Managing DAOs at Scale

[Music] [Applause] [Music] with that we are ready for our last uh talk of the day and for that i want to welcome these four amazing people so we're going to talk about managing dao's scale and this is going to be from the perspective of managing anyone from design trust foundations to grant programs so we have julia from worker protocol larry from compound grants uh we have corbin from avigrance and eva bailing from the graph foundation uh they're going to cover all things dao anything from on chain to option to legal to complaints to tooling and it's going to be a really fun talk and discussion so without further ado i'd like to welcome all of them here and get us started welcome everybody hey hello thanks for having us i'm so excited for this panel let's talk all things doubts um i know everyone here wears many different hats so i kind of wanted to give everyone the opportunity to just give a quick intro and talk about all the things they have their hands on in the crypto space larry you want to kick us off yeah sure um so i'm larry i'm the co-founder of reverie and also the the program lead for compound grants and you know quick background on myself and reverie i mean i was at dc for three years and we started reverie because as me and my co-founder he was also a former vc and you know we just thought dows are really cool and we thought dallas could be trillion dollar organizations but it wasn't enough for us to just say that sort of had to roll up our sleeves and work for them and so one of the first things we did is we left our jobs and started working for dallas and you know we did things like compound grants and a bunch of other cool things and that's what we do we invest in thousands we work for them too amazing eva uh my name is eva director of the graph foundation i was part of the initial team that launched the graph protocol we're currently you know exploring how to transition to a dao but prior to that i worked very closely with molok dao and even dao house so i've been around the dow space for some time thank you corbin hi everybody uh so i'm corbin i am currently uh i'm currently at consensus where i helped lead product for all of our fintech products and then i also spent a lot of time with the ave community mostly with the the ave grants dow so we we've deployed i think it's uh over a million dollars at this point to various projects that help kind of grow the ecosystem and it's just been like a great learning experience to you know see how a dow can be as impactful as like a major you know software company right like this is a totally new type of organization like we're trying to figure out how to make this work from the ground up so uh excited to share learnings and uh jam with you folks on a good friday afternoon amazing um i think it's so interesting that all of you kind of sit in different parts of the dao ecosystem like corbin you're in the uh grants ecosystem eva you're helping transition the graph into a dow larry you help provide services to daos i guess like what are just sort of the biggest point pain points do you guys see um as you help grow these dow ecosystems i can go ahead um so it's something that we're seeing just starting from a foundation that gives grants and sort of has these external contributors so in a sense emulating a dow but in a centralized format um is figuring out how to scale the real life aspects of jobs um that people actually need from dows as well so something like knowing that you're going to have a full-time job not because like the dow is going to not vote you in again next quarter but because like you can maybe continue working as long as you're not fired from the dow perhaps um and thinking through like what are those tools that need to exist that like aren't a technology problem it's like people safety problem for them committing to whether it's a protocol or a dow community um but long term so they're not just like a short-term contributor yeah i totally um agree with that it's like it's always a human thing or even like little things like you know if you're starting at a new company right you're gonna probably discuss your your offer how much money you're gonna get with what like an hr person your private boss and then the dow setting it's all public that's kind of awkward right it's just a weird sort of thing to do to discuss your salary in a public forum that anyone can see and then potentially someone's gonna tweet about and then everyone just knows your salary which is awkward and so just dealing with those sort of things is is super necessary and you know with compound grants when we started it right we didn't really think this through we didn't know that's going to be an awkward sort of thing and so um the way it ended up working out though is in in private we sort of had to discuss with the grantees hey how much do you want to get paid you know what's the hourly rate that sort of thing and then in public we would say what the final sum was but not you know all those sort of details and that really just makes it more comfortable for people to join which hopefully lowers their barest entry and gets more people working for dallas but it's always a human thing yeah i would i would second that i think it's absolutely fascinating because like we're basically reinventing organizations from first principles right like everybody says the same thing about defy right we're looking at the financial system we're looking at like what it's providing from first principles and rebuilding it with the internet on chain we're doing the same thing with corporations foundations nonprofits with dowels right all those types of coordinating bodies for humans are being reinvented now that we have the internet and these like awesome types of tools uh and so like that is a very messy process like we're figuring out what's working what's not working um like these folks said like what should be public what should be totally public what should be private because it's more of a human matter right and then at the same time the tools to do these things aren't purpose built for dowels right like chris dixon had this great post the other day that we're in the kind of like schoolomorphism phase of web 3 