DAO Collaboration: A Case Study - Joshua Forman

good afternoon everybody thanks for coming this afternoon and hearing me talk about dow collaboration my name's josh foreman and i've been involved actually same organization that danielle who is just up here shape shift i've been there for a couple years and as she mentioned we just transitioned to a dow last year so i'm going to provide some case studies some unique scenarios from when shapeshift was a centralized company to when shapeshift as a decentralized company and i'm hoping that through these examples that you're going to see that the collaborative power of individuals as equals is one of the things that sets daos apart from traditional companies i think there's many things that sets daos apart from traditional companies but i think this is a very significant factor especially as we look at the societal impacts and basically just how organizations do work together okay so the collaborative power of individuals as equals sets dow's apart key phrase here is collaborative power and i'm going to bring in a working assumption and that is that if you want to see how power flows in an organization you must follow the money so if you disagree with this happy to talk about that as another time but going forward to see the how power works in an organization you got to see how how money is controlled so that being the case let's follow the money shall we and let's start with a centralized company how does money flow in a centralized company so first there is a bank account that's right for all using crypto that evil terrible financial instrument called a bank account they're pretty much necessary for a centralized company and there's a board of directors and a ceo and an organization underneath them and excuse me come budget cycle the ceo and if they're good and it's a good culture in the company he's gonna or they are going to put together a budget submit that up to the board of directors which will allow money to then flow down through the organization company budget department budget team budget salaries expenses etc to keep the organization going so let's compare that now to a decentralized organization no bank account for those of you in crypto you can rejoice there is a dow treasury hooray and how does money come out of the dow treasury so for a fully decentralized organization and there's a couple variations here there is a a bunch of governance token holders in the dow and a token holder then submits a proposal to spend funds from the treasury and there's some kind of governance process where this proposal ultimately goes to vote where every token holder that's a part of the dow can say whether they want those funds to be spent in the way dictated by the proposal so everyone votes that's a key differentiator between a centralized company and also any token holder can put together a proposal and send that to vote so again here on your left power and money flows from the top down through the hierarchy and in a decentralized organization it goes around creating what i think of as a circle of equals all right so let's get into some of these specific case studies that i was talking about so first let's look at the software development life cycle of centralized shape shift why are we looking at the software development life cycle well for the few years before shapeshift decentralized i was the director of engineering and uh so our engineering team had a couple key responsibilities in the organization one was to do the technical design of our product which here is a screenshot of what our product looked like as a centralized organization great product this is a web we also had a web version and uh so we designed this we wrote the code that built this and ran this we did some initial testing and we maintained it in production and we fixed bugs when they occurred all of this happened within our centralized company shapeshift so what happened for a couple times in these years uh leading up to our decentralization is that the ceo and others in upper management i'll put in air quotes decided that uh oh i'm sorry a key the last key thing that uh engineering did is we provided estimated dates of when features would be complete hey let's build this we would go back do some design and then come back to the company and say all right we're going to have this done by xdate so sometimes the ceo or others in executive management would decide that we needed a date sooner than that that could be driven by an external factor such as a conference or a press release or something like that and then engineering further down in the hierarchy would then go back there'd be a lot of mixed emotions consternation how are we going to do this how are we going to do this and we would talk to the product team what kind of features can we cut so that we can hit this date we'd have internal conversations can we cut any architectural corners make this maybe not as good as we would have liked but we can still get those features in we would look at what kind of can we cut quality a lot of the times in a situation like this engineers will talk about getting not writing tests right so it won't be as robust it won't be as solid but heck we'll still get those features in uh can we work late to get this all kinds of questions about how can we do this and there yeah there'd be a lot of discussion is it worth it to hit this date is it worth the corners that we need to cut is it worth our future growth right for any of these cutting corners we incur technical debt tech debt evil word if you're an engineer you hate that stuff but it it it grows when you cut corners is it worth it is it worth it no matter what engineering thought what happened is no matter what engineering thought we ultimately resigned ourselves to hit these dates that came from above the organization why is that what i would propose is that no one in engineering felt empowered to say no to those above us now in full transparency that does include me as the most senior ranking engineer in the company i did not feel empowered to say no and what i'm neither did anybody else and what i'm here to propose is that this is not a problem of a specific person's problem you know you could say well hey josh you're just not a good enough leader you know well that may be that may not be but my what i'm proposing here is this is not a specific person problem this is a human systems problem and i've been leading engineering teams for 15 years now i've talked to lots of head of engineers i've talked to a lot of ceos chief product officers all kinds this was not a unique challenge inside of centralized shape shift further evidence that this is a human systems problem and if this is a human systems problem then that means it needs a human systems solution so let's talk about the software development life cycle at decentralized shapeshift shapeshift dow here's our new v2 platform product totally awesome beautiful elegant product we can talk more about that in a bit but for purposes of this conversation we are now in a decentralized organization and i'm going to relate to you a series of events that occurred in just october november last year right as we were transitioning into this dow method of working so what