Hello friends welcome back to club Seed Club's podcast. I'm your host Jess. And today we continue on with our DAO contributor series with prolific DAO contributor Chase Chapman. And Chase is a contributor to index Coop Orca protocol, rabbit hole, pretty sure contributed to Forefront and I'm sure there's a few others in there as well. And importantly, Chase is also the host of the other side podcast, podcast that is really quite incredible. And I'm sure this conversation will convince you that you should go give it a listen. My conversation with Chase blew away my expectations, we went deep into the weeds, challenging current narratives of DAOs explored what it looks like to enter and join a DAOs as a contributor, and how we might make that process better. And Chase specifically spend some time talking about how cities and citizens might be the best way to think of DAOs and token holders, we unpack what that means so much to get into here, you're going to enjoy. So let's dig in.
Chase, welcome to the club pod. How are you doing today?
I am wonderful. I'm excited to chat.
This is a long overdue conversation. I think we both sort of started, I think your podcast started a little bit before the club podcast did or even around the same time. And we sort of saw these amazing explorations sort of in parallel in different directions. And the intention has always been to kind of like, do the crossover. So I call this one the great crossover episode, no better topic for us to crossover with then the mini series of DAO contributors, given the fact that you are a rather prolific DAO contributor. Let's start off the bat with brief introductions. Who are you? And how do you describe what you do?
I have no idea how to describe what I do, and it changes every day. I'm not sure I ever really convey it properly. But I typically start by talking about DAO contribution. So I'm a contributor at index Coop, I also am a little bit of a contributor at rabbit hole in the past have helped contribute at Forefront. And I also started a developer tooling Company A couple years ago that I'm now more of an advisor to, but I'm still involved a little bit in how they're thinking about DAOs. And then I have a podcast. And I'm also doing some contributions and research at Orca. So there's just a lot of things going on a lot of different things, but most of them are DAO related, I probably think way too much about DAOs.
Yeah, that's gonna be fun. Let's maybe start at the beginning, like, what was your onboarding moment into DAOs? How did you get to get into the space?
It's interesting, because I was working in crypto for a couple of years on developer tooling on thinking about more broadly how to make it easier to build in this space. And that's a very different bubble from the DAO bubble, and the crypto Twitter bubble. And so in the summer of 2021, or spring, summer ish, I graduated from college. And again, I had been working on developer tooling for a while and got exposed to some people who were working in and thinking about DAOs, and kind of fell down the little DAO rabbit hole, like I always liked econ, and I was like a model, un nerd type person. And it was just like the perfect convergence of all of those things. And so I started getting involved in Forefront and index Coop, those were my first two jobs, which were amazing experiences, felt this sense of freedom in DAOs. Like I could bring whatever I wanted to an organization and see how it reacted and kind of play around with what I thought work could be. And that was really appealing to me. And then I was like, Oh, shit, there's a lot that DAOs don't have figured out. And that sent me very much on this. I don't even know what I'd call it a journey of trying to find really good mental models for navigating the space. And I think that's very much still my approach of participating in DAOs for index Coop that's very much around like creating a space that's diverse and equitable. And for rabbithole, it's more of like a community vibe. So a bunch of different things. But ultimately, my lens has been, what can we learn from existing orgs? And how can we take that into DAOs? Because we act like everything we're doing is so new, but people have been organizing for so long. There's a lot that we can learn. So that's kind of been my approach so far, and I haven't really looked back. I've thought about DAOs like consistently all day, every day since falling down that that rabbit hole.
Yeah,I can identify with that deeply. There sort of seems to be these two types of contributors that I'm seeing with within DAOs and I often use the word like monogamish versus monogamist. So focus on a one down go deed versus apply one skills across multiple different towns. In my analogy that sounds kind of weird, but we're going to stick with it. I'm curious, like, how have you sort of thought about that? Because you sort of said about this idea of freedom and the ability to sort of do many different things. Do you sort of see those dichotomies exist? Or is there one that's better for others? Or for some people than others?
I feel like, what it really comes down to is, are you a, and again, I'm going to use Web2 analogies that aren't perfect, but I think it's good to think about it. Are you a freelancer? Who's good at something and can provide that skill across different organizations? Or are you going really deep in one organization, and I think that framing is really useful for thinking about how when you come to an organization, you not only position yourself, and like communicate that but also how you think about focus. So I think that's that's very in line with what I've seen, across DAOs. I think one of the major aspects of of that type of work and how you engage with it, that matters a lot is if you're going to do something that's more freelancing, or across different DAOs, it's going to be a lot easier if you can either build that skill set, make it very clear and have like a very expected set of deliverables that you can keep up on. Or you have special projects that don't require a lot of context, which matters because like, you could be a freelancer who works on something that's a very specific skill and gets really good at it. But if it's really high context requirements, then it's going to be way harder to do that across a works. So I think it's really about like context, whether or not that's a need across different DAOs how much you can benefit from aggregating insights from practicing that thing across DAOs versus going super, super deep and and given DAO. But that's totally a pattern that I'm seeing. And I'm definitely not a monogamous when it comes to work. Which is a fun, I think, thing to explore.
