#BUIDLing the Future of Work - Panel

cool uh hey thank you for for coming to this uh panel on uh biddling the future of work uh i i think i'd like to start with letting the panelists introduce themselves uh and answering the question uh how did you end up here at east denver uh let's let's start on the end sure uh thanks i'm i'm excited to be here i'm aaron dilley-san and so i was i'm a web 2 guy i was starting to be web pre-curious last year a bit have a couple of projects you know speaking transparently with uh social media music healthcare trying to leverage crypto but what really drew me to this particular project i've worked for webtoon for a long time for a lot of those larger tech companies and there is no real community um and the one thing that drew me to opolis was the idea of self-sovereignty and benevolence and the idea that the communities will be truly benevolent to its to to itself by helping us to grow and be being benevolent to yourself is being benevolent to community so when i saw those things i was like wow this is where i want to be at this is the this has next and so that's that's when i came on board to obelisk nice to meet you nice to meet you too my name is loewy taylor um i currently work at gitcoin and i'm a people ops person um i started a guild for all the people ops folks of web 3 because we need a support group a little bit and i like to think a lot about how we decentralize hr practices how we manage and have a healthy workplace in a land with no bosses and no hierarchy and i love that future so thank you and happy to be here uh i'm anne wilmot i um wow how did i get to east denver closer how did i get to east denver it was by quitting a really good fiat currency job in hollywood and uh moving to wyoming and going on to web three full-time i've really started to love crypto in 2014 and was just looking and looking for that opportunity to do this full-time so that was in 2021 which i'm very grateful for and brought me to east denver because i don't have to ask for vacation time anymore i can just come hello everybody i'm i'm spencer my journey to east denver 20 what years is it 2022 december 2022 began really at east denver 2020 i came here not knowing really anybody i met a few cool people uh and you know one thing led to another and ended up joining uh raid guild which as you you may know is a collective of web 3 freelancers developers designers marketers uh product people etc and i had a magical experience joining red guild i didn't really know anybody there but i built these amazing relationships with people inside of the safe space of a flat organization inside of the dao and i kind of the next thing i wanted to do was make sure as many other people as possible could do and have the same experience as me and that led me further into the dow space with dao house and now i'm here thank you uh and my name is joshua i'm one of the core stewards of denver and uh this the treasurer for sport dao which is the parent dao of denver um and my journey started also in in 20 20 20. in 2019 i was i was working at consensus i jumped over there from from lyft where i was doing driver growth and competitive intelligence and i was part of the now infamous uh 2020 february 2020 uh class uh of uh that was culled uh from from consensus and i came to eat denver to find another job and i was walking around saying to people hey cobra is really expensive they wanted me to pay like twenty four hundred dollars for a family plan and so i was walking around saying uh how do i get health insurance is there a web three solution to this uh and everyone was like uh you should go talk to opolis so i went up to the opolis booth and introduced myself and said hey i need health insurance uh and the rest is kind of uh history um i fell down the dow rabbit hole i met uh bill warren and and aaron soskin uh and uh tom howard and they introduced me to meta cartel and then that led to dao house and then that led to to raid guild uh and and working kind of part-time in the in the dow space um and the my my role at opolis was to find people individuals who were like me needed health insurance um and wanted to process their crypto payroll compliantly and i had no reputation and so my is a very interesting tweak on business development my my job was to go into dowse and do work join the dao do work for the dao build reputation build value somewhere else uh and then say hey this other thing that i work on uh opolis uh you you also can get your benefits uh through us and it's such a very interesting route to bd um you're a secret agent yeah uh not secret agent the opposite of a secret agent a very public agent uh that is right in the bio uh community steward of opolis um one of the the first question i want to get into is um we talk about malik and we talk about coordination games um do you guys ever feel like we play coordination games for the sake of playing coordination games or are we actually building something real that's going to last you know after we're gone so so my thought is this right is that as we grow our community right grow the web3 community and we're really pushing self-sovereignty that that goes hand in hand i i keep saying over and over again with benevolence i think that these these we are incentivizing ourselves but we're incentivizing our community as well too but if we truly believe in the things that we're doing and we want to help the person beside us within these communities then we can build something that can be for forever this is just the beginning of our journey into web 3. i think that um with all things intention and impact are different and when we talk about like are we coordinating just for the sake of coordination i don't think it's anyone's intention right like every complex system people arrive at that because they believe it's it's the only solution that they've been able to find and it's usually only in hindsight that we see dang that complex system was not truly necessary and it ended up being only coordination for the sake of coordination and not having that impact um and for me like the way that i i don't know fight that part of malak in my daily life is i just try and make systems as simple as possible like stupidly simple especially if i'm asking folks in a dow workplace to try and adopt some new system for work contracts or role documentation like make it very eli five and add complexity later um yeah i think that we are building something real obviously i sort of bet