Finding non-technical web3 work with Dariya Khojasteh, founder of Layer3

All right.

So I was just telling you about Indeed's Uday, right? And I'm going down, I'm having my midlife crisis. I can admit as like someone who's gonna be 39 in like 3 months, I'm having my midlife crisis and I'm going down these books about philosophy and search for meaning. And one of them is this book about productivity and how we use time. And, and this is gonna get back to this Indeed Uday thing, but one of the things that talked about was how the world is always on. And religion had this idea of Sabbath or holy days where everyone stopped and rest. And I realized that Indeed basically has enforced that with a one day a month Uday where no one in the company is really supposed to work. Because otherwise I'll work on Saturday, I'll work on Sunday. And so it is really refreshing to have the U-day because if, if I have a day off but I know everyone else is working, it's not a day off. If I have a holiday in the US but everyone outside the US is working, it's not a day off. So it's really not until like Christmas where like so much of Europe and the US shuts down. New Year's, the like Western New Year's or these Udays. So it is nice, but it also makes me realize how little we actually rest and stop working.

Yeah, that's a very interesting concept. And especially like looking at this kind of through the founder lens, it's like very easy to never stop thinking about your company. It's your baby. You always feel like your back's against the wall to some extent. You're always thinking about, okay, what do we do next? Potentially worrying, okay, is this going to meet the deadline that we're aiming for? Are we going to ship this product by this date? Whatever. And I'm very interested in how I get better at compartmentalizing. Okay, I just still have to come home and I guess walk the dog, just turn everything off and completely focus on nothing work-related, which I do not think.

And I think so, I'm not good at it yet. And so it was interesting to see this point of view that if you had a day where you're not supposed to run water and you had a day where you're not supposed to use electricity or devices, you have to really intentionally plan ahead of that day in order to accommodate it. And it sort of forces you to have this day of, of rest. And so it was just an interesting concept because I think it is extremely difficult in our modern world. And as we sort of go into the conversation about DAOs, it was one of the things that occurs to me is, can you have a holiday if you are— if people get to the point where the majority of their income comes from DAOs, is it possible to have holidays and days of rest that truly feel like days of rest? What do you think?

Yeah, I actually don't think it will be possible. I mean, If we don't have somebody kind of at the top of an organization who is to say, "E.J., do not work this day," or, "This entire team take this day off," I think like what we'll see is just people will operate on their own volition in a lot of things. And it's going to be frankly impossible just because, you know, people are already operating across time zones, but nobody's like there to tell you not to work. And so if somebody is like an overachiever, they will just work themselves to the bone. And then you will obviously have people will want to take that day off, but I really don't think holidays in Web3 will be a thing pretty soon. Honestly, it's like a kind of a scary reality that I think we'll see a lot of churn in DAOs for that reason alone.

I wonder if we'll have to have some type of governance decision around it. But before we go into that, I'd love to just sort of introduce you. I'm here with Dariya Khojasteh. The founder of Layer3. And I'm gonna try to explain what I think Layer3 does because I'm an incredibly tiny investor in Layer3 through some SPV that I don't even remember. But tell me, I'm gonna say it and then you correct me afterwards that I'm wrong. So Layer3 is creating a way for people, and I should say non-technical people, to get involved with DAOs. And DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations, a new form of people organizing themselves. And these, the Layer 3 sort of identifies what are like, allows people to identify types of tasks and work that needs to be done. And in exchange for a bounty, people can do it. And then it creates a decentralized mechanism to verify that the work has been done. Is that how, how close is that? How far off is that?

Pretty, pretty darn close. I mean, I can kind of describe it from my perspective.

Yeah, I'd love that.

From Brandon and I's perspective, is that Web3 is going to be increasingly disorganized if we don't figure out really amazing ways of coordinating these decentralized organizations and at least like shipping stuff and actually like getting work done. And so Layer3 is actually— we're striving towards this mission of creating a platform where you can basically route all Web3 work through this decentralized way of getting work done. And the go-to-market for that is creating a marketplace where DAOs can offload all of their non-technical work that actually allows the majority of their, say, user base or their Discord members to find opportunities to actually get involved. On the back end of all that, you have to figure out, well, how do we actually, like, quality assure things when all this work gets done and verify that these tasks were completed effectively? So we have to build this like task verification mechanism where people can actually like earn an income for frankly like grading the homework, you know, for all intents and purposes that people are turning in for the DAO.

Interesting. So someone's going to do the work and then someone else is going to be incentivized to grade that work.

Is that right? Yeah, exactly.

Okay. So kind of picturing this, you have your sort of core contributing team, the probable probably the more technical talent. Maybe that's not completely fair. I think community managers play a role and there's some other less technical roles, but you have your technical talent and then your non-technical people. They need a way of getting involved and contributing to the DAO. And then that question becomes, how do you do that? Because there's not necessarily good mechanisms in Web2 to do that. Whereas I think in maybe in Web2 you can like have GitLab and you can like have people check out code and you can assign things through Jira. That doesn't really exist in the same way. Is that right? Is that Layer 3 kind of coming in with this solution for non-technical people to get involved in that way?