I love this, because you're a great example of somebody who's taking sort of like the opportunities that are inherent or very natural and DAOs and really run with it to some great success. Can you maybe highlight or give us a bit of a window into like, what your day to day looks like working across those orgs? Or maybe even specifically for index rabbit hole are the projects are contributing to right now?
Yeah, I feel like day to day is weird, because it varies. But in a week, the projects that I work on, so yeah, index rabbit hole, Orca, decentology, which was my company, and then the podcast. And effectively what it looks like is doing very specific like meetings and thinking around my own little special projects. I've learned again, that like, lower context, things, if you're doing it across lots of orgs is very much required. And the amount of time that you spend on something, ideally, you're not spending that time trying to get context, because then that's time that you're not doing actual work. So for rabbit hole, that looks like doing Twitter spaces, which is more community building, we've been experimenting with, like some speed dating, which helps people in the community meet each other, all that kind of stuff. And then for index, that's like attending meetings that are like leadership level meetings, also thinking about community meetings, and then doing like one off Twitter spaces in meetings, for planning different initiatives, specifically around diversity, equity and inclusion, because that's my focus within index. So we're doing like a Jedi training, which is sort of like Dei, but with a justice focus, with an org called the ready, which I'm a big fan of so planning, all that kind of stuff. And then like advising, you know, is also meetings, I guess it's a lot of meetings, but it's also going back to the drawing board and like putting pen on paper. That's one of the big things that I personally spend a lot of time doing, especially someone who's not technical. It's a lot of like, okay, writing out what we're going to do with orca, Ben exploring how we can build operating systems. So it's like, how do we create a governance structure? Let's write the governance structure, let's talk to people in the community and see what they think. So that's a lot of the nature of the work that I do. But yeah, I think it definitely depends on on what your your skill set is. But for me, it's mostly meetings, research, and then Google Docs or notion.
I love that call it around context, I usually talk about it in terms of just like the immense challenge of information asymmetry that exists just because there's so much happening and even if you're full time focused on one thing, I truly have a hard time keeping up with all the things that are being built and done and decisions that are being made and Seed Club and so yeah, thinking about how you go apply that across multiple different organizations is daunting. And I think it's where a lot of people kind of maybe bring judgments or critiques to that sort of type of work and that, you know, a lot of valuable work requires you to go deep, but at the same time, there's an incredible value for the sort of connectors and for thinking about DAOs kind of being these, you know, we're not building our own silos or little islands, making sure that there are people that are sort of cross pollinating through various organizations is actually a very, very valuable role. And I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we actually structure organizations so that we have a mixture of like the folks that are going deep and being very core heartbeat owners of the delivery of we're trying to create here at Seed Club, but then also for us, how do we stay in touch with not only our projects, but then of course, the broader ecosystem.
Yeah. And the other thing that I've noticed that's really useful here, if you are working across different projects, is if you're lucky to find collaborators who are really high context, who essentially help you get up to speed. So like for index, one of the people that I work closely with is Meg, and she's amazing. And one of the things that she does like very explicitly, we decided this is ops and keeping up with everything that's happening. Whereas I'm a little bit more on the side of like events and doing these specific things. And so I think a lot of the power there too, is finding people who have the context. And if they are good with it, helping you gain that context when it's necessary, and not have to think about it when it's not. So I think people there are two and creating relationships that help you gain context is super valuable.
Yeah, our team leads we call stewards and Seed Club are, that's their core role is to build context for their growing sort of contributor network. And I think that's a really great call out this sort of like going from zero to contributor, I think, is a really interesting piece to look at. And I think you often hear it from like the terms of DAO onboarding, as an individual who's sitting here, maybe listen to this podcast thinking, wow, I want to test the waters, I want to be a part of an organization. How should people think about that seems like this big challenging sort of friction full thing to get in? But then at the same time, it's maybe not? How are you sort of advising your friends and loved ones who want to get involved to DAOs?