and we're applying traditional structures to this new movement right we're talking about daos as if they're a software company right but they're very very different than a software company right there is no like w-2 right there so like all this dow tooling that folks are working on like we're using kind of the framework of things that we know from the traditional world but dallas might end up operating totally different and so now we're using that as a reference we're trying to make it work here and then we're also constantly evolving it so you know even things like signing transactions coordinating people figuring out salaries all that type of stuff is going to need to be reinvented and that just takes a lot of iterations and it's going to be messy in some cases yeah i think that a big issue we see is like the definition of a dao and what that thing is is all like constantly evolving um i'm kind of hearing that's what you're saying corbin is like you know we don't actually even know what this thing is yet um how can we be applying old tools but also we still do need to be applying those tools to it um so i guess also just like to take a step back like why do we even care about that like why is this so important for us to be working on and helping develop these tools you know i um i i was uh like a year ago i was chatting with um the founder of a company i was an investor and asking for the cap table and then i opened the cap table and uh there's like four people there it's myself three other guys and him and this guy has like hundreds of employees i thought it was weird and they so i hit him up and i'm like hey why are you so greedy with with your you know employees it's kind of weird like they should get some upside and he tells me and i should know you know this guy he's in um in southeast asia and he tells me you know in our country you know employees don't want equity right the idea that hey i can work for startup make a bunch of money on this piece of paper is not a really fully formed idea in many countries right we're super lucky in the us where there's fully foreign startup markets and parts of europe have that too but most of the world does not and i think with dallas right we literally have that on a global basis where people over the world could get ownership in this network and you know potentially make a lot of money and have you know life-changing wealth through really contributing to the world through really cool products that make the world better and so i you know if there's one thing that gets me excited about dao's it's that globalization of wealth and these opportunities that mostly folks could read about on techcrunch and stuff but never experienced for themselves yeah i i totally agree with that i think i think uh in terms of like the accessibility right like like you're seeing the exact same trends in crypto kind of apply to to organizations with battles right so accessibility like literally for the ave grant style we're spinning up like a developer's dial as part of the grand style and so they're gonna help contribute functionality um to the core protocol working with the genesis team spinning up you know improvements parameter tweaks adding new assets that type of thing and i was hoping to do some of those interviews and like i hop on zoom one day and it's like an 18 year old dude from uh nigeria who just like is a smart contract wiz right and i was like i was like looking at his github repo before and i'm like holy [ __ ] this guy ships right like this guy knows this [ __ ] and like i never would have talked to that individual you know if we were running a corporation you know in the united states like you just don't have access to that talent pool or you know maybe he would have been too intimidated to apply and so it's like that open door is where i see a lot of the benefit of dowels just like in d5 one of the benefits is that you have a global audience on day one that anybody can uh you know start contributing to right the same kind of like ethos is uh instilled in dallas yeah i echo everything corbin and larry said and i would add um dows let us coordinate almost around a mission something larger than just an entity whereas like a private company the only people who care about what the private company does are like the shareholders of the people that work there in a protocol you can have literally hundreds of companies full-time aligned to that protocol and endow can be that you know framework to coordinate them in a way that aligns them to something larger than just their own private interests yeah i think that um i agree with all those things as well um i do think that sort of the ideals of the dao are very different than the reality of today which i think we can all sort of agree on so like corbin to your point do we actually think that dows are accessible today yeah that depends on who you asked i feel like i i know other developers who feel like you know they're sharp developers and then they haven't been able to get into any of the dials they've been interested in because like maybe it feels a little bit more clicky right um again all organizations are different shapes different sizes and have different gateways and so i think yes and no you know frankly you know if i could wave a magic wand i think we need to unbundle this term dao because like a d5 protocol dao has very different needs users accessibility than like a dow spun up to invest in nfts or a dow that emerged around your favorite podcast right we're calling all of these things dowels but they all are very different types of organizations they do have certain things in common right like we try to be internet native we try to like have code as law and there are certain principles that flow through them all but they're very different organizations and so like even the term dao could you know means ten different things to ten different people i agree with that i'd also say that dao's ultimately are just communities and the dao is kind of supporting that community so if someone's struggling to enter doubts because that community might have high barriers to entry um and a lot of the coordination even between people is currently still off chain it's you know maybe discord