Episode 19: Farrah and Weaver | Yearn Finance - Going from Silicon Valley to Web 3
Newsletter Copy?
Status
A discussion and Q&A session with Farrah and Weaver of Yearn Finance. Premieres on January 11, 2022
Timestamps
1:15 - 4:24 - Farrah’s Introduction
4:25 - 8:28 - Weaver’s Introduction
8:28 - 13:21 - Building Yearn, the DAO and the Protocol
13:21 - 17:38 - Inspiration behind Yearn Finance and Web3
17:38 - 22:23 - The Structural Makeup of Yearn Finance as a DAO
22:23 - 30:20 - Opinions on entering Web3, and thriving in Web3
30:20 - 35:11 - Onboarding into Web3, and how DAOs can improve on their onboarding
35:11 - end - Next Steps for Yearn Finance
Transcription
Humpty: [00:00:00] 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 BanklessDAO, A movement for pioneer seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
BanklessDAO 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 everyone, and we are back with another episode of Crypto Sapiens. Today we are talking with Farrah and Weaver core team members at Yearn Finance. We discussed the Yearn ecosystem, including its organizational model from the lens of [00:01:00] each of their journeys transitioning from FAANG companies to Web3.
We explore what growth looks like in Web3, along with emergent opportunities with onboarding talent from traditional HR systems to decentralized reputation systems. Let's get started.
Farrah: Thanks again, Humpty for the invite. Really psych to be chatting with you all. So my name is Farrah I also go by Blue Willow. Hence the handle. I'm currently a core contributor at Yearn. In terms of like my journey overall I'll try to keep this brief, but I essentially studied engineering in school, had the chance to work as an engineer and then transition more on the product management side of things and traditional tech companies.
A couple of years ago when I think blockchain as a kind of concept became more of a buzzword across a medley of different corporate sectors, had the chance to like really dig into the underlying tech stack through Hyper-ledger specifically and work on building out a medley of different like use cases there.
So that [00:02:00] was my essentially like first exposure to decentralized tech. And just seeing it, its applications and ability to disrupt traditional sectors. Obviously, Hyper-ledger corporate use cases obviously have a medley of shortcomings and don't necessarily unlock everything that Web3 or the decentralized space has to offer. So I became more interested in really delving deep into the community at large in exploring like what other like nascent or net new projects were building. That kind of slowly led me down to a rabbit hole of exploring like a medley of different protocols. I was particularly interested in Defi specifically because I had previously just been an investor and It was really interesting just to see how like a medley of different products and ideas were spitting up that completely did away with a lot of the like intermediaries that I was used to like encountering if I wanted to lend or borrow or invest. As [00:03:00] Yearn finance itself was spinning up around that time. It was kind of like the payday of Defi summer. I actually started off just using Yearn finance just as a regular user and leveraging their platform especially on the yield aggregation side of things as well as, using a quite a number of other protocols and the like. This earlier or earlier last year I had the chance to interface with a member of Yearn specifically and talk with them about more, less about the product side of things, which I was familiar, but more so about like how the team operates and how the DAO functions. And that really just struck a chord with me and really was a calling to not just Web3, but DAOs as a whole and the nuances there in terms of how folks can collaborate and coordinate in this new model. And that was essentially how I got involved in Yearn, specifically I wear a couple of different hats at Yearn finance, but largely my focus is on the umbrella of people and people [00:04:00] operations, onboarding, bringing new folks in as well as like building like capabilities to help with like product development and the like .
Humpty: All right. Amazing. Thank you so much. That's a really comprehensive introduction. Weaver why don't we get an introduction to you, your crypto journey as well and how you got to where you at today.
Weaver: Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Thanks so much for having us on Humpty. So my my, my crypto journey, I guess in, in some way has been a sort of a mirror of my professional journey in my career I've always worked on things. I like to say I connect people to things that bring them joy and, and I've done that at the bigger tech companies, smaller tech startup usually in and around the content space. But I've done a few different things over the years. But I've had that sort of back and forth big to small company and my crypto journey has been similar.