I wish my loved ones wanted to get involved in that. So it'd be amazing. I think you hit the nail on the head that it's big and intimidating and seems hard. But it's also this narrative that it's easy to become a DAO contributor is definitely quite common. I've been thinking about this concept a lot more broadly. Because when you think about like, DAO org design, let's flip the question on its head. If you're a DAO, you have certain work that needs to get done, you can either have current contributors to that work, and a lot of DAOs, like very much still need talent to come in and do that some of them don't. And they're sort of like, holy shit, we have enough people, I, we don't really need more people. But technically, we're supposed to be permissionless. So we'll say you can join us. And then other DAOs, like really do need work. And so I think what we're seeing now, and part of the reason that this tension feels really challenging is that every DAO is at a different stage with the demand that they have for work based on what they're trying to do, and the supply of people that want to work there. And so I think when we think about onboarding, one of the big questions is like, what work needs to get done? And how can we find the right person to do this type of work. And there's some work that's pretty straightforward, let's say video editing, just how I originally got involved in Forefront. That was something that's just like, there was a bounty for it, I stepped up to do it. And then people at Forefront were like, Hey, would you want to do more video stuff. And I was like, Sure, that sounds fun. And so because Forefront was early, that was very feasible. Now they have an application process, and it's quite different. So I think when you're thinking about what you want to do, and joining down all of these things, it's really important to consider the stage that they're at. And like the sheer number of people that are going to be applying or trying to work on something. So an earlier DAO was probably going to be a lot more permissionless, which seems counterintuitive, but I actually think a lot of DAOs early on, adopt a much more, hey, anyone can come into the discord and do work type mentality. And then when you get enough people who want to do that, you're like, oh, no, we actually need a process for figuring out who's doing work and who's not going to be able to get paid for work that they're doing just because we don't have a demand for that. So I think considering the stage is really important there. Later stage DAOs are probably going to have a more formal process for joining. That's not always true. Some of them don't really have any idea of what's going on. But for an organization like index or others, I think one of the big things is about going to meetings if they're open and just seeing what needs to get done like listening in starting to chat with people. And slowly kind of stepping up and finding the people who can help you sense make and and find the right opportunities. Other DAOs have bounty boards like I think every DAO has a very different approach. But I think reaching out to people regardless and the DAO not spending all of their time without doing any research but reaching out once you've done your research and tried to figure things out. People are probably going to be the ones who are going to pulling you in the right direction. So I think that's a really big aspect of all of it.
Yeah, I love that. I think there's this sort of narrative around DAO onboarding that assumes that DAOs have almost like this unlimited desire to onboard people. And that the challenge is really a lack of clarity on information, maybe like the need to gather more information to simplify onboarding. And some of that's more effective than just dropping people into discord. I think there's truth to all of that. But the true friction that I was, I feel as somebody who's you know, deep in the operations these DAOs is that we have things that need to get done, and we have talent. And the matching of those is never, never one to one, right? Like, there's always an imbalance somewhere. And we're lucky in that we have a lot of talent coming in, and our frustrations, how do we go put those people to work effectively, especially as the organization is growing? But I think this idea that open permissionless DAOs want to grow to millions of people? And how do we get everybody in and onboard them effortlessly? It's just completely missing the point. And it leads to this belief, I think that from a contributor standpoint, that it should be easy to get in. And, you know, I think one of our collaborators sort of pointed out that like, what if we looked at DAOs is actually like the most interesting DAOs being the most compelling in demand jobs possible. So like, what that might be like, sir, for Business, School personnel might be an investment banker, think about all the hoops people have to jump through to go and get that incredible job. I think if you're sort of thinking like I am competing with a lot of people, this is something that I want to be a part of, because I love the mission, and there's economic opportunity to build a career here, those are the type of people that are actually going to be effective at making it in and through and somebody who's taking a lot less of a focused direct approach is just kind of gonna get lost. I don't know if that's good or bad, or whatever. But it is, I think, kind of the state and there's this mis guided or sort of misunderstanding, I think of like that top level goal that DAOs are trying to solve that leads to more complications for people to join.
Yeah, and I will say the other element of this is, I think a lot of people have this critique of an application process and a permission system, partially because it feels like well, DAOs should be open to everyone, and creating the same systems as web2 just create sort of like the same problems, you know, where like, you might have certain careers where people from different backgrounds like definitely are not able to access as easily as people from other backgrounds. And of course, you have like race and gender and all these things that play a role. I think the other way to look at that, though, is that if you don't have an intentional onboarding process, where you're trying to curate a group of people, you probably end up having the same issues, because you sort of just put everyone in a room together, and you're like, Hey, everybody, just start working for us, I don't know what that means, you're going to end up with a group of people, that probably doesn't look exactly the way that if you care about really intentionally thinking about background, your skill set or whatever, like, it's very unlikely that by not curating those people, you get the group of people that's ideal for your organization. And so I think we need to be a lot more open to what that really looks like in means, and consider that to find the most ideal group of people like you do have to do curation. And anyone could join a community, I think keeping that open is great. But not everyone's going to be able to get paid for contributions that they make, especially if their contributions that they just come and make without checking and seeing if that's something that's even going to get compensated, like that's a sort of weird narrative that seems to still be common, where it's just like, oh, go to a DAO and start doing whatever work you think is necessary and, you know, somehow get paid for it. It's like, if you did that with any company, that wouldn't work it nowhere. Does that make sense? Because that suggests an unlimited demand for any kind of work. That just doesn't, it's not possible.
