Episode 45: Samantha Marin | Aragon - How to turn a traditional business into a DAO
Newsletter Copy?
Status
[0:00 - 02:37]
Intro
[2:37 - 6.30]
Samantha Marin Explains her Transition to BanklessDAO
[6:30 - 15:00]
Samantha Marin on Writing and contributing to DAOs
[20:03 - 26:24]
Samantha Marin explains Expectation, commitment and freedom in BanklessDAO
[26:24 - 28:02]
Samantha Marin on Gaining equity in DAOs
[28:20 - 29:19]
Samantha Marin on Recognition of plans
[29:19 - 37:09]
Samantha Marin explains why Argon will become a DAO
[00:45]
Humpty Calderon
Hello and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens, and today we are talking with Samantha. Author of the Quorum Newsletter and Core contributor in writing and communications at Aragon. Samantha recounts her discovery of DAOs as an early subscriber to Bankless and becoming an early contributor to Bankless DAO.
She describes her experience working in a traditional startup, wanting equity in the project she was helping to build, and how being remunerated for her work at Bankless DAOn Bank, their governance token was a monumental step in the direction of what she had been. Of course there are challenges with bounty pay too.
She recalls times where she attended meetings, participated in retrospectives that added value to the DAO, but didn't see any compensation for it. She had to consistently produce articles and other tangible work to earn a sustainable income. We compare the flexibility of bounty pay versus the stability of salary pay.
We also talk about the emergent structure in DAOs versus centralized organizations seeking to decent. The challenges in both. There is tons to unpack here. So without further ado, let's get started.
[02:10]
Samantha Marin
I first got interested in crypto. Towards the beginning of the 2021 bull market. So I'm pretty recent into this space. I was working at a very small startup at the time and I was also kind of learning about crypto on the side, starting to, listen to the Bankless podcast and just hear more about the space. Then I was working at this kind of web2 style startup. I wasn't super happy with it. It was kind of a classic startup story of like, you're working a lot, you're not getting paid a lot, that kind of thing.I asked the founder I asked for equity and I said, You know, if I'm gonna make this my full-time thing, if I'm gonna keep on giving hundred percent of my working time to this startup, I feel like I need a lot more kind of stake in it. I need a lot more skin in the game sort of. He basically flat out rejected me and I was like, Okay I need to leave this startup. And it wasn't that long after that I found Bankless style and the first day I joined the Discord, I got tipped like four or five times on collab land in bank tokens. And then that was, that was my big light bulb moment of, okay, I just got skin in the game. It depends on who you ask. Our governance tokens, equity securities, that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down. But at that moment, for me, coming out of a more traditional startup experience where I couldn't get any equity and then jping into bankless now and saying, Okay, I can, I just, you know, people are sharing the pie, people are sharing the wealth. They were welcoming me in, I already have stake in this project and skin in the game. And that was, kind of my DAO light bulb moment. So, I kind of launched headfirst into BanklessDAO. I was still doing web2 work as my primary gig and doing BanklessDAO on the side. And then I took the leap, let's see, when was this? Beginning of January, of this past year to just do crypto full time. So I was in Bankless and In May of this year, I transitioned to Aragon full-time. So , that's, that's my story.
[04:35]
Humpty Calderon
That's wonderful. And I love to hear, how quickly you went from being crypto curious to just kind of taking that leap Into a DAO because of maybe something that you heard within the Bankless podcast that then, helped guide you to BanklessDAO and how through this velocity, and I'm quoting this term because this was a term that was used a lot in the early days of Bankless DAO was increasing the velocity of bank.
We used this token to onboard more people and tipping was a huge piece of that puzzle. And how that was a way that you felt recognized and allowed you to take ownership over certain things that interested you within the FAO.
[05:34]
Samantha Marin
It was pretty incredible. I think. I think the first couple people because I joined the Writer's Guild immediately. I think it was Frank America Nonsense, Sadar and I think Frog was Writer's Guild still at that point as well.
So those guys just, you know, sent me a couple bank on collab land and I was like, Whoa, this is so different from anything in the traditional world I could possibly be doing. And so that was like the best onboarding I could have had. You just instantly get a token that to me at that moment just had like so much weight because of where I'd been at that time. So , it was a really quick, kind of fall down the rabbit hole I feel like that's the case for a lot of people in DAO. So it felt, felt right? I took , I guess a stake in BanklessDAO to become a member when I first joined. My personal journey was I wanna join all the ones that I can, because I don't know what a DAO is, but I really am curious because, you know, there's. Connection of people and ideas and values, and I really wanna learn who's doing it right and what it is that they're doing that makes it right. And those that aren't, what we can learn from that to improve and, you know, make a better ecosystem that is really driven by.
