Making of Collab.Land DAO: The Colorado Digital Coop Panel

that we were going to become a DAO and what we what I intentionally planned out from the beginning was to work with uh a bunch of different organizations and so this is uh collectively the core group uh outside of the the main engineering uh for collab. So, uh, we'll go down this this way and if you wanted to do introduce yourself and kind of what you did in terms of, uh, helping out making collab. I did everything. It was only me. Uh, no, my name is James W from Fire Eyes.

Uh, we try and work with like a couple of projects a year and try and make sure that like their token launches, token and governance launches the most meaningful way possible. And so that means that in uh at MCON we were talking James and sort of like those numbers about collab land really made it clear that like fire eyes should help with that. And so specifically around sort of like the airdrop mechanisms and sort of like the governance uh standards or sort of expectations is our main value ad. Excellent. Hey everybody, my name is Ben.

I am the CEO and one of the founders of origyami. We are the DAO platform that uh Collaban chose to go with. Um we're an alternative to existing DAO platforms out there. And so we help build um large scale enterprise scale Dows. And James, I don't know if you checked today, but I think you're about to cross 50,000 me uh Dow NFTs minted today.

That is one of the that is one of the largest Dows in the world um at this point. Yeah. Yeah, let's go. So, my name is Jacquelini Raaba. I am an attorney and partner with Jason Winer PC and I got brought into the project by uh EF Mushnik with launch legal and I helped with some of the paperwork, entity design and information and it's been really fun work with working with this team.

All right. Hey everyone, my name is Chris. Uh this is Harry and Mikey. Uh we are rocket fuel. We are a a team that provides a team as a service platform to help uh other startups and companies accelerate the road map.

Uh we've been working with collab as technology providers for the past few years I think and this has been a very transformative journey for us as well because we aspire to become a DAO and are learning together through this process. All right. So um where do we start? There's so much to talk about and we have like 13 minutes. Um, so I I'll kick it off and then feel free to interrupt at any point.

Um, so I helped launch Mollik Dow the framework in 2019. Prior to that, like Dows were not quite a thing. And uh, the way I look at Dows and tokens really, I don't see it from like a financial perspective. I see it more from like a coordination and a an alignment tool. And what I've experienced in this last couple years as the DAO ecosystem has evolved is that um there is this like prepoundonderance of just like oh we can just kind of do whatever we want.

It's free flowing. It's just community. But what we wanted to do here with collab land is like see if we can actually have like a proper business and how do we exit to community in a responsible way. And so when we were forming and thinking about organizationally even before we were a DAO because we were a central organization a bridged and to me it didn't make sense to then do all the work as a bridge and then just kind of let it go. So even before we did all of the kind of you know task work to be able to launch the DAO organizationally I wanted to make sure that it was set up so that we can work with like consultants at first and these consultants then would transition into a DAO and I guess that can lead off into our relationship first talking about rocket fuel.

So, uh, Rocket Fuel was a consultant that a bridge hired to help build out some of the core features of Collaband, but when we started our relationship, we both intended to be a DAO. So, Collaband is now a DAO and Rocket Fuel is planning to be a DAO. and maybe you can talk a little bit about how your approach as a service-based DAO plans to to play out and looking toward what we do at Collaband as kind of like a foreshadowing of what you plan to do with Rocket Fuel. Yeah. So um I guess we as we form this this playbook on how to to evolve into a DAO I think that the most important thing that made our collaboration work is the fact that we focused on the um the people aspect uh of it which means that uh in everything we do we build a solid foundation of trust between us and at the same time we we as rocket fuel instead of having a typical like transactional relationship.

We gradually became an extension of the collabant community. So having aligned goals and working with the spirit of co-ownership is what actually makes this work. And from our side we really focus a lot on um process as well and of course there's the technology part of it but that's that doesn't replace the people aspect of it. So um the processes we use and the artifacts we base everything upon is just the glue that brings everything together. Um on that I want to pass the mic to Michael as well to if you want to talk a little bit about our approach about the you know people process technology pillars of and how we approach the centralization.

