Future of Work Mini-Summit

[Music] foreign the future of work Symposium mini Summit of bitter week Our Round of Applause for the future work in classic web 3 fashion we're going to kick off 30 minutes late and we just change the schedule a little bit um I'd like to not waste any more time and bring up the founder of opolis and founder of East Denver uh John powler to kick us off oh [Applause] come on there we go good morning GM how is everybody who's been here more than a day y'all tired yet ah come on man this is like pre-game warm-up this is like tailgating in the parking lot you kidding me who's been over the Biddle hub pretty cool eyes warm up y'all ain't seen nothing yet I've seen it and it's pretty amazing what is this can we get rid of this that would be good okay so if you don't know who I am I'm John I'm the founder of opolis also the founder of Denver and we have a ton of fun putting on all this stuff for you guys so hopefully you dive deep and enjoy everything that's happening around you if you haven't checked out like the well you probably have but if you haven't checked out the side event calendar there's like 300 and something things happening in the next three days so like I would definitely like over ticket yourself and then just kind of see where things go and YOLO but it's a ton of fun first off before we get I'm going to come back here Josh I'm going to hang out on your buffer corn for a minute but I wanted to say thank you to everybody who's contributing to the event today um as is common all of our web 3 friends are slow to get out of bed so I'm sure people are going to start trickling in here but just uh in alphabetical order Brain Trust bulla Network collab land chord nape daring advisors Dow house DX Dao Etc soft hyperplate job protocol meta intro me down non-fungible Council launch legal raid Guild request Network save shape shift super fluid and upside Co-op so holy [ __ ] thank you guys for everything and your support we very much see the future of work as a collaborative exercise and we absolutely would not be able to put on this event without y'all so thanks guys we appreciate it very very much now as far as my basic um sort of like introduction here we're just going to kind of get rolling to kind of save time so I'm going to kind of abbreviate what I was going to talk about but I say quite a bit that web3 is synonymous with the future of work and what I mean by that is the ethos the tools and where we're going as a culture in web 3 is going to attract millions and millions and millions of people from web 2 if you want to call it that or Normie Land If you prefer that but we're going to basically create opportunities with these web free tool sets that have never existed before now when people are deciding where to put their time and attention commercially they're always looking at what the best value is to Arbitrage their time so in the Industrial Revolution Phase post-world War II it was fashionable if not economical to contract your time to Big corporations because it was much easier to make good money retirement and all sorts of other things that were good for Safety and Security for the average person and then you fast forward 70 80 90 years depending on when you want to start the clock and we haven't really changed anything that much but if you look at what people care about it's no longer Safety and Security what they care about is freedom and flexibility so the current systems that we have are not conducive to where the trends are already going if not already arrived does anybody know about a little law in California called ab5 okay ab5 is a law that basically California said platform and contributors gig workers must be classified as employees by the people that are Contracting their time now they do this under the banner of like employees rights and protecting workers but if you ask the workers how many of them actually want to be subjugated by these companies most of them don't so it's the wrong solution to the right problem so what web3 really presents with whether it's smart contracts or Community tokens or decentralized governance or gamification of work or whatever it might be we're creating new paradigms of opportunity Economic Opportunity for people to choose and opt-in from a Glo on a global scale so this isn't a geocentric thing this isn't going to be well I have to be in Denver in order to participate you could literally be anywhere with an internet connection and be able to participate so the landscape of work is going to change fundamentally in ways that might not even be fathomable today I'll give you one example today we see we have like activities that we do that are fun and then we have activities that we do that are work one of the things that you're going to see the gamification of work that I mentioned everything is going to be gamified you will be incentivized to participate in really boring [ __ ] but it'll make it fun opolis is a good example of that that's our day job you'll hear plenty about that today but we've gamified the basic process of payrolling and made the game participants or the members owners and you earn value just for consuming basic services and you're going to do it anyway this is stuff that you're already doing so this Paradigm is going to end up in almost everything that we do and so from an opportunity standpoint we're just barely scratching the surface right now so if you think about where we are in web 3 I if anybody knows me they know I like baseball so I use a lot of baseball analogies so we're in like the first or second inning of the seven game series like we are early and congratulations you're actually way ahead of the curve because from a percentages standpoint we're talking about most everybody has no idea about this even though there's 25 30 000 people showing up to eat Denver this year which is insanely huge most people still have no clue about any of this so what can we do about that well we're here to you know to share our Wares to educate to learn from each other collaborate and to have a better understanding of what this future of work is and by the way I don't write the book on this stuff we have some of the most brilliant people here contributing to this and I'm I'm excited to hear about all this too I mean I've got my own ideas of course I've got my own Echo chamber of confirmation bias but the perspectives that we've put together today are diverse and Incredibly genius so looking forward to it so um let's see I want to give something away but I got to think about what to do about it anybody who's an office member here employees don't count Board of stewards members don't count okay raise your hands again special edition playing cards from Spork Dao who else where you go catch watch your head it's pretty good it wasn't bad actually I didn't take anybody's scalp off all right uh with that I'm gonna hand the microphone back to Joshua Lupitas everybody know Josh everybody knows Josh all right Josh take it away man thanks John all right I'm gonna hand it right over the moderator we've got our our first panel if you guys want to come up Funkmaster Flex that's our first time meeting in person this is awesome uh handles D5 Partnerships at index Co-op did you say Coop or do you say Co-op I think it's both uh and then Jacob clerkhout this co-founder and CEO of job protocol we have Grady Gardner the CEO of distributed Labs which is one of the core nodes building Brain Trust we have Lacey Kalani who is the co-founder of meta intro the professional resume wallet for web3 and Mela Marilla who has turned her passion for creating safe spaces for women and girls into her reality into a reality and is also Annapolis ambassador oh here you go awesome uh thanks Josh my name's funkmasterflex obviously it's not actually funkmasterflex my name is David Garfunkel uh people in D5 know me as Funkmaster Flex funkmasterflex.heath uh I work at indexcube for a few years now uh around the D5 World a monopolist member I've ran my payroll this morning um but yeah uh it's good to everybody here uh web through work is a huge topic when I joined crypto a couple years ago I just showed up uh and now it's a bit different um so great to have all these panelists here I think the first question is just really like is it hard to get a job in web 3 what are the obstacles like how does it work left or right yeah can you guys hear me okay I kind of just a web 3 head first knowing nothing about it um I wouldn't say it's hard I just feel like you have to be willing to not be conventional with seeking a job so I got into web3 uh as a business coach and life coach and I was really just trying to understand Digital Trends and how they were moving forward and marketing and found nfts and at that point I was like well let me try it out and see how it works out and if I can actually teach other people to do this and so I launched maternal instinct nft which is focused around maternal health awareness and I did it the complete wrong way so I did not build my community I did not do any of that I just put out my nfts and jumped onto Twitter and then learned oh there's a right way to do this but in having done that it helped me learn a lot about the space just because I did jump in head first and it taught me to reinvent myself so I think the when it comes to working in web 3 the easiest way to get in is to reinvent yourself with the things that you're passionate about outside of what web2 makes you think about work I like that answer we can keep going down one if you guys think it was it was easy when I joined but I brought my skills and then everything's completely different so yeah I think it depends on what you want to do and how it reminded you are um I think with web three it's such a beautiful thing you can try a ton of things at the same time um and you depending on how you jump into web three you're almost immediately uh met with a community and so at least for the people that are in our Discord I see a ton of people come into the space every day that are new to the web 3 space and a little overwhelmed with the options I'm not sure where their skills will land with a job but they're immediately met with a community that's supportive and so yes it can be easy if you are if you stumble into the right communities like meta intro yeah I think I can Echo that like it's it might be might feel a bit daunting in the beginning because there's like we tend to speak a certain lingo we try to like the fact that we're very Community focused makes it such that sometimes if you're not part of a community it might feel like it's really hard to get into but actually just joining the conversation learning um everybody seems to be very open-minded um we our job protocol help people find full-time jobs in web3 and there I would actually say that it's very much like finding a job in a tech scale up or in a startup you just need to understand a bit okay what are the the slight niches that that web3 tends to focus on I think obviously if you're a developer you need to know like what's happening in terms of tech stacks and and where which types of contracts are being Innovative who's building lots and that requires you to be someone knowledgeable um and that could be a barrier to entry even though there's a ton of really cool projects boot camps that that can help you get up to speed there and then on the marketing business side it's basically just coming to e Denver right and join the conversation uh learn learn about what it takes and who's doing what where um because yeah all that to say that if you if you put in a little bit of effort I don't think it's that hard to find a job in web3 and there's a really big demand for for 10x people to try and and build this into a billion uh billion users foreign yeah so um so maybe a little background on me just to give you guys a reference point on this so I've been working the last four years at Brain Trust helping to build basically a giant decentralized Talent network uh what is that that basically means we're connecting talented people usually in the tech so product managers designers Engineers with companies who need them um spanning kind of both web 3 and web2 so everywhere from Fortune 500 companies like Walmart Citibank Allstate Nike Google Etc all the way down through web3 startups hiring their first engineer so over the last like probably four years I've probably held I don't know a thousand plus companies hire ten ten thousand or so people of that probably 150 of those are crypto web 3 companies hiring everything from engineering through digital marketing through anything that they might need so my experiences kind of spanned both sides and a ton of it in the last you know two three years um the main thing that I've seen for difference in getting a web 3 job first web too is like they're very similar right like the hard Parts about finding a job like finding a job sucks just in general like no matter what you're doing partially what we're trying to help with but the difference that I've seen here is like you got to find something you're super passionate about and most of these companies if you're going to like just a straight pure web 3 startup or kind of like maybe mid mid smaller size company like everybody just wants passionate people like nobody [ __ ] has experience with web3 no one has experience like working at other organizations that have built out a lot of things in most cases or a very small number of people and they're just looking for transferable skills who can come in and get excited about what they're building on jump in with the mission and go start to you know try and drive a difference in that little organization but I think the main thing that I've seen is like if you show up with passion and excited to learn and like you don't need any experience whatsoever like you're good to go I definitely agree uh the skills you have now are going to be different than what we call Web three in five years so whoever says they have as many x-years experience probably isn't going to make a whole lot of difference but uh hopefully it does at least um a few of you guys mentioned Community um there's a lot of different like job sectors within crypto I guess to me like Community was a big one that popped up um most people don't think you can work Business Development or marketing I've worked business development for the past three years in crypto um so you guys mentioned Community uh Lacy you mentioned it first is there like a is that just a buzzword or are there like things Within These crypto companies that actually bring in community um with uh Community I because it's web 3 Community is super important I wouldn't say every single web3 company that I've come across puts Community necessarily first um depending on what they're building so like with us with meta intro when we went out to build we decided to build the community first um for a few reasons first to see if there'd be any interest in the product that we were building and then B help people find jobs and so again it depends on what you're building but for a slew of companies in the web 3 space Community is super important and a great job to have if you're able to land it agreed uh Community was one of those words I thought was made up when I got into crypto and it certainly isn't so um it's good to hear that uh Jacob you guys said you guys are trying to get people to get full-time jobs is that all of the crypto landscape are there freelance part-time jobs I feel like I know a lot of people that work at five different Dows so how do you guys think about it absolutely so we were first uh back when I got started working in web 3 first nft game but okay after that um we we started with building a platform where people could create and curate professional credentials and there it's actually on trying to figure out how to do that that we learned okay a lot of these great projects out there like even though they have a community and very often they're open source you can come contribute uh to both the code and and even like some of the the sales MBD orgs the the best projects out there the ones that create a lot of alpha actually have core teams and these core teams are recruited full-time those are people that are willing to put their life and their heart and and their personal Brands behind the mission of a certain protocol company project um so we decided to focus on that uh because there let's say it's it's also where let's say the overlap between web3 and the regular recruitment Community uh is was the most prominent uh and just for context there what we do with with uh job protocol is basically we're a decentralized recruitment Network where we uh partner with companies like the graph and and gnosis and binance to help them find full-time employees and we have an ecosystem or a community of talent Partners we call them and they take on very wide shapes like we have freelance recruiters we have agencies job boards communities themselves uh that are focused on a certain Niche and that want to help facilitate making uh making making connections and and hire get people hired in exchange for earning a bounty because what a company does is they come to us they list their hiring spec we put that on chain and let them attach a bounty and then those Talent partners that I mentioned can come in and earn those bounties so so yeah I would say um the the full-time Spectrum I think a lot of us have a full-time job if not like really cool I really believe in in the fact that people can be multifaceted have multiple jobs but for us as a as a first niche as a first wedge we focused on on full-time contributors uh yeah so we see we see a lot of full-time uh through our network but what I've noticed in web3 is um you know a lot of these startup Founders are like first-time web3 Founders oftentimes first Founders like starting a startup in general doesn't matter what industry you're in is like difficult and challenging and all these things so what I've seen is a lot of startup Founders for web3 specifically are actually super interested in like hiring contractors like come in work six months full time it doesn't mean part-time it oftentimes means you know 40 hours a week plus but it's oftentimes a great way for you as whatever position you are at that that company to like learn if you like it do you like working with the team do you like the culture is what they're doing actually meaningful all the things that you might do at any organization but on the web 3 side of the house like from a hiring perspective a lot of people coming in like don't have the skills yet right like they're excited they want to learn they maybe have some transferable skills if they're a Dev they just got out of you know they they're very good at Java or JavaScript or something that they could lead into more of a you know smart programming language they they don't know if they can do it right so you got to like learn fast on the job so like everybody kind of wants to test each other out so I've seen a ton of people hire yes full-time first sure but Contracting is a big thing that can be you know meaningful for you and obviously for them too definitely agree there as someone who's like hired D5 people it's like hard to know because traditional Finance is very different but there are transferable skills uh one of the things I always recommended to people was hop into a Discord ask some questions see what's going on then see if you like it do you guys have any recommendations before you make the full Deep dive in of like how you can actually learn in that sense um I think for me my process has always started with jumping into the Discord um but I also like to do a deep dive into the white paper and figuring out you know what is what is this company or organization's organization about you know what ethos do they have does it resonate with what I want to do in the world of web 3 when it comes to equity and redistribution of wealth and creating a system that we've seen that is completely Shifting The Narrative for what it looks like to generate value and if they cross those things off then I get into a conversation with them and it really is just about finding even a few core people that are in the project and hearing what they have to say and sometimes even with the the people that are pro I guess providing value outside from the core team what's their experience been like you know what do they have to say about the project why are they still there and if those things resonate with me I'm jumping in whether it's a volunteer role or it's actually looking for a position it really just depends on kind of the conversations that are being held outside of just saying hey buzzwords buzzwords so yeah yeah buzzwords and salary are helpful but it's like when you talk to a new team and or an old team and they their core team's been there for three years you know they're serious you know what they want to do so it's you kind of need both sides to be able to get like a long-term core hire um so imagine you do get a job in web 3 and this is probably why Obelisk exists but why is it different and why is paying people through a multi-sig different like I'm used to it at this point but that's probably a huge hurdle for a lot of people trying to get into crypto they're just not getting a normal paycheck most of the time um so do you guys have advice for those type of questions I we see that a lot of our customers they they're willing to be or increasingly willing to be flexible about that like if you want to attract amazing talent like um obviously a bunch of them like especially the D5 crowd they want to be paid and stable like they have very complex structure set up where like they optimize for all kinds of things and very often taxes is is an important one there um so they you want to be able to accommodate that but it's a shame to miss out on talents uh because certain things are not there and there's a very a couple of really cool companies and I think opolis and and some payment providers like are working on like for instance um Fiat I think request who's here like is is has me excited about a feature like crypto to to Fiat bank accounts uh payment transfers we see a lot of like uh especially in our talent ecosystem we're working there with recruiters and agencies and these people for them like uh very often starting to work for us just because we band stable is a very big hurdle so like I even though I believe in the vision like we need to make it uh as seamless and smooth as possible and there we're doing a good job in in getting getting let's say or Paving the way there um I think the the best projects out there are willing to do to be flexible around let's say the payment terms uh yeah I'd agree with that um I mean most most these companies operate like a startup right like you come in with a core team you're relatively centralized and then you work to decentralize over time and with that you're often times needing funding rounds and these type of things early on so what I see most common is they'll usually give people options oftentimes they'll lead with Fiat and actually ask them if they're open to some other kind of currency and you see kind of Hit or Miss right like depending on your level of comfortability with it and then what I oftentimes will see is as you get into it and you start working with these companies you become more comfortable you you start opening your horizons on how you want to be paid and you start optimizing for certain things which may lead you into crypto yeah from my experience the first time I did my payroll through opolis I was like oh wow that's actually way easier than I thought it would be uh because you start worrying about taxes and really everything and that's not something you normally have to worry about as an employee uh but once you start to do it I think if we're able to give better examples demos to people more protocols that are are helping assist that process I think it'll get easier um so when we look at like the web 3 landscape do you guys look at it as different types of job sectors technical versus non-technical or is it just all web 3 dive in and see what you can do with your skills um I think because of what web3 is it it goes web3 and then into Technical and on technical like a non-technical non-technical individual in some cases might be able to contribute to technical opportunities depending on their skill level and then vice versa and that's the beauty of it so we see a lot of individuals that come into our communities that have this flexible skill level to be able to contribute in multiple ways and that's amazing so that in an individual then can diversify their types of work opportunities I would add to that that the fact that we're still very often building infrastructure means that like even the business people they need to be technical like or have a have at least a certain technical Affinity to be able to like beverel people everybody's looking for whatever else people like it's it's really hard to find but these like if you're building um web tree native businesses for now because we we're still building out the infrastructure to be able to be able to build like the applications that will scale to a billion users it is still very technical so I would say that I think of it as like web tree hiring uh whether you're a business Dev or or a solidity developer that what gets me excited is that right now we're starting to have conversations with like web 2 Giants to who want to tap into what it means to hire in web3 because they identified that it's actually not one-on-one transferable like just being able to speak the lingual like if you're meta like it's not that easy to to tap into this crowd right they throw a lot of money around and uh and and obviously have some some really cool Partnerships but then transferring the the core identity of a company to to to what this is uh is is not something that is done overnight yeah I would say as someone who came in as non-technical I think because of my desire to participate in the space and to really understand how effective it can be I was pushed to learning the technical side of things right I had to educate myself not only to just understand the the buzzwords and the key things that I'm trying to learn to be able to translate it to people but to really internalize what it is that I'm working towards and what the ethos is and so I think because of where web3 is there is this need to learn more about the technical side to be able to translate it in a way that actually makes sense to people who don't want to learn about the technical side of things and anyone that's coming in at this stage has to in in a sense be a builder on on both ends yeah for me it's uh I