Working for DAOs

[Music] [Applause] [Music] early and alex singh they're going to be talking about what does it mean to now work for a doubt um this kind of sparked off as a discussion from chatting with cooper where he has been part of so many doubts that uh i feel like the timing is right to talk about what does it mean now for somebody to be employed by a dow what does it mean to work full-time or to say that you're working the dow and the challenges and the tooling and everything else around that world so uh it's gonna be a pretty active discussion and i'll let all of them do most of the talking so without further ado let's welcome cooper gabby and alex [Music] thank you so much kartik it's pleasure to be here excited to have you [Music] hey gabby alex how we feeling today hey hey great thanks so much ready to kick off this uh beautiful friday morning talking about working for dallas huh no better time cheers nice so guys i know that um we have a pretty extensive amount of area that we can cover here i want to keep this more casual today i want it to feel very natural and basically just help people understand what is our day to day look like you know i think a lot of the time i get questions about thousand conceptually it makes sense you're in a discord server you're hanging out with people that i think more the mysterious part of working for dallas is what this actually looks like behind the scenes you know i hope that after this conversation people listening can walk away with you know what would this look like if i were to try and go work for a dow full time you know how would this compare to working for another crypto project maybe working for a web 2 company in the past hopefully just try and give some more uh clarity to what this looks like but before we do that i want to kick it off with some intros maybe i'll start with gabby and then send it over to zay would you guys mind just giving a quick background on first and foremost you know your your first dow experience and then maybe a little bit more what you're working on today and how this ties into working for dallas tomorrow yeah awesome um i'm trying to think of this counts as my first style experience cooper maybe uh you can give me some thoughts here with the bright moments dao i think that counts as my first experience um absolutely the the experience that brought me full-time uh into crypto and getting me so excited about this space which i'll talk about in a second uh was with a community originally based in los angeles called bright moments which uh started as a physical nft art gallery in venice and if you wanted to come mint an nft at the gallery you had to come in person and kind of go through this experience one-on-one uh sitting down with the organizers of the dao learning about the project understanding their goals for the community and then you commit one and join the community and everyone has gone through the same process to get one of those nfts and so the community is incredibly strong because there's this shared sense of ownership and background and belonging in this community that spans these physical and digital walls which i think is really special um so spending time in that community uh you know i was going to that gallery so often that's how i met cooper it's how i really got so excited about the space and that's what prompted me to uh leave my job in web 2 and join full-time kind of pushing forward this new frontier of consumer software so what i do now is i'm an investor at tcg we're a decade plus year old firm uh that invested digital consumer and we've done so successfully over the past decade and been very thematically driven and so we invested early in openc in the athletic twitter pandora and now uh really incredible communities like barcelona sports crunchyroll exploding kittens um tcg started driving a lot of conviction in the crypto space believing that this is the next big horizon for consumer and obviously i feel the same way so i mentioned openc we also invested in dapper labs led the series a and z run so now i've just recently joined the team to focus on investing earlier in crypto at this intersection of consumer and blockchain trying to really identify the on-ramps or the companies trying to bring in the next 10 or 100 million users in the space amazing zhang what are you working on these days man uh hey everyone uh i'm alex zhang a lot of the homies call me zang zhang my first hour experience is still my main dow experience it stole my heart quite early on and and i'm still deep in the game there that's friends with benefits uh i always say that i was i was recently sort of pilled or brought into the web3 space only about six months ago i was previously working in different various community organizations always at the intersection of culture and technology whether it was running radio stations or running sort of startup accelerator programs always interested in how different people with different backgrounds could come together what that sort of overlap space looked like and what are those what were the innovations that were sort of come when when people met with sort of different backgrounds and different perspectives that led me to an organization called summit series which was a global community company of about 25 000 members around the world uh where we hosted festivals conferences events and our most notable project was coming together as a community and fundraising to purchase a crowdfunding to purchase a ski resort in utah that was going bankrupt that we then turned into sort of a physical place where we all spent the last five years um sort of living together collaborating together and in a site where we hosted most of our conferences but that was all within this web 2 framework and i saw a lot of the challenges that um community organizations faced that were just limited by web 2 right lack of transparency lack of things not being on chain the idea of like you know value accrual to a corporate entity as opposed to value accrual to a community to the actual uh you know the users or the members and so it was web 3 and sort of more specifically the dao framework that really opened my eyes into all new frameworks in which to organize and bring people together and to create value for the entire uh equation or the entire pie that then led me to discover friends with benefits where i got to meet cooper and trevor um and a whole bunch of other members sort of started friends with benefits uh where i now spend uh almost all of my time leading uh strategy and operations as sort of the was the first sort of full-time you know head of community to really distill uh sort of a vision in a product roadmap and really take uh what i think a lot of internet communities possess this day which is sort of lightning in a bottle overnight right like a sort of fractionalized nft you know purchase or an immediate dow that spun up over a specific cause but i see a lot of the the work is in the tail end of actually taking that energy and creating organizational structure around it so that a team can come together and harmonize and build uh over a longer