or a forum so there's like some real like regular social uh improvements that can be done just to even improve dow engagement yeah i agree it's like you know i'm sure everyone sees those funny tweets like uh is a group of friends paying for dinner or dao right or is like a group project to dao and it's like well we don't really know what a dao is but we know what a dao is not right and that sort of gets us halfway there but i think over time this sort of stuff you know 20 years from now we won't probably be arguing about what's a doubt we'll figure it out it's like one of these growing pains that we all have to deal with in an emerging industry yep i think this is an issue that continues to come up is like what is the the dao what is it but how do we sort of like create standards and move sort of processes and tools forward if we don't have a success definition around this thing yeah i'm i'm happy to jump in on that one i think um we were actually chatting about this uh before we hopped on like like ideally the tools get configured around like the needs and goals and operating processes of the organization um actually we just had the zodiac kind of demo before before this panel and like i'm a big fan of their approach right because security is the top concern built on top of gnosis safe which is very much battle tested but then you have kind of like an open ecosystem of plug-ins that you can attach to that right capital is kind of like the lifeblood of any organization and then so having very different rules for modifying how that operation actually runs and having that as an open system that anybody can kind of like you know use what's there and what has worked for dallas in the past or build your own if you need something that's more tailor made and so i think like i think the platforms that are going to win the platforms that are going to like own b2d or d2d commerce are going to be the ones that are configurable to make sure that the tools work well for the type of organization that you know needs to use sorry if i give any thoughts on that i i generally agree um you know like in practice i'd say maybe the urine ecosystem has really figured that out like um there's a tool called coordinate that was literally created out of the dow's need and is now the most used uh way of coordinating um sort of rewards and acknowledging um the con the actual contributions within the dao um and i don't know if chord nape is actually the best tool for every doubt right it kind of just worked for the urine ecosystem because of the way they kind of spun out um but i echo corbin's sort of sentiment that um you know it'll be even i suppose even if you're using the same dao framework the the dows you create might be completely different um like i would say like the original malik dao is very different you know that was supposed to be simply funding e2 is very different than like meta cartel ventures that now is a full venture fund um it even has like these off-chain connections to enable like um the actual participants to have ownership of over the dow um and so even when you take the same smart contract the actual execution might be completely different um it might require different tools awesome um i want to talk about grant's programs i know you all sit on grants programs in different um ways so sort of why are grants programs an essential part of dow ecosystems today and why are we seeing so much development around them right now i can start on this one i think a lot of people are like so confused about grants programs it's like why do they exist right and and you know maybe uh i was creating an example for compound could be useful but you know when we started compound grants which was i guess early this year um and maybe february march you know prior to that if you weren't discord or if you were you know just an active um comp token holder and you're really just interested in contributing and you needed money right to either quit your job or have some sort of financial motivation to do the work right you shouldn't be working for free you basically have to write a proposal on the forums lobby people to pay you money publicly and then wait for this weird governance process that could you know basically take seven days for you to get paid out right and that is a crazy barrier to entry to get like 25 000 to do a little project right and so with grants the idea was hey let's create a pretty centralized organization which was called the multisig that basically creates a process for people to get paid super quickly right and that was the idea and the longer term motivation is well hey you know there's maybe a thousand or two thousand or however many people in the community that are active and maybe some subset of them could actually be full-time contributors one day but we just don't know which ones they are so what if we provide grants to a lot of them see who is capable and who actually delivers and what they say they deliver and do that for a period of maybe six to nine months and if that experiment is successful by the end of it we'll know okay well this person you know they asked for 25 000 they shipped like 150 000 worth of code these guys are [ __ ] killers um maybe we should hire them full time right and that's funded by grants and so that was sort of the motivation for grants and um it's worked really well so far because it's such a simple thing that makes the user experience for the grantee really enjoyable compared to especially the the inverse of that which is governance yeah i totally agree um we've also seen like that proven where we've had a number of grantees now become full-time contributors either like another team will hire them or they'll get just paid a long enough grant to be full-time so it's clearly proof that like a grant is a really low key way to start like dipping into a community without proper commitment um because people leaving their full-time jobs especially in web 2 to web 3 is still pretty scary um so grants being like a really good hybrid solution to that yeah i would i would jump off that and you know i think even is going through it right now i see grants it's like a really critical like point in the progressive decentralization process right