That's interesting. I often wonder these conversations are challenged by the fact that the term DAO means so much nothing at all. And so like, like, any meaningful conversation is to start off with a definition and maybe some sort of like gradient between like, decentralized and not, etc, etc. The idea of open permissionless broad networks is extremely exciting and amazing things are going to result from those types of structures. And we've talked about Bankless guys is the Bitcoin is a good example of this, like, even more sort of decentralized and autonomous version of it. And so that narrative, I guess, is broad, accessible, shared financial incentives allow for this emergent behavior and culture habits. And yes, cultural habits, some DAO has it as well. But I think a piece that's like less explored, but potentially more impactful is this idea of high leverage organizations. And you think about what a software done and what smart contracts do. Yes, in one sense, it allows you to have sort of social scalability and you don't have to having to trust so many people and you can kind of grow human coordination much bigger, which is without a doubt exciting, not suggesting it isn't. But on the flip side, it's like what what is software allowed us to do is like small teams like WhatsApp was able to go sell something for a billion dollars or there's 11 people working for them. And I think we're seeing too with like, say a party DAO right like seven, eight contributors created An exceptional amount of value there, does it benefit from having an unlimited number of contributors in there? Probably not. So I think we're gonna see these organizations that still use the same tools, same language, same intentions, but are being for whatever, like the nature of their business may be developing product, you know, at Seed Club, not helpful for us to send 1000 people to work with early stage projects, this is not helpful. They need the right five people. And so depending on where we're going, but I think we're going to see some extremely valuable, extremely impactful organizations that are rather small number of contributors, definitely very permissioned manage culture quite a bit, but are really trying to, like, do what most organizations do and just get the absolute best, most aligned talent you possibly could find. And I think that's interesting. I think that's gonna result in some cool things.
Yeah, I think ultimately, it comes down to this idea that permissionless work is not the core fundamental thing that makes something a DAO, it can happen, that's very possible. But it's not really the fundamental thing. I think it's ownership and ability to have a say, in certain types of decisions. Like I think that ultimately, even something like Seed Club where you can have a community owner is really powerful. Regardless of how you decide who's going to do the core work of what Seed Club fundamentally does, it's interesting to like, start to draw those lines, because the, the analogy I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I got this from Rafa from mirror, who's a wonderful human, I was talking to him about how DAOs are kind of like cities, and he was saying, you know, every city needs a mayor and all these things. And it's been framing a lot of my thinking around what it really means to have a community owned, you know, Project platform, whatever it is. Because ultimately, what you're asking is, who are our citizens that are helping govern. And there are things that mayors and other people that work for a town do and citizens don't need to agree to it or vote on it or whatever, that's fine, we can figure out what that means and what those things are as a community. But at the core fundamental level, I think it's really a question of who are the citizens? And how do you give them the power to govern. And a lot of times, what that's going to look like is you give a very small group of people the power to govern and the power to hire people who also are going to help govern, and run the actual city that needs to get run. But also acknowledging and building a space for citizens, I think is a really interesting way to think about all of this, because citizens don't care about running the actual town. They're not approving building permits, and they shouldn't be. And I feel like in DAOs, for some reason, we're like, oh, no, people should be approving building permits and, and doing sewage checks. And it's like, probably not.
I love that analogy, because it's something that we've been thinking a lot about, as well, where there's sort of this tension between citizens and operators and DAOs, I think, feel, and probably rightfully so the need to cater to both those groups, and probably many more, as well. But I think it is incorrect to think that you would cater to both those groups in the same way. And I think what's interesting when we think about contributors, right, DAO contributors, often we're thinking about DAO operators, people in a core teams, but there's also this sort of like contributor as citizen that I think you're getting at here. And I'm curious, what what do you see is like the doing like, what is the making the participating look like on a citizen level.