I first got into crypto in 2017. It all began in Russia. Actually we were on a family trip, my wife and I and our kids, one of her siblings, his partner and then their parents. [00:05:00] And my father-in-law actually grew up in Russia so it was this awesome family trip and he brought us back to where he'd grown up and got to speak the language and show his grandkids the country and all those beautiful things. But perhaps equally beautiful was that my brother-in-law was and still is in full on crypto evangelist mode on that trip.
We would see amazing things during the day, and then we spend a lot of time at night drinking vodka and talking about things like how Ethereum works. And honestly, it was awesome. I learned a ton. I was working at a big FAANG company at the time, but when I came back from that trip my brother-in-law owed me some money like reimbursing from that trip and I told him to take it and put it into some projects that he was interested in and just explain to me how he did it and why. And in some way the rest is history. I got really quickly found myself spending more and more of my time trying to understand crypto and how it works. So I bought this dual GPU gaming PC and turns it into a an ETH minor. Didn't run that very long, didn't make much money from it, but to me like getting to the command line, understanding how it worked was sort of, that was the pill that kind of got me in.
And [00:06:00] later that year i left my FAANG job and went to work full time in in crypto. The stuff I was working on at that time was really around cooperative ownership of things and finding ways to take things and break them into little pieces that the average person could participate in. Which some of those is you could say finally starting to happen today in 2022. We were definitely ahead of our time in 2017 working on those things. But learned a ton, met a lot of great people in the space. I mentioned earlier, sort of back and forth, back and forth for me, in 2019 is the bottom of the bear. I had been all in for a couple of years, had blown through savings and kinda gotten to a fairly dare place financially. And another FAANG company made me an offer. I couldn't refuse to come work for them in a global growth role. So I took it and no, no regrets. It was an awesome job. Working for a pretty decent company gave me a traditional paycheck which enabled me to be able to buy a house which folks working for DAOs know is a little bit tougher if you don't have that, that a sort of W2 income. Bought a house just going along that route.
And then in early, 2021, about a year ago I was aware of Yearn, but I started [00:07:00] talking to tracheopteryx. We, we have some good friends in common and so I went really quickly from chatting with him about how about crypto and how we think projects should work, how we think organizations should work and that sort of quickly evolved into “Hey”, why don't you come hang out a little bit at Yearn Hey, why don't you work on some projects at Yearn I, I took some vacation time off from my day job just to go sort of full-time and in bursts working on Yearn stuff. And by May of 2021 I quit my job to go full time at Yearn and I the short version of my role that I, I say to folks is that I work on growth. You know what that means? Looks a little bit different every day, some of it is more traditional growth in looking at how we can get our tech in the hands of more people, particularly these days on the B2B side, there's quite a lot of opportunity there, but it also just means working on the organization itself and how do we grow, how do we engage people like Farrah who can help, you know, help us level up in our talent and onboarding and what have you, how do we think about compensation and all that stuff Yeah. All these months in I, I feel really fortunate to have landed back full time in crypto [00:08:00] and and at Yearn.
