julia rosenberg from orca protocol talks dao governance

Welcome to the Armada Podcast, where we are focusing in on DAO governance. Let's hop into the show. If you could start with who you are and what you're working on.

Awesome. Yeah, so I'm Julia Rosenberg. I am the co-founder and CEO of Orca Protocol. Um, Orca Protocol is a lightweight, people-first DAO implementation. Uh, we're very focused on building sort of the middleware between these tailored UX experiences and some of the protocol-level DAO primitives and really being able to enable some more modular governance structures.

Yeah, and I love that. I've been kind of going down this rabbit hole, and when I saw what you're working on, I was like, that seems like the right step, which is part of the reason I had wanted to reach out is I feel like there's a lot of vision and aspiration out there, but then there's sort of the pragmatism of how do you actually get there? And that's what I love about What you're trying to do.

100%. And I mean, I think it's a huge problem is that we're just missing some of the, the Lego pieces between all of these really exciting tools.

Totally, totally. And not to go too far off topic, I'm trying to create a tradition here on the podcast, which is which fictional character would you like to have dinner with?

I love this question. Um, I think it would have to be Liz Lemon. From 30 Rock, in addition to maybe Jack Donaghy, if I could get like a 2-for-1

there.

Yeah,

that's

having their antics and being right in the middle of it. I would love that.

That is— it is such an underrated show, uh, at least from a pop culture perspective. I just— I absolutely love that show. I miss it so much. And, uh, that is— I did not expect you to name those 2 people, and now that you've said them, I feel like that might actually be my answer if I ever get asked. I was going to ask that question myself. That is a great answer.

Amazing. 30 Rock forever.

Oh, such a great show. So back into kind of the DAO space, what makes you interested in working on DAOs generally?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is informed on sort of how I got to the crypto space. So I actually was formerly part of the cannabis world. So I sort of joke that these strange new frontier legal gray area industries are somehow becoming my niche. But I also spent some time in consumer social, which is really what got me down the rabbit hole, specifically thinking about kind of the limitations of Web2 platforms for digital communities and creators. I kept getting stuck on this one problem and that there's really only one growth trajectory available to Web2 communities and creators. So that's more subscribers, more followers, more users. It's really just a game of the masses. But as these communities grow and these kind of like digital collectives grow, the more sort of fractionalized and diluted they actually become. And I really think that they lose their value over time. So that's kind of like how I pivoted into the Web3 space and just thinking about how we can create better tools for communities, at that point it was communities, to better self-manage and self-organize. And then obviously as I got further and further down the rabbit hole in thinking about decentralized communities and decentralized organizations, I realized that this same problem exists at a much larger level. And in that the same kind of problem is happening in our decentralized organizations in the Web3 space, in that we just have these massive ecosystems of actors. And the larger it gets, the more the same thing that happens, the more sort of fractionalized and diluted it becomes.

Right.

So that's kind of like how I pivoted into DAOs and becoming obsessed with DAOs and how we can create better tools for DAOs to thrive, whereas I don't think they're thriving at this point.

Yeah, that's such an interesting way of stepping into it. Having ironically worked on a social product myself, there's one path. And I remember a few years ago really thinking about benefit corporations and how does that apply and sort of having gone through that loop, realizing that That's helpful as it relates to maybe some high-level, you know, company mission and values and things of that nature. But it doesn't really fundamentally change the equation that you're addressing, which is super interesting.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is a bit of a tactical question is, I mean, how did you actually then translate that sort of desire and feeling into founding something and kind of contributing it in this particular way? Were you like doing backend engineering for that and said, hey, I'm going to apply this to that space? Like, how did that actual jump

