Growing as a DAO - MakerDAO Lessons Learned -Nadia

[Applause] hey everyone this is for tall people not for life so um yeah i want to give you a little bit of history because i don't know how much you know about maker's evolution in the last few years because makers started as a dao but then created a foundation to bootstrap the dao and now we are completely decentralized and we are like maker now so everything started uh two years ago now uh when the community and some people inside the maker foundation were thinking about how to growth maker without the foundation but just like it depending on the community and this this is super important for us because we need that the future of the maker protocol is in hands of the community and decided by the maker governance we we don't want a central point of control deciding what what is going to happen with the maker protocol that is like the most important uh objective that we have at the time and that is also super important for us right now actually like we have a lot of conversations in our dao and sometimes someone like maybe a new person comes with an idea of why don't we create a foundation because that would make things so much easier and we're like no we can't go back there like that's not what we want to do a roadmap is complete decentralization and we know it's hard it's challenging but that's what we want to do because that's like the initial ethos of the protocol that's why the protocol was called maker thou in the beginning so everything started like that and thanks to that vision we are now organized by core units a core unit is just like a subdao as other that was called or a group of people that wants to help and provide services to the protocol in some way um every community has a mandate has to present that mandate to the maker governance to the maker community and inside the mandate i have to say okay i want to do this and to achieve that objective i need all these resources so then the maker community starts like discussing that idea and then it starts the governance cycle and the maker holders decides if they want you in or maybe you need to work more in your proposal so my vision on on how koreans work is that every career need is helping maker to grow but in different with different perspectives so for example we have the protocol engineering career unit they are creating new services for the protocol they are developing new things on the protocol they helping to grow the protocol from from the smart contracts perspective but we also have the oracle school unit and they are supporting the protocol by uh adding more collaterals into the protocol that's also growing the protocol new collaterals help us to increase the supply in a and help us to like have a more a more integrated ecosystem with other crypto projects that exist around there's also a risk or unit they also like their mandate it's about increasing die supply but considering all the challenges that every token could have within the maker protocol there are i don't know how many koreans we are right now because the protocol is growing super fast i think we are like about 21 career units which is insane and fun fact we don't know how many maker people are we have no idea we think it's about 100 and something because that's the number of people in our discord channel but we don't know and we like it that way because we don't care about that we care about growing the maker protocol and there's there is us i i didn't mention other koreans because like we are a lot of now and i just wanted to make it simpler for you and then it's growth growth career need and so part of the business development team in the foundation we decided like we love maker we are super in love with maker we decided we wanted to continue helping the protocol to growth from the business development perspective so we created the growth core unit and our mandate is to help the protocol to increase the supply and demand with the ecosystem so we care a lot about uh our partners and projects and how the ecosystem can help make her to grow and how we can help the ecosystem to grow at the same time so now i'm going to talk a little bit more about the growth core unit so what's our strategy and i think this is super important yes we are a dao but we also need structures and uh probably the dao is is is chaotic and that's good but inside every care unit i think every career has to have like a clear strategy on how they are going to achieve that mandate that we said that that we promised to the maker community so understanding that what we care about is maker die supply and demand we are super focused on how we are going to achieve that or how we're going to increase supply in the maker protocol by having more collaterals but good collaterals for the protocol because you'll know that we are super conservative uh for for us die is uh is like the most valuable stable coin in the ecosystem and we have to take care of the of the security of dai and the security of the eye depends on the collaterals that are backing die so we are constantly looking for new collaterals and new users that can open vaults and help us to increase the supply in the protocol but on the other side we also have to think about demand so we need to have like more users using dye so this like right now this is has been like a an awesome challenge for us because right now we are thinking about the multi-change strategy how are we going to like grow not just in on main net with all the challenges that it has because of the gas phase and all you know but also how we are going to like have dye everywhere not just like in layer two but why not uh solana or other networks so that's part of our strategy and with that strategy in mind we organized the team the team is organized by regions why and this is like we decided that because it's like what maker is we are a a global solution but this global solution has to be customized depending on the regions and the users that will have access to the makerbots or die so that's why we need like a customized vision on it region because