Open-Source Funding vs Venture Capital with Scott Moore

In this episode I spoke with Scott Moore, the co-founder of Gitcoin and Public Works. Scott was one of the pioneers in public goods funding through quadratic funding and DAOs.

During the discussion we talk about the "everything is coordination" meme, his advice for starting a DAO, and open source development. We also talk about our differences in views on the role of venture capital in crypto and avoiding the issues with the status quo for more collective forms of investment.

Venture Mutualism: https://www.publicworks.fm/mutualism

Music (Düne Düne by Acid Arab): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC29TpGFgtE

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Kevin took my criticisms pretty well. It wasn't like that we disagreed or anything. My main point was just that when you say like coordination or that like I'm coordinating and that everything is coordination, that in certain contexts and situations it can kind of gloss over the power relationships that are in that specific context. Like I think when you say, because it's kind of like, it's like reminiscent of saying you know, there was some sort of like as if everything is just kind of like a miscommunication, that like the communication failure is just like oh, we should have communicated better, we should have had better coordination mechanisms for XYZ, and totally like I think that's that can be a very true statement. I think it's just that if you're looking at, like the example that we used and we're talking about was oil and gas exploration like if I'm an oil and gas executive, like it's definitely not like a miscommunication or a coordination failure that I'm continuing to extract oil and gas from the ground and sell it to make money that's

Speaker 1: 1:26

sort of like the way that the system works and the reason that we can't tell the oil and gas executive like hey, can you stop it? Or, like you know, we can't just say like hey, I think there's been a miscommunication, you're supposed to not do that anymore, because we don't want you to like they're not going to listen to that. Of course, because there's a power differential and there's, like you know, this system that people are embedded in that they can't necessarily break out of as an individual, and it requires, it requires coordination, of course, but it requires coordination towards some sort of collective action and that means, like, fighting power. Yeah, so I exactly.

Speaker 2: 2:04

I think there's like a degree to which, in my view, coordination is basically just people coming together to do something, and the important question is what are they actually going to come together to do? What are they trying to accomplish? And I think we often make the mistake of assuming that we can just sort of like set up a arbitrary, abstract situation and then, you know, just kind of throw these sort of concepts or mechanisms at it. But there's a much broader social context that all this exists within, and I think to me that's where we actually need to be more precise about the sort of goals of crypto or, you know, web3 quote unquote as an ecosystem. So to me it's um, I don't know, everything is people. People have to do things together, and then what are they doing together? What are we, what are we like trying to accomplish? And I think to that extent, coordination is like it's a good thing to like outline, especially like when you're creating a new technology, because usually in like the modern, in like the modern age, that technology is going to be somewhat social. It's going to involve like people coordinating, like working together. But I think that like kind of explicit description of what we're trying to do is something that's been missing from the crypto ecosystem for a long time and, in a way, it's been one of the strengths of the movement, because by not strictly defining, you know exactly what we're coordinating towards. People have, from all different parts of sort of the political spectrum to the extent that exists.

Speaker 2: 3:40

I don't necessarily believe that's right mental framework, like they can all agree that they at least want to build some cool stuff and that cool stuff might eventually be useful.

Speaker 2: 3:51

But I do think this is like kind of the point we're coming to now, where we have this sort of question of, okay, we built all this infrastructure, what are we going to do with it? And I don't think in that context, we've actually really articulated you know, what does meaningful adoption of crypto look like? What does meaningful what is a real world use case of crypto look like? And we have some of those that are starting to emerge which is awesome, by the way, I'm actually very which we can get to like pro infrastructure. I think we actually don't have quite enough infrastructure, which is a hot tape, but I think that, like the real world applications have to be grounded in some kind of like truth about the world in terms of what we actually want to achieve, not just as a technology but as a movement, and that's where I think we've lost a bit of the. I think I can.

Speaker 1: 4:42

I can understand the maybe strategic approach to framing things in almost like a politically neutral way by saying, like coordinate, by using the, the meme of coordination to like bring people in. And I think, no, no matter where you are in the political spectrum like everyone's had the experience of like a giant miscommunication or a lack of coordination in some sort of social group that caused some sort of like negative outcome, but then indeed it were. I think crypto is sort of like in this situation now, where it's like okay, we have all these people who are, like they're interested in like coordination abstractly, but we don't really know the, the direction to go in. So, like then there's missing this, I don't know clear, clear direction to go, and my feeling is that this means that there is no like. I like it's hard for me to say that there is a crypto movement personally, because I feel like it's made up of so many different, uh, like different groups with different beliefs and like ideas about what that future is supposed to look like.

Speaker 1: 5:59

So, like you'll have I mean you have people who will say that, like, we need to like completely destruct the state and like create, you know, bitcoin as our, our currency for the world. And then you'll have other people who will say, like we need blockchain to be mass adopted by all of the banks and like all these institutions, that we have mass adoption for crypto, and there's like this there's a tension inside of crypto that I think hasn't been dealt with yet, but will need to be dealt with like it, like it is, like it is going to be dealt with in some capacity either, like you know, crypto gets adopted, uh, gets mass adoption through, like you know, paypal having their stablecoin becoming super popular or something like that. Or I mean, maybe, maybe the you know crypto anarchists are right and the state does somehow collapse because everyone's using bitcoin to pay for things we need a uh PayPal, uh, you know, uh, global world government, that's uh, that's actually that's the future, that's, that's the worst habitat actually is very nice.

Speaker 2: 7:03

It's a very it's a very nice habitat. They they provide a lot of like PayPal themed foods a lot of billionaires as well beverages.

Speaker 2: 7:10

I don't even know a lot of, a lot of, yeah, a lot of billionaires. The PayPal mafia, you know, owns most of the property, but like that's fine. Um, I do think that like there's so yeah, like this is an interesting question in the context of movement building, because I've been thinking a lot about like historical movements um, and actually this sort of ties back to like even like open-source software as sort of like a cultural movement. Um, like red turner has a really good book from uh counterculture to cyberculture, about like how, essentially, you know, going back to like stupe brand and like the whole earth catalog, this movement was sort of first about like ideals and then sort of just tangentially about technology and that sort of like shaped its, its development. But I think the interesting like question with crypto is like in in some sense it is a movement like. It certainly is against like certain certain outcomes, um, at least historically, if you go back to like its roots and like the cyberpunk movement, to the extent that it's like kept a single consistent thread around, like what it stands for, I think that's definitely not true. Uh, it's, it's certainly alleviated from that, but I do think there's some value in structuring our like thinking around it as a movement, because when you think about movements, they sort of go through life cycles. They, um, they start, they sort of like grow, they like start to, you know, slow down and and sort of reach this sort of um, you know top of the S-curve, and then they sort of head into like some kind of mitosis, they, they fragment and they split and and I do think crypto is kind of in this phase now of splitting in this way where ultimately we need to figure out, like, what is the actual sort of you know fork of this movement that we want to like really see reach some kind of mass adoption, and I do think that like to.