think it'd be more like you guys will hear this theme for me I think of a more like traditional business roles in many cases where you know you've got like an infrastructure project or like a you know very detailed D5 project that is going to need people they can go tell a story they need marketers they need designers they need to build a front end that people can freaking use they need sales people like they're going to need a lot of the traditional roles so I actually think of it very similar to that in most instances the other thing to your point is like when we think web3 we always kind of think like startup companies or like somebody that's starting something new like guess what like every large company on the planet right now has a crypto or a blockchain team like every single one of them um so like what I oftentimes will see is people are passionate about the topic they don't want to go work for a startup because you choose big company or like small companies like a mental shift doesn't matter what industry and I see a ton of people going in and taking on these crypto projects within Bank of America or JP Morgan or Walmart for God's sake like everybody's got these projects that exist and there's a lot of opportunity out there I just don't think a lot of people who are looking for those jobs like think about that as like an opportunity well actually very often they get looked down on by this very Community but actually they might be the ones that drive adoption for that billion dollar like for that billion users so recent job posting that I saw that got me excited was Crocs was hiring for their web trade division um so but seeing the Innovation for some of these companies that are fan favorites is is pretty cool and so if you want to go work for a large company there are those arms um you just have to look yeah I hope Walmart shows up at East Denver this year probably unlikely um so I think as a default web3 crypto is remote it's global but we have these events what advice would you give to people like just showing up they never met any crypto people before what advice would you give to you see a million booths that these these things what do you actually do [Laughter] um I would say don't be afraid to look stupid or sound stupid and that's the first hurdle most people that are new in a space are afraid to say the wrong thing and come across as like the dumbest person in the room but I feel like that should be your target to be the dumbest person in the room because that means you're going to ask the right questions even if they're the wrong questions you'll ask enough questions that you will hit the right one and I think you know like Brady was saying it's about being open to learn and having the passion and I think the the best way to show that is come be dumb be ready to learn ask questions if you're coming and you're looking for a job in the web 3 space my advice if you're going up to the booths and you have your resume but let's say this is your first job asking the higher if there's a hiring manager there or who's ever representing the company asking hey you know look just by looking at my resume what skills would I need to be able to work for a company like yours or what skills do I currently have that would make me a good match with your company and asking those questions will spark good conversations and as you get to the second third fourth employer you'll quickly see what skills on your resume are transferable which is really the first step in landing a job in the space ask questions crypto people love talking about their projects so definitely ask questions um any like final piece of advice for people have sort of maybe been in the space for a while looking to get a new job looking to see what it might look like in a couple years because there weren't job protocols there weren't resume teams that could help you with these things so what's it going to look like in a couple years like what recommendations would you give to people looking to build for very long term my I hope that we won't be speaking about webtree anymore that like it will just be part of like how we build valuable systems and how we re like build Innovation um I think as soon as like as soon as we become part of the normal Tech stack as like every business every software business will be a web Tree Business that's I think a shared belief here so I hope that 10 years from now everybody will especially if you're a technical person like you'll need to be a web 3 native person on the business side of things yeah let's let's hope that we reach enough usage and that like the the some of the thinking as to how how we think about value creation and ownership that on the internet that that becomes normal and the only way of doing that is by getting enough smart people on and I think we all have a shared responsibility to to bring on board the the people that are still working in in jobs that they're not particularly excited about and come join this this ecosystem where where your work very often is is closer to your heart than just doing I think John mentioned it like just exchanging your time for money I think what we're doing here very often is closer to our hearts it's um and therefore we give a better version of ourselves and if we do have enough smart people do that then for sure like uh reaching that one billion people uh will be I don't know five I hope less than five years away so um so that we can just stop talking about web tree definitely less than five years I like the word or like the phrase ownership economy maybe rather than web3 everyone needs to say crypto no one likes to say defy anymore so we'll probably have different buzzwords as we keep going but yeah I think I'll just be more normalized to your point um this is the same advice I would give probably five ten years from now to somebody who's here today which is go find something that solves a freaking actual problem um and and talk to them right and ask hard questions like if you're new to this whole space like you're gonna start asking like say a founder or somebody that works for your company on a core team and has been in the industry for a couple years like they're gonna start throwing weird acronyms at you and like [ __ ] that makes no sense whatsoever like ask them just pause and be like can you tell me like what that means like don't feel stupid doing that um oftentimes people will throw a lot of this stuff at you just to kind of like move on past the topic and you're like can can you tell me like what you're trying to solve like is there a problem here that and like that's where I would go try and spend my time trying to find a company that solves a real problem with people you like agreed I think on top of what he's saying is a couple years ago I heard a couple years last year time has moved um last year I heard someone saying web3 is a permissionless space and everyone should feel that it is and just jump in but one of the things that I realized made me feel like that was an incorrect statement was the big words that we're using because we're using big words and we're using jargon people don't feel the permission to come in people don't feel like they can just jump in so I think the onus is on us to make our language accessible to make the way we communicate Equitable for the people that honestly this isn't where they work you know we need to bring it down to where they are and how they exist and make that feel like oh this is something I can relate to this is something that I can contribute to and like Grady said then if they know the problem well enough with the words that resonate with them then they're willing to step in past feeling like I need permission right the last thing on this is I I have found anyone who's like a good web3 founder or crypto founder actually can get out of the buzzword stuff they can actually talk to you like a person they can make it sound real to you and communicate with anyone like those are the good ones out there definitely push them on the acronyms for sure uh well this is very helpful to me I'm sure it was very helpful to everybody else uh thank you to all the panelists uh seemingly we have a few more coming up here that'll be good so thank you guys foreign are not your lawyers so um first let's bring up our moderator Bill Warren who's the product lead at opolis and executive Steward I had to read that off a sheet known the guy for years come on let's get some laughs That was supposed to be funny there we go all right Josh Hale has been an attorney speaking about startups for the better part of 20 years and recently changed the company name to uh fungibility group that's a great name for a for a law group Adam Miller the CEO and co-founder of my Dow and the host of just dowett podcast with a special guest whose name is Goldie we're very touched to have Goldie on our panel today Tyler Mori is the co-founder and CEO of upside Co-op and yav muchnick is a managing attorney at launch legal and a member of the employment Commons Board of stewards and with that I'm going to turn it over to Bill Warren a recovering attorney himself all right thanks Josh I figured we could start out by just everybody giving a little bit of background on themselves and and what you're working on primarily right now so let's start with you and work this way I'm yeah much Nick I've been practicing law for 15 years this year focusing primarily on corporate insecurities and early stage Tech startups growth stage Tech startups have been in the blockchain space since 2016. and we formed the first Dow Co-op here in Colorado which was the employment Commons in 2019. so I'm pretty proud of that uh Tyler Mori okay yeah there we go uh co-founder CEO at upside Co-op AKA upside Coupe I guess because that's what we're calling those these days um all right these These are attorneys and they are not your attorneys I am not a lawyer so don't ask me any questions um but uh yeah no upside Co-op doing uh regulatory compliant Community ownership for everybody hey everyone I'm Adam Miller and I'm a co-founder of my Dow which is a company that's working with the government of the Marshall Islands to try to create the best legal and Regulatory framework in the world for Dows and eventually for digital assets it starts with our Dow LLC non-profit and for-profit that we offer for Dao's in the Marshall Islands hi all I'm Josh Hale I have been practicing law for nearly 20 years I think that's 20 years next year and for most that time I've been doing Works in startups even though I'd practice some other areas at all when I started and got pulled into web 3 about four years ago with one of the clients that I had that I was part owner in that wanted to do something with comic books and I knew nothing and I jumped down the rabbit hole and I'm here four years later and having fun conversations with all you guys so like Josh said one of the questions we hear a lot in the web 3 space especially with respect to Dows since people actually work four thousand get paid by Dallas is should Dallas have an entity structure and if so which one should they have and and let's start with Adam because it sounds like you have an opinion I do have an opinion definitely biased but I do I do feel strongly I mean first of all that every Dao should okay not every Dao but most Dows should have a legal entity right they should incorporate in some way and there's really three reasons for that one is to limit the liability on their members as individuals two is so that the company the Dow can own property like its own name its own logo and do things like open bank accounts if you want to and three is that the Dow can pay its own taxes so that you don't simply have pass-through taxes on all of the members now a dow LLC or other legal entity for a doubt goes great with obelis because there are reasons why the ideal scenario is for the Dao to have a legal entity and for all the contributors that are working as contractors to have opelous legal entities but neither one is really sufficient in my opinion without the other and yev we'll go to you next because I know you have an opinion the quote so I mean there are times when when a legal entity rapper doesn't make sense and you can have a community that is not you know potentially in charge of a treasury but that's more of like a like a social community um that that runs on telegram or Discord that you know it over complicates things in certain situations to wrap yourself in a doubt but I'd say for 98 of the time it does make sense to um to find some kind of legal wrapper that's that's right for that Dao and there's so many different types of dows right there's investment Dows there's um producer does there's developer Dows there's just a myriad of of different types of Dao so I think looking at um really what kind of the community bases like um the kind of flow of income and flow out of of potential income and distributions really guides kind of the the proper legal entity that you should be looking at um we're huge fans of co-ops in Colorado they are incredibly flexible adaptable they provide the legal liability legal liability protection that a lot of dows need I will save my Securities analysis for a little bit later but there's a nice little Securities exemption that's built in as well so and let's go to Josh next yeah so I I I'm kind of on the other side of that equation as an attorney I think that a very simple analysis of should a dow have a rapper is one is it conducting business and two is it a sole proprietorship which obviously would not be a Dao sole proprietorships when it's all said and done they can have a LLC or whatever but they still may be able to pierce the corporate veil and a dow if you're doing business you should probably just suck it up and do it doesn't necessarily mean any particular form because that question is obviously the legal answer of it depends um but with that being said if you're conducting business you probably want some form of legal wrapper and business generally equates to is dollars being transacted or some currency being transacted if you're not doing any you know exchange of currency then like what she was saying if it's just social in nature then there's not really a great amount of risk but the second you're transacting you may want to have that thought process and maybe maybe even want to talk to a lawyer God forbid yeah and Adam I'm guessing you're in the co-op camp but uh how is how are co-ops or coops I I'm not getting on board how is that working for you talking about Tyler you're talking to me sorry Tyler yeah all right sweet um yeah no I'm I'm firmly in the co-op Camp uh with yev for a lot of reasons uh you know a big one is the Securities exemption that that uh evaludes to uh the other is that yeah the the other options for uh forming a a dow generally um yeah don't like if you're if you're going non-profit and it is meant to be a for-profit business you're going to have a lot of trouble actually like running that for-profit business um a co-ops it's very squarely in the middle uh where it is not traditionally like for-profit neither non-profit and you know the revenues and the profits of the actual Co-op can go back to the members um but you know art like me upside Co-op where we sit is really not as a you know a holistic Dao rapper um you know we look at uh Dao startups I guess I would call them right um so you know if any like familiarity people know sometimes like story Dow or uh you know early majority or um uh archive you know decentralized museums or consumer products and things like that where you have a real team a startup they're raising money they're building something they've got a C Corp or like an LLC on the back end that holds all of these assets and it can't be an offer profit because you can't you're not really taking in VC investment you know and doing all that through the tokens a little little crazy business um we we sit in the middle we we give a co-op a co-op really is just to to give you know a formality and and a voice to the community and give them an ability to to participate you know in the value that like that Core Business is actually creating um you know where sometimes it makes sense to have different entities because you have different types of groups that are contributing here right a community is very different from a core team who's you know building an entire you know consumer like outdoor apparel brand right so that's the um for uh in favor of the Dow LLC for a second as an alternative to The Cooperative um you know the Dow LLC was first popularized in Wyoming um in the Marshall Islands we took what happened in Wyoming and improved upon it and passed a couple laws over the last couple of years to create this Dow LLC um what's cool about an LLC and you know adjusting it for a Dao is that you can have you can do anything you want anything you can describe in English in terms of a governance structure in terms of how you manage the money and the assets of the organization in terms of how you distribute them you can do um so what we what we really focus on with these Dow LLCs is when you do want to wrap the entire Dao in an LLC kind of like when you talk about the Microsoft Corporation you don't say like Microsoft has a corporation and uses it for certain things you just call it the Microsoft Corporation most of the Dows we work with want to call their Dao the Dow it's a Dao it's a dow LLC and it's fully wrapped in the in the in the legal wrapper all right and you have I think brought up the sticky situation that seems to be brewing with the SEC so how screwed are we start with yeah I think we're fairly [ __ ] yeah seconded I mean I think there's a there is there are obviously carve outs and there are ways of like um trying to protect yourself from uh Securities laws so for example a lot of the Dows that we work with are non-profit doubts right they have some kind of mission whether it's the furtherance of an ecosystem or a protocol governing and supporting something saving the rainforest whatever it is if you're really if your primary purpose is really not to generate profit and you're not planning on Distributing dividends to your members then you know we believe that a token that represents governance in a non-profit that's kind of like having a seat on the board of a non-profit company somewhere right the SEC is not going to say that your board seat means that you hold some kind of security um and so you know I think that I I would add to that though that if you can buy and sell your board seat at different prices uh that and you know the SEC has made comments the governance tokens are securities so yeah there's there's a lot of nuance here um and I would add to that that if you buy it and sell it for the same price that might be stable and the SEC might still be there still a security right so you know like in the United States yeah kind of [ __ ] but I mean if you're looking at specifically the Howie test and the the prongs of expectation of profits or the efforts of others going back to co-ops um the efforts are your own co-ops are designed for Patron membership activity and so that's where you get that exemption from uh from Securities registration or even it being considered a security um and that's sort of the Saving Grace so that has not been tested in the courts and we're hoping that it won't we're really praying and hoping that it won't because we've set up a lot of Dow co-ops but in if you think about an investment club which the SEC has specifically made an exemption for in terms of of fund registration you have kind of in a similar vein people investors making decisions about their Investments and this is kind of what you get in a in a co-op style situation as well and I think Adam I'm starting to get names right brought it up a little bit earlier and was shillingopolis on my behalf so I didn't have to the idea of also wrapping your individual contributions to a Dao in a legal rapper so rather than just relying on the legal rapper that is the employment Commons LCA I might rely on Bilco to protect my personal assets as well and as I'm working for Dows give me a little bit more structure how effective do you think that will be in really kind of protecting folks can I just jump in really quickly um I would say that a single member LLC depending on which jurisdiction you're at in in or forming it in is very ineffective um and I I don't know that that's been openly voiced I mean it does kind of give you some legal liability rapper but arguably there are certain jurisdictions that give you better protections like in Wyoming unfortunately even though I'm a Colorado Native but Colorado or Wyoming llc's are much stronger than than Colorado llc's for single member llc's and when you see that say they're not great for it you're just talking about the liability protection right because they're effective in in other ways like they are yeah exactly but for specifically liability protection yes I mean and I the way I think about it is really from the Dow's perspective um which is that it's much easier to be able to just hire 1099s as we call them in the states right contractors rather than trying to build all the infrastructure that you need to be able to hire employees from a bank account to you know payroll and paying payroll taxes wherever you have those employees so I think this enabling infrastructure like opolis that makes it so that at least you have a little bit extra protection from from your Dow's perspective in terms of hiring firms instead of just hiring individuals and then maybe coming up against like ab5 that John mentioned earlier where California is going to treat everyone like an employee unless you you know you meet certain considerations so that's why I think the combination is is really great even from the Dow's perspective you know strangely enough in ab5 attorneys are Exempted from that obviously there's a lot of exemptions actually right yeah four or five it's basically professionals with some sort of licensure is the easy analysis But ultimately exactly what you have was saying for liability purposes a single member LLC is probably not great there's other ways you can protect with that with maybe having additional members but now you're looking at you know how how's it held how's the business you know shared and you start getting into complexities and the more complex you get with attorneys the more expensive we get we love that but you may not yeah and what are people's thoughts on the series LLC because within web 3 I think the series LLC has become kind of a popular I guess like legal meme uh personally I don't think I'd want to be like I wouldn't want Bilco to be a series of some random series LLC where you know somebody on the other somebody in some other series is doing something very sketchy uh but my opinion is just one of five up here so curious what others think about it I mean there it's pretty Silo liability in in terms of you know a serious LLC like if you're gonna go get like a a series LLC nft rapper from rapper.wtf or something like that it like it you know it does the same thing that most single member LLC rappers do I think the interesting thing about the series LLC uh you know is hey well hey you have to trust your counterparty like like you know Lex style has to continue to pay for filing and everything on the master LLC or your [ __ ] out of luck right as well yeah yeah exactly uh they're all the same thing to me but um the interesting thing I find there is that everyone uh not everyone and I actually find that it's decreasing at a rapid rate how many people actually care but there was a day when anonymity was very important to a lot of people in this space um I would say you can never be anonymous to the tax man then you're probably doing something illegal but you know there are ways in which you can be anonymous to the other people in which you're participating in something with right and that's what a series LLC is kind of cool and good for is that the series LLC can be you know your instrument no one knows who owns that you you know you own it and it can be the participant it can funnel your participation through that um you know and that way like the only one who knows who you are is the IRS and honestly it's kind of how it should be but yeah those are my thoughts okay I think series LLCs are incredibly efficient for funds for real estate holdings for things that you need um you don't need to go and register your new LLC with the secretary of state with so that you can basically spin them up by creating a new operating agreement I think it can work really well in web 3 but if you are sort of relying on more of a um like a third party Master service like in I think Cali Dao service if I don't know if everybody's familiar with it or not but it allows you to spin up your Dao incredibly quickly um they've created all of the infrastructure for you to be able to do so but you rely on a third-party Master Series which could uh potentially dissolve and that would Implement that would impact all of the other series LLC so in that kind of situation where you're depending on somebody and it's not kind of in a kind of a controlled environment then there's there's definitely some risk there but otherwise I think for efficiency purposes um we use the Wyoming series LLC for buffercorn ventures as well so I think we're really talking about two different things right one is using someone else's Master like the Cali uh wrapper system and then you're just creating one series within it and you don't know what all the other serieses are the other situation is you're actually creating the Master Series LLC for your own purposes and then spinning up series within it for you know different projects that you're launching I think the latter makes more sense like the former you know it's so cheap to set up like a series LLC with Cali that if that's all you can afford maybe the project literally started like five minutes ago it's probably a good solution to start out with but then once you actually get some momentum there's really some assets at stake or you know there will be then you probably want to look at creating your own legal entity um you know one of the interesting experiences we had with a series from a rapper was they wanted to use that series LLC as a founding member of one of our Marshall Islands Dow llc's and they couldn't pass our compliance process because there was no state registry where our kyc provider could look up at confirm you know the existence and nature of that series LLC they could only see the master and I'll just add sorry to I'll just add that in Delaware you can have a protected and a registered series LLC I think there's only like 19 states in the U.

