Future of Work Rule Breakers panel with Katy Jeremko, Steph and Madeline McCartney

uh she's from rehash the First Community owned podcast previously she led uh content at rabbit hole and Unstoppable domains she spends most of her time outside of work hiking skiing and climbing and she likes to do as much of it as possible with her dog Toby we have Katie germko she's co-founder and CEO of Indy a team of senior level design and development experts and creators of Indie protocol a future of work product stack fun fact she has an alter ego when she plays competitive Esports we have Steph from polygon step as a devro engineer previously a web 2 software developer and her fun fact is she played the tuba in a marching band we have Madeline McCartney is on the investment team at idioco lab Ventures and is based in San Francisco previously she worked at consumer startups in product strategy and growth roles and her fun fact is she likes to make her own kombucha laughs so if you look around at eth Denver you're going to be overwhelmed with web 3 technology you'll see protocols and nfts and l2s and all this stuff we're really here to talk about what's at the heart of it all which is human impact and you know what we're really uh trying to cover here is you know the things that people are doing with all of these Technologies it's about exchanging value it's about connecting with one another and it's really about finding and pursuing meaningful work so through this lens of web3 Technology we're here to ask the question what will the future of work look like so we'll start with Madeline question for you so ideal collab started as a research lab before evolving into a venture fund before moving into investing you worked as a freelance consultant how have your views shifted over time as you've deepened into web 3 and what big wins do you see for the future of work I think due to the nature of web3 There's an opportunity to contribute permissionlessly rather than asking for permission to work at someone's company you can just jump in and start working on a project or for a protocol and then you start to build a non-linear resume or a career and I think there's also a greater opportunity for ownership and we see this with things like Brain Trust where Freelancers actually have ownership in the marketplace that they're a part of or with we three which is a design Collective that Ido works with and we all share in the collective upside and we can collaborate on things like research and diligence love that thank you so Diana as a Creator you've started your own course leveraging web 3 tools to build your own products and audience what are some challenges you see with independent distributed work versus traditional working models yeah I think some of the biggest challenges I see with independent distributed work in the web 3 Space is really with web3 tooling I think in web3 we're still a little bit behind in terms of social uh the web 3 social platforms that exist today simply don't have the same kind of reach that web 2 platforms like Instagram and Twitter have although this is quickly changing with uh with platforms like lens for example which we have been experimenting with a lot and you'll see all of our podcast videos on lens tube and we use Leinster and we've been experimenting with all these different kinds of paid collects that they have that really help you to be able to find uh build your audience up quickly find new viewers and find new subscribers so I would say distribution is probably the biggest challenge right now just with lack of tooling and lack of the number of people in web3 as there are in web 2 but again I'm seeing this quickly changing and I'm really excited about things like for that reason thank you so Steph polygon has been one of the longest term developer ecosystem projects in the industry through your unique perspective into the developer ecosystem how is that ecosystem starting to shift with the centralized flexible work and how does it change the type of people that can contribute how's that okay awesome so I think the biggest difference um with work in web 3 especially for developers like me is that it goes from working for one single company to kind of working from a bounty system so everything is open source you can see what work needs to be done and you can just decide what you want to do based on your own interests I think that's something that was missing for me when I was working in web 2 it would kind of just be product and project managers saying like here's your tasks for the week and it was fulfilling for a certain amount of time but I found that like after four to six months at a job I wasn't really learning anymore so I wasn't stimulated the problems I was solving were kind of more of the same and it just was an interesting longer term so I'm really excited about this new system of work where we can look at what problems need to be solved and then actively find things that are interesting to us and I am really bullish on developers staying engaged with projects and kind of developing what they're excited about and then eventually turning that into something where they spin off their own startup or become product leaders rather than just like code monkeys totally as a developer I love that being able to work on the things that you're excited about is really important so Katie Andy just announced its protocol this week which will transform the landscape for independent Consultants what unique ways are you starting to see designers and developers working with clients in the future of work when we started Indy in 2017 I initially just wanted to Vibe out and build things with cool people and it was just me and my partner it was just the two of us and then we quickly started to find more people who were senior level who wanted to do stuff with us and we realized hey this is actually a movement this is an independent movement that is happening in the world okay what does that actually mean for senior level people who are