Anarchist Cookbook for Running an Open Org - Joseph DeLong

next up we have a special friend of mine joseph de long uh we go way back we actually used to work together uh in 2015 before ethereum launched on blockchains at a bank and entrance company called usaa and i'm super proud of where he's come since then um not that he was ever in a place of like lower like status or anything but he's basically like moved on from a like prestigious corporate environment to sushi swap if i would have told you years ago that you were doing sushi swap at this day would you believe me no no i might my first denver presentation i wore a suit [Laughter] so much since then all right well thank you so much joe take it away yeah sure so um great uh thank you um uh for having me i'm really like grateful to be here um uh that last talk was really great i i really appreciate their their insights um uh my topic is anarchist cookbook for running an open org um and what it is is it's got i'm going to kind of detail my journey in um in um kind of like how how i've been you know i've been at sushi swap like a month and a week now so um i like it's gonna be kind of like me exploring my uh uh like philosophy um without like trying to like smell my farts too bad i really just want to like kind of express how i think we can run open orgs um going forward without being um very smug about it and i'll just kind of like go through each of these slides and i'm going to riff on each of them you know about about that topic okay uh yeah people uh people are key hire good people um this is the probably the most important thing um you want to start with a kernel of an organization of like very qualified people who are highly self-motivated because that culture is like as you go forward is going to like permeate um and so from that you'll grow an organization that has that as part of its culture um one one thing you might ask is like how do you get that right well i think early on you have to have a like uh not um you don't want to be uh too loose about your your hiring you want to be very specific and intentional and so that part of that means like reaching out to your network and finding people that you think are qualified um to meet the needs openorg is a way of expressing how we work in an open style where we can have contributors kind of come in from the discord community members people who are ex-sushi holders lps are all kind of focusing on this individual product not necessarily the structure i think that that's kind of something that gets mixed up um in that we kind of go okay well we're going to do a decentralized org we're going to do a flat organization we're going to do um we're going to kind of go full on with the anarchy theme right um and i don't think that that's true i think that um having the right people and providing the right structure helps with that um it's so early on you want to hire really good people uh as your colonel and that over time will permeate the organization uh this is my favorite one faux professionalism so vote professionalism is like this like me wearing a tie or wearing um khakis in a polo with my company's logo on it right that's faux professionalism um i think what real professionalism is is saying you're gonna do something and doing it uh showing up on time um uh as a sign of respect for your co-workers um uh communicating with your co-workers with candor but also a a high level of respect in the way that you talk to them and address them i'm lucky enough to have come from organizations where early on um at the same stage uh i i got to learn some valuable lessons about kind of uh what happens um uh when when you leave kind of like a um sort of a lord of the fly situation right you like it never it never descends into order right it all it only ever descends into chaos and um kind of the uh kind of uh a um divisive atmosphere and once you get that atmosphere you can't get rid of it it's kind of like permeates the the whole organization going forward so you want to start from a place where people are kind of open and honest and respectful that's real professionalism saying you're going to do something and actually delivering on it being on time um showing respect for your co-workers in the way that you talk to them uh yeah so this is another one that i i like is don't just do business things because they seem like or don't do just things because they seem like business things to do right like one in particular might be hiring hiring in a way that is we get a recruiting firm and we're looking for this particular skill set um when you're when you're early on you can have kind of high touch um because you're only hiring a handful of people you want to make sure that you're kind of getting the best people and so that's one of these business things that people do just because they're business things right do we need a bank account do we need an llc right well do we have problems that can't be resolved without those tools um and that's kind of uh uh one of the things i think like sushi swap as an organization will likely have a legal entity well we'll have a legal entity very soon um but for the most part right not all open or organizations are well suited for that i mean look at wi-fi etc uh yeah so this is uh this is our hiring process for the offer is still out they want to meet more of the team but this is kind of like how it went down we made an rfp we tweeted about it um saying that we were needing senior solidity developers um as kind of like a call out um and then they would dm us right and then we would say actually a couple of them offered us their resume and we don't really want that we want to see like if we're talking about a development position we want to see your code that you've committed um from there you can take recommendations from them say like you know who do you know that i know right and go and find those people and get a um get a feeling for how other people like working with them and that's what we did in this situation as well and then the offer letter right doesn't have to be anything formal it can just be a dm with some of the cryptographic tools we don't really need to um we don't really need to have things like legal contracts in the instance of our uh pay we do that through sablier we do streaming payments shout out to savelier really a great product so we can put our we can put their pay in there for a year and have it stream over the year we don't need to have some sort of like paper guarantees oh yeah overwork um i talked to the team about this a lot um some people enjoy working 60 hours 70 hours a week some of us have um some of us have like families like me in particular i have two kids and a wife where i could probably pull like you know 60 70 hours every week when i was much younger and didn't have a family i now can't but also i don't know that um working additional hours at that level sustained is actually beneficial i think most of the scientific research that's out there says that um we're you start hitting diminishing returns after you you get um a high return for a very short sprint um but you achieve diminishing returns if you have kind of like a sustained pattern of um overwork um and so one of the things that i say is that you don't necessarily there's i tell them there's no expectation for you to be here and available at all times to uh to be working on the project you know you have to have a life because there's other things outside of our work oh that's the wrong way uh yeah blockchains are stupid um we're really good at like uh they're really good like certain contractual enforcements but most of this is human coordination and i think that is most clear at the rise of snapshot with snapshot being a tool that's used for off-chain voting to as a signaling mechanism and then that signaling mechanism being enforced on shane uh within multi-sig so um the users come and vote and they signal their intent and then the multi-sig uh