DAOFest – Donnie Benjamin, Sobol.io

okay hi thanks for staying in this cold room it's probably colder in here than in Antarctica I think Antarctica got to 65 degrees and it's definitely colder than 65 degrees in here so I'm a my name's Donny I'm a co-founder of Silvio and work we're trying to well I'll get into what we are but when I tell people when I say the word Dow I don't know if you were on the Dow fest website but there's a thing it says what is it Dow but the people my friends and family they don't say what is it Dow they say what the [ __ ] is it down because you know it's a strange word so that's why I'm calling this presentation what the [ __ ] is it Dow and kind of how Sobel's the bridge between the web to in the web three worlds so we want to oh and by the way I'm gonna make fun to dowse but it comes from a good spot I love dowse but kind of how we think about bridging the gap so this is how our kind of mission we want to accelerate the transition to decentralized and humanistic work that's kind of a lot of what dowels are doing decentralizing how organizations operate and ideally providing a little more humanism into what you do every day as opposed to the bureaucracy and the hierarchy so we're big on pragmatism in the sense that we know we live in the world as it currently exists we know who has the power in the world and we obviously want to migrate the world towards a different future but we're not starting from a place where we're pretending that all sorts of people are going to be ready to jump into the decentralized movement or the blockchain space or dows or whatever so we're living in the world as it is with the goal of making it as we want it to be so here's uh you know when people say what the [ __ ] is a Dao you know first the first problem we have is that it's an acronym which I just think is a terrible I don't know who came up with this but to have a movement be represented as an acronym so then it's not only people don't understand what it Dao is but then you have to explain what the acronym stands for and then even then the words in the acronym don't make a lot of sense to a lot of people and then we think when we think about Dao is we think it's already a niche part of a niche industry so we're getting super nichy with what we're talking about but on the positive side it is a really cool inspiring way to imagine the future of work so we think about approaching it from a web to place first using simpler language onboarding teams without scaring them away with big words or futuristic phrase cyberpunk phrases and we hope that this approach will appeal to more than just very niche sectors or industries and it will continue to be a very cool inspiring way to imagine the future of work so we don't refer to a dao as a dao week instead of calling it a dad we just call it a team and in this case team is represented with a capital T or a Dao as a team of teams and that we find that's a lot simpler and I have the head explode emoji because it shouldn't make your head explode but you know we find it's just an easier way to talk to people of what we're trying to say so Dao is a capital T teams and then what's the difference between a capital team and a lowercase T team well we think like a true team works together to accomplish it goals but if you've worked for a big company even a big tech company they really operate in terms of lowercase t teams where you have people who are competing with each other so you're on a team you're supposed to try to accomplish the same thing but you end up competing with each other whether it's for a compensation promotion recognition or whatever capital T team doesn't need a manager it can be decentralized whereas a lowercase T team that's where you need that manager to deal with that bureaucracy the paperwork things like that capital T team you can determine value capture as a team as opposed to having a manager or some HR people that don't actually know what people on the team are doing day-to-day so we think of like who's the best person to evaluate members of the team well it's the members of the team collectively there's tons of biases to managing performance with with it lower case T team we try to get rid of those with a capital case T team and then we also have you know this idea that we can continue to bring the humanistic work where you're doing what you enjoy as opposed to some bureaucratic hierarchical stuff and then we think about what is this platform for teams need so we're not trying to be a Dow in the sense that you need to be able to send some store of value around or currency or stake but there's other basics that you need so in this case role setting goals agreements and a ledger of activity so people know what's happened in the role the goals the team things like that so this is so ball dot IO and I will jump into a quick little visualization so this is Sobel this is a demo environment called cyber storm entertainment so basically it's a robust way to view an organization so if I want to go into a specific team I can find out all about that team what they're working on who's the contact link out to things we can create our goals you can do that in a variety of ways in this case you can manage goals across people and across teams and all that updating in real time you can close out goals attach different things so really robust way to do goal-setting as opposed to okay our software again because we're focused on people and not titles people actually are roles and have multiple rules across an organization so you can see all the roles on this team you can dig into the specific descriptions of what people want out of that role and then you know importantly how do you have these agreements about how the team operates in a way to sign-sign those and then that same thing with the ledger of activity ways to have discussions make decisions all from the team as opposed to an org chart or hierarchy so I'll end there feel free to reach out to us at so Buldeo or twitter at team sovel I don't know if any of the few people in the room have any questions but I'm happy to answer [Music] the showing but we do have high quality audio video for your delight my question here is you know when Sobel is out of the demo environments and you're sort of moving to the proof of concept you know trying this with different firms companies is there a particular corporate structure that you're imagining or is this something that will redefine the structure and kind of create some different opportunities so I think you can run or not I think I know that you can run teams if you want to be completely decentralized but then some organizations will put in like an executive team circle or they will create a field in their summaries of manager so you will have like you'll see who your manager is so that's why I think of it is like we're bridging these two worlds so you can do both you can run a totally remote decentralized team and Sobell easy but it also allows more legacy organizations to slowly move over without managers and feeling like they have to give up power or executives feeling like they have to give up power you know they can still show you can still you can even still do titles and so well we see it all but that's again we think we want to help people naturally migrate there which I think they want as opposed to overly complicated and say you should have a dhow and then they go what the [ __ ] is a Dow so simply you know managerial structure yeah kind of what you just said as opposed to we don't do Co budgeting but ideally we'd like to integrate with teams that are building the co budgeting stuff this is more like organs it's like the CIO would want to know about the org and the legacy environment how that how the teams actually structured or how the groups actually structured versus hierarchy yeah yeah we get that a lot so I just said like holography is a very rigid I hope I see works for teams great I'm not putting down holacracy at all but it is a more structured way and I know the hawk or C people will say it isn't but I think when you approach team again haladki see it's another word where it's just you know it's it i think it overly complicates things whereas this is like you can continue to run your organization exactly as you in Sobel as you are right now but maybe the way you view your organization or the way information flows changes and that kind of changes how you think about how you're how you should be designing your organization so you can run holacracy in Sobel almost we'll get there soon where if you wanted to run it set it up so you could but I think part of the reason this is purely my hypothesis that maybe self-manage Paulo crack styler didn't really get very far it seems like it's peaked is because it's it sounds more confusing that it probably is and it's not easily explainable and it it requires teams to just jump into it like a Zappos is the classic case study on this word that like we're just doing it and you can will give you severance if you don't want to be a part of it but I think that's the only example of a larger organization that has you know from the top decided so hopefully more teams will migrate there but I just don't like from the pragmatic side I just don't imagine teams jumping there instantly thanks to the question