Humpty: One of the things obviously we wanna touch on is building this DeFi protocol, right? But I think what we want to facilitate is a, also a discussion on what that transition looks like for someone who is on the outside who isn't necessarily interacting with, crypto and Web3 on a day to day. Let's see, maybe Farrah if you want to take this, what really motivated you when you were seeing the opportunity coming from this traditional Web2 space into Web3 that kind of made it clear to you that this made sense as a career. Both in terms of like Oh, I can actually work on this on a day to day, make money doing it. But also this represents something to me
Farrah: I think for, I would imagine, there's different elements that would resonate for different folks in terms of, aspects of that being the transition or what would appeal to someone or you, making that switch from Web2 to Web3 from a career perspective as [00:09:00] well. But I can speak at least my experience. I think there were a couple of factors at the onset that really were a key driving factor. I think the limits of kind of companies overall as coordination mechanisms was just something I had been grappling with for a number of years, I would kinda argue that I think traditional kind of corporate employment is becoming somewhat outdated as just a means for coordinating activity and con and contributing and like today's information age. We're already seeing the emergence of a medley of different, like alternative forms for earning, be it like influencers, contractors, creators, people participating in the GIG economy overall. And, these ways of earning or having, building a career don't always feel like work per say, but they're all examples of like people participating as like individual value providers in a complex network and earning income for their contributions accordingly. I hadn't seen a lot of like applications of that in, [00:10:00] in tech but the more I learned about Web3 and using the term Web3 here kind of very loosely to encompass the new iteration of the worldwide web that incorporates decentralization based on blockchain, including, all things DAO, DeFi and tokens and the like. But I would say again these complex networks aren't always easy to access. But I think for me what was clear is that I think the Web2 paradigm, there were a lot of elements of it that weren't super appealing to me and I was eager to kinda explore, what other opportunities were there to coordinate, contribute, collaborate with others outside of the legacy structures. So I came into things I feel like there are this past year into this year I think it the barrier of entry has become a lot lower. There's no shortage of really prominent protocols, institutions, and the like that are actively like building, net new things or, building these social structures in, in a [00:11:00] way that it's very easy to see their value, and it's easy to see how they can essentially disrupt the future across their verticals. So for me it wasn't like a super hard case of sorts. Like it was pretty easy to become like onboarded and be able to understand like at the end of the day it's really like a new tech stack similar to how VR or ML or AI just represented like a new a new tech stack that had the potential to disrupt how we consumed traditional products. I feel like at it by and large like blockchain or decentralized tech holistically is also offers us similar capabilities. So it's really more so a matter of what underlying tech stack has the ability to like meaningfully move the needle forward. And has the team to doing tech stack, I think has matured enough where it's really easy to see the value add there. Plus, I think DAOs is a coordination layer. Provide like an easy mechanism to be able to make that transit.
Humpty: Yeah. So one of the things you mentioned here that I think is really interesting [00:12:00] is in terms of the coordination mechanisms in traditional corporations and industries is, it's limited, it's restricted. I think certainly in Web3 there's tremendous opportunity. But I think currently it looks as if we're in experimentation stage, there's still a lot of learning that's going on. Yearn itself, right? spinning up coordinape I think is an example of how that experimentation is going. There are mechanisms that are being explored within these ecosystems that then could potentially become products themselves that can facilitate better coordination and collaboration within communities. What would you say in terms of the current state of collaboration and what from your personal experience, like what are some of the things that you've seen that have worked? and some things that still are challenges that can represent opportunities as well.
Farrah: That's a really good point. Yeah, I think there is, it's definitely not a perfect system. I think there are still some like you mentioned, challenges and opportunities to DAOs going mainstream and truly becoming like the center of work.
[00:13:00] I think from an opportunities perspective I think there's still a lot of a lot of work that still needs to be done to develop like the infrastructure tools and systems that Hcan support DAOs and their and their members. From , from a tool per tooling perspective. I think today most DAOs are still relying on like a mix of DAOs Web2 software that really wasn't made for DAOs or alternatively Web3 software that's still pretty nascent and fairly young. And in that, in case like DAOs needs aren't really fully met, I know there's quite a number of individuals actively working on this, the likes of parcel maltus, discord, collabland but like I mentioned, a lot of those are still early stages, so there's still quite a lot of opportunity kind of make it easier to coordinate. I think one area that I've focused on, especially in my role at Yearn is displacing how we think of traditional like HR, right? So with a DAO you don't necessarily have the traditional [00:14:00] like HR systems of you like you hire someone and then you assign them a manager and they take that responsibility and even during the interview process, you might go through a loop or a round of interviews, review resumes and the like. I think in a purist now, right? You're more so relying on like reputation systems or at least trying to build those When you have individuals coming in, especially at Yearn where most folks are like a non or at least Pseu Anonymous, how do you then better understand their reputation especially in a world where you're contending with like scarce resources. I know like rabbit hole you mentioned coordinate, like the idea of like on chain reputation systems. I think there's a lot of areas of opportunity there. I don't think anyone's fully flushed it out yet. But for DAOs to really become like the future of work per se being able to move that kind of transpor or reputation layer Into on chain as much as possible, or at least like better contend with how you assess someone's skill set and contributions in a [00:15:00] decentralized manner. So I think those are two areas to me that stand out where there's like a lot of opportunities.
