In this episode, Nicole speaks with Deana and Natasha from the Boys Club founding team. Natasha and Deana shared a multifaceted look at the evolution of taking a DAO From 0 to 1, including the genesis of a leadership team, the work behind their first membership NFT launch, and lessons learned from putting their first proposal through governance. As Boys Club moves into its next stage of development, there is a lot to explore from how they are building their future business model.

For our final episode of Season 2, we return to web3 first principles: community tokens create yet-unrealized opportunities within an immeasurable design space at the intersection of culture, ownership, and value creation. The realization of these opportunities is inevitable — but the timeline and cadence remains unknown. Derek Schloss is a partner at Collab+Currency and a regular guest on Proof with Kevin Rose. Derek and Jess explore possible futures for the community token design space, taking both inspiration and cautions from Nouns, Art Blocks, Chromie Squiggles, and $10 pizza with a friend. While internet native communities have leveled up innovation on the side of pooled capital, we have yet to unlock truly novel ways of allocating that capital using shared decision-making. The builders who both perceive the unrealized opportunities and sit in the discomfort of a novel design space will be the ones to watch through the next cycles of innovation.

“The next generation of internet protocols and platforms and applications will be owned and operated by their users.” Mason Nystrom is an investment partner at Variant Fund, and he – like Seed Club – firmly believes in this bright version of our collective future. In this episode, Jess and Mason explore emerging trends and challenges in web3, and what they mean for community token networks. Governance makes a cameo, as does the call for more DAO leadership and structure. They touch on the increasingly blurred lines between users, consumers, builders, and owners. Web3 unlocks new types of consumer interactions; creating containers for those novel interactions to emerge will accelerate onboarding the next billion people to crypto.

In this episode, Nicole speaks with Bas Grasmeyer and Jeremy Grinberg from the COLORS DAO founding team. Colors is a global community of creatives supporting each other across disciplines, building off Colors Studio, the global music talent showcase, and discovery community. Bas and Jeremy discussed the importance of building cadence, basic structure, and predictability in a community and how that allows people to build cultural legos, plus the process of evolving a DAO out of an existing organization and navigating the various organizational and token structures that best meet the needs of the community.

We’ve got a special episode of Club Pod with Seed Club Co-Creators Jess Sloss and Nicole d’Avis. Jess and Nicole recorded the episode late on a very hot summer Friday to bring us a comprehensive exploration of what we can expect for SC05. We hear about the thoughtful, significant changes to the Accelerator (shoutout to interval training), the updated selection process (double shoutout to the Accelerator Portal), and what makes a great project for the Accelerator. We cover why the Accelerator matters and the role of Seed Club as an unmatched sensemaking network of the leading web3 innovators. Applications for SC05 opened earlier this week, and the application period remains open through August 15.

The core value at Seed Club is our network, which traces its origin to its nascent days in crypto. Wong Joon Ian is one of Seed Club’s earliest co-conspirators. He’s a shining example of the “thoughtfully” in lets f*cking thoughtfully go – integrating historical insights from the physical world into the high-velocity design space of web3 community-building. Joon runs Amplified, a web3-native premier event and conference planning service, which amplifies the role of gatherings in cultivating great communities. We jam on token insights through the lens of loyalty points programs and local currencies, pulling apart the parallels and key distinctions. Our conversation ends with a jump down the web3 media rabbit hole.

In this episode, We spoke with Gabriel Tumlos from the Mochi founding team. Mochi is a team-based goal-setting game focused on collective accountability and growth. Gabriel shares how the idea for Mochi evolved through multiple crypto cycles and the different approaches to building community market fit he is currently exploring. Mochi is experimenting with in-game economies in novel ways and leaning into web3 native partnerships to understand and design with communities - whether for shared productivity or even to achieve lucid dreaming. Lots to learn from an experienced web3 builder!

The questions motivating Arkive are not distinct to the needs of a decentralized museum — they’re universally resonate considerations for anyone building community-owned networks in web3. Tom McLeod is the executive director of Arkive, the self-proclaimed “last museum” and simultaneous first-ever decentralized physical museum. Arkive’s design space exists at the intersection of physical objects, digital community-building, and member governance. Tom walks us through decision-making experiments enabled by their in-house DAO tool Atrium, providing a justification for bespoke DAO tooling solutions. He shares the coordination tensions they’re hoping to solve, guided by a strong belief in embedding community engagement ahead of financialization. We’re left with a clear takeaway: the most exciting DAOs will become institutions.

In this episode, we sit down with Matt Medved, co-founder of NFT NOW. We talk about his experience building media brands in the legacy world, having worked at Billboard and Spin Magazine, and how that has informed what he is doing with NFT NOW stepping into the web3 space. We talk about how DAOs and communities can be effective media organizations. And how to build great founding teams and culture.  

Nicole d'Avis sits down with Jonathan Mann, aka songadayman, aka the founder of SongaDAO. It turns out they have been in the same music/crypto circles for 5+ years, on similar tracks, though just connected in the last year, so it was cool to look back at shared history. They explored the genesis of SongaDAO, including the early inspiration for the DAO, as well as its start in the last bear market cycle and what current builders might learn from his experience. They discussed the power inherent in creating something daily and shared some of the very cool community and technical experiments that are happening right now and in the future of SongaDAO.