S that that recognize Syria's llc's to begin with but Delaware allows for registered series LLCs to actually have their own Ein and you can do that that kyc which you have to apply for it though right yeah the the I think the biggest problem is affordability and accessibility right and it's like what you're going for if if this is a very simple thing that you're doing and it's just like you interacting with one project and it's like a one-time thing then it makes sense any other like if you're starting at Dao or like a business no like no no uh that there's there's way more complexity that has to be handled but when it can be twenty dollars and take five minutes interestingly something that Adam said is something that most attorneys will never ever say out loud which is if you're starting a project the thing that may be right for the project may not be the thing that is right for the project a year into the project and you may have to continue to have conversations with your attorney and you may have to continue to say hey this is the new thing that we're doing what does this do to what we started with before and most attorneys are going to point you to what we believe is the long-term correct right that's that's what we're going to point you to because if we don't do that we're like committing malpractice right but it's a little bit like when your doctor says to you hey stop eating bacon you're fat a lot of people still eat bacon and have heart attacks right not all clients listen to their attorneys I mean do all your Italian yeah never so you know while I can't advise you to go down that path I can tell you that you should have an attorney flexible enough to help you down that path even though they're saying I don't think this is the right way to do this but it gives you these protections and then the business side says those are enough for now or not the attorney's always going to say hey bulletproof and the business end sometimes has to say well we don't need that that thing yet and that's the give and take of a good attorney-client relationship in my opinion do you tell your clients that it's Bulletproof I said it's close all right yeah don't put it on paper right um never on paper and please say you're not recording this well I I I'm not an attorney so I'll I'll tell you straight right but also I'm not an attorney so don't listen to a word I say same here actually by the way not an attorney and it's interesting um you know our prospects who are thinking about a dow LLC they're always asking us questions that are like borderline legal advice and on one hand we can't provide legal advice and we give them like major disclosures about that but on the other hand if I hear a question that I've literally heard like 20 lawyers answer the same way and they've told me that it's probably the same in every situation I'm going to tell the client like hey look this is what we hear over and over again this is what we see in our other clients do so it's interesting being kind of a services company that's in legal services but that's not a lawyer so I think this is a good segue to what will probably be the final question but at what point do you bring a lawyer in or do you rely on the service companies because let's be honest lawyers are expensive most entrepreneurs are in what's in the access to Justice world called the massive Middle where they're not qualifying for like free legal aid but they're also not going to to be able to afford Coulee where an Associates like 700 bucks an hour so if you're starting a project you know when do you rely on third party Services when is it prudent to kind of bring a lawyer in how do you manage that cost if you're broke every attorney is going to say day Zero it's the same as a startup build a product figure it out see if there's any interest in it and if there is then that's day zero right so we'll call that one day Zero I'll give Josh that one but uh before that's day negative one and I think also as soon as you can afford it is one good way of looking at it because for then what choice do you have and after that point you probably have something at stake one of the interesting things that we found though is that most lawyers and also tax advisors and there's at least one in this room they'll give you a little bit of advice for free because they know that maybe you can't afford it yet but but they're willing to to do that to build a relationship with you so one of the things we've started doing is offering from all the lawyers and advisors in our network will set up a free 30-minute call with that lawyer or advisor and the person who's interested in our product which is the Dow LLC and they know that like they're giving a little bit of free advice during that half hour with the hope of maybe attracting a client down the road yev gives tons of free advice I do give it for Oculus prospective members as well I've got a 15-minute link that you can schedule with me but I I personally don't believe in lawyers being Gatekeepers I think that you can do there's a lot of DIY that you can do I know that's maybe not the most popular opinion amongst lawyers I think there are some critical times where you do need one and when you're touching on regulatory issues especially when you're raising Capital so if you're issuing Securities are you having Securities questions that's absolutely when you need to engage with an attorney never sell a token without an attorney yep yeah never and while I agree that DIY is something that is feasibly done I also would caveat that with saying there's there's a very fine line between do-it-yourself and now it's going to cost you more later because you did it wrong it's true no I I agree with that but for example I had um I was we got stopped to Mentor one of the Biddle teams a couple nights ago and they had Capital that an investor wanted to give them and they're like we just don't have the money to set up our entity in the U.S and they were a UK company and I was like take the capital I mean use a safe note um that's why combinator safe node that is tried and tested and then you can sort of clean things up afterwards but there are times when you just have to do that yeah and just as a chauffeur big law firms which I can't believe I'm saying a lot of them have tons of free resources and educational blogs to help you navigate that DIY stage before you need to bring in an attorney to really deal with the specifics of your project which are always going to be different from the examples that you can find out there so I think we are all out of time but thanks for this discussion thank you thank you [Applause] are you going to go down the street to chase on web3 it's not going to happen I think what's going to happen though is as ownership becomes more um more people have ownership of their wallets they're going to be more interested in financing companies and offering credit and so payroll is the first step to getting people onboarded into web 3 once they have then a couple of stable tokens or a few eth then they're going to be looking for opportunities to maybe invest those or help Finance other Dows things like that it's the gateway to the web 3 ownership Society I'd say that I'm fortunate the unfortunate reality is that we operate in a legal system and that legal system is set up in a way that uh like if you look at Labor Frameworks they mostly developed in this Century well in the last century right mainly to protect employees from predatory you know uh working conditions that that we previously had the problem is those regulations are very prescriptive right they tell you what a labor relationship should look like rather than you know creating safe boundaries and as a result web free employment looks very similar to web to employment because it has to right and that's unfortunate because obviously we're building payment rails from scratch you know building everything from scratch you know it's super fluid we stream money every second you know find the labor regulation anywhere that is you know was expecting that right and unfortunately that's how regulation works most of the time they try to take what exists the best version of it and make that the default de facto way to do things and that slows down um Evolution but you know things like Obelisk that kind of abstract away employment so you could kind of uh you know receive funds as a company and then pay yourself as an employee that's a really good step towards allowing those people to experiment with new ways of employment and I think you know the best and most exciting stuff is in the most web free native uh applications right so when you have decentralized autonomous organizations who autonomously pay people that that's where you know it's really exciting and scaling that is something that you know we're very excited about at superfluid you know with with super fluid with one operation on chain you can open a stream that is Perpetual so you know you can literally pay a salary from a smart contract with one transaction right and that we think will enable a lot of kind of new ways of employment the questions the regulatory framework that that sits in and that's you know question from previous battle so I'm gonna borrow from someone to pay my tax on a against the stream of my salary basically yes Hallelujah I can't wait to uh look more at superfluid we're really excited about what they're doing by the way at Ebola we have tokens for salary tokens for invoicing all that stuff but I really want to add the uh the streaming element I think people don't at first I always thought wow business is more discontinuous how many people are really going to stream and then I thought about it again I was well that's sort of my bias streaming could be the default actually if I start a credit then it's actually easier for me to pay in nickels and dimes than it is for me to wait three months later and and send in a big check so really cool I think in a lot of ways web3 payment systems are easier than traditional systems I think as in people in the west we forget that most people globally are unbanked and so if you work in web 3 and you live in a country where most people are unbanked it's way easier to describe you a wallet address and just send you payment versus in a traditional system here if I were to get an employment I had to fill out all this paperwork and then all they have to give them my bank statements and it's like this whole transaction versus web remix that a lot seamless I think to your point after the hardest part is after you cash out that website for Fiat and then you have to deal with the tax vacations and all that and so forth but I do agree with I think streaming payments um being able like for instance that coordinate if you get paid for carbonate you can basically decide whether you want to claim your payment so you can either save it up or cash it out I think the the future is payments flexibility whether that be claiming it whenever you want streaming it Etc and I think a lot of I think a lot of ways web 3 is easier than traditional systems not harder because if you've ever been a manager at a retail store or something you have to do pay payroll it's a lot more steps than even paying a treasury in Dallas so um so um that that flexibility certainly will give me the opportunity to speculate on when to cash out my paycheck I think um what are what are some unlocks that you see these flexibility enabling in more business to business payments or like transfer organizational payments not not in this like very structured you know one way from an organization to contributor well I I've been talking a lot about the distinction between public and private Tibet if you want to make Pub uh payments on chain whether you're streaming them or using bulla or or coordinate that's very a public thing right and I there's a reason why it should be public well probably you want to monetize it Factor it do something uh that would the the public would help in that realm but there's also a private element that I'm seeing uh creep in a lot more ZK all this you know privacy layer so what I'm talking to some people who are interested in integrating web 3 with more privacy so that if if I do make an invoice or I do make a payment and there is a problem with it and we have to go to arbitration there's a whole layer of privacy that that can then be added to let's say a Claro's court or something like that so that's I think what what is really interesting about payments for me at least is this sudden Discovery Well we don't want everything public and we we don't necessarily want to stay completely Anonymous of course if you're doing business with somebody you have to trust them by by definition so anonymity sort of goes out the window so I'm seeing a more of a relaxation with public private and payments I think one of the bigger unlocks to your question is going to be credit like if you if you look at even small organizations in web free who even have some income right or even individuals who have income from web free like who's ever got a mortgage backed by Dow payments right once that ever happened and unfortunately the truth is traditional institutions are going to continue to fail us in that regard like we can't expect Banks to start accepting streams as a you know as a kind of collateral to give you credit and I think they're missing the opportunity because those are verifiable uh verifiable income streams right you can as to your point of being public you can check on chain right you can see that the money is there you can see who it's coming from you can see how long it's been coming from from those people and it's actually very easy to build on-chain Primitives for credit and that's something actually we're exploring with whom I finance which are one of the the sponsors at if Denver and you know building credit on top of revenue streams is the big unlock because that is something where traditional financial institutions continuously fail people you know people are unbanked right and banking them is important but banking them is not just allowing them to make electronic payments right banking them is providing credit to them it's providing Financial products based on their income it's basically giving them the flexibility to you know take their income forwards if they have consistent cash flow and all of those opportunities are only there if we use uh if we use basically crypto for payments so that all that transaction history is building up on chain right and that's an opportunity that I think uh even a lot of web free companies Miss is that you know making payments public makes your credit history public as well and making your credit history you know publicly verifiable makes credit cheaper as well and you know long term that's gonna give web free companies who adopt this kind of stuff a significant competitive advantage and one of the most important things I think about three unlocks is the governance part when you look at web 2 and web 3 the payments tools they may look similar at some point but of course number three we have the opportunity to to have that governed by the people who use it bring in values or a certain Mission banking the unbanked or going to markets that are maybe not profitable um or experimenting with new payment reward schemes like holding nape does or reputation based compensation which can often be bottom up or a Grassroots initiative but in the traditional Legal Financial system you would have a much smaller and maybe differently incentivized group designing those Payment Systems right so even if it maybe looks similar in some ways I believe the the design space is is probably bigger but also the power and the governance of making use of that design space is very interesting of course I think there's just simply just a lot of excuse me a lot of areas of payments that are unexplored for instance we've just now optimized payments for dialed a contributor but I haven't seen too many software too many products specialized in like doubt or doubt payment or sharing treasuries or like organizational level payments I think that's a space that's just completely unexplored and also just really simple in the web 3 terms I feel like it's simpler to pay in order like for go to one treasury to another treasury versus um in traditional Finance usually if you're paying another business if the invoice is the whole big thing and I think we're all trying to build our individual payment like silos and I think because there's not enough tooling for collaboration in terms of like treasuries thus we all kind of go on our own silos and build the same things and I think building a tool or going into the space of like cross-organizational payment and collaboration will allow for those relationships and collaboration to happen easily between Dallas yeah I I think