period of time which is which is specifically what i spend my time at friends with benefits doing nice and i want to stick on that for a second because you were the first full-time hire from friends with benefits you know i think now at this point we have close to 10 to 15 paid rolls on a monthly basis but i'm really curious to hear when you're entering the space you know having no prior web 3 experience what was that conversation like to sort of flesh out like a formal paid role from a dow you know relative developing not really been involved in crypto deeply before that like what did that conversation look like how did you feel about that can you walk us through sort of your state of mind entering that conversation yeah um i think the crypto industry at large um i think had at least from the perspective i came from as being a relative outsider it has a lot of pr and branding work that needs to be done collectively right as all of us who now let's say work in crypto and everyone now who works in crypto i think would agree that crypto isn't even necessarily an industry right it's an underlying infrastructure that can affect like every single industry but i think a lot of education needs to be done and yet the media isn't 100 on our side of like how they tell these stories uh but i think the first thing that that that i was sort of processing was what does it actually mean to sort of work or be affiliated in crypto right so i think that takes finding incredible spaces like bright moments like friends with benefits like all these different projects um and beyond that that feel like they're they're they're working um on that longer tail horizon and sort of stepping around a lot of let's say like the ico narrative that dominated you know a couple years ago or sort of these these different fun these different yeah these different branding mechanics that didn't really serve i think the industry at large so i think first was figuring out where i sat in relationship to the overall space um and then there was just like the basic um you know mechanics of like okay what does it look like to transition from web to um i think frameworks even right like how do salaries um you know the concept of equity that vests over many years if you work in a startup i think this narrative that a lot of you know people over the last 20 years who joined sort of the startup silicon valley grind of like i'm going to join early employee at a startup i'm going to like try to grab as much equity as i can in this company that those sort of um i think parameters that that that you know the zero-sum game i think of startup world in silicon valley world it was just really interesting to traverse into web3 where so much of those those those paradigms and those frameworks uh exist in totally different context which was really exciting so even understanding how you know paying in token you know how earning tokens as contributing to a dow was something that that i had sort of never thought thought of before i think even the notion of um contributing to and being locked in in one specific company full-time where right startups are very much like oh everything you create here is ipo owned by this company you need to give everything your attention i think dials really favor uh and where the future of work is going is skilled laborers and contributors working for handfuls of different dials based on their specific skill index and so for mine it was organizational design and leadership and community building and being able to take that and build that bake that into ffwb which just required all my bandwidth but eventually supporting with that function with other dowels so it's almost like fractionalizing your specific skill set and and and dow's have made it so much easier to contribute to things versus like the traditional like company of going through hr or multiple interviews like that whole narrative of of of of of web 2 um recruiting i think in web 3 has just greased those wheels a lot better and so joining these organizations i think has also been simplified to an extent and also the the the ways to contribute i've been amplified as well yeah and i want to zoom in there because i think it's really interesting the way that you joined fwb you know it wasn't like overnight you rocked up to the discord channel and then you're like okay i want a salary for a full-time position and i want a bunch of tokens yes or no vote on snapshot you know i think it was a much more iterative process than that um you know from my perspective you had a close friend and trevor who was very actively involved in the dow at that point in time we had a close working group that was running as staff basically but it was very loose and informal and at that point in time i think we all recognize that we needed someone to be full-time on this and so rather than you just diving in and being full-time on day one there's a very much iterative process of starting with the small usdc allocation you know coming on part-time and really engraining yourself in the community and as you sort of found that to be comfortable you know found out like who was working on what who are the key operators that i should be aware of you know what areas can i collaborate people where can i slot in i think at that point in time correct my wrong i want to say it was like one month to two months in when you were like alright i'm ready to actually do this full time and at that point i think it was working with you know people like myself trevor to really like flesh out what that role looks like more definitively and then start having those conversations about usdc salary versus tokenvest over here and kind of modeling more traditional compensation package that i think in the dow world might seem weird on the surface that it you know resembles such a traditional employment structure in a lot of ways but we'd love for you to just talk through you know how did you feel about that leaving your web 2 job where you had a really amazing position locked in you had amazing compensation you know i know that there was a lot of uh you're like hey what are these tokens that i'm getting like what is up with this you know like i'm getting a lot of internet tokens like these things even have value what's going on here like we'd love to just hear about that very quick transition from web 2 compensation package to web 3 like really just yoloing it like trusting that it was going to work out yeah um so i think the most relevant thing to this this community in this audience would even be i guess that that let's say that one to two three month period um where you're really i always call it the first date before you get married which is sort of the figuring out if there's a cultural fit and a skill set fit for the dow that you're looking to contribute to and so yeah i think that early process is incredibly important i believe that right now across the dial landscape that barrier needs to be significantly lowered and it needs to be easier for people who express interest to dive in and be able to start contributing picking up tasks and essentially proving to the community