if each region and each country has its own its own its own challenges and its own reasons of why using dye or make or the maker protocol so uh that's why our team is organized by different regions these also help us with the time zone like we are a global team i guess this is a a common challenge between all the dows it's it's crazy organizing a call because we have people uh in in in south korea we have people in dubai we have people in europe we have people in the u.s we have people in latin america so it's crazy the time zone it's it's like it's crazy thing but we we all are super flexible with that because we want like to we love the protocol again that's like the uh the common thing that you will find in all the maker people we like the other day we were joking and we were saying that probably maker is is a toxic relationship because doesn't matter what happens we are there for the protocol but also we have to like have experts on the different verticals that we identify that are important for maker so c5 d5 gaming's and nfts we are working on how to bring nfts to the protocol so stay tuned and also things that are important for us uh there are two initiatives that will help the protocol to increase the supply that is institutional votes and the real-world assets so we have the strategy we have the team but now we need the people inside that team and what we always look is for people with a make or doubt mindset what is that payments in die we don't we don't touch fiat payments and die all the time because of course why not that that is important for us because that helps the team to understand like what the diet users need and that help us also to think about okay what partnerships we need like what's my dream like if i'm getting my salary and i what do i need now like i need to like convert that into fiat sometimes to pay for something so how i'm going to uh how i'm going to develop that use case and if we get solution the solution for for ourselves we are getting the solution for all of all the users which is is great the incentives of the team has to be aligned with the strategy like if our strategy right now says that we need to increase the supply then we have to think on how to find more users that are putting their collateral their eat into maker to meet more thai and that's why we created this solution that we call institutional vaults that is just like um different terms for users that want to open a vault of a minimum of 200 million die so how are we going to approach these users what are we going to offer to them why they are opening a vaulting maker and not using another lending protocol so this is all the things that we need to like understand and the team of course it because it's it's like a huge uh challenge for us like to convince all these crypto users to come to maker so we are looking on ways to incentivize the growth team so they can like be focused on bring more institutional vaults to the protocol and and help the protocol to grow in the eye supply we are contributors of the maker protocol there are no employees in the maker protocol this is important because we we are there because we want to be there if we want to work in another protocol at least the contributors of the of the core unit they can do that like it's okay like you you are just focused on your objectives as a contributor not you don't have to think about uh i have to work from nine to six i have to like uh have these these days for vacations like that's not something we care about we care about uh what you do and well it is like the last point but proof of work we don't care about who you are we care about what you do so uh usually when when someone wants to join the team like i i don't like we don't care about like if you studied in a place or not or what we care is about how are you contributing to the dao to the ecosystem what did you do in your past what you can bring to the protocol so that's what's important for us and also we look people like super passionate about maker about all this craziness that is a dao because it's it's it's super cool you have a lot of freedom but also it's challenging because i invite you to like go to the maker forum you will see how challenging it is like a lot of super smart people discussing in the forum having a lot of ideas we don't have the answers of a lot of things like for example just recently we start to think about how we can improve the way of when we of board a career need because onboarding it's important but of boarding it's also important and and and we have to think about like the best process for us and and i'm not talking just about korean it's also collaterals onboarding it's important but what happens when we decide to afford the collateral so all of these are questions that we don't have the answers we are creating the answers and and if you're interested you are welcome to join the maker community and help us to create solutions for that and that's why we need self-started people like we don't know what we have to do we just like start doing and start thinking and we all know that the main objective is to help make her to grow so the growth car unit was created last year on march april i don't know and uh since then these are this has have been no results we are super focused on closing integrations because again well our mandate is to increase help to increase diet supply and demand and we do that through our partners so uh we are super focused and our metrics are around how many integrations we are closing every quarter and how many activations we call activations marketing activations is when we help our partners to create a campaign around die but like helping them to grow in this case and this is this is super interesting we are looking for a win-win situation where maker will like have more die users because of this partner that integrated die but we are helping that partner that protocol to grow as well because we are creating a new use case that will help them to like attract more people to that protocol so that's important for us um like for me like the things