Speaker 2: 9:06

In my view, that's probably not the one where we just sort of end up being like well, I guess you know the sales force coin is doing really well, we're gonna see that like the, that's the future. But at the same time I mean, without those sorts of players like having some kind of say in the system, it, it will be challenging to like really make meaningful change. So you have this, this constant dichotomy, or like or like tension between movements that are really really, um, idealized, but really don't get anywhere. It's very hard for them to like build momentum or they or they fragment too much um that because of like the rigidity of of the movement itself. So, like, occupy Wall Street is, um, maybe an example of, on the one hand, like a movement that just kind of peered out because it had so many different directions, and, on the other hand, a movement like, let's say, the purely like free software movement is one that kind of ended up being red queen, doubted existence in a sense, by like the fact that you had other sort of like open source players come in and say we, we sort of want to like take this in a different direction. And I'm not saying either, those are good outcomes actually, like I think both Occupy as a movement and the free software movement uh had a lot of good to them in the sense of, you know, they were both very, they had strong idealistic visions, they had very principal kind of members, um, but they also didn't have the organization to like really reach like kind of uh the sort of like level of scale to be like uh meaningful, quote unquote out of you know um over a one, two decade period and and krypton's kind of getting to this point where it's like now at, like you know the end of the first decade and now it's like kind of halfway through the second. We're like, okay, what are we like? What is, what is the sort of like end goal of this? What is the like you know next stage of this?

Speaker 2: 11:07

Um, in my view, it's possible to get too far in the other direction where you really just sacrifice everything to like like make the movement go fast. You know, like this is like the constant problem of um. You know every well-intentioned uh startup um like you know the let's say hypothetically, the I'll say the anthropic problem, I won't even say the open AI problem, but like, hey, we're gonna like solve this. You know AI safety problem actually, just kidding, we're like gonna build some more capacity for AI. Actually, uh, that seems like more profitable and it's not a probably fully fair characterization of of that case.

Speaker 2: 11:48

But on the one hand, yeah, in movements you have this problem of like these early stage kind of like deaths or like um slowdowns of movements before they can or or mitosis of movements before they can reach adoption, and, on the other hand, you have this like massive overgrowth of movements and this is a very narrow corridor, like which is like the problem with this, this sort of like framing, is like it's a very and I think this is just like the thin line that we have to walk. Unfortunately, this, like this, this thin line, basically, is the only place where we, the movement, succeeds while retaining some notion of like the initial initial values that it that it had, um, and I don't know how you think about that. I mean, that's that's sort of like what came to mind, but I realized that's like a really long. I mean it was it's.

Speaker 1: 12:42

For me it's reminiscent of a book that I really like called neither vertical nor horizontal by Rodrigo Nunez, or he's. I mean he's talking specifically about different left-wing movements, how, um, sometimes there is this idea that we have two choices either we have a completely like anarchists flat, horizontal movement nobody has power but everybody has power at the same time, kind of like occupy wall street type of thing or a completely vertical, highly organized, highly disciplined but much smaller group of people who are trying to initiate change, as if, like, those are the only two choices of like the organization problem is either that or the other. But he's trying to advocate for like a more, a much, much more nuanced sort of understanding of organization building and mass movement building that is kind of, like, you know, diagonal in some way. I guess you could say that that has elements of both, based on the context and situation that we're in, and having like a plurality of different types of of strategies and different types of organizations that are all working towards like a general, like same general kind of goal.

Speaker 1: 13:48

Um, since historically those are like the types of movements that have one I mean like the, the feminist movement in the beginning like one because it had many different types of organizations who all didn't agree with each other on a lot of things, but they were able to like reach like certain certain larger goals that were really, um, that had a lot of like social progress, and so that's kind of what I think about, but maybe it's been about uh, about 14 minutes now, so I wanted to um pause the discussion to introduce my uh guest today is Scott Moore.

Speaker 1: 14:21

He is the co-founder of Gitcoin and he's also starting a new project called Public Works. He's a steward for a few other DOWs and is an advisor for MetaGov. I've been having the pleasure of being able to talk a lot with Scott the past like couple of months, I would say. Now we just ended up being at like a lot of the same places and we've been having a lot of just back and forth of like interesting conversations, so it's nice to finally have one that's uh recorded, I think awesome.

Speaker 2: 14:50

Yeah, thank you for having me. I feel like, um, that's probably a good, honestly, starting point for Any any discussion on the space, because I think that this narrow corridor of like which I think is actually what the author you mentioned is is probably also like in alignment with. It is like probably the most important question that we actually have to answer as a space, and I see like not that many people which you know. Maybe it's just a result of the fact that, like there's already so many attacks on the space just Naturally occurring that we have to defend against. Like I don't see a lot of people taking like an active approach to trying to articulate, like, what is the future? Like decade vision of the space itself. But, yeah, great to be here, really enjoyed. Like are also unrecorded conversations and hopefully we can like, yeah, touch on some of those ideas here too.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Yeah for sure. So we're like. So, like we were just talking about, I just like kind of summarizing a bit of the what are the sort of discussion points that I had with Kevin Awakey on his Podcast Green Pill, when I was on not too long ago talking about the book. But yeah, there's kind of like this question of, I think this larger question of like coordination, and I think get coin was One of the I guess kind of like the main Rep organization. I guess I was pushing the meme for for coordination the representative of the concept.

Speaker 1: 16:22

Yeah, they were repping coordination as a concept, yeah, but I thought maybe we can, in case people don't know who you are, if you want to talk a bit about, about get coin and how, yeah, I guess a problem that was initially trying to solve and and kind of what's come out of it, the story behind it.

Speaker 2: 16:39

Yeah, so I feel like Get coin has gone through a lot of iterations.

Speaker 2: 16:43

I Think one of the things maybe isn't the right metric to really focus on.

Speaker 2: 16:49

I don't want to, like you know, end up in Good hearts law, but, like we've existed for about five and a half years, which by crypto standards is Already a long time, and we've gone through like so many changes over that period, it's hard to like encapsulate all of them. But the overall like original mission and I'll try and keep this short it was like how do we actually fund open source software as a sort of public good in a way that is equivalent to the way that you know, other kinds of public goods locally get funded when there's a government, you know a city or a state or a nation that can actually like facilitate and sort of maintain it, and Historically this has been a huge problem for open source software because you have all these maintainers who are Are really not that concerned Based on, as I started saying before, like the historical cultural nature of open source with money but still need money to actually like exist. It turns out we all sort of need money to like do things in the world.

Speaker 2: 17:55

Unfortunately at least currently. I actually think Money can be good in a David Graber sense. There's lots of, like you know, ethan Buckman talks a lot about this, so I won't dwell on it, but, like, read his work on sort of the nature of money in crypto as sort of a means of sort of Managing debt very interesting stuff. But I think that, like, historically, open source has been very to that, you know, same view, like anti money, and what this is meant is that you know you have all these One security risks that come from that where, like, like Hartley was a great example in 2014, open SSL had this like heartbeat option and, essentially, like there's this like over read where you could just pull in all this like ostensibly private data and Then get access to everyone's sort of accounts. It caused billions of dollars of economic damage because, you know, in the XKTD sense, the one guy from Nebraska who was maintaining all these things I actually don't think he was from Nebraska in that case, but that's the sort of comic he was just doing this in his spare time. He had a job, he had a family and stuff he had to do in like the real world, so, so to speak, and he just ended up, you know, forgetting that. You know there was this security vulnerability I guess that he was supposed to fix or maybe didn't see it.