where you're just saying like hey like you know we obviously could keep this capital closer to our organization but we're not because we want to decentralize right we want to incentivize contributors we want to grow our ecosystem we want to grow our number of uh integrations and we want to basically open up like our kpis to anyone around the world to kind of help us meet right which is a really really cool thing to do um i also don't necessarily think that you know this first wave of d5 grant experiments has gone far enough right i'm very proud of what we've done at ave grants i think we've funded you know over 30 projects you know built all these kind of cool cool folks contributing to the ecosystem but like it's still like decently hard right like i think we have two tiers so if it's over 100k you still have to like make a post on a public forum and we gather ave community sentiment and maybe it goes through if it's less than that then it's like the ave reviewers that are taking a look at your application setting up milestones and then payments right maybe we need more than uh like just two tiers right like maybe if it's less than 2k right anybody around the world can just like point to evidence that they did something like had a thoughtful take on risk analysis for the protocol or went ahead and built out the integration and now i'm retroactively applying for a grant to get compensated for doing so right so i think again like we took grants from like the the traditional world model of like we have a bunch of capital we want to grow the ecosystem all right grants i think we can now take it a little bit further and say like with crypto we can do all these programmatic things that we couldn't do before so what does a grant actually mean now maybe we like need a whole bunch of other experiments and different tiers to continue to get other people involved but that said i think it's been relatively successful with what you pointed out with part-time work like half of our grants come from people that are holding down a full-time job and it is like the best gateway drug in the world to get people moving crypto into web 3 is through grants because they're like oh my gosh now i have crazy upside to this protocol like like people love me here they're posting memes about me people are excited to use my tool and so like i think it's another it's another great gateway for getting talent yeah i think those are great points corbin and i think what i've noticed is like there's a really interesting activity happening and sort of the siloed um grants um like sort of the this part of the ecosystem unlike these grant programs um i think ave is a great example of what you're working on um at all by grants and like seeing the amount of subcommittees that are forming underneath ava grants and seeing where there's activity and like okay how can we provide resources to those um you know little nucleuses of groups can you speak a little more specifically to like some of the initiatives that uh you guys are spinning out yeah yeah absolutely so so the two key ones are really the developers dow and then the uh the risk dao right like in terms of a dow that's going to be governing uh like a major d5 like uh protocol right like lending credit like like the the total addressable market of something like that is absolutely massive if you look five years out right so like what is the specialized knowledge that you want to cultivate internally to manage that growth to manage that as it scales um the first one everybody turns to because we're all nerds is developers right like we need more software you know you know coders are going to solve the world we're going to automate everything away and so we've started off with this developer's dao and if anybody on this call is the developer wants to get involved please please apply avigrants.org um you know we basically are going to take off some of the load from from the genesis team right and this is this is core protocol functionality this is this is tier one stuff um but we're going to start opening it up to anybody that has solidity or scripting or javascript skills around the world so we're really excited about that one and then the second key one is risk right we all know that uh monitoring the risk of these systems is so important especially as you know crypto assets continue to be volatile we have like you know crazy up crazy down days you know every couple months we got to be able to like react to that and we need a lot of thoughtful very very very specialized expertise around risk and so i believe we have a wrist dial that's spinning up too to make sure that the protocol can scale and meet all its goals that's amazing um i think it's interesting because like i think every dao is trying to get developers um and community managers i think those are probably like the two uh most in-demand uh kind of professionals right now um but what makes like getting just a small grant from one of these programs a compelling offer um for these extremely in-demand users or these extremely in-demand professionals i could maybe chime in here um you know in my experience the grantee archetypes right there there's several core archetypes and everyone's basically trying to get something different out of the dow right out of a grant you know sometimes there's uh you know a company that maybe has a good idea it's pre-venture funding right but it's a company it's formed and the people are like well it'd be awesome to get some you know non-dilutive capital uh build something for the dow and just kind of work together and see how we're vibing right that is a clear use case um for for that archetype it's a clear use case for the dow it's like a you know group of folks working on something cool great let's let's give you some money um and so that's definitely you know a huge uh bonus for for people in that position um you know there's people who are like you know i'm not sure if i'm a good dev and i just want to try something out and i want to test my skills right and it's like you're getting paid to improve your skills that's great right like why would you not do that and by the way a lot of these grants programs they promote you on twitter right so if we give you a