at large that they're the right cultural fit and the sort of right alignment of skill set um and so that's what i did right i came in i wasn't immediately like hey everyone i'm this is you know i'm full time and i'm the leader like you know in these network leadership models those those types of leaders don't don't succeed i think for me in that two to three months it was about coming in and listening was kind of what i explained first was like sitting there in like a coupe i don't think we've even talked about this but like that first two months i did probably like six to seven phone calls a day of dial community members anyone i saw that was posting that i thought had like merit or value or had an interesting take specifically the people who were critiquing how we were running running things i would reach out quickly introduce myself and ask to get on a quick discord chat and i was just banging out you know 15 20 minute calls a day building sort of repertoire a rapport with with this community and understanding and listening hey what were their biggest frustrations and what were those sort of needs that needed to be met and so i think that's where any community manager is looking to break into the dao space web 3 the first thing is really joining a computer community hopping over that hopefully lower buried entry and like listening and trying and spending time in a dao and then figuring out where your skill sets can specifically um plug in at in terms of the specific let's say web 2 to web 3 compensation package leave um there's no like just like in web 2 there's no like clear cut formula to be able to like replicate but i would say a framework i use is now we're onboarding new part-time to full-time contributors like every week i always say it's not about the first negotiation it's about the second just like get your foot in the door and like start contributing right i always like think of it if anyone's ever hired people here think of like how hard it is to prescribe an immediate value set to that individual if you've never if you haven't worked with them over an extended period of time you're kind of like shooting in the dark which is what i think a lot of web 2 was it was like competition of like you were making x at this big tech company and so i'm gonna match this plus ten percent plus x more equity i think that sort of like the inflated let's say compensation rates of silicon valley is quite dangerous and at least in web 3 i always say it's not the first negotiation it's your second come in get something that like makes you feel equal and valued but then as you prove value you then will have as a contributor significantly more leverage to be able to then ask for something that you feel like you're you're worth in your value i'm all for having you know contributors advocate for their contribution um value but i think it's about if you it's getting your foot in the door listening and then working with the existing team and in the community at large because everything is taken through proposals once you've proven the value it's a lot easier for a community to vote on like hey we think you're worth this whatever salary token schedule et cetera it's amazing and thank you for diving deep on that i think a lot of the times it's conceptually easy to say i work for adele but like really painting that color around what that looks like and that ramp up process is very helpful to people so gabby i want to go over to you here i think that you're an interesting spot where obviously your mo is you're an investor but the one thing that i respect about your work is it's not like you're just coming in and like hey where can i put money into this you know it's very much like an iterative process being hands-on with these communities you know i see you writing a lot about these subjects i see you kind of in the weeds on the discord how do you see your role sort of in the wider down landscape and when you think about joining a dao you know what's the frame of mind that you take as you go into those conversations yeah yeah absolutely so i guess some background on myself is i've always been really really deeply curious about how we interact with technology so i studied philosophy in computer science in school thought a lot about how do you grow and scale social computing systems anything from you know wikipedia to facebook and i've done a lot of thinking over the past couple years of what the future might look like in tech in digital culture in media and in community and particularly over the past year i realized i was just naturally gravitating towards crypto solutions and so it wasn't this moment where i woke up and decided okay i want to work in crypto but i just ended up finding myself there because i wanted to join the most interesting communities online and it ended up being a lot of these niche discord servers um i think zhang is totally right that the path to contribution is a little bit blurry now and luckily for us there are already solutions being created to help that um even how i met zang as i was i wrote a piece about like something around social tokens that i thought was flawed and exactly like you said he reached out and we got on a call and we talked about it and we talked about what a better onboarding might look like um i've joked before that there should be like a fraternity rush process for daos where you kind of get sort of a bird's eye view of what the community stands for and and what it's about and you can see if it might be a fit um as opposed to focusing on um financial upside by buying your way in or other things like that um so for me i focused on how i like spending my time and where i like to contribute a good example is i'm a member of forefront a media and publishing dao where you can help to write and edit and distribute uh pieces of content around uh crypto media so that's been a way for me to get involved um and i think for me kind of what i what i stand for in this ecosystem is uh speaking to two audiences really uh so the one audience i speak to is crypto natives people who spend really like every waking moment of their lives in this world like you guys to remind them of how people outside the space operate um because i kind of bridge this world being at a traditional investment firm and then the other audience i speak to is people outside of crypto to show how and why this space is for them too um and so a lot of the work that i focus on is promoting these projects that i care about that have really strong communities and showing people how that how they can get involved as well and so um i try to walk the walk and not just uh uh kind of pontificate from the sidelines yeah and how does your you know personal involvement in the space differ from your professional involvement as an investor do you think that there's a difference between how you're interacting with those on a day-to-day as gabby versus as you know professional investor do you think that they're more or less one of the same these days it's a really interesting question that um i haven't really personally reflected on to me it feels uh pretty similar where as an