Yeah, and I can kind of go over why the problem exists in the first place. It's just because DAOs and core contributing teams frankly are focused on just building whatever vision this core contributing team holds near and dear at the very beginning of the formation of a DAO, but also the tools in Web2 that kind of are provided to Web3 are for like accomplishing work is just like some amalgamation of like Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, whatever. So there's no real like centralized place to come figure out, okay, what needs to get done? How will I get paid here? What outcome do I need to provide this organization? And just what context do I need to actually do this work as soon as I join a DAO?

Okay. So if I sort of think about my Web2 world, I join at a company, I'm gonna go through some onboarding. I'm gonna find out if it's a larger company. At Indeed where I work, you probably have, there's a, a week-long course about what is Indeed, what do we do? And then my manager will have crafted an onboarding plan for me. Now I think DAOs, both because they're decentralized and probably also because they're so new organizationally in the past year or two, they don't have that. And so they need a way to create that for people in a way that scales and works in a lot of different capacities, right? Where people might come in at different times a day, different time zones, different knowledge levels. Is that right?

Right, yeah. There's a huge onboarding problem in DAOs and it all comes back to context. Just because when you join like a brand new organization, you might see that there's a lot of like things being done, but you, E.J., right, when you joined Indeed, you probably need context for why do we do the things that we do in the ways that we do them. And what Layer 3's job is, is to facilitate all of this work in a way that you like don't actually need all that much context because, right, these core contributing teams inherently will just know way more than you about the inner workings of an organization by the time you just join a Discord. So if you join a Discord and you're interested in, say, like a high-level mission of a DAO, you can basically just come to Layer 3 and see, all right, what work can I do to contribute? And you won't really have that asymmetry of information. You'll just see, okay, here I can provide this outcome, and once I get verified on that I provided this outcome, I will get paid some X amount of governance tokens.

Got it. That, that is interesting. So I don't know if you saw I think Sam Altman tweeted out that he wants to get involved in building and started this Discord in this group called Hyperscale. And so it looks like Sam Altman is going to deploy $10 million in investment in Web3, but probably using a DAO structure. And so I joined, I think, within the first day, and I'm trying to get involved and understand what's going on, but it's, it's actually difficult to keep up with everything that's going on. And so it sounds like by then taking this documentation And by governing, I would sort of get up to speed in a better way and then actually have a say in what goes on afterwards by having that governance token.

Right. Yeah. And that's kind of a novel concept that DAOs introduced to the world is you join this organization, you create value, and then you earn value proportional to the, I guess, contribution that you create.

Proportionally.

Yeah, you're compensated in value to the value you create. Right. So if you do something that's very heavy lift, high intensity task, like develop some complicated smart contract, you'd obviously expect to be paid more governance tokens than, say, someone who just writes microcopy for a website. And with that, say, financial product that that smart contract is being used for really proliferates, then you will have a lot of governance tokens that will ideally go up in value because you have just done incredibly meaningful work that you can now kind of reap the rewards from.

You know, stepping back a little bit, how did you come up with the idea for Layer 3? Like, what, what had you thinking about DAOs and how people get involved in them?

So I can kind of give you kind of a long answer here. And, you know, just getting involved in DAOs and then coming to the Layer 3 idea was, I guess, probably about a 12-month process. But as with most people, I'm assuming the concept of a DAO was super foreign to me, uh, 12 months ago. It wasn't really until like DeFi summer happened that I even started paying attention to decentralized organizations. And even then, it took another 6 months after that to call myself a part of one. And the way I got involved in these was because of this curiosity on how on earth we could possibly use a decentralized group of people to coordinate the development and like maintenance of a suite of financial products. What was always like apparent to me was that you think you need very closely aligned people to lead, at least in the early days of, say, startups and companies. And adding a decentralization layer to that sounded like an easy way to reach deadlock in decision making and basically just march towards an unclear goal. So it was more like a Okay, this seems like interesting. These decentralized organizations seem like pretty compelling, but how the hell would this work? And I'd say that it wasn't really until earlier this year when I got involved in some Rari Capital stuff that I was really, really a part of a DAO. And so I actually started Layer 3 as a growth marketing agency to help, you know, tell the story of DeFi because we built these incredible products. and the user base was frankly pretty tight-knit. People were just bouncing from protocol to protocol, and it wasn't like there wasn't a lot of top-of-funnel stuff being done. And so I have this marketing background, and I realized, okay, I am incredibly fascinated with how we can actually tell the story of DeFi, which is why you still see marketing stuff on Layer 3. It's just because it's our roots. And so our strategy there was launch marketing drops just because drop culture is incredibly popular right now. And the crux of marketing, right, you know, is just getting people to do things. And so our third, like, marketing drop was something called Bucket List as a Service, which is we would get people to do random things in the world, like get a tattoo, go skydiving, tweet an embarrassing story, go take a picture in front of a monument, like really random things, and pay them in governance tokens. And this actually, like, saw a lot of traction. We had all the tasks completed, get— except change your name, change your baby's name, to RGT, which we would have paid you 1,000 RGT to do, um, which is now worth about $20,000.

