Episode 43: Aaron Soskin | Govrn - Contribution Management & Bear Market DAOs
Newsletter Copy?
Status
Timestamps
1:55 - 7:00 - Aaron’s introduction and inspirations behind working on Govrn
7:00 - 17:18 The flaws Aaron began to notice in typical organizations/DAOs
17:18 - 24:04 “Anything that Governs you, You should be able to Govern” How Govrn assists with better governance.
24:04 - 30:35 How does Govrn work for users?
30:35 - 36:55 More indepth conversation on the Govrn Contribution Graphs, and how other Web3 projects utilize graphs for reputation
36:55 - 41:24 Empowering Contributors in a Bear Market
41:24 - End - Aaron’s Crypto Inspirations. The people who inspired Aaron to be in Crypt
Transcriptions
Govrn Project
Humpty: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative Web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with Bankless DAO, A movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
Bankless DAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens and today we are talking with Aaron Soskin, founder of Govrn. We kick off our discussion with an intro to Aaron's journey into Web3 and his introduction to DAOs. He recalls immediately seeing opportunities in how DAOs can be used to reorganize communities and political structures.
As Aaron puts it, the ultimate usage of DAOs is self-organizing and self governance. If we could take this concept and apply it to our everyday lives, then we would truly be using the technology to its full potential. This eventually led him to launch Govrn, a platform where you can track, record, and manage your DAO contributions. Aaron believes DAOs are not made up of people, but instead contributions, and that these contributions belong to individual contributors and not the DAO. Govrn allows you to provably verify your ownership of your contributions across DAOs. This is a fascinating discussion, so without further ado, let's get started.
Aaron: Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here. Happy to be part of this conversation. So, hey, Yeah, everyone, I am Erin Soskin. Super nice to meet you all. The founder of Govrn I have been in the space for about four or five years now, I think. I think I got, I learned about crypto for the first time in 2017 I wanna say maybe 2018. You can find me at, at Aaron Soskin or @GovrnHQ on Twitter. And in person you can usually find me skiing in the mountains. That's like where I am, although I currently am living in New York. But I do love to be outside. I love to get out in the mountains, uh, and listen to some good music. As we were previously talking about. I, uh, got into the space about, I learned about crypto for the first time in my old job actually. They were like teaching us about like new technologies and they taught us about crypto and I became fascinated. It was like immediately fascinated. This was probably in 2017, 2018. 2017 is when I first learned about it. Sorry. And I started trying to get my hands on any material I could find. I was like, just like all struck by this new technology, these new ideas, and how to apply them to like our daily life. There was like zero podcasts out there. Back then. I remember I was like, there was like eight podcasts I was listening to like, and there was like 10 followers. Like I would like email the guy being like, Hey, can you put this guest on? He is like, Sure. There was just like no one, It was just like such a small. And then about a year into learning about crypto, I learned about DAOs. And then once I learned about DAOs, it was just game over for me. Like that was all that mattered to me. I literally couldn't think about anything else. The concept just was so fascinating about how DAOs could really transform the way that we organized. And everywhere that I looked, everywhere that I went, I just saw people organizing. I saw people coordinating and I just like saw flaws and I was like, how it, It was mind boggling to me. Once you like see the light, how all these old institutions, how these old things that are run are still, how that's still the default. It just didn't make sense. And so I spent pretty much all of my time trying to learn as much as I like. That became what I focused on, and that was about the end, 2017, early 2018, I just spent all my time learning about DAOs, and spent all my time trying to understand what DAOs were being built. That was when there was like legit, the only DAO was like the DAO and that had been like a, a, you know, a big learning experience, let's call it. And the tools out there, there's like three different tools out there. All like, nothing was like deployed live yet. I spend started spending all my time learning about DAOs and what fascinated me the most was how we could apply DAOs to reorganize our communities, to reorganize our political structures, our civic structures, cuz that to me is the ultimate use case.
