How Orange DAO grew into a multi-million dollar investment DAO with Ricardo Garcia-Amaya

right hello orange doll there you go hey oranges get in here yeah we see some oranges over there come and join us whoever is tired and wants to sit down come and join us you're gonna You're Gonna Learn a couple things on the way all right so welcome everyone that's here uh Welcome to our session this session is about how orange Dow Peak has grown into a multi-million dollar investment down and has built with the top web 3 builders in six months so pretty pretty crazy what they've been able to do my name is Alejandro Garcia Maya I'm the moderator for today I I lead Partnerships for constellation Dao it's a community made for and buy Venture back Tech Stars Alum and I'm also the CEO and founder of answer byte we help Founders at startups close more deals with our AI sales enablement platform so today I'm very excited to be able to have all of you here but especially to have Ben Ricardo and Jessica to delve a bit deeper into orange Dow and how they became what they've been able what they've been able to accomplish so pretty crazy stuff uh before I start I want to ask everyone here show of hands who's who's in a dow right now oh wow nice boom show hands who wants to be in a dow okay all right pretty cool all right so um how about we started off with uh a quick little intro if you take a minute or two to introduce yourselves uh so by the way how many people here know what orange doubt is okay so I'll give you a quick explanation for those of you who don't orange doubt is a community of Founders experienced Founders the vast majority of us went through the YC program in one way shape or form um we also have a venture fund that has been actively investing in the web 3 for the last year uh we have a fellowship program for new entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs entering web three um and the Dow is actually building public goods uh from both technology as well as web 3 uh social infrastructure and so Ricardo and I served together on the uh governance Committee of the doubt so we were responsible for making sure that things run smoothly in the Dow in terms of proposals processes onboarding marketing and things like that and the the framework the design and the architecture that orange dial uses came from my research and experience building Dows and so since then I've become the CEO of a dow platform company called origami which if you were here just a few minutes ago collab land launched using our framework about a week ago and is now one of the largest dials in the world and so we're very proud to do that yeah excellent so I'll give a quick background as Ben mentioned I was a member of the founding governing Committee of the orange Dao I have 10 years of experience as a Founder in Silicon Valley uh Venture back 10 million 10 10 years building AI software and 20 years building High Affinity successful communities uh one of the latest is the white combinator alumni group about 2000 alumni and uh also the top American Latino Latinas Tech leaders in the United States 65 members 11 of which have exited for billions of dollars uh and I'm also the founder of iloma which Jessica will tell you a little bit more about it hi I'm Jessica Taggart I'm the co-founder and CEO of illuma iluma is the GPT powered superhuman of web 3 organizations our AI is layered on top of your organization's communication channels platforms to be able to extract the most exciting and relevant insights data metrics knowledge is being shared so that you're able to have your team stay in sync and up to date with everything that's happening um I have 10 years of experience building AI product and running technical teams in Silicon Valley I'm a second time founder uh Ricardo and I are co-founders we have other co-founders also with illuma we had a previous Venture and that's where we went through y combinator race 7 million and we're building conversational Ai and uh we are illuma is a proud portfolio company of orange now awesome all right so uh by the way um I have notes here I'm not texting my mother or anything like that um I can confirm that it's not as well so Ben as one of the Three Gps of the orange fund and one of the founders of the orange Dao can you tell us more about the inspiration behind the orange dial and what sets it apart from other Dows yeah absolutely so there's three of us at the Fun Orion is one of my co-founders back there uh orange fund is a 50 million dollar early stage Venture fund that works with orange doubt two separate companies two separate organizations but they we collaborate very closely together the reason orange fund exists all of the profits and returns from Orange dial that belong to the GPS actually go to the treasury of the Dow in other words we are taking money that used to belong to investors giving it to entrepreneurs and letting the entrepreneurs decide how to fund the future so if you think about how entrepreneurship and Venture Capital works today 80 of the returns um that are given uh to the investors go to the people the private individuals or funds and the remainder go to the GPS if you could take some portion of that and reinvest and put it in entrepreneurial control that is actually a massive Advantage for all of us because the next time we build companies we have to deal less with investors and more with our peers and I think that was the inspiration that drove us to build the Dow to say how do we build an entrepreneurial community and how do we actually scale that and in fact um myself and origami actually helped start constellation down and so constellation dial uses the same framework as oranged out because of that reason because we