my own career on this but one of the reasons why is because i think coordination at the bottom is about compassion for other people being able to coordinate with other people means to be able to really see someone else's point of view and to work in in a some sort of equal way with them and sometimes it's frustrating and when it's frustrating you have to dig down a little bit deeper and see somebody else's point of view more i feel like that's extremely valuable and necessary in the world so for me you know i i do think it's something real and i think it's evolutionary and i think it's important also there might be a thing uh called too much coordination but i do not think we have gotten there yet i think for every day that something gets coordinated well something is falling through the crack so like we still have plenty of work to do yeah i think that's right i think we have plenty of work to do um i i think it is it is the case that we offer often playing coordination games for coordination game's sake but coordination game's sake is how we build the muscles and the habits and the practices and the technologies and the skills to play real coordination games as we kind of move out into the future and i guess i don't really know for sure if what we're building is gonna last but what i do feel pretty confident about is that it's our best chance to actually make a lasting change on the way the world works and the way humanity interacts with each other in the world um the other thing i want to say is i think we've already built something that matters even just on its own i have myself and a lot of people i know their lives have been completely changed not just in a financial way but in a meaningful way and a way that they go about their daily lives and the way that they don't feel like the work they do is work and i'd like to think that that counts interesting um all right so john powell who's the one of the founders of eat denver and uh the one of the founders of opolis likes to say uh very very often um you cannot build the future of work on the history of work so i'd ask what does that mean to you and then also are there are there parts are there components from the history of work that are still important things that are valuable from the nine to five grind the vc centric the um that should stick around and then we can learn from as we continue building the future of work in web 3. we'll start here yeah um i think the the the history of work has been marked by uh individual human relationships oftentimes those are gatekeeping relationships but i think in the future of work we can't forget how important the human relationships are i think in everything that we're building we need to be building it to foster additional or extra or higher quality human relationships and not forget about not forget about the humans when we're designing mechanisms and not optimize for mechanisms over humans not optimizing for protocols as amazing as protocols are not optimizing for them over humans i think they can work together but we can't forget that yeah i i hit the glass ceiling really hard in the traditional world of work and uh you know probably every workplace doesn't have that but i think i'm not the only person who will feel that when you are the wrong thing whatever you bring is the wrong thing you're the wrong thing you cannot work your way out of that i like a merit-based system where i can learn or grow or try to do something new or correct something that's going wrong but when literally it's who you are that is the wrong thing um you cannot bring yourself to work you can have to protect yourself so for me work the past of work has a lot to do with always protecting yourself and the future of work has a lot to do with being brave taking some risks making your own path and asking other people to do that with you or to um make space for you and and to make space for yourself when they're not um so it's a lot more about bringing myself fully to it and being really brave um so yeah it's it's not easy but i cannot go back that's for sure and for years i called my job my fiat currency job because it was just like how you get the fiat currency and then you get to do the fun stuff at night so now i get to do the fun stuff um all day and at night can we get a round of applause for not going back [Music] [Applause] yeah for me there's a lot of little things that um that i appreciate in legacy systems of old world workplaces even though i'm like fully here in this future um you know we're saying we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and um there's simple stuff that like was fought hard for and won through various labor movements throughout the past i think it's worth it for those of us who have a hand in the future of work and in building that to educate ourselves on those movements and remember like what we fought for and why what our predecessors fought for i mean even even the 40-hour work week breaks you know health care these things were recently won in labor movements and i see sometimes in web 3 we depart from those a little bit or we forget um we forget how important that is and i just think about like union organizers and activists who like really put their lives on the line and some of them even lost lives to win moral battles for right treatment um so that's part of it to me as far as like keeping the history with us are you are you saying that you quit your nine to five to work 24 7. yeah i i like to chill yeah yeah i would piggyback with that and say that there are things we don't want to forget right uh legislation has been passed we have access to benefits right these benefits have been earned and they're deserved right so why why shouldn't i as an independent worker freelancer why can't i enjoy those same benefits as somebody who works for aws or from meta i deserve those benefits as well too as an independent worker so i think that that even though that's more legacy but even as you move forward into web 3 as an independent worker self-sovereign worker i also deserve those benefits i i i require those as a web 3 employee right and so we can't remember we can't forget some of those things just let's piggyback on what you're saying because as we move forward we're we're changing the world but we're still entitled to our benefits at least until we live in societies that are better than america is currently and have some basic things covered right i think it's a little sad how focused on u.