[07:14]
Humpty Caulderon
I share your story in that while I staked my bank early to be a, I guess they called it a level two member. I still was very much participating in that tipping ecosystem, both in terms of getting remunerated for work, where I was like, Oh my gosh, like I was doing this. I just really wanted to do it, but thank you. Then kind of turning that back out and saying, Well, thank you and tipping someone else, and just really, that's the way that a lot of people's onboarding experience started in the early days, I find.
[07:39]
That's definitely something I miss most in Aragon compared to Bankless style, I think is the tipping culture because Aragon is. One foot in traditional organization, one foot in a DAO. And so we don't have the full like tipping culture there. And I just think that makes Bankless DAO so unique. , absolutely. , I think there's uh, I guess at least a decentralization in the way that people can incentivize each other to contribute to the DAO.
[08:25]
Humpty Calderon
Definitely. So you talk a lot about DAOs and decentralization and organization in your blog and I do want to maybe just touch on just writing in general and what that means to you and maybe even how your writing has evolved since starting to contribute to DAOs. I'll, just start by saying your blog is probably one of the most awesome as blogs that I've ever read .
Quorum newsletter.xyz for anybody listening, if you're not reading this, you're missing out, because there are just so many interesting topics that Samantha is exploring accessibility and the interest in some of the things that you're talking about. But then you go really deep on some of these things, on some of these topics. C you describe just generally, like maybe if you were already doing some writing in your web2 life or if you weren't, how did that start in web3 and how has it evolved since then?
[09:55]
Samantha Marin
I am trained as a writer. I went to college for writing. That was my primary skill set.
I guess just going into the workforce most Internships work and experience before crypto had some kind of writing edge to it, whether it was marketing associated or freelance or anything like that.So writing has always been kind of my thing and then when bringing that into crypto, everyone knows that crypto is notoriously impossible to explain. When I joined the Writer's Guild, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna start trying to explain some of these really hard things. I think my first article was trying to explain the concept of trustless because that was something that I'd always gotten hung up on at first, and so I was kind of trying to tackle these more theoretical topics that we throw around a lot in crypto and kind of expect everyone to understand, but then really break them down and help people understand them better. I started with more of that educational blend, I guess. Then I got more into kind of opinion piece writing pretty quickly just because I found that more entertaining.
Honestly, like I just liked it more, trying to advance and just take a position on something So just explaining what you see in front of you. But I don't see kind of that like opinion edge coming in. So my writing quickly became more opinionated, and then I just wanted to launch my own newsletter so I could write whatever I wanted, honestly, and just kind of have ownership over it. That's how things evolved there.
[12:48]
Humpty Calderon
I think you bring up a valid point. I think I'll include myself in this. It's hard to write opinion pieces when you don't have one. You really, I think, need to understand how something functions and it's impact on you as a person. As a person who's gonna be writing this to maybe a community that you represent, and then making a statement, a bold statement.
Whether that is an alignment to who you are and you know, your personal experience on the blockchain or if it doesn't, and then challenging that. I think that is, that is really hard because it expects you to be able to do many things and so it's, it's really beautiful when we see people like yourself who can digest the complexity of what is blockchain, what is crypto, what is, what are DAOs, And then understand the nuance in the opportunities and challenges and describe them in written form. And then present it to us in a nice, neat little package as your blog is, and then allow us to comment on that and have these conversations like what we're having today. So I commend you for that. That is incredible. You're able to do all of that and then allow us to have these conversations that then just explore the positioning or that perspective.
[14:22]
Samantha Marin
Thank you. I also just kind of wanted to be able to get ideas out in a way that can be digestible faster because I find that so much.
Great ideas in web3 are in audio, they're in Twitter spaces. They're, you know, exactly what we're doing right now. They're Twitter spaces and podcasts and YouTube videos and that. I love that I conse so many podcasts, I am like a huge podcaster. Sometimes it's like they can't find those in depth conversations because they're all in the audio realm. They don't find the, you know, it's so hard to find substack articles, like they're very hard to index and things like that. So that was another kind of sub goal of just bringing more in depth conversations to a written format as opposed to just having them in audio format.
