PhilH
Task
Status
Date
Dec 13, 2023
Completion Time
Email
Interviewer
Segment
User Details
Subject info
- Name
- Role / Job title: gov lead
- Experience
- Purchase summary
Company info
- dOrg + Mangrove
- Size:
- Type:
- Maturity
Intro
- Check that the answers from the screener are correct
- Describe the process and rules of the interview: timing, permission to record audio, impersonal, they can refuse to answer any question (if it’s not appropriate)
- No right or wrong answers
- It is important for us to go back to the past, to remember the chronology of events as best as possible
- Tell me a bit about yourself: What do you do?
Subject info
- Name: PhilH
- started working in web3 at DAOstack circa 2017
- the first attempt to build in web3 — reputational system, people could make decisions based on what they’re recommending (voting)
- left DAOstack crew and participated in Genesis DAO (super interesting socially, one of the first true DAOs)
- Aragon was experimenting at the same time but it was centralized, whereas Genesis was community, resources controlled collectively
- Role / Job title
- contributing / advising other DAOs (the list is too long), superficial involvement in most cases
- writing a little bit, curious what was going on in forums
- old generation compared to usual DAO crowds (62 years old), doing a lot of IT and conferences about org challenges and tech, developer / engineer and entrepreneur
- involved in dOrg (small scale, incremental improvements, doesn’t make a big difference) and DeFi protocols (large scale)
- interested in commons (public goods, managed by community)
- in 2016 learnt about Ostrom and blockchain
- currently governance lead of ??? and
- trying to solve experiments around problems seen in DAOs, e.g. the mobs problem
- Experience
- Decision making
- Purchase summary
Company info
- Name
- when you have ??? fast decisions in traditional teams (big or small) and conversations are not important (?)
- like this idea of environment with distributed power but also completely dysfunctional
- deliberation: with respect to open communities, I’m very pessimistic — if you have a lot of people, I don’t believe it can work (not because cognitive problem, but other structural problems)
- on the other hand I’ve seen that in smaller settings, e.g. councils and groups of stewards, there’s a lot of room for improvement of communication / deliberation,
- Harmonica could be useful in small groups like that
- underlying assumption: DAO governance (at least for very specific scope) is a matter of political process and we need to organise interaction b/w different stakeholders that have to agree, so I’m pushing on ??? and token voting
- when you vote with tokens, everyone has the same interest, and … if you give a token to user, they are going to either sell it right away or keep it and act as shareholders, and that’s why you keep the token (not to represent their interest as users)
- unrelated to DAO itself, can be ideological… this is why I’m so pessimistic — this is not the right distribution of power, we need representation that’s not based on distro of token, but instead we need to represent different stakeholders (e.g. third of voting power going to builders, third to investors / users, third to developers / strategists and others who build on top of protocol)
- instead of … minority interest, no one can ??? other constituencies, and to make decision process work you have to talk to people who don’t have the same POV, that’s why deliberation is essential
- technical issues are ??? but the scope of decision
- AVE for example, it has technical parameters for each ??? that constitutes a landing market, there are hundreds of parameters, governance is entity that decides them — crazy stuff that we don’t do, ??? doesn’t require participation and should be delegated to competent people
- scope… we don’t need forums or deliberation spaces, we need to limit governance space to actual topics that matter, e.g. do we want to change distro of revenue with developers of Mangrove, do we want to change the governance design
- is there a platform risk? OpenAI could ???
- do people really want that? will they realise they want it?
- VCs can be the first in a proven category, it’s going neatly in their mental models, not a big cognitive effort to
- I would be very cautious about time and effort that would be spent on VCs at such early stage in unproven category, they will ask for traction
- if we can get 10 DAOs using it, being willing to testify, that’s different
- Size
- Type
- Maturity
- ???
- What are the key factors you consider when deciding to invest in a startup?
- Can you describe the process you followed the last time you evaluated a potential startup investment?
- Which of these stages were the most difficult for you?
- Can you share an example of a difficult investment decision you had to make and how you navigated it?
- …