s standards we are but yeah a lot of us are centered here but i mean i i think a lot of that has to do with the sec being the the biggest in the in the world uh and so all these don't say that too loud uh but so all of this development that's happening all around the world and web3 is supposed to be global yet every single team that that builds something is like okay but how do we include americans without pissing off the american government and so it's it's it's the big gorilla in the room that's stifling a lot of innovation uh and and the choice is do we involve americans and succeed or do we not involve americans and risk it we shouldn't be so american focused but it's the largest the largest segment of what we're doing but how do we change that um making space for non-contributors right like there's there's several countries that folks would be residents of that would have a hard time getting hired or or surviving in a web 3 workplace because of the country that they're from and in a way allowing for a non-contribution solves that it definitely doesn't solve all of it right because then you still have folks that like you know are parents and then need to have a lot more like fiat fiat salary and liquidity in that way they need to have benefits what not but but i do think that like making space for anonymous contribution from at least the folks whose lifestyles allow that can can help us step away from the really like lacking standards of certain countries one thing i didn't want to get too far away from you you mentioned the glass ceiling in in in your web 2 the corporate world uh how has your experience been in web 3 so far what have you have you found glass ceilings has it been better worse different um and and if it is worse or existent what could we be doing to help break those maybe i'm in the honeymoon phase i don't know but um i i really i'm at an age where people like i'm not the age of people who just jump from one thing to another change their career and that was a big barrier to me for a long time it didn't seem that possible so i think when i saw that there was a way and that there was work it started with just working in daos um actually working for molok dao the original molok dao um it was such an eye-opening thing to me so i for me i would say obviously not everything has been perfect there's a lot of like it can be really chaotic compared to hierarchical structures when you don't have hierarchy people get a little bit confused about how to have accountability and responsibility and communication sometimes so i feel like i've seen a lot of chaos but i'm just very willing to sort of explore all the opportunity and potential of that and um yeah i felt like i jumped off a cliff and the parachute did open i'm working for that dow i'm also very involved with metagama delta a dow that supports women by giving grants to women led initiatives in web3 and i also work for a great company upstate interactive where i do um product product owner work on on web3 projects so like i've had maybe it's just a great time i've had a range of choices i've been able to work on really interesting things i've been able to say no to things i don't want to work on which was not a feature of a regular job really um okay uh so yeah so i i don't know if that answered the question actually but it's it's a plus one for me it's good yeah it did uh did either of you wanna did you wanna sort of a speculative idea that i've been playing around with um in my head recently which is um kind of related to what you were saying or connected a little bit um i think there's a lot of especially now that there a lot of us have had some time to build some expertise in in some of these areas while hopefully remaining humble that we don't know everything i think something that we can do to help everybody participate in this world and in the future of work is start to start to accredit some expertise in power dynamics in what it means to not have power over over what you're doing every day to people who have not won the genetic or the geographic lottery even if they don't have specific expertise in daos or in a very specific thing that we are working on i think that there's a lot of different type of expertise that is a huge um input into what we are doing every day could could you elaborate on that a little bit more about like not having control directly over what you're doing or so i guess my experience um in in web 3 in daos has been that i am pretty much in complete control of over what i work on who i work on it with and when i work on it and why i'm working on it and it's been incredibly freeing and basically life-changing um but the flip side of that is not really my experience in like the previous web 2 corporate world it's a lot of people's experience having almost no control whatsoever so i think the perspectives of people who have had that experience should teach have a lot to teach us about what it means to actually have control so we've only got a few minutes left um i wanted to give you each an opportunity to talk about uh there's this great resignation that is happening uh throughout the country primarily in like silicon valley and wall street and they're making the jump either to web 3 or becoming independent workers in web 2 and leaving the corporate 9 to 5 behind if you if they were watching this right now if you're talking to somebody who is in corporate america what is the one thing that you would want to say to them to say you know we're here to eat denver welcome uh the web 3 world is is your oyster what's the one thing you'd say to them well the first thing i think is self-sovereignty is the future of work you own yourself you own your work and it's going to be about community and benevolence within community if you're feeling weighed down tired out by your web to work come over to web3 be a self-sovereign being but also if you join opolis you'll be able to get the same benefits you had when you're in web 2 work i love the it's about community i think that's what i would say to anybody if you want to work in a place where you feel like you've got friends supporters people who will be really honest with you who will engage in different parts of your life and that you'll be able to work on a mission that you all care about that's community you know web3 work is is as close to an activist collective as it is to a company and if you want to be in a community working towards a mission together this is definitely a great space to do it everybody i know from my old world of work when we talk they say wow you sound so happy your voice sounds different you look different so like that's all i really have to say is that people see that i ha i am lifted up in some way and i had a good job i cannot complain about that but they just see a difference in me and i think that that's what that's what communicates i i guess one thing i would say to to those people is that it's not going to be easy figuring out metamask or whatever well you're using is is kind of a mind at first uh there's it's a totally different paradigm in a very specific kind of way but it's worth it so stick with it uh my my one thing with the negative 30 seconds we have left would be um the equity works differently in web 3. when you're when you're contributing to a dow when you're contributing to a project it's so much easier uh to just have a stake to be a stakeholder and earn equity by showing up and doing work uh so i would just say show up do work and you're gonna be rewarded with it um i was at lyft for like three years and ended up with zero equity uh when they did the ipo our team literally got the the company ipo ready zero equity you show up at uh opolis and dao house and and raid guild and meta factory and all of these things are saying here take a piece of the company be part of it uh and and on that last note if you have not gotten your swag yet uh meta factory uh is selling some great denver swag in the back that's my last final shill um xerox joshua sl on twitter if you guys wanna where can we find you uh i'm on twitter uh spengra s-p-n-g-r-a-h and wilmot at ann wilmot w-i-l-l-m-o-t-t i see everyone writing it down that's good uh i'm lowy.eve on twitter and i'd like to talk about lots of dow workplace stuff so i'm on telegram aaron a-a-r-o-n a-a-ron underscore um opolis thank you guys you guys have been a great audience thank you