that uh caused more impact in the protocol was the creation of this thing i just explained to you the institutional votes thanks to that we created more than 1.5 billion die uh so of course it's not just growth career in it but because you can you can work by yourself in a in about you need to cooperate with other care units because but this was just one of the initiatives that we were leading and thanks to that like we we we brought that to the protocol and also we help with new collaterals on the on the psm the psm is is is a model where we include others typical stable coins as collaterals but in our one-to-one ratio and we thought okay if we are including these new stable coins maybe we should like think about a long-term agreement with them where we can find this win-win situation so that's what we are doing and thanks to that well that helps help us to create a 500 million die in the protocol so lessons lessons learned first coordination is key not just in your career need or sub-dial but in the dao coordination is the most important thing because again you can do things by yourself you need other people and that's that's like what i like the most about working in nadao we have like people from different backgrounds different time zones different people uh so we need to coordinate with them to like start doing things we are humans and uh we are super used to the online world like i i spend all my time in front of this computer on discord on twitter on a zoom call all of the all of that but we need to go to real life every so often that's super important because we need to like have this human connection with all others and sometimes we forgot about that and i think because of covid we we really forgot about that but it's super important so if you're working about trying to like i don't know hang out with your people in an offside not just your career unit that that that was an experiment we did just recently we organized an upside usually teams have these soft sides just within their teams but we thought we are a dao we we we need people from the dow so we invited other people from other car units and the community to our offside and that was great because we learned a lot that that that was great we need to attract more diverse and talented people i think we are in a very close environment like i have been working for maker for the last four years so i have been crypto for the last five years or so and and crypto environment is super closed and what is what what i see is happening now that we are getting a lot of attention of people from the traditional world and that is awesome we need to attract that talent because they will help us to really grow and create an impact on what we are doing and that is that is my next uh challenge and that is what i want to do next within maker and the growth career and i want to like have people that's not crypto native because i want them i want to convert them using maker as an excuse because they will receive payments in die so that's good um scalable we need to scale we need to grow but we can't i'm talking about growth career coordinate or the growth subdial we can grow and convert ourselves into a big company that would be crazy because then we will be the next foundation and we don't want that so we have to like always think about it we have to like just maintain a small team and if we see the need to have another team we can incubate that team and they could be a separate career unit so we need to grow but in a decentralized way that's super important for adult and last thing is burnout is real because we are always always working because we are passionate about what we do i think that's something that every crypt of people shares we are super passionate so we have to take care of our dao like because again we are people and yeah sometimes people don't know when to disconnect so we have we have to help them like dude you have to take time off because this this this this is not working and what's next well we are scaling the growth careering but by incubating a new team so right now the maker dao doesn't have a marketing car unit which is crazy because this is this is another of the crazy things of the dow i don't know if you went to the maker party on wednesday we organized that party as a dao because we don't have one team that organizes parties so there were people from different career units people from the community i don't know like a bunch of people that wanted to have a great party and that's what we did there's no team responsible of doing that so as a dao we find the solution and we execute it so we right now as a growth team we and maker we know that we need a marketing career unit we don't want to grow the team and have a marketing team so we are going to incubate that career unit i don't know what will happen with that i will tell you in the next denver how how it went uh because this is this is all new so we'll see we have to improve our internal processes because we need to be more and more and more transparent transparency is key and we also have to like take better decisions by having more information and that is that is just possible if you improve your internal processes and we want to help make her to grow with these strategic initiatives real-world assets institutional vaults and the multi-chain strategy that you will learn more about it in the next months i hope and yeah that's it i invite you to like follow us on twitter if you want to know more about maker growth so we have a twitter account maker growth and also in the forum i'm uh always of the uh posting updates about what we are doing so if you want to know what a growth team should do for adults you can just like take a look and or update some also like available if you have any questions if you are like thinking about how to help your doubt to grow just like uh dm me and and and i can help you on that thank you everyone awesome thank you nadia so next up we have a rare sighting here in the middle weak stage which is someone from tradfi so everyone please welcome grace from mastercard [Applause]