Speaker 2: 19:14

And you know, part of the reason that happens is just because there's not funding for open source software in the same way as we have funding for roads and bridges and electrical grids. And the other problem is sort of you know, more fundamental, which is Because there's not really money in the system. You don't really have a way to Sort of account for, like you know, thinking money is a unit of count the work that people are doing in that system and giving them sort of a clear sense of ownership over the project as it grows. And so there's there's sort of you know, on the one hand, the problem here that emerges, where maintainers don't necessarily want to give up control, maintainers are, you know, usually one or two people that are just doing this on their own and you get this problem of there's no one to like kind of be in succession of them. But the other problem that emerges is that you don't really have community governance and instead what happens is Other larger corporate players come in and they say wait a minute, like we can just give you like Tons of money like we can. If your community isn't funding you, we can fund you, but we just want to be able to decide everything that happens in the project for like the next 10 years. And then, of course, this creates like all these Like larger problems for the broader open source community that they could have solved if they had been more sort of attentive to the money problem in the first place.

Speaker 2: 20:42

So we started with the idea of just how do we fund these sort of like maintainers, and it was very lucky that Vitalik, zoe and Glenn had written this paper on like quadratic funding, which was not originally the intention of the grants tooling. It was just let's get these maintainers some like funding and magic internet money. That seems like a good idea and we just sort of realized this is a much better way to do it. It ends up being actually a great balance between. So, like you know, rank the way quadratic funding works in the short is just if you have like ranked choice voting, you can decide. You know, here are the top three choices I have of things that should be done or people that should be funded or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2: 21:23

In quadratic funding you're actually able to like instead measure the intensity of your preference with respect to each Potential option.

Speaker 2: 21:32

So you might say I actually like, prefer option to like Pretty closely to like option one, but option three is like way down here.

Speaker 2: 21:42

So I want to really like showcase in my my vote that I actually really care about option one and option two and what it essentially, rather than just doing this with, like you know, a sort of vote or voice credit in quadratic funding is the names would Suggests you're doing this with with money, so you're having a say in the project, but you're also in in turn by having to say, giving them capital and, and one of the benefits of this is not only that you get this like granular expression of your own preferences, but that you get the ability to Fund the project as you see fit and In turn, if lots of people do this, one of the nice properties of this particular model, it's just that like you're sort of cool and I think actually a lot of your listings might be familiar with this, so I'll I'll stop here but like you can actually collapse the preferences in a way that makes sure that whales or large funders are not, like you know, like the corporation in that example, like Getting way too much say in how the project evolves or how the maintainer or set of maintainers or ecosystem is funded.

Speaker 2: 22:44

So that's the TLDR sort of how we ended up where we are with this quadratic funding stuff. It's been a really long road. There's a lot of stuff in between there in terms of models we tried, different approaches we took, but you know, the open source problem was kind of the the main part of this. It just happened actually, that you know, we've expanded beyond that because there's other kinds of public goods that are in this category, I'd say, of not just digital public goods but global public goods that are just not really well funded To title together because of this coordination Failure.

Speaker 2: 23:15

You know, I think that's actually accurate in this case, which has to do with the incentives of each nation. They don't care about things that are like beyond their borders. That's Maybe, you know, spicy, but that's sort of my take.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Yeah, I mean I think there's. I still feel that there's definitely a power relationship in the open source Question as well, Just like I mean I do think that corporations benefit quite a lot from open source Development. Of course that's like I don't think that's like difficult to To say otherwise, just like the amount of open source that obviously people use. Hold on one second. What? Sorry, my my music randomly turned on. Okay, good news is I can't hear it.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Yeah, I was just really loud in my head. But yes, it's like the background it's. It's part of the actual experience of like it's. I hope it was like an I don't know, some kind of maybe solemn classical piece, just as you're talking about the dangers of Corporate governance.

Speaker 1: 24:23

Do you want to know it was? It was a Middle Eastern house music. Actually, I was like a play that sounds a lot more interesting.

Speaker 2: 24:30

Actually, you send me that after.

Speaker 1: 24:57

Time. So I was going to say that, like, I think so. Corporations benefit a lot from this, like power imbalance with developers, people who want to develop open source code, like hackers, people who want to work on this stuff. If the states were to fund, you know, more consistently open source software, then it would potentially hurt corporations from being able to exert as much influence. There is the other side, of course, on that, like if the states is then prioritizing what gets built and what doesn't, like I don't know.

Speaker 1: 25:59

People may make some sort of arguments for or against that. I think it just depends on the intentions of the states, probably, but the intentions of a corporation is usually pretty much the same they want to make more money. To me, I think there is still like it's still a, it's also a coordination problem, but it is also like one that is bounded by power relations, I guess in that sense. But I think what you guys have done with Gitcoin is kind of the power relations are there, I would say, but different. It exists in a different way because it's more spread out and how the money flows, I guess.

Speaker 2: 26:38

Yeah, I mean I think that there's always like you always have to be aware of those dynamics, like with the state example. That's a good one because, like I think it's obvious to people generally speaking that like hey, this big company is funding this thing. They probably really care about it for reasons that have to do with their bottom line. We should probably figure out what those are and like try and make sure that those things don't like conflict with the overall goals of like the project. But, like with the state, I think people have the expectation in a lot of places that those kinds of actors are.

Speaker 2: 27:13

You know, it's actually interesting when you talk to especially folks from like say before about crypto, like often they'll say you know, why don't we understand like the problem? Because, like when I try, and you know, send this money transfer, when I try and use this public service, you know it just works, like it seems fine. So people don't really get it because the system hasn't like broken down to an extent that, like you can see the cracks and you can like start to like really feel the difference in the quality of the system. But like I do think that there's, you know, problems with state funding as well. But, by the way, I would love it if the state's funded open source software more.

Speaker 2: 27:55

I think that like that would be great. I'm like for this. Alternatively, it would be nice if, like, we had some kind of, let's say, like more mutual assistance, where people collectively decided to like fund things themselves on sort of a local, grassroots basis, and that's sort of the idea of like quadratic funding is, in a sense, it's just like how do you figure out what that group actually wants to do, and then how do you like bubble those opinions up so that you can like let other folks kind of view them clearly and then decide whether they want to support those opinions themselves about, like what is important in a given local community, and I think that's something that is like not really this kind of happens sometimes, although not as much as it should, in like municipal governments. This is like usually something that people kind of make fun of of, where, like you know, the one person goes to town hall and like really complains about like the stop sign or something. But like I do think there's value to like that local participation, which, which can happen because there's like avenues for it in those environments. There's not really as much of an avenue for it in like a digital realm.