But nonetheless, I think what works really well today I think is that just if general ethos of continuous improve, I think most folks be it at Yearn or across other DAOs I've collaborated with are very vocal about, wanting to continue to improve and explore like net new models in a very collaborative way. I think the core principles of DAOs or the decentralization framework as a whole in terms of giving individuals that are actively working and contributing kind a stake in the protocol or the social structure or whatever, like the purpose of the DAOs, I think that can't be understated enough. I think for me at least, that, that really appealed to me. And why I wanted to like work for your full-time and why I, I'm actively like even bringing on friends and family members into DAOs as a whole.
I think it's a really cool concept, having a horizontal structure that actually works and really doing away with like traditional like management and the bottlenecking that introduces but encouraging [00:16:00] everyone to be like accountable for the whatever it is that the DAO is ultimately like responsible for it. In Yearn’s case, obviously, the protocol and relying on folks to like act with integrity, to take those values, take all of that onus and responsibility and then, really do their best to move the needle forward and create an impact. And doing all of that right in without management or traditional like vertical structures I think is really, I think, can't be understated enough and I think that to me that's what's really that what, that's what really works well in the overall kind of DAO model and what I'm excited to continue as we flush out again the tooling, the reputation side of things and some of the other components that still haven't been fully flushed out.
Humpty: Tons to unpack there, but also I think you, you've done a tremendous job at introducing maybe something we should explore a little bit here, and that is Yearn finance.
So in terms of Yearn finance, I think anyone who's been in this space for any amount of time realizes the impact that they've [00:17:00] made into this ecosystem. They're one of the first DeFi protocol. Certainly one of I think more of the exemplary DeFi protocols, and I think they've definitely been setting the bar in terms of how Web3 can operate.
And so I wonder if you could briefly explain a little bit about introduced Yearn and then from an operational standpoint, like some of the functions that it's built to enable that type of coordination, collaboration that is Web3 native, where it's acting with those Web3 with that Web3 ethos.
Weaver: Yearn, we describe as as a robust yield source. And it's a, it's, I think what makes one of the things that makes Yearn unique is that this source of of yield is certainly for users, right? Like individuals can come to Yearn finance and put their holdings into vaults and earn earn yield in the same, in the same token that they deposited in and [00:18:00] there's value in that. But there's also we're also a very valuable yield source for institutions in the business to business or do to doubt space, right? Projects like Alchem X or urgents, build either build their tech on top of Yearn vaults or build integrations into Yearn’s vaults.
Focus on building interfaces and products that, that that bring their users joy while, while reliably providing yield from from Yearn from Yearn’s vaults running underneath. But it's also a robust yield source for for doers, for developers, for individuals who want to come build between 5 and $6 billion in TL these days depending on the day In individual vaults with as much as a billion dollars in them. It's it's the opportunity to work on very big opportunities, very big challenges at scale. And to the other part of your question, the way that we operate is a DAO there's no there's no CEO of of yearn. We might joke about that with some individuals, but there's no CEO of Yearn and there there are rather empowered teams, Y teams of people who work on the core parts of the operation of making [00:19:00] this whole thing run. There are strategists who are the big brains that actually code the the strategies that take the, that take these these holdings that are deposited and go out and generate as much yield as possible from those. We actually recently relaunched sort of a Wikipedia of our vaults of just vaults Yearn Finance, but you can break down in there all the different strategies behind behind all the vaults at Yearn and how it works.
