Preamble: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me!  I think your departure is an opportunity for the DAO to reflect, so I wanted to get your perspective down.  Hopefully we can use this to improve ourselves as an organization.

What did you do at the DAO?

• Early days: framing and trying to align the DAO in certain directions
  • I.e. building framework for what a guild is, what seasons are, what happens in a season, how does governance work in a guild/broader dao
  • Lots of thinking, lots of mental model, elucidating to others to get consensus
  • At the time it felt pretty easy - no one knew what was going on, they just wanted some type of leadership. Stuff that he wrote just made sense to people and that became foundational to how we operate
• Next evolution: executing on those ideas, making multisigs, grants committee/funding, holding elections, etc
  • Executing on the ideated infrastructure (first 2-3 months)
  • S1/S2 was about helping projects figure out where THEY fit into the whole thing. Heavily involved in newsletter, advised projects on what they can do, how they can leverage resources, how to get a proposal up to grants
  • Also heavily involved in writers guilds and administrative operations too: discord, coordinape, discourse, notion
    • Spent a lot of time building out the notion page
  • In july he was absent from the DAO, he had to step away to deal with some personal stuff
• End of S2 - started focusing less on operational and started to think more broadly about governance and strategy
  • Felt a bit lost in the last two months - didn’t know how to reshape strategy and governance
  • At this point he felt like he was spinning his wheels

Where did you spend most of your time?

• Early: talking to people, gathering alignment and consensus on WHAT to do
• Next: talking to people, but now it was HOW to do things on the rails they were building
• Then: started getting deep on Ops Guild and Writers Guild

What attracted you to BanklessDAO in the first place?

• He was planning on quitting his job - he was pigeonholed into doing work he didn’t enjoy doing
  • The parts that he DID enjoy, there was a glass ceiling (they wanted to hire someone more mature than him)
  • He got a bit disillusioned by this
• Then he was freelance tech writing on crypto projects - that’s when the got the email from Bankless HQ
  • Got an airdrop, spent a week in discord and it felt…like he knew the right direction to take
  • So much enthusiasm, so many possibilities
  • He had some experience with DAOs, the enthusiasm was there, the people were awesome, and it aligned with his personal side too. Everything aligned.
  • Q: how many people were around then?
    • First coordinape at end of june was like 100 people, but not all were involved, more like 2-3 dozen people
    • First couple of weeks with hundred was all hype - people were taking way more time than was sustainable for them
      • They started to go back to their jobs

Did you feel you were supported here?  Set up for success?

Yes, very much so!

• Mostly because there was no structure or system in place to tell him “No”
  • In fact, he built those structures
• He was in a leadership position where people trusted him to shepherd the process, he never felt hindered
  • Newer members might feel it though

Was anything lacking?

• As time went on, there was a question around: why are we doing this? What are we trying to accomplish?