So you're saying no one changed their baby's name to RGT?

Yeah, yeah, nobody changed their baby's name to RGT. But that would have been like incredible marketing spend in my opinion, just because it would have been like probably covered by a lot of different news networks and gotten a lot of—

definitely would have been. I can't imagine Being the partner who made that solo decision to change my kid's name, I just don't feel like that would go down well. But certainly I agree with you, that would've gotten a lot of attention. Yeah. Like when a town changes their name, people pick it up. So I'm sure when a baby changes its name, maybe Elon did, did you tweet at Elon to see if he would change his kid's?

No, unfortunately we didn't. That, that, that could have worked though. I, I know he is a fan of interesting child names, but okay. So that, that saw traction and you know, I kind of realized we could apply the same thing to, to getting people to do do like less hilarious stuff that I was already trying to get people to do before launching this drop, like writing copy and creating cool visuals. And, you know, as, as I mentioned before, the reason this problem really exists in the first place is because of just an asymmetry of information in DAOs between, say, a random Discord shitposter that has just joined and a core contributing team that's been there cranking on things for the past 6 months. It's just really hard to figure out what you can actually do to start contributing and earning governance.

True.

So I was pretty— yeah, yeah. So I was pretty close to this problem of like getting people to do things in DAOs, and bounty boards just seemed like a great starting point. Using a bounty board to get people to do things just seemed to remove a lot of this asymmetry of information that you just have in most, if not every single DAO. So it's a very just clear way of saying, do this for this community, we need this, and you will earn this amount of governance tokens. Or like this amount of ownership in the protocol itself.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely, given my experience in the working world, so I think I've been working in corporations in some form or another since, I don't know, man, 20 years. And so when I look at this, I look at the problems that exist in sort of the pre-Web3 world and knowing what work to do when and its perceived value is a problem that exists. I think it just gets solved through management communication layers and multiple layers of management. And so understanding that that needs to adapt because the communication is so asynchronous in the Web3 world, and I think probably so flat, is an interesting change that needs to happen. And if it, if that problem is solved well in Web3, it can be solved in other parts of the working world. Too. And so it feels like a very big market to me when I hear what you're talking about.

Yeah, it's, it's an incredibly big market, and you can apply a lot of what we're doing to basically all work that gets done, which is like a very obviously giant TAM, right? If you could route all work— okay, complete this task, earn this amount of ownership— then you could route basically everything through Layer 3, which is interesting. An interesting—

yeah. And so I know you and I have spoken 3 or 4 times now, and I feel like every time we talk, I still get something new out of it. And so I think last time we were talking about this, I really just think about middle management and administrative layers. And so I think I talked about this, and I still think it's interesting, which is that when you look at the rise in tuition at colleges, or you look at the rise in healthcare costs, a lot of that additional cost has gone to the administrative layer. And so if what you're doing works in Web3 and then has a way of exporting 15, 20 years from now, like it could bring down the cost of other things pretty meaningfully and have a very positive benefit to a larger group of society, starting with shitposting basically. So it's kind of interesting to think like where that could evolve, but like Facebook evolved from similar origins, I would say similar types of origins and had a pretty large impact within 10 to 15 years.

Yeah. And to kind of touch on what you mentioned with middle management, it's not to say that there isn't going to exist some administrative layer or middle management layer in DAOs. It's just that chain of command, I guess, is just going to be incredibly shortened. Just the distance between kind of like the nucleus of the DAO and say even your most fringe members is going to be incredibly small compared to something like a Mark Zuckerberg and even the janitors at the Facebook Menlo Park offices. You know, in a DAO, that, say, the analogous kind of, I guess, distance between two members like that would be much, much smaller.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I think it shrinks it, which I think is probably beneficial for a group of people, although for the group of people who are middle management, less good for them. So you've talked about getting involved in these DAOs, getting involved in Rari Capital. What was sort of maybe like an aha framework for you on thinking about the product of Layer 3 and what that should be like and how that should help people interact with DAOs? Do you have a, a mental model? And I'm really just hinting at the mental model of, I think, the, the planetary system, which I find interesting.