granted compound grants we'll promote the heck out of you and we want you to find a cool job of course at compound uh protocol after but if you want to go somewhere else we want to promote you too and we'll actually you know give you opportunities to to get a gig elsewhere so a lot of it is a lot of people just want to break into the industry and they want to you know improve their jobs a little bit by by working on something um and then there's just people who are just you know they're uh they're really good at what they do they don't like having a boss and they're like i could work for like six seven dows basically as a contractor do really good work get paid a bunch of money and do that and i am a nomad and it's a good lifestyle for a lot of people too those people are really good professionals and there's you know all sorts of sort of archetypes in between but those are i would say the most common ones i've seen yeah i'd agree anecdotally it's been mostly individuals contractor types um although i predict that we're going to see a lot more entities so we definitely have like a lot of grantees that are like dev shops that are doing something you know maybe building out a product but i foresee us doing a lot more like down nesting in the future where maybe um it's like you know a security dow you know it has you know received a grant from the mother dao and maybe that security dow is then like five security teams working for this protocol um and so it might not you know in the future be even individual kind of like larry said archetypes like we might see a dow that represents every single archetype um just because that's the service that's needed at that time yeah i would say larry covered the the archetypes like really really well i have nothing to add there what i would say is like i think the space needs to evolve also beyond just developers right like at the end of the day like community is everything behind these things if folks have like energy and some amount of talent or at least accountable for certain things like we can probably figure out a pretty good job for you just i don't think anyone's like scoped out what that job means for like you know a 22 year old you know communications major that just graduated right like you could probably find something useful for them to do it just hasn't popped up yet so devs and community managers are definitely like towards the top of the priority list but i also think we need to like think about what roles are important and you're seeing this flush out on like very active discord servers a little bit but like there are like curator roles or like you know i don't know hall monitors some some type of role that like you don't need like crazy dev skills versus management skills um or like security auditing type skills to do and i'm not sure i haven't seen a ton of great experiments there yet but i think they'll come yeah i think corbin brings up a good point which is like i'm not going to name any names but i've seen dallas where it's like you know hey anyone can come in get some free money right let's go let's go and there's really no focus on scoping the rules and you see the the forums and the work product and it's all kind of disorienting it's really just confusing it's a cluster right and you know that's not to say something of value won't get created there but man if you are a focused person or if you're an ambitious person you're like i know what i want to build just give me the resources you're not going to want to work there right and so i think scoping um hey here are the roles the down needs right here's what we are building towards is necessary and then every now and then you you know if you find someone who's too good to ignore you want to fund them as well and give them a little bit more of a free reign but it is a struggle i think to scope those roles appropriately in uh in a dow environment and we all got to get better at it what do you think is like a specific skill set that daos aren't attracting now that they need to be like i know corbin mentioned a few but can you point out specifically what some of those roles might be there you know we had just um we just hired someone um at the at the radical community a governance facilitator and the role is basically inspired by the maker governance facilitator role and long story short i mean you know for a more mature dow there's going to be many different working groups just like a company has many different groups and you basically got to make sure that the dominoes fall in the right order right if you have a product and you're shipping a product maybe you want the you know the engineering team to ship it on by date x the marketing team to you know pick it up from there and you but you basically have a factory rate to ride um for a complicated product there's many different working groups and making sure everything is running on time is the job i think of a governance facilitator so it's almost like a a program management role but you basically need someone there to be lashing those whips and if people are not delivering on time right they gotta be you know told that so that everything is running on time and so i think that is the role i've not seen many dows do but it's so critical and so necessary because it keeps the train running on time yeah another role i'd add is pms um technical pms or product pms um because most of these proposals or the teams behind these proposals aren't good at doing the proposal writing like it might be a really technical engineering team um and so it really goes a long way to have like a really well formatted proposal like having had you know done the proper due diligence for the community um whatever it might be the concern or i guess the the unsolved problem here is how do you properly incentivize pms um so right now for example in the uni-swap ecosystem a lot of the people sponsoring the proposals you know are very large uni um voting power holders um whether they're delegates or they they are uni holders themselves um so that's you know one way to align those incentives um but i think there's maybe even a better way to you know incorporate pms as part of the dow contributor process um and for us to kind of all accept that