The ultimate use case of DAOs is self-organizing and self-governance. And so everywhere I looked was like how do we enable, like how like this, if you can take self-governance and apply it to like the IRL world over our, our given lives Then we are, we are fulfilling the full vision of DAOs and we are like truly taking this technology to the nth degree to like what it's like fully, fully capable of. So that's how I got started about in 2019. I, you know, I started working on a couple ideas in 2018 on the aside part-time, just like trying to learn as much as I could about DAOs. And then 2019 we started Govrn, which was basically the idea of trying to bring DAOs, right? How do we bring DAOs to civic engagement. How do we bring DAOs to a bunch of different things And what we've found on this journey, and this is like the big unlock we've had, and I think what we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about today was that what we have found on this journey and what we've transitioned to is the real unlock of DAOs is not to like build tools for like the center of an organization for like a community, but it's actually to build tools for the DAO contributors, right? That we've like thought about DAOs, we've thought about communities incorrectly for years, for bajillions of years, which is that we imagine there's this like center of the community or the center of the organization that we have to build tools for or we have to build, empower the center of the organization to then run a better organization. But the real superpower of DAOs Is not necessarily worrying about empowering the core, but looking at the actual members of an organization, looking at the actual contributors of an organization of a community and empowering them, which then bubbles up to the DAO. Right? And like that's, that's kind of, I, you know, I'm, I might be getting a little ahead of myself here in the question Humpty, but that's what we've spent the last two years, You know, after a year of trying to empower, like, quote unquote the traditional organization, we realized and learned like, Oh, we have been looking at this the wrong way completely. There is no center of the organization. You can't build tools for a center that doesn't exist. The real unlock with DAOs, the real power here is to focus on the contributors or the constituents. How do you build tools to make them more powerful, to help them coordinate with one, with one among one among each other. And that is where we spent the last two years focusing, empowering contributors to better empower the DAO. So long winded answer, I I'll stop there for a second though.
Humpty: No, that's wonderful. If anything, I think you've presented nicely what we're gonna be talking about today. So you're doing a wonderful job at hosting and you know, and that way we could start breaking these DAO and unpacking them, right? Little by little. One thing that I, Here, You say here, and I, I, I wanna start rewinding a little bit to what, what, what you were just saying now, and that is that maybe a year into your crypto journey, you learn about DAOs, and as you learn about DAOs and how they organize, you saw some of those flaws. Maybe we can start looking and unpacking that for a little bit in terms of like maybe some of the flaws that existed then and maybe some of the flaws that have carried over through today that you've seen. And then when we start framing the discussion around how the building for contributors and not the core of a DAO is how we can solve some of these challenges.
Aaron: Yeah are you asking for the flaws of like, traditional organizations that we, I saw that got me into DAOs or like the first DAOs and like what, and what those flaws were?
Humpty: Why don't we briefly touch on both? Why don't we briefly touch on like, you know, how traditional organizations are organized and then maybe even like some of the maybe, things that have carried over into how we organize DAOs that may be influenced by that, or may just be some new challenges because, you know, DAOs are such an emergent thing anyway.
Aaron: Yeah, that Yeah. Well I can definitely touch on both cause I actually think it, like, our journey is pretty indicative of how like we, we've figured out these learnings. So when we were first, I was like first enamored by DAOs. I started my journey in two ways. One, I started like jumping headfirst into the DAO space. And I joined communities like Raid Guild and I joined Medi Cartel for instance. And these were like the first two DAOs I really learned about. I went to ETHDenver and was like learning about all these different DAOs and was being like an active participant. And that's like my journey into DAO Land. And the second way was like I was looking at all these traditional organizations or communities and seeing the problems that they were happening, Okay? And a lot of the time when I was working, when I was looking at these traditional organizations or traditional communities, I was thinking through how does like DAOs or how does blockchains help empower these things. Like a big line that was used when I was getting into crypto was that crypto or blockchain Is a hammer that's looking for a nail, right? Like that's what everyone was like, that was like a common line back then. They're like, There isn't a problem that's actually solving. And I was like, that's just not true There is real problems that it is solved. And what I figured a better way was is like let's look at the traditional organizations that we have problems with, find what is not working about them, and see if we can build tools to help solve those problem, that leverage the unique properties of blockchain Or crypto.
So I started this work and like I said, what what my goal is, is I think DAOs I think DAOs are going to change the way that we govern ourselves, not just our digital communities, but all of our communities. I think we're gonna belong to millions of DAOs in the future, not just one or two, but millions of DAOs and like the, the cross pollination, The cross sections of all these different DAOs that you belong to are gonna help us govern our real spaces, our physical spaces. And our digital spaces and that those will like slowly become one and the same. And that the same way that software has eaten the world, DAOs will eat the world. So I think it's just gonna totally change the way we're thinking about things. And so when, when I started looking at traditional organizations, and again i was really fascinated by civic structures, irl, community structures and politics, lo local politics, I started looking at ways that constituents of a group, constituents of a city could organize together to empower like build tools to empower themselves to better self-organize, right? I wasn't necessarily looking at how to build tools that helps like a mayor govern their city better. Rather, how do you build tools that helps constituents better manage and organize amongst each other, right? And that have like a, or self-organized group of citizens can also work in tandem with a mayor to make a more productive city. And so that was this first journey I started on with like traditional organizations.