So just uh touch on people process technology. Um the way we use it uh in terms of how we're building the relationship with uh uh and the example that's been set the relationship uh with collab as we're moving forward. What we're trying to do is develop uh a people pillar that is based on pods. So we're offering collab land, let's say the service, the people and the talent to be able to do the work full stack from product design through to implementation. For process, we're very for process we're very design thinking oriented.

And uh for for process we're very design thinking oriented. We put a lot of emphasis into the empathize and the defined phases of the process and defined phases of the process. Um and uh and and those uh those key processes drive feature requirements and uh solutioning through deployment. Um from a technology standpoint we relate we relied very heavily on working with uh Raymond who's here in front of us and he's been a guiding light in terms of providing us with the back end and the SDK to um deliver a front end with. So he's uh been central as well in in helping us decentralize and learn how to do that.

Yeah. So um just um I think it's been as I said a very transformative journey. We're still like going through the wits of it. Um and we're we're learning a lot from the process you are going through on how we can decentralize how we can be become a DAO and from besides our relation relationship how we can incentivize other freelancers to grow our team and do this in a decentralized manner. So yeah, a lot of people think that like you launch a token and then the token will bring everyone together and then you start working together.

For us and what I experienced and this is why like even before we had a token, you know, we have these relationships. These are trustbased relationships, not transactional ones. And it's actually the trust that you need to establish first and then you can build a token on top of these relationships. then it turns into a more powerful relationship because now you have this transactional bond on top of this foundation of trust. And so Rocket Fuel is not yet a DAO.

We have just become a DAO. I think Fire Eyes has a Dow. Fire Eyes was half a DAO. Let's talk about this. We pretend to be a Dow because it sounds cooler.

I wanted to completely hijack uh the panel conversation and sort of like talk a little I mean I know there's only six minutes left and talk a little bit about how like I think it's really exciting of what Collaband is doing with the proposal process and with the 100 communities that are getting an airdrop on top of optimism you know so like there's been a lot of governance experiments that have taken place in the past 3 years 4 years since Dows have existed and like they're still really expensive and annoying and so one on one side of it using optimism to like reduce that cost and go from paying $20 for a transaction to 2 cents I think is like really meaningful but that's really meaningful for the collab community right those top 100 communities is like a million people roughly a couple of 600,000 people and none of them have done governance before most of them right most of them are like NFT holders even the board apes don't do any meaningful governance and so giving those people a drop and like getting them to engage in this proposal process I think is actually a lot more meaningful than giving it credit, right? Getting the top 100 Discord communities to write proposals about how they receive tokens has never happened before. And so like I think a lot of credit is due to like all of the people sitting here, but especially the collab team of like doing that experiment one on optimism and two sort of like unlocking the idea of governance for like NFT communities. Awesome. Thank you.

Appreciate that. And I just wanted to also touch on the origami framework. Um you know for us at Collabland we we are trying to be this kind of bridge between like web 2 and web 3. I mean like the company a bridged is its namesake is to kind of shortcut mainstream adoption into web 3. And we looked at origami as a great starting point and Ben if you want to talk a little bit about origami.

Yeah so my experience has been building several different dows. one using Moolok and completely flat hierarchy for a bunch of my friends to buy NFTTS all the way to um helping start Orange Dial which is a 1500 member mostly VC founders and very active with a large treasury and multiple projects running so very complex governance um running a seasonal budgetary process that uh contains millions of dollars of treasury and so I've run the gamut and so like what James was saying I believe that decentralization is a direction not a destination so you can take any centralized organization and start to see decentralized by moving yourself into transparent open governance having uh uh uh uh transparent membership tokenization all the things that we are experimenting today in real time at this large scale is going to translate to much larger and more efficient coordination of tens of thousands if not millions of people around the world and that's the dream that I think they're working towards is how do you get people to learn participate and earn when you create value for the community. Awesome. Thank you. Maybe I'll pick back off of that.

Yes, please. Um, I I love what you said about building community u and then kind of building trust and then coming up with a framework because I think that's that's usually how I I advise people and I want to see and what sometimes I find lacking a little bit in in the movement both in cooperatives but also for Dows that we're building a pro a product before we're building community whereas here we have an entity or a bridge that has a fantastic product but that has actually built on trust and building community first before the legal framework comes into place. So that the design and coming up with the entity type that makes sense is something that is natural that allows for the development. Uh and I think you've guys you've done a great job with that. Thank you.

