Ep 23 - DAO Contributor Series - Nnnnicholas (Juice Box)
12:45AM Apr 1, +0000
Speakers:
Jess Sloss
Nicholas
Keywords:
dao
people
tokens
nicholas
project
create
work
paid
protocol
bit
participating
felt
contributing
juice
discord
governance
contributors
technology
process
called
Hello friends welcome back to Club Seed Club's podcast. I'm your host Jess and today we are bringing a conclusion to our DAO contributor series with Nicholas. The first important question we have to ask Nicholas is how many n do you truly have in your name Nicholas? Pretty sure we get into that in this episode. Nicholas is a developer contributor to a number of fascinating projects. We've learned about his journey into the DAO landscape, how he joined sharkDAO partyDAO FWB, and ultimately settled into contributing more impactfully at juicebox. We learned about his process of entering a DAO and what that should be, Nicholas most recently left his core contributor role at Juicebox. And so we had a chance to talk about what transitioning out of a DAO looks like and how to leave on great terms. So a little teaser, we're also trying to get into what Nicholas is up to today, after leaving juicebox conversation. Let's jump into it.
Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you?
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
This is the third time I tried to introduce this podcast. So we got giggles all around already, which is a great way to kick off this conversation. Because I don't know I get this vision into Nicholas as a DAO contributor as being a fun, jovial, light hearted thing even though your contributions definitely have been more of the deep, useful and pragmatic style. But my first question to you is how do we pronounce your name? Is it Nnnnicholas? Or is it Nicholas?
I just say Nicholas. Yeah, that's that actually dates from way back. I think first, my Twitter name was Montreal Nick, ages ago, when I was a kid, and then I started going by Nicholas more often. And obviously all the Nicholas's are taken, so we're stuck with just 4. Okay, when asked me how many, four is the answer if you're ever looking, but I like it. When you meet someone in person, they, they're always like, Oh, let me get your Twitter or whatever. And I just get them to like mash on the end. And there's, as far as I know, nobody else comes up. So it works out.
Literally how I search for your name. Or all times just put a bunch of guns. Of course, this is the rousing, detailed conversation people are looking for here. You know that. Nicholas, we have the pleasure of speaking to you as part of our DAO contributors series. And actually, I'm not sure if I have a full picture of all the things that you've been doing over the last little while we sort of have had multiple touch points, but how do you introduce yourself to new folks? And maybe if you can give us a bit of a window into some of the things you've been doing of late?
Yeah, I guess I went down the DAO rabbit hole. First off with SharkDAO, I think I had been exposed a little bit to FWB. And then really with SharkDAO got an opportunity to be there in the early days. I've told the story before so I'll tell the brief version. But basically, this guy eldefijesus got in touch with me on Twitter asking me because I was involved actually to rewind slightly even. I was like a very minor member in partyDAO, which I am to this day, just sort of more like a spectator in partyDAO because partyDAO operates with more like a core development builder team that work a little bit more in private, I would say amongst each other, and then occasionally making updates to the broader DAO. So I was a little bit involved in FWB and got a little bit of an insight into what it looked like I was very impressed early on with partyDAO is not only how partyDAO started with the party bid MVP that Aneesh Agnihotri put together which one a actually a Seed Club related mirror? Was it Seed Club related? Samir, the YouTubers, creator YouTubers, are they Seed Club related? Or was it just a mirror fundraise?
No, we we collaborated on that. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I would call it a Seed Club thing. But we jammed with them.
Yeah. So anyway, so these these YouTube creators did a mirror of fundraising. And he threw together this MVP based off of a tweet from paradigm researcher, Dave White, I think to to create like a technology is smart contract adapt to let people bid together collectively on a single auction, which at the time, also, the price of NFTs was was going up a lot. So it felt like a little bit more of like a community vibe to be able to pool assets together and use them to bid collectively on these like more blue chip or just more expensive NFTs more generally. So and these two together this MVP, and then it very quickly turned into mirror, fundraise to create partyDAO. And I got to see a little bit of that process, which was very yellow, very, very DAO, what I call like DAO to like this more, I think previously, Seed Club talk like social tokens like, but basically, I'm a late comer to the whole ethereum scene like late 2020, early 21. But I think of it as there being this 2017 year DAOs are like ICOs and DeFi protocol DAOs like uniswap even ENS they're still coming. But they're more sort of token airdrops related to running a protocol DeFi protocol versus like DAO to, to me is more like NFT culture more about the culture, rather than like DeFi or protocol based culture. So yeah, so I got I got to see partyDAO a little bit, I was super impressed by how that came together really quickly. And guy would have been struggling to make decisions in that context. And people were just like setting up I think Dennis set up the crowdfund, and very quickly, John Palmer, who had a lot of experience in uniswap governance, set up the sort of took on like a sort of project manager almost vision for what partyDAO would become, and put out this blog post about what the purposes of partyDAO were. So I sort of observed that whole process. And it was very interesting to me, but I didn't feel yet capable of really participating on that level. And then a few months went by and in July, I believe it was this eldefijesus, to round out the Tarantino style story, got my Twitter, DMs and was