-- PRE-CALL CHECKLIST ---

General Discovery

Researcher: Jaris James

        **John Paller - Founder of Opolis**

Joshua Lapidus - Executive Community Steward of Opolis

About the event

• Project: Opolis
• Guests: John Paller, 0xJoshua
• Topic: Decentralized Employment Benefits
• NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE

About our guest speaker

• John Paller, Founder of Opolis. (Twitter: @PallerJohn) (Discord: JohnPaller | Opolis#2670).
• Joshua Lapidus, Executive Community Steward of Opolis. (Twitter: @0xJoshuaSL) (Discord: 0xJoshua#0888).
• Write a short bio about the guest(s) including their role at the project they are speaking about.
  • From 1999 to 2001, John Paller was a Division Director for 2 years at Robert Half, one of the leading recruitment and staffing agencies worldwide. John later became the CEO of PeoplePartners, another staffing/recruiting agency for 8 years before he founded Opolis in 2017. Joshua was the Business Development Lead for Lyft from 2018-2019, before becoming the Head of Business Development for Panvala, a sister DAO of ConsenSys. In this role, Joshua secured the first corporate sponsorships for a DAO.
  • Before even getting involved in crypto, John’s vision for his HR firm (PeoplePartners) revolved around a vague desire to help “democratize employment,” referring to what he saw as a lopsided social contract where employers have a huge amount of power over employees within U.S. society. Questions started to gnaw at him — why is employment so disproportionate in power and value distribution? Why is healthcare in the United States tied to employment?
  • It was while reading more broadly into economics and game theory, in hopes of answering these questions, that John came across Bitcoin from a friend working at a technology startup who told him it was the future of money. John read the white paper, and didn’t fully understand it, but bought some. Buying some Bitcoin on a whim was, however, not John’s only forewarning of blockchain destiny. While attending a small entrepreneurship conference in California in early 2014, he met Dmitry Buterin, Vitalik Buterin’s father. There was only around 30 people there, so it was a very intimate affair. Dmitry and John bonded as fathers, and quickly became friends.
  • Due to this chance connection, John had a direct line to Vitalik’s father, who made “social media posts on the Ethereum white paper and the ICO.” This meant that he had exposure to the project from an early stage and, in early 2016, asked Dmitry to connect him with his son, Vitalik, who “was kind enough to spend several hours with John to talk about his ideas for use cases. John stated, “In hindsight, he was very gracious because my use case ideas were terrible” — John didn’t understand decentralization at all,” he recounts, adding that his mind was still stuck in the old world of centralized corporate structures.
  • John eventually did have “the lights go on,” at which point he decided to do a full pivot in life. “It was almost kind of like my version of a midlife crisis,” John explains regarding his sudden decision to sell his business, effectively turning his back on a successful career to go full time web3.
  • John decided to capitalize on the steady rise of self-employment by creating a decentralized cooperative to automate the employee payroll/benefits experience. John stated, “The rate of self-employment is accelerating even faster now due to the pandemic. The estimates are 90 million people by 2028 in the U.S. workforce alone.” Though the share of independent workers is rising, John sees an untapped niche in the market for human resource systems. From data management to identity verification and credentialing, “all of it is designed with the corporation as the customer — they are farmers of talent and the talent is the product,” John explains. On the blockchain side, the phenomenon of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, is set to benefit from, and offer opportunities to, this growing crop of independent workers. Play-to-earn games, the increasingly popular framework of blockchain games that allow players to make money within the economies of video games, are also set to burgeon. All of this poses challenges for governments, which can benefit from the arrangement where most people have an ongoing, full-time job “because employment is a great way to make sure that taxes are paid,” whereas managing the reporting of independent contractors is much more difficult. “Imagine a world where you work in 20 countries simultaneously with people that share your values, share your worldview, and you don’t have to worry about any of the jurisdictional compliance.”
• What are some notable achievements that increase their web3 reputation?
  • John Paller is the founder of ETH Denver, and Joshua is the Executive Community Steward. ETH Denver is a global innovation festival, which is currently the largest web3 summit in the world.

About the project

• What is the general positioning of the project? i.e. DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, governance.
  • General Position: A member-owned digital employment cooperative. Opolis utilizes DeFi, DAOs, and governance.
• What is the value proposition of the project? How does it clearly differentiate itself from others in the web3 space?
  • Opolis is the first project of its kind. Opolis provides top-tier insurance benefits, along with W2 and payroll for the US web3 world, making sure that their members are tax compliant and insured. Service members are also owners of the service, and receives a share of the EOY profits.