I mean it's like it's weird if we were like this central organization and then we say all of a sudden flip a switch we have a token and become a DAO. Like where where do we where do we go? What pattern can we match? And that's why it was important at the beginning when I was reflecting on this and having Collaband become a DAO eventually knowing this you know 3 years ago we have to start with us first right and then and then it kind of replicates itself and so ultimately I guess the TLDDR here whatever the mechanism is right like I think a lot of you here that are interested in Dows you can get caught up in the process of voting this way, voting that way, doing this and doing that. I kind of because I've been in the Dow scene for a while, I kind of look at people that are like these influencers and Dows as like the web 3 MBAs where like there there's a lot of, oh, you should do it this day and that way where I think that like we're still so early there's no way of really doing a DAO.

And I would say, you know, it's really purpose over process. And I think that is what we want to focus in on. And this is why like for me, like I needed practice in order to like figure out when we became a DAO, how do we organize, right? It doesn't make sense logically for a central organization just to exit to community and just say, "Hey, here you go." We needed to start before we exited to community with these componentized constructs, keep the core team as lean as possible.

And this is why we worked with rocket fuel and you know we didn't come up with all the mechanisms and we know that they're experts like fire eyes and even though I helped with like the original Mollik framework I looked to origami right because when we become a Dow it I it can't and it's hard to and I think that like a bunch of or like Bitcoin or Ethereum originally are maybe the exception to the rule when it comes to oops when it comes to um kind of decentralizing at the very beginning. Um, so I I would say that uh you know it's been a great journey here. Uh but I would encourage everyone that is looking to create a DAO to reach out and not and you have to think about it your own way with your own values. Uh one last thing and then I'll throw it to any one of you here is um you know ultimately you know my my wife is my co-founder, right? And so we've been together for 28 years and really that is where it all starts and it's all relationship based and that's kind of how I see this growing and so it grew from the two of us and our relationship to a company and organization here with you know a bunch of partners to the general public and I think that is kind of what we want to cultivate here uh at least for us in our DAO and everyone else's dows will be different but I think it's really like for me the way I think about it and what's my guiding light here with collab and the collab dowo is just being true to yourself right so as you go out as you look at and listen to other panels and you think of different ways and you'll learn different techniques when it comes to creating dows uh it really is this opportunity just to create our own future together here uh that we want to see so I don't know if we are negative I mean as a final note a Second final note I think like I would emphasize that from a fires perspective you know generally we choose like two or three maybe four projects a year that we would work with and so the last one was optimism the one before that was ENS like ETH domains you know like when we work with projects it's really about like how far does this network go and you know like who is affected by this network so ENS it's very obvious having an ENS name is cool you know for optimism having rollups and more scalability is cool and is useful for Ethereum and And for Collaband, you know, there is millions of, you know, tens of millions of people that are using Collaband that have very little context about what's going on here.

You know, they bought one NFT, joined a community, and now they're using Collaband. So, sort of how can we use those tools to like make serious impact. It's very cool. Yeah. The other the other challenge that and opportunity that we see especially with Collaband is just how many people want to be a part of this Dow and how many people want to participate.

If you think about teaching 50,000 people who have never been a part of a DAO how to behave, let alone participate in governance and earn, it is an incredible communications and onboarding challenge. And that requires hum human beings to see each other and say we are people and we see you where you need to learn and to provide that information because without it Dows will not grow and we have to do that work now for the next several years to get there. Yeah. Excellent. Awesome.

Um well thank you everyone. uh feel free to come up to us, ask questions. Uh we're all kind of learning and figuring this out as we go. Uh you know, I can't imagine like I've been in the Ethereum ecosystem for many years and now we're here. Look at all these people, right?

And it's uh it's going to continue to grow and uh I think it's just facilitating conversation and dialogue here. Um and we're all going to be learning together. So uh thank you. Thanks everybody.