Speaker 2: 29:02

That's kind of the main problem. It's like in or with any of these global problems, because this, this scale, the abstraction of the problem is so like high that like to try and you know, go like if you went to it like your, you know local council person or whatever like the equivalent is, and said, hey, like there's this library that I use for this, like piece of software that I'm writing, can you like help fix this problem I have, they'd be like this is nothing to do with, like my department, and I think that's where you sort of need to develop like more parallel, like alternative systems, like mutual assistance. Ideally, in my view, that can facilitate this sort of work, because otherwise it's just going to take forever to get done. You know you can make arguments about like the bureaucracy or problems with the system or whatever you want, but like the main problem is just that like there isn't really anything being done. So like I think that's that's the kind of thing that is is something that we don't want to just like.

Speaker 2: 30:02

I don't think it should be the only organization doing this. That's actually a risk in itself. Actually, if you can win the organization, that's just like the funder of these things. I think it has to be like a broad community effort and Ethereum's a nice like. There's a I won't go into death, but like I think there's a nice sort of like way to view Ethereum as its own ecosystem. People talk about it as an ecosystem and it has its own monetary base, which is, like, perhaps one of the most important features because it means that you actually have control over the. You know things like the money supply and things like the actual like economic model, and I think that's kind of a useful property of like. The reason that Ethereum has been able to do more of this open source funding than like previous areas of the internet is that we actually have this sort of like natural, like internet native way to like distribute value, but that's a whole different. I won't go deep on that quite yet.

Speaker 1: 30:57

Yeah. So the one of the things that has come out of this on this, on this kind of thread that you were, that you were pulling slightly, I mean one. I think that Bitcoin is an interesting evolution in the Ethereum ecosystem. For me, I think, just because in the beginning all you had was sort of ICOs or venture capital as, like the ways that people get funding Maybe there were some grants, programs here and there, but it wasn't very big Gitcoin made it sort of like a like it's. It's like a way that people can try and receive money that doesn't have like these strings attached to them for like, having a return, which is interesting and I think, super necessary.

Speaker 1: 31:38

Like there has to be more Gitcoins and variations of Gitcoins, I think, in order for there to be much, much less dependence on venture capital in the crypto world. That's like you know, that's like straight up. I think crypto world should be get away from venture capital as much as possible. But one of the things that you guys did then is the creation of the ALO protocol, which is, I guess, like kind of like the open sourcing of the protocol that Gitcoin itself uses so that others can take it and apply it to their own communities or organizations or what have you. So do you want to talk a bit about, about ALO?

Speaker 2: 32:19

Yeah, for sure, and actually I mean I will say like I actually am actually in agreement on the need for it, obviously, like grants, programs and so forth, but I also think venture capital is like not inherently bad, which is probably the hottest take.

Speaker 1: 32:36

We'll disagree.

Speaker 2: 32:39

For the audience because, like, here's the thing right, like, the original sort of like vision of organizations like Bell Labs or Xerox Park was very much like having this sort of bundled economic model right when and this is sort of like, I think, something that maps pretty well to like mutualist thinking, solidarity economics and so forth you have, like, okay, the thing that is like the research initiative that's going to like make you know kind of like money eventually, but it's like probably going to produce all these other externalities that like are not and you want to figure out, like what is the way that you can and this is actually something Vitalik's talked about too in the context of like the sort of revenue evil curve but like, how can you essentially take the thing that like can be monetized without like restricting it or making it, like you know, less accessible ideally, you know as, as you know, less less accessible as possible? Like basically, how can you reduce the amount that it's going to be like restricted by the largest amount in order to make sure that, like this thing is monetized so that you can go and fund other kinds of projects that and subsidize projects that would otherwise, if they were monetized, be very much like like excludable. There's probably a better way to phrase this, which is like, basically, how can you make sure that something like, say, in a city you know, a subway system can make some form of money through transactions? You know, people using the subway system like fees. This is kind of like an August to Ethereum. You have like the sort of subway system sort of like transaction fees that are going and like funding parts of the ecosystem you know. In this case, they're, you know, not being taken directly back into a developer treasury. But I mean you could do this with, like contract security revenue or other other ideas which I would actually recommend people look at. But like, how can you make sure that things like that, which are not really heavily excludable, based on a small fee, are going and subsidizing, let's say, a patent or like some other research initiative which can then be opened up in a way where, if it were not to be, it would just be like totally restricted, like closed off in a box and we're not accessible to the community.

Speaker 2: 35:09

And I think that's the sort of piece of the puzzle that the original sort of conception of venture capital in like the sort of like post Xerox Park, post Bell Labs era could have facilitated. This is like my hot take, but I think that it sort of failed to do that over time through perverse incentives and kind of this like need for endless growth. And I think that there's ways to change that model by just flipping essentially the dynamic between the initial funders of a project. This is like what ICOs did try to do right. It's like change the dynamic between the initial funders and the large scale like eventual community for the project and ideally, you know, you could just eventually have these sorts of projects be like funded by the community itself, shares like or equivalent sort of like tokens be given to like each project and each member of each project, and then those people being sort of like direct, sort of like contributors to the project over the long run through not only their capital contributions but also through like just their direct sort of labor in the project itself. This is kind of like what happens now, when VCS say like oh, but we are value add, we're going to do all this stuff. It's going to be like amazing.

Speaker 2: 36:29

I think that like often falls short, partly because you know they are not really operating on that model anymore and partly because the size of these funds have grown so large that it's just impossible for them to really contribute to and like be sort of like providers of real labor in the projects that they're sort of invested in.

Speaker 2: 36:53

So you know, I think there's a sort of active like almost like activist contributor model, which I know some other folks have been sort of jamming on, that could work a lot better but still kind of ends up being somewhat like similar to you or like isomorphic to like the overall, like venture capital quote unquote structure, in the sense that it is looking for this return, it is looking for this like eventual surplus, and then this sort of solidarity economics element of this is really fundamentally that you want that to be redistributed back into the community. You want to have some kind of guarantee that this is not just going off to, like you know, create a yacht somewhere. It's going to like actually do something back in the community, and so that's like one thing I want to quickly note on the VC side, because I do think that's like a misunderstood element of this sort of current maybe not of the current landscape, it is the problem with the current landscape but a misunderstood element of like the original sort of idea of some of these research institutions, like the labs.

Speaker 1: 37:54

I mean, yeah, I kind of think that there's still like. For me, what defines venture capital is really like, I mean mostly investment in tech products or investment in the things that seem like tech products but are actually just like I don't know real estate companies like we work, and this is huge expectation. Very true, though, and this huge expectation of return, that is like beyond. Like venture capital used to be illegal, like it was not legalized until like fairly recently, like only a few decades ago or something like that, and it immediately created this kind of like. It created the conditions for the tech bubble and all these other types of bubble, like financial speculative you know periods of our time and like venture capital is it's not a collective investment firm, you know, it's like a there's a few people trying to make better returns than everyone else that they can extract the value for themselves.