Simultaneously, I was contributing to organizations like Meta Cartel. I was working on things like Raid Guild and I was experiencing some of the, the, what was and wasn't working. And when I was joining those organizations back in, back in 2018, 2019, Everything was experimental. It was crazy like it was like this, weird cambrian explosion of new ideas. Nothing was off limits. Like there was an idea People were just going out and doing it right. There wasn't like the governance processes were much simpler. We were like funding a lot of different things Everyone was willing to experiment in any kind of way, and this kind of ability of just people making contributions that they thought were valuable was the super cool emergent thing that was happening. And because everybody had a vote in how the organization was run, people felt a lot more shared responsibility and actually progressing things forward, Right? Nothing was off limits and back then what a lot of the problems were with DAOs was the role of communication, right? How do we communicate to each other the work that each other is doing? And that's why discord became really big. That's why discord started to become really big. It became a lot about how do we disseminate information, the type of things we're gonna work on. Back then, it was really a popular to have very regular weekly meetings for your DAO or monthly meetings so they get everyone on the same page. There was a very strong synchronous action to it all, and that was like a very powerful force. What happened in the normal DAO world is as things started to scale, as everyone from the first two years of DAO started to split off and do their own projects, Right? It became a lot harder to have these touch points of synchrony, of synchronous. Right. It became a lot harder to tell everybody else what it was that you were working on. It became really harder to coordinate the types of things that we were all working on. And you know, what ended up happening is a lot of people started to build tools that empowered these specific subsets of projects, Right? But it didn't build a lot of tools on how the subsets of projects, how all of these different nodes actually still can coordinate with one another, right? Like I was in MetaCartel with a hundred or so people. Out of those a hundred people, there's probably about 50 new projects that have spun up out of MetaCartel, all like basically who I learned from the medical cartel journey, but have now doing all these amazing cool projects and cool things, there's very hard ways for us to coordinate amongst one each, once another On how to communicate all these different learnings that we're having, all these different ideas that are going on at the same time. Right? And all the tools that are now coming out are much more how do you help projects within a silo better disseminate information within the silo? Again, from a very core out, from a very middle out ideology. In my opinion, that was because what was really true in the early days of DAOs is that you needed a couple people to really push the bill forward. Like in the early first two years of DAOs, there was not that many people that were like working on DAOs. So what you had to do is you had this like 90 20 power dynamic 90 10 power dynamic where the middle 10% of people were creating 90% of the value for everyone else to benefit from. And that worked for a very long period of time. And then we built all these tooling to better empower core contributors, community managers to better like manage their DAO structures. Right? So that was the first phase that was going on . Now bring you back over to what we were doing on the other side of government, which is understanding how to bring DAOs to politics, right? Or civic engagement. And now in that stream of life, we were looking at how to empower constituents, right? Which is not necessarily the core group. This is the people making passive contributions, right? This is the people living in a city that do really small things every now and then to empower. Their community, how do we build tools to help empower them to self govern? And we are exploring that realm of like contributor constituent empowerment, and about a year. We kind of put the two together and we're like, whoa, this is an unmet space. If you flip the two narratives, right, if you took what was being built in the DAOs space right now, and you applied it to politic or you applied it to civic engagement world, it wouldn't necessarily be in focusing on the constituents or the contributors. And likewise, if you looked at what we were building, which is in focus on empowering the constituents or contributors and took it over to the DAO space. You'd see this whole thing that was missing, right? That we weren't spending enough time building tools to empower normal bottom of the pyramid constituents and contributors. And we had this huge unlock, which is that, oh, we've been thinking like, I get why the DAO space grew like it did cuz there was a concentrated few core members of people that were focused on really pushing the the field forward and were quite successful in pushing the field forward like that's what they were doing. That when people are like, Hey, how do you push the field forward better? They're like, as a community manager, meaning these are the tools that I need to better Push this field forward, but if you looked at the IL or physical space, those weren't necessarily the tools that you should be building. If you went to like the housing association Carmichael, like California, they would be asking for a different set of tools, and that's the questions we had been asking And so we brought the problems that we saw in the IRL space over to the DAO space and we said hey, these are kind of the ideas that we've been having and we've been seeing in IRL communities, in physical meet space communities, Do you do these proms exist in DAOs? and we found out they do they like overwhelmingly do that. And In fact we had been seen, in my opinion, a huge centralization of coordination, a huge centralization of meat because we trust we had these really trusted intermediaries. These trusted core contributors and community managers that had been pushing the field forward. But now we're seeing a world where we're distrusting our community managers a lot more, not because they're distrustful but because the space is bigger. We have gone beyond Dunbar's number and we just can't know everyone.