asking me if I given my somewhat connection to partyDAO as a minor member, if I could help make the adapter for party bid to work on the nouns contract. Because eldefijesus, it turned out, I had been working with the sharkDAO people to collect test net nouns, and they were making the transition to main net. So they the reason that it was called SharkDAO is because they collected a shark noun, on test net, there were four versions of the nouns contract on test net, and they, they were pulling Rinkeby ETH. And they managed to get the announced on test net. So then, when they made the transition to main net, they wanted to use party bid, it didn't work out the code was not public until the launch day. So there wasn't time to write this adapter contract for party bid. But through that, I got to know the sharkDAO people a little bit, I was very skeptical of getting involved at first, they wanted to put money, they were like a party bids not gonna work. So maybe like we'll do a multisig, something like that. And then in the end, they found jango from juice box. And juice box was really the tool that was right for the job for them because they didn't want ultimately I think part of it would not have been an appropriate choice for them, because they didn't want to have like a fractional token off the back of an individual noun. They wanted to create a collective, you know, that they wanted to create a long lasting DAO. So yeah, so I got involved a little bit in Shark sharkDAO, then. And then I sort of stopped paying attention for a few a few weeks as you do. And something happened, I don't remember what it was. But I got called into a meeting or I saw a notification on Discord or something. And I went to a sharkDAO Town Hall. And there was like a crisis going on in SharkDAO, this a few weeks after they had one now number two, and there was some kind of crisis going on they, some of the members of the DAO wanted to radically change the exchange rate between donations and the shark tokens that were issued to be a member of the DAO they felt they had already collected one or two nouns. And it just seemed like unfair that the issuance rate of the token was so similar to what it had been before they had any any nouns. And when I got in, I got in, I was on the call as the auction was ending for the first noun that they won. And I ended up jumping off this kind of boring Twitter spaces and jumping into the shark, that discord. And they were, they were all in their planning. And they had, they won the noun as I was like connecting to the call. And they were talking about like, Oh, we're going to change the discount rate. And I didn't really understand what it meant. But I got the sense that it would be better to buy the tokens before the change were to happen. So I was like rushing to make a transaction, try and get it. In the end. I didn't it was very fair, though, I think I think there was like a 15% difference between whether you were a supporter before or after that first acquisition. So anyway, that was kind of my introduction to like, SharkDAO. And then juicebox by extension, which was really where,you know, I became quite passionate, because I saw what they were able to do with juicebox for grading shocked out and I thought shocked, I was awesome, and a great extension of what nouns was doing. But it seemed to me like what was really exciting. And I guess what's close to my heart always is this kind of protocols that enable creativity, and sort of the people building the tools that others are using to create social experiences are really anything. So that's that's kind of what drew me into juice box.
I love that winding answer because it gives such a great window into the randomness. I think that no matter where you're joining in a DAO sort of formation that you kind of get exposed to maybe just a bit of a higher level, you are a developer by trade. Is that the right way of describing your career?
Yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm not the I'm not the best developer in the world. I tool around with solidity, and I'm always getting better. And, you know, I have I've written NFT contracts. So I describe myself as an NFT developer. But I think what I ended up doing most of all at juicebox, where I worked for something around six months, subsequent to that introduction. What I ended up spending a lot of time doing was sort of DAO operations, I guess you could say like, there were a number of issues that you know, just organizing the discord UX I got involved in originally and then I ended up hosting all of our town halls while I was working there and also working on governance and a bunch of other things we can get into the details of but basically I ended up doing a lot of work around sort of making ensure that things run smoothly and people feel both welcome and like able to be effective.
Awesome. I mean, all of those projects, SharkDAO juicebox, they all sort of hit me in the same way, which was like there's just enough chaos happening here that it's probably something I want to own some tokens of. So disclosure, I definitely have tokens to juicebox. And in SharkDAO, and probably a number of other things. But I think like the appropriate amount of chaos and going, I don't get this. And yet, that's maybe a high signal. I think, actually, a number of our conversations around juice boxes probably started and ended in similar ways. But okay, so zooming out a little bit as well, I think this is helpful, like you, as a developer, often are very interested in like people's first touch points with DAOs. You know, how they sort of close down that rabbit hole, I think you kind of give us a bit of a window into that. What's going through your mind, like, as a developer, I just assume there's an unlimited amount of opportunity, like you could literally go work anywhere and do anything. How did you decide where you wanted to spend your time? How are you approaching it?
Yeah, you know, I was really sort of wandering around, I had been working on a project when I first jumped into NFT, land and web three, I was working on this project that was at the time called NFT story. And that story has since evolved to be just sort of like a brand that I use as an umbrella for lots of stuff I do.