holders will then go and kind of like carry out the action um uh and this is kind of like a like generally a human coordination problem you cannot program into the contracts to kind of account for every single scenario that's going to happen even with like very sophisticated contract sets like moloch v2 that are that allow for self composition you can't really program all of that in here's an instance we have a multi-sig that has our ops wallet and occasionally we need to occasionally we need to um swap our sushi for usdc or something to pay a contractor um we all have to kind of get because of the the time that it takes for a trade to happen we have to coordinate as a group and that doesn't always work sometimes we just send the funds to someone and say hey swap them and and send them back to the ops wallet please because multi-sigs are difficult to hit kind of like time targets for things like trading especially things that are high in gas flat organizations are [ __ ] uh that is something that i've come to know to be true from other organizations that i've worked for it doesn't work um and i'll tell you why the reason is is organizations naturally develop power centers and in flat organizations those power centers are opaque um if i'm working someplace and i don't know who my manager who my boss is or who i'm able to ask for help from uh that that's kind of a difficult problem right like let's talk about something that could happen in any workplace even in open or let's say sexual harassment who do they go to it's a flat organization right everybody's a peer um that doesn't really make all that much sense so we have to have some level of structure people have to have um people have to have a hierarchy [Music] and by hierarchy i mean leadership and i think that leadership isn't necessarily a position it's a behavior right it's like um someone you can put somebody kind of in charge of something i think we've seen like many examples uh at the national level of the us for like um sometime now about people who are put in charge at national level and just are incapable and so leadership i think is a behavior and not necessarily a position and that's why you should stay away from um flat organizations or saying that your organization is flat because no doubt power centers you know the second that you have to write a check the second somebody has to make a decision somebody has to okay something power centers develop right and so um part of that is like bringing that structure beforehand so that it's transparent for everyone and everybody has a level playing field uh establish asset and capital controls this is really difficult for something without a legal entity um something that we've struggled with who do we put the domain who do we give ownership of the domain we don't yet have um on chain you know domain ownership outside of xyz domains right so how do we do that without uh how do we do that in the meat space how do we control a aws account how do we control our graph account um uh git book like any of these individual accounts right we have to have some sort of access control we have to have some sort of security model um and you know if somebody just walks away with it and you're an open organization what are you going to say that person took or they took our domain okay who's who's we well uh an anarchist collective of like me and some friends um you know that's not that's not really going to make it in an adequate uh position for you to retrieve um something that belongs to the organization uh capital controls um i've been inside organizations where um at the end at the initial the at the initialization right everybody's friends everybody's cool you know guys we don't need a multi-sig that's like gas heavy and like you know it's like we're not we're not gonna be we're we're chill so like don't expect anything weird to happen with us right that's a complete like farce you have to have that it's just human nature people have disagreements some people walk away um and sometimes they walk away with a big chunk of money right so um the way that we want to do that is enforce that democratically through things like multi-sigs ah this is my favorite one treasurer management um shout out to krugman who's doing a great job on the yams treasury um uh and we've seen kind of this is the problem okay so you hold a treasury and typically you're gonna hold it in your token um we hold most of ours in sushi um uh ef holds most of theirs in ether um and so we're like this is something that we are struggling with as well as i think our contemporaries be being like your runway is guaranteed by your treasury no one has ever uh said that uh an undiversified investment is a good idea and so like if you think of it from that perspective as this is a group investment to give you the runway to continue your development you're in trouble um if you have kind of some price fluctuation um uh but this is like hearsay so like take that with a grain of salt but as i understand like ef even had some trouble with the early like they did their pre-sale and then they had a crash with the bitcoin price which kind of significantly reduced their runway um that has happened to a lot of projects um and so it's very important that early on you're converting your treasury into something that has a better strategy you know not all stables but maybe some stables some of your own tokens some of um some some other tokens on the market right creating a basket doing a good job of managing your treasury so that you can continue to provide the services that you have uh promised to your users uh yeah this is maki this is something maki have brought up to me it's no lizard people meetings um uh lizard people are this um conspiracy theory on the internet of like um like a reptilian uh illuminati class that are like half alien breeds anyway so like the whole idea is that like at the very highest levels of government there are like these lizard people you know essentially every congress member has been accused of being a lizard person at some point but the point being is that like if we're making group decisions kind of like isolating yourself and making kind of a a a pack or a group to kind of make a decision without the insight approval or even kind of the capability for anybody outside that small group to intervene is problematic for an open organization we can't make decisions that way um and so uh with that that concludes my talk thank you for um having me here and i really appreciate it i don't know if we can take questions or uh absolutely if you want to take a look over on the right hand side there's a comment tab sure getting a lot of that cool yeah cool uh yeah transparency uh yeah treasury management uh yeah definitely do that uh okay how do you determine what is reasonable about about work is it the amount of productivity fitted into a lot of amount of time or some other method i don't know i say like 40 hours you know like that's a standard work week brought to us by um you know the labor unions let's let's stick to that if you're enjoying yourself continue on like that's you know that's you know that's what gets you going but we shouldn't normalize that as like the as like the expected behavior it's kind of like silicon valley behavior of like oh you have to work these you know crazy 70 hour work weeks until you're you know you're 25 and you know um you can finally afford a house in palo alto it's i think it's unreasonable we should be expecting people who are working um to have uh to have the freedom to kind of have a regular life as well oh oh i'm sorry i didn't see you there um it's not what it looks like i'm married but anyways okay so joe thank you so much for that uh this has been one of the most commented about uh panels or talks today uh everybody's been giving thumbs up in the chat so go check those out feel good about yourself and thank you so much for joining us cool thanks austin it's nice seeing you