Yeah. So when you're joining a DAO, let's think about the contributing team as kind of the sun. In the solar system that is whatever DAO you're joining. And so you kind of join as this Pluto, right? You are on an incredibly far orbit from the sun, and you're obviously not quite near all the hustle that's actually going on within the DAO. And bounties are kind of a means of jumping from outer orbits to inner orbits when it comes to, okay, you might start at Pluto, but the goal is to get really, really close to the sun. And I don't really remember that much about astronomy, so I don't know what planet is right by the sun. Is it Mercury or something? I honestly don't know. But your goal is to get as close to the sun as possible. And bounties are frankly just a means of doing that. So you might start as this fringe member. You come to contribute. You could write a tweet or something. And then you might move to, OK, I'm going to write some copy for the site. And then you might move to, OK, I'm going to create this visual. Whatever you can actually do within your vertical, because obviously those skills could be disjointed potentially. But maybe you'll start with microcopy and then you'll move to kind of like more macrocopy and then Medium posts, Mirror posts, and then writing full-blown documentation for the whatever protocol design and things like that until you're now this effectively like a writing engine for the community that you're now a part of. So yeah, I just think like thinking of DAOs more as solar systems than hierarchies is probably a good way of looking at it.

That's interesting. So we both, it sounds like, come from a marketing ground. I do background, I do performance marketing at Indeed.com. I've heard you talk a lot about writing and also some design. Do you think there's room for other types of marketers? Like, is there going to be an acquisition function in DAOs, or is it going to be tokenomics and, I don't know, airdrops or something like that, and that advertising and SDR, sort of like sales development, will just kind of go away? Do you have any thoughts?

No, user— yeah, user acquisition is going to be incredibly important, especially as, as you think about these DAOs, right? A lot of the products they maintain are just open source. And so there's no real reason. A lot of times your moat is your community, right? So what we saw with Uniswap, right? SushiSwap forked Uniswap and then built a community around their products and they created an incredible product and suite of products that ultimately drove their token price up for a great amount of time. And so it'll be really important to figure out how you can actually differentiate yourself with respect to like user acquisition. Like how do you go about getting users, retaining them, and basically like providing as many perks and benefits and just almost like akin to a loyalty program for your community. So we'll see a lot of like top of funnel stuff, but you'll see a lot of like retention. Like retention will probably be the most important piece to figuring out this, like this people puzzle when it comes to getting customers.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I don't know how different it is. I mean, it depends on the type of business model. And that's one of the things that I'm sort of curious about in this space as well is, you know, when I've talked to you, when I've talked to other people that are looking at building in this space, I think I've sort of seen two business models. And so one is something around the governance token. And so you'll issue governance tokens to investors and then the governance token will go up in value and that's sort of a business model. Another is potentially some type of payment for services model, and it's still kind of TBD. I think that Uniswap has a business model around sort of the exchange of, of these crypto assets. And I think MetaMask is when you swap from Ethereum to something else. And so those are more on the swap side, but I think with these other DAOs, it'll be interesting. And I'm specifically thinking about it as a performance marketer. And the retention aspect and sort of what that means. Because like with e-commerce, you know, you have someone buy something and that's kind of it. But do you have a sense of business models and how those might play into DAOs in any sense, or how you are all thinking about it?

You know what's really interesting is that crypto is this, this place where if you piss a user off, they can immediately transition basically themselves out of using your product. Whereas Facebook, you can't just get yourself off of like Facebook, right? You can't like export your Facebook data and like take it to Twitter, right? It's what you can export, you know, your ETH or your USDC from whatever financial protocol you're using and just use a fork of it, which is frankly like a hilarious problem that I think is like really, really like tough to solve. And so I think like, you know, these communities, as I mentioned before, will probably take like the Amex route when it comes to providing as many amazing benefits to their users as possible. Because it's not this— it's all going to be— every DAO will have like a loyalty program or like a rewards program for just sticking around. Right. And that's the, that's the governance token, like at the base layer, at the very—

I mean, that's interesting. So we just went through the pandemic, obviously, and pre-pandemic you had Apple and Google and Facebook with these amazing offices, and you could get babysitter services and haircuts, and they competed to retain talent based off those perks. And what you're saying is this sort of fully remote world, but even in the DAO world You'll still compete for talent and people on perks. It's just the nature of those perks will have to change and make sense in this decentralized world, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like a lot of things you and I probably can't even think about right now. Like just the perks that we'll want, right? Could be completely different from this, the life that we currently live right now. I might not want like WeWork perks or something like that, or like breakfast, lunch, dinner paid for, whatever. I'm not sure, but I might be more okay. Well, if I'm, if like the metaverse really, really takes hold, maybe I will value whatever in there more than something like a new, I don't know, keyboard every year or something, something random.