I think the composability can be a big thing like the the stuff Fran was talking about like your you know financial transaction history on chain and then you can layer um Team level reputation from coordinate so you know maybe maybe you have like a low income but like everyone you've ever worked with has appreciated you greatly which is like an indication that you're probably going to be more reliable pay um so you mentioned the lack of um infrastructure for collaboration what what would you want to see build to enable more collaboration on the front of payments and treasury interactions I think I would like to see like my my brain always goes to let's let's find an app that already has a lot of clout and as a feature versus building my own thing so like a gnosis level or parcel level um Treasury System that let's say I'm in coordinate and I want to send payment to I don't know um I don't know you can swap or something um it should be easy to like basically get their treasury information from someone who works there I can basically go and send it and then um have it go into like a bucket like a project bucket or something like that and so that I know that money is going to be spent for that specific thing it's on chain I can see the money being sent to contributors and I can check on that project um I don't think you can send money to a treasury but it's not like designated funds you can't like say this is for this at the moment um I don't think I might be wrong I'd like to build on on top of that right it was it was quite interesting to see a bit of hesitation as to try to figure out who you would even pay yeah right and that is the point I wanted to make which is what I wanted to see built is companies that actually use crypto as their main income Source because otherwise what are we even talking about right like if uh if I have a massive Dow Treasury and I want to pay my suppliers in crypto and none of them accept crypto then you know it doesn't matter that there's no tools for it right so I think having more business in the space that first of all have a business model would be nice and having those businesses have a business model that depends on on chain payments would be even nicer right and then I think the space is demonstrated that we're pretty good at building tools right we're much less good at building business models so I think you know the tools will come when the need is there and I think you know companies like bulla will you know jump in there and build a tool like the second there's a need right but there is no need right now and that's because a lot of us are very focused on you know treasury style you know asset growth right bull market kind of mentality of the number will go up and I'll sell some of that and I'll pay my dues and nobody's focusing on making actual income as businesses and I think that's what I think that's what we should be focusing on it's funny because because we were talking about payments and like the implied assumption is we were talking about outflows nobody's talking about income what is a revenue model like can I can I add to that too I think it's important to remember that we're talking about creating a source of Truth on the blockchain and that's very powerful and I think if you build your app or your your protocol whatever it is around the idea of a source of truth that's shared then you get a lot more collaboration you get a lot more see-through right I can see what's at the who's at the track who I sent money to at treasury X I can see who I you know build here and they can see it as well because they share the same source of truth they're looking they're using the same protocols and just one more thing to add what Mike said earlier about the ownership economy I think when you talk about payments that's that's really important but we also have lots of non-payment incentive mechanisms right so sharing ownership in the Dow um doubted our relationships um that just built an ecosystem together instead of paying everything transactional on the Chinese level I think that's super exciting too probably not the topic of this panel but um the lighting incentives through non-payments is I mean of course we're doing this already and maybe you should embrace it more yeah it's uh I I I still want to like Circle back to because it seems that the biggest problem in payments today is like lack of business or Revenue models I don't know how much time we have left but um I'll I'll be curious to hear if if you have some ideas of like how can I actually fix that like like what are some things that we haven't explored and might work out well I I think better easier links to uh sorry my talking too much easier links to uh if you are a contributor let's say on YouTube or medium wherever you really need a a link that doesn't always be stripe PayPal venmo it's a link to uh paying in crypto and we've already developed something like that for bulla I'm sure other people will that's one way to get uh started I think a lot of people it's too easy on YouTube the turn on venmo and and forget about it so we need to offer ways for people to earn in crypto and then the rest should follow yeah I agree with that one thing that's making me continuously angry on Twitter is this company called third web which promote web free checkout it's web free checkout it's stripe it's stripe like you click on a stripe right that's a failure that's us failing but what I would what I would say is that a lot of companies in the space I think Super affiliate included are afraid of charging right like we're all we talk so much about public goods we don't realize that public goods need to be built and to build them you need money and that money comes for people using it and you know we've all benefited immensely from Nosa safe and they've never seen a dime right now obviously we have other models tokens are a great model for that you know and uh ownership economy allows us in a lot of ways to push that conversation down the road but I think a lot of people should discharge they're building great products people would pay for them and we shouldn't be afraid of that right um the basically I think the kind of number go up uh Treasury kind of uh model is not for every token it's not for every project right most projects are simply charge a subscription right and uh I think making that easier so building payment links uh using something like super fluid for subscriptions that's obviously something I'm very keen on seeing um but then building credit on top of that you know basically what I want to see in 2023 2024 is that if you launch a business in web free you're going to have a customer base that will pay you they'll pay you in crypto you'll get access to credit from that you'll be able to do all of this in a very easy interface using Ebola using gnosis safe and you will have an advantage over web 2 businesses and that will create a pull for more and more businesses to join but we have to do it by example and chicken chicken and egg it is just to piggyback off of that I think in the uh the bull market everybody's talking what's going on but no one was thinking about money and then now that the money went down we're like oh crap we need Revenue models but now we're scared to charge all of a sudden because like who has money um so I I often see a hesitancy to duplicate web 3 models SAS models things like that for for revenue and I think I don't think that it's super rational all the time like you said like not every um web3 product is going to be able to have a token or governance or Dao and sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer which is a subscription model I think the longer we wait to you know come out with these models the more and more our users will be like taken back I think even at coordinate we've we've discussed like different ways and there is a hesitancy there like you know people have been using this product for free for so long but like how do we even creep in and I think to your point it's like just start like if if it's valuable enough they will pay for it um and then also we we're working our butts off in this industry and we deserve to have some kind of money or else it's all going to die so I think don't don't be afraid to duplicate simple models for things and also um the the hesitancy we're already doing a new thing so don't everything doesn't have to be left through you don't have to have a complete web3 stack every idea has we have a tendency to reinvent the will over and over again and sometimes it just doesn't warrant that and I think um just being smart about what you choose to reinvent and what you choose to duplicate is probably the future of thinking about better Revenue models in the space yeah there's not much to add to these great points I would just phrase it as like ux for Mass adoption I think that's really something we also as an ecosystem um should should focus on more so that we reach more audiences more markets and and Target different customer groups that are not currently served and I think then um we have products that are proven and can also be monetized but um currently with like wallets and lacking social recovery for example is just like some very basic features we can technically build and once we have that integrated and and a solid stack that whether you ask speech where the ux between projects also is a smoother I think at that point we have a better chance for Mass adoption get Mass adoption get paid that's the summary right thanks everyone taking part in the panel thank you everyone thank you thanks Yvonne that was fantastic and thank you guys for coming all right now we have some really special guests it's me all right up next we have freelancer payroll benefits and compliance this is going to be a nice candid fireside chat with two of the founding stewards of opolis uh not that I don't know this off the back of my hand but I'm going to read it anyway uh first we have will Morgan will is the founding Steward and chief of staff atopolis and the OG Finance Steward of eat Denver which if you're not familiar with is the thing you're at right now where he has been driving force for both projects since 2016. has it been that long does it feel like it's been that long even longer okay before diving into the world of web 3 we'll let a few other lives working in public accounting for three years is that more or less fun Less Fun okay traveling the world for a year as a freelance writer oh I didn't know that about you and spending seven Summers fishing commercially in Alaska I did know that about you all right and Eddie pastor is a founding Steward and chief operation Steward atopolis you also did some stuff for eat Denver right I did not as much as will I just take credit for it that sounds about right and he's responsible for opelous's overall Financial strategy and operational Direction Eddie has been an executive in the HR Tech and payroll compliance base for 10 years holy smokes decade a decade and all that with John yeah wow yeah we'll get into that I have many questions about that overseeing payroll compliance in nearly every U.S state oh nearly every which ones were we missing oh you know the usual Arizona uh Michigan okay so we're gonna take a little bit of a less formal approach to this one to let the these two stiffs who sit behind a keyboard kind of loosen up get a feel for things nothing quite livens a crowd like talking to a Finance and Accounting guy I must say Let's uh let's have some fun here what are we going to talk taxes compliance yeah can't wait okay let's start off by telling the audience what they're doing wrong first question what are the common mistakes that are made when freelancing and crypto or in in the in the web 2 world so um I think one common mistake for anybody that's out doing anything in the gig economy or or freelancing for the first time uh or trying to make their way into a job board or whatever is knowing how to set the correct rate or really just knowing your your worth and how to scope a project and how to properly bill for it um so having done payroll for so many years and having been on the employer side there are a lot of hidden costs to employing people directly that you wouldn't see normally as a worker so knowing these things really can be helpful when you are setting your rate because if if I'm a project and I and I want to just hire somebody direct as a W-2 I'm paying more than just the base salary right I'm having to pay up to 21 of additional burden with health care and employer taxes and any kinds of benefits and that doesn't even count PTO and 401K match or anything like that so I think a mistake is you think of yourself okay I'm a hundred thousand dollar base employee and you forget oh I really can mark that up the the um the market allows for it I mean the employers expect it projects expect it so I think knowing how to set your right right is is key do you have a I know this but I'd like the crowd to know it too do you have a fancy phrase for this markup it's called Burden Burden rate that's not what I was getting at what is a self-sovereign tax that's true that's true it's a self-sovered tax I don't know if you want to call it a tax to a to a client maybe you do uh self-sovereign fee right it's a hey I'm handling my own compliance I'm handling the complexity of my employment so you don't have to you don't have to worry about HR you don't have to worry about workers comp you don't have to worry about local taxes I've got it handled I'm a professional business I employ myself right these are the pitch this is where you can pitch yourself using uhopless because there's no compliance issue here either you are truly a business doing business with another business and so there's all of these this value that you can kind of frame around hey it's good that I'm a contractor it's good that you're dealing with me as a business and not a 1099 or a W-2 that's a that's a good answer all right now question to you will same question but I want everybody to know um and I know we had a few obelis members oh I'll actually I'll you have a question all right we'll get to that after this one um he's actually the the name and face behind support at opolis.com and so you do see the mistakes so what would you say what's the most common mistake that you see Colin when I see is not treating yourself as a professional right so many of us that are Freelancers are out there contributing to multiple different projects at any given time but I see a lot of people especially first-time Freelancers co-mingling personal funds using a personal account on coinbase to receive their payments from multiple clients best practice would be to set up a business account treat yourself as a professional to Eddie's point take the time and the energy to invest in setting up your entity in a way that professionalizes your experience with your clients so have a business wallet address that receives your payments pay your invoices from that and then receive your net pay to a personal account separating your personal and business is just a best practice and we see quite often the commingling of funds gets really tricky at tax time and so that would be probably the number one that I would say make sure that if you're going to be a freelancer you separate those two that's a really good answer okay I wanted to do you still have a question did he um so for the because there was no mic so for the audience at home um what would the floor for web 3 is their web 3 markup rather than a web 2 markup is for the industry like as you would for a project like I think this is where we would have that kind of discourse so regardless of what your particular Avenue is in web3 just because it's such an emerging valuable field do you think that there is a minimum floor for what people should be asking for and going into any sort of interaction yeah um so I'll get i'll get to my answer on that but I think before I do I would I would highly recommend that you don't have the mentality of Race To The Bottom not that you are but for anybody that's that's going out freelancing for the first time might be tempted to want to feel like they need to compete with their rate um and it's not really it doesn't need to be a race to the to the very bottom now that said there should be I believe minimum [Music] it's sort of a substitute for minimum wage right there should be a floor that every project should expect to have to compensate for for anything um but it kind of depends on what you do right so the the floor the range that you could bill for if you're a graphic designer versus the range that you should expect a bill for if you're a seasoned uh project manager scum master or um web developer or something it's it's all going to vary so what I would recommend is um there are many tools out there online tools even indeed.