But at the time, it was a specific website that I was working on with my roommate at the time, where we had basically reverse engineered open seas lazy minting, which, without getting into the details is the thing that lets you create NFTs for free without sending a transaction. So you sign a message saying I'm willing to make this NFT if somebody is willing to pay this price, and then open sea hangs onto the what's called a permit, and then anybody can go and buy your your NFT. And in the process first admits the NFT and then it transfers it to the buyer. So the buyer pays the gas. So this was like a read around the launch of Zuora v1 Foundation, well, I guess v2 Foundation v2, but what people think of as foundation, the original Foundation website, most people know, I had a shower thought which was I imagined PewDiePie saying in a video, drop your ethereum address in the comments below. And at the end of next episode, I'll announce the winner, whatever my NFT or something, and it just seemed like a very compatible thing immediately for me, between creators and creating NFTs, especially if you have lazy minting, but just in general, they're like, pretty close to free to create, depending on the technology you use, they can genuinely be free to create, they don't really depreciate given that they were free to create. And there's something that you can layer into a strategy for revenue generation if you're an online creator, internet first creator. So it seems to me and I think we've sort of still yet to see that really happen. I think what shook out and what I saw during the development of that NFT story project was, it's grown since then. But the NFT collecting community was very, very small to be in 21. Now, it's grown quite a bit. But if you want to make large sales in NFTs you you kind of need to appeal to people who have ETH, not to the broader public. So the idea of like a mass market, even like USD or stable coin denominated, and if T marketplace, I think it's still probably a little bit early for that kind of thing. So anyway, we worked on that for a bunch of months, I learned a lot through working on that process. Ultimately, my roommate didn't really want to grind on on trying to make something huge. So we parted ways. And as I was looking around, I fell into all this DAO stuff. And then the reason I chose juicebox really was because I vibe with them, the people in the DAO, it's very juicebox is very cool. It's very grassroots, no VC, everybody comes in through the same Pay button, if they want to buy juice box tokens, no special deals have been cut anywhere. Everything happens in public very transparent. So that's quite different to how a lot of other DAOs work. And I think it's neither good nor bad universally, that things should operate in a particular way. But at that point in my life, I was pretty excited about working with people who were doing DAOs like in a very what I felt was authentic way to to their vision, which was provide access to tooling to create your own DAOs. And then there were a couple other things about juicebox that really got me excited about juicebox just as somebody who spent better part of 1015 years studying network effects. I think juice box has a lot going for it to this day and into the future in terms of creating something that's it's not just like a oneclick make a token it's very much like an ecosystem that incentivizes I guess I might as well just get into it. The two things that really excited me about juice box when I saw it were first one was that I discovered that some of the DAOs on the protocol were spin offs of juice box that had been providing services to juice boxes, individuals and then decided that they wanted to scale up their contributions to serve both juice box as a client and others. So examples of that are wag me studios and canoe DAO, which do sort of wag me are responsible for Benny the irreverent weed smoking banana, that people have come to know and love associated with juice box. So they're kind of like I think of them as like the the meme warfare unit think maybe more Trad description would be like a creative studio or something like that. And then can you DAO is the community management DAO, one of them, I guess, the one that I'm most familiar with on juicebox protocol, and that was an individual who was community managing for juicebox and then another person And it was community managing fertile DAO, which is another cool art NFT project on the protocol by one of the cofounders of juicebox. And so these two people were community managing for both these communities. And they decided to spin it out into their own DAO and switch their payouts from these DAOs to a new project on the protocol, which is pretty cool, because it meant, just by dint of the way juice box works, like when juice box pays either of these DAOs and the bi weekly basis that it does. So it pays ETH into their treasuries. And then their treasuries issue tokens that represent claim on the treasury of their DAO, or possibly some governance mechanism, depending how they how they use those tokens. So it sort of allows for, like immediate DAO to DAO token swap just by DAOs, paying other DAOs on the protocol, which I thought had a great network effect potential because it gives you a reason to prefer to work with people or to suggest with people that you're working with, that they start their own DAO on the protocol, or even DAO, maybe overstating it, like really, juicebox is just a kind of just a treasury protocol. And it really wasn't even designed to be a DAO protocol so much, it was more designed for managing funding for project building. And it just so turns out that it's very applicable to DAOs, whatever this like amorphous DAO term actually means.
So think about, like, there's obviously a need and opportunity to provide value there that you got connected with. There's also sort of like a philosophical alignment sounds like intrigue and building a new type of organization. And ultimately, there's sort of this, like, you know, I think, sort of six to all of our conversations has been the desire to build something that people really want to use. And that's valuable. Definitely. That sort of good way of capturing kind of your, if we just sort of framed like, how you made a decision of where to work, given a broad Parameter Set of potential places you could go work.
Yeah, I think it was also very, it was a very permeable org, anybody could work there. And everybody is a contributor who has a very strong vibe of, you know, even like the founders have no privileged position, they have some credibility that's shared socially. But even that could change over time. So ultimately, a lot of DAOs, I find end up having people talk a lot about whether or not decentralization is viable. Given that it seems that organizations tend to have a handful of people who are kind of spearheading stuff. But you know, I was just able to, like walk in and start contributing, and they were very supportive. Also, it's a bit of a detail, but like, not stingy with cash, not trying to avoid paying people or avoid getting screwed, but instead feeling like it's kind of a unique thing to juicebox in my experience, but there's a very organic, especially then a very organic process for like, come in, do something, prove that you're like interested in the DAO and capable of doing something. And then you can make a proposal for trial payout that can last one or two cycles, so cycles two weeks long. So get a little payout, like maybe somewhere between $500 us and $1,500. Us, and no matter what the task is that you're doing development or operations or community management, whatever. And then that can evolve into like a recurring payout, more substantial recurring payout from there. So I think that rapport building, what really interested me about it was that it's like, a lot of the members of juice box are Anons. And if you're going to let Anons, contribute and be paid, then you need a way to establish their credibility within the group. And it's not going to be on the basis of what their degrees are, what their prior jobs were, it's got to be on the basis of what they do and how they behave in your presence. So I think that's like a lot of people look at DAOs, especially people coming from like unpaid internship industries, like arts or whatnot, and are very skeptical of the idea of performing labor before being compensated. But I think without it has a lot to do with the lack of information or the openness to not having any information about your prior qualifications. And so to compensate for that, you sort of have to show that you could do something. So anyway, through all that process. Yeah, it was really about that alignment on vibe is as vague as that is and what they were building was very much up my alley.