If you get into a DAO that has enough pull, can you get whitelisted on a hot NFT mint sort of? Like there could be different things, but I think that's also part of the fun for me is just the, the speculation of where this will go. And so maybe that's another question I have for you is, is you sort of think about DAOs, you know, I'm reading this book on the history of the corporation, the joint stock corporation, and it talks about a sort of multi-hundred-year history. And it talks about how it wasn't really until the railroad started that corporations took off. It wasn't until you needed large amounts of capital and financial management for where corporations started to make a lot of sense. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on like, where, where will DAOs occupy a niche? Like where, like what makes sense as a DAO versus a corporation versus a nonprofit? And I know some companies, if I talk to 'em, okay, we're gonna start off as a C corp and then we'll transition to a DAO and it's still sort of being decided. So just in terms of random fun speculation, do you have any sense of that?

Yeah, yeah. So I have like a couple, couple things here. First of all, like, just shout out ConstitutionDAO because I think they've really set a great precedent for how you kind of like come together with this common out-there mission and kind of get crew capital around it from corner— like the weirdest corners of the internet and like try to make something crazy happen in the real world. So I think we'll see a lot of acquisition DAOs. That will basically just try to pool all of our magic internet money, which frankly doesn't seem like that much per person. As long as we get 500,000 people to contribute, we can do some crazy stuff to happen. We can do some crazy stuff in the real world. Right. So acquisition DAOs, I think, will be incredibly funny things for just generating acute excitement around What if we all bought this?

Sports teams are the one that come to mind. But yeah, I think the Constitution was a super interesting one because it was, it was affordable-ish. I mean, obviously it didn't work out.

Yeah. Yeah. But like Krause House, right? What they're doing, like trying to actually buy an NBA team, like that would be incredible if we actually do that. And it'll be such like a paradigm shift or holy, holy shit, we might've just broken the simulation type moment. When people will realize, oh my God, we just pulled billions of dollars in capital to basically create this crazy real-world outcome. And on the more practical side, when you have to decentralize a lot of tedious work, like, frankly, things that you can get a lot of people to do a little of, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I think that same principle as like the acquisition DAOs when it says, okay, let's get a lot of people to contribute like a little bit of money. Well, let's get a lot of people to do like very small tasks that create like incredible network effects in the world, right? So we launched this drop called Quest Party, right? Where you tweet GM WAGMI and after n people actually like tweet that and like complete this kind of like quest, right? Then everyone gets paid out, but only after N people complete it. So everyone has a direct incentive to go, you know, shill this to other people and like actually like get and reach that threshold so that everybody gets paid out and earns the NFT and everybody gets some money for doing that. Yeah, it's a really like interesting thing for me because right at the core we have to figure out at layer 3 how do we coordinate people to do things en masse And I think creating this Ponzi of contribution is an important puzzle piece in all of that. So I think a DAO will really work when you need to get a lot of people to do a little bit of stuff, whether that's contributing money or time or just whatever use case I'm not thinking of right now.

That's a good framework. I hadn't put that together, but I think what you said about ConstitutionDAO with a small group— sorry, a large group of people doing a small amount of a thing. And so maybe in the past we all used to give a small amount of our attention to Facebook and Instagram or things like that. And now what you're saying is we can get a small amount of our time and put it towards a productive use and a task, and that all of us together aggregating it produces something, if not useful, at least interesting and entertaining in different ways.

Right. And you know, if we— since we're marketers, we could talk about this from like buying impression-based media, right? So if you could pay 200,000 people to retweet something for a dollar each, you can actually do that with crypto. It's like not hard. We did something like if we use Solana, say, to like pay people out, or Polygon or whatever. It obviously wouldn't be practical on ETH mainnet, but the amount of impressions you would get from 200,000 retweets would probably be way more than you would get if you just like bought $200,000 of impressions on Twitter, right? I think I haven't done the math, but I think because you've probably hit like escape velocity on getting or on just like awareness with getting 200,000 retweets, people will be like, what the hell? Why is this like random thing going viral? So you can, there's like a lot of really cool things that you could do with kind of that, like get N people to do this thing, but only pay people out after N people do it.

Yeah, having that threshold, I mean, it's certainly a new, it's a new dynamic, right? So maybe I enter a referral program and I try to refer 5 or 6 people because I think it ups my chances for something. But if those people then have an incentive to participate, that is an interesting dynamic. Is that something that you all came up with? Is that something that you'd seen in some other place? I'm just sort of, it feels like the birth of a new type of marketing campaign. And so it's just kind of interesting to hear. Be curious if you have any more insights into where it came from.

You know, I'd like to think we came up with it. I haven't really seen it done anywhere yet other than, I guess, just like, nice, completing like one-off things. But yeah, well, like, look, something that's incredibly fascinating in crypto is just this Ponzi-nomics, right? And like how everyone's, oh, this is a Ponzi scheme and whatever. But how can you kind of like take the same effects that a Ponzi scheme has with like getting people into a frenzy of, oh, I have to like ape in right now, and apply that in like productive ways, right, to like get stuff done. And so really, like, yeah, what's like integral to that is like keeping things like pretty low effort, but like obviously feeling like you're part of something, something larger. So we got a bunch of, like, a bunch of people to do really small things, uh, then I think we could like create some wild network effects.