Humpty Calderon
I’ll speak for myself. I guess when I used to do a little bit more, driving the podcast is the first thing that I turned on in the car. Second to the air conditioning. It's such a great way to digest information, but to be honest. There's still the challenge of, is this person writing in a way that is incomprehensible because they're using technical jargon.Or they're not really digesting that to make it any more accessible than if I had just gotten to read that white paper or light paper. I think that this, tremendous and so maybe we can now frame the discussion around your writing and exploration of the DAO ecosystem.
Samantha Marin
Do you have a particular question on that or should I just kind of launch in?
Humpty Calderon
Well, we could do a little bit of both. Why don't we launch in just generally, like what is it in the argon ecosystem that you've maybe found the most challenging that people have, uh, more questions about.
Obviously, I think Argon is one of these projects that has been around for a long time. It predates many of the DAOs that most of us . And so, you know, many people are asking and then how is it that you are facilitating that education and that kind of maybe new entry point to Argon?
Samantha Marin
As a project, Argon is a unique one . It's a really, really fun place to work, but I've learned so much in just the last couple months I've been there. Aragon's been around since 2016, so very dinosaur grandfather in DAO years. I feel like a lot of the issues and like potential opportunities that I see coming out are like things that many DAOs and many businesses are going to go through eventually. So for me, a big thing is just how do you reconcile this like employee verses contributor idea? So, in Bankless we were all very much independent freelancers, like very our own person. You know, you decide what you work on that month, and then that determines exactly how much you're paid. You're not paid based on a salary. Maybe you hold a role and in that case, you're paid based on the hours that role takes per week. So maybe you're getting like, Seven hours a week for a particular role, and then you're paid on top of that for the bounties you pick up. And so your pay is fluctuating like insane. I was full time there for a while, so I remember some months coming in and being like, Dang, you know, I didn't actually make that much that month, that month. But I feel like I worked a ton. And then I go and look back. I'm like, Oh, I was kind of sitting in all these meetings. I was messaging people a bunch, but I wasn't actually creating output that was valued in bank. So then that month, maybe I didn't get paid that much. But I also would say, you know, I feel like I was still creating a lot of value because maybe I was in this retrospective where we talked about the future of a project I'm working on in the past of the project and how it can improve in the future. So I felt like, I don't know, I felt like, and then at Aragon, I am paid a normal salary. I felt like at Bankless, a big kind of shortfall was the inability to make a full-time living there and to have to be kind of either constantly creating output, you know, I'd have to be churning out tons of articles and content and keep getting paid for that. Or to have a bunch of other gigs and other DAOs to kind of make up for that. So, and then coming into Aragon where it's a very traditional salary where you are, you're not paid in bounties or anything, but then we're kind of saying, Okay, how do we DeFi this a little more? Like, do we add in a coordinape? Do we, you know, X, Y, Z? , and so, that's a big difference. It sounds like a small difference between like a full on decentralized DAO and kind of a half in half out DAO, but I think it really changes a lot. I mean, I prefer the latter. I prefer the stability, but that's something that I feel like has been coming out in my writing a lot more of trying to grapple with this instability that DAOs create for people working in them. So , that was kind of a long thing.
Humpty Calderon
No, not at all. That was actually quite succinct. I think one thing that you are revealing here is the misalignment between contributors and DAOs, and generally how those DAOs may be. And maybe this is just an issue with decentralized work or this is an issue with structures within DAOs. One thing that I picked up from here, and maybe I'm picking it up wrong, there's an expectation that, which it operates, but there is an expectation for commitment, so that you can earn a consistent salary versus maybe the freedom that you without commitment to be able to earn bounties. Like how do you, how have you seen, maybe because it seems like you've seen both, you know, the way that this freedom of contribution works at a project like Bankless do and how maybe more committed and kind of expectations of deliverables works at a project like Aragon.What have you seen in terms of maybe opportunities. To bridge the two where maybe there's ways to allow for certain freedoms to individuals to contribute to a project like Aragon through bounties, but still allow for a committed, you know, commitment to that project. Say a hundred percent commitment of your time where you have a base pay, or maybe on the latter a project like Bankless DAO, which is maybe less structured, because it was DAO first, and it needs to now build up some sustainable incentives for their contributors to be able to take on more commitment and a consistent pay.