Yeah. So I am not a technical person. So my co-founder John, he comes more from the traditional enterprise Ethereum world, and he kind of came to a similar conclusion more on the enterprise side of things. So he was a blockchain architect at Ernst& Young, a big consulting firm, and saw the same problems happening at that institutional level like you just mentioned. So just from like an ideology point of view, we kind of came to this concept of, okay, how can we create better tools in this landscape? And that's when we really started digging more into the technical aspect of that. And like, how does this ideology that we've come to and these, the sort of thesis we've built translate into an actual product here? And what we sort of landed on was this concept of pods, which is a really big part of Orca's architecture. And you can kind of think of these pods as miniature DAOs. So they're small working groups to build governance around people based on their expertise. And then from there, these pods can interact with any existing project governance framework. So The concept there is really the ways in which DAOs exist today is that you have this single ecosystem of thousands of actors, all with different incentives. You have your operators, your investors, your users, your speculators. Every proposal surfaces in this sort of referendum-style way where the entire consensus gets to vote on it. That's rarely what actually happens. And it honestly doesn't really make sense. Like, why would you have, you know, non-technical contributors voting on technical decisions?

Right.

Or, you know, there's just all this weird cross-pollination that kind of happens. So the way that we kind of like to think about it is we're more focused on building effective governance around maybe a group of 10 people and seeing how we can plug that into a larger organization. Sort of click these subcommittees together to build out a larger governance scheme.

So there's more of a— and I hate to use this phrase, but it's more of a pyramid structure. No ties to a pyramid scheme, but sort of providing some sense of hierarchy through expertise that allows those kind of teams. And Spotify is an engineering model or team model I've studied a lot, and they talk about pods and being full-stack teams that are focused on the core. product or feature within the thing. And then those obviously all ladder up into consumer and artists and all that stuff. So is that a fair sort of analogy to kind of structuralize that? But then you guys are, instead of allowing that to exist within the Spotify space, it's obviously detached and they can apply that energy anywhere. Is that off or on or?

Yeah, we sort of like, I think I agree, like the hierarchy term sort of has like a bad connotation with it, especially in the the crypto decentralized space, since that's kind of like the antithesis of decentralization. But the comparison we like to make, like the real world comparison, is like the US government, however flawed it is. Right. You have the executive, you have the legislator, you have the judiciary. They're all elected in different ways. They all vote in different ways. And there's this very comprehensive checks and balances system. So we kind of think that that's the route that DAOs will start going, is building out these more unique checks and balances systems that work for a specific organization and their needs.

100% agree with that. There was a really great Twitter thread that I'll put in the show notes that partially was kind of going down this path. But one of the things that his name— I think his name is Elad, and he was talking about Basically, every democratically successful structure is sort of in this republic-style way where you have representatives that we are bestowing our faith in to execute on our behalf. And whether that's in an organization, corporation, the government, whatever it may be. And totally right. I'm seeing it play out the exact same way as how do you— Yeah. You have the first early innovators coming to the space and they're like, okay, we're going to bring this amazing vision. And I love that as the end state. But how do we get sort of the average CEO or the average fund manager, whatever it is, to say, yep, I'm going to put a ton of money or put my next organization into this structure. How do you do that? And I just love your guys' thinking on exactly kind of making a conduit to allow the beginning of that process. And I love that. It's a great analogy.

Yeah. And I think in what you're sort of saying around this representative democracy, I think it sort of makes us examine, like, okay, who are the users in this space that are, you know, that we're tailoring these tools towards and what do they actually care about? Like, there's sort of 2 narratives here. We're either building governance tools for users that care about governance and want better tools to participate, or we're creating tools for users that don't care about governance and don't have the time to vote on these things. And it's really not a priority to them to be engaged in that way on a regular basis.