Like back two years ago the hundred percent DAO it was easy to know everyone. Now we're working on DAOs the size of a thousand that have like 20 different community managers. It's impossible to know these people and we're working from a different standpoint of not distrust, but trust is not assumed. So, Now these tools that focus a lot more empowering DAO contributors have risen to the forefront and become a lot more powerful and so it was really the merging of these two Like we saw the problems in the DAO space, we saw the problems in the IRL space and once we put the two together, we saw this huge unlock of like something that went just people weren't considering yet cuz you didn't need to.
Humpty: Yeah, that's wonderful. I think what you've done here is you've also presented nicely, or at least positioned nicely the conversation to talk about Govrn directly. So with some of the things that you mentioned right now was, you know, in terms of how do we empower these contributors in particular, the passive contributor passive contributions, talking about centralization of power, talking about trusted inter intermediaries You know, I guess this is something that I think our, one of your statements at Govrn really captures and that is anything that governs you, you should be able to govern Right? So in terms of like how Govrn the platform sees the representation or the empowerment of contributions and contributors, how is that different from how we're doing it today? And you know, really I, it seems like a lot of this is informed by learnings that have been happening, but how is this continuing to, I guess adapt to this scaling and changing environment that our DAOs.
Aaron: Yeah, that's a great question. So we like, that was a what we, We love this idea that anything that governs you, you should be able to govern, right? It's like, it's this really elegant and circular way of understanding, accountability. And we talk in this world a lot about decentralization and I think we are over, we're losing the forest in the trees here. Decentralization can mean a couple things to me. Decentralization is all about accountability of power, right? You decentralize something because it makes it harder for a bad actor to take control of the system, and in my opinion, like I think the framework that Spencer Graham has provided with this anti capture framework is really how we should be thinking about decentralization. Decentralization doesn't just mean increasing nodes in a network, in my mind, it's any way you can provide prevent capture Or make it a capture resistant organization. And that can mean a couple things. It can mean increasing the amount of nodes in a network. Yeah. Like i e traditional decentralization, or in my opinion, it's increasing accountability of your leaders. I think something that we have seen in this space, which I don't necessarily disagree with, is that leaders will emerge no matter what, You can't stop this from happening. In fact, we kind of need leaders. My only issue is that when leaders have no accountability, right? Or that you are tied or like you are more accountable to the leader. Uh, the, then the leader is to you, right? So how do you focus on a world where anything that governs you, you can govern as well? And what we focus on is the idea of let's, some people are focused on increasing nodes in a network. We focus on ways to make things more accountable. And what we have found, what are the big learnings that I discovered about a year or two into the DAO? Was that the ultimate form of accountability? The ultimate form of accountability is what we were, what I've been referring to is exit rights or the freedom to leave an organization. It was an idea that was really introduced me i this mechanism called rage quitting. If you're not familiar with rage quitting, it's a property of molochDAO structures, where at any given point, like if you pass, you submit a proposal that wants to be passed, the proposal passes and I disagree. I have a grace period to quit the DAO rage, quit the DAO, and get my proportion of the treasury back. I can exchange my shares for the treasure, for the amount of treasury I have given at any point in time. So it gives me ultimate exit rights of an organization mind, experiment or thought experiment that I used to play with Peter Pan. If you know Peter Pan was if you lived in an authoritarian government. If you lived in a dictatorship, but you could rage quit the nation state at any point in time, does that make it a dictatorship or does that make it inherently bad, Right? So how do we work to create ways where you have ultimate exit rights over a community. That I think is what we've now adopted is a much better way to understand decentralization and a much better way to make decent the dream of decentralization a lot more realistic by not just focusing on increasing nodes in the network, but giving people unalienable exit rights from an organization because when you do that, you have made people self sovereign and you've given them ultimate power. Now, you could have someone that is governing you, but if you can exit the community or organization, or you can exit whatever group it is that you are a part of, at any point in time with zero churn, with zero issues, In that case, you have now created accountability because the leader makes a decision. The, what I like to say is like, let's say we're all, let's say we are all in this Twitter spaces right now, and hunting starts becoming a huge dictator and they are taking control. They're not letting anyone else talk, they're tick people off, they disagree with them. If all of us have the ability to like what I call forking, this like Twitter spaces and rage quick to that Twitter spaces, that would be fine right? We could just be like, You know what, like, you know what Humpty we're done with you, we're just gonna fork and rage quit and join this other organization. And there's two ways to remove a bad actor from power right? And this is like the two examples I think Rage Quit is the one side of the coin. And the other side of the coin is actually impeachment. So we in this Twitter spaces, have formed an organization. Humpty is a bad actor and we're gonna try to impeach Humpty. That's really hard to do, like it's really hard to remove you from the organization. What is a lot easier is to get everybody in the organization to quit and start a new one right? It's a lot easier to remove the power from the actor than the actor from the power. And that's what we like are really into this idea of forking and exit rights. And that's like, I think, a better version of what we're we're talking about here. If you are a bad actor, instead of trying to remove