One very transparent, but two sort of know, shines a light on the complexity of how it works and it really is combination of of, of automation and big brain, human power that, that, that makes it operate. So strategists are clearly a, a core part of the world being one part dev, one part one part finance wizard.
But then, we have folks that work on our on our web team that build the interfaces and maintain the interfaces front and back that make the website work. We have a partnerships team that that engages some of the folks like I mentioned, and there are, there are designers, there are finance people. All of these things but no org chart, right? There are groups of individuals who who coordinate [00:20:00] largely asynchronously. We do a lot of work, for better or worse, we do a lot of work on on, on, on Telegram. But, at the end of the day, run running a business that's on a run rate for about a hundred million dollars a year in, in in revenue with a group of full-time contributors. There's about 40 something full-time contributors and another a hundred plus part-time contributors. It's it was pretty compelling to me to come work on an organization operating like this, but I think also pretty impressive to run something at this at this scale with a group like it, like this.
And one piece that I maybe would double click on when I talk about for better or worse, working on Telegram. I would definitely I would say for me, as somebody who is one of the operators in this business, I'd be curious if if Farrah agrees I would guess that she does.
I spend so much more time at Yearn just doing, just getting shit done where in my previous life working for a FAANG company, most of my day, most of my, workday was in back to back calls, right? During Covid, it's literally back to back video calls, but right i was on calls from let's say 10 hours a day on average, back to back. So much of that time is spent managing up or shuttling information from [00:21:00] 1, 1, 1 group to another. It differs from day to day and Yearn but it's never at that level. Like today will be one of my more booked days and I think I might have four hours of meetings and conversations including this podcast, right? so it doesn't even really count in that way. And the rest of the time is either asynchronous they working with people or we might quickly get into a chat on something, maybe we'll get on a a one to one call and then last resort is things like zooms or group calls. We do have a, a small number operating things and people operate in standups and stuff to keep things flowing, but there's a very strong desire to build in the right way. Not build in the way that sort of traditional organizations teach us that we need to. And it honestly, it, it's might sound cliche, but it is amazing the amount of freedom you have to just go do and build when you remove the overhead of a hierarchical board.
Humpty: Farrah did you want to respond to some of that? It sounds like Weaver may have left the door open there for your perspective.
Farrah: Yeah, no, I'm totally on the same page. Weaver and I have commiserated about our [00:22:00] previous lives
Humpty: For sure.
Farrah: And some of our, some of the things we've liked and disliked they're in, but yeah, I totally agree, i think that's definitely an element. I think that's been super refreshing about Yearn finance specifically and just how we've been working collaboratively but I think the focus is a lot more on the contribution in the work versus kinda some of these other like bureaucratic or administrative functions that don't always yield value and sometimes can get away in or get in the way of meaningful work.
And I think one thing too, to add on to that, I think for me particularly I've just found a tremendous amount of fulfillment in, in the work that I do, even if it's like simple in, in nature, I think just the ability to be able to like work on something and know that I have us, playing a role in said products like evolution or having an impact there.
Just yeah, I think makes it a really unique experience that it, it doesn't so much feel even as work it it just quite fulfilling.
Humpty: So you know, I think going back to something I mentioned early and I'll double down on this. I think Yearn is highly [00:23:00] influential in this space and I think anyone that's building, I would certainly recommend to them take a look at what Yearn is building, take a look at these processes that they're creating and defining for themselves so that they can operate in a more decentralized fashion, right? To, to your point of how Yearn operates where it's not hierarchical, where you can just get stuff done. So I guess one of the questions I would be curious to see what your response would be. For anyone that is coming from this traditional Web2 space who may be curious about how they can make that leap, whether they're joining a project or whether they're trying to transition their traditional Web2 business to become a Web3 native business.