investor i'm incentivized for the companies i fund to succeed and i want to get involved right so the best investors have like a real significant value add and and same with joining a dow it's like you're quite incentivized with the platformer community itself and so um zhang was saying kind of like in web 2 it's a little bit of a zero-sum game and that's why i think on that compensation note uh i would caution against trying to compare a web 2 model of compensation to a web 31 because they really are fundamentally different from the ground up in web 2 communities as a user not necessarily as an investor but as a user we've seen as communities or platforms grow in web 2 they become increasingly misaligned with what users actually want um and that's just you know how it's structured from the ground up it's no fault of the users or of the people who have uh who run those platforms but in crypto when users are you know aligned with these platforms or communities from the ground up as they grow they become larger and more resilient and the users actually become more incentivized over time to innovate and create new technology and so um it's really exciting i think it actually blurs the lines between what an investor is and what a what a user is i think everyone is an owner now and that's how it always should have been and so it's really a new era in how people engage and interact and transact online and so um it's just exciting to see the blue ocean of opportunity in the space and a lot of people who have never been accredited investors before and never been in a position like mine who now get to do you know the same work that i get to do and add so much incredible value to the space that's exactly right and the one thing i want to call out from our dinner last night is it's wild to me how fast you are now regarded as someone who's like a leader in the dow space you know it's been six months obviously you're working for a killer community could you just talk a little bit about sort of this uh from your mind the fact of having been completely new six months ago and now people tagging you at tweets being like top mind in the dallas space like how do you think you came into that position what's kind of the key takeaway there for other people that are looking to get involved i i think to my earlier point um regarding crypto is not being an industry but as being this underlying infrastructure i think is an incredibly specific thing to i think pay attention to and and listen to right and by by saying that i mean crypto fundamentally or blockchain or doubt like all these like if we extract all those into their like the first principles of like what all this means right like distribution decentralization community ownership these frameworks i think can be applied to like literally every single industry and so if you if you think of it in that venn diagram it's like what are you bringing from if this circle is is blockchain technology whatever the biggest bucket and this circle is like the specific web 2 lens that you've been operating in and you have a specific skill set in if it's you know community building if it's art if it's music if it's fashion you know whatever it is your skill set will be sort of in that overlap area of the venn diagram that you can just carve out and dedicate you know content thinking creation production into that overlap i think you'll quickly find yourself owning um that category and aligning with other people who also are focused in that category uh and so for me i guess speaking to my journey like friends with benefits was just the perfect entry point for me or the gateway point because like i can speak even though i'm super new to crypto um i'm i'm i'm very well versed in understanding community building at scale and and how how humans come together and organize towards shared goals and the infrastructure and work design that it takes to get there and to align those incentives i just crypto just unveiled a whole new set of tools that i didn't even know existed and so it was just like once that clicked for me it was like oh i shouldn't be speaking to more crypto people about why or i mean yeah i mean i should yeah i should be speaking more to people from that world on like why crypto is relevant and then that immediately sort of positions myself in a way of like just having a unique i think insider perspective by no means is like an explicit leader just having a specific vantage point so i think yeah to other people who are looking to break in or already in but trying to figure out like where do i play or what space i hit i i exist within i think it's about what does that overlap look like in terms of a previous framework or context that you just have a unique skill set in right the more niche the better in my opinion like if you are like an incredible coffee connoisseur like find a way to tell that story and how that overlaps with like blockchain and like figure out something that like actually meets the needs of a set of community members so i think that understanding that overlap and then going very specific on like community building and org design and then you know obviously just timing it with the market like now daos are like everyone's talking about taos um was was sort of like the for me like the little recipe or cocktail of like finding my footing within this industry if i could ask a question to you guys from from this vantage point of uh kind of one being thought leaders in this space but also running this community that you hold you know really near and dear in the community is so so important of the the people who are part of it um a second order effect of you guys bringing so many people into this ecosystem and getting them excited about the space is there are probably a good number of people who are being highly speculative and just viewing fwb as a financial asset that they want to be a part of and so how do you kind of filter through um growing the value of that community uh from a financial perspective but also making sure that you're attracting the right people and getting them in the door um and then also not missing the people who might not have uh you know the financial buy-in but want to be a part of it i'll take that one first and saying love some commentary uh it might be a counterintuitive answer but i think the way you grow the financial value of the community is by not focusing on the financial value of the community when i'm onboarding someone into fwb i never talk about the token price i never talk about the valuation or the cost or what it whatever it might be you know really focus on the people i think the more that you can really shift the frame of mind away from like hey this is a token that has a financial value to hey this is a community of amazing people and you can work with them on a day-to-day basis i think the easier that becomes more specifically i think trying to point people into areas where they can contribute meaningfully is really really effective so it's not really beneficial for me to kick someone tokens and then just drop them in a general chat and be like good luck here's like