either going to be stuck in the management path at their jobs or they have to start their own agency and deal with all the business administration which the business part of freelancing takes away entirely from just focusing on your craft and when you can't focus on your craft then when somebody's hiring you you're not really that useful anymore to them at the base level but when we think about independence as creators in this Creator economy like with what Madeleine talked about with having a token to actually represent your contributions when you earn Indy you actually get a distribution of the profits and you actually get voting power on what happens with the organization you actually have exponential upside on any project that you work on so really when you think about those incentives it's like these Independents are the new creators coming together these Independents are the designers and the developers who are creating their own reputation networks and then they're using each other to link arms and create a much more powerful industry-leading Leading Edge Innovative group rather than just being behind like a big agency brand that might or may not work long term totally and I I know the more senior you get sometimes as like a developer the more you get that pull into management which pulls you away from your craft which is really a detriment I think to individuals and in many ways to organizations as well so let's bring it back to some of the that swirling technology that's kind of all around us like you know what is blockchain and the web3 ecosystem uniquely unlocked for the future of work and this is open question for anyone to jump in on to take advantage of collective intelligence and to incentivize people to contribute and then also reward them for that I 100 agree and I think that platforms like lens that Diana mentioned earlier are really fascinating because we can actually have an entire node connected network of all the people that I know people that I've worked with and I can actually see a social graph of who I worked with and so for service Dows like Indy it's an incredibly powerful way to actually have the social reputation linked into the work that you do awesome so this is a transitionary phase right so what does this transition look like just in terms of changing work Styles changing business models in just like overall timeline for this transition for a deck hurting cat I think on one hand we're really excited for this decentralized style of work but on the other hand we need to create tools to manage and have roles and responsibilities and so things like hats protocol or other Dow tooling can make that possible so that there is still a role and a responsibility and kind of an end goal in sight with your work I think it's also going to shift the way that we think about our careers and we think about work I think people are going to move a lot more towards dipping their hands in a lot of different roles instead of committing their entire career to one specific job and I think we're seeing this already with people that work in the web 3 space I think for all of us up here we did not start our careers doing what we do now we all made some kind of pivot at some point so I think we'll continue seeing a shift of more I don't know if you want to call it like generalists but just people having a broader skill set than than being than the the kind of Specialists that we sort of pushed for in the past I think another thing is that Dows have incentivized individuals to take more ownership or understand things deeper because you have the opportunity to put forward a proposal for work that you think should be done in an ecosystem or for a Dao so you can look at the problems around you and say like I see this huge problem why aren't we solving it and throwing resources at it and then scope it out to the way you think that someone should solve the problem and then someone else who's like I know how to solve that or I have the technical know-how can pick it up get paid for it and the ecosystem continues so that's really cool and it's always been top down until now so I love the idea that a community could contribute ideas get those built and then have incentives to keep contributing more I love that I just wanted to add I feel like what you both are saying is that due to the fact that web3 is so new and the Technologies are still forming it requires people to actually have a deeper understanding and actually dive into topics that they may not be that familiar with like oh I have to think about a budget now I'm a developer but I have to actually think okay this is completely different but entirely useful because you're putting the power and the ownership into the hands of the people that are actually going to be the participants that's really exciting it is exciting and this is a crypto conference so let's talk about money for a sec so one could argue that this transition impacts a one trillion dollar market with like how we work so who are going to be the winners and losers in this transition I think people that take that collateral and I think that can be said for startups it can also be said for Venture and that's something that we do with we three is that we have shared diligence and research and things like that and it only makes the collective stronger I I think it's like really important to strip away a lot of the rigid rules that hierarchies and structures that still have very clear uh division of power we were actually talking about this the other night with our core team about how important it is to establish what different sub-dials or committees are doing within your community and how having Clarity around that is important but also having a path for people to be able to have that Authority and get to that point where they can make more decisions is really awesome and so I think that the clear winners in this market will be those that are focused on creating the right incentive mechanisms for people to want to take those