you from the situation, we remove the situation from you. So we rage quick, we fork, we started new Twitter spaces without Humpty. The crazy thing is, the way that game theory works is we don't even have to exercise this right, the prison's dilemma, the payoffs change just by having another option. So you, as our leader hunting, once we have the option to fork and rage quit to that fork whenever we want, it forces you to now become a better actor. Just by the fact, the sheer fact that we have this other option. And that is mind blowing, Like that is unreal sick that we don't even have to exercise the option. But just the fact that it is easy with the press of a button we have makes you a good actor. And that's what what we say when anything that governs you, you should be able to govern. We want you to be in control of all of your assets. It's all of the work that you do. We want you to be a self sovereign individual. Someone that's able to be autonomous that can coordinate you. Without a leader so that when the leader is governing you, you have the option to foren rage quit. Cause once you do that, now your leader has to be accountable to you. You don't have to have any other accountability checks. The ultimate accountability checks is the ability to foren rage quit. I know I haven't even gotten into what the platform does yet, but that is like the mentality and what we think is quite different about what we preach.
Humpty: Yeah. And in fact, you're actually touching on some things that I do want to dive into So let's definitely talk about what the platform does, because I do wanna come back to this idea of, You know, creating better actors in a, , in a given community or DAO and this idea of being driven by maybe reputation even, because I know that one of the things you were, you were commenting earlier when we were preparing for this call was we may be seeing reputation. You know, we may not be seeing reputation in the right way. We may not be necessarily implementing some of these ideas maybe in the most comprehensive ways or in most, In the way that really takes in maybe some of these other ideas. So let's just rewind a little bit. Let's go back and talk about just Govrn the platform. Maybe even framing that from where was Govrn V0, where's Govrn v1 Now, some of the differences, but lets also touch on maybe how govern is looking at reputation, maybe informed by this Rage quit or the capability of forking a community, or just generally by building reputation through some other mechanism.
Aaron: Totally. So what government does right now, and it might feel a little out of left field from everything I've been saying, but what go does right now is we make it really easy for DAO contributors to track, record and own their DAO contributions. So the making, and when we say DAO contributions, we mean like the labor capital that you provide things like taking notes in a meeting, running Twitter spaces, doing due diligence on grants, doing tweeting about the DAO, posting on discord, participating in go voting. Also voting I think is the only thing that we act like in the current mentality have been indexing on, but onboarding new members, that's a really important contribution. These are the DAO contributions that we think actually power communities and actually power DAOs and the way that we view DAOs. DAOs are nothing more than a bunch of contributors or a bunch of contributions that have been tied together towards a common purpose and towards a common goal. And the real value that a DAO creates is in the work that its DAO members actually do. So the best way that we think we can empower DAO contributors is actually allowing them to track, record and manage their DAO contributions and have on chain records of that work that they're doing that actually belong to them. And this is a huge difference. This is probably the biggest difference about what we do and some other projects do, is that with us contributions don't, shouldn't belong to the DAO, to us contributions belong to the DAO contributor. You as a contributor make the contribution that creates value for your DAO. Right? And this is like back tying back to your other point about like having exit rights and for like rage credibility right now in DAOs, you can rage quit your money contributions, but you can't rage quit your labor equity contributions. If I donate, if I like put in 10 DAI to a DAO for one share, and I then work for this DAO for a year, I've now created a bunch of value for this DAO. But let's say the DAO, I'm like, now the DAO is dissipating Now I need to leave. If I rage quit the DAO. I only get the amount of value that I put in in terms of a money primitive in terms of that 10 DAI but I can't really take all the work I do have done with me. All that work still belongs to that DAO Cause the only record of the work I've done is in the DAO. Like let's say I went to another DAO that I wanted to work for and I'm like, I did all this work. And they're like, Great, how do I validate it? You're like, Well I can, you can call someone. Like I don't have a manager in my other DAO. Who are you calling? Or maybe I did have a manager and now I'm beholden to this leader to give me a good review. And do I really think this leader is going to give me a good review of something that I did nine months ago. They're just not gonna remember this, right? So even though I rage quit my money contributions, I haven't rage quit my labor contributions, and I don't actually have ownership or records that I own of that work. So I am still beholden to that organization. I am still beholden to the leaders of my old organization, like they're not like the autonomous unit of DAOs is contributors and contributions, and we need to be able to break down DAOs into the contributions It, makes and into the contributors that it makes up. So what we're making is essentially a contribution graph that allows contributors to track and record and own All of their DAO contributions So on the platform you come on, you report the DAO contributions you're making, and then you're able, the ones that you think are the most impressive, you're able actually to mint on chain records and then have peers validate that this actually happened with social, like validity attestations, right? So now our peers are validating that you've done this work and not some manager. And in a year from now, when you go to a new DAO and you're like, the DAO is like, Hey, what have you been doing? You can say, Hey, this is a list of all my records of contributions. Here's who has validated it. This work was actually done, and like I don't have to be beholden to anyone else as a result. So that that is the platform that we are building.