happened is that a called an influential token holder they were the ceo of centralized shapeshift they decided that they were going to offer a bounty to be able to hit a certain feature set within a certain time frame so engineering even though we're we're in a totally different structure uh danielle mentioned about like there's still structure in a dao so we still had an engineering team as a dao we were together as an engineering team and i was the now at this point i'm now the engineering work stream leader no longer the director of engineering so here's engineering we get this bounty and we take it back and we go through the same discussions that we had before right to be clear this is the exact same individuals that were in the centralized company same senior engineers me uh maybe we had a few less on the engineering team at this point but it's this it's the same people here and we discuss is it worth it is it worth the corners that we need to cut and we thought no it's not worth the corners that we need to cut previously as a centralized org we would have resigned ourselves to doing it anyway this time because we're in a circle of equals we actually said no and what happened as a result of that is that the this uh individual came back with another offer a counter offer that had an extended time frame based on our feedback we said here's what no thank you but no thank you but here's what we can do because we do see the need to get something out sooner and this individual token holder came back with another proposal for a reduced feature set a longer period of time to get it done and then we went back again and talked as an engineering team and decided this was worthy to do and we therefore did that so let's look at this again here on your left is the centralized company with power flowing down through the organization and one of the things that resulted when we were in this centralized structure right the the product after we had this after we had resigned ourselves to cutting corners multiple times the product itself was um even though it was a it was a good product to be able to interact on the blockchain with it's still it had it had quality issues it got more and more complex over time so when there were bugs they were harder to track down we went through periods of sometimes like multiple weeks of performance issues like what is going on with this product because it had grown in complexity so much it got so much harder to understand what was going on with it and it also was a a terrible developer experience very hard to work in took a long time to build new features and bringing a new developer into it was a real it was a real pain in the ass frankly so on a right now that we are in this circle of equals and we are really looking at the engineering quality that we're building our product is very elegant it uh runs well it's very lightweight very performant can be run in a decentralized manager a decentralized manner along with the ethos of our organization and we also are now able to offer it open source so we know very well that new contributors come in really quickly get spun up and are able to add features and functionality so much so that in january we had more external contributors contribute to the code base than we have members on the core dev team that's a pretty significant improvement there [Applause] something that we're really proud of is the community that's being built around our code base would not have been possible at all under decentralized shape shift under sorry centralized shapeshift would not have been possible okay so i'm hoping that after all of this you've you've been able to see as i am that is the collaborative power of individuals as equals is what sets a significant aspect that sets daos apart from traditional companies so where do we go from here right i've hopefully given you some anecdotal evidence if you're not here with me right now on this statement i hope that you're thinking about it and maybe you'll look for some your own direct experiential evidence towards us if this inspires you at all to learn more about dao's to find out if this is true that's awesome what i would like to see is any kind of empirical study with quantitative data about this statement to see if it's true or not i'm not a researcher so i don't know how to conduct those kind of studies if anybody knows of any of those i'd love to hear about them and if there's anybody that hears this that wants to collaborate on doing some study like that please reach out to me and let me know i think that daos are here to change the world i think they can take this on a much larger scale and i'd love to get some evidence now to see if this is true or not and pivot if we need to pivot so i'll get to questions in a minute while i'm not sure if i'll have time for questions but um maybe but for now on the on your left here that's app.shapeshift.com that's our awesome new product it is a platform that you can go to and connect multiple wallets to interface with multiple d5 protocols across multiple chains that's a lot of multiples but we are going to the multiverse so we want to be there with you when you do on the right is a link that's me i'm actually stepping down as the work stream leader at shape shift dao staying on as an advisor and a coach also now on the treasury management diversification committee that danielle mentioned and uh am launching my own coaching practice it's been a side business of mine for a while so if you follow that qr code you can see a blog post that i wrote that goes into this case study into much more detail there's also a way to book 15 minutes with me if you want to talk about dows i want dallas to succeed i want to figure out what we need to do to keep this thing forward i really think that we're here to stay and make the world a better place and if i can help you make the world a better place i'd love to do it thank you josh thank you [Applause] judd is there a question do we have time for a question or two if there are any yes what are some of the challenges for some if someone's looking to come into a dow and they're they're they're hesitant because of power in my say it again oh yeah yeah um so the question is like if you're a centralized company and there's there's a higher claim people getting paid more right and you're looking at coming into a dow well so the one of the things that's important about dallas is they're very transparent all the budgets at shapeshift dow you can see them they're they're posted in our forums they're in our proposals so you do have to be comfortable with transparency and even as a centralized company there was a lot of arguments for making all salaries transparent in the centralized company some organizations are doing that today so it's just a lot clearer you just know more about the structure the power dynamic and how money flows into the organization that you're stepping into you do have to be comfortable with that you have to be comfortable i think in the world we're going to here you have to be comfortable having all the information at your fingertips it can't be something that you're scared of or makes you feel less secure even if you're making less than somebody or something like that thank you josh