ColoraDAO: The Collab.Land Co-op Comes to Life with James Young

foreign are we good to go all right let's get this started here thank you everyone for joining and for everyone online my name is James Young I am the CEO of Abridged we just had a token launch for collab land last Thursday and we are forming uh a dow under the Colorado digital Co-op so it's a us-based entity that is going to be governed by a Dao using the Colorado Co-op structure and I'm going to talk about it today uh this is a story that actually started last East Denver so last East Denver I talked about becoming a Dao and uh when I said this last year I really said this for myself because I wanted to make sure that I kept my feet to the fire and I would not come back to eat Denver this year unless I did this launch so it was me last year I'm wearing the same shirt uh keeping myself honest here so really when I said that we're going to launch a Dao I didn't really understand or know exactly what it was going to be and this last year was really really figuring out what collab land is and like doing some soul searching and looking inward I really come to this like story thread of what collab land is is this story of the in between and this is what I would like to present today so it all starts with me I'm a child of immigrants I live a very Multicultural life uh on the on the right side it's me and my wife Anjali we had a Korean wedding here on the on the left side we had an Indian wedding uh up there is uh my father-in-law my brother-in-law and uh these two are our adopted children here so being in between web 2 and web 3 being a a us-based entity a digital Co-op here in Colorado uh and then being a Dao actually is very comfortable for me and this is what I've learned um and I'll explain some more so with the collab land bot just to give a little bit of kind of context here uh the way I think about it is that we're at the in between of web 2 and web 3. so in a lot of ways I think of it as like we're helping the immigrants of web 2 get into web three uh just to give you some stats we have and manage over 45 000 web 3 native communities we have 8.2 million wallet connections and from a web 2 perspective that might not seem like a lot in terms of numbers but in web 3 we're probably the largest or one of the largest daps in the world um and so we want to balance what we're doing in web 2 with the ethos of web3 so privacy and consent is really important to us we don't share user data at all and when people sign up for collab land they don't expect that uh their wallet addresses and their like usernames on the web 2 platforms like on Telegram and Discord will be shared so we do not share any of that information we are also the in between when it comes to these different ecosystems that are shaping up so we service majority of our communities our nft communities but we do have a significant amount of Dao and D5 communities so we're also kind of this in between not only in web 2 and web 3 but also in the different ecosystems here and really when we talk about a Dao it means a lot of different things to different people and so what I wanted to do is kind of shift The Narrative a little bit and really focus on the co-op because the co-op is the in-between and what we see as a future of communities and corporations so it's this balance between the two I'll give you a few examples here so in web 3 privacy is in high regard so you can become an Anon and you can join the Dao or you could kyc so with being able to kyc there are other benefits that will explain as the co-op formation continues on and there are reasons why we chose the Colorado Co-op legal framework we're working through those issues in real time and we'll disclose that in the future you can we're Global and so we want to also make sure that from a regulation perspective that Americans can actually join the Dow where U.S based entity so that's important for us you can hold tokens um and you don't even have to be part of the doubt so we try to keep this balance in in the in between as we transition to web 2 and web 3 and finally we use the origami Dao framework because it is a web 3 based framework with web 2 sensibilities but it's more than just talking about the Colorado Co-op itself and the legal structure I think what I wanted to really impress upon in this talk today was no matter what you're doing and whatever you get out of this whole eat hackathon the East Denver hackathon or just exploring Dallas in general um really thinking about and for me self-reflecting is that it's always purpose over process and it's really easy to get caught up in the process of setting up a legal entity or what voting structure you're going take use and you know now that we have a few years under our belt when it comes to Dows we see a lot of thought leadership when it comes to how to set up a Dao how to Dao what what to do and what not to do um but I think really it's being practical and being in the weeds here and exploring this from a practical example because I think the danger of what we're doing and what we're seeing here in web 3 is like you get these thought leaders and it's equivalent to like I don't know a dow MBA so a lot of inner talk and talking amongst ourselves rather than real application so you know whether you do a Colorado Co-op or whatever legal structure always you know have to go back to the roots of like the purpose of it and for me and what I see in terms of this balance between um commuting and a corporation I actually went back and I actually tried to get mentorship from Jeff Bezos because I look at him as someone that actually was able to take like from web one and be able to create a successful company Amazon and web too but Jeff is a little hard to get a hold of so what I did was I was able to get mentored by Colin Breyer uh who is uh Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos he was considered Jeff's Shadow and really talking with him and helping him understand Dows and me understanding what organizations and corporations really mean is that and this is what I took from it is that leadership still really matters and I know that that could be kind of a hot take when it comes to Dows because it's Community run and Community Driven but for us at uh collab land and with our Co-op we actually have to touch the real world so they're like server cloud infrastructure AWS bills to pay and their real like