what you can do if i'm on boarding someone to the community i really want to sit with them and say hey here are three or four different pockets of this community that you can start adding value to that's not to say that you need to hop in and start doing it today but have this on your radar you know pay attention here and my ambition is if i'm helping someone get into this community it's i have high conviction that they can actually add meaningful value in some way shape or form so i think it starts out like zang was saying just familiarizing yourself with the community putting gm in the discord chat you know popping and giving an intro something very basic but beyond that you know really showing them that if they put in the time and effort to work for this community they can earn tokens which have that financial value you know once someone earns those tokens i think that they're able to participate in the upside of this community but they have a very different frame of mind and as the community starts to do well you notice that those are the biggest cheerleaders for its success because they're the ones who actually helped create that value in the first place yeah those are i think that those that's all really solid framing uh coupe and i think the only thing i would add would be for me one of the most helpful framing around thinking about token price when building and in operating endow was something that um fully allocated and tina shared on a in a conversation which was that token price um is essentially dictated by the right people who are value aligned holding your token over a long period of time and once it was like simplified that clearly to me i was like oh this is fascinating it's just about really making sure that the right people hold your token through ideally earning because then that signals that they're value aligned or they're down to put in the work and that they're much they view it significantly more as an equity versus a currency right equity being something you hold that accrues value over a long period of time and then to ensure that the vision values and purpose of your organization is crystal clear so that the the holder can verify why they're holding checked against that vision and if they're still in alignment with that then they hold if they're not if that trust is broken then they sell right it's quite simple and so once i started viewing it like that it was about ensuring that all of the contributors you onboard all the people you choose to work with all the the desired members that apply are as close to an overlap of the organizational the organization's vision and values and that individual's value vision and values and that was why at fwb we put in place a membership committee which was essentially our actual set of community members who elected into being the first filter review so everyone who joins fwb has to apply in you know not explicitly based on their like professional qualifications but essentially like what are your values and what are you looking to get out of the space where are you looking to contribute to the space how do you want to participate and that community of community members self-selects the future community members in a way that like we designed is almost like a self-reinforcing mechanism to ensure that everyone who joined put in a little bit of skin in the game right they filled out an application they bought the tokens so that they're much less likely to drop in and be like oh this isn't really my space sell and like leave right so i think that function first off of like ensuring that there's value alignment between the token holder and the in the in the community member and like there will always be speculation that sits in and around that but i think if you can focus on that core and build over a long-term horizon eventually i think the tokenomics will favor the people who held over a long period of time and then i think to cooper's second point and and gabby you're you're framing around like contribution and earning that to me is like the biggest unsolved area um and i think how you address the social token paradox thing that that you've so succinctly and beautifully written about which is this like the social token narrative still hasn't really figured out um you know if everyone's working together a token price goes up then that like blocks out future contributors and then eventually that you know that hurdle to to to join becomes higher and higher and i think what needs to be solved is how do we create stronger scalable and repeatable contribute to earn functions so that people can can can participate in these taos through earning which is essentially the strongest form of skin in the game and the strongest signal of value um and vision alignment and i don't have an explicit answer for that yet but i think that that's something where right now it's done in a very non-scalable way it's it's very much like the right people who create the right content or products or design experiences like us reaching out and then bringing them in in a very manual basis i think the the the the evolution of like zero to one or one to ten specifically will be when we can create clear explicit and repeatable functions sort of like you know playing to earn you know functions and and things like ygg where it's a lot more like easy for someone to quickly on-ramp contribute sets of tasks to accrue tokens to then participate in in that in that tokenized uh community i love that i want to you know just a quick comment here in the chat that i think's really pointing at here almost every doll that i've seen uses some kind of token based governance and i think that's fundamental weakness that introduces aspects of a capital-based economy when dallas are better built around a reputation-style economy gabby i think one thing that you and i are really heavily aligned on is this idea of curation you know i really love the post that you put out about the importance of curation its role in the ecosystem and specifically related to reputation i think that there's a lot of takeaways here would you mind spending a minute or two talking about the thesis of that post maybe how it ties into dao's and then more specifically you know this contribution and contribution to earned framework yeah absolutely um i'll actually start by talking about the post i wrote about social tokens which then kind of touched on quickly the social token paradox um and this was actually a solution that i thought about and of course we're so early i always say that 99 of dollars don't even exist yet and so um you know a lot of these solutions we just haven't built yet and so um you know it's great to be talking about these things and starting the conversation so that we can encourage that kind of innovation but uh generally the thesis of the peak the piece is uh today decentralized communities are primarily valued proportionally to their to their token price so when the value of the token goes up so does the value of the community and when the token price is higher the community naturally becomes more desirable to join um the problem here is with that