Speaker 1: 39:03

I think there is something to say for like I think there is a spicy take to say that there is. There are similar things that a venture capital firm, investment firm, does, that like some sort of collective investments firm, would do as well. That makes sense. Or like even states, even a state run, you know, social wealth fund that invests in different things would do similar things as a venture capital investment firm. Just because there is, like there are similarities in what you're trying to do. It's just like how you're whether that money or that return that you're making is being extracted for yourself or that's being reinvested into, like whatever types of community or collective projects, and so like I think, like in an alternate reality where the Dow actually worked, like maybe that could have been something that it did.

Speaker 1: 39:56

It would have been like interesting.

Speaker 2: 39:58

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:59

It probably would have failed, but it would have been like interesting to see how that went out. But I do see, like I mean, gitcoin is still different because, like it's like Gitcoin is not an investment firm but it is doing some form of like collective investment without necessarily the expectation of a return, although, like I think you can argue that, like the, you know, the sponsors of the quadratic pool are benefiting from the growth of the crypto ecosystem at large. Perhaps, but it's they can't, like you know, you can't say for sure, like me, doing this will output this return in the way that, like a venture capital investment firm would like make these calculations or something.

Speaker 2: 40:46

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that like, by the way, like even one of the one of the things that I'm like noting here is like I'm using the term venture capital just because, like that's the term that people I think are aware of, I don't think that's like you know, that term comes with so much baggage, that, like that's why I think it's a spicy thing to say, actually, it's not, it's not always bad. But I think that like, yeah, there's sort of two components to this. One is, I think you want more collective capital pools that are essentially aimed at trying to essentially like like give non dilutive, like, almost like free capital to a project that's like at an early stage. But you also want to weigh and this is sort of the model that optimism is doing, I think, a good job of like really stewarding, to like reward people who have gone and created those types of projects that have then gone on to be very successful in the sense that they've been impactful in the ecosystem. You want them to still be able to go and like actually return, like you know, basically receive some kind of benefit that is commensurate with the value they've created, and you want that to probably be, I would say it be true for the early sort of sponsors essentially of that project as well, who kind of in a sense selflessly although you know you can talk about the dynamics of if this becomes a standard suddenly, does everyone expect they're going to have all these returns from you know going and giving to grants? This has actually happened in some of the grants rounds in Bitcoin, where people have started AirDrop farming to try and see if they can, you know, catch sort of the next, the next state optimism, which was in one of the early grants rounds and did a distribution back to the community.

Speaker 2: 42:29

Can you, like you know, in theory, run into this problem with you know, sorry, can you in theory, like you know, solve some of these dynamics by giving that incentive and sort of like that return back to people without it being an expectation or like a guarantee? And I think that's an interesting approach, I do think you know separately, just having even sort of a more cooperative model where people are just funding the project themselves with their community, with the expectation that, yeah, it'll have a business model, yeah, it'll have like some kind of like sustainability. I think that's like an approach that would be okay in the sense that, even with, you know, a, an organization like like Dejardance, obviously like one of the largest cooperatives, like they are able to sustain themselves because they're an insurance company basically, but they are cooperatively owned and they're providing essentially a service. That is like then going back to cooperative members and I would argue that like that sort of model is still relatively mutualist in you know, the same sort of way that we would want to see with organizations and web three. It's just that like there's all this other mess of like bureaucracy and general sort of you know attachment to the existing financial system that something like Dejardance probably you know, makes it a less compelling representative of the sort of like cooperative movement, and so that's sort of you know. I think my take on the question to me is like how do we create sustainable models that are iterating on the like notion of venture capital but still retain this notion of one sustainability of the project and two of sort of meaningful returns, surplus, essentially? And if you get those two things right, I think you can create a networked sort of like more mutualist economy, because these projects can start to sustain each other and, in the way that I was mentioning sort of before, you can have this sort of you know, tax, let's say, on something congestible like the subway system, in order to subsidize the increasing return of, say, what would otherwise be a closed patent that's not producing positive externalities through being sort of left open, you know, to the broader ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 45:01

But I also want to make a distinction between venture capital and early stage funding as a concept.

Speaker 2: 45:09

I think projects should be encouraged to pursue community ownership more seriously and I think investors should be more incentivized to cap the returns that they're taking in order to facilitate that community ownership.

Speaker 2: 45:26

And I think this is not something that's possible with the current model because of mostly winner. Take all dynamics and sort of like the fact that you know VCs are essentially passively investing in all these projects and aren't able to continuously gain rewards from actually participating and working with each project that they're investing in. And I think this is something that you can sort of fix in the current VC model by sort of taking the premise that you are really part of the team, you are part of the community and you are working with them, hopefully for the next, you know, 10 plus years. And if you take that position, you know you can't take as many investments. You have limits on your time, you have limits on your capacity and you can't expect thousand X you know billion dollar returns, but you can't expect that you're going to have more sustainable, more long-term oriented projects and, fundamentally, more mutualist projects, and I think that's the piece that the space should also try to consider.

Speaker 1: 46:35

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think we agree broadly, I think you know, and the Aloe protocol I think is just an interesting development to see how people take it and maybe modify it for slightly different ends or like slightly different, using slightly different mechanisms, using the protocol itself.

Speaker 2: 46:57

Yeah, and so to answer the because I know you asked that like that at this point, to answer the question about Aloe, like I think the interesting part about that system is it kind of goes back to the point earlier like you know, gikwinsh shouldn't be the only funder of these things, you know. Similarly, I don't think that you know if we're even saying venture capital is good, like if I'm making that claim, I don't think that, like A16Z should be like the only funder of these things. I think the fact that we have these like large billion dollar plus funds is actually like net negative. It like creates really weird market dynamics and like all these adverse sort of like selection problems. But like I do think that having sort of all these different local communities that have their own sort of like various mechanisms they can choose from which, like Aloe, is sort of like aiming to help facilitate that, allow them to fund their own sort of shared needs, their own ideas and their own sort of community initiatives. That, to me, is the piece that I think is currently missing from our conception of gonna tie this all the way back to like the movement piece, like what web three, what like crypto, is trying to accomplish. And what I mean is, if you look at the history of crypto, it's a lot of speculation, it's a lot of like DeFi, it's a lot of like more recently, like NFT shilling sometimes disguised as like artist sort of community support it and I think that's like probably not net negative but is like directionally in terms of the movement, in terms of the technology, I think interesting and provides a lot of like new, evolutionary sort of like primitives that are eventually gonna do some cool stuff.

Speaker 2: 48:46

But I think in terms of the movement, those things are less interesting and perhaps less impactful than just providing primitives for people to actually engage with and like sort of coordinate around their own shared community. And that's where you can start to be more like tangible about the actual impact that this stuff is having, because you're not just talking about like the web three ecosystem or the crypto ecosystem. You're talking about a tech community in Lagos. You're talking about like a community currency in Oakland. You're talking about like actual sort of people using this in their daily lives.