you know dows don't eliminate the middleman um or kind of the middle management of like shipping products and getting things done they just allow us to coordinate better amazing um i feel like the general sentiment of those answers comes back a lot to just like the onboarding process of the dao which i think we've all sort of identified in this conversation as um one of the weaker points of like how we actually you know turn engagement and excitement into contribution how do we sort of like better facilitate that and better facilitate um you know people who might be interested into actual real valuable work in these ecosystems yeah i would i can jump in there first i i think you just uh julia i think you just described a new role right like like this is your first day buddy maybe uh maybe easy role that anybody in the dow can take is like new member ushering in education set up a call talk through how they want to contribute why they're interested maybe that's a new role i mean i know for me personally it's my own problem but like i'll join a discord and then there's like a whole big list of things i have to go through and i have to interact with a bunch of bots and then like maybe i already own their token back like verify it i'm just like oh like i you know i i just go back to something else right and that's that that's bad right like we we should do better um i think that this is a tooling problem you know like we were discussing earlier like we've got to have better tooling that meets the needs of the different type of organization like what if somebody puts my dow in their bio on twitter and just like you know tweets about it all the time maybe it's even like thoughtful tweets on like what could be better you know what they're working on how they're contributing like they're they're a new dow member and like they should be on boarded somehow right and so like i don't necessarily think discord's gonna solve it you know maybe you know some other you know chat type tool comes out that solves it but like i think we need to figure out how to make like participation as frictionless as possible and then people to get feedback like right away like first tweet first you know shout out to conference whatever like like they get swag right they get something they get an nft right to like create that excitement that's like this is a community i want to be a part of this is where i want to be corbin i'd love for you to be my first day buddy at ave um eva larry do you guys have any thoughts on onboarding i hate to say it but like crypto twitter discords it really starts with like getting involved in the community um because it's really hard to like be employable if you don't know what's going on in that protocol that's kind of the unfortunate situation now is like there still is quite a bit of like education ramp up that needs to occur um so i'd say getting involved in those forums and that is like public knowledge i think it's just us like even sharing that these forums exist on the other web two platforms like we should be talking about you know the eth research forum on linkedin like there's all these developers on linkedin like craving crypto content and they don't know where to find it um so maybe there's just like more crossover we could be doing between those platforms amazing um a topic i always like to talk about around dao's is what does leadership look like in dao's i think in this sort of dow ideal we talk a lot about decentralized uh power control ownership all these things um but there's also been a little bit of pushback on that and that leaders are important in these doubt ecosystems what do you guys sort of think about leadership in in daos maybe um you know i could speak about my experience here but this would be um more uh focused on the you know the larger dowels were part of right which are primarily the d5 ones i know we sort of discussed about what really is a dow but i'm talking about maybe some of the larger ones not some of the social token ones but you know the way i think of this stuff is you know there's there's formal governance power and leadership power which is like i own 10 of the company or i'm on the board of the company or on the multiseg and then there's the informal which is you know that we're all a group of individuals at the end of the day and there's a social hierarchy right and some people have more command and control and some people have less right and none of this stuff is ever documented but you know if you go to the forums and you see the founder posting they may not hold more tokens than everyone else combined but they definitely hold a lot of social credibility and that credibility is used for governance power you see a lot of this sort of stuff with with traditional companies where maybe the founder left or has no formal position but whenever there's you know the ceo saying something and the founder comes in and says hey i disagree people generally look at the founder uh for for control and governance and so i think a lot of this stuff is is um is tricky right and um at the same time though a lot of it from the traditional world kind of maps over because we are just groups of people coordinating around projects and groups of people always have some sort of informal ties with each other and that sort of tie is the the governance power but i think generally though it's good practice for a young early stage project for the the founder or the founding team to use that informal power to sort of um shepherd the community towards a certain vision and that's the easiest way to just coordinate a group of individuals to build something special but curious what everyone else uh in this in this panel thinks too i'm curious too because like i think what we've seen in the in uh a most recent experiment in luke was the sort of leader of that ecosystem realized his soft power and the ecosystem and that was actually taking away from the potential vision of the group so um i'm curious corbin even if you guys have any thoughts or thoughts on leadership yeah i'd say that just you know in a productivity regardless of like a dow or whatever it is like there usually is a team like at three people there's always a leader even there so like