Becoming a DAO and the Organizational Legos you Need to Build - Danielle Wall

danielle all right hi everyone this is a good volume can you hear me up there great welcome to denver i'm so excited to see such a packed house what a cool venue to be in a nightclub and oh wow all the way at the top hi guys today i'm going to talk to you about becoming a dow and the organizational legos that i think are the most important to help you build you can find me on twitter and instagram at danny wall so my introduction i fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2014 and came through it from you know a liberty perspective and really wanted to find a way to take power away from governments and banks and corporations and return that and back to individuals and so bitcoin was really interesting to me and yeah i haven't been the same since probably like the most you guys i contributed to shape-shift since 2016. i started as a support agent and their first 12 employees and just kind of grew with the company and learned how to build the organization and have the operations there so grew all the way to director of operations and have helped through this decentralization process as we've become a dow so i wanted to start and ask as well how many of you have heard of shapeshift nice cool it's about half the room hi friends oh yeah hi friends and hi new friends you know we started as a way to really interact with crypto trade crypto seamlessly without custody as much as possible and so we are excited to see the decentralization and everything that's happening with d5 and we hope to be your you know d5 stop your d5 platform to interact with everything so i'll talk about a history of shape shift and how we made the decision to decentralize i'll talk about decentralization is not the absence of organization so i'm going to drive that point home and then quickly i think the communication and how you pay contributors is really important so the tools that we use to do that and then we'll conclude and talk about you know this is all about the building legos all about d5 legos so use what works for you all right shape shift began in the summer of 2014 you know pre-ethereum trying to become a dex basically this way to interact with liquidity this way to interact in a non-centralized way in a non-custodial way so you did have to trust us for a split second um you could trade bitcoin and litecoin purecoin dark coin so we're og we go all the way back we called it a crypto vending machine put one in get one out and that really was our ethos no kyc easy no custody as little as possible custody we continued to grow we had a lot of support in the early days and it just continued our team got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and then kyc happened and our company that was built on trading and exchanges and so you know we did the kyc for you we went and got all of the exchange accounts for you so we could do the trades on your behalf now we need to take your information we did not want to do this just something that you know you have to do this is uh i think like a coindesk article or some article when we started taking kyc came out with this picture i put it as my background for a long time you know we were inspired to get back to our ethos but we weren't exactly sure how to do it we went from our highest volume days 50 million 75 million dollars 24 hour trading volume to thousands of dollars a day trading volume after we made these switches it completely gutted our business and so we found our way back we found a way to get back to our ethos get back to who we were and a lot of that was thor chain and being able to integrate xerox and so what that did for us our product offering to our users stayed exactly the same but now we didn't touch the crypto we didn't have to take user's information we could go back to the shape shift that we were so this inspired us to go deeper how can we get rid of all this regulatory burden that we have how can we open up and become more efficient and grow faster and have people contribute all over the world so shape-shift decided to decentralize the entire company and execute the largest air drop in history yeah woo i love that give me some woo woo um you know we've seen a lot of companies or sorry we've seen a lot of dals start with the foundation we've seen a lot of you know different routes to become a dow but we thought we had kind of pioneered this first being a truly centralized company with multiple entities in multiple countries and going straight for it getting you know in waves laying off all of our employees paying out our shareholders shutting down every entity that we have and turning over the keys to everything that we do to our community and foxholders so that's the why and so then i just want to go over you know what i think is the most important lessons that we've learned and what if if i was going to either become a dow or start a dow what i would want to know check my time okay so decentralization is not the absence of organization you need to offer clarity on i'm talking specifically about mine but you know insert your dowel name here insert your token name here offer clarity on the shape shift dow functions and governance process enable anyone to easily start contributing and earning fox enable work streams to operate with a high level of autonomy and to achieve their mission and goals maximize governance participation and minimize fatigue do not have your community vote on every single thing they will stop voting they will get burned out quality not quantity proposals enable work streams to securely manage and utilize funds allocated to them from the dow willy you recognize this that's your words bud i know this one's a little blurry but you're going to get the idea hierarchy is important you know it's not just chaos and everyone running wild elect leaders elect experts in their field make sure they have the autonomy and the money to back up the goals that they want to accomplish one example of this in particular that i was um that i worked on and submitted the proposal for was a treasury management and diversification committee and so what we realized we had this you know at the time i took the screenshots 100 million dollar treasury that we're trying to you know work with utilize capitalize on and we realized wow every decision that we have to make is running through the community and it's taking 14 days at least before we can send money to whatever opportunity investment strategy that we want to implore so what we did we started you know small community small committee for three months to start a trial period and really gave them autonomy over a specific amount of fox so that they could go make the decisions do what they needed to do as a committee so they can vote it's not one person making these decisions and give that power to them so we can move faster so yeah just really really important to create a hierarchy create people with power give them the power to accomplish their goals and don't make your community vote on every single thing that you're doing how do we communicate with our contributors i'm sure everyone knows discord but instant message of course you need a quick instant way to talk to people a forum you want to have these ideas discussed in a way that is clear and concise and is not lost in discord so i think it is important to have two separate places to talk about you know the daily and then the strategy and then for us governance proposals we use snapshot i looked it up snapshot has over 5 000 spaces now 5 000 teams 5 000 you know communities are using snapshot if you're not familiar it's a free gasless way to create proposals and also free to vote on them votes are signed messages and are easily verifiable online and i think this is the biggest question i get it takes a snapshot on chain of where the fox or whatever token it is is in what address so i can't send you know i can't vote with my million fox and send it to willy and he vote with the same fox you know it is clear who can vote and who's eligible to vote on each proposal and then there it's also customizable so multiple voting systems um you know for your team and figure out how it works best for you how to pay contributors so shapeshift had this large pool of community with its shareholders and its employees already established and so what we wanted to do is try to convince some of them to stay show them that they have an opportunity to make you know their fox more valuable so we did grants to employees and shareholders with sablier and so that vest over three years you know in each block these um community members gain more fox and so the original idea was oh we'll give everyone you know a payment a month well then everybody gets paid on the same day that hurts your token economics so really what this did every block every person can decide when is right for them to withdraw when is right for them to sell their fox and do whatever they want with it also what this would be good if you had a core team an initial team that you wanted to launch with and then it gets rid of like a hassle of payments and payroll admin that you might have we also use colony colony address is a critical need for dals you can pay contributors you know securely transparently efficiently cheaply with xdy so it's really helped our like salaried dow employees we also started with fox as payment but with that treasury management diversification committee we realized we could do stable coins and so of course you know our employees have mortgages our employees have bills to pay so it is really nice that we're able to pay them in staples now as well coordinate is a new proposal that just went through and allowed each work stream to kind of get a budget to start playing around with this this allows everyone on your team to you know say hey you're providing value you're providing value and then pay those people so someone can come in and start providing value day one and then you can pay them later all right and uh again just d5 legos decentralization the idea there there are so many dow tools out there and so i think you can find what works for you you don't have to be a 75 80 person company you know who's decentralizing who's starting this you can be two guys in a basement you can be a few people and you can really use you can really use any tools out there to help you achieve what you're looking for so yeah i just wanted to rap again and i say this over and over again i'm a broken record but decentralization is not the absence of organization and it is so important that you have a clear foundation and clear goals and clear initiatives of what you want to do even though you're a decentralized community and you want you know participation all over the world so i'd love to take some questions if i have time um and yet you can find me on twitter and instagram at danny wall and you can find out more about shapeshift by going to shapeshift.com [Applause] okay cool all right thanks everyone thank you danielle