believe the same shared philosophy of funding more entrepreneurs and giving them more access to Capital origami and illuma we use uh constellation down uses both of you guys so very cool yeah actually so I think there's a underlying um pattern that you'll see 1500 entrepreneurs at Orange now several hundred at constellation the idea is that when you become a member of the Dow and you're able to join this ecosystem you can sell into that Community with a much faster rate of adoption uh Ricardo since you have experience building High Affinity communities over the past 20 years what made you jump at the chance to be a founding governance Committee Member of the orange Dao and what are some of the interesting things you've learned with Dao's versus other communities that you've LED yeah I think the the big difference with high Affinity successful communities I guess the typical example of a non-dow would be like your alumni alma mater alumni organization which is very uh centralized I would say community ownership was the first thing that got me excited uh because I've been waiting for this for years this is a missing ingredient in any Affinity Community ownership is huge so that's the first thing that got me really excited to jump uh and serve on the founding governance Committee Member of the orange now and then once we start being part of the Zao I was learning a ton uh through that through the first year and the the centralized aspect of it it's huge the autonomous aspect of it for example just here at eat Denver the last four hours yesterday and today we have hosted seven different events and that's due to the decentralized and autonomous aspect of how dowels operate uh so that when you have that when you can move so so fast the growth happened so so I mean it's incredible what you can achieve so this decentralized an autonomous aspect how you can actually collaborate within the Dow is is brilliant the third piece it's uh how open Communications are in a Dao so if you join right now let's say I don't know Google's huge but it's probably like a thousand employee organization it's very siled in terms of communications uh in terms of what drives you have access to in a dow everything's open all the all the all the teams are open so you have some incredible amount of information that you can leverage me having 10 years of experience building AI software it's like oh my God if you want powerful AI give it a lot of data and it can create an incredible level of information asymmetry for organizations and for professional careers of individuals so from that seeing how open it was the Dao it led me to build illuma for web3 which is bringing AI the power and now we're PPT chat and open AI people really understand more about what we were doing we did this about a year ago in web 3 and we've been pioneering this stuff thank you towards the end of the talk we're going to be talking about best practices so we'll we'll get to that in terms of for those that do have Dows and how do you increase engagement and all that good stuff uh Jess with your company Luma being a portfolio company of the orange Dao what see what sets orange apart as an investor sure and be careful Ben is right next to you yeah I know no pressure you guys already have the money so you can say whatever you want so I think what's that uh orange now apart as an investor is a lot of VCS out there talk a talk a value-add but very few actually come through and orange now is one that comes through because it's so founder friendly and that's because of its unique DNA of being made up of 1500 of the top Founders in the world haven't gone through Y combinator and also now some of the top builders in web 3. and so that just creates that alongside of its unique web 3 high growth mindset I think just really uh it's that Rising tide lifts all boats mentality and so when you're a portfolio company of that you really benefit from the orange Dow I think in three main ways first being and this is speaking from my personal experience at illuma one is product so product sandboxing one is a network investor relations uh intros to customers intros to talent and then three being marketing uh spin marketing reach and championship so to talk a little bit more about the first one um product is really close to me I run product at illuma and it's been a really amazing testing ground for us to be able to spin out our most edge of ledge really exciting features and products to the orange now first these are our peers who are incredible Founders Builders themselves and to get that level of feedback on our first kind of approach MVPs spinning out and then being able to take that and beta that out to the rest of our beta clients who are we have a hundred different communities over 100 different communities now weapon organizations using illuma we have over 200 000 users and so it's really powerful to have the orange job be kind of that first layer to be able to get that rich feedback from our peers so we've done this in a few different ways so we've one of the features that we launched last year now everyone of course is very familiar with chat GPT we launched our version of chat GPT for your organization last year with orange style they were able to benefit from it from obviously building a generative knowledge base for their organization we were able to early test a lot of those features to affected and roll it out to other beta clients we've also done this for our tldr summaries which are short bulleted form of long-form content this could be call recording summaries this could be documentation on notion articles Etc we're able to roll that out first for the orange doubt they could use that to leverage for those who couldn't attend