So I was talking with Danny Zuckerman, and David Phelps, at ETH Denver. And Danny blew my mind about this, because I've been really trying to, in my mind grapple with this question of delegating power to experts, and people who know a field really, really well and giving power to citizens, people who are you know, whether it's token holders, or all of the contributors and people within the community, like however you define a citizen. And Danny said something that I'm totally going to botch. But it was really interesting, which is basically like, you kind of have two ends of a spectrum, and you need to balance it. One end is all powers given texperts. And the problem that you end up with there is that what experts decide on is not always going to be what's best for the people that they're governing, for whatever reason, like it doesn't matter if that's because they just haven't been forced to take those people into account. Like if you think of if, you know, like a monarch basically says, You're in charge of this because you're an expert. Like, if their mandate doesn't come from the people, then you're going to have this weird situation where they might do things that aren't actually best for people or they can get bribed, you know, you have all these different challenges. On the other end of the spectrum, total populism doesn't work and it's not good for anyone because you don't don't have expertise, you don't have specialization, often the populace is not choosing decisions that are the best ones. And so that doesn't work either. And so what Danny was sort of saying is like, what you want is experts who serve the people and are given their power by the people. That way, they're constantly balancing an act of saying, Okay, I am going to make a decision based on my specialty, my expertise, but I have to also take into account the people that I am here on behalf of and making decisions on behalf of and given power from. And so by putting people in that like balancing place, you end up with something that feels a lot better. My basic, and this is definitely not the entire thing that citizens should be doing. I don't think I think there's more than that. But I think one of the main ones is giving different people the power to make decisions on behalf of them and holding those people accountable. And so I think we're going to start to see a lot of orgs that are like, Hey, we're going to delegate power to you to do this. And we're going to delegate these people this power. And that's going to be interesting. What I am anticipating is going to happen is there's not going to be enough transparency around those things. I have already seen this happen in orgs. And the problem is that that second piece of accountability matters a lot too. So there's delegating, and then there's holding people accountable to doing the things that they said they're going to do or acting on behalf of the people. And I think that's like the the piece that's going to be really, really important. Because from there, you end up having people who are able to make decisions for the group, who are able to think about those trade offs and be transparent about those trade offs. And citizens can keep following those things like this is also why Think content around governance is going to be really interesting. Like you've already seen certain DAOs have podcasts about governance forums, I think that's really cool. But yeah, to me, those are some of the really important aspects of what citizens can do. I'm curious if there are other things that you think would fit in there?
Yeah, I mean, because I think like, again, depending on the type of organization like that citizens, like one of the role of citizens would just be living their lives, right? And so what is it what is living your life within that DAO look like? And I think for me, service DAOs, maybe index, maybe there's like, a lot less hanging out going on there or value through there. I don't know enough about it. But I'll just make that broad assumption, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Whereas maybe on the flip side, you look at something like friends with benefits, which is very much a social club. And then like, the core thing is just kind of living your life and getting the benefits of the education. Maybe that's more a member. And I think citizen is almost somebody who's taking more of an active desire to participate in the civic life of an organization, where I get hung up in my head a little bit is like, Well, how do we actually maybe they look more like a board, right? So it's like a cross between like, the populace and a board or they're in charge of the your DAO will be stronger, the more competent your citizenry, or the more thoughtful your citizenry are. So how do we think about onboarding new people into into that type of role? Or at least incentivizing that because inherent to contributing a DAOs? Is this idea that you sort of earn ownership? Listen, in my worldview? And but do we have a similar sort of structure for people who are maybe not coming into contribute on a work type basis, but that would fill a good role of like, citizen or gov participant? So I don't have a good answer for that.
I think using platforms as the other thing by existing and FWB, you're basically using it and you're giving it value. If no one existed there, it wouldn't matter. And it's interesting, because I feel like there's been a lot of discussion about who should be a recipient of an airdrop in a lot of the airdrops that have happened. And a lot of platforms have, of course, chosen to give users a large portion of airdrops. And so I do think this question of like, Are you a citizen of ENS by using ENS? And is using ENS actually part of what makes you a really good citizen? is an interesting question. And there's a lot of debate or some debate at least about whether or not that's true, and to what degree users quote unquote, create value. I personally think that users should be recipients of airdrops, I think that they do create value. But I think that would probably be that, to me is like my spin on exactly what you're saying.
Yeah, I think that is an interesting debate. And I think like most things, it's probably both the yes and type thing. I think you had a wonderful tweet seems very relevant to this conversation. And I'm just gonna quote you because that's fun. Lots of orgs outsourcing work to their communities and calling themselves a DAO. I'm not a fan of gatekeeping terminology mean either. But if you're going to say your DAO, please give your community real power. Can you unpack that a little bit? Like what was the intention behind that? And why is it so important? Do you think to draw that line?