Speaker 2: 49:25

Now, to be sure, we need a lot more actual improvements in like UX and overall sort of usability of crypto. For example, account abstraction is like a great step towards this to me for this to be actually useful. They're people that are probably gonna like not wanna just store $2,000 on like their phone to walk around with and try and transact with on a daily basis. But I do think there's like we're starting to see, with things like Aloe and other sort of tools, this ecosystem of projects for them, in this general movement around sort of, I guess, something that like folks have now called like regenerative or like more sort of impact focused sort of applications starting to form.

Speaker 1: 50:13

Yeah, so we've talked about funding. Another thing that I wanna talk about with you is DAOs, because Gitcoin is, I mean, one of the, I guess, larger DAOs out there and you were part of the process, of course, like being the founder or being one of the founders and then going through the process of turning it into a DAO. Do you wanna talk about that process a bit and, like I don't know your thoughts on DAOs now after like really exerting a lot of like effort and labor into making that happen and kind of the the difficulties that were involved with that, since I think there's a lot of people interested in crypto who, like they have an idea for an organization, they want to build it and then they want to like turn it into a DAO. It's like what are the things that people should expect if they want to take on such a task?

Speaker 2: 51:06

Oh man, I mean I think that there's lots of really interesting parts of what DAOs can accomplish, and then there's a lot of just the bumps along the way that I think people maybe don't prepare for necessarily, maybe don't talk about. Or in the bull market, people didn't talk about them. Now that it's a bear market, I think everyone kind of like talks about everything being, you know, worse or less impactful than it was. Yeah, it kind of swings in you know extremes. People like either like everything's gonna be an amazing utopia or everything is immediately going to, like you know, fall apart, and I think it's. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But I think that what I like about DAOs is that you didn't really have sort of internet native mechanisms for distributing value to groups of contributors in a way that was, like one, relatively seamless and transparent, but two also that allowed for these other less common, more equitable structures, say cooperatives, that otherwise would be a pain to instantiate locally, let alone across all these contributors from all over the world, and I think that the ability to do that now in the Ethereum space is actually quite novel and quite useful, even in cases that might eventually just be real world cooperatives. I think the other piece of this that's interesting about DAOZ is a lot of these sorts of projects can actually do this with their own currencies. They can do this with currencies that reflect their internal values. They reflect the goals that they're trying to accomplish. They also reflect their internal economic or social principles and those are things that I think were not really very easy to do at scale. In other cases you had community currency experiments in the past, even back hundreds and hundreds of years, but especially in the 70s and 80s I think there was a pretty famous experiment in Ireland in the 80s. Those are, I think, the prototypes of what I hope DAOZ can accomplish and become in the next cycle.

Speaker 2: 53:35

But the downside of DAOZ is that there's lots of great history on best practices for organizations, tradeoffs between efficiency and resilience of organizations, tradeoffs between scale and overall alignment, tradeoffs between the amount of this is the good hearts law part the amount of measurements or KPIs you put in place and the propensity of your organization to overfit on certain objectives. That are metrics that are hit. The downside of DAOZ in those contexts I think are only now being resolved and it probably took the ecosystem on the whole two, three years to realize those things. But I think one of the downsides is it's a new term, it's a new concept, it's a new design space, and so people forget that there was other stuff that previously existed that we could draw from in terms of approaches or models. So that's the downside. I think that the good part of DAOZ is we should use them to create new types of organizations that are actually aiming towards globally distributed common goals.

Speaker 2: 54:58

The downside of DAOZ is that you still have to do a lot of organization. You still have to actually do all this coordination, and that is the part of coordination that I think is really the emphasis actually is this change from you all hanging out in a small garage the meme of the startup in the Silicon Valley era to, okay, we have this online community that we're all coordinating around and we're all trying to engage and make sure it's heard. And how do we make sure we do that in a way that is consistent and also leads to long-term sustainability of the project, maintenance of core tooling, maintenance of the initial values and mission. These are all things that I think, again, a lot of historical literature on organizational design has addressed and solves for, but I think it's something that is what I hope, that DAOZ can sort of quote unquote, bring online or I guess, as people would say, now, bring on chain, although we have to define what that term means, I think, more clearly. So that's, I guess, at a high level.

Speaker 2: 56:24

I think DAOZ are pretty cool. I like DAOZ. I think we have seen a lot of the benefits of the DAOZ through just the fact that we've now shipped this protocol. This community has now grown and I've also been able to step away from the DAOZ myself with relative confidence in the team and the community that is operating it, and I think that's something that is pretty interesting, because it's a hard thing to do, probably in even a regular organization, and I think the fact that we've been able to sort of see that in the context of the DAOZ being sort of like to me a sign that they can work, but I don't think that's a sign that they're perfect. I think there's still a ton of organizational debt that probably be every DAOZ, including ours, is still, like you know, making sure we're recovering.

Speaker 1: 57:25

So I guess it's a good thing you still like DAOZ after trying to make one.

Speaker 2: 57:33

I feel like that's actually like probably another hot take. I don't know if that's spicy. I feel like there's a lot of people that have written, especially in this market, like a lot of like much spicier, spicier pieces on like how DAOZ are, you know, doomed, or like DAOZ are over. Same with tokens. The people are like very garish on anything to do with the token. Now it's like as if this hasn't had like multiple cycles and iterations of token models that people have like written you know books and tons of like literature on. But I do think it's like it is a good sign. Yeah, feel free to edit this part out. I'm just kind of rambling here. It's like we'll cut this.

Speaker 1: 58:14

Well, I mean, I think what is interesting is that and I've said this like multiple times before, but like how I've witnessed, kind of like the people who are interested in DAOZ online sort of like more and more become interested as they try to do a DAO in like a very idealistic sense and where it usually kind of fails, and then look into, oh, cooperatives have already done similar things or oh, there's already been you know people thinking about decentralized organizing and what does that mean?

Speaker 1: 58:45

I think there wasn't this, because a lot of people came from, you know, I don't know traditional working corporate backgrounds, that the I think it wasn't internalized, like the real difference with having you know reporting to your manager and this like centralized pyramid hierarchy, versus you know, a DAO which is, in the most idealistic sense, like the kind of organization that's owned by a whole lot more people and that has a lot more decentralized structure of ownership.

Speaker 1: 59:17

And this different structure of ownership requires a different form of relating with one another and acting towards one another than a centralized one. And yeah, this is it's not a new problem, but it's like a problem that's still. I think we need to figure out or get better at doing so that we can then socially reproduce more organizations that are more democratically run and democratically owned. So that, to me, is why DAOZ are interesting. It's giving that space for people to experiment. Mostly fail, I think, in the beginning, but at least experiment so that they can. That's like the only way they're going to get to the point where we can do it more more frequently.