their town halls or you know long-form content that they wanted to make sure people were able to grab those right insights nuggets use that from Yuma and so those are just two use cases in in product that we've been able to also I think have a very mutually beneficial relationship with the orange style another example of that what I mentioned is the network so not surprisingly 1500 of the top Founders having a great Rich network is not surprising individual or collectively but it's their willingness and their proactive approach to intros to investors intros to potential customers for pipeline intros to talent and we've seen that personally in illuma for example we raced our precede last year of 2 million and we're just heading out on our seed round we just started kicked off the round a few weeks ago and we have almost around half closed and committed thanks to warm intros from the orange down so that's unbelievable um and then third it's the championship so orange now is a huge champion of its portfolio companies and that helps us all with marketing reach and getting in front of new customers an example of this also anecdotal uh from the from illuma is uh there was a discussion a few weeks ago on Twitter relatively chatty about the top products in AI for Dows and orange Dow very graciously through our name kind of into the ring and it put us in front of a much larger audience a much larger reach for us so that's been unbelievable and I think it's you know those are the three that really have had the most impact on iluma there's a lot of other initiatives that they do in terms of irls hackathons meetups sponsorships but again like it all speaks to that amazing flywheel that they've created but thanks to that awesome community of Founders Builder approach and uh The Hive growth mindset thank you uh the summary of conversations that happen within a dow coming from consolation Dao is priceless uh that's been really helpful awesome really helpful all right Ben I know uh many Dows struggle getting off the ground in terms of setting up legal and operational structures could you speak more on that process with orange Dow yeah so orange style um was the first to use the framework that I've been designing so it took a lot more effort to actually get it through the the door so you know six-figure legal bills the typical kind of um understanding what the landscape looks like orange and I had to go through that first and now subsequently every other Dao is able to go through that process in you know a fraction of that time right once your trailblaze that path others can follow fast same thing that happens with collabland when we launched collab land it was using a Cooperative legal framework that allows them to issue legally allowed securities so that's a big pioneering uh moment for all of us and now that uh collab land's done it it's going to be much easier for somebody else to go through that process so having to go through and talk to lawyers but understanding what how you can turn that into a product is very important because otherwise you're stuck talking to lawyers and having decisions and take taking a risk by yourself what we're trying to do is aggregate all of the best practices all of the knowledge that we've earned by going through and launching so that we can make them available to other Dows so they can choose how to make their decisions so I'll give you some insight collabland has almost 50 000 down members on our platform today one of the largest Styles in the world 80 plus percent of them are using their email address sign up to the down so when you think about what web3 stands for and the future we want to live in that doesn't actually jive with the fact that people still live in web 2 today and so how do you close that Gap you have to go where the users are right you have to go listen to the users and that's what we get trained on as entrepreneurs and that always holds true regardless of you're building a dow or a startup or some technology Ricardo thank you Ben Ricardo with such a large group of YC Alum Founders over 1500 in the Dao how do you think about governance um yeah I think with the type of uh group that we have of you know why combinator alumni Founders what are the cool things that I was thinking going through it is how can you work together because we've known each other as alumni the same way that you know alumni or your album matter right like yeah we hang out with each other but how does how it's going to be that relationship working with each other towards something bigger than ourselves bigger than creating something bigger ourselves bigger than our companies that would last 100 years and that was something really incredible going through the experience of how Founders that are usually choose to be Founders anybody who knows Founders or our Founders know what I'm talking about here we chose to be Founders because we kind of like to do what we want when we want however we want it whenever we want right extremely freaking selfish and no one gives us a job because of that so we have no choice we're unemployable is what you're trying to do institutional unemployment that's what it's called and so how does that work with 1500 of them right or us uh that was super interesting and I think it came down to trust and admiration for everyone's domain expertise uh we we would like to know whether just by virtue of being old you get good at certain things experts can we and I just point to him on that I'm excluding myself for that and we have all domain expertise and and we just you know like everybody else we're not experts in everything we're experts in certain areas but then you meet this incredible other founders with domain expertise in