positions of power and to want to create the right proposals and create the right incentive alignment so that somebody that is working on a team that might have a separate goals but will still be aligned for the general success and consensus of the entire network I guess one thing I worry about in this though is that the same people keep winning as previous systems it's the people who are have a lot of digital literacy the people who are educated about technology and blockchain so I think it's all of our job to do a better job educating everyone so that everyone benefits from this not just people who already know about it yeah Chase Chapman had a post recently about Dragon Slayers and how you know those that are slaying dragons will just be replaced with another dragon and so I think there is uh you need to be conscious of that and make sure you're preventing certain things from happening um so like what other like warnings in other pitfalls you know within this transition should we be considering and working collectively to uh address I mean I think kind of going off of what stuff just said I think one thing that we should be careful about is that we don't repeat the same mistakes that we made in the past I think a lot of The Primitives that we're building web 3 on are some of the same Primitives that we built web one on and we all saw how that turned out so I think not repeating the same mistakes we made in the past if we say that in crypto you know one of our main goals is to democratize access to things like when we talk about Dows we uh boast about Dao's like anybody can come and work in a dow you don't have to have gone to a prestigious University or have a stellar resume as long as you can contribute you can come work and while this may be true in theory I think in practice what we're seeing is that the people working in Dallas are still people that got into that Dow through people they know which is the same as in the in the traditional world of getting jobs through people you know and I think you know uh with a lot of the people that we're seeing in Dallas still they don't have very robust compensation models so we're seeing a lot of people who have other full-time jobs or who have some sort of other way of making money that are joining Dao's and kind of contributing their time for free but if you're somebody that needs to make a full-time income it's still pretty hard today to work full-time for a dow and be able to sustain yourself so I think I think we just need to be honest with ourselves and we need to be reflective of the mistakes that we made in the past and really not just theorize about this world that we're trying to build but really think about how do we build it in practice I just want to add on to that and say delegation is a really cool governance mechanism but I also think that sometimes we're a little bit comfortable delegating our power like just allowing things to happen because we don't ask the hard questions because we don't want to look silly so I think just making sure that when we're part of a dow Community we're asking the questions about whether or not something is actually going in the right direction and sometimes that's really tricky and tough and there are Gatekeepers but I think that that's ultimately the right thing that we have to do all right we'll close with a fun question because future work a lot of it is about optionality working on what excites you working on what you're passionate about if you had unlimited money what would you do would it be the same thing you're doing now or would it be something different so this is a question that I have probably about 75 of them said that they would be doing exactly what they're doing today for me as much as I love rehash I love podcasting I love crypto everything I'm doing I would absolutely not be doing what I'm doing today if I had unlimited money I would probably go travel I'd probably spend a lot of my time hiking skiing being outside maybe start like a dog rescue or something just kind of like random things I mean there's so many things I would want to do like if I just had money to like throw out anything and didn't have to worry about work I think that the creativity would just explode I think that we would still need to coordinate with each other and I actually think that if money wasn't an issue we would still come up with some kind of fun incentivization thing to use to trade value with each other but because it's kind of a game right like money and capitalism is kind of a fun game that we get to play and if you think about it that way I think it makes work more enjoyable but I also think it's just really important to focus on um how how vast are our identities are we have so many facets to us and we've been so boxed in and traditional work that I'm excited to personally see what will happen once we have more democratic um we don't have that well gapping so substantial and people can be more on an even playing field that's the goal that I would really like to see happen in my lifetime for me I would do some of the same types of work but I don't think I would consider it work I would consider it creating or building and I would take more risks which would sound funny to my parents because they're like you work in crypto but I really like the phrase around find out and so I think I would just do more of that and take more risks in the types of things I'd be doing I would build things that I would know would make no money and I'd be fine with that I would definitely be doing what I'm doing I love meeting new Founders I love learning and researching things a big Focus for me as an investor is the early majority in creating real value for real people and so I would still want to pursue that and if I had unlimited money I would also live in a Cottage By the Sea so awesome I am really glad I don't have to answer that question so thank you everyone for coming and talking about the future of work please give it up for your panelists [Applause] foreign