DAOs and the Future of Work - Adam Kerpelman and Spengrah

so um we're gonna uh cue up ray guild who i think has one of the the coolest names of any project out there um i personally uh after the dow happened in 2016 the dow hack i sort of just wrote off the concept and um i don't know about you guys but i just kind of it was under the radar and then all of a sudden like i completely missed it but all of a sudden cool shit's happening with with daos uh metacartel is a good example and i believe uh red guild is is leveraging metacartel and uh spencer and adam are here to tell us all about it absolutely uh thanks for thanks for having us um i'll say uh right at the onset uh anyone who looked at the calendar invite for this might have noticed that this talk was supposed to be given by deacon uh brown he had an emergency so spencer and uh are are filling in uh which we were laughing because at a meeting just last week we were talking different project but we were talking about uh an east denver talk and i said look the problem is i don't have time to plan a talk i'll give a talk if someone else does the slides and so here we are i'm essentially going to try to do deacon's talk based on his slides but little other communication so here we are um awesome i thought uh i i hadn't planned this ahead of time spencer but i thought we could show the the trailer video first because i noticed that um that stream yard had a head yeah let's do it uh video share button um how do i do that do i just awesome i just let me know when you want me to roll it yeah let's roll it it's just a quick uh uh fun explainer we made for what is raid guild [Music] do [Music] [Music] the rest of it is just a showcase of some of the work that we've done you're right to cut it off before the copyright infringement kicks in great um yeah i guess uh from there you know we can go ahead and jump into the slides if you want to just share that one so people don't need to keep looking at my my lovely mug our lovely mugs other than exactly small in the corner like that um yeah so so uh yeah slayer exactly uh this one's called that that particular version it's called the demon slayer edit um uh yeah so raid killed uh raid guild is a decentralized horde of designers developers uh marketing professionals who all got together about a year ago and started doing what we do but as a decentralized uh collective essentially um i'll go into the story a bit more but the reason we're here to talk about dowsing the future of work is ultimately we're dow owned dow operated everything that we happen happens through our dao interface and uh like uh like you're saying on the way in here uh yeah we've the the broader community has moved on uh a great deal from the dao although i'll say uh personally i still have government meetings and stuff where people say well we all know what happened with the dao and then immediately dismiss everything that you have to say um i think partially we're here to you know uh talk about some of that stuff and kind of where where we've come since the dao and where raid gill has come in the last year which has been a crazy year globally certainly um but uh it's only accelerated everything for us we'll have a slide a little later when we talk about sort of our growth and stuff like that but uh yeah we're raid guild so let's let's kick this off um yeah so i guess uh at the point deacon was right to put in what's a dao and what's future of work um it's not safe to assume that everyone knows exactly what the deal is with daos etc um even speaking at eth denver uh yeah so so a dao um not the dao but a dao it stands for decentralized autonomous organization uh what it really is easier way i've also heard it called like a digital augmented organization which is sort of taking the same acronym and giving it other letters but but that almost says it better insofar as you know what a tao really is is a group of people who are using web3 software to uh uh eliminate coordination failure and the reality of how you do that really effectively is by controlling the money effectively and so in its simplest form a dao is a bank a collective sort of shared bank for your organization and you can't add members with voting power and you can't move any of the money around without votes so if i want to get paid through raid guild i have to put up a proposal for my payment that month and the other members have to vote it through and it sounds like it's all about controlling the purse strings but what it's really about is collective ownership the fact that everyone controls that kind of stuff really creates a a unique sense of collective ownership um and in the case of raid guild that collective ownership is over what is in essence a creative uh you know design and development firm we recently spun out a marketing arm but i'll talk about that in a little bit uh and i'll say on the raid guild front it you know personally before finding myself in raid guild i spent 15 years in various versions of either owning my own creative agency or working at others and it's it really this is kind of the bridge to future of work but it it really is a remarkably different experience working inside of an agency where literally every person is an owner of the agency along with you and i think we're up to 90 people now but because we're a dow the price of doing business is everyone is an owner uh and that really really changes how it feels like late on a friday when you've got a thing due on monday and you're trying to grind out these last few hours and you're going like no one's even gonna know that i worked on this because i'm just behind this faceless agency versus the sort of collective uh feeling um yeah and i think let me double check this next slide okay the next slide is more history so this slide is i guess i'm guessing deacon's literally i think in a hospital somewhere so i have gotten no input from him um but yeah we'll get into history some more but really like the exciting thing here that we've realized that we've tested out for the last year is you know as simple as you can make that dao software it's it's working now and it's allowing you to have what is in our case a collectively owned guild of people who are really working every day to uh we call it slay web 3 demons but you know if we're real about it we're just doing client work like any dev shop building people's apps uh i saw you on muted spencer thoughts i think an important distinction um between between raid