different areas and it's just like oh this is how we work together right it's mutual admiration so from a governance perspective that has been incredible it's like how do you activate this many experts in across domains that has been the biggest piece kind of very macro looking it down and specifically at the Affinity at this affinity group I I would actually add this thing so when we're working on governance together one of the things that we realized was that Dao's by the nature of the peer-to-peer structure of it in other words no one is a senior or Junior at the membership level a lot of impasse impasses or uncertainty around who's supposed to make the decision and so what we've done is to go through and give Authority and power to specific roles in the doubt so if you serve on the treasury committee you have specific powers and roles and it's defined in the charter of the Dao which is uh part of the origami framework whoever takes on that role now receives that authority to execute those responsibilities and so you can work on a document or a design or process instead of arguing with one another and so putting documentation and processes in and to declare that as a standard makes it much easier for you to keep evolving the dial moving forward instead of going uh Ricardo hated that idea and that that actually leads us to best practices and so um I want to be able to cover best practices experience so far for the Dao I'm going to mention a few key words and would love if either one of you can jump in and explain what they are so first one is quadratic voting voting is a means of reducing the influence of large token holders in your uh ecosystem so if uh Alando has a million tokens and I've got a thousand I know that there's no way I can beat him in any vote if he goes against me but chronatic voting actually would discount his voting power from a million to something like 500 000 where my voting power now gets increased and so I can group 10 people together and because there's some amount of tokens that will rival his influence quadratic voting can even out the score between the whales and the fishes um there are some mini drawbacks to it but we can go into that later quick voting yeah quick voting uh at the beginning we encountered some challenges like many Dows at the beginning trying to figure out what do you draw a proposal for and how many people how many cooks in the kitchen and like how many boats and budgets Etc so for we did a couple of things that Ben would probably mention like t-shirt sizing like budgeting has been huge but um we made it so you can streamline some of the things that do not require huge budgets really fast even boating in town during Town Hall et cetera so that's an example how do you expedite things that are not require youth budgets really fast so they don't get stuck in like a four-week proposal process you mentioned t-shirt sizing can you go a little bit more into that yeah so if you think about how people are compensating the Dao you can compensate anyone between one token or a fraction a 16 you know digit number token to an infinite number of tokens so that huge gradient of potential uh reward makes everything into a negotiation I'm gonna move this chair how many tokens I'm gonna get 3 four five that is absolute don't waste your time with this so what we did was we created different tiers of compensation and so you get five thousand tokens for serving in a roll ten thousand twenty thousand and so depending on your commitment to the Dow you'll receive a set of tokens for That season so I'm not constantly going back to someone going I'm going to do work X I'm gonna need 100 tokens It's Your Role to cover this area and so that reducing the overhead and the burden of management because management does not exist in a dial the same way you think in a company reducing that burden of management is critical in helping scale that organization so T-shirt size is basically make that simpler I love that that's really cool expanding responsibility yeah I think a good example of that would be in you know I think we saw very successfully working the fact that at the beginning treasury held the single wallet and so everybody's getting paid at the end of the season and it seems like everyone's kind of waiting for treasury to get like your I don't know your paycheck or something and it just it doesn't doesn't work out it's kind of depressing so so the evolution of that is how do we Empower not only the Committees but teams with their own wallets in a byproduct of that is is that it not only makes it easier for treasury but it empowers people when they're in charge of uh themselves approving you know three signature multi-six signatures you know a multi-sync wallets Etc it gets them involved in the process and of even disbursing their own pre-approved budgets Etc but it's just the buy-in is huge and we saw that working really well so their smart autonomy things have been happier and and and you know decentralizes though the whole payment structure of it I don't know if uh do we have yeah we're done we got okay so for anyone that has any questions feel free to find us over here anything about a dow or whatever you want you're more aware of and I think I think uh is Panda down up next after this who's okay Pando where are you at all right all right uh I'm gonna steal your thunder for a second we've been working origami has been working with panda down since day one we're so proud it's totally coincidental that we've been here on three stages in a row as a Founder with my team over there thank you so much and uh these guys are great um thank you Ricardo and illuma and orange style really appreciate it thank you guys awesome everyone foreign