mental model these tokenized communities are incentivized to uphold exclusivity and um kind of a as the comet suggests i think that's a fundamental weakness so if you work backwards from here if you want your community to be valuable you need your community's token to go up in price which makes sense based on the original model that we laid out but to make the token go up in price you can either increase the price of the token or you can decrease the number of tokens available to prospective members and either way that restricts access to the community um when we think about crypto as an ecosystem um generally like if we create a world of more exclusive groups and communities based on more exclusive assets like is that the solution that we really wanted to build for and i don't think so and so i definitely agree with the comment in the chat that that is a weakness and so um for me one of the suggestions that i brought up in that post was um we really should be baking in on chain reputation and on-chain data of what you do especially particularly what you do in these communities um and so you know of course we're so early in it and so um it'll be interesting to see see how that actually gets baked in but um i absolutely agree that a reputation style economy makes a lot more sense um from a curation standpoint um i'm curious what you mean by that cooper if you mean you know curation within the community or on the outside of choosing which community to join i think it's both i think that it's such a wide spectrum i just love this idea of being able to like signal towards value and earning from that signaling and then specifically related to reputation as you're seen as more of a curator in this economy i think that those earning opportunities become easier and easier and so like really just pulling out that contributing to a community doesn't have to be technical it doesn't have to be like deep work on doing something for writing every day or something like that like there is this sort of hazy middle ground i think we're still figuring out where there's curation incentives baked into this space more broadly like i'm really just curious to get your thoughts on really how that manifests basically or for dao specifically like how do you see people starting to curate dao's moving forward yeah yeah absolutely i mean it's fascinating to see that there's a dow for you know basically pretty much everything right now uh you know we've got flamingo down for nfts fwb is a social community forefront for media and publishing party dow build software uh git coin funds the open web um we've got all of these different you know spectrums and it's really um across all industries we have these communities that are working to kind of push forward this next frontier and so um whatever your skills or interests are you know you can curate what that experience yourself looks like and i totally agree with you you know if you're not a developer maybe focus on writing or if you're if you don't know how to write then maybe you know build the software to push forward these projects um and then uh yeah being able to really authentically vouch for the communities that you are a part of in curating kind of what communities you care about is the best way to bring other people into the fold from this really authentic perspective there's a really cool analogy that um my partner jared at tcg has written about and so um i wanted to make sure i got it in at some point because i think this is a really good point of curation and and focusing on authentically what matters to you jared wrote this piece where basically said a lot of digital communities there are like the mcmansions of the internet um with a lot of communities today they're you know absolutely amazing communities have really worked together to create real substance and this comes through curation and you know being very discerning about the communities that you do want to be a part of and spend your time in because there is a fixed amount of time that we have in a day and communities that you can really contribute to um the analogy that he gives is is back in the 80s developers would go out to like a random suburb in jersey or something like that and like build a complex or build 50 homes um and they would look really nice and they would be really attractive to new buyers but those homes would lack a local newspaper or a bar or a downtown or any semblance of community or culture actually within that physical area and so once the aura of that newness goes away people kind of shrug and they're like okay what now and in some cases people stay because it's a home like it has four walls and a roof but um in a lot of times those communities become abandoned and so um it's on the organizers of the communities to to create really uh easy ways for people to contribute but it's also on the user to figure out what do you want out of this right the same way in nfts it's like don't buy things for the price going up buy what you actually love same thing with dows you know don't join for the price the token going up you should join the communities that you love i love that and i think the reason why i'm excited about both you guys being on this panel is you're so uniquely suited at this intersection of culture and crypto you know i think that specifically that tie-in is super super special to me and so saying i know you had a comment there so i want to let you get that in first but the question i have for you is when you think about working for a dao i think a big piece of that is curating the culture of that community making sure that the vibe is right that people are satisfied that they feel like they are aligned and how the the community is growing would love just like any comments you have around like curating the culture for a community like fwb yeah um i'll happy to share that i think just to jump into something gabby was writing earlier i think about um i think about the exclusivity in a lot of these different spaces and how yes there's obviously things that detract from it and in ways that we need to create more open sort of permissionless access but i think at least in this early stage we actually have a problem i think too many people are contributing to too many different dials without focusing on specific one specific thing where they can drive a lot of value i think the exclusivity reinforces that like like the focus which i think is really important to like innovate and push things forward and the best analogy in which i think about a lot of these dials is really like internet cities in that with the social token paradox and its relationship to token and price you can take a parallel like new york city where there's a high cost of living affiliated with new york city right it's different than other cities because of the cultural capital or because of the culture that it attracts restaurants museums that you know the the the different variables that lead to someone saying i'm willing to spend more money to exist in this space i think there needs to be stronger and more sophisticated diversification of access points is i think