Speaker 2: 1:00:04

The pro of this. Like there's like these death and rebirth cycles, which I was saying like our bad in the sense that you know, daoz are this blank canvas that we can like kind of work off of, and people take that to mean like let's just like try all the things you know again that people have like already gotten a you know a decent handle on. But I think that the the sort of like benefit of that is that you get the ability to run way more experiments in parallel like much faster, and if you can collectively like learn from those experiments and also like collectively share value between those experiments, this kind of goes back to like you know, in my view, like why you need this ability to share value like as an ecosystem and like return value as an ecosystem. Like I think that can be something that's useful for you know, for the long run, none of the you know crypto TM sort of space, but also just like of the way we organize generally. The other point I'll mention on that just quickly is like I think one of the things that we're unlearning through the process of creating DAOZ just as a space is.

Speaker 2: 1:01:10

We historically are very, I think, yeah, used to hierarchy. We're used to like the notion of like, to your point, having a manager, and I think it's actually very hard to unlearn that for a lot of people. We sort of have like being trained to like have less agency, I think generally, and what that means in practice is that, like you, sort of you know, people will like join a channel or, like you know, join initiative, and they'll be like, okay, like I'm here, like please give me, like you know, the full rundown on everything that, like I should be doing. And people are like like wait, who are you? Like, what are we doing here? Like and I think that's the sort of challenge is to get people to unlearn this sort of like sense of needing to be, you know, instructed, needing to be like managed Not that management is necessarily always bad Like I think it's a dissonance to these things, right, and I think that there's one thing I want to just like make sure people read. That is like for me an inspiration on this, which is Ivan Ilich has a few books on this, but like de-schooling society is one in particular I think is like really great in terms of sort of articulating the way we have abstracted, sort of like what we're previously like way back, you know, like personal relationships with each other, to more institutional, abstracted sort of bodies that you know, and what that's done over time is has essentially been like it's created this, this sense of like learned helplessness, I think, unfortunately, in like a way that we can probably, you know, and I see people recovering like it from, like and kind of like improving from, but it's, like, I think, still fundamentally a challenge, especially because, you know, all of us still exist in a quote unquote real world where these are still the standard modes of operating.

Speaker 2: 1:03:10

We haven't really changed any of that yet. So I think that's just a super important like part of and like, maybe, like you know, in addition to the fact that you have this like benefit of experimentation and sort of like this iteration on new ideas and models and this sort of like you know, change in the way that we're thinking about, like organizational structure and your own agency.

Speaker 2: 1:03:33

I think there's also maybe like just ideally, benefits to just our realization that this is all kind of made up, that, like all these other pieces of like organizational, you know, structure that have existed are just building blocks that you can choose basically to use, based on context and based on, like, whether or not they fit what you're trying to accomplish. You should still know what the building blocks are, but, like you can use them in ways that are much more like sort of modular, configurable, based on your actual, your actual needs. And I think even just that like psychological, social realization that crypto is allowed people to have about like, oh yeah, like the world is just like made by people and I'm a person and I can make and I can make things, is like, I think, a useful shift. That didn't really happen, you know, in wasn't, wasn't a really a big part of the conversation, I think, in the past sort of decades.

Speaker 1: 1:04:30

Yeah, I think. I think I think it was Graber that said like the secret, like the great secret of the world or something like that, is that you can change it. I'm definitely bushing it, but something like that yeah yeah, it was.

Speaker 2: 1:04:42

I think it's from. So from utopia of rules it might be from, but yeah, it's like the great secret of the world is that you know it's. Yeah, let's cut this part out. I'm gonna follow that. I think you got it.

Speaker 1: 1:04:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:04:58

I don't have a better way to phrase it than you. I don't remember either actually.

Speaker 1: 1:05:04

But so the newest project that you've undertaken since now you're kind of phasing out of Gitcoin and pursuing this new thing called public works Would you talk? Would you like to talk a bit about that, and what are the goals of that project?

Speaker 2: 1:05:20

Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, you know this might be part of the reason that I'm like interested in at least to some extent defending the notion of investment. I think that, ultimately, the goal of public works is to showcase that there are certain types of infrastructure, that one we're missing in the space, in a world where even you know, as I was saying, what we need more is for real world adoption, but, like one of the ways you do that is by creating tools that make that adoption easier. So, like an example would be in like previous cycle, like I think WallConnect played a critical role in things like Rainbow being widely adopted, which played a critical role in things like NFT marketplaces being used. And although I don't always agree with like the way those NFT marketplaces were used, it was still like pretty important that you had this sort of like fundamental building block. In the case of WallConnect that led to people wanting to actually interact with crypto at all. And so I think in the next sort of cycle there's other types of infrastructure like that which have now sort of become, I think, talking points that other people can cover in more depth.

Speaker 2: 1:06:25

They've become sort of memes in the space in their own right, but things like account abstraction, things like intense space tooling, things like better, even just developer tooling, have become parts of, I think, a conversation that is sort of split between. You know, hey, we like have more than enough infrastructure. You know why are we building more sort of the same thing? And this is kind of true sometimes with, like some of the infrastructure, like we just probably don't need more block space at this point. I don't know why we keep creating more block space. Again, exceptions to probably everything.

Speaker 2: 1:07:04

But there's also a question of, you know, on the other hand, like what are the sort of missing core pieces of the tech tree? You know, if we sort of think of it that way that, like we need to actually get to some you know sort of math adoption in the future, and I think, of those ones I mentioned, like account distractions probably the most tangible where people, I do think, really understand that this is kind of necessary. And so the goal of public works, in a way, is to be able to actually like invest in these sorts of projects, but to sort of encourage them ideally to like exit to community in a way that is, you know, as I was mentioning, more in line with the sort of mutualist framing of the way that community ownership and sort of community investment should work. And I think that this is a very tricky thing to do properly, but, like, if done right, this can hopefully reframe the way that we view things like venture capital today, because, again, like, I don't think venture capital is inherently bad. I know we're going to disagree on that, I also think there's a lot of nuance to that, but I do think that venture capital as it exists today is pretty broken and is largely reliant on, like a handful of you know smaller organizations that are basically just trying to like get projects to like you know billion dollar plus valuations, and are trying to essentially, you know, create winner, take all like monopolistic markets, rather than trying to create, like pluralistic sets of infrastructure that are more modular, that people can like actually kind of work together on and ideally, you know, essentially invest together on.

Speaker 2: 1:08:48

And I think that this is, by the way, like I guess I should state, because I don't know, like you know, I'm not in the US, but I don't mean invest here necessarily in the sense of a financial or, you know, economic contract, I mean in the sense of having some kind of governance stake over the project itself, et cetera, et cetera. That's just my disclaimer, because who knows how the US regulatory environment will actually end up. But I do think my point is that, like, if you can reframe this model and change some of those functions and like features of existing VC, then you can sort of at least start incrementally improving the sort of path to this like fully sort of peer to peer ecosystem which, by the way, like I would actually argue in some ways that, like we sort of had closer to in the ICO era. There was way less accountability to projects in the ICO era, but at least we had sort of like direct community investment. Probably legally you couldn't do that today, but like I think that this sort of is something that will naturally, I think, need to be facilitated by at least some key players. It's not something that will like happen on its own, because the existing forces in the market are just so large at this point and like so like kind of like oligopolistic, that like it's hard to imagine tons of new entrants coming in to like basically help pull projects from this sort of like venture capital pipeline to a more community oriented pipeline without like some kind of interference or some kind of like engagement.