Humpty: That is really interesting. You know, I'm a huge fan of graphs, just generally. I think that when you can visualize something, especially when it comes to like people, ideas, contributions, I think it really makes a big impact. When, when you were talking about, I guess in terms of this labor primitive, that really struck a chord with me because I think, For the most part in, you know, these decentralized society. So, you know, these, these social experiences that we're creating and DAOs being a big part of that. I think what we've, what we've been doing is we've really been kind of visualizing people. And I think that's, I mean, that's not a bad thing. I think it's important to understand, you know, that what comprises a DAO in terms of diversity of people and backgrounds and ideas. I think , that's super important and, but I'm also seeing this as an evolution of the way that we've been visualizing this. So I'm looking back at like Bright ID right? It's a really great project. I'm a fan of it, and I see the social graph that comprises Bright ID, the people that are connected and that. Network that keeps growing and the connections that you make, et cetera. Then I'm also thinking about like the graph, and this is probably one of the graphs that I learned about early when I started contributing to DAOs, and that's coordinape the, within a DAO the, there's these circles and that graph is, it gets bigger over time as more people join the DAO and the network becomes that much more robust and, more interesting. The more connections you make and the way that you connect via these incentives, shared incentives amongst your peers. But now I see Govrn as this very novel, new way of like thinking about, you know, a social graph if you will. Where, but it's not made up of people or it's not made up of incentives, but it's made up of work contributions. Can you maybe just give us a little bit more insight in terms of how you see this graph being used in a DAO to not just visualize the impact of the contributions, but also to maybe help incentivize people to want to extend their network of contributions within a DAO as well.
Aaron: Yeah, I drew great points. I'm, I'm gonna grab a notebook so I don't forget, so I don't forget the, the, the points that I wanna answer but The way that we see, I think the first question was how do we see this contribution graph, working with like other kind of graphs? And the other way is like, how does this extend the features of what people contribute? And that's really interesting cause that second point actually gets to a learning we had from the, zero to B one. So extending contributions, So a lot of those graphs that you spoke about. I also really love big fan of Coordinate. I also, one of the original graphs, OG graphs, you gotta go check out Source Cred. This was like the OG thing. I heard about Source Cred for the first time in like 2020. And I like, it was like, I remember I heard about it. I was like, I just don't get it. And now I'm like, how did I not get it? Like they were just so ahead of their time and are still are like they really, Everyone should learn about Source cred. That's my show. I'm also gonna show me game cuz they were also doing this before people even realized what they were doing. Sorry, The way that we see it working is a lot of the graphs being created right now I refer to as value graphs. There are graphs where people are distributing value to one, one another, and something like Coordinape, which I do, I really like, it's based off relationships and perception of work that everyone else is doing, and you distribute value to each other and create this value graph. What we are excited about with the idea of Govrn is Govrn in my opinion is actually a graph One step underneath that, right? It creates a contribution graph. What we're trying to build is an objective set of data of people who self declare the work that they've actually done. People can validate that they've done these things and you create, see this graph of what of all the contributions people are making, all the contributions and how they are connected to one another contributors. Like the contributors, the contributions they are making and the DAOs of which they're being pushed to. And once you have this base level set of graphs, once you have this base level set of contributions, you can then create then create all these more complex, all these really interesting reputation graphs, value graphs in general. And it's actually based on primitive level data. I think a lot of reputation systems out there focus on what is publicly available sets of data, which right now is just money primitives. Which is good but it is incomplete. And for us to build more better reputational sets of data or reputational graphs, we need this labor capital primitive a graph to be underlying it, right? So now it's not just I'm giving 10 GIVE to Humpty, but rather I'm saying I am giving 10 GIVE to Humpty's leading a Twitter spaces on Bear Market DAOs, right? Or with Aaron Soskin from Government HQ. And we can start to incentivize not just you but the actual contributions you're working making, right? And what's really cool is what this starts to emerge is people start to see what types of contributions does this DAO think are the most impressive. What types of contributions in this DAO are the most valuable so that a new DAO member can show up and be