Yeah, look, I mean, this is sort of moving from the wisdom of crowds, which I think was a big thing in the late '90s, early aughts, to the power of crowds. And I think we maybe saw this with WallStreetBets early on. It's okay, what can a large group of people coordinate to do together? And now you're talking about this from a DAO. So I think that's— I think it's really interesting in thinking about what you said. Okay, what's $200,000 in media on Twitter? You know, I look at this from a Super Bowl commercial. A Super Bowl commercial might be $10 million and you get about you have access to potentially 100 million impressions. The daily active user count on Twitter is 200 million users. And I have no doubt that if you were, were gonna pay people up to $10 million for everyone who retweets, you would get a lot of impressions. And so this is potentially unlocking something even bigger than has existed on the, the biggest advertising stage before. So that's super interesting. The, the Khodjasteh campaign.

Yeah, and once you, once you see Twitter integrate just whatever Web3 payment rails they choose to, I think this will just be like significantly easier to do. Even though we've already built like the mechanism to do this, but I think like it'll, we'll probably be able to just rebuild it using the Twitter API for everything. It's okay, we just trigger a bunch of transactions on verifying a retweet or whatever.

Do you think through Twitter, do you think this works on Discord or does it make a lot more sense on Twitter?

No, you can do it on Discord too. It's actually like pretty simple to do with the Discord bot. So long as like we've used like a CollabLander or whatever to do to, you know, link someone's Discord account with their wallet address. But it's, it's frankly like really easy. Like it's not like it's like, it's a really easy thing to do.

Nice, nice. All right, I have some DAO marketing questions. How do you go about getting other DAOs to use Layer 3?

Yeah, so I mean, it's a pretty easy sell, honestly. Like, the idea of getting even your most fringe members the ability to get involved is something that a lot of DAOs are trying to figure out. And so we've had a lot of inbound, we've had, you know, some outbound, and we're in the midst of like a complete rebuild right now. So we're kind of like slowing things down when it comes to new partnerships, at least for the next month. But it's basically, okay, here's what we've done for other communities, and does this interest you? And if not, that's fine. It's honestly your loss at that point. And so that's like why this is just such a prevalent problem that it doesn't take like a crazy enterprise sales team to basically convince a DAO to want to try this out. And so what happened with something like Olympus is we had worked with 10 DAOs or 15 or something before we worked with Olympus. We showed them just a couple things that we had done for other communities and we tried a pilot program. It went fantastically. And then we just launched another one with them. And I think we'll probably do a third as well, which is like really interesting because we're seeing people come back, right? We're seeing like these communities, okay, we actually like mobilized people. Let's like keep this going. Let's keep figuring this out. And it's a very like iterative process when it comes to thinking about how we actually move people around in ways that don't get stale or aren't spammy. And so I'm, I'm like just frankly incredibly excited for what's coming next.

Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned you don't have the enterprise sales force. Does that mean in the DAO-to-DAO world, there's no sales decks? There's no one that crafts, or do you have decks? How's that work?

So no, we do, we do have kind of like internal decks that we, you know, pass around to these contributing teams. And we haven't really like gone through governance for much, if anything. Just because a lot of these core contributing teams have kind of like a discretionary budget that they can use without going through governance. But no, we will totally see sales decks and like well-crafted pitches as, you know, more noise pops up in these governance proposals.

Do you think it'll be on Notion or do you think it'll be an actual deck? I'm just kind of curious what that'll look like in this world.

So, I mean, if You guys want to go take a look at the first deck that we put out. You could search like Rari Capital Layer 3 Partnership snapshot, and you'll see the first proposal I wrote was a full-blown deck, and it's pretty well designed. It tells a story. It's pretty bold. And I think having a good deck will be great for these governance proposals because Putting a lot of stuff into text is just not that effective because just frankly, people don't like reading. So having a nice visual deck will be something that's really important for closing the sales.

You need to tell the story, basically.

Yeah, you want to tell the story. It's like a way you get a community excited. And if you get a community excited, then I assume that getting their votes would be a bit easier.

Yeah. So you said you have not had to go through governance yet, but I I imagine that means at some point you'll have to be able to look at who, who has the governance tokens on chain, who has what, and sort of go and sell the largest token holders, right? To, to get them to sign up at some future point where you need to get governance approval.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's, I think it's a pretty like straightforward sale as well, right? If you have a, a large governance token holder, and you come basically say, hey, we're going to get like a lot more work done, we'll basically accelerate the future that this DAO is like headed towards, which ideally will raise the value of your governance token. So if you think about like the way we actually go about pitching this to communities, it's a pretty like beneficial thing for everybody involved, right? It's okay if we get more work done First of all, the people doing that work are probably like token holders themselves, so it's like just more opportunities to earn more governance tokens. But it's also, hey, hopefully these governance tokens will be worth more after all this work gets done. That makes sense.