com where you can get a sense of what salaries are going for in your local area and it'll show a range and it'll be based on experience and everything else and so if you if you felt like you were just starting out and and it was appropriate because you didn't have the five ten years of experience you could aim for the bottom of that range but again I would Mark that up um 20 percent uh on average to say to cover the that self-sovereign fee of you handling your own compliance if you're a contractor and you handling your own taxes and you paying your own employer taxes and that should be absolutely reasonable especially when you point out to the client you'd be paying that anyway you'd be if you were to hire me as a direct employee you'd have to pay half of Social Security and Medicare and workers comp and unemployment so I'm baking all that in and you don't have to worry about it so I don't know if that answered directly answered your question if there should be a minimum I'd say um it would at a minimum be minimum salary exempt wage for your state so a lot of times that's about forty thousand it's like thirty six thousand dollars which you add the markup on it so it's like 40 45 000 a year on average cut that into hourly rate if you want um but in States like California and uh New York you know it's it's fifty sixty thousand dollars even Colorado is a high market so just Google uh salary exempt wage and that should be your minimum yeah I was just thinking about something that you said was that for the area that you live in but like we all work in the metaverse right indeed needs a metaverse section yeah so then I I would uh probably make a case for the higher rate then so I live in San Francisco that's what you're gonna pay me yeah geographical Arbitrage is a real thing uh and I think it's one of the things to the previous panel of the unbanked it's one of the opportunities in web 3 that people have is you can work for a project that maybe New York based and you can live in Nicaragua and have a higher quality of life there's no rules in web 3 to say that you can't do that right and so there is a level of geographical Arbitrage with our Dow projects especially I think with web 3 obviously this is what our third bear market so you see wages rise and fall we don't have quantifiable data that says web 3 has higher rates than web 2 companies I think generally web 2 companies are often better funded and so we see a lot of Freelancers coming in from web to especially with theopolis that maybe have better and more stable funding than web3 and I think having a sense of diversity in your clients maybe don't contribute to just a single project in web 3 spread it out across several clients gives you better stability if one project fails or lacks funding it gives you a little bit of ability to make those reasonable wages steady across the year uh so it makes me think of kind of the history of the freelancer a little bit that uh the term freelancer first appeared in the English language in the 1800s and it was actually two words it was free Lance and what it represented is a medieval um night basically mercenary uh that really their mentality was I'm going to work for whatever Nation pays me the most uh and so you know initially the freelancer mentality was about getting paid more it wasn't about um going out on your own and freedom and it was that but there was an element of expecting to get paid the most now I think to some of the points that were made earlier you want to be excited about your project so it's not always about earning the most either right so I I we've seen folks sort of take a lower contractor rate because they love the project so much and then there's maybe other upside like tokens and things like that um but uh yeah know your worth I guess you get what you put into it and don't be afraid to bill for projects either uh you know so much of our history is trading time for pay um there's new models there's ways to Value project basis and jump from Project to project from client to client where you're not having to do a steady 40 hours to get paid don't be afraid to negotiate a project basis contract with your clients either so that kind of leads to another um frustration I guess or or a risk with freelancing and it's knowing how to invoice properly and knowing when how often and how to set the correct payment terms um and how to properly scope that project and to lower your risk of not getting paid you have to have a pretty good handle on that but there are a lot of online tools for that uh opolis if you're a member you you get a discount for zero which is a it basically a QuickBooks competitor it's a cloud-based accounting tool and they have invoicing if you're invoicing Fiat and then request network is an option obviously for crypto and um and and we're looking at uh rolling in other things into the roadmap with our dashboards so that you can easily and quickly invoice your customers ideally your clients with uh in crypto howdy so we don't currently now but the question was do we have a list of all the tools and other things that you can use theropolis complementary topless there you go so we don't have that quite yet but it is on the roadmap this year to start layering in those other other tools we have a landing page right now for discounts for things like xero but it's it's a pretty deep discount it's 75 off your first six months but it's you know it's not free uh and we also have partnered with daring advisors who you'll hear from later today with a special discounted rate if you're an obelis member for your accounting which is another uh common mistake for Freelancers is they maybe think they can fly under the radar and maybe you can for a time um I wouldn't bet on that strategy long term because I personally know people who have been found by the IRS and have to pay a lot of back tax for the years that they didn't they didn't pay their taxes yes yeah the IRS has bulked up post coveted and they're auditing a lot of Freelancers so not to like put the fear of God in all of in any Freelancers but the IRS has upped their game as far as crypto Freelancers people not reporting income over the last five years so be compliant don't yellow your taxes and with opolis there's no need to because we handle all the withholding for you we remit it uh we convert it to Fiat if you're funding in crypto and so it's 100 compliant we're looking at the state local levels and making sure those taxes get taken care of now though on your business side um you still want to keep track of your expenses that's another uh common mistake that Freelancers make is they don't properly document or keep track of or organize all of their business expenses that they can write off especially when they incorporate so those laws change frequently you got to kind of stay up on them but it's easy to find out what is tax deductible but just keeping a ledger keeping your receipts and everything else so that when you do hand that over to your business accountant it's it's not going to cost a lot to file and that's where our partnership with Darion advisors comes in they have a a base rate if you're if you have your stuff in order you know you can file a return as low as 10 500 for your business if you're really organized you could do it yourself but again you want a freelance you want to be out there doing what you do best because time is money in that sense and so weighing the pros and cons there yeah I'll kind of actually go a little philosophical on that as well so we've come out of an age of information uh and then we had web 2 which was just people buying our attention I don't know about most of you I don't have any attention left to give to anything uh other than the things that I'm already giving attention to and so what's helpful as a freelancer is to find these uh points of curation in an age of perspective where you have someone that can aggregate all these things to help you be compliant to help you have benefits to help you understand the implications of being a freelancer find those points that that reduce the amount of attention that reduce the amount of research so that you can be a designer you can be a developer you're not having to spend your time figuring out how much taxes you owe quarterly and trying to figure out all your business expenses it's find something that curates the experience for you to free up some attention to do things that you do best little lull for me to ask another question yes if you got one yeah I do take live questions I like support can you tell me about your shoes these shoes are limited edition John power swag the best what is there like 10 in circulation I think there's there's about 10 in circulation okay I do have a serious question um and this is more relevant to Dows that have contributors in the US because you know Europe has Universal benefits um should should Dao's offer employment benefits make sure they offer a package uh so what I think all projects should think about is how to properly compensate a consultant to include what they would have covered in terms of benefits So my answer is yes but not directly I don't think they should go through the hassle of working with a broker underwriting a plan submitting a census finding group coverage that makes sense having to having to understand what a deductible is and an out-of-pocket Max is and a copay and all that they can avoid all the nonsense of of knowing what what is good quality benefits and if you are a self-sovereign worker through opolis you have that work's already been done for the client and for you so we've already curated four group plan group healthcare plans that are are high quality much larger networks vastly larger networks than anything you're going to get on the open State exchange and we could talk about that if you want to that there's a lot to that but I guess my short answer is they should pay for benefits but they shouldn't necessarily offer them directly and then I'll chime in as well to the legal panel I see you have back there and so to the to the legal panel there's some real compliance issues as well to go through the steps of incorporating your Dow into being able to underwrite plans and to be able to hire employees compliantly legally across the globe it's really it gets clunky very quickly for a Dao and it can distract the Dow contributors from doing what the Dow contributors do best if employment is not the purpose for the Dow it might not make sense and so higher you know your contributors as B2B relationships and they can live work where and with whom they want to without having to have that compliance layer from their Dow provided to them as a bureaucratic you know employer historically and that bureaucratic mess sounds like you also would need to hire or appoint somebody internally to manage all that stuff that sounds like a lot do you want the job yeah my first nickname was HR of the Dows and I didn't like it yes hey guys um so a follow-up question regarding you know uh uh HR in Dao's should there be mandatory sick days and things like this because I think a lot of times these things kind of get overlooked because so many people in crypto are young and they forget that people get sick and you know um there's all these other best practices that in the United States we have but when you have these International companies and then they become Dows they kind of tend to overlook these things so what are your thoughts on this and like what's the future there I want to also add like maternity paternity leave to the to the to the tail end of that question yeah so I I've seen a lot of um articles and presentations about how employers can give more to employees to help with retention and flexible and flexibility is one of those things that's happening right now and this is traditional employment I'm talking about so unlimited PTO is fairly trendy um maternity paternity leave sick days all of those things there's even a discussion right now that maybe a four day work week could result in higher productivity I don't know my stance on that really I don't know that that would be right for me necessarily but I think the beauty of the future of work being s being independent and folks really thinking about their work relationship as a business owner is they can they they can fit their work into the hours that they want to fit them into that fit that where the most productive and they don't have an HR team or employer dictating that oh okay well we've decided that four days is the most productive for you now you might be able to pull that off but I think to your point um it's it's really about how you Scope your bill uh your your invoice and how you Scope your project if you're doing it hourly then the client would be inclined to think that okay well when you're not on the clock then I'm not paying you however you don't have to bill an hourly rate you can do what um uh a lot of develop Dev shops would do and they'll scope out a project and say okay this is going to be about fifteen thousand dollars a month and I'm gonna do this work now you have to complete that list right but this is where if you're very efficient you might be able to pull that off in less than a 40 hour work week and you might be able to take a a week off for vacation but you have to set the right expectations with your your bill rate now um I guess more directly the question was should the should the Dow be thinking about that and I think yes um but not in the traditional employer sense but more of yeah I'm a business of one I'm self-employed I am going to have vacations I'm going to have these things and you're upfront about that and but I'm going to get this done this month and I'm going to get this done this month and you can do your contract month to month now in terms of who pays for it this is where you have to add to your bill rate because again they would be paying for that time off they would be paying for that sick leave and paying for maternity leave or paternity leave and so you you could do some quick math and say all right how many hours is that per year and what's that what's my bill rate and add that spread it out over 2080 hours um so I don't know if that answered your question but even if it didn't we've got to move on uh all right just to wrap up real quick you guys have both been this is your sixth eat Denver what are you most looking forward to the rest of the week I always love Sunday afternoon seeing what the biddlers have come up with um every year it's different the first year it was all fun and games and unicorns and crypto kitties and every year it's gotten progressively um more compelling as far as the problems that are being solved and the things that are being built so I'm really excited to see what projects we're we're seeing on Main stage on Sunday Eddie uh uh it's gonna sound weird but I my favorite part is actually the the few times I get to man or Oculus Booth because I just love talking about our project it's been my life's work for the last 10 years and it's it's great to share what we're up to and then visiting the other booths of course is always great so yeah and at our booth you get to give out some new and rare swag excited for that better hurry though while supplies last I said yes while supplies last but we also had a palette of shirts you'd be surprised yeah thanks guys thank you all right up next we have a very important one necessary evils crypto and freelancer taxes and I'd like to welcome there's another fireside chat uh with oculus Coalition Steward Micah Baylor uh and Cameron Brown who's the lead CPA and partner at Darien advisors of cryptocurrency and web 3 specialized tax advisory firm is over 12 years of experience working in public accounting startups fintech small business owners Freelancers and individuals he has been working on cryptocurrency accounting taxes and compliance since 2016 and that's since before I was even in the space wow and focus exclusively on the space in early 2021 he jokingly refers to himself as a defy Degen with a CPA license and on the note of him having a CPA license it's very important to note he is a CPA he's not your CPA until you hire him right so this is not is it financial and not accounting advice not tax advice it's not tax advice that's the word all right take it away Micah no tax advice life advice only um so Cameron and I have been doing Twitter spaces these last several months we've gotten into a lot of the Nitty Gritty of like what is an S corp what is a C Corp when do you pay taxes and why why do you pay taxes Cameron um today Cameron I was hoping to get into more of like the meadow with you uh and ask more like the question like why what how where when who you know um curious like your thoughts on the future of work and how these necessary Evils are changing to you know apply to the future of work sir where do I see it okay where do you see the future of work sir in the future the views in the future yeah so what I kind of say I was speaking that's outside as well is like I see like a Resurgence of cottage industries it's the idea that you know pre-industrialization people would like live and work out of their home they would you know be a seamstrip shop downstairs a butcher a fruit Monger or whatever but they also lived and worked in the same space and I find that since the change that people commute to the office the factories Etc it's disassociated that relationship to work and the biggest part of where I see the future work going is autonomy even sort of my schedule where I do it how I do it so you're giving the most output per you know hours spent if I'm slogging it two hours on the bus every day yeah I might have a great fantastic job but I'm not doing my best life's work you're speaking to uh work life integration exactly and it's very hard to do that through like a normal like employee relationship so when you have the autonomy of like designing it living you know I want to go to like Honduras or wherever for like a month like you have the option to make sure you're doing your best work you know I think uh one of the fundamental things that is enabled when you set up like the Obelisk wrapper is you start to do business not business to Consumer where you are a business being employed by or rather you're like a a contributor being employed by a business but instead what you do is you take your little freelancing practice and you wrap it inside of an obelis employment rapper and that allows for you to operate as a business doing business with other businesses um yeah your thoughts on like business to business is is that the future of work in certain cases so it has to work with like the flow what you're doing the relationship like a lot of people are totally cool like working for a well-funded company check and check out you know Colgate Palmolive or whatever like get do your nine to five like that works for certain people um but I see the relationship engaging business to business this was a straight like transition of labor for dollar or certain benefits is that you're not just selling your time you're selling your IP the rich you're undertaking your input Your Design it's a more creative process supposed to being codified and that's why a lot of you know the ab5 test was talked about earlier it's just like when there's control over the relationship it also doesn't allow for your little creative input to what you're doing um and all starts though just like the other plans on legals is like you have to have an actual entity it's just you the IRS is still going to see you as a person no matter what you do you got to have some sort of legal structure in order to have the conversations of what can we do you're you're hitting some of my favorite like bullets here uh you're talking about how like business to business means that like you own your IP and you you are the owner and when it comes down to it I feel like talking about Obelisk it's really easy to get into talking about the features and the benefits of opolis like Yay you got health insurance that doesn't suck you know that's really nice but then it's like what problems are we solving and I feel like the like the biggest like meta problem when it comes down to it is that ownership for the person who's actually contributing you know there's there's like four problems on earth right there's four problems on Earth there's environmental degradation like our stuff is falling apart there's global inequality there's climate change and last but not least you have just Global insecurity and like the problem that Oculus can address the most I think is inequality right like you look back to 1950 when the wealth Gap was the smallest that it had ever been that's when we had the highest participation in unions and unions were a way for people to own more of their work this being like the next iteration what I think is like a change in the way we actually own our work um it's beautiful to think what it may be able to do for us I I think fundamentally what it does is it comes down to like that work token and allowing for people to own all of their own IP maintain the rights of ownership but then contribute inside of a larger Collective where they continue to gain back ownership we call it stakeholder capitalism but you know these things that I do that you do that you do what are your thoughts on uh I don't know how this change in Dynamic on how individuals owning things just changes the way the game is played yeah it just comes down to skin of the game uh I started my first practice we're a public benefit Corp we did the right things we had you know circular feedback and good compensation structures above Market wages like all the classic ways to satisfy it but I sat down with my wife and I was like like do they share on the upside of this going crazy like is it just like they just put their time and they get bonuses which is great like Fiat actual compensation is it speaks a lot in volumes but to have that real like input requires stakeholderism into the actual entity so what we're doing now with Darian and we're working with other projects on is just having a little bit of skin in the game whether it's through the contract you own this piece of Ip that's you know of value to that you know entity that structure Etc um or you just get to share on the upside and actually above and just my time and efforts which you should be compensated for it's that extra little bit you're getting through actual skin and through their profits voting governance bonuses whatever yeah the uh the benefits of ownership are maybe hard to list right um so much of it is just like you own your stuff you you wake up in the morning more invigorated you're likely to be working on projects that you love more um if you simply own your stuff I I think one of the things that's most beautiful in in my opinion is that it really allows for you to do positions that are more like task based and less like role based um I'm absolutely horrible at anything administrative and no one should really ask me to do things that are administrative uh my main gig is like talking to people and being a person who says words out loud and that's pretty much all I do and you know it's uh it's like when you're when you are your own owner and you're contributing maybe in the Dao space or on multiple contracts allows for you to contribute where you like um how you like and that's the future of work in my opinion is like doing what you want where you want when you want how you want with whom you want yeah it's like very kind of like a personal VC approach like I'm gonna pick a bunch of different projects a little bit of time and effort in have autonomy over and then one pops awesome but you have the late the freedom and the ability to choose so and I also find just like in the concept of work itself like I'm a father of two children under the age of three it's tiring but the greatest thing I can have is breakfast with my family like if I can carve out that a little bit every day and enjoy that moment it allows me to dive in three four hours afterwards and have the most productive work session possible so having those little like access to qualities or questions in life really really changes work it's um I know that in so many of my conversations with you you've you've listed things that are not necessarily all that complicated to like go about you just have to like know which rock to look underneath and you have to go and just file the thing um so it seems like the future of work requires us to really like choose this mindset of abundance and to do a lot of like self-reporting right but if we can get over just doing a little bit of a little bit of paperwork right we can kind of like unlock all these things all too often I think we're focused on like the taxes and the insurance and these types of things um what folks still can do though with obelis and with Darian advisors is just a little bit of proper planning so that you can kind of get ahead and just live live that oh yeah and it kind of comes down to like it's the administrative BS that just exists of functioning but through putting that little bit of time or effort like having that legal s-corp whatever rapper is you get to have funner quote unquote conversational tax perspective like self-employed retirement or hsas or anything of that sort where you can just tweak your situation A little better where you don't have those options available to you and it's just like having a door you don't have to take it but it's there which is really nice to have through that sort of entity it's not for everybody um you know that's why there's a minimum for W-2 wages when we get winning age obelis um there's also just the cost of doing stuff and efforts so like it's when you feel things