How what recommendations would you give to them in terms of from an operational standpoint, some of these processes that need to be implemented to flatten the organization or from a communication standpoint, the way that you go from having four hours worth of meetings
[00:24:00] It's six hours worth of meeting where you can't really get work done to a place where you can just streamline that and function in a way where just you're just working on something that you're passionate about and doing, but while still remaining connected and into what the organization, what's happening at the organization
Weaver: It's really around focus and if you're a business, I would say focus and partner and what I mean by that is pick a spot or pick a couple of spots. I think the Web3 world can be so daunting because it is so much, right? It's so much more than than cryptocurrencies, right? It's a whole new way of building and operating and even if you just were interested in NFTs, right? There is a whole rabbit hole to go down this in that world, right? And if you're just interested in in yield farming or in a portable identity or whatever it is. I would say, don't feel bad about it and, and actually feel good about picking an area or two to focus on. This is something I honestly, I try to remind myself of every day, right? And I'm sure you, you can relate Humpty Right? I try to keep up on what's going on in the industry. Even just in one corner of it [00:25:00] feels impossible at times. So whether you're an individual trying to get in or you're a business trying to pivot or add, add Web3 elements, I'd say focus on and partner. Partner is important too right? Find others who are building things that are like-minded to you and build with them. I mean something that, that I've heard trachs say in conversations with partners or other companies that are building things that, that are maybe could be competitive to something like coordinape is like this is crypto. Fuck it! Let's build together, Let's, it doesn't need to be comp competition. Let's find ways to, to go further, faster together. And I. Remind yourself of that or really really embrace that as a mantra, right? These things, it does not need to be the, beholden to shareholders. Everything is about competition and, race to the bottom kind of kind of stuff. This is, this is our opportunity to build things the way that we think that they should be built it. And yes, it's still ultimately so much of this is about traditional growth metrics and revenue and all those things for sure.
And there is competition for sure. This is not all rainbows and unicorn. But it doesn't mean that we can't get further, faster together. So You focus on your piece, I focus on my piece, we find a way to handshake and go do [00:26:00] things. Like I think looking at it from that way would be yeah, would be my first piece of advice.
Humpty: Yeah that's good. I think one of the things that you brought up there that I think is worth emphasizing is the ability to focus and partner. I think that's something certainly that is applicable to individuals and to businesses, right? Don't try to overextend yourself, maybe in the traditional Web2 space you had to do everything, but as you come into the Web3 space, maybe your business is four or five different businesses, and finding an area of focus and being able to grow and find meaningful partnerships that'll help that develop that business in a way that's more cooperative. I think that's that's definitely a very interesting one. Another thing that I always like to point to and I don't know what your thoughts are on this in terms of whether you agree or not, but the one thing that I've always looked back to DeFi and the success that it has been and the explosion of its usage back in [00:27:00] 2020, in terms of that excitement, in terms of that rapid growth for me, obviously one of the things that I saw that was crucial to that success is the fact that it was composable, interoperable, meaning pieces, projects were able to take other projects and build on top of those, right? the word money. Legos became a very familiar word and DeFi, I believe that any project today, whether you are an NFT project, whether you're a DAO, look to why Defi was as successful as it was, and the reason why it was able to scale and come up with such creative applications was that composability and I think truly other Web3 applications like NFTs and DAOs will find value in doing the same in terms of that composability so that they can focus to your point and scale
Weaver: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and I think it's it, one of the things that attracted me to, to coming back to the [00:28:00] space full time, I, you never leave crypto, right? But I had definitely, been split splitting my time there through the, through the end of the bear and even through DeFi summer.