Right. I love your example about the engineering one, right? I'm thinking about an engineering decision of, you know, hey, which type of database structure, you know, are we going to use? Or, you know, what library, you know, whatever it may be. And yeah, why have everyone sort of equally vote on that? And, you know, by de facto, a lot of these organizations, the CTO might go down to their VP of engineering, the VP of engineering might talk to the lead, you know, like there's this sort of process, but like that process has merits and it also has downsides. And that makes a lot of sense. I, sorry that I keep repeating how much I love what you're working on, but I love what you're working

on. And I think in that sense too, it's like, you know, me as a non-technical person, I'm not interested in voting on the technical aspects of the, of the project. What I might be more interested in voting on is who actually holds those seats and who's actually participating. And I think that's a really real possibility with what we're building, that you can build these really cool checks and balances systems where token holders can still have full control in terms of who's delegated these rules and responsibilities. But the kind of— that it becomes a really heavy lift on this group of, of users that might not actually care about voting on these things.

Absolutely. This is a— I don't— I didn't have this in our prep notes, so I apologize, but how, how do you think about this transition? And perhaps this is my relatively early journey into understanding DAOs and how people think about kind of a quote-unquote job in these spaces. Is part of what you're kind of talking about a little bit is that one of these pods could team up as and then have some sort of stable income source of some kind funded through some process that allows that team to execute in a particular way, you know, with a particular goal in mind that might be subjected to some of these governance decisions? Or do you sort of see that as like, that's kind of a forever state of as we think about DAOs and sort of these like, hey, here's a proposal, and, you know, it's been approved, or, and here's my grant, and kind of that process, like, Do you see a parallel of like a quote unquote classic job that's not funded by these venture-backed kind of labs that then own or majority shareholders of tokens? But how do you kind of see that playing out?

Yeah, that's an amazing question. And I was just talking with some sort of peers on this exact topic and that I absolutely think that we will start to see almost like full-time roles around proposal management, around grant committees. The term that's kind of being thrown around is these protocol politicians. And I think it's absolutely necessary for these protocols to function in this more agile, yet still decentralized ways.

Right.

I think we're maybe a little bit too optimistic of people's ability to engage without compensation. Right. And I think a perfect example of this is Yearn. Yearn, I think, is one of the most successful decentralized organizations in the space in terms of their level of decentralization. But they've also struggled in making sure that their top contributors are compensated. correctly for the work that they're doing. And we even see Yearn sort of transitioning into this model around what they're calling Y-Teams, which is very similar to the pod model, and we're excited to work with them on that. But that a member of the strategy team, or a member of the dev team, or any of these teams that they've identified, They would be fulfilling a full-time role within the organization based on the roles and responsibilities that they're being delegated.

Right. Which then allows a little bit of that kind of transition, for lack of a better word, to kind of more jobs. Is that fair?

Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

So we talked a little bit about some of the roadblocks as part of sort of the broader vision, but What are some of the biggest roadblocks in the DAO space that you're seeing right now?

Yeah, I think again, it just comes down to tooling and properly executed composability. I think when I think about the DAO space and the DAO stack growing in the future, I think we're really moving away from these very prescriptive models and templates around some of the legacy DAO implementations and moving towards this tooling approach so that we'll have this massive tool chest of available options for organizations to click together a larger organization scheme. And I think the biggest challenge in that will just be around composability and making sure that these tools can actually click really well together and that there's a seamless user experience there.

Yeah, one question I've been wrestling with in my own mind is, are we going to see a sort of a— I'm picturing the adoption curve of the S-curve sort of model, which is it's like, okay, so these people are existing in a centralized organization. Someday and in the future, there might be more of these kind of DAO-inspired organizations. It's like, are we going to see, in your opinion, a slow sort of migration to existing organizations to then implementing elements of DAO-inspired technology and governance in their existing centralized things that will eventually get us to this kind of vision? Or do you think it's more of a breaking, like as people, you know, start a new newsletter co-op or something like that, or whatever they may be working on, that they're fundamentally going to make a jump. And there's, you know, thinking about the S-curve, those 2 curves aren't going to touch. So there's actually a gap of saying like, no, no, we're actually going to create new types of organizations that have new incentives with new values. And kind of what you talked about, the social networks, right? Like those certainly feel like they're going to be more in the— like they're going to break and jump to the new area, and it's going to be slow going in the beginning and then massive later. Do you suspect that we'll see a lot of sort of existing organizations figure out ways to use technology to transfer to DAO-inspired kind of structures? Or do you think we'll see just more like, nope, starting something new and that's kind of the new frontier?

