Driving growth in an ecosystem, what worked and what didn't - Berkeley 2024

[Music] I don't think I can do Total Justice introducing everybody here the way this came about just to set this up I just said why are there two camps in open source funding and why are they so wildly different what we're seeing now that was mentioned earlier is trying to use crowdfunding and drips models and whatever to provide sort of this minimum income for open source developers which is like targeted directly at developers so why do we have these two different camps why are they so widely different I I think it's a fair statement to say that we're sort of straddling two different worlds where a nonprofit Community Foundation is a a model that's existed for hundreds of years um at this point where we we serve a specific community and their philanthropic interests but we're doing it um as you said in a totally new way by applying on chain Tech um and by starting day one on the internet as an institution um so rather than taking something that's uh brick and mortar and making it technical we sort of started on the technical level and aren reaching back to um make it accessible for folks with stock or Fiat that they like to donate as you mentioned um and make sure that we can make the the advantages of onchain giving accessible to folks that maybe aren't familiar with the space yet I know that Brian and the Linux foundation and Mozilla have had very long visions and have built sustainable institutions um that we all rely on how can we have a longer model longer Vision if what we're doing is these short directed grants what we're focused on right now funding wise is getting people over that value of death to the sustainability point and then whatever comes next um I think there have been parts of Milla that have had that longer term Vision about how to fund stuff we kind of look we have a long-term vision for the ecosystem as a whole but I think we're actually we're moving more toward that model kind of in a way as well philanthropy always has an agenda and that's not necessarily a bad thing but you have ask what is the agenda is the agenda to um make change at in the core components of a project is the agenda to stimulate the outer sphere of developer activity building on top of something and I think the programs that are appropriate and effective at each layer are going to be pretty different um depending on on what your goals are um I think it it depends on what you're looking to do what you're looking to achieve and also I think there are um there are patterns we can borrow both from government funding large scale public infrastructure funding as well as startup funding so that leans into something more like quadratic funding right do you see that as the most effective model to get that broad-based support that measure of success I think it depends on what layer so whereas if you're talking about those bigger um deeper projects uh it looks you know for us it's looked a lot more like more more traditional funding where any any other type of fun is you know joining into fund the same goal or the same same purpose at a certain point you'll be able to say that unique value proposition there's companies realizing that now is the time to go to those stakeholders and say you know for a hundredth of the value you're getting out of that be a part of a collective funding mechanism uh to to to not only sustain it nurture it but but continue to push it forward as this layer while all of you are building proprietary value at this layer next layer up right because um uh the current funding mechanism for ipvs I think is going to get us to that point but you think about the 30-year horizon 40-year horizon for this stuff and we need those stakeholders who are realizing ultimately that value to be a part of uh moving that forward and I I think we can plant some of the seeds of that now we have with the decentralized storage Alliance uh which is a good start at that um uh but I think we'll we'll see more of that in the fall coin ecosystem I think there's I mean there's a ton that we can learn and I think every talk I've seen today there's ideas that I'm like oh these are things that we could try and should try um I think like you said it's not even necessarily about using the chain it's kind of what are the ways that we can invite Community into our grant making what are the ways that we can have Community kind of be more participatory in our grant making and I think that's a huge part of what I'm thinking about this year and um kind of going into the future and I think that there's so many ideas that I've heard today you know Liz talked about having current grantees have a hand in choosing the next next round of grantees and having grantees choose your fund funding themes and things like that um I think there's a lot of ideas just about kind of inviting in community participation that could be really helpful there I think one one of the things you know one of the benefits we have is the experience of Grant making in this space and the experience that we have in the open source ecosystem and so there's just things that we've learned over time through trial and error right so one of the things that we found is um you know with good intentions you can airdrop ,000 $10,000 $100,000 on a project that is not prepared to receive that money and that you can sometimes create more problems than you solve by doing that um projects have to be prepared to receive funds they need to have the financial infrastructure they need to have the community infrastructure um and so those are the kinds of things that we've learned over time that like we would also love to share with folks who are new funders in the space who are you know maybe have the energy and the funding and the um kind of focus in terms of who they want to fund and what they want to fund um but there's so many things that we've kind of learned about the best way to work with projects right MH MH said um money can't do all the work right and I think that like increasingly we are moving toward a model where we are working directly with award to figure out you know in addition to the funding what are the things that they need in terms of um Community infrastructure governance infrastructure um what are the kind of missing pieces of the project that we can provide through expert guidance workshops uh cohort model kind of similar to the cohort model that Liz talked about um and these are all kind of puzzle pieces towards sustainability right money is one part of it um but we're trying to figure out what are those other puzzle pieces as well and how do we provide those to projects there are some great um people projects companies out there already building some of this stuff and I think especially in the past year we've seen a lot more kind of on and off ramps between traditional um traditional funds crypto funds um I want to give a shout out to the drips team um who if if you haven't heard of drips um you can basically specify who's going to be the recipient of your funds in a GitHub file and then they can claim you know the maintainers of that GitHub repo can claim those funds so they don't have to actually incur the tax liability or the paperwork or the hassle of getting funding before they're ready but it's also they publicly committed to that project um I don't know if that's something you've come across in in your work man but um teams and and um infrastructure like that I think is going to make all this experimentation much much faster and much much more approachable I think that's it for this panel I want to thank Manan and Brian and Mos and Dave for joining us and I hope that there's a lot of great hallway con that comes out of this one w [Music]