One of the things that brought me back is this sort of, yeah this whole concept of Legos, of building things that others could go build crazy stuff that you never even thought of on top of or they don't have time for. And this, you even see it with things like there's sort of a, there's a general allergy things that I don't know, contracts with licenses and things like that, that aren't, aren't made to be shared or forked. And it's yeah, if you wanna fork something and go build it a different way, go for it. No I totally love that. I think, it's interesting too to, to look at, and you could say this of of Yearn but to your point, more of DeFi more broadly. It's really something that was born during Covid that maybe only could have been born this way because of Covid, right? All these big brains locked up at home just with time to build, right? No one's going around chilling at conferences or or selling vapor. It's let's just go build a bunch of crazy stuff and, and leave it for others to build on top of. And I think it, we think about that way at Yearn for sure. It's why we've seen so much and expect so much growth in [00:29:00] that sort of B2B or DAO to DAO piece of it, right? It's maybe an easy, but I think really valid example is, People often will pop in and say, you should build a really, like normy front end for Yearn. Something that's just super, super simple and easily accessible for nubes to come in and learn about DeFi and get involved. And the general response, certainly where my head is on this is yes, someone totally should go build that. I think it could do quite well, right?
Like we're focused more on infrastructure, right? Our end product is very much there for users, but you have to kind of, It's designed more for people that have some level of DeFi fluency. And there's opportunity for somebody should totally go build that on top and guess what? They'll get, fee sharing back, they'll get fee share back from Yearn like it'll pay to go build like this. This whole idea of building things where the incentives are aligned to your point to have Legos and all that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right and as folks are building out other parts of Web3, if they're thinking about whatever they're building to make it, I don't know what the right terminology would be make it, make it future proof, make it so that, others can just can plug [00:30:00] in. It's like the, it's the modern day equivalent of back in the day when you'd buy a, like when I bought like a Mac Tower back in the day, it had all these different expansion ports in the back of it, and it's like I wonder what, what amazing piece of hardware somebody will think of in a year that I can plug in here right? And just leaving it open for that kind of building, I think yeah. It's a big part of what it's all about.
Humpty: That's very interesting actually, the physical element of what we're building in this digital virtual space. So to, to kind of harken back to something you said just moments ago in terms of, DeFi or Yearn and all of these products in and during the explosion of Defi summer, only being able to be born during co during the, when Covid was getting started.
I think one of the things that I've been hearing a lot since then, and this is not necessarily to do with Web3, but maybe. Is people really trying to take control over the lives again, where they're, they realize that maybe life's too short to be working on [00:31:00] something. Going to work every day, punching the clock, nine to five and really, there's nothing that they're taking back or gaining from that relationship aside from just the paycheck. So there's people who are now trying to find joy in what they do primarily in life, but also in what they do for work. And so I think Web3 certainly presents an opportunity because it allows for people to really do what they love. And if it doesn't exist, go out and build it and build a community around it that supports you and your vision and the project, and then scale that, alongside with other people that are of the same mind in terms of what you're building, right? So you have these like-minded individuals who are passionate and are either technically savvy or socially savvy, where they're able to organize communities and empower them through these shared incentive.
So I wonder and maybe this is something that Farrah you can take, is in terms of onboarding. This [00:32:00] potential next million users that are trying to find something that feeds their mind, body, and soul beyond just picking up a paycheck. What do you think are some opportunities here? For us to learn from some of the successes that we've had, and then maybe scale those and build out those onboarding tools and opportunities for us to be able to like welcome these individuals into this novel ecosystem.
Farrah: Yeah, no, I think that's a great question and it tell dovetails into a question you asked earlier regarding how individual can enter into Web3. Broadly, I think at the individual level, I think finding an intersection between what folks love to do, what they're inherently good at, what they could potentially be paid for and what a particular DAO needs is definitely like the or like the first opportunity, I think individuals themselves have to be clear on what their goals are for journey or joining a particular [00:33:00] DAO or, or building a new one. From a DAO perspective I think then like better understanding, the goals of specific contributors and then working with them like individually to onboard them and get them more plugged in to the DAO.