guild and you know the molok dao framework that radial uses or something to highlight there is and as it's captured a little bit in in the bottom quote on the slide but what having i think of just a very very simple framework for uh collective ownership and how to make decisions about those funds really frees up everybody who is a collective owner every member in the dao every member of raid guild to experiment and kind of iteration after iteration of thinking and talking and and experimenting uh align iteratively around what what it is we're trying to do um and evolve the evolve the dow without having to change its infrastructure without having to change uh the baseline kind of thing that keeps everything glued together and so we are a collection of individuals but we are kind of glued together by our membership in this dow and that glue allows us to experiment and do all sorts of interesting things some of which we'll we'll probably talk about uh in the rest of the rest of our time and it's and i'll say back to my previous point the powerful thing of the collective ownership is you know you can bring all your employees together and say well how should we handle this you know client issue that came up you know they're unhappy about something like in a fair way well the reality is the owners are the people whose real reputations end up at stake while the employees are all sort of maybe you have some that will stand up and have a conscience about how they are going to handle things mostly they just don't want to lose their jobs and so as we've worked to evolve the dow and make good decisions from a you know what does this mean for the dao standpoint it's been it's been really interesting to see how that conversation is different and how the dao intermediary the software that is the dao has really effectively facilitated those at scales that i have never i've been in startups at 20 people and somewhere around 20 30 people like that stuff starts to break down and you start to not have the same dynamic of like well it's everyone's reputation is at stake and we're up to 90 some members now and still having productive you know discourse about how to evolve the dow and how to grow you know our own standing without without uh you know too much struggle i guess or without you know while still holding to what ultimately are sort of core core values i guess um which is actually a pretty good segue to talking about the history of raid guild just a little bit um i came on a bit later so i wasn't there for this part but i've but i've heard tell of it um raid guild spun out of meta cartel and ultimately uh metacartel is another dow it's a grant giving dow uh the focus is on giving grants to uh community first what they call community first projects um there's a uh document i can share somewhere that's that's uh it's called the community first manifesto it's a one-pager it's pretty easy but it really comes down to the idea that if we're working with open source software and we're working in the space that web3 finds itself we we end up in a in a in a situation where community is kind of all that matters because so much of the rest of everything else especially in open source where there's no intellectual property to hold dear um community ends up being all that matters and so community is first and so before we even started raid guild we had there was a group of people that said hey we all want to do this kind of design work together uh how can or you know development work together what would that look like uh and really you know it started from chats and more people joined the chats and then it started then when there was a call and more people joined the call and then that snowballs eventually to a point of going i think we've got something here and then you plug in the dow and that's where it can re you know the dowel the software part of the dow and that's where it can can really take take off uh the story behind the the name raid guild ultimately and it's one of my favorite things in the world is alongside with the community first development we've seen the emergence of sort of meme driven development which is to say you know even a step back from the idea that community is the first thing that matters uh the memes that pull that community together are sort of the only things that matter ultimately how do you communicate as a group um and in a sense when i say memes i don't necessarily mean you know bernie sanders with his mittens i mean memes the idea of like ideas that behave like genes but uh the founders ultimately you know deegan would be able to speak to this a little more directly if i were here because he was one of the founders but the way i've heard him tell it is ultimately they started getting the group together and they had a running joke that all of this stuff all of this coordination it just comes down to game theory which means it comes down to game dynamics which means everything's just a giant role-playing game so why not just commit to that meme and then not have to explain a bunch of things uh and it worked and so raid guild is kind of built on the idea that you know anyone who's ever played world of warcraft or dungeons and dragons knows that everyone eat that that you know you need a well-rounded rating party right and you know and the dynamics are very uh very similar when a client comes in with a a demon they mean slain you know you need a designer and a developer and a an account manager and a product you know project manager you know you're putting together your rating party right uh if it requires other things you know you call in those other things um and that's one of the things that i found the most remarkable about raid guild is that i've that i've seen fail at other agencies which is you know the awareness that you need to pull that group together uh doesn't always exist and i've never had to have that fight inside of raid guild because there's this meme filter at the door which is the understanding of of role-playing games and to be completely honest when you explain this to some people they go well geez that's stupid and you know the reality is that's a good filter because i don't think it's stupid i think it's fun and so the people that also think it's fun like i want to work with and so that's part of the beauty ultimately of of raid guild um and yeah it's popped out of that and sort of our our pursuant aesthetic popped out of out of that idea of of you know role-playing memes and