are real that's when it's very important to do and then you have to deal with the necessary rules just doing it but it allows so many doors open um there's a regime from the tax perspective encourage you to take the easy way out like work a W-2 I pick check the box elections I get this handle for me my reporting's done with just like 30 seconds um but it takes that X after a little bit of Mile and it gets you so much further down the road as far as what you can do with it and it it's not like I said it's not for everybody like people ask me it's no secret um can I sell file sure um but the reason why engaged professionals or automated is when your time is worth something and also if we can find just like a marginal imperiment or make something happier or better for you we're ahead of the overall in the tax situation this is uh bringing to mind the the concept of like professionalizing or freelancing practice um I think is largely what a lot of you know obelis and Darian advisors is really focused on is like taking taking something that before is maybe just a sole proprietor a person operating with a bank account and doing a thing um and helping them professionalize that service what you're speaking to like this idea of like can you file yourself well absolutely you can file yourself but you earned X number of dollars last year by doing this many hours of work so your hourly rate is 150 bucks and you're gonna spend 30 hours of your life trying to do what Cameron can do in four minutes you know what I mean it's like know your value amen he's done on that he's like that's right I can move faster and meaner than you do what you're good at kids that's really the future of work that's the point do what you're good at where you're good at it when you want to do it hello no it's a fantastic I mean fantastic fantastic Point um let's do it foreign do you have words to say on the future of work what are your what are your I don't know thoughts around like just the future in general I mean speaking is like a old salty freelancer Nomad free pandemic um I just see so much more people living similar Lifestyles like it's not for everybody we're also creatures of nomadism very very long time before so enjoy it and having the autonomy is great less uh Suburban Suburbia just same old day in day out we're moving towards just New Life Experiences exactly beautiful autonomy um I honestly have no clue how long I'm supposed to talk but you know there's words in around that I feel like um it is perhaps like worthy tagging things like going back to the ill Twitter and reviewing like we have hours worth of how to write off your taxes and pay your taxes on time and all of the fun exciting things I don't know if you have like the uh the goodie bag of things you want to leave with people as far as like the the what I feel like on on The Meta being kind of the goal of what we wanted to cover today is this this Vision that's been cast yeah I mean kind of going back on that too like things to look out for like easy conversation starters like work with me work with our CPA whatever like don't care but like at least go into the conversation knowing what have I done like is there any notable events uh something crazy I was exposed to X whatever and then also knowing like which degree of first Comfort um we balance a lot of times the the impress firm is the Darian gap which is like uncharted waters we are going to our land between like Panama and Colombia where you don't really know what's going on but you got to get across it and that's kind of the idea is well there's a lot of signaling there's a lot of pressed in there's a lot of similar things that have happened um but just like understanding to some degree how you feel in those conversations whether like vaults or rapping or like what I do in nfts um it's really really helpful in that conversation you know I feel like um I feel like a lot of crypto is like the transparency aspect uh so much of it is just like allowing for people to be involved in the conversation and this idea of allowing for individuals to become like their own owner it gives people who previously were not having like tax strategy planning they're they're now involved in the conversation right um ultimately the future of work I think should be one that's just more equal one where more people are gaining access to business lines of credit more people are gaining access to just like yeah opportunities on an equal talent pool right uh it's interesting really like whenever you apply for a thing as a person you're perceived to be that person but when you are doing business to business you are a business you know and it's like that that reduces inequality it reduces these things so the future of work I hope is a More Level Playing Field where all whom participate get to gain ownership in the value that is created so let's make sure we do our taxes and insurance to get that covered buddy yeah right no and I'll quote like one of my good partners the past few months uh Ephraim Olsen they do crypto tax law and like it's something where I firmly believe that taxes shouldn't hamper Innovation so like it's very very complicated by Design like it's meant to be hard how do we file what risks we take and it's like you're kind of guessing where you need to be but it's a necessary evil in order to participate in the economy and launch a business like that the whole reason the LLC exists is because we pay tax there's a structures the governance the police entities the judicial structures to support that all funded by taxes so understand that it is a relationship like sometimes there are yes things we get spent on or BS taxes but it's all kind of like for some sort of benefit of being that part of that Society you can't just take all your cake and eat it to them are you talking about funding public goods I am interesting interesting that's that's probably like another like conversation let's go down let's go down the old public goods conversation but that's interesting honestly with like theopolis uh I mean opolis's goal is to be a global public utility its goal was to be a public good um previously what you've had is owners have owned businesses and they have put the most valuable things inside of these businesses and then they have gate kept these valuable tools inside of these businesses like if you go back to the 1940s and the 1950s when people were being introduced to like retirement accounts inside of their Union for the first time when people were getting access to health care that would allow for them to like go get sick and not go bankrupt um people got richer and more people retired on time you know and access to these Services being equal and access to these services like being fair and permissionless like it ought to be a public good it not ought to be gate kept so like like part of me is over here talking and I'm happy to continue paying taxes in the traditional system to like keep funding my police and I want to be able to call an ambulance right like that's important sometimes um you know the weather and the roads are important but I'm super stoked and I think we have a hard time even beginning to imagine like the world when it's different when public goods go digital um it's the first time that a public good would be allowed to be Global right now public goods are kind of maintained to a region but when you uh you make things digital you can just solve larger problems like access to employer Services you wouldn't think employer Services is the thing that needs service solving but turns out it's pretty unequal so it ought to be solved I mean essentially what you're providing is like a social security network it's a public good in that fashion just a privately owned Social Security so you have disability health and you have like if you go on your own you go through like you know um Medi-Cal or you know what's the other my God like Covered California my wife has had awful horror stories it's a one-to-one relationship and the simple like what why we form Darian even just the Cooperative or just NT structures is the purchasing power I can negotiate when I have one friend on a raid as opposed to just myself I take that up to scale to 10 to 50 to 500 and that conversation with insurance brokers brings it down at the benefit of not you know multi you know State care with UHC that's awful or like your overpriced Blue Shield Blue health alternative um because you're operating such a larger scale and the power purchasing power together yeah collective bargaining agreements um these in the past have been done to negotiate Fair wages to get better rates on Health Care um it's always been I think well intentioned but then there's always been this misalignment and incentives where still one person is the boss right like unions have union bosses there's always like some Central dude who's kind of like gaining most of the value you know and then here's like the first time where we've seen a a collective bargaining group that's owned by the people it's just kind of like I'm so stoked for it you know having had been like in the employee benefit space for so long I came across seeing obelisks and I'm just like oh you guys are benevolent to the people you value the people you grow the people it's just positive some game so this is the future of work right like just uh more win-win-win unless win-win lose yeah and I think like the public benefit purpose is all I mean like launching wikis education understanding it's something that's like it's a fault of our current public education system where like I was doing home at class baking muffins but I couldn't balance a checkbook or like how to file a 1040. and these are things that have to happen as far as like hold American pass but a birth certificate and you know you can bake muffins all the time but like that's something you have to do in life and I feel like there's a lack of Education about it yeah that stuff gets put out there's walkthroughs Etc um but once you understand even just the fundamental level of like here's myself here's my tax self and what I can do with that in different Fashions like going out and researching you're hiring contractors um that's tax deductible if you're in a hobby startup it's not tax deductible until you've actually got an entity um so it's just little things like that where you can find a little bit of edge Improvement home office Etc um which you know every penny saved is a dollar earned just a more Good Financial education for anyone who wants to hear it anybody with skin sir you know what I mean you just come around it is here good quality Financial education I dig it thank you questions thoughts concerns emotional outbursts it's uh sometimes I feel it's very difficult to know like what to talk about when you're the insurance guy and the tax guy because it's like really broad conversations um I feel like ultimately you know the the goal of of us is to solve problems um we go about that by setting up strange Financial infrastructure and helping people make good choices but end of the day it's like you know Financial Wellness for Freelancers it's about making Freelancers more competitive allowing them to access the health services that they needed giving them a sense of belonging in place where they they belong there right like a sense of productivity and morale um yeah I'm talking about the problems we solved sir you know oh yeah and it's kind of the idea of like just making life suck less as a freelancer like really just suck less and like I've went down the process my first startup we had a you know policy with UHC and it's like we have to engage this other you know guideline to do our payroll and there's Gustin there's always like people talking to each other um and it's just like overly burdensome and then state agencies and workers comp boards and just like gets all through on you um and it really kind of burdened a lot of folks um in that respect too so just making that part of this like a little bit easier um you know we file taxes making that a little bit easier uh because I think I'm a messenger like I've got to tell bad news like dude you didn't sell your Luna by 12 31. yeah sorry about that bad boy um but it's not me like this is a bubble to public bulletin by the IRS and I'm just iterating the bad news um so it's something where yeah we're here we're accounts just like lawyers like we'll appreciate every penny you spend on us um but at the same time just like doing that pre-work like engagement for your end doing your book evenly very simplistic things can have a such marginal Improvement on the back end to make tax compliance all this stuff easier like obelis beautiful shirt beautiful yeah you know it comes down to like the different roles you you play as a freelancer not forgetting that you need to play the role of Chief Financial Officer as well in your organization my friend in the back with the hand up sir sir what's good foreign that we can give to all our accounts on all our blockchains all our wallets and just say hey figure out what our cost bases figure out what our our you know what's our our tax you know what can we give to our accountant so they account and configure everything out with a appropriate numbers and not have to take you know 30 hours of our time trying to figure out just one of those accounts thanks to the underhand pitch we can do that um no but like where we built our bread and the butter the past few years is just like throw me everything throw me your random wall dresses let me know what you're on um and we'll chew through it if you want to DIY like coin tracking is a software we use it's fantastic just a drop in your API Keys your exchanges your wallets um we'll happily review it um but that's like I'd say just throwing everything out there and then seeing what sticks and then we take like okay these 15 transactions this year but it takes just having things together um but yeah I'd happy to help you I think that is that I hope you all have a little bit more sense of the future of work Cameron thank you so much for being here today sir Mr Lupitas thank you that was fantastic okay next up we have retirement and crypto assets how to optimize your future uh with jobs agual welcome her to the stage is currently serving as CEO of etz soft Inc Etc soft offers the first employer-based retirement benefit plan that can invest in crypto prior to this jaza was formerly a VC with Lego Ventures and Foothill Ventures thank you for the intro the slide act just I'll just do okay all right hi everyone so thank you for coming and I see a lot of female in the crowd and you know what's funny the first to 15 users on etz was female I love you guys anyway so the um yeah so before I started my name is Jazzy I'm the founder of CEO of etz and I want to take a moment to say thank you to my team and also our clients and investors and some of them are watching a live stream right now and without them etz will not be the first B2B crypto retirement in the market ever and so what Etc is we want to make crypto retirement Investments simple and accessible and affordable and how we do how we do that is well first of all the market opportunity so the retirement Market in the U.S is about 37 Trillium and as of today there's almost nothing in the crypto industry now it's really interesting that when we ask 80 of the U.S Workforce ones have some their crypto sorry the retirement and diversified in crypto once again we're not asking you to pre-retirement a hundred percent in cryptocurrency we we're offering the option to actually diversify in the crypto industry so now why we want um uh have you retirement where you think is a long-term very studied investment in this very volatile asset well world or two by day but I think over time in the long Horizon is a pretty good investment and why is that it's by the way this slide is actually was a Bitcoin but now we're at Easter Denver right ethereum so if you buy Bitcoin about 10 years ago and you hold it all the way till today you'll probably retire by now and I wish you I wish I had done that but 10 years ago there's no etz in the market but for e3m 60 years ago if you bought ether in your retirement a hold of the day and it is 34x Roi how many investment so think about if the S P 500 that your retirement is in today right so what does that even mean you invest in the future and retire well with information today and also how low the return is on the retirement and you actually are not really [ __ ] with that you imagine that you're going to so now the thing is etz the first B2B and crypto retirement where there is a platform on the market where you can open individual IRA and do everything yourself and takes a very long to opening account but we're trying to do here is that when you worked at our large firms or even when you work at uploads and you actually will be offered equivalent time in your compensation so it's part of your composition while you what are you working for your employer and it is we cut 80 institutional degree cold storage with 220 million insurance now the thing is that why Cold Storage is so important is because imagine you have someone's retirement savings on the Chain while getting hacked right I don't think I will be okay with myself and look at someone and then so we keep your asset on the cold storage and which is a fingerprint and and underground with 320 million insurance but we use that to borrow we actually have relationship with OTC desk where we use that as collateral so we have anching located trade so you will be trading 24 7 on the mobile apps that built very simple to use Buy sell transaction I made sure that my grandma know how to use this mobile app because we're not here to teach you something fancy and then you can trade it all day long and with the token that we we offered here using retirement a very left hand side you see the 12 325 64 cents that's your retirement money which is defer tax if you're in the rest area is zero cup talking after five years and also later we'll tell you about government just offered more tax credit and to using platform like us so now the thing is 24 7.

and and then and but your ass is actually in the cold storage with insurance that did not make me less relaxed anyway yeah so now um in terms of tax advantage I've been asked many times well I'm totally fine with coinbase and uh I'm gonna be client at a binance what's the rule for ETC well the question back is that who doesn't like tax deferred right who doesn't like text Advantage the purchasing power is much more higher if you use pre-tax money to invest especially invest in your future with something I truly believe that I think we should pay attention to especially for a generation now so what's the difference here um I would quickly go over quick so we have 401k that you guys very familiar with we have individual IRA and also the market has individual area and also sub array it is this much focused on the last two the difference here is that for individual Ira that you can open account invest in a variety of products cryptocurrency Venture Capital all the other investment vertical sub array is actually the very new thing that's like a 401k can be used up to 62 000 66 000 a year and it's operating like a 401k but it's all for for smaller corporations so now for the employer we have um we actually built a CRM where we give Ginga and loss now analytics and on-demand statement text reporting tax reporting HR integration and very here you can manage your kyc plus link you bank account authorization so this CRM we build is actually for the employers to manage your team's uh retirement if you are using individual account it will just be the mobile app that we showed you earlier now very big news for us also for you guys is that for the secure act 2.0 word Joe Biden had proved is that if you spend up to 5 000 on your retirement service and it's actually a tax credit back to you so it's not deductible it's actually a credit so the government will write you a check for whatever you spend on to figure out how to invest in your future so please use the service like us it's free anyway so our area custodian today's Solera and I have to say that we have another one a gentleman's in the in the in the audience Fortress trust which is another very outstanding partner and we'll be working with and also coinbase as well so the team so myself um I'm former um I'm sorry VC and um and fall in love with crypto I'm very passionate about it and I want to bring the tri-fi and C5 to the mass market and or other founding team member Milo is a former CTO in Silicon Valley Bank and he actually built a trading desk for Morgan Stanley and he's running about six billion dollar fintech fund and the security is the number one thing at Etc like I mentioned again so our chief security advisors 15 years at Silicon Valley Bank as a chief security advisor so since that Etc is heavily designed by him at a Tavi gentleman right there and which is my best best friend and my crew and Tavi is a Microsoft IBM and is the first person to announce the best engineer I know can build Hardware software web 2 web 3 web 2.5 and also now crypto retirement is a highly regulated and a compliance um uh hurdle space so we have a maclambers currently uh chairman of silver gay and he joined etz to lead the regulatory aspect of it and so we have the policy maker from Washington DC to tell us that what you can do what you cannot and to making sure we're in land with the regulators and then to making sure we can serve you guys the best we can so um so now last but not the least sorry yeah so if you scan the QR code on the screen then you can sign up for individual or employer accounts we have a pretty long wait list but we'll work it through and another good news is that uh I actually made out this the etz baby blue dragon is our first nft drop so we gave me the 300 of those baby blue dragon well gave it to the first 300 sign up at ether Denver and now what's unique about nft is that honestly I was not very fan of nft until I realized that I would drop the baby dragon in your wallet with your retirement and every month when you save more this Dragon grows Vizio and eventually one day we will have a market to Train Your Dragon but take care of your baby dragon from etz and that's her very best of Hope and best wish for you thank you very much for your time and uh we have some time for Q a or yeah anyway okay so my question is for opolis employment Commons members I'm wondering how this could be leveraged to and uh to support the employment Commons uh for those of us that are saving for retirement have a 401k account I'm just curious how this can be used in conjunction with our already existing services very good question so uh you can open either an individual account as yourself but under your entity for what you're working for you can you can open this app account for yourself so a lot of actually in the industry a lot of people use steps for especially for self-employed people it's a really common vehicle because you get to invest a lot more oh sorry yeah the steps are actually really really common for Freelancers and all the self-employed people are just even single member LLCs all those situations perhaps are actually the most common tool of retirement accounts there so uh it actually fits really well for this we're also intending to use steps for regular employers to have multiple employees too so but steps are very default yeah so uh I'm gonna add on to that so the r plus is actually one of the partner I wanted to grow with because I really believe in the vision and then that I think they create the services for the contractor industry which is you will not receive a lot like the the corporation benefits so what we want to hear is that we will bring the sub Ira which is self-employment IRA and it is the similar benefits as a corporation but between individual so we would integrate with our Plus at some point and you'll see etz on your office account okay thank you very much thank you for your time excellent thank you try to steal my phone all right here is her contact information okay up next we have the future of the firm and I'd like to First invite up our moderator e2t or Earth to Travis who has had a career exploring the future of work so this is perfect uh uh currently focus on slaying Malik and the coordinated chaos in building the Dow house V3 platform we have Anastasia angelova is a business development and growth strategist with experience in the nft space Deacon Brown who's the Visionary instigator Community backbone full-time Dow contributor early member of metacartel and Summoner of Dow house and raid Guild jacobsc.eath who is the founder of hyper play a web 3 native game launcher and aggregator of game stores uh formerly lead operations and product strategy for metamask and a lifelong gamer who also leads product for game seven Dao and the mantle L2 chain and Sky minute you're supposed to come up on stage take your seats this guy is a full-time Dow contributor highly focused on Dow 2 Dao relations and supporting projects that are building what proper Dows need to function in a truly decentralized manner you can find him around metacartel dxdo house public nouns Diamond Dao logos Dao Hydro Ventures it's just like can you fit all that into your Twitter bio all of all of the Dows is there a doubt you're not a part of no hasn't found one yet all right take it away eat a t GM GM GM I believe in Bank lists but I I'm not an active contributor to the bankless Dao um but I'm glad to be here with you all today and hopefully we'll take it up a notch explore where we're going with all this crazy [ __ ] that we do every day um and I'm so glad to be here with all of you big brains on the stage as we