I see two different things happening right now. One is companies that are progressively decentralizing and to is orgs that started off as DAOs realize that decentralized work was hard and sometimes fallback to centralized structures and hierarchies. What I'm learning when I'm talking to people from the ready, which is like a self management consulting company. I'm a huge fan of I know you've listened to brave new work, I think they have a great podcast anyway. I've talked with them a lot talking with people who are like experts in sociocracy. I'm learning how much it is true, that if you want the benefits of decentralization, you actually need to take on some of the things that are scary. Having this like decentralization as a means of signaling that you're decentralized, but not really being decentralized is something that I think happens a lot in this space, because we think decentralization is a virtue. And I think that's fine. But there are actual benefits to decentralizing as an organization. And I think that in an effort to make people think we're decentralized, we're like, oh, we're a DAO, we're decentralized, blah, blah, blah. But there's this lack of true power. And a lot of communities that I'm seeing where companies that are progressive decentralizing or DAOs, that have sort of swung far more to the centralization side, end up kind of using their community as outsourced freelancers who they can, like, throw a bone to, to make them feel engaged. And I just think that's not the vibe. I mean, I think first of all, we do that, because people don't fully want to give power over which I completely understand. It's like, you've built this little town. And now you have all these citizens who have come in and you're like, oh, do I trust you to make decisions and have control over my baby? I don't know. And I think that's very, okay. But I think a lot of communities or or I suppose, like core teams, or leaders or whatever, need to sit with that discomfort, and at least acknowledge that a lot of them are not giving control to a community because they're scared to do that. One of the things that Aaron Dignan on the Brave New York podcast said that, like has always stuck with me is that they see this a lot in companies that want to be more self managing. Or they'll have managers who are like, Yeah, everybody's on this boat, and I just need everybody to like, paddle harder, you know, like, this is I just need everybody to work harder, and this will be fine. And I'll tell them what to do. And it's like, no, you need to give them all speedboats, but you don't want to do that, because you're afraid of what that would look like. And I think that's again, like totally okay. But if you're going to call yourself a decentralized organization, you need to be giving your your community speedboats, not like tossing them a paddle and being like, technically you're doing work. And I think that's where to me drawing on self managing orgs and all the stuff that they they've done at the ready. And you know, sociocracy for all and others is really valuable because they see this happen all the time. And they're not helping organizations decentralize, just to be like, Oh, we're technically decentralized. They're doing it because there's a there's an economic business case for giving people the autonomy to do their own work and not have hierarchical structures. And so they've done a lot of like the human thinking about how to do that. Whereas I think we're very much coming from like a protocol decentralization approach, where it's like, well, Bitcoin is decentralized and permissionless, we should, we should just try to emulate that. Humans are not computers, though. So like, you need better systems for doing that. But yeah.
So my spicy take of the week that got a bunch of attention is this the tweet that I sent that said, we need more DAOs, not more DAO toolings. And I think underneath that is exactly what you've, I think more eloquently described here, which is that we are not computers, it is not technology that's limiting our ability to really be effective in these organizations. I think it's a failure of imagination and great examples on one side, and also like a failure to really bring the learning that we've had over the last number of decades through so many different types of organizations and big fans of already as well as self management, etc. To figure out the complicated human stuff, right, which is like, how do you bring people together? How do you get aligned? How do you make decisions? How do you? And I love that idea of like, the aura versus the powerboat? Because, yeah, like if, if you truly believe that you have incredibly talented people, and you truly believe that you have this big goal adventure mission to go achieve? Why would you not give people the most powerful tools possible? Well, the reason you won is is fear or other human things that we need to kind of address. So I think that that's like probably DAO onboarding on one side. And like this idea of, yeah, like, what is it? That's actually the limiting factor in the growth of DAOs today, I think are just completely misinterpreted by folks that are not deep in the space. And if we can just get our heads around that and start solving those hard problems, we're gonna see a lot more progress.
And this is also I think, back to this question of onboarding and choosing people. You don't want every single person to have a speedboat like you do want people who you know are aligned with your values and necessary for the org to do X Y Z like you need the right people to have a speedboat. And I think that's where this, these two very commonly held beliefs around permissionless work. And I want to be decentralized but not really sort of come and kind of conflict with each other slash are each other's problem like this is a self fulfilling, not good cycle, because people don't want to have more selective power delegation, let's say or just be more selective about who has a speedboat. And so they don't want to give people speed boats, rightfully so like, you don't want to give speed boats to every single person who's doing anything ever. But I think it all comes back to that. So to me, like, a lot of the stuff is really about kind of like personal org, personal hygiene, but for orgs. Or it's like, if you don't solve one problem, you create this other problem that makes this other thing not work. And I think we need to be thinking really deeply about a lot of these things and experimenting with different things. Because otherwise, we can't we can't build on on foundations in a way that's helpful.
Yeah, I think this idea I've been toying with, and I get a variety of opinions on it, and it's super interested in your take, you know, I think there's like, the product that a DAO might be building, and then there's the DAO , and I think it's probably helpful to look at both of those as products, or at least the places where innovation will create value. And I think, to your point, yeah, like the failure to solve or to address organizational issues, they don't go away, and they become limiting factors. And if I look, at least what we're building at Seed Club is we're building a network, it's a sense making network that projects plug into contributors plug into and collectively we're incentivized to do good for those members. And, but our job is to sort of build build that network. And that means many different things. But one of those is, is definitely like this focus on helping us collectively work better. And if we do not invest in and think about and continuously put sort of resources towards trying to to reduce that friction, or at least become more effective, we're not going to be able to create a valuable network, and we're not going to be able to sort of achieve the big goals that we're after.