like, Oh, I see the contributions that end up achieving the most value, Not just that I can dive into that specific contribution and learn about how you're actually doing it. So in the future, I can adopt some of those best practices. Right? And so this value graphs that we have been creating in my opinion are just incomplete because they don't show what we're giving value to, and that leaves an incomplete picture and does not actually give you true ownership of the work you're doing right? Still. The work you are doing is tied up in the value of that DAO. Let's say that DAO's value goes to zero, or it dissipates, You no longer have anything to show for that work that you've done because the value you have received is worth nothing. Now it's gone. I've been a part of a couple DAOs that have launched tokens, and the token like is how we're keeping track of what people are doing and the value you've created, But if all of a sudden the value goes to zero, or the DAO disappears, Then I have no real, I'm still tied to that doubt. If I had a contribution graph right? to show the work that the value was built on, I still have the records that have been done. And furthermore, it actually allows for time aspects like the, the aspect of time to be played into the value. Today I make con you like lead this Twitter spaces Humpty and that is a contribution you have been making to Crypto Sapiens that provides a certain amount of value today. Let's say this podcast goes and inspires 30 more contributions that have been built on top of this podcast in a year from now, you have created more value And we can do things like retroactive public goods funding by having the baseline con like contributions that have been making. I talk about this with OG DAO people all the time cuz a lot of people don't know The first things that were done with DAOs. But those DAO experiments were pivotal and core to what we're able to do today. And if we were able to have a graph of how, what I call the contribution chains, if we were able to create graphs or, or records Around everything that people are doing. You could see how the smallest thing, the smallest idea now triggered an entire chain of contribution that we could have never even thought to be possible. And that, that is mind boggling. Right? And that gets into the second point, which is why this extends contributions. It's that because now, We are a, people are able to come and just make a contribution that they think is valuable. They make the contribution, they report the con contribution. Anyone can build value on top of this, and now any contribution chain can be built on top of this, right? So it really opens up the world to what is possible in the contributions you’ve been making you show up and you drew something you think is valuable. If that provides value in a year from now, you can now get contribution or you can now get, you can get value at that point in time. Like I said, it it, it allows us to change the time scales when we think about how to contribute value.
Humpty: Yeah. My gosh. I mean, I feel like there's still so much left to unpack here, but I do want to give an opportunity to kind of ask a few of these last questions and then maybe even bring some people up that may wanna part participate in the talk. Because even before we went live, I had a few people saying, Omg, I've been wanting to learn more about this and I do see some of them in the audience, so I do want to give 'em a chance to come up onto the stage. But before, you know, to wrap it up here, we're currently in a bear market, right? And the title to this was Bear Market DAOs. So can you maybe give us some insight in terms of like how looking at this framework for organizing DAOs and really empowering contributors based on their contributions and building out this contribution graph, how is this playing in a role in creating better DAOs as we are building in this bear market so that when we come around to the next cycle, whenever that happens, we have these much richer experience that really are driving forward a lot of these very aspirational, ambitious missions that we have.
Aaron: Yeap, Totally. And so I, yeah, the title is Bear Market DAOs, and I know we're just getting to this, but it actually touches on everything we've already been talking about. Like original DAO boom was done in a lot a big bear market. Right. And there's a lot of similarities here. DAOs have no money right now, like DAOs have treasuries that are worth very little And where over the last year and a half we've been valuing how we've been making choices on what work would be done based off what would get proposal funding or grant funding. We can no longer do that. Like, that's just not something that we can do any longer, which really opens the door for experimentation. Now, like I was saying, when you only judge work that's being done in whether or not it receives a grant, that means if you don't have any money to be given grants, we are now not having any work be done. That's a problem. That's a problem with top down governance or top that's like a problem with top down community managed governance, right? What governs approach is a much more of a bottom up approach where you are now able to show up and you make a contribution. And even if that has no value, even if that has no grant, tied to it, you still get an on chain immutable record verified of that work you have now done.
