Building At The Edges

Web3 networks, from DAOs to tokenized communities to metalabels, have so much to learn from the work of David Ehrlichman. He’s the author of Impact Networks, and co-founder of Converge and Hats Protocol. Pulling from his experience in decentralized organizing, David walks us through the organizing tenants of an impact network and shares his theory of self-organization. Jess and David discuss the need for the DAO ecosystem to move on from faulty coordination principles that emphasize leaderless and structureless organizations. Instead, they argue for a vision of leader-full orgs and co-created structures. Also explored are what it means to exclude with purpose, the usefulness of constrained delegation, and a theory of DAO leadership.

Nathan Schneider is a teacher in Media Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he runs the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He’s the originator of the “exit-to-community” meme, and as the co-founder of Start.Coop, Nathan thinks deeply about what crypto can learn from the long history of economic justice. In this episode, Jess and Nathan unpack the provocative concept of innovation amnesia that accompanies moments of great technological disruption. He argues for a rethinking of ownership as citizenship, inviting people to be more than just economic actors in relationship to an entity. Ownership enabled by blockchain creates the possibility for people to define their relationship to productive activities and the fundamental human pursuit of a more just, democratically-owned future.

Internet native organizations — whether we call them DAOs, tokenized communities, metalabels, or other — are novel organizational containers allowing people to collaborate in previously impossible ways. Rueben Bramanathan is a General Partner at Ideo CoLab Ventures, and he believes in the power of tokens to enable more equitable means of organizational participation. How we incentivize, reward, and design for the specific interactions within these containers remains an exciting design space.

Having survived the last transition from bull to bear, today’s community-owned networks are discovering the merits of curated communities aligning around shared passion. In episode 2 of Building At The Edges, Jess explores the future of value creation through the lens of passion with guest Gaby Goldberg. Gaby is an investor at TCG Crypto, an early stage crypto fund. Their emerging thesis on “investing in passion” could be described as shorthand for the intimacy and connection that comes from building intentionally with small groups of dedicated people. While much of the crypto space incentivizes people to get out, fork, or rage quit, the most promising products and experiences will arguably come from the communities where people are incentivized to stay and create.

In our Season 3 kick-off episode, Jess sits down with Marty Bell, founder of Poolsuite, for an inside look into the Poolsuite universe. Poolsuite is one of those irresistible brands that’s nearly impossible to explain. That’s partially due to the precisely executed, multilayered experiences across Poolsuite's world, including auditory, visual, digital, and physical goods. Jess and Marty pull-apart the experiential details that define Poolsuite, and surface lessons from their most recent release, Grand Leisure. They explore the novel interactions of web3 brands and businesses, DAOs as incubators for community ideas, and the importance of technology optionality.

David Phelps is the co-founder of JokeDAO, a governance platform for decentralized, bottom-up governance. In a recent essay collaboration on Not Boring, David takes a stand against consensus in DAO governance. He argues that forking — more specifically, contrarian opinions — presents a more interesting opportunity for governance innovation. Jess and David touch briefly on the value of community curation, the complications of off-chain + on-chain coordination, and the persistent challenge of the attention economy.

Pet3rpan is in an investor at 1kx, an early-stage crypto fund. DAOs have a strategy problem, conflating decentralization with structurelessness. In practice, Pet3rpan sees an opportunity to start with governance constraints and then build toward governance minimization. Decentralized coordination and community building are developable skills. And yet there is no replacement for the experience of running and failing experiments.    

Julia Rosenberg is the co-founder and chief pod officer of Metropolis (formerly Orca). Metropolis is the trustware layer for scaling socialware: pods. Pods build on the embedded socialware within small groups of people, creating an automated container for coordination. Jess and Julia explore current governance experiments, both successes and challenges. Recent DAO shakeups demonstrate an over-indexing against centralization and corporate structure. As we move toward scalable trustware, there is one socialware that cannot be automated: leadership.

Jango is a developer at Juicebox, a protocol for community fundraising. Web3 coordination often exists at the intersection of large treasuries. Innovative means of capital allocation is one of the most promising crypto design spaces. Jess and Jango discuss automated funding mechanisms, the use case for frequent proposal and discourse periods, and how this could unlock more DAO experiments.

Joy and I discussed how her mindsets from her time as a musician inform her current work as a founder in web3, her philosophy on what a member-owned apparel community will look like, her approach to good growth, and the way they are iterating with their community as they bring their physical products to market and their digital tokens to community with their upcoming NFT launch. This episode has so many deep takeaways from a builder with tons of cross-industry experience who is now learning and building in real-time in web3.