Totally. And the other thing that I think people don't think a lot about is that when you join, like a traditional hierarchical org, you don't have a say in how things are run. You don't have a say, and everything that's going on. And I think a lot of people mistake the conversation around DAOs and structures, and all that kind of stuff for sort of like useless meandering or just like, thinking about all the things that are going on. And and just like, I don't know, I've see on Twitter, you know, like philosophizing for No, no, apparently good reason. I think a lot of this is actually incredibly useful. And part of the reason is that what you're seeing is, large groups of people who've never had a say in how their organizations are run are designed, finally having a voice and coming to their own conclusions. And I think that's really powerful. And the fact that we're doing it out loud together, builds this narrative, that you actually do have the power to make decisions within your organization, to have a say in how it's how it's sort of structured. I don't know, I think that there's something really amazing too, that that, I hope continues, because sure, like I think people need to be doing work, I think a lot of people are doing work. And if you just want to like hypothesize about DAOs, I think that's fine, you're probably not going to get paid by a DAO for doing that anyways, unless you're specifically doing or design work, which I think there's a lot of value in. So it's a really interesting narrative that I'm seeing pop up a little bit, but I don't necessarily think is quite the way to think about it.
Putting that into context is probably important. Because if you think about the sheer volume of human beings, percentage of human beings who are working in hierarchical structures versus who are not, it's massively disproportionate. And, and so like, we have a long way to go and thinking out loud together to even get to remote parity with through the the amount of experience that has been had in these hierarchical structures. So yeah, I think like the work of exploring that intellectually and practically is incredibly valuable. And for those of us that are sort of in the ecosystem, and in the echo chamber, it's probably going to seem very loud and repeating. And but I think keeping that in mind that there's sort of this like, adoption of DAOs will necessarily have more space, more voices going through that process of self exploration in the broader context. And that that is ultimately good, and we should probably be encouraging that and creating more space for it.
100% Because what happens if we don't do that and don't have open conversations and don't articulate not just why these things matter. But how we could potentially see this through, I think what we end up with is falling back to hierarchy, because it's what's familiar. Like I think a lot of decentralized organizing is really uncomfortable for people because you don't have someone some boss to point to or CEO to be like, Oh, they're the ones making the wrong calls, and that's affecting me. Instead, it's like, no, we're all supposed to be owners, and we all have a voice. And if this system sucks, it's our place and our responsibility to fix it, because no one's going to fix it for us. And I think that's really, really uncomfortable, because you have to sit with it. And you also have to find the solutions for it. And if we don't have conversations about how we do that, and the fact that we're doing that, I think what we end up doing is falling back to hierarchy, because it's just what we know work. So we're like, Oh, we got to get this thing done. Let's just do XY and Z. Because most people have been trained for decades to work that way.
So we've sort of been experiencing this in various ways as our team sort of grows and thinking through like decision making, and how do we navigate the complexities of trying to make sense with a growing team and a growing level of complexity that existed in our business more generally. And what we found is actually incredibly powerful is structure. And I think there's almost a miss belief that structure and hierarchy are the same thing. And I think they very much aren't, they can be and I think the default is that they are reticence to have an org chart in Seed Club, when I look back on it now is just like, huge mistake, absolutely huge mistake, the power that has come from having a quote unquote, org chart, which doesn't look like there's a lot more circles in this org chart than you would have an additional chart. I think that's all DAO org charts. But just having that sort of like, this is what I am responsible for this and how it fits into the broader things. And then clarifying specifically that that structure is about facilitating getting work done. And our stewards are about helping to facilitate that that work getting done, not the decision maker, or boss, etc, has relieved a lot of pressure and tension and back and forth within our team. And yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on structure as an essential part of being a contributor, or sort of building a DAO.
I have two favorite analogies for why structure matters. One comes from Ted Rao, who wrote a book called many voices, one song. And the fundamental thing there is just like, if you're singing a song with a bunch of people, and you're all singing a different song, that is not going to go well. It's gonna sound terrible, and you're not really singing a song, everybody's singing something different. And so I think a lot of structure is about making sure that everybody's singing the same song. The other one that comes to mind is playing a game where there are no rules, which just creates chaos. Like, again, you don't, if you have no idea what you don't even know what game you're playing, there are no rules, then you're not going to get any type of emergence. Emergence only comes from when everybody has agreed on the set of rules for the game. You consent to those set of rules effectively by playing the game. And then people have the ability to think about strategy and, and all these different things. But without a basic set of rules, you have no, no thing to go off of, and you're not going to actually have any quality of emergence. That's interesting. And I think this is the big thing that people just completely miss. Like they think that emergence comes out of pure decentralization, and absolutely no structure. And Aaron Dignan, again, from the brave new work podcast is like always sort of sounding this alarm that that is just never the case. Like emergence only comes when you have enough structure. That is the the sort of foundation that these things can blossom from.