i think there's always going to be these micro leaders maybe for specific objectives maybe for a specific grant or team um and then we don't necessarily need some kind of overarching leader because the point of these protocols is that they're actually so multifaceted that like we need everyone's domain expertise like you're not supposed to have one centralized entity that is controlling it um you know on the counter example or maybe proving in this example is so kane you know he was on the spartan council left and then was asked to come back um and so you know he has been a leader this whole time but you know just because he was a leader doesn't mean he was then you know an autocrat or some kind of like centralized figure simply that he was good at leading specific initiatives and the community respected that um so i think that that's possible yeah i would piggyback off that and just say you know the leadership also evolves with how the dow you know matures right so like take a a d5 doubt right they're gonna be going through a progressive decentralization process right ideally you know the founding team or the founder like should you know be seating control over time as it's you know appropriate to to more people in the organization right and that's what's interesting is that's what success looks like for dalles versus it's generally not what success looks like in traditional tech startups right it's like oh we want to be founder-led you know through the ipo and all that type of thing so kane's a great example um uh maki from sushi i think there are a couple others that are like that benevolent leader which like metallic is the archetype i think of like the benevolent leader who's like yeah i will take a step back you know once the organization can kind of run on its own um that said i think it's an art more than a science right like you gotta know where you know when to weigh in when not to weigh in like i think that you know the uniswap you know core team has had to make that decision at some points with different proposals that have come through so uh yeah i just think we're seeing it evolve the last thing i would say is like i like to think that dowels like like uh promote a merocratic type like system a little bit more than traditional organizations right like you might have a non-users or pretty much everything is you know like has a time step online whether it's chat or your actual like like like prs like like everything is recorded with these organizations online and so it's like it's very clear like who's doing the work and who's doing like a lot of the thought leadership and like whatever politicking still exists i like to think that it's less so than like a traditional corporate structure where it's like drinks after work you know get you the promotion so um you know it's all it's an art more than a science it's still evolving but i like to think that dials are a little bit more flat and fair than what came before them yeah i think on the other end of the spectrum too like we're talking about extremely good productive um contributors in these ecosystems what happens when we have bad actors in these ecosystems like how do you handle bad actors and dows that are potentially creating problems that's a tough question i guess one way that we've sort of tried to manage quality at the foundation is not paying out the full grant up front so we'll do 20 up front 80 the rest of the 80 upon completion and that kind of weeds out anyone who didn't want to work and you do kind of pay a small cost perhaps but they also take on like a reputational cost like their team maybe we won't work with again or won't recommend um similarly you know like we saw today with robert leshner you know there's ways to sort of like intrinsically and reputationally um you know bring someone to be more altruistic than they otherwise were that you know are also part of the incentive formula but just aren't simply like a dow grant um that is incentivizing that good behavior so i think there's like a lot of social ways to manipulate perhaps a bad dow actor on chain to be better off chain you know certainly milestones um i gave a mention work really well but then you know to double click on that like social point i mean it's i think it's like a little like company culture right where some companies have this vicious culture and if you're a dick right people allow you to do that right versus some other companies if you're being a prick you know they fire you they're gone right and um and i think it really does require the doubt to sort of have an informal or even foremost social contract here's our code of conduct right here's how you behave if you're commenting on a forum and you're being addicted to people you know we're just not going to take you seriously and the moderator is going to ban you and it's like little things like that it feels so obvious but it's necessary i think to set up for for a dow context yeah the last thing i would say is um you know i'm not saying that a token always makes sense but a great thing a token does is it aligns like interests of the token holders right so like like a bad actor is going to be less likely to be there if you know they're working against the goals of the overall group or they're being disruptive or they're slowing things down right because like that is the most powerful kind of incentive mechanism that these things have um and then like if you remember way way back in the day like one of the original innovations from molok dao was like the rage quit right because like if we aren't getting aligned or like you know if i'm a you know if i'm a you know petulant child that like you know we absolutely have to do this and everybody else is going the other way like i can take my toys and i can go home and i can rage quit so i think like again we're evolving these mechanisms in real time and you know frankly bad actors is one of those things we have to figure out sounds fair um okay last question today we have to wrap up but what do you hate about your dow set up right now corbin we were joking about some pinpoints you were experiencing before but what is terrible in your dad set up right now yeah i think julia we're going to go over now so i'm just