So it's perfect for bear market DAOs because even if the, you're not receiving any quote unquote grant funding from a DAO, you still have records of the work that you did in a bear market. And if that leads to value down the line. Amazing. Now, when it's a bull market, you can be rewarded retroactively for that work. So the key to bear market DAOs is not like, how do we do treasury management? In my opinion, the key to bear market DAOs is to have an explosion of different contributions. Like I think there needs to be a revamp of this meme that bear markets are for building. No, no, no. Bear markets are for experimentation. Bear markets are to get crazy as as have to see what's out there it to try. The things that we couldn't try when we had a million dollars in our TVL in our treasuries bear markets, for us to get weird and say this is the right governance mechanism. And I don't know if it's gonna be valuable, I don't know if it's gonna be invaluable, but I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna create my contribution record. My peers will validate that this was a thing that was worthwhile and down the line if this did create value, I can then be rewarded. It allows us to track work without worrying about what the value is today, or whether it's a bear market or a bull market, right? Another good example of this is something I like to call contribution mining. A lot of DAOs especially in a bear market don't actually start with onchain treasury. What starts is like 10 people get together and they get into a discord and they're like, Let's start. This would be a fun thing for us to do. And so we're all pinging in the discord, right? We're making contributions. Someone spins up a GitHub repo and now they're contributing to the GitHub repo. With something like contribution tracking and govern, you're able to start there, get into a discord, be making contributions, track out with Govrn, you spin up a GitHub repo, start tracking out with Govrn someone makes a Twitter, Twitter account they're tracking that with govern. Now, nine months later, you have records of all the contributions that have been made by people. Maybe you had someone that helped out the first week but then dropped off, You still have those contribution records and about 10 months later you're able to build a reputation framework or a value framework And mine, all those contributions that were made and actually distribute value and governance rights as a result. So bear markets are for contributions, bear markets are for experimentation, and that's the crazy thing that we have now, is we now have the freedom to get wild with it. And that's what a bear market DAO is all about.
Humpty: I love that, I think the time is just being like get wild, I think that that really is a nice way of framing all of this, so I'm gonna ask you one last question This is should be an easy one. You know, throughout your crypto journey, if you could point to one person or maybe thing that has allowed you to learn better and get to where you are at today, who is that? What is that? It doesn't have to be on Crypto Twitter. We like to recognize, you know, what has been influential in our paths here along our own crypto journey.
Aaron: That is a good question. The one I have to point to, one thing or person that was the most influential on my crypto, crypto journey. I, right now when, when I was first getting started in the crypto, someone that really reached out and kind of took my hand and like helped me gain a lot of confidence in the scene Was a good friend, Gaylor. I mean, if you're not familiar with Gaylor, I highly recommend going out and checking, checking his workout. He was one of the original community managers of couple DAOs. He was, showed me how you could be an effective community manager, how listening is like a really important skill, and how giving space for other people to contribute really helped and kind of helped me gain a lot of confidence in this journey that, that we've been going down. So that's one person I, there's so many like honestly, there's so many different pieces. The first DAO I ever started was a DAO called Depot DAO with a guy, Bill Warren, IC Kirk is in the audience too, I think, who joined person that honestly, I have to give a way back, throwback. The first person I ever told about Govrn this was like literally when I was still working in my old job and I got up at a pitch event. We should all go to more meetups. Sorry, sidebar, I know Humpty you asked me one question I've given you a bunch of answers but we all need to go to more meetups. Meetups is how people get started in this space. Meetups are how I got started in this space. I learned so much from meetups and if we just because like we need to go to more of these things and help people out the first Time I ever really made Govrn public. I went to a pitch event and it was in 2019 and I, this guy Robert Greenfield, who used to work at Consensus Social Impact, now works at a couple other, He has his own thing as well. Highly go check out Robert Greenfield the third, he let me give a pitch from the floor. I pitched govern and literally came up to me after and was like This is an amazing pitch. This is what you should be doing. And that really is what got me to switch over from my old job to this. I really recommend checking out the work that Robert Greenfield has done show, and we all need to be going to more meetups. Meetups is the single thing that inspired me the most. There we go.
Humpty: And that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Aaron as much as I did. I'm personally very excited to see Govrn continue developing their contributions. It has the potential to unlock rich and dynamic experiences for DAO contributors.
If you'd like to connect with Aaron, you can find 'em on Twitter @AaronSoskin. And to learn more about govern, you can go to govrn.io and on Twitter @GovrnHQ.
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