There's a great book called Finite and Infinite games, that is broad exploration of philosophizing on this topic. So if you haven't given that top top 10 Read in this sort of general direction, I'm here. So coming up on the hour here, I look to you as somebody who has really just dove headfirst into being a contributor into DAOs, you're an entrepreneur, you have this little figured out type vibe, which I think makes you successful, whatever you go to. But I think one of the big roles that we have as early contributors is trying to make the path for future contributors a lot easier. And I want to talk about structure. We talked about solving some of the basic problems. We had Patti from FWB just talking about the barriers of not having healthcare, clarity around how to do health care, there's all these sort of things that are being solved. I'm curious, like, what is the the magic wand that you are if you wave your magic wand, what do we solve to make it easier for the next batch of contributors to really lean into the DAO space?
I've been thinking a lot about how important it is to articulate or explicitly state things. And I think one of the most important things that you can state to people who are joining an organization, and I think also there's a brave new work podcast episode about this, you can tell him in my like serious obsession with Brave New Work space. Anyway, onboarding is uncomfortable. When you're doing it into a self managing organization, again, because you don't have a boss, you don't necessarily have someone to guide you. I think those are all things that like DAOs can get out in some way. But I think acknowledging up front that moving and shifting your mindset into one that's required for self managing org is not easy. And it's going to be kind of painful is really valuable. Because otherwise people go into an org, and they're like, Oh, amazing, I can do whatever work I want, I can get paid for doing it. You know, I, this is like, fantastic. And the reality is that none of that's true in the way that you'd think it is, like, yes, those things are true, but not quite. And I think being very open and honest about those caveats and about the discomfort, frankly, of onboarding yourself, because no one's gonna onboard you into these orgs is one of the most important things, because then when I go in, and it kind of sucks, I'm like, Oh, I'm supposed to feel this way, I have a very simple example of this that I absolutely loved. But that is kind of unrelated, but somewhat related. When I joined FWB, the welcome message was like, Hey, we have a lot of channels, it's going to be very overwhelming. mute them all, except for a few. By saying that up front, they took away this feeling of like, holy shit, I should be keeping up with all of this stuff. And I think it's the same way with self managing orgs. Because even if I'm overwhelmed, or even if I uncomfortable from onboarding myself, I can be like, Oh, no, it's supposed to be this way. This is okay. And I think that matters a lot more than we realize.
Absolutely adore that answer. I think that's such a useful framing. And I think we can even extrapolate that out broader to the entire space. And say like that, managing expectations is such an important thing for anybody who's taking even a leadership or a vocal role in the space today. Because the deeper you are in the world, the more that sort of reality just explained is apparent across the entire structure, right there is, it is awkward, it is challenging, there's still friction, things aren't figured out, we're still within this broader gray area of operating, what like what like, and, you know, I joke all the time, and just about how my brain breaks daily, just trying to figure this sort of stuff out. And so I think as this way crashes, right, or sweeps us up, I think we're in the sweeping up phase of DAOs, it's very easy for people to think that more things have been figured out. And so I think the reality is that more things haven't been figured out the work to be done today is to be a part of figuring it out. If that doesn't appeal to you, probably not the thing to go jump into just yet. Give it a few years, and your skills will probably be very valuable over here. I think a lot of our learns, if we go back to I don't know, when we first met and you think about how the world has changed from then till now it is very, very, very difficult to wrap your head around.
Oh, yeah. And if you are sold on a version of reality that's like, so different from the actual version of reality that exists. I just think it's a much more painful process. Whereas if you recognize or told at least like 80% of what's actually happening, at least you can go in and kind of like consent to the idea that you're going to immerse yourself fully in that reality. Because no one really does web three, like kinda, you know, you sort of either like curious or you're like, Oops, I, this is my personality now. And so I think like, being very upfront about what that entails is very powerful. Otherwise, it's just like, it's not pleasant for anyone.
The insight that is wrapped up into that one kind of funny, but very deep statement of no one does web three kinda I think is immense. And I love that a lot. Chase, this conversation has blown my mind on many different ways. I had high expectations, you completely crushed them. Where can people find out more about you? And can you please, please, please plug your podcast?
Well, I appreciate this. This has been a very fun conversation. I'm on Twitter @chaserchapman. There's like an arm between my middle name doesn't even start with a R just like Google. And then I have a podcast called "on the other side", which you can find on Spotify and Apple podcast and all that stuff. Just you were one of my first guests. So we'll have to do a follow up conversation. I'm finishing up like a DAO mini series right now, which is funny. We're both doing mini series at the same time. But after that, I'll have to have you on because this is so fun shot.
Amazing Chase, thank you so much for sharing your insight with us and highly recommend on the other side and just give us a follow up. She thinks out loud works out loud, and there's an immense amount of value that gets shared on it on a daily basis and some spicy takes. We like the spicy takes.
The spicy takes Yes. Thanks much for having me on Jess.