how we really solve this long term is not this you know fwb as you hold 75 tokens and then you get into the discord that that like very linear framing will evolve and we're pushing to evolve that where eventually there'll be dozens and dozens of different tiers where you can hold 0.1 fwb to access this specific part of the neighborhood and if you want you can spend more money if you want to live specifically in manhattan specifically in the upper east side because maybe that's what aligns with your specific current financial or social situation right so i think of a lot of these dials needing to frame things with urban planning perspectives and sort of city critical theory around like what are access points how do we allow people to like tour like how do we allow tourists to navigate through the city versus the people who want to specifically um live in them so i think that was just one framing that the dowsing sort of pushed you to really incorporate into how they designed their uh their tokenomics that was helpful for me and thinking about friends of benefits um that's cooper i guess your next question around like how do you create culture within daos do you is it specifically like what are maybe like tools or insights that other community builders can use in like setting their culture or you want to refine that maybe yeah i think it's two-sided i think it's one like what are the practical implementations of that in discord in the tooling that supports that and then more broadly how do you listen to a community like what does that look like what's the way that in which that's actually enacted yeah um so i think if i would break them into like step by steps i think it's it's it's one um i think the strength of a community is the strength of the one-on-one connections that members within those communities create so as you as a community builder i think it's about like doing the one-on-ones right like if people are writing interesting things if people are critiquing interesting things establish one-on-one human-to-human relationships um to to really create that network where at least in the beginning you're centralizing a lot of that different data and input from different community members once you feel like you've got a strong enough sort of a vision or or or an understanding of where a specific the pulse of a specific community is shifting from one to one to um sort of one to many are many to many right starting to create and bring those one-to-one relationships into town hall formats group conversations audio using the tooling of discord using the tools of clubhouse to get people together start having those different you know those one-on-one people meeting each other right and and allowing people to hop on stage to sort of share their vision and their perspective that's that really exciting delta point when you start to see the community begin to take on a life of its own and then i believe it's then harnessing and starting to document those natural feelings and and perspectives that those communities are taking on and so then once it starts to you feel like that pendulum starts to swing between founder leader with the vision into actually community starting to have their own interpretation of like what does fwb mean to them or what does insert down mean to mean to you then it's about someone who's really good at sort of the the vision purpose work to start to like distill some of those thoughts into writing so we use tools like fig jam mural where we allow community members we start doing uh brainstorm sessions where community members can start to submit here's what fwb means to me from a vision perspective we start to ask provocative questions if fwb were a city what would it look like what would it feel like what would your friends look like in the space like things that allow for community members to start to really input and break down what that spit what their relationship to that space is and then it's sort of distilling that and codifying that into sort of an explicit vision values code of conduct that you then use to govern your community internet city with elected governance and so i think um for for folks who are whatever stage you're in in that process it's about listening um it's about listening to specific members within those spaces and then shifting from one to one into group conversations with with with ideally people who've done this work before to start to like get all this in writing so that language can be used to then scale um and enforce those cultural norms that a community sets for themselves i think the most interesting part of that answer is you didn't mention one on-chain action that's being taken and i think that's really important here because when we think of daos we inherently think that this is a web through world there's a lot of cool crypto stuff going on there's governance there's all these token distributions and whatnot but what i've come to notice and what i think you highlighted well there is that a lot of the success of these taos is based on social skills and human coordination so when you think about the tools that are being used to do that you don't need an on-chain transaction to tell whether or not someone's happy in a community you just need to spend time with them i think that's why this whole maturity scale of what i'm noticing is that the dolls that are doing the best today are really hiring on the human side you know they're putting people into leadership positions of you know vibe checking the community doing things like curation doing things like membership onboarding i think that's a strong signal that you know maybe it's more specific to f3b because of its makeup but i think more broadly across the board the successor community is going to be directly related to those who are helping people feel comfortable within it and so looking to hire out for the human side of things is actually really really effective i want to um you know answer a question that's in the chat here that kartik do really quick is there an argument that being part of dao's is a zero-sum choice i'll take this first and if any of those comments i'd love to hear them i would say that right now we're in a very positive sum landscape of dao's i think that people are very happy contributing to many daos they're very happy and open sharing information with one another you know i'm personally in a bunch of dows i know that both of you two are also in multiple dows i do think we're in a bit of a utopia state right now where this is going to be the case for you know let's call it the next couple years but at some point it'll start to get a little bit more competitive and so while we're in this heyday i think it's important to recognize that there is value in contributing to many dows but to zeng's point you will earn and create the most value by doubling down on one specific doubt and so what that looks like is getting token allocations in these communities you know really finding a high social role in that community so beyond being a contributor being seen as a leader and someone of influence i think the compounding effects that