We're big believers in vibe here. So that's a very fair answer. In a certain world, the ideal outcome, if done right, for both DAO and participant would be this sort of retroactive rewards. I think the metallic has talked about quite a bit like, come into work, if you can trust the fact that it will be compensated well, or well enough. It's almost like the most aligned way to do things. And these decentralized works, obviously, like actually delivering on that consistently in a way that actually supports individuals is kind of the issue that falls down. So it sounds like juicebox has like a good amount of structure to create the pathways for people to at least understand what they're getting into beforehand. And I think this idea of like getting paid is still a such a fascinating thing to so many people. They're still in this phase of the market where most people are like, can you turn your cryptocurrency into like money that you can pay your rent with? That's so surprising conversation. You know, I think thinking through how people get paid within these organizations, interesting topic, you sort of like the initial piece there. So how people come in, because it's elegant in its simplicity. That step after that, though, knowing that you've gone from sort of trial contributor to somebody who's going to lean in but more consistently, he tells what like negotiation around a salary or compensation or even how that was approached.
Yeah, I spent some time thinking about this. And right after I joined, we had some. So juicebox kind of blew up, the Treasury blew up in size as a consequence of constitution DAO. Actually, as a consequence of the second stage of constitution DAO, which was post failure, when it became a meme coin, especially in China, people who made like 100x, or I don't even know, I didn't have any constitution tokens. But people were rotating their funds into juice box thinking, I guess that juice box was a similar project, even though it's very clear that it's not at all the same kind of economics. So as a result, there was a lot more money in the treasury. And then a lot of people started asking for money, we went through a kind of a cultural discovery process. And I think what I discovered, it's delicate, because I mean, there's a reason companies have like HR departments and very streamlined hiring processes. And it's, it's to avoid disputes, it's to I mean, even then, it's not really clear. And I can tell you, having gone through, like the education system and stuff, you know, elite schools in the States, etc, have very opaque processes for how they select to their students will be and who gets grants and whatnot. Even very traditional organizations do have a lot of opacity sometimes and in terms of how they how the process works, but what we figured was that we should be open to giving people trial pads, but really, you should demonstrate some we called Proof of Work. These are just like social terms. These are not like policies, that juice box or anything, but you know, there's got to be some level of proof of work, wanting to do something is not enough, you kind of have to show that you actually accomplished what you say you're going to do. And that can be with small things. Also, I think one thing in DAOs, that people who don't have a lot of experience may not realize as much as that sort of presence is very convincing of like, just being in the discord and participating in conversations coming to the meetings, these things are all contribute to and not being a nuisance, obviously, you know, being a force that people prefer to have around, I think those are all beneficial things to kind of arguing your case around around being a good person to bring on in terms of a trial payout. And then, and doing something before the trial is good, too. And then through the trial, just sort of setting a task and accomplishing it. And then and then once that report has been established through a period of like two to four weeks, typically, often two weeks is enough, then a proposal can be made to do this recurring path. So recurring payouts usually are paid a little bit more, I'd say basically, the way the salaries work is just by reference to prior paths. So you just sort of look at what people are already earning or have earned in the recent past. And then sort of peg your salary according to those those numbers. And it is a little bit strange. I think there's also an element of like how much you're getting done affects how much you're being paid, rather than maybe how much time you're spending. If you're spending a lot a lot of time but you're not really accomplishing very much, then that's not really a justification for for payouts necessarily. Rather, it's how much are you contributing as a builder and and that can be like, just helping people in a support role also.
So give me a sense of the playing field or like the venue for these discussions to happen. And are they happening in discord set the scene here?