I think there's still a lot of opportunities I think across a DAO to continue to refine like how we onboard the next hundred million, what have you users on or individuals to a DAO. I think today there's some areas of opportunity, regarding disconnectedness or cognitive overload when you potentially first join a DAO given how things are currently set up. But I think the way a lot of DAOs can look to address that is, investing a bit more in their kind of quote unquote, people, contributor, arms, whatever you wanna call like that specific team. But I think having a particular kind of team or group of individuals really focused on the contributors journey, be it through onboarding or thereafter as they're, Or as they're [00:34:00] working and collaborating with others and even like the perspective of like people focusing on full time, continuing to focus on that plus like building the right mechanisms and tools to introduce like more automation, especially, as we talked about earlier the idea of building your reputation in a DAO receiving compensation for the work that you're doing, ensuring that it's done in a way that like makes you feel fulfilled. But then also allows you to live your life and contend with obviously day-to-day realities of like expenses and the like, Yearn particularly, I think our history, there's been I think the focus has been really like on the engineering front in terms of building out the core set of products we talked about earlier building upon those, maintaining those, But I think recently there's been like more of a focus, and that's one thing that I've been really focused in on is I think just paying closer mind to again, like that people side of things to not only help the group of folks that we're onboarding today, but also looking like to the future as we continue to build upon the DAO
Humpty: Looks like we're coming on the hour [00:35:00] here. Anything we missed that we should touch on whether it's about Yearn or the DAO and some of its function that you feel like we should definitely make note of before we close out this session?
Weaver: I think maybe two quick things come to mind for me. One, we'll file this under alpha or beyond the lookout for I've mentioned a couple of times on this, in this conversation that you know, that sort of B2B or DAO to DAO is a big focus for us in terms of growth and I think that the next biggest one that'll be coming is a integration of Yearn vaults into Ledger Live. It's just the integration is just about done, but Ledger the ledger team announced it on their podcast just before the holidays cool to, so it's not a not a leak but something that's that, that's coming soon. But I mention it because I think it's look for more of those kinds of integrations from from Yearn and really, us trying to work with builders like that, that have large consumer audiences or we can meet them where meet people where they are. I think that's an area of interest and focus for us.
Layer two also an area of interest and focus. You'll see that show up first in our in the vaults that [00:36:00] show up in, in labs. So the more, the more experimental stuff. But definitely a watch this space thing. And then, on the, on the organization side and this relates to the whole, I get the whole thing but If folks have been following along token andos, it's It's been a, it's been a major focus recently and I saw i don't think he's in the room anymore, but Finn, who contributes for both BanklessDAO and Yearn. Finn is one of the folks in our community that did a lot of great work to drive discussion around tokenomics where we could focus and it really one is an example of how folks in the community can really jump in and and make a difference. But two, it helped us, helped spark a lot of great conversation and go to the governance forum if you haven't, if you geek out tokenomics and those kinds of things. But it, it looks very much like X Y and V E Y fee will be a reality sooner than later. And this stuff has far reaching implications, right? There's a, obviously folks wanna talk about the, the, the token price and stuff like that. And that's interesting. But when you think about the long term vision of Yearn and just in line with us building something for the long haul, it relates into everything including compensation. We're talking about team member compensation and how we can shift to [00:37:00] options why fee options that, that leverage tokenomics like like the V E Y fee. Just to, I think it's a great opportunity for us to again demonstrate the long term vision of the protocol, but also help Contributors put their put their tokens where their mouth are, where their mouth is, or whatever the expression would be. I botched that it was gonna be great. But anyways, I just think it's, there's some of the stuff that I'm super psyched about because it's, it is, again it's long term thinking. It's super transparent the way that it's come together and I think just gives us, gives us an opportunity to expand the circle of folks that are, that, that are working on building things building things together.
Humpty: And that's a wrap.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Yearn finance, please go to yearn.finance and on Twitter @iearnfinance. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow life and a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast. And stay tuned for our next discussion.