explore the future of the firm so live edits I love it I love it I love it yes yes yes Malik we're slaying Malik together um but I think we should start like with what the [ __ ] is wrong with firms today you know why do we need a better future anybody care to to start with that one um yeah so I guess it's kind of like we think about well you made the picture the the for our telegram group was the firm with uh Tom Cruise I thought that was pretty funny so I think of like a legal firm but really you know in my past there's firms for all kinds of things there's a you know a developer or product firm is what what I have history in um I think it's the employer and employee relationship that a lot of times the employees get taken advantage of and so there there may be a firm where you know 60 70 percent goes to operations and that and the admin and Executives and all the the people actually doing the work are getting the rest which still may be okay but they have no actual ownership so I think that ownership tie-in is something that we may start to see more in the future of the firm Anastasia you had a pretty hot take on kind of um you know historical invention that had a pretty big impact uh do you care to share something about that yeah and it's basically partially building on the on the previous point so in my opinion one of the like it's a plus side uh on one hand and and has its negatives on the other uh historically they mentioned of like uh limited liability um and I don't mean like the one just L seen in the 20th century but uh the the roots of limited liability company in like historically so what it sets is actually what you just said um the value is extracted from um firstly the let's say what the problem is from from all the stakeholders and and um goes to the to the shareholders which usually are the financiers in one or another form right uh the plus side of it is with with this um with inventing uh limited liability uh companies like they were called very differently in the past um people would like the the liability would go from uh from the personal from the individual to the company so basically the um companies who take people take way more risks and actually innovate uh so I can give an example so it's so it's clear I think it's um very clear example was in the US building the railroads so before that if if um if I build a railroad and and something happens trying to train crashes I would be personally liable for all the debts right uh and with the limited liability corporations um I wouldn't be like I would be I would be able to innovate and actually be safe enough to be that that Railroad and not and not go to jail you know or be or even worse uh if if there is an accident traditionally firms have have taken resources their inputs being capital and humans and they have a process and and their their goal is to kind of maximize profits I do do we see the profit maximization as as being important moving forward in the future of the firm this guy you want to jump in on that yeah so uh in terms of uh sustainability and things sticking around obviously you need um you can't have systems or companies or Dows or uh yeah whatever you create you can't just have it uh continually burn and lose money forever right however the rather than like talk negative about the way old firms work I like to stress like the positives of of the way things can work and the what we're trying to figure out and that's really like things like early ownership um across you know you know it's not just the founders of the the single person supplying the capital that gets to participate in the upside the early Believers the um the early workers who are contributing the value they all get represent they all get a representative representation of ownership in that in that entity um from the early days and that allows you to you know spread spread that ownership across a much wider um like variety and and the power of token economics so you have the users you have the creators you have the builders and you have the founders and they all hold this thing and this is what tokens allow you to do which was very hard in like traditional corporations where you can give out these tokens early on um and that that idea we're still figuring out exactly how it can all work together but that system that's created which then starts generating value can flow back to the early people Everyone that holds a stake um and then the continue the building of and the growth of that of that organism or that organization May build a bit upon that I totally agree with sky here uh the like the solution and uh what we see in the future what we can take from from um like the Dao worlds and implementing like traditional companies at the moment is yeah ownership I would like just just uh old school traditional Equity uh through economic tokens some some I can give a couple of examples of uh projects that are already testing um trying it out like fair means enco for example uh so Distributing those economic tokens that would that would give you ownership basically in in this endeavor and I would go even further not only like currently now the shareholders would be would be again the financiers the the founders and sometimes very very early like employees I would go even further so so not only the employees also the users then then vendors Partners like hearing skin in the game changes everything so so yeah this like literally redefining what Equity is yeah Jacob jump in yeah so the the traditional um LLC incorporation I think it's structured to essentially force that and it's it's really hard to share ownership and um in Collective models and in community powered models I think that as an ecosystem like the early Dows and like the early token airdrop type things like we've started to make progress towards Community ownership and news forms of incident structures but we're also seeing um you know where uh you know some of the challenges for us are that we're we're seeing the The Lion's Share of airdrops going to uh to airdrop Farms that are run by a small number of VCS and um it's it's a super difficult problem to align the incentives of um of those who work and those who contribute and those who create value with the incentives of um you know of of the broader community and um the the um you know Dows and and the projects that are that are building them um I think that um you know we're I think we'll we'll increasingly see like a move towards recognition of reputation and recognition of uh Builder contributions as um you know maybe the most important uh form of of signaling for ownership and so I mean I can share a little bit more maybe um you know later in the presentation about some of what we're doing on this but I I think that markets are really important to to allocating and distributing um you know Distributing um uh capital in labor efficiently but the current incentives and structure of them are for monopolization and extraction and conspiracy against workers and against uh against users and so we're seeing the internet and its early structure moving into the structure of businesses I mean it's essentially what Dows are like Dows are are the internet's native business model for how to structure human organization and I think that they open the possibility of new forms of human organization and new forms of human coordination but we're still in this early period where the the models that we're creating are uh in some ways have many of the the same flaws as what came before them and we have to fight really hard to make this something that that we are proud of and you know ethereum is is the opportunity to do incentive uh incentive design and to structure markets around fulfilling human needs and human um human uh flourishing rather than just the the the private accumulation of a monopoly have you seen any models like in the gaming industry with you know different things that we might want to emulate or might want to avoid well yeah so like the the old school airdrop models like uniswap's airdrop was was brilliant like it it you know you had kids who had just done a swap wake up with with four thousand dollars in their wallet and like if you look at the top countries in metamaster so I used to be leader of operations at metamask like you know like the second biggest country at the time was Nigeria and so these were these were kids that were were waking up with four thousand dollars in their their wallets it was a life-changing event and then you know unfortunately like since that time like airdrops have become something that's you know uh that has rather perverse incentives and where you know it's it's just like this obnoxious wind token entitlement and things like that and so in in gaming and for us in hyper play we really want to reward Builder contributions and developer contributions and uh so so for some background kind of to step back on hyper Play We Are a autonomous entity inside of the game seven Dao which was an autonomous entity which was created by bit Dao so we have this this model of a fractal dial that creates other dows and one of the other products that's inside of game seven that we're building with is called summon um it's I guess I'm actually giving you Alpha leak it's being announced like in two days uh forget what you heard here um uh but uh it's a reputation protocol that allows us to reward uh contributions and to do multipliers on votes based on you know you contributed a lot um to to this developer Community you also played these games and people see your reputation in that way we're just creating like a gamification of of uh of Labor and also a gamification of um of ownership and in governance and by multiplying you know if someone makes a lot of contributions and those who contribute the most to a project should have a greater say in the the governance of a project than a Speculator who maybe just has a bunch of capital and their Fly by Night and they want to squeeze you know short-term capital out of a project and so we're in hyper play We're consuming this summon protocol which is another entity created by the game seven Dao and uh in in using that for our future governance as well this guy just to add to that so interestingly Deacon myself uh yeah some of other people in this room some of us have been in Dows that have been not using not liquid token governance for like three or three and a half years um most of the molec Dao Frameworks are share based which you earn through contribution to the Dao time and commitment I also work with DX Dow which is one of the earliest he uses reputation based governance power which is non-transferable you cannot buy and sell this the only way you can earn it is contribution of value to the Dow via proposal on Chain by the Dow um this became a lot more popular when vitalik you know and team published the paper on Soul bound tokens which led to the idea of like you don't need a liquid token and and then oh we should use that for governance because liquid token governance isn't is dominated by Rich whales and so the cool thing is that's happening a lot more now which is why you're making this this new protocol and a lot of other people are doing this and optimism has you know bicameral type governance where one is liquid token but one is you know custom nft Soul bound nft and so all of this experimentation is happening but it's really has been starting since that paper but it's been expanding since that paper was published but we can also look back to the communities that have been doing this for over three years and and and that side they they have to figure out how to get the capital holders involved as well so I think the end answer is something which some Community called like governance 2.0 where it's actually a combination of the two where you have the equity earned or the shares or the reputation that you earn in a community and then there's also this financial Capital which is important and it's a combination of the two in some smart mechanisms and you can have so much experimentation in this that that governance power is in the hands of that group of people which would most benefit your community and it's a combination of those two and that's probably the future um and we will see a lot more experiments in that and I think that will help solve the problems that exist on both sides yeah and our ability to experiment our ability to iterate and to take the learnings to to change and to grow and to improve we're not stuck in these giant corporate structures that you know take years and and millions to actually change the direction of I think that that's one of the most promising things about the space that we're exploring um Deacon is kind of the YOLO King and he likes to to move fast and to break [ __ ] what are some of the experiments and and changes that that you're most excited about um yeah I think like with raid Guild the the name is actually um describes it pretty well because raid Guild itself as a Dao is more of this kind of fuzzy meta concept you know it's a um it has a treasury it manages it but it's never raised capital in any way but it every member in side forms raids and sometimes that raid is their own company and they're going to go work for a client and then raid Gill acts more as kind of this business Network or it's you know it's more of an there's a lot of power uh for Freelancers to have a good Network and and so that's one experiment I think that was we see that all over the place now with kind of this larger fuzzy kind of doubt like what you're saying and then uh these kind of sub-dos that are underneath it or companies or LLCs or whatever they are um recently in public house which is kind of the Dow house governing uh Dao um we're doing something with retroactive rewards and kind of a liquid token so kind of the two token thing you're talking about where um there's kind of open staking periods which would be open for anyone to who has the token but then there's also retroactives which are signaled by the current members to reward the builders the developers the any contributions in the space that are even like on the edges of the space but have added value so you have like you can get a little more of that uh reputational based power out to people I think through retroactive is a really cool way one of the things that we haven't touched on is sovereignty and that's an important Concept in the space does anybody have a why that's important and and then maybe a how you know we can encourage that moving forward do you mean sovereignty of like individuals or organizations wow that's actually a very important question so like for example so the original idea behind bit Dao was a fractal dial so it was a Dao that would join together with other projects in the ecosystem to co-create autonomous entities and we see autonomous entities not sub-dos because they're not they're not subordinate to the original Dao they're Dows with distinct cultures um autonomy uh goals around the things that they're doing and bit Dao would co-invest with other projects and would create these new Dows and so for example game seven was a dow that was co-created by Forte and bet Dao and then game seven went on to form you know as is now launching two new products here at East Denver hyper play and summon and you know those products will go on and we're we're going to contribute a lot of new Open Source Products that come out of hyper play and things like that and so we're creating this this fractal of many many different Dows and we use tokens to align incentives around those there are some of the hardest problems are figuring out how in this fractal ecosystem do we accrue value back to the original Dao because it like the treasury of bit down has grown quite substantially the the price of its token isn't always directly correlated with that treasury growth and so there's a lot of interesting work that's being done now to figure out how we tie the incentives of the Dows to each other in a line incentives you know with each other while also still having autonomy of action and distinct cultures and distinct goals and and things like that but it it's created a really diverse ecosystem of products and we're also building a layer two which is called mantle which is a layer two that's meant to serve all of these different um these different products that are being incubated uh and and to to basically to help bootstrap a um a community governed Layer Two On ethereum this guy I know um decentralization is an important concept to you how do how does that apply and guide kind of the future of the firm yeah so rather than what we've seen the last you know 15 years we have with in the especially in the internet age when you put capitalism together and you put the internet and free markets like it just made sense that there were these giant uh centralized organizations a few of them that can that build up and control everything and then we see most of the negative things that come from that like centralized databases that all get hacked like they can they can shut your account down censorship um yeah there's tons of negative problems it's easier to think about those because we're all aware of those the opposite of that is the decentralized version of that and it was impossible to have truly decentralized versions of these of these organizations without blockchain because you have to do this on a blockchain you can't do you can do some of the things to decentralize these systems but there if you don't have blockchains um and DOW tooling you basically can't own the protocols the front ends the things that these organizations are doing and so now that we have blockchains and we have Dow tooling we are starting to do the decentralized version of these and that allows you to eliminate all of the negative things that come with the centralized versions whether or not they can be as competitive right now they're probably not it's harder it's more expensive there's a there's a decentralized financial system you can use today it is harder to use and it is more expensive than the centralized version but if depending on who you are in where you are in the world you like a lot of us use it and we're willing to pay that cost and and and figure out how to use it and eventually more people as it becomes easier will also do that the fact that it exists today and you could you and you can go bankless which bank list now is leading right is pretty amazing it's just hard and more expensive right now but you the fact that it exists is amazing um so Anastasia um you know you've come back from the future and then you've seen where we're going you know what what does that look like to you what what are what are your hopes for our future oh my hopes are uh like firstly all those amazing projects here like all that doubtling that that Sky just mentioned that we saw in the previous panels like I'm I'm more on the user side uh um or Builder but but also on the user side uh contributing to a bunch of doubts at the moment and I see the same problem everywhere um you have so many tools like yes they need they're all building they're all progressing innovating and so on the one of the most important things is uh for them to be able to work with each other so we can plug in one into another you don't need to have everything in one like I sit there all the time like we're building this and we have that and that and that's like we'll have reputation here on top of that and and then like Discord like and so on be like do what like what you're good at and make it interoperable with other tools and and then users will just come the the the they'll use what they need they'll take from everywhere what they need and just plug and play this is what I see for the future honestly so if we do that so many things um um like will be I don't say I don't say that Dao tools like it's nothing is enough like we're gonna innovate uh further tests we're literally in the testing phase everyone's testing I'm testing a bunch of tools myself at the moment so yeah guys if you if you have to so honestly I'm I'm seriously I'm not technical but technical enough maybe to um like just test for different uh different purposes so if we have that we'll have reputation uh um like we have the concepts already we have it solved uh we will have liquid and liquid tokens we have for example for reputation uh one thing they're they're like not only a reputation being illiquid in my opinion it should be also it should be also Dynamic so we already have the technology we have the dynamic nfts that that can solve that so for example if I've been a super duper contributor of of a Dao you know the first few months and then then I just disappear it's like something changed I shouldn't I shouldn't lay like lie on the same you know um Equity let's say same ownership uh and and some rights in this dial it should change so someone else that have taken over why not like it should like it should be um like we already have it so so yeah before Josh shuts us down one really important thing in the future of the firm and this you know with opolis with Dows with web3 is when you used to work for a company like Exxon you could only work for Exxon right you maybe had some Hobbies on the side but we live in a world now where you can actually work for 25 different organizations even ones that compete against each other you can contribute you can move around and I actually recommend that people are not in one Dow some people are just in one dial and you shouldn't just be in one down and concentrate I like the 80 20 rule like even if you're one dollar and that's all you care about spend 20 20 of your time in other communities in other Dows you will learn more you'll bring ideas it will help your main organization more and you can float between all of them and you can if you don't like one you can go to another one and that is impossible in the old Exxon uh past firm world and now in the future firm uh you can you can you have full freedom and interoperability and open be like Skye thank you for the filibuster Sky that's a great way to close it out thank you guys Round of Applause for this panel thank you thank you [Applause] I let them drag on because we had a special I uh jump out and bump back in we had a uh the original panelist who had just got here off of a plane and like made it literally just in time he just got out of his Uber uh so that was uh Spencer Graham whose bio I don't have in front of me uh CEO founder of hats protocol early okay one of a founder of hats protocol really contributor to Dow house and raid Guild uh moderating the we made the jump you can too if he's here above average Joe are you here okay I may have to sub in a moderator this guy don't go anywhere uh David hamoteo AKA mantis clone who's a full stack web3 developer and is full-time at request Network also contributes to Bank of style Talent Dow ocean down raid Guild developer Dow while you're all over the place you must know Skye all over the place uh and William who is the head of decentralization for the fox Foundation and I'm a not-for-profit organization dedicated to sporting shapeshift bow and achieving full decentralization so this is like the quintessential we made the jump you can too I'm hoping that's the pitch he makes you guys want to come on up the the early panels that everybody came up when I called the names in the last two panels you guys just hung out down here all right grab your seats above average Joe are you here thank you that's okay you want a sub yeah making the jump all right yo yo there you go flip to the other side these are mostly my friends too so I can ask good questions hey toad hey Skye so hey so I'm assuming you so you're already in they're all introduced you all used to work for corporations at some point you discovered web3 and now you all work I think all of you at least two of you and maybe all three of you work full time in the decentralized Dow world and I would like to hear briefly from each of you why you made that jump starting with Spencer starting with me um I have a very general answer that I think everybody has probably heard 700 times um which I can give but maybe I'll give the more specific answer which is that at the at the time the thing that actually both really got me into web3 and then really got me into web3 was that I was working as a product manager at a big giant corporate health care company called Optum probably the most bureaucratic thing I've ever experienced beside like government itself and I but I was working in this uh particular area on a particular product that led me to realizing the the power of smart contracts we were working on uh payer and provider contracts and I was realizing oh smart contracts could make all of these problems go away tomorrow if we could just figure out how to do it in this particular context it wasn't possible for a lot of reasons but I learned a lot about what smart contracts were from that doing a lot of research and then it was realizing that I wasn't going to be able to help make that happen from inside of this big giant Corporation that ultimately helped me realize that I just needed to leave and go work in web3 and ultimately that that led to me quitting and and joining a few Dows and um that's my specific reason last minute as always Denver stuff welcome Joe okay so I've had exactly no time to prep so dive in where you left off and I'll do my best sweet all right I'll talk about how I got into web three and made the jump um probably I'll try and be brief too this started back in my first corporate job was dropping out of CU Boulder as a student to start up my first startup which was a legal Tech startup did that for about five years and ultimately ended up selling that at the end of 2017.