Yeah, absolutely. So actually, one of the things that I did it juicebox is work on the governance process quite a bit. Many parts of the governance process were informal, any major decision would run through the DAO, but the governance was a little bit too informal. For my taste, considering the size of the funds we were dealing with. At that point, it seemed like we should really have a very clear process about the one in particular that brought my attention to it was occasionally the protocol will drop the fees across the whole protocol to zero in order to allow for a large fundraise where people will be worried about contributing to it if they won't get their funds out if it fails, like constitution DAO, for example. So the process for lowering the fees to zero, which sort of just benefits everybody, so it's not so controversial, but nevertheless, it's something that I feel people should have a formal voice in, we ended up defining this governance process that I co authored. The first version of, basically, proposals are made in discord, there's a channel in discord where you think it's called proposals workshop. Now, people can just sort of talk about proposal if they want. But really, the formal process begins when they go to in notion, we use notion for workspace management. So they can use a template. There's a template for trial payouts, for instance, or recurring paths, I think we're shifting away to a more generic template recently. But in any case, essentially go to notion, grab a template, there's a page that tells you sort of what to fill out. And it has just a bunch of questions in it, like, who's writing this thing? Who's going to get paid? What amount are you expecting? You know, what is the justification? What are the risks, and a lot of this was laid out by Django in a first pass on these templates and has been refined by Philip V. Who's heading up governance these days or one of the people heading up governance so basically fill out that proposal and then drop it in the in the notion system that people who handle the governance process are aware of it. So every two weeks at a certain point in time, there'll be posted to a thread will be created for that proposal in the discord proposal. Workshop channel. So people can discuss in this thread off the back of your proposal, their feedback authors are meant to incorporate feedback that they choose to, obviously, they don't need to incorporate anything. And then there's a discord vote temperature check to see if the there's enough support in the discord for it to bother going to snapshot for a formal vote. It's not too restrictive. It's just sort of, you know, if it's a terrible proposal, no point putting it in snapshot. So feel free to go to juice boxes website and the notion page, you can see the exact numbers around quorum for all these steps. But basically, if it passes the temperature check, then it goes to a snapshot vote. And then it's up to the holders of JB X to decide whether they approve of it or not. I believe at last I checked, it's 66% in favor is the requirement for something to pass. And there's some number of independent addresses that must be voting in the vote for it to count. Obviously, that's kind of gamble. But so far, it hasn't been a problem.
Give us a sense of like, what's payroll or something like that looks like what sort of scale are we talking about here from a monthly or cycle base contribution?
Yeah, I'd say like trial contributors usually start around four or five $600 US per two weeks, up to like 1200 around there, depending on what task it is they're doing if they're doing like, you know, serious development work. I remember some people were working on like writing tests for v2 of the protocol, those people maybe we're getting closer to 1000, or over in their trials. We're talking about a broad range of people it is maybe worth mentioning, like people that come to mind like zody. CO is like a comes from the game dev world. And his translator does like management of translation. So that person started off doing getting a trial as well, community managers, mostly building there's not a lot of managerial work that's done for the most part. So building writ large. And then for the recurring Pat's, yeah, something like, I'd say the range is something like 2000 to 15,000 every two weeks. And it depends on the involvement. There's very few people above, I'd say above $7,000, every two weeks, but they are very, very involved and really putting their whole lives into it. Cool. That's super helpful. And by the way, all those numbers are on the juicebox page, anybody can go check that money. And check out the JB DAO project. And you can see that everybody's salary right there.
Yeah, that's like, the cool thing is it's every salary, every action, transaction, etc, very clearly laid out. And I think I need to use juicebox more as an example of like these sort of more emergent type of DAOs, I think they're, you know, there's a series of experiments being run right now, as far as like how permissive how decisions get done and how leadership is recognized or stewarded there. And I think those are all fascinating. But one of the core pieces that I think is still a challenge is just that working in public nature that really, you need to be able to do to get that create the environment that allowed you to sort of come in and find your place fairly effortlessly. I think for builders out there thinking about where even is for contributors thinking about where to participate, easier to get in, though maybe more uncertain as to how to create value, and certainly some more permissive spaces, and yet, maybe harder to get in, the more clarity around exactly how to create, though I guess it probably changes depending on your role. And the goal of the organization.
You know, it depends a lot on just who the people are like, I would say Django Perry meos. Zoo org, were the voices who were there when I showed up. And they were very welcoming, and very happy to have somebody who, like, couldn't tolerate a boring meeting and wanted a tight Town Hall, like they were appreciative of that it wasn't something they were they loved and loved, like organizer do. And so it was, you know, they're pretty happy for that. So this kind of thing, like, basically, if you fit in, and also I think there's also like, maybe as a person, I wouldn't want to impose my values too much on others. So that's not to say, like, just come in guns blazing, like telling everybody what to do. You know, I was very much like reading the room the whole time. And it just so happened that we were very, very compatible. So I guess for an aspiring DAO contributor, somebody, especially somebody wants to go full time, you know, you got to find the people who are your tribe in this stuff. And I think it's possible. I think the greatest challenge for DAOs, especially the kind of DAO we're talking about here, like juicebox is retention of focused people, dedicating their focus to the DAO. So if you really like the mission, and are actually dedicated to it, and are not just going to, like get distracted by the next shiny thing, then maybe that's a good place to spend your attention. Because the other thing I think contributors can also be distracted by a sort of like, what's the next big thing? Or, you know, what's the next thing that's going to take off like crazy? And so if your primary motivation for choosing the place you're going to work is that, then I think it'll be harder to stick with it when things sort of slow down, whatever it was that got you excited, is, you know, cools off. Maybe you'll lose attention. So yep. And actually, one little detail I might add is just like that day. I didn't totally tell the story. But there was this crisis in SharkDAO that got me into like, contributing actively to DAOs with like people wanted to change the the discount rate the the exchange rate for the tokens for sharkDAO and I ended up like I woke up I was just happened to be in this discord call. And then over the next two three days I ended up co authoring their mission statement, the mission statement for sharkDAO, which I had basically not been involved in since I had heard of it previously. So like, I think even just doing some one off activity without the intention of making it your full time thing can sometimes just like help you sort of figure out what it is that you're good at, and also establish some connections that will make you more comfortable both discovering the next project that you're interested in, and also contributing more full time in the future.