going to start listening things um multitude signing is the worst ever oh my gosh like a bunch of telegram things and like first thing i do when i wake up in the morning i like like log on and see what's up it's like oh my god i gotta sign eight transactions like there was like 30 minutes of my day like we just got to figure out maybe a better coordination mechanism or maybe it's a ux problem and like we should experiment with ideas like like assume signature if you haven't vetoed within a 48-hour period or something like that like i think they're all types of things that like like multisig of like you know seven of nine is probably not the end game of the space here so i think that's one easy one um governance actually gets a lot of attention right so i think that problem is on its way to being solved right like how do we coordinate better and actually have thoughtful discourse on a proposal and get it voted through but it's also still a [ __ ] show today right like boardroom and tally do a decent job snapshot but like we also see proposals get to a far stage without like poor people paying attention because there's just so much stuff going on right so like thoughtful thinking about governance and voting on it and having like really good solid delegates is something that needs to continue to improve um you know capital allocation treasury management all those things need to improve how we explain this stuff to normies is another great one right like like you know anytime you say oh i you know i contribute to a dow they're like beat down like that big hack like oh i remember that it's like no no it's not that but like you know we're dolls are still around right they're actually like pretty cool you should contribute um if these things do go mainstream probably around social tokens or streaming right about these like organizations around like content creators is kind of how i think they'll go mainstream like we need better ways of introducing these concepts these tools these ways of contributing to normies so so all those things you know from the minute like signing you know multi-sigs to like explaining these things to the real world in a way that they'll rock yeah so corbin is basically laid out there is no room for improvement and that's larry eva i think we should just come up with a new term like dao sucks like can you imagine being like in 2024 2044 and still saying dao's like it's so it sort of feels like saying intro web in like you know 2020 is just no you don't say that term so to corbyn's point just to marketing right uh of dallas i don't think most people intuitively understand what a dow is when they hear it and so just trying to simplify the messaging a little bit i think could go a long way to make making dallas just more accessible to normies maybe one thing i'll add is i don't think we've quite figured out what a dao uh like holds as liability in itself versus its participants um and i don't think we've had that many examples to explore this space yet and or like not that many like very large capital inflows or outflows but um there could be a time you know where a government regulatory agency or really just people are upset about um some behavior that a dow grant has achieved right uh maybe it's you know funding some malicious behavior but the dow didn't realize it was malicious at the time um and then who is liable then um and how do you then protect maybe your down members from being the ones to incur pain yeah really good points that i don't think gets talked enough in these style discussions um well eva corbin larry thank you so much for this panel i think before we end julia what is your answer to uh to that same question um the lack of accountability in dao systems people need to face repercussions for their actions and doubts i wanted to dig more into that but uh i should have started off with that question [Laughter] fire the bad guys fire them we have a four squid function instead of a rage quit um amazing well um corbin eva larry julia thank you so much for that amazing chat uh before we end uh let's kind of go in order and and just quickly uh say how people can get involved in each of your organization's endows and communities and how can they find or contact you after start off with corbin great yeah i'm court page on twitter um reach out about anything the biggest things are go to avigrants.org and like apply for a grant there are a bunch of rfps on there there are a bunch of things that we need so take a look at the list and see if anything speaks to you and apply please do and especially if you're a developer check out the developer we're literally hiring folks like in the very very near future and so uh come contribute and get involved say yeah so the graph is for non-technical and technical people so if you are interested in running a node uh get involved by being an indexer if you're just you know a front-end full stack developer you can build a subgraph um if you're just here you know interested in the crypto ecosystem you can be a curator and use your knowledge about apps entering gmt in the network mary for compound grants you can you can always go to compoundgrants.org um you know always apply to us before ave though just just saying um and and if you just want to message me i'm at sukhernik at telegram you can find me at any time i'm joking you should apply to both ave and and and the graph and and compound everywhere it's not a zero-sum game um this is awesome and julia lastly uh we'll end off with how people can get in touch with you uh yes i didn't get to introduce myself but i'm co-founder of orca protocol we're building tools for dows um check us out on twitter and join our discord we are gearing up for launch so lots of exciting updates to come amazing well thank you so much everybody and this marks the end of today's summit now we had the ave grand style summit yesterday and the next summit is next thursday with compound grand so we'll we'll give the same people both opportunities to avoid both but uh we'll see you all uh next week and in the meantime for everybody participating at the hackathon um happy hacking and uh see you next week enjoy your weekend thanks everybody thanks for having us thanks [Music] [Applause]