Yeah, such a good question. And I honestly think both. It really depends. But I think that what we're building is not like an all-or-nothing approach. So obviously we're anticipating to build out our own internal governance from the ground up using a pod model. But we're also very much in the belief of this kind of progressive decentralization that I think the one sort of problem in the latter approach around these organizations being like, okay, we're going to decentralize and we need to build out this comprehensive plan and It needs to be really well thought out and we need to make sure we have all the tools in place. It becomes a super heavy lift and a very intimidating process. So I really think we'll see more of progressive decentralization being the more successful use case with both of the kind of centralized organizations using these tools and also the newer organizations that are hoping to adopt a decentralized governance approach with their sort of community building.

Yeah, I yet again 100% buy your perspective on that because I think there's some really cool opportunities to even do small things like saying like, okay, our product roadmap is an exercise that the leader of product works with their team and the CEO, whatever it may be. But that certainly could be a fully quote unquote decentralized process of voting throughout the entire company that you could start to take key elements of an organization and saying like, okay, like we've been kind of running this in a very hierarchical structure and we've been very kind of top-down, right? The VP of product makes a decision and, you know, goes all the way down versus starting to take some of these inspirations and breaking apart different elements of our organization. And that can obviously go into compensation and, and, you know, equity type stuff. And like, I totally agree with you that there's like some sort of progression and there's going to be these key use cases that we're going to unlock. And some organizations, to your point, are going to be just fundamentally better suited to just start in that world, and some of them are going to probably dabble and fail. And like, there'll be a lot of interesting kind of faces, but I 100% agree with your view there.

Yeah, 1,000%. And I think that is the most digestible use case, especially for when we think about the first example, um, of these sort of centralized companies. Like, giving up that sort of control and power once you have it is a scary task for organizations and maybe not something that they fully want to lean into.

Right.

Whereas these smaller organizations that are ready to build a fully decentralized kind of community-owned organization, that's a really easy first step for them.

Right.

So building out more of a progressive model in both of these use cases, I think, is going to be really important.

Yeah, it strikes me listening to Jack Dorsey talk a lot about sort of his his crypto love, and yet he runs a centralized— that strikes me as an organization that could dabble in sort of this elements of starting to slowly break apart their business model as he tries to accomplish some broader vision, whether it's successful or whether Twitter should exist, a whole separate conversation. But it strikes me as one of the larger companies out there that maybe take a swing at it.

Totally. And I think that's especially relevant to a company like Twitter, whereas their main product is very stable and they're really just looking to innovate in sort of new and exciting ways and add new features and rework UX experiences. And so having these more autonomous bodies that can really freely think on sort of pushing the boundaries of what's possible, I think that's a great use case for an organization like Twitter.

Yeah, something just jumped in my head too. I mean, thinking about sort of some of these skunkwork teams, or even, you know, these like, hey, we're gonna, you know, Vine comes across as a, like an opportunity that in hindsight, Twitter could have spun out as sort of this DAO that is sort of going back to the lab model where they're owning, you know, a vast majority of the tokens. But like, I'm surprised we haven't seen a little bit more of that at some of the larger organizations as they think about, you to your point, innovating in an entirely new way with a stable product might be an interesting area to keep an eye on.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

So how can anyone who might be listening be helpful to you or Orca? Or is there a shout out to anything that you'd want people to check out?

Yeah, I mean, we're really still in the building phases, so we're hoping to get to mainnet this summer. But of course, We want people to get involved in our community and feel that they can really be involved in an important way. So obviously check us out on Twitter, join our Discord. We're really hoping to engage the community and make sure that they're part of our journey. So I would say those are the best places to look.

Great. Thanks again for your time and joining the show.

Thank you so much. This was amazing. I'm really excited about future podcast episodes as well.

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