Yeah, I like that as well. And there's two big things in there. One, the pull of short term incentives really can lead people astray in crypto, probably no shock to anybody listen to this podcast. But as it applies to work, and yeah, think embedded in everything you're saying there's the importance of almost like the connections that people layer like your people refer to as and how that value, it's like planting a garden, right, you're not going to be able to realize that the true value of this ecosystem as you're growing up around or in and as part of, if you try to harvest those seeds right away. And so this sort of slower, or at least participating around one's interests with people that are interesting, will pay off at some point, I think you sort of found your way in through multiple different things to get to where you are today. Another thread that keeps coming up in these conversations is the importance of personal responsibility. So this idea, I guess, like DAOs, being responsible for making it easy for people to onboard and participate. I think there's validity to that idea and importance to sort of focus on that. But also the personal responsibility of potential hires or participants to like find their way in, sort of have thoughts on the various roles and responsibilities involved in getting people into DAOs? Or how we should be getting them into them.
From like a recruiting perspective, if you if you need help doing what you're doing, or?
Yeah, I think from a perspective of like, we obviously want as many talented people as possible to come in and participate in DAOs. And also, I questioned whether or not we really want to be removing friction from that process, or more purposefully introducing friction, I think your examples one, where I would be like, Oh, in that system makes a ton of sense to reduce that friction and a bunch of the decisions he has made to really choose boxes made to make that easier to participate makes a ton of sense. I also sort of think that there is a world where we're one type of DAO looks like million members strong, collective brainpower figuring things out, but on the opposite side, there's probably many, many more DAO look more like party bid or even Seed Club, which is like, or FWB right? There's there's some permission access to. And so getting in and working there actually might take a little bit more work. And, you know, whether you want to work for a big tech company or big DAO or similar processes are going to be involved in that you kind of need to position yourself for success there. That was one hell of a tangent, but.
Yeah, I think for juicebox, that that manifests is like you're expected to write your own proposal for being paid. I've done the occasional one to get somebody else on board who was a little bit shy, in general, you know, you're there is an expectation that you're going to be the one who makes the leap. Yeah, it's fun. DAOs. I mean, they're so different. You know, it's, it's there. There's no right answer. It's really just what works. I think the thing that I would suggest to people is, if you can just like get involved with whichever DAO is the most appealing to you at present, and then sort of don't worry about where it's going, because the unforeseeable future is, it'll go somewhere like you don't need to know the DAO you are most involved in probably doesn't exist yet. So in terms of personal responsibility, I'm not sure that I have any great, great answer on that. I think we haven't seen it. We've seen it in more the DeFi protocol. DAOs, like the kind of social blow ups or real contentious relationships between token holders. I think the DAO to space is like yet to see that in a major way. But I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.
Yeah, I don't think any spaces immune from human challenges, definitely. Yeah, I think I think that the personal responsibility piece in the way you phrase, it is almost an in choosing where and sort of without expectation, so participating and following your interest there.
It feels like it's really a space where if you do good, then like good things come to you. I think we're in such a growth stage of the thing that just contributing without anticipating any kind of return, you'll just something good will happen.
Yeah, I think, you know, luckily, we're in a position now where that period of time or uncertainty is often a lot smaller, right? Like these, a lot of these styles have capital. And so you know, the juicebox situation, it's not about whether there is money or isn't money. It's like how do we best manage a process to get great contributors on board? I think we go back a year and a half. That was a very different, different world where people are sort of participating without even any understanding of whether there's value here whatsoever. Maybe just sort of moving back to the present here. You've recently decided to step back from your work at juicebox. Sort of one of the Benefits of this sort of permissive work environments that you can kind of come in and go. But he also sort of talked about how consistent effort over time or at least getting people's consistent over time is like the biggest challenge. How do you think through when it was the right time to leave? Are there complications around that? Really interested in sort of how you navigated that space?
Yeah. So I worked at juice box, I'm just trying to see look at a calendar seven months, something like that, six, seven months? Yeah. For me, I love juice box. I think there are risks involved in participating in all DAOs. And it's up to each of us to sort of decide what our risk threshold is for that participation. And basically, I just, even more broadly than juicebox. But I just felt I needed a little time to think about what kinds of things I'm comfortable participating in as like a core member, in terms of all of the sort of legal complications that come up from these things. And I think I felt that I didn't want to bring too much of that questioning to an actively running DAO was already very much like the rubber hit the road. And also even maybe more importantly, I really wanted to take some time to develop some NFT projects of my own and some collaborations. So it seemed like a good time, I put in a lot of work there six, seven months, which I think is probably longer than most people contributed at a DAO. But it was still difficult for me to go, I very much love the people there. And I really believe in the mission that they're working on. I think nothing has really changed about that for me. So I'm excited for juice boxes future. And yeah, taking a step back. And just give me a little bit of time to focus on solidity stuff, I've been learning forge testing environment for writing solidity tests, in solidity as opposed to JavaScript, as is often the case in hardhat, and waffle and truffle and all these things. So it's been a good time for me to have a little time off and focus. Time moves so quickly in the space, you know, there's always always something new. So it can be a challenge to just get a little bit of time to focus on some projects that one wants to work on for oneself. So yeah, that's what I've been doing the past few weeks, since I left.