Samantha Marin
Mm-hmm. . . . I mean, such a tricky topic. I think the way to approach it is really kind of concentric rings. So you have an internal ring of your core members who are paid a full time salary and maybe they get some kind of a token vesting schedule to reward them to stay long term. because that was another thing that I kind of struggled with in Bankless style, was just. Constant. In and out, in and out, in and out. I mean you guys know the discord channels of how there are people circulating constantly. , and so I think some kind of, for that core team have a salary, a competitive salary, and then some kind of vesting schedule. And then it's sort of like, okay, as you move outward and more into the community as opposed to into. As opposed to the core team, when you're into the community, you're doing bounties, you're doing coordinate rounds you're active tipping. Like I think it's more of a layered approach as opposed to black and white. But as far as. As far as actually implementing that, I think that's like crazy hard, you know? Implementing that in a way. Everyone's happy with and everyone feels as fair, because I loved the freelance vibe in Bankless for a lot of reasons. A big reason was because I was working a full-time job somewhere else. So I had to be in Bankless, like very much on my own terms, right? Like on times when I was able to be in and so that worked for me in that stage. But as soon as I decided I wanted to be a full-time, long-term contributor there, I was like, there's just not a place for me really. And so I felt like I had to go somewhere else to make that like time living, you know, to be entirely honest. Just like make money, because I think a lot of it really comes DAOn to that. I think that kind of layered approach using a lot of the different cool tools that we have now, like coordinape is the way to go.
I personally agree with you. I personally like the idea of building maybe some flexibility.Maybe that's the wrong word, but I'll go with it. some flexibility in terms of incentives through, uh, a mixture of DAO Native or web3 native tooling. There's gonna be some folks that are doing work that might not be visible to a core group of individuals. And if you're always expected for those individuals to recognize you, uh, to be able to get paid, then that's just not going to be a fair kind of solution. I think that there's definitely a few others that are building out some kind of incentive mechanism, even collab land to a degree, you know, with tipping within a DAO discord. I think that's fun. But ,no, I think that there's definitely, bigger, kind of opportunity here in terms of how we can stake our commitment, our time to a project. And to get equity, right? Because I think that's what you were saying here. And in fact, you started the conversation with one of the things that you disliked about the web2, startup life was that you were putting in a lot of time and you probably weren't getting a fair pay. And the only way that would make sense in terms of the time and energy and value. That you were creating is that you could get a return on that time based on equity in the business? I think there's something, there's something there. I think that also is true in a DAO like I get it, it's a decentralized organization, but there should be a way to gain equity in a project. And is that financial or is that not, I mean, that could. Governance power, right? Like I think you also mentioned like in terms of like, what is that token? Is the, is the token a governance token? Is it a security? Like, I mean, there's just so many other things to unpack, obviously, but I think that there's certain ways to consider equity enDAOs you know, in terms of like how you are remunerated for your time and commitment.
Samantha Marin
I mean, ownership, shared ownership is really, The thing that brought me into the DAO space. And so that, like, I think that is kind of the crucial like piece to never be able, like I would not want to be part of a DAO that eliminates that idea. , I do think there are argents, of course for maybe not launching a fungible token, maybe doing an NFT and doing kind of like what a DAO launch and having, having shared ownership of the project that way. But I think with any, any Dell or any business, becoming a Dell like that is kind of where I start of, okay, so how, how can we use the blockchain to create some kind of shared ownership over this project That's, The old web2 of like, everyone's an owner kind of slogans. It's really ironic because the last web2 job I had before going full-time crypto, one of their main values was that everyone was an owner. I was like, No, That's not true at all. I think, I mean, it's a whole, whole can of worms to go into, but I think that like that ownership piece is, is kind of what like lights the fire for me a little bit.
Humpty Caulderon
I just wanna recognize how important POAPs apps have been for our project and our community to recognize our community of listeners. I can actually track how many people listen to our first POAP when we first launched on Bankless DAO. So it is a nice metric to see the. That we've made across the different channels that we've distributed to. And so I'm really excited to have POAPs back, as a another way to engage the community of listeners of crypto sapiens. To continue with the conversation, you know, one of the things that you wrote about in your article two months at Aragon, was about progressive decentralization and how scary that can be without the necessary safeguards. And I think one of the things that we've been talking about now is that kind of need to bridge the two worlds that Aragon currently lives in as a centralized organization. Very much maybe just a web2 business that develops software tools for web3. To becoming a web3 native organization as a DAO for instance.So can you explain, based on your personal experience within Aragon, some of the, I guess, reasoning, and I think some of these you've already mentioned, but maybe reiterating some of the reasoning for wanting to become a decentralized organization and maybe some of the steps that they've taken in that direction, and maybe some of the reasons, if you wouldn't mind, reiterating what you've written in terms of why there needs to be a moment of pause to make sure that you're not doing things so rapidly that you actually could really cause a really big problem.