It totally makes sense. And I think what's interesting too is the immediacy probably of seeing the token price change, whereas I think with stock prices, I have some stock, and indeed, it— like, my actions, it's hard to say, okay, what drove the stock up or down this time? Is it what I did? Is it the market? Is it something beyond the control? But actually, here, while there are certainly the macro trends of crypto, it does seem like there's a lot more control, and you can see immediacy in the results and the returns.

Yeah, and that's, you know, an incredible pro to crypto. And what I think will ultimately become a slight con is just the immediate gratification of everything that crypto basically provides is being in flux in crypto doesn't really exist because everything just kind of happens and you see exactly how much money you're making at any given moment in time, which is kind of unhealthy when you think about it. I could open my phone at 3:00 AM and see "Oh, did I lose 15% of my net worth today or not?" Yeah.

I guess that goes back to the beginning of our conversation. And I think that's an issue in society is there's going to be a need to need a way to disconnect is going to have to happen. So did you, did Layer 3 get paid in RARI tokens when you did that work?

Yeah. So we got paid at the time. Like, I think it was $7,000 in RARI governance tokens. And now that 7,000 tokens is worth approximately— actually, it might have been significantly less. I don't think about it. See, I think that 7,000 tokens is probably around like $15,000 right now. But yeah, so, and, and that illustrates again an important, you know, aspect of all of this is that you, you would assume Ideally, the work you're doing, you're paid in ownership that will ideally appreciate in value over the long term. So the earlier you do work, the hopefully more money you will have in some random time period, which also incentivizes people to do things like early and often, which is just something we haven't seen.

Yeah, I remember.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's urgency for, for, uh, for work.

I think you and I had talked about that a little bit last time too, and I think that is interesting because Normally you see companies go towards enterprises because they have the most money, but in this case, it's more similar maybe to venture capital where you want to get early because you want to see as much appreciation as possible. And so that just creates a different dynamic. And so that is definitely interesting. Do you have any thoughts on the Rari-FEI merger? Is that going through? Did that happen?

So I haven't stayed completely up to date on it. And Jay, if you're listening to this, that's my bad. He's one of my closest friends.

Well, I can edit it out if you want to.

No, I think you'll find it funny, but I think it represents a paradigm shift and what they're doing is just incredibly amazing to watch. And I think if it goes through completely, it will turn a lot of heads in the traditional financial world that I think will just basically probably come to the Fei and Ry team and just be like, what the fuck just happened? Like, what the fuck was this? How did you guys just combine this much capital this efficiently and create, frankly, this outcome in the world? Totally right. It's something that people probably will look at from a traditional financial perspective and think this should not be possible. And some might be mad, some might be captivated by it, whatever. But I think a lot of cool things will come kind of using this as a benchmark. Yeah.

So looking forward, do you think that at some point in time people will be able to go full DAO and get all of their income from working at DAOs and on DAOs?

Yeah, 100%. I think that's a no-brainer. I think what we will really see happen is fluid work across DAOs. So long as you can adequately remove the context necessary to contribute, someone will be able to come to something like a Layer 3 and contribute to like 10 different communities incredibly easily just because, okay, I have these skills, here's how I can use those skills, and here's how I can get paid. It's really, really it.

What role do you see reputation playing in work here? So you all probably have a reputation. It's probably not necessarily recorded in some way, but do you think there will be some type of reputation mechanism for, for people who work across DAOs?

Totally, totally, totally. I think what's really important is porting like your Web2 skills to kind of this like Web3 world, which I think will have like a great hand in helping happen. But what is really like interesting is if we're marching towards this permissionless work future where, EJ, you won't have to like apply to the Indeed of Web3, right? It's just, okay, you have this reputation. I like, on-chain, even though it's because of like off-chain tasks. I know you can like do this work, so I don't need you to go through an application process. You, you're just like allowed to submit the work and we'll, we'll see if we'll accept it. And that's how you kind of level up. Oh yeah, I think like reputation will have like a huge— obviously like it's a, it's a very necessary puzzle piece and actually enabling a, uh, a permissionless work future.

Yeah, so that, that's interesting. So you have your reputation on-chain and that may or may not give you access to different things. But then you also have your decentralized work verification. And so you could have someone with no past history do work, as long as they're willing to accept that if it's not verified, it won't get done. And you could have someone with a past history do work. And it's— I guess it equalizes in some way too, depending on how that verification is done of the task.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's a pretty cool equalization mechanism that I like to think that equalizes the opportunity to work that people in this world have. A 14-year-old in Bangalore with some crazy skill would have access to the same work that a 22-year-old recent Berkeley grad who's working in Silicon Valley would, as long as we're routing things through some pseudonymous way, I don't care actually who that 14-year-old in Bangalore is so long as they can do the work. It's something that I think represents a complete paradigm shift from who someone is to just what they can do.