liabilities that we have to be accountable for so for us at the application Level and it may be different for those that are building Dows at the protocol level that you can get paid in need and you can remain in on for us we don't have that luxury to be able to do so so for me it was really just trying to understand like okay we have this useful utility we invented the category of token gating with collabland we have competitors that are coming in and you know do we wanna compete me as the CEO of a bridge and knowing that we need to empower and we want to give back to the community how do we do that in the most useful and practical way and so with that what we did was we had this token launch and the token launch was really to help power the Dao but really thinking about what does a Dow do and so we came up with this concept and we launched this yesterday we launched this Marketplace so one we want to be inclusive and we want to keep incentives aligned under what is you know legal and under regulation and so the tokens in the Dao are this kind of stepping stone and really what we're aiming for is this Marketplace so that third-party developers can develop on top of collab land and this becomes really interesting because you know as you go through your journey whether you're an entrepreneur or you're part of a Dao just reimagining kind of an understanding and be comfortable with this in between and so what what naturally happened and what occurred and what was really just under our noses was that collab land because of our huge reach because of our first mover Advantage we actually are the best distribution channel for web 3. so if you think about it when it comes to a Marketplace which we just launched we allow third-party devs to be able to build on top of collab land and if you think about how as a developer you are going to reach tokenized communities you're not going to be able to buy Google AdWords you're not going to buy Facebook ads but if you wanted to kind of slide into a community's Discord you can if you join the collab land Marketplace as a third party developer and that's extremely powerful and what we wanted to make sure though is that when we launched this Marketplace it wasn't us as collab land repeating the platform kind of story or Playbook from web 2.

so this is why we have a dow and this is why we're so passionate about what we're building here so that not only can we allow third-party devs to be able to enjoy this new distribution Channel but we can all share this together so the way that it works is that if you're a Dev you can submit your app to the marketplace and this Marketplace is governed by the Dow and now if you create an app those those apps will add more features to collabland and with those features we can detract more members and when you have more members you can actually as a Dev put energy and time and Trust into collablin because you know that there's going to be people that are going to have the opportunity to use your product a lot of devs so let me finish this so with devs you have more features in the marketplace that attracts more members and those members attract more devs and this is a flywheel that we're hoping we can kick start and value a cruise to the token and so everyone can share so I know that a lot it does in this hackathon are like just willing and wanting to put their you know best efforts and next great idea but a lot of developers and I have fallen prey to this myself you have a great product but you then have to Market it you have to distribute it and I think this is what we're trying to solve in the web 3 ecosystem it's just instant distribution so if you are a Dev and you're hacking this weekend you can hack on collab land we not only have bounties but we also will provide the winner of the hackathon uh a mini app a spot in our Marketplace so that you can get distribution to the 45 000 plus communities that we serve so again what we're trying to build and the real aim here is we want to be the best web3 distribution platform and uh I am going to try and continue this story so I started last year and now we have the the Dow and hopefully we will be successful in the marketplace and I just want to leave everyone with just a sprinkling of what I think is going to happen for next year so for those devs that are interested I think that the coming kind of age of nft's Dao and defy will merge and I think these separate ecosystems will come together you see that happening right now with Dows and defy I think you see it less so in Thousand nfts unless like you are into the nft scene you might see nouns down which is doing a good job but I think overall these will all converge and I think the next cycle or the next iteration of this is going to be decentralized IDs why well I think that I don't know if you've seen the the kind of progress that AI is making not only with like chat GPT but like stable diffusion and mid-journey it's going to be really hard in the future to really figure out what is real and what is AI generated and so I think the kind of next cycle that we're going to explore is verification and so this is where you need to verify the source material of is this really real did did Joe Rogan really have that podcast with huberman or was that a deep fake or not and I think you'll be able to verify that through decentralized IDs so I think the coming age of like AI so AI mixed in with daos for example if an AI can understand the different Dows and on-chain voting systems it may be that AIS are the new ambassadors that bring Dows that are not knowing of each other aligned in a way where they can work together and help better coordinate AI will also bring in the emergence I believe of decentralized IDs to be able to verify if some claim has really happened or not and I think that you know we're finally I know that the decentralized ID kind of movement is like 10 years in the making but before it was really something that people knew should happen because of privacy and the ability to be able to have selective disclosure in terms of how you as an individual can own your own identity and represent it online which was a good idea but I think now in the coming edge of AI it will become more of a necessity um but that's my talk thank you um please follow me on Twitter and uh I have a minute and a half but if there's any questions I happy to answer any all right thank you foreign [Music]