come from being seen as leader in a specific dollar is greater than contributing to all of them and so for people who are looking to get a jump in dallas i think it makes sense to join a bunch of them at first you know as we talked about earlier get a cultural fit for it but more specifically once you find that one that's really important to you know really do everything in your power to have a meaningful role stake and reputation in that community because that's how you're going to learn the most and uh be able to do the most meaningful work yeah i absolutely agree and um you know there's problems with dallas today they're not perfect um and i think the reason that it's still such a positive environment is because it's so early and so it's so exciting to be in the space but um something we touched on earlier is saying kind of use the word tourist in uh you know jumping among daos and i personally think that that's going to change in the future once kind of this heyday settles down of um i think there's going to be a more difficult entry point into different communities but there's also gonna be a more different exit point the same way you know if you live in a house if you're gonna move you know it requires some amount of thinking and you can't just you know click from one to the next um and so i think it's gonna be more uh kind of productized to really double down on these communities and so um like you said cooper it's a great time now to get involved and see what's in the space and it's so early that um it's so awesome to know what's happening and and what people are working on and devoting their lives to but um as it settles down it's gonna be so important to focus on what you truly care about because i think you know even it's going to be baked into the structure that um people are focused on on a fixed number of dows or communities i also think to add to the the zero sum versus positive sum framing the biggest innovation i see with daos is actually in the corporate structure and i use that loose term because it's obviously a corporate structure but like the way that daos can actually play together as like parallel economies as opposed to you know in in traditional startup landscape and and and you know different startups like the the what gabby mentioned like the misalignment between user and corporate governance in the dow framing you have new sort of mechanics to be able to do token swaps between dows right you have the ability to sort of merge styles or have dials play with each other on sort of seasonal basis that with the right financial alignment which to me is like the biggest innovation of dao's from let's say web two corporate structures web three corporate structures is the idea that daos can actually begin to partner together do token swaps and have community members you know where there does feel like a value alignment actually work together where both dials now want to see both organizations succeed because and watch their treasury value go up and to the right if the right sort of collaboration is is is institutionalized so that was that to me is what excites me most about how you know yes we're in sort of a bit of a utopian landscape but i think at least the potential for stronger positive some scenarios not between every single dow obviously but between um specific dials that are value aligned within the space to actually collaborate and work together guys i want to be conscious that we're coming right up on time here sort of in closing thoughts here i want to leave you with a request from the community you know we're at a hackathon right now we're talking to a bunch of amazing builder and operators you know what are some things that you wish you could see from the down tooling side of things that would make your life easier i just touched on this so i can hop in but better onboarding um if there's a structured way of getting involved in a dow and learning about it before you join and buy in um as a user that would be helpful for me but i think it's really needed in the space um and then uh there's a company i'm talking to that i think is really interesting that's building kind of like a um a version of google docs but encrypted where you can sign in with your wallet and i think there's a really interesting application for dao's there of being able to kind of collaborate um privately within the community yeah similar to i think one better sort of uh let's say web 3 dow based project management software so that allowing for community members and leaders within dials to coordinate better um right now the tool stack is very i call like bubble gum and scotch tape where it's like very piecemeal together but having you know different infrastructure for how uh essentially the distributed and and agile nature of web3 allowing for them to collaborate in in sort of quicker uh fashion and then um i think voting can be significantly improved right i think like like what gnosis guild and gnosis safe spun up with zodiac their new form of voting software i think creating way more sophisticated forms to have communities decide and make decisions beyond just one token one vote or or one person one vote or even quadratic voting which is super complicated for a lot of users and bringing making it easier to make decisions like integrating into discord for quicker off you know voting mechanisms but really encouraging community members to vote to get more involved is is i think a huge uh area for for innovation as well yeah double click on both those answers i think for me the answer is simple um make it easier to join dowels i think across the board once you're in a down you're really comfy it's very nice but that first leap of getting into that that was still very difficult so small things like onboarding to a discord channel being able to sync up your wallet being able to know that you actually hold assets that have the ability to join dows seeing across styles like what's going on and staying up with things i think right now we're in a very ad hoc nature where all these gals are building custom products to be able to support communication across their communities and so anything that can be done to make it easier to join and stay up to date with what's happening i think would be really really positive um guys i want to be conscious we're right at time here where can people stay up with you on the internet gabby you're first i love twitter i'm at gabby underscore goldberg and i write about digital communities and uh digital culture at gabby.mirror.xyz uh twitter as well alex zhang with two x's and two z's amazing and i am koopa troopa come and find me on twitter come hang out discord koopa troopa number nine seven nine nine but instagram people of the world here and ella even running it up so koopa troop on instagram too let's keep it let's keep it going card dick thank you so much for having us man cooper gabby else thank you so much and uh it was an amazing discussion we'll we'll post those links on the chat too and uh yeah this is great it'll be great to have you again and absolutely your panel up back thanks see you later [Music] [Applause]