Yeah. I mean, that's true. And this kind of goes back to thinking about the history and evolution of the workweek and the role labor unions played into it. And they got us the 5-day workweek and roughly 8 hours a day. And at some point in time, progressives, hey, kids shouldn't work. Now what you're saying is that pseudonymously we're not going to know, and it shouldn't matter. As long as someone could do the work, we shouldn't care about their qualifications. At the same time, it'll be interesting to see what type of, of balance sort of comes into the, the world as well to counteract some of our tendencies to always be connected and always do something. It feels like a challenge that I don't know if anyone's trying to solve right now.

Yeah, it'll definitely be a challenge. I think like what's just being online 24/7 and frankly, like being able to consume and own everything that Web3 provides just kind of echoes this larger problem that like mental health and like just being able to unplug and completely disconnect will be like a very hard thing to do and just very like taxing process over the long term. Like what I was thinking about the other day was if you can own everything, is that really like a good thing to do? If I can own the, I don't know, the text on my website, that's an actual NFT. Is that so good for society? Like maybe, I honestly, there's a lot of reasons why it is, but it's also, you could have, you know, the world basically become toddlers who don't like to share anything ever. Right.

It's another interesting aspect. I mean, it's the commodification of everything. So from the text on your website to a part of the Constitution, everything could become ownable and like sliced up into some fraction and then traded around. And what are the implications for that?

I don't know.

That's an interesting point to bring up. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah.

I mean, we're, we're real people still, right? And as much as we want to ignore it, we still exist in this physical world that We have to have like emotion still and things like that. And I'm sure there's obviously there's a way to do this correctly, but there's also a way to do this incorrectly. And I'm curious which way kind of like the market will, will, uh, we'll swing on this.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll, we'll get there eventually through ups and downs. But I was thinking about now just ISA is an income share agreement. So someone goes and they take a bootcamp and maybe they then go and do work at DAOs and they're starting to get governance token while they're, their income stream could be then divided up and sold to other people. So in some way, like that person's time is being commodified and sold off. And so—

Yeah, that's actually an interesting— during some of our whiteboarding sessions, we had talked about that as like ways to bootstrap, you know, someone's career and like something like this. And if we have high conviction on, say, a really valuable contributor who we think will be like just a super contributor in the space, Then if we can provide like upfront, oh, some way, yeah, some upfront maybe capital or some like upfront value that we add to them where we would have like some allocation of like their future token earnings, I think it'd just be like an incredibly cool mechanism. But obviously you'd have to do that in an ethical way or like kind of—

I mean, I think Substack does that with key writers and I think it makes sense and works, but it It opens up interesting things. So maybe going from some of the future implications, what are you working on that you're particularly excited about right now? What are you thinking about for the next 6 months and where's your focus?

Yeah. So if you think about a DAO, the core, I guess the atomic unit of a DAO is a person. And each of those individual people have really cool skills. And how you unlock kind of like that individual potential within your community is really interesting. But how do you coordinate them in like groups of people that have never met? And so I think what we'll see, like, really, like, what will be really cool that we're working on right now is just like group bounties and maybe like under larger, say, projects that the community is trying to, uh, like advance towards. So A community might want to translate, you know, their docs into some amalgamation of, or some like group of like Asian languages, for example. Well, obviously like one person probably can't do all that, and so that wouldn't just be one bounty. And so, all right, how do we like gamify getting 20 different people to all do this 20, or all do like 20 different tasks and make it fun to like accomplish in like a very short period of time? With providing bonuses if you like reach— if you— if everybody like does it by this deadline, and giving them NFTs that show that they were like a part of this larger like push, and then also like allowing them to level up through layer 3, which will then obviously like be their reputation system. So we have a lot of like—

that's interesting—

cool stuff in the, in the, in the pipeline. And that was a, a small, a small teaser of what's to come and Come mid-January.

I like it. I, I hadn't even thought about that. I mean, it's, I think part of the fun for me talking with you is there's always something, sometimes many things new that you all are thinking about, sort of pushing that edge. So, uh, I, I definitely appreciate the time. Any last topics or shoutouts you wanna cover before I give you back some time?

Honestly, I'm just like incredibly happy and, and grateful to, to be in this community. I think someone who Probably gets a lot of, probably for someone who provides this much value to the space, I guess Cooper probably doesn't get enough shoutouts. Cooper Turley, if you're listening to this, I hope you are. Shout out to you, man. You're probably the most positive sum person I've met in this space.

Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Well, I appreciate it, Dariya, and I hope that those people that you mentioned will listen. So I hope that Cooper listens. All right. Well, I appreciate it. It's great connecting and yeah. I'll talk to you soon. Hold on.

I'm just— awesome, EJ. Thanks for having me.