in web too then people are leaving and they're gonna go back out i think the reason people work so heavily in dallas right now and don't care is because it's cool and we're experiencing experimenting trying something new it's exciting right so we don't really care but that's not going to last for forever um do you find it's going to be more of these like you know the autonomous way where you like you have an idea you write a proposal uh where you ask for funding and then they fund you and that's how you get paid it's like contract work do you think it's like more salaries or combination like how do you think we make this all kind of work

yeah yeah i mean it's definitely early days and like like you said just eating the enthusiast segment and the enthusiast segment is like sort of more like a never-ending hack-a-thon or a bootstrap startup or uh like exactly which which means that in many cases the dao game for many um you know not all um uh but many it kind of sits more in the hobby category in terms of like where the rewards are at and how sustainable or predictable or secure they are relative to um you know the the alternatives that they're evaluating against now i believe that there are some people who um you know live in different state nations or geographic areas where um you know downs are actually producing an opportunity um

to earn a living that is superior to their alternatives um and in a more hardened currency than their local currency and so i love those stories i think that shows um you know some serious potential and a redistribution of wealth you know potentially if this continues to be a thing that you know is quite positive um in many ways um but i think in order for this to progress yes more more dows and more funding for dows needs to kind of flow in or more successful downs need to fund more dows like you watch some of the larger um dows starting to become um you know uh granting and funding um and have a venture you know guild and like stuff like that and i think that's excellent

right like as as we find um you know profitability if you will in many attributes of the system the system needs to continue to propagate itself um and so i think as that you know sort of solves itself naturally we'll move past the enthusiast segments and um and so i think yeah i i i think that's kind of like how that will sort of uh sort of play out is is that you know in the initial phases mostly enthusiasts um as some become successful um and resilient they'll spawn new ones for things that they can't do themselves and they will start to produce things that look a little bit more to the second part of your question like

like a mashup of all the ways of work you know i think bouncies are a little bit like you know the upwork type system for bite size things there's already the concepts of like dow salaries emerging with this you know recurring payments you know for for roles that feel more like contract work or renewal of guilds on a you know you know uh seasonal or you know every three month basis within thousand that's starting to kind of create something that looks a lot more like um you know uh traditional sort of contractor knowledge worker um scenarios and so uh i i think you know all these things will will occur and as governance mechanics mature you might even start to see things that look a little bit more like um hiring

um and um and firing models um you know but and then there's probably some things that we can't even predict that will emerge in terms of working styles and compensation styles and so like it'll be interesting how that plays out um as we put more capital in and the experiments related to compensation um or working styles um you know find the right set point because if you bounty everything um your doubt kind of struggles and uh you can you know because you can't upwork building every business kind of thing and it's the same idea um you know we're relearning some of these things as we go inside here and i think we'll we'll we'll play with um what you know employment contract um uh

you know and and bite-sized work looks like in a self-sovereign environment of thousands we'll see you you're involved in so many dows i think that's a you know there's to me there's two common questions i get from people when they're thinking about getting work at web3 one is the compensation how do i make money so thank you for addressing that that is definitely something that is still being figured out and the other is do i just work in one do i work in many you talked about balance before mental health balancing this is tough there is definitely no structure of when your day ends when your day starts and

likely there's people in your down that are on the exact opposite time zone as you so you wake up to you know hundreds of messages in a discord that you have to file through in order to get caught up and understand where the conversation is at and participate i'm just curious do you what would be your recommend i mean i guess for you how do you balance working in so many dows actually let's let me ask that yeah so that's a great question i'm not very good at it and it was actually a fun struggle for me um i'm kind of a recovering workaholic um uh and so my my first foray into workaholism and the you know some of the negative

attributes of it came from plugging into that silicon valley model and feeling the first rush of like we're going to innovate together we're going to do great things that it's culturally acceptable to like work till midnight in fact we're going to kind of make it feel like you know we all should be and like there was just like there's a lot of imbalance in that system and i always sucker to it um uh and and and paid the paid the price but it also developed some bad habits so i am a recovering workaholic and douse reignited some of my workloads um and uh so uh and and some of the things that go you know with it like you know creating a sense of worth for myself around you know my job and how my peers perceive me and that when you start adding tokens in