it wasn't a big win we like paid back the investors and it was a small win for the team that same month I started bit fract which um throughout 2017 I've been getting very crypto curious and um so the same month that we sold just legal I started a tool called bit fract with some friends because we saw a problem in the space and it was the first tool we could trade Bitcoin for multiple digital assets at once and it was built on top of shapeshift so six months later Shapers required bitfrect I moved back to Colorado and I worked at shapeshift as a principal product manager for about three years before we made the jump ourselves as a corporation and decided to decentralize um when I heard from Eric and John the CEO and CEO that we were going full Dao it was like The Best Day Ever which I say that every day but truly it was the best day ever I jumped out of my chair and I was like whoa I was so stoked and uh part of the reason that I was so excited about this was that I had been at Denver 2020 did a hackathon project called cause which was the DOW to save the world um and met Griff green that day and cause ended up becoming basically the new version of giveth so it was right during the pandemic I got I had a lot of time to spend basically building the new version of giveth as a decentralized community and it blew my mind because David had such a powerful meme of rewarding those who gave it was a vision that I had been dreaming about for years so I met the giveth team and I'm like this is perfect we have the same vision and then other people all around the world heard the giveth Vision we're like oh I also want to help save the world like this and you guys are a dad that's just building this and I can just jump in Discord and get involved and add value and uh it worked like we just saw this community grow if anyone's ever used giveth you know it's a really awesome app with great ux it's got over 2000 projects around the world where you can donate to them with crypto with no added fees and that was built by a decentralized organization so meanwhile I'm working at shapeshift we see defy summer we see all these awesome D5 protocols that are structured as Dows I had seen firsthand the ability of dows to coordinate and to ship beautiful amazing products and so um I actually want to give a shout out to um to James over here because shapeshift had a chat with him and Cooper around how do we make Fox like more of a governance token what's the best thing we can do with Fox and that was a very inspirational conversation where they were like the best thing you guys can do is to decentralize shape shift and at the time we weren't even sure that that was possible as a corporation to do that um I remember Eric and stuff was worried that there might actually be like some legal risk of doing that sure enough the lawyers actually came back to us and they were like no actually like um this is probably one of the best things you can do is like decentralize that'll actually put shapeshift in a safer position and so um after that it was like Full Speed Ahead and yeah now we're a little over 18 months into this decentralization thing and I can say even though there's a lot of like skepticism around Dallas that we're objectively spending less a lot less we are earning more revenue and we're shipping faster than we ever did as a centralized organization so no regrets that's incredible um I'll jump in next uh my journey into web 3 kind of started on on a little bit of a darker note I uh near the end of the pandemic I was working at a small startup that was working on uh speech recognition technology and mostly because the the the business wasn't the best run I ended up getting laid off as from that job so I was uh I was floating you know immediately without Health Care immediately without um any sort of uh income and I in that moment just decided that I wanted to look into this web 3 stuff I I I saw the number of job postings all over LinkedIn for for crypto related stuff and I was like there might be something here so like I'm gonna go check it out uh that was at the start of 2021 is when I started um and I I I I I signed up to join a uh the incubator called kernel uh spawn out of Bitcoin and I was uh I managed to get into block 2 which was you know one of the one of the earlier blocks and from that I was able to explore all of the different uh aspects of web3 that that interested me the most um I was able to uh Divine down what what motivated me and and really some of the things that really motivated me the most was the ability to shift your focus between different things and participate in multiple Dows I think that um being locked into a specific role in a specific company for years on end was was something that was extremely painful to me over the course of my career and uh this this new opportunity to just like Branch out and explore was uh was really appealing to me um I was also super interested in just uh the parts of web3 that promise um better privacy and better better data sovereignty and ownership over over our digital lives I think that that is something that really motivated me so um uh I I kind of just jumped in head first and never looked back I started with my my kernel adventure and then I just started applying to a bunch of different uh jobs working in web3 and luckily I was able to get one working with the ocean protocol Foundation um I worked for them for about a year or just over a year then I spent about five months just freelancing amongst all the different Dows that that I could find and now more recently I'm working at the request Network Foundation Building um uh the ability to store immutable payment requests in ipfs and then hashing them onto gnosis chain so that we can build all sorts of cool accounting and compliance Primitives for web3 awesome so I apologize if this is something you guys have already talked a little bit about but that was the first question no awesome um when you made the transition full-time was there any moments that you guys had doubts about whether or not you'd make it and if you did how did you overcome for me no um I think it's because I waited too long I waited until I had both a kind of way to you know to do freelance work through raid Guild if I ever needed to pick up more I could I also waited until uh dollhouse was really starting to ramp up its activities and there was like a fair amount of near full-time work to do and I also waited until I was able to get health insurance as a basically a freelancer through a little thing that you guys might have heard about called opolis I don't regret anything about the way I did it but if I were to change one thing it would be to make the change make the switch sooner and I might have had a little bit more uncertainty about what I was getting into whether it was going to work out et cetera et cetera but the experience of switching and being in this space has been so so rewarding that I wish that I had done it even a couple days earlier would have been nice for sure what about you my friend yeah I uh similar to you I had like zero reservations um so by the time that shapeshift made the decision to decentralize I had already been contributing to giveth for over a year um so I had seen firsthand that it can work and um yeah I mean there was a lot of employees that would shape-shift that were very concerned so I remember the day that Eric basically announced to the company like we're going full Dao I gave a presentation to try and paint the picture of like here's what the Dow could look like because a lot of the employees and you can imagine there were like 45 full-time employees very varying um understandings of dows and there were some employees who had like just only heard of the concept and still kind of thought it was like a fantasy and not not realistic I tried to First paint the picture of like here's what the doubt could look like to try and put some people at ease right after that that really crazy announcement that was basically like hey the whole company is getting laid off like over the next six months right um and then I made it a goal for myself to try and convince as many shapeshift employees as possible to just give it a try we got we all got Severance and I'm like look like I know it sounds crazy but like please just like give it a try you like the the day that your job ends at shape shift you can come back to work Monday and like contribute to the Dow in like a very similar capacity or figure out a new way that you want to contribute you know it's all it's all up in the air now it's all possible and uh fortunately we did have a lot of employees who decided to make the switch not everybody but yeah definitely want to give a shout out to uplift because that was a big part of what um basically made these employees who did have reservations feel a lot more comfortable about still being able to basically get paid in Fiat and get a mortgage and get health insurance and all that good stuff um yeah uh I'll I'll say that my my journey uh I've had a lot a lot of doubt and a lot of adversity along the way that I overcame um mostly in the way of just like uh my my family was was very skeptical about the whole thing I I um I I am the sole owner for for my family of my my wife and my son and um this this idea of just like completely pivoting my career into a new technology as well as at the same time starting up my own business you know with opolis uh and at the very same time starting remote work for a foundation that was located halfway across the world um was a lot for them and and uh it took a lot of like Steely resolve to just kind of like push through and prove to both them and myself that it was possible to um to to make this sort of work Arrangement sustainable and and uh have no have fun doing it um one of the things that that was really that that really um motivated me to make the jump actually was uh when when I got laid off from my company in in 2021 um I don't know if it was like a misunderstanding of how Cobra worked or or whatever if you're familiar with Cobras like the the insurance that you get in between employers um but uh they they wanted me to come into the office and drop off a check every month for for my health insurance which was ridiculous because they laid me off I was kind of I was kind of pissed at them you know so I had to continue to see them every month after that for like three months straight it it just sucked um so that that whole experience really showed me the the the um the lie that that is that that this the having a single employer lends stability to your life I I think that in today's world there's near zero loyalty between company and employee and that uh if it's if it's what's best for the company that they'll lay you off in an instant oh the other thing that I forgot to mention was that I got laid off like two weeks before Christmas that was like it was the worst I got laid off my on my birthday once oh no yeah nobody can lay you off right yeah yeah there you go oh sure but I mean with Dallas you can diversify your workloads so that even if you do get laid off by by one group it really doesn't affect you that much because you can you can lean into the other communities that you're already part of actually if you're dead we don't call it firing or laying off we just you stop getting paid but you can still contribute if you want to for sure okay so I look at most of us here in the crypto industry that have taken that leap to full time as Heroes of this web 3 world and every Hero has a journey and usually right near the beginning there is a point of no return where you know you're never going to go back what was that moment for you guys I don't know if there was ever a single point for me but there is a p there was a period between um Heath Denver 2020 when I did my first hack and like maybe July where I during that that time I joined raid Guild I started doing a bunch of stuff started experiencing what it was like to be in in a dow that was counter-intuitively so supportive and friendly and close um somewhere in there I I figured out that I wasn't going to do anything else ever again I'd say for me I remember Devcon 2018 was like a definitely kind of a life-changing moment and gave me I was right it was you know the bear market so like people are starting to have some doubts and stuff um shapeship is a business was starting to struggle because we'd implemented kyc but I went to Devcon 2018 and I started like all these amazing Builders um that's where I met gaveth for the first time and I'm like these people are going to [ __ ] change the world like they've raised a bunch of money there's a bunch of nerds building cool [ __ ] like I have no doubt that they're gonna change the world I think every ethereum conference I went to afterwards like it's every time it just gives me more conviction because I get more and more bullish especially during these bear Market conferences where it's all Builders um but yeah so I remember when I accepted the role at the fox Foundation um at that point I was like this is the last I want to just work for Daz going forward because I love it I never want to be a CEO again it's very lonely being a CEO there's a lot of pressure you feel like you can never really take a vacation because there's just an endless list of [ __ ] to do and you got investors you got a team counting on you so um yeah I think going full down going forward and uh when it took the role the foundation I'm like all right this is the last time for a corporation again I think I think for me the the moment where I realized that I wanted to spend the next however long on on working on a web three was that uh uh I was I was in a a talk at the kernel incubator um where they were discussing the the gravity of of this this concept of being able to create programmable mechanisms that um Grant incentives for for actions that benefit the network and uh it it compared it to a a development on the scale of like human language itself is like this is a whole new way to tie value to our words and to create games where you can influence the behavior of society as a whole for the betterment of society I I think is is the way we should be building it but um and and that just kind of blew my mind it just blew my mind that that was something that was not only possible but like already being worked on by so many different people because I joined the space in 2021 I mean the the these guys next to me are OG's compared um and it's uh it's it's been it's been a whirlwind ever since I I I love learning about uh tokenomic design I love learning about um uh privacy tech and and trying to change the way that the world Works uh for the better I I I I I couldn't see myself doing anything else for now awesome um so there's probably a few people here that haven't made the jump yet and they might be on the fence about it what would you give them as advice to front run the issues that you guys experienced and how was that impactful for you like if you could front run your own scaling problems from your journey what would you give them yeah so uh just to Sky's point in the last panel like you can work for multiple different Dows right and so that also means if you are still have a full-time gig and you're not in web 3 yet like you don't have to quit your job and then go find a new role in a doubt right like you can just jump into shape shift Discord or any of these projects requests you know that's like you can start contributing you can get involved and it can add value and even get paid before you leave your role and if ideally like you can set it up so that's a really seamless transition um and that you're not just jumping out into the blue but you're jumping into a a role that's already ready to go um obviously easier during a bull market than a bear Market to do it but I say there's no excuse like if you're interested in doing it bear Market's a great time to get involved with a lot of these projects and then like worst case by the time the bull market comes you've already got all this experience you're ready to jump into a role um because yeah when the bull market comes there's going to be a ton of demand for people who like not just understand crypto but understand like what it's like to work in a dow and there's not going to be enough people who know how to do it so it's going to be a good good position to be in I don't know if this is advice that I would have needed to hear or anything but I think it's still relevant um don't underestimate your skills and the value that your skills can provide or can create for existing organizations existing Dallas existing communities um there's like a lot of very specific skills that exist in this space but all the skills that you have from whatever you're doing are going to be relevant to somebody somewhere and probably a lot of people I think the the most concentrated form of of that is within service Dao's um where service Towers there are serviced owls for like web 2 like things that are dows um raid Guild is well they do raid Gill does web 3 development but it's like kind of like a web 2 Dev shop but it's organized as a dow so you can do things that you could that you're doing today in your in your in your job in the context of a Dao Yap Dao is the same thing but for PR and there's there's many others as well so don't think that you need very very crypto specific skills to be able to work in in Dows and you know find your place here I'd just like to real quickly Echo what Willie said I I think that um one of the things that I I would advise people to do is is like figure out a transition like you don't have to quit your job right away and and I I I'm probably one of the outliers of like jumping head first in and it caused a lot of stress honestly so I I think I agree with your point that um it's good to like keep your day job find your your role in a dow start to ramp up and and try to make the transition a little bit more smoothly um and uh oh shoot I forgot my other point never mind that's all good I guess I'll wrap it up by saying if you're not bullish on Dows yet you should be thank you guys thank you thanks everyone uh and don't forget to grab a shirt on the way out if you if you didn't get a colon on the way in and lunch okay instead of a AMA because we we did a little bit of a slow start in the morning I'm just gonna let John the founder uh dive into a little bit of vision casting and megalopolis and one last thing uh this the shirt I've got on unemployable is just a quick plug for our podcast unemployable pod um I'm unemployable and if you're here you probably are unemployable too so you can grab an unemployable shirt thanks dude those shirts are great uh yeah so if you don't know about our shirts hey James what's up dude um we we use like the softest thing on the planet and you like want to sleep in them wear them all the time we kind of do it intentionally so pick them up on the way out all right so we're going to talk about megalopolis we're actually not gonna get into it I'm just teasing right now because we're actually doing the full roll out of this so if you hadn't noticed payroll benefits and compliance and tax payments is really boring [ __ ] sucks okay so in order to make it a little fun we're actually creating we've created a storybook Canon so we've actually created a whole world called megalopolis which is the Refuge for the self-sovereign worker that happens to live in the Ethereal Galaxy so you're going to learn more about that and then the second piece of this is the order of the Opus gray so if if you follow any Dan Brown stuff there's Opus day right work of God well this is Opus guay which is Small work right so Opus is Latin for work and guay is the smallest unit of account in ethereum so these are the grand Protectors of the megalopolis ethereal community so this guy right here on my hoodie his name's Griff there happens to be a real-life Griff that happens to be a fighter for the self-sovereign worker but um that's another story but in any case um we've got a whole storyboard of this stuff that we're going to announce not announce but show you at Opening Ceremonies on Thursday evening so if you want to know more about it if you want to know how to join the Opus Quay and become essentially the Jedi for the megalopolis community huh talk to David over here that's uh Kitty slasher for those of you that don't know what yeah except your name's weird Slasher joking okay so in about two seconds I'm gonna hit uh and now I'm being called stop leave me alone I'm busy they don't care I'm tweeting as we speak and if you follow me like the post and retweet I'm going to randomly pick somebody to upgrade them to sporkwell status free Denver so give me just a second and I'll finish that but keep an eye up so that's from my account pal at paler John okay so just give me one second and I'll do that tonight uh the bufficorn Biddle Brigade is hosting a an event called buffalo laughs we've got a whole evening of tomfoolery and Ridiculousness we might even have some roasting going on who knows what's going to happen that's going to go from about eight to ten and then afterwards we've got big bed machines spinning DJ beats all night until about one o'clock um right now the way that it's ticketed is BBB holders actually get free entrance and then it's 5280 to come if you want to pay but because you're here you also get free entrance so if you go to the page where's the page code oh at the door so okay so bring this code to the door original buffer corn 5280 and you can get free entrance to Buffalo tonight so that means you also don't have to own the buffcorn Biddle Brigade nft if you don't want to what's that I know I haven't finished it yet I'm multitasking thanks um I will finish it in just one second so again thank you to all the partners and sponsors of the the uh mini Summit Symposium on the future of work um the amount of knowledge and wisdom and experience that was dropped today in like a half a day is pretty remarkable I mean the amount of progress that's been made in the future of work over the last three or four years and web3 has been staggering quite frankly I can't wait to see what happens in the next three or four years who knows we'll have a hundred thousand people at Ethan for next year why not and that's about it so we've got to clear out the room here shortly for the next mini Summit coming in one hour so please grab food and get it out of here even if you've got friends that are hungry take it uh we don't give a [ __ ] if you do so just take it and grab your t-shirts on the way out we do actually have other swags showing up at the main event so stop by the office Booth stop by our partners booze for other cool stuff and we'll see you around thanks guys thank you