Samantha Marin
Definitely. I mean, I think my perspective on businesses transitioning into being fully decentralized has changed a lot recently just because I've learned a lot about the things that you have to kind of worry about beforehand. So, Aragon They launched back in 2016. It was an ICO situation, and so the treasury was held in a multisig. And when it comes to transitioning a massive treasury of ICO money from many years ago, when it comes to moving that s into a permissionless, Trustless smart contract, things get terrifying. I think this is a conversation, at least I was having a bit of Bankless style , at one point, and I know it was something Frog had talked about a bit of, okay, do we want to move away from a multisig structure and move toward, okay, we're gonna have smart contracts at the center in that conversation. I don't know if it's still going on at this point there, but it just opens up this huge can of worms of, Okay, how are you going to protect this treasury? How are you going to set up voting and governance so that the treasury is not easily attackable? You know? So for me, I think I just realized how high the stakes were for moving crypto, honestly into a smart contract out of a multisig and trying to set up a system that prevents attackers from getting those funds when you don't have a group of trusted individuals holding it for you. So that's kind of the biggest learning, I guess, for me on kind of the timeframe for transitioning businesses into DAOs. Like one of the things I really love about Aragon is we have so many DAO practices which like, I'll list a couple examples. Self-managing very like asynchronous. Everyone's all over the world. Like very similar to Bankless style in that way.Everyone works their own schedule. , man, not really a manager type structure. More of a, more of a, a flat style organization where people kind of have their own like power and stuff like that. So we have all of that kind of like soft side set up, which. Bankless style was also very good with, but as far as the actual like hard tech side that I'm, I've just really come to terms with how scary that can be.
Humpty Caulderon
100%. I think that, you know, there's definitely a lot to be cons considerate of the decision in either way whether you are looking for, ways to decentralize a project or maybe ways to, structure a project, right? Bankless DAO is probably one of the most decentralized project early, but it absolutely, uh, would need maybe more structure. You also don't want to add too much structure where the ability for contributors to jp around between, you know, guilds and projects is removed and slow down because without that then What is it? How is it that people can truly participate in ways that, connect with them?
Samantha Marin
Right? So I think that's interesting in terms of like maybe looking at it from both perspectives and taking methodical approaches to addressing both of those. And it really gets me thinking of kind of how our, everyone's definition of what a DAO is is so incredibly different. When you really look at it by a lot of definitions, Aragon's been a DAO since the start, you know, But it's just we're trying to not have a group of signers on a multisig with the Treasury and have it managed by the community via a smart contract, but, If you'd written everything DAOn on paper and showed it to me like March before I joined Aragon, I would say, , they're already a DAO. Like all their funds are in crypto. They're totally remote. They work all over the world. Like all of these aspects. I'd been like, ev, I would've said that every aspect is already a DAO but it's just like everyone's definition is so different and when they're. Like sub organizations interacting with each other which is kind of like bankless style guild. You know, each guild is set up differently and that's kind of similar in Aragon. Each kind of sub organization set up differently. So you could like argue about statuses of different sub organizations and sub DAOs and pods and all of that but as far as the overarching structure getting the Like, I guess Aragon's definition of a doubt into place is important. It's been taking a while, but it's fun and it's also a big, big, big learning for me. Like, I think they just had a Discord server. I don't think there was any kind of structure. It was like a Discord server and a token, and then the structure emerged out of that. Whereas with Aragon, it's kind of like we already have a structure to a certain extent, and we're kind of trying to alter structure. And so it's just like a totally different challenge and it's really, really unique.
Humpty Caulderon
I truly hope you enjoyed this conversation with Samantha. She is an incredibly gifted writer who is tackling a lot of crucial topics, both through her blog and at Aragon. Many of the topics we discussed have inspired me to be more thoughtful about how we structure decentralized organizations and build incentive mechanisms.
If you'd like to get connect with Samantha, you can find her on Twitter at Samantha j Meron and her blog at Quor newsletter dot xy. And to learn more about Aragon, go to aragon.org and on Twitter at Aragon project. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. If you enjoy this episode, please give us a five star wherever you enjoy your podcast.
It costs $0, means the world to us, and helps others discover this content too. You can also find more conversations like this one by visiting our website at cryptosapiens.xyz I look forward to reconnecting with you at our next discussion.