In front of like, a, there's a world, you know, corporate world where if you're working on a project for a period of time, six months, we seem like an absurdly small amount of time, and probably a failure, I guess, a company to engage with and then there's almost inevitably like a sort of an onboarding process or like, how do I make sure that that does work that I've been doing is picked up by others. And you know, you're obviously a conscientious human being like nothing about how you act in the world makes me think that you would have approached that process without like, a lot of sort of care and attention. Can you talk about in any whatever detail, you're able to like, how you thought about that transition?
Yeah, definitely. It was a good moment. From my perspective, I mean, just I guess, to give a little context, you know, I left on very good terms with everybody. And I'm still friends with everybody there, no doubt. So it was a good time, there were some other people who had come in and taken on more responsibilities in this sort of governance operations, parts of juicebox, who were ready to take on even more responsibility, and in many ways for doing a better job than I was. So I was happy to hand off to very competent people who I felt could definitely take control and, and do a good job. And I think there was also a bit of a rethink of the development project I was working on, was this NFT marketplace, sort of a rethink because of some changes to adapt it more closely to the version two of juicebox. So it just felt like a good time. And I think I think it worked out. I mean, obviously, it's never super convenient for somebody to leave. But juicebox and other DAOs, I think are very open to this idea of like, SharkDAO also comes to mind and you come in and do what you are interested in doing and then leave when you when the time is right, or when something comes up in your life that you have to it is a question going forward? Like how can DAOs successfully retain great contributors? I don't know that anybody has a wonderful answer. I see some sort of emergent new kind of DAOs. Like, information token comes to mind like these expensive NFT. Or maybe the I think the NFT was originally free. But at this point, they're They're pricey. But membership in the DAO is limited to like 100 people in that case, and is connected to the ownership of an NFT. So a question for a DAO, like that is like, I don't have any personal experience from inside. But I know there are some very clever people who are involved over there. The question is like, how do you keep your DAO in such a situation from just becoming a group of very wealthy people who have no time to contribute anything at all. And I think that's just sort of an extreme case of the more general problem, which is, if you compensate people very well, early on, they may sort of lose interest in contributing over time. So I think we've yet to see any brilliant tokenomics around this. I suspect things like vesting, and other kinds of sort of traditional insights from traditional compensation are headed our way in DAOs if they aren't here already, but also I think it's kind of part of DAOs that like the culture is, you can be participating in a DAO and or multiple DAOs simultaneously. You can be something you do it evenings and weekends, or it can be your full time thing. I think one thing that really differentiates DAO lifestyle circa 2021 22, is, you're really, unlike your work life, you're very much encouraged to bring all of you to the job. And if you are there, because you're a community manager, but you're also a musician, well, maybe the podcast needs a theme song. And maybe we're going to do a party in crypto voxels. And we need a DJ. And why don't you do that? Rather than just, you know, I've been trained in this, I'm certified whatever. And that's all that I do. I'm a physiotherapist. And that's all that I do. Instead, it's like, well, I'm also I have other interests. And maybe I'll spearhead the t shirt project or something just like that.
Yeah, I love that. I think what is so interesting is how consistently when some of these steps back, others step up. And what can be tough, I think in a leadership role, which do fairly naturally assumed it juicebox is thinking that I'll speak for myself often thinking that I know what's best, even in my own world, and then recognizing almost inevitably, by sort of stepping back, and having other people step up, that it could be done far better. And that I'm not the be all end all solution, which is something I think I deeply understand about myself, but it's still like, consistently put in front of my face. To me, what makes me so excited about these types of organizations is the ability to attract such talent, and to have those people with the most information, the best insight, the best experience, make those decisions and run with those projects. And while that might be variable or malleable, depending on who's in the room at the time, that that is still always the intention, like how do we put our best foot forward here, like who has the best information, etc. And so it becomes less of this sort of static thing that falls apart if one piece is removed. And we have more of this sort of like emergent, even if you have more CO structure, this sort of emergent management or getting things done type thing leads to complications, and that some of the objectives and stuff start to shift because of that as well. And so there isn't a sort of like, factory that you can run. But it does lead to all sorts of fun things with, you know, people who show up and say, hey, I can do this. And you Okay, cool. And it turns out, they can do that. So incredibly well, but would have never in a million years come through an application process in that way. And you definitely, that's how you can start to taste the difference here. Coming up at the top of our time here, I think one of the intentions behind these conversations is just to give more of an insight window into just the multitude of different types of people who are working in and around DAOs, who found their way in early on from like a magic wand question. Like if there's one thing that we could solve either as a space technology as human beings that would really just unlock either like a huge flow of talent into DAOs, or just the value of DAOs itself. What are we using that magic wand on?