the mix it's like you know you start to get a little bit of well you know did i do good in the coordinates and like you know you're gonna the more social attributes of it as well like you know i i really care about um you know sort of the work experience i'm having with others not letting them down and like as i started to pick up accountabilities within multiple dows because of my curiosity and my my exploration took me to multiple dowser i'd say yes to people like hey come over here we're going to start something and we'd love to have your thoughts on x and you're like oh you want me you like me like you know okay and so uh i think i actually took it to

a state of complete imbalance um by the end of 2021 and i started to recognize that the strategy that evolved for me was this concept of like tours of duty and i started to recognize that there are certain types of things that i really enjoy doing um and they were no surprise to me because i've been observing these things you know across my entire sort of working career and that dow's at certain stages or certain phases or moments in time invite you to participate in those types of things and so i'm starting to recognize this idea of like a tour of duty and it also helps me deal with like the discord you know because as i was selecting you know the discord left bar now for me it's just crazy

um and so i started to kind of like get better at um agreeing um where i was at a given moment and trying to meet those agreements and then sort of subtly moving out when i'm moving in somewhere else and so like i might have participated in a lot of dows across 2021 but i wasn't um hyper focused on all of them all at the same time i had a tendency to kind of like you know do something um feel that wind down for one reason or another because dows are fast moving and evolving it's like you know i'm not renewing this season for that role could somebody else take it you know here's why um you know or

the structure shifts in the dao and in the case of city dao for example when they moved from the sort of core team that was doing for the early stuff that i was involved in um there as as one of the founding citizen holders uh we we the further decentralization of the dow the natural progression was towards this council phase um and then council was basically going to create sort of the uh the constitution or charter um you know of how how they were going to operate and respond this guild structure you know i chose not to participate in the council um because i saw a lot of great people arrive who would have had new ideas and it was time for me to to sort of back away and you know uh put a little bit less energy in there and create more

space for myself outside of thousands so yeah i think like just watching for those moments in time where you have to choose to renew or not renew your commitment and respecting that that that's natural and that's how you need to operate in dallas and that you know for me often the hardest part about associated with that is either my own ego of like they need me which is totally untrue um and or the other because i just want that to be true when i'm in that space of ego um and then the other thing that i have to watch out for um is the sense of like uh i'm committed to them and i try to make those things more explicit working more as more as much as i possibly can on explicit commitments

um you know it's very helpful for my own mental health was like i'm explicitly agreeing to do this job or this role i am not able to do this one um thank you for the invitation and i feel that that's the thing that we will learn um as we embark on this more self-solving way of working we're gonna have to grapple with our egos more we're gonna have to grapple with um uh finding you know more ways to express commitment in more explicit ways so that we can get past the guilt and the shame that comes from like you know implicit commitment of like well now i'm letting someone down and it's it's eroding my reputation or like the imagination spins incredible yarns and if you make it explicit it's not as scary um and my my monkey brain isn't going crazy on me so that's how i

try to deal with it but like i'm far from being involved enough uh to and aware enough to pull it off i think um this may be our one of our last questions here but uh um i love first of all this term self-sovereign way of working like working in self-sovereignty that's super cool i i don't think i've heard that before um i think that's very interesting and i wonder as you talk about the way to manage you know working in a dow or multiple days do you think that the future is us all contributing and working in a bunch of different dows or even like a bunch of different communities or like a bunch of different you know communities that have certain missions you're just kind of well i i like to you know i want things to go

green so i want to work there and i want you know equality so i'm going to work in that dow and kind of contribute to that and it's like we just find our hobbies the things we're interested in and we we just contribute um it kind of makes sense with this whole self-sovereignty to the way you work right you're not stuck in one spot or owned by a specific company i feel like we're already starting to see that even in web 2 now that a lot of people are remote there's a lot of people that are a part of multiple companies whether that's consulting or freelancing or whatever i mean i'm a part of a bunch of different things that's just like my nature though as an entrepreneur so maybe i'm more biased but like do you think that dows then make this even easier and so we are going to be a part