stuff like that so you know if you stop into the raid guild discord you'll see we all have classes instead of departments um i'm a ranger which i'm a leader no i'm a uh what am i in raid guild i'm a rogue engineer i'm also a scribe because i write things in a bard because i do marketing there's a bunch of other ones um and yeah it was really that's that's uh you know that's sort of the the mythology behind the birth ultimately of raid guild um anything to add no i i also joined after so yeah the stories you've heard are the ones i've heard so you've caught it covered uh i'm checking the chat real quick i'm watching twitch to see if anybody's talking there were some questions in there that i'll get to in a minute so stick around if you asked a question um what do we got uh yes that's the history of raid guild uh and you know i'll say one of the cool things that sort of gets us i think as a as a is it a segway no it isn't okay so that's raid guild uh i feel like maybe we failed to talk a little bit earlier about the idea of the future of work um i think we used to talk a lot more about the future of work and then the pandemic hit and i think it's a lot easier to explain how this meshes with the future of work to people now that most so much work is remote but we used to talk more broadly about the idea that the future of work is remote and you can be wherever you want and shared ownership and all these you know sort of things and now everyone kind of just has to live live that life right so the fact that everybody's so remote this just tacks into the idea of once once there isn't the sort of arbitrary geography of everyone being in the same office you can start to do interesting things like layer dow software on and start to have something like raid guild um and that really was the sort of grand experiment of raid guild and this is kind of where we are almost i think exactly a year from when we were spun up uh oh i already said balanced roster cool um yeah so we have around 100 members uh we've had uh people i'm a housekeeper uh we have a couple other housekeepers we've we spun up separate houses to essentially focus on different somebody you know to wrangle the designer somebody wrangle the developers um and i oversee the marketing department that's sort of more my background digital strategy and stuff um and oversee isn't even right the right word it's a you know it's a collective it's a flat organization uh i just earn a couple extra shares a month to sort of wrangle some meetings and and keep the marketing effort going um we've had 50 weekly meetings uh almost every week we've had a packed house for our weekly sort of meetings we've switched to a pattern now where we stagger between meetings to handle ongoing guild and raid business we call we call the client work raids i mentioned that already right that's where raid gold comes from uh and now we've started flip-flopping futures meetings where uh every other week we talk about the future of the guild and try to figure out growing and things like that which has gotten us to the phenomenon of fractalizing which is partially where the houses come from but having hit about a hundred members we're sort of starting to have a use for uh subdows is an easy way to refer to them but they're almost more just spin-off taos um uh where you know we have groups of people working together who uh uh you know the way to manage the money that flows into that department that makes sense is a dow and that's really interesting because it's kind of like having a departmental budget but it's kind of having a departmental budget where if enough people joined that department you could just kind of be like cool we're going to go over here now and be our own dao and it really doesn't take anything other than sort of telling raid guild you're going to go over here and be your own dao um we do pay i'll say a shill shop which is the marketing dow does pay tribute into raid guild um largely because they feed us our business so what are you gonna do uh and yeah uh if you've if you're if you're here and interested um come by and check out the uh discord uh it's open we have a few different open channels so you can talk to us and um and you may be rewarded a thousand-fold i'm not sure what that means but deacon will be in the district it's deacon being deacon that's and you can ask him um one of the other things that has started to happen as we've been working on projects is ultimately we have we have revenue we have money flowing into the bank um and we want to use it for things and so we've started internal uh projects ultimately um one of them being dao house a sort of a full-scale almost startup that spun out of it's almost every member is a raid guild member and spencer and i are both on that team we went to go work on that i think there's a dow house talk sometime sometime later and we built our own info page i'll show that off if we have time but we might run out of time because i talk a lot uh we've been working on an escrow app which is really cool uh we needed it it's a classic case of dog fooding i think maybe spencer can talk about it a little more he worked on that one um but yeah it's just to handle client funds in a in a responsible way but we're working on spinning that out so other people can use it uh certainly creative professionals are in need of escrow tools um yeah there's a whole bunch of stuff um so i i saw one of the questions in the chat is do you get paid in in crypto or in fiat we uh only eath and erc20s uh is what we takes because that is what uh that's what goes into our dow and that is what we have collective ownership over uh and so there's a lot of infrastructure that we have realized and infrastructure and tools that we've realized that we need for ourselves um to make things easier on both ourselves and and on clients and there's a lot of fun interesting experiments that we've been doing with the news tools in web 3 to kind of replace or make a lot of things that used to be really hard and annoying a lot better one of those is is our escrow system uh we're likely going to be building that out a little bit more and automating some of our some of our processes even more with with additional smart contracts and and and web3 tools so there's a lot of stuff that that we that we work on um in addition to working for clients and one of the ways that or actually the only way that we really are able to do that is because the way this all works is that and you might