To me, it's the the famed legal ambiguity. I saw a great tweet, I wish I knew who put it out. But a month or two ago, someone was saying, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic, etc, etc, local businesses are suffering. Why can't some of this web three technology do something about it? Why is it not applicable for people who are struggling with small businesses and things like this? And I come to a lot of this technology from the perspective that I think many people who are in technology understand sort of economies of scale. And it's just, you know, the initial costs of doing anything are the eat into the profits. So obviously, McDonald's can make more money selling, you know, whatever doing real estate, or whatever it is that McDonald's ultimately does. But in any case, like, you know, it's challenging to do small projects, and it feels like DAOs DAO, one thing I observed throughout my tenure at juicebox, etc, is people are using these tools to not only create large, decentralized organizations, but also do you know what looks more like a mom and pop business, or what is somewhat derogatorily called lifestyle business in the startup industry, which is to say something that's not trying to hyperscale and become like a global billion person user kind of operation unicorn thing. I think it's challenging to suggest to people that they use this tooling for that kind of thing right now, because it's not clear what they're really getting themselves into. And it's one thing for people who are somewhat technically inclined and good researchers and can sort of do the diligence both on what other people are doing, but also what the law says and where you live versus where your DAO members live, etc. I think if we really want it to be something that's super accessible to people, then it needs to be something where there is just a certain amount of clarity on what bright lines are for involvement. I think what 99% of the projects I look at are doing is perfectly ethical and well intentioned and interesting and new, and it's a small percentage that are doing scams or other kinds of nasty behavior that is, you know, I frowned upon. So the question is just like how do we make that message clear to the people who write the laws and who are supposed to represent us. And you know that we can't just judge a new emergent human behavior and technology on the basis of what the worst actors are using it for. If we did that, we would we would never change anything. In fact, we just stopped doing most of what we already do. So how can we set things up so that people are encouraged to use this technology to do the things that you know, at NFTNYC, I came up with it at the partyDAO party where there was a get together at a bar. And somehow in conversation, I think with Suhaib, something, it came to me like the tax us when we earn the money, they tax us when we spend the money. But we aren't even really allowed to choose how to allocate that money ourselves, what's left between those taxes. And I think many DAOs would be very happy to pay taxes to be registered somewhere to do all the formal things in order to keep their contributors safe, and just avoid any kind of complication. So you know, right now, the choices are do something that's very much within the traditional system and somewhat uses the the rails of DAO technology, or, more or less, sir, sort of go off roading, and hope for the best and try and try and, you know, either make decisions in order to protect yourself or really just ignore the situation altogether. So there's a whole spectrum of options, and we're exploring them actively. My hope is that things don't take a contingent negative turn, and people get a real nasty taste about all that we're doing. Because I think the greatest problems in the world are problems of social coordination. And cryptocurrency and DAOs are an application of the fact that cryptocurrency is one of the only technologies that I've ever seen, maybe the only technology software technology I've ever seen, that has something inherent to say to social coordination, I came up in the hypergrowth era of social networks, and observe that whole process very closely. And the problem is that a lot of people hate Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, but it's like, is Mark Zuckerberg actually evil? Or is it just that we have no alternative plan? I think the problem is that systemic one that there is no great theory for how better to run a enormous centralized operation like Facebook with something on the order of 4 billion daily actives, 3 billion, 4 billion, we can argue about the number but the point is tons and tons of people are using these services every day. And I don't think that we have a great social structure for managing the algorithm that chooses what those people see. I'm not totally convinced the DAOs have yet figured it out. But I see DAOs, much like crypto as a wedge, just an opportunity, a chance for us to discover something new through change. And by sort of shaking up all the factors. So I really hope that we can come to some kind of resolution in the near term where people can really confidently participate safely.
Yeah, double click on that. Nothing underneath the desert, we need more DAOs we need more experiments. And truly to get to that level. We need more clarity. Yep. In pursuit of clarity. So we're working deeply on it soon as the viewers well. Nicholas, appreciate you spending an hour with us. Afternoon for me an evening for you. Where can people find you? Where would you like to direct people's attention?
Yeah, check me out on Twitter, @nnnnicholas at the start. And every Friday I do my own Twitter spaces web three Galaxy brain. It's recorded every Friday 5pm Eastern 10pm UTC. And it goes on to a podcast feed that is available at web three Galaxy brain calm. It's been really great. I think we're up to 10 episodes recorded. They're not all on the podcast feed yet but some really awesome builders. I mentioned some of them today Jango John Palmer, people behind crazy projects. Last week we had on some NEV NFT searchers who exploit NFT drops revealing all the dark arts as they exit back into ERC 20 MEV because they think it's more profitable. So always have some interesting guests. So we'd love to have people come check that out. And for the deep cuts, check out solidity Galaxy brain, which is a separate podcast dedicated to interviews with solidity developers, something like Inside the Actors Studio for solidity devs if you're familiar with that show.
I love it all great things to go check out Galaxy brand on Friday evenings is the place to be obviously popping off and jumping on occasion. So yes, Nicholas, thanks for this one conversation and sort of front row seat to somebody who in and out and around but very thoughtfully engaging.