of a bunch of different things because so easy to just like sell your tokens and move on to the next one or you know be a part of a bunch or do you think that we end up like really centralizing or focusing in on one thing like we do sort of now in web 2. yeah i love this and i think the the whole point of self-sovereign work is a discovery of what meaningful work looks like for you or what you know joy-filled passion-filled work looks like for you and so i think each you know if the system is healthy and functional then i and i'm truly in that self-sovereign you know future uh then that i have the ability to choose and because of the i think one of my theories is because of the the

global abundance of work that happens when we go to this remote digital somewhat unbounded by state nation um styles of working that dows are kind of unlocking that in essence we we get less scarcity around the opportunities to do work relative to our personal passions and skills and so we have and i think that you know because dao's will have so many different styles um and beyond so many different missions like we said you know this is the green you know dao but it's not just the green dial this is the the uh you know this is the australian reef um you know oceans initiative now and so i think that's the the neat thing about

it is that if i'm super focused and want to be 100 um that i will have optionality and choice potentially in that in that global abundance of work and so i think some people might choose to do the 20-year career in a single dow if it truly was the right home for them and never evolved past being the right home for them but if it did evolve and change that they would have the ability and the right to quickly move to a different one um that matches what what is right for them i think that is the essence of a really healthy global self-sovereign work environment and um maybe i'm a bounty chaser and a mercenary maybe i'm a um a multi dao you know maybe i'm a you know

a butterfly like me who's just like that's cool [Laughter] you know architecting uh tourism duty uh in my in my personal sweet spot of joy so we'll see it's great it's a great answer there was a there's some great quotes in there that definitely we will pull out uh okay i just i want to wrap up the uh regular interview questions and move into a bit of a speed round just some fun questions uh to wrap up and then i have one more question about uh sobel and where people can find you online and how they can connect with you uh kai you good you any more questions on your end okay cool um okay usually usually in the speed round my first

question is what's an nft you'll never sell but given that we've been talking so much about dows what are tokens that you'll never sell yeah um i would never have my bank bank token uh bankless dow a token balance at zero it's just i don't understand how that could go to zero i think i'd have to keep some even if they were uh zero cents for nostalgia but like i just i really appreciated that community cool uh favorite person to follow on twitter uh i don't have just one i can't i can't do that one

[Laughter] for who's who's somebody that pops into your head give me a few uh yeah i've been enjoying uh some of the thoughts from uh spencer um from uh dow house uh uh has protocol recently cool um raf raf the builder is an enjoyable one to follow as well definitely definitely awesome any project that you're following closely right now that you're excited about in the future could be nft project could be dow project could be anything in web3 yeah um so i mean i think i mentioned uh disco and hats protocol and like orange protocol and like spruce id uh ceramic anyone who's doing something in the

identity space i love it yeah yeah totally and for listeners if you haven't already heard we had a podcast with evan mcmullan the founder of disco uh a few weeks back so go back and listen to that if you want to learn more about digital identity it's real fascinating stuff there uh something you've purchased recently for under 100 that brings you joy does not have to be web3 or crypto related yeah zero dollars uh going for a morning walk for an hour it's crazy i totally agree i i'm the same even if my walk is like literally walking if i have five minutes i walk out the door

and then i come back like just to get outside it makes such a difference okay if you had a billboard with one message that one billion people in the world would see what would you write on that billboard you don't have to work like this very good damn that's a good one that is a very good one well done uh we don't have a billion listeners but however many we do have they they took that and they heard it put it right on a commuter like yeah yeah the highway right on the bus stop

uh brian this has been amazing uh want to tell people where they can find you also talk quickly about team sobel um as your home base and uh you know do awareness you're raising there so quickly team sybil where people can find that and then also where people can find you and connect with you personally and we'll put all links in the show notes yeah um perfect so we're at team sobel on twitter um that'll give you the official link to our discord server for the sobel community so if you're interested in the topics of decentralized work and operations in the dao and mapping daos and then i'm at brian peats on twitter um and yeah for now my my dms

are open and i actually really enjoy connecting with people um both in discord and on twitter amazing brian this has been just fantastic i feel like we could have we could have gone for hours there's so many things to unpack and we might have to have you back on for uh a part two at some point in the future yes likewise there's a lot of fun um just talking through these topics and love the questions fantastic well thanks everybody for listening have a wonderful day get outside and go for a walk 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 by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer 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 implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one