be able to see this at the bottom of the page here is that when we get paid as as raiders when we do client work we give 10 back into the dow into the collective ownership pot and then those 10 that 10 can be spent on whatever the dao as a group as as an organization decides it wants to spend the money on and some of those things have been uh have been some of those those tools that that we were just talking about and were on the previous slide uh this is actually a good place to answer a question from twitch from uh crypto unico i believe it was who asked about the tribute uh why we have tribute in the dow uh i'll say one we're working on stabilizing that now because eath is so wild uh one eath is way too expensive as tribute uh but the real reality is the shares in our dow have value uh and so if we're gonna give out 10 new shares to a new member it would dilute everyone else in the pool if we didn't have it at a stabilized price uh that's part of it uh part of it's also just buy-in you know it's so easy to get into a dow because you just a couple clicks and your proposal is submitted uh that you know we we early on the group decided that they wanted to make sure that people were were only joining if they were serious um and you know i put up these everybody else that wanted to get in put up the eath it makes sense to me as an easy filter for to you know sort of both reduce people that might see an attack vector by joining the dao but also just you know uh uh it's it's fair to have have a bar set for how serious you are about the project um you know sort of a put up or shut up kind of thing that said we are also and have been for some time experimenting with other ways that people can join the guild not just by sending one ethan into the bank um so we have a an apprentice program that has been a really big success success and is going to be probably morphing and uh getting more formal potentially in in the near future so via that program you can be an experienced developer or or have experience in other areas in web3 or you can be a little bit more of a beginner and kind of work your way up and work your way into the guild so you don't have to just have what is it now seventeen hundred dollars uh lying around to join an organization right yeah so you can you can uh start working without putting up that tribute so you can earn the money for that tribute in the process of uh working through the apprenticeship but yeah i've had this up for a little bit um i want to save the time of not reading through the numbers here but here's just some sort of by the numbers i like the 9 000 years of combined experience [Laughter] i am not 100 sure that that is accurate i suspect that might be [Music] exaggeration we've got um 17 i mean i've been at it for 15 years uh 17 internal projects we did 20 uh external uh projects um 11 client projects uh yeah 200 000 paid out to people through this stuff uh pretty good for the first year of a startup to me and then yeah we've had these uh spin-offs we got this this bad boy fireeyes which is all about tokenomics the shill shop which is doing marketing work for people uh the dow shout which is helping other people set up dows and then we're working on the angry dwarf guild and the tavern keeper guild uh the angry dwarf guild is to help people with their treasuries and the tavern keepers is to help with community organization and stuff like that um really those are all just places where we realized as projects came through that people needed other services that we have people internally that are good at and guild you know it's it's all entirely self-directed i stood up and said hey i can put together a shop to handle that stuff and so now i i'm the keeper of shell shop um and we're doing marketing stuff for clients that have come through the alpha uh yeah so i guess this is just sort of the the the pitch ultimately you know sort of the future of this stuff um we have the experience we have the talent uh you know this is working it really is a it really is an opportunity i think we have here to do something that is that is new and exciting um you know the question ultimately though is like what what do we want to accomplish and i suspect where deacon was going with it that is uh yeah i have no more power to make that decision than he does than spencer does you know it really is up to the dow so if anybody listening to this thinks that's cool and wants to you know come way in uh the the tent is open ultimately um learn all about that stuff at raidguild.org i will add that it this is um this is an exciting time for for raid guild uh we are i think there was a question in the chat about how we're handling gas costs um we are in the process of migrating our dow over over to xdi and that is going to allow us to experiment um with a lot of new interesting stuff so things like different rewards models or the way that we organize ourselves and the way that we maybe can automate some some more stuff there's a lot of really exciting things that come out of that uh yeah just some of the thanks to call out uh dao house where we now uh administer our dow which i'll pull up real quick so we can so you can take a look at it this is it looks kind of funky because my massive screen is shared but this is what it actually looks like inside of our dow where we have our wallet with all our stuff in there and our members settings uh proposals so you know if you want to get paid put a proposal in here that's how all that stuff works um and then ultimately if you want to check out page raidguild.org is the place to go um i saw somebody in the chat said they applied a little while ago and uh i haven't heard back uh yeah that relates to what we were just working on with spencer um we are awesome figuring out some admin junk so we can process this stuff more effectively well guys thanks for the info and i got to say you're after my heart by the way combining chip tunes with slayer did you happen to know what art that was for the intro no no i don't uh you don't hear a lot these days but when you do it's like oh yes that that's good stuff yeah uh i can look it up it's it's something we licensed off of a you know like a stock audio cool well guys great aesthetic great and i love the fact that you're you like you said you you're you're seeding control to the community this is the true spirit of permissionless and decent decentralization and a doubt so keep rocking up yeah thanks for having us thank you so much