Speaker 2: 1:10:31

And, and I think that's like probably something that on our own, as a sort of fund, we can't like we can't accomplish that like as me and, like you know, do other people.

Speaker 2: 1:10:43

I think we can accomplish that if we pluralistically get lots of smaller groups engaged on this idea, and that's where I hope that we can sort of like start to spread the message and start to get people engaged. I've actually had a lot of conversations with folks who are interested in sort of like this activist contributor model, folks that are interested in sort of broader approach to like early funding, and I do think that there's sort of a movement starting here. But it's a bit of an uphill battle, right, because on the one hand, you know to your point, people hate venture capital or anything that's like associated with like early stage funding, which has some kind of like economic arrangement. On the other hand, you have people that you know, I think, are reluctant to change their sort of ways or like or adjust their models, because you know the large funds, these large organizations are doing perfectly well, yeah, they're benefiting from it anyways.

Speaker 2: 1:11:45

Sort of in their current state.

Speaker 2: 1:11:47

Yeah, so it's a question of like, I think you know what we're trying to do is really just like, very simply like, invest in ecosystem infrastructure that will be useful for, like, hopefully, like this next wave of actual adoption. But I think the bigger question is, like how do we actually restructure the way that, like, capital flows in this space, which is like going to be, for at least the foreseeable future, quite heavily financialized, and then how can we slowly shift towards a model where we're actually valuing labor and valuing contribution, especially in an early stage, more, and so it's, it's tricky, it's like, you know, I think it's a, it's a probably, it's probably too early to tell exactly how that will actually play out. But to me, this is something that I think is has been sort of on my mind for a while, because we actually saw this with Bitcoin early on, where you had projects like Uniswap or projects like Optimism or projects like Xdai, which did, you know, I think, the right thing in the context that they were in. They raised, you know, capital to like increasingly grow with the community, grow with the ecosystem that they were building.

Speaker 2: 1:13:02

At the same time, I think that, like, generally, you know the sort of like early supporters of those projects may not have, like you know, wanted them to go and, you know, raise excessive venture capital rounds, only to, like sort of exit to community three, four years down the road. And that, to me, is the thing that, like, we're already so, like my point is essentially we're already seeing this happen, like we already saw this play out, and now sort of we're in this lull, I think, as people sort of recover from the insanity that just happened in 2021, 2022. How can we make sure that, like in 2024, 2025, there's not the same dynamic? And again, you know, spicy take, I think it's going to be like controversial, I think it's going to be interesting and I'm excited for it because I think I think it's necessary.

Speaker 1: 1:14:04

Yeah, I mean, like, when I think of venture capital, I think I have a very specific like image in my head of what that is and what that looks like when I, when I talk about it, I've definitely I've met, you know, especially recently, just because of all the conferences I've been going to, like meeting all these VC people that I mean don't look like they're VCs in the first place. They're like they're like not suits, I guess, and they're like you know they talk about how they want collective, like they're that they themselves are interested in, like collective ownership, and that's why they invest in crypto and like whatever, like more, think they're like more progressive causes, I guess, through their venture capital. I guess I'm pretty skeptical that it will all turn out okay. Just considering like larger incentives of the system. I think that there will be.

Speaker 1: 1:14:53

I think there could be certainly like some important wins with a kind of like strategic, very strategic, very like not succumbing to like mullock, maybe with this like venture capital investment. That could be pretty good. Yeah, like to me, like I want. I want like a giant system where people are all able to collectively decide where we want to put our collective capital towards places to grow, you know, the system larger which I think is what a lot of people want is just like not an easy thing to to organize and create. I think that's good. That's going to take a huge effort probably.

Speaker 2: 1:15:32

Yeah, I mean I think, like most people in the sort of same section of crypto, that like we're in, I think want that. I think the hard part is, like you know, kind of follow through on the results, and I think that, like the hardest part is like to your point, like you know, the sort of people in crypto conferences that are like saying that like I think a question to me is like you know, how much are you like saying things versus like living those values, which is like a constant challenge in the space. Like I think a lot of people like have perspectives on things, Like a lot of people have opinions, you know, including easy to have opinions, but it's harder to like make sort of actions, take action that like actually furthers those opinions in a meaningful way.

Speaker 2: 1:16:20

I think this is like one of the reasons I've like been a little bit less active on, like you know, twitter, like any equivalents, is just like I think there's a lot of you know, a lot of distance between the people that are like really actively building and the people that are like have opinions, and I think that like that's like also again nuance to that like I think there's lots of great people on those too.

Speaker 2: 1:16:46

But like that to me is something that like I think needs to just like take time to play out and I hope that like this sort of this sort of end goal here is that we get to essentially much more of a peer to peer system.

Speaker 2: 1:17:01

To be honest, if we could just like recreate, you know, better versions of like the sort of like initial, like capital, neighbor, contributor model like that like something like an ICO created, I think that actually could be like much more interesting. The problem is mostly making that happen in a way that doesn't lead to like either people in jail or people like generally sort of finding ways to game that system. Yeah, at least right now, and so I think that, like that sort of that's the path we're on, but I think that it'll take some time to get there. The organization I would mention, by the way, that I think is like actually interesting to view from a like more mutualist, anarchist perspective on this, would be like C4SS, right, like I think they sort of have a much more market based perspective on like, more still like mutualist, like market based anarchism, and I think that to me, is an interesting sort of like model that we could potentially again you know question marks on the implementation details port over to the sort of like crypto ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 1:18:20

Interesting. Yeah, there's a. I mean there is this kind of like provocation from, I think, c4ss and also from people like Yanis Verifakis, of like how do we use markets without capitalism or how do we have markets without capitalism. I think is an interesting provocation. Last question I wanted to ask you you've had a lot of spicy takes. What is your spiciest take that you would like to leave the audience with?

Speaker 2: 1:18:44

Oh damn, I feel like I've already given some spicy takes. Probably the spiciest take is that we still haven't really, you know as an ecosystem, proven. This maybe is a good way to tie back to the very beginning, like proven why we're here. I think there's still a lot of like open questions, a lot of like things left undefined, a lot of like details that we sort of should be filling in, especially around what the movement of crypto is about, and, of course, there's the origin sort of in this sort of cypherpunk movement and so forth.

Speaker 2: 1:19:21

But I would love to see us come together and sort of articulate, you know, pluralistically, a vision for what we really want this to be in tenure, and I think that's part of like for me, the motivation of like. You know, what is this sort of like tech tree look like? But it's also a question of like, I think, mapping out and Vitalik has done actually a really great job of this with like his recent posts maybe not that recent now, when this is released around sort of the real world applications that he would like to see. But I think I would love to see more sort of of a map on not just the tech sort of tree but also on the sort of like movement as to, like you know, where we want to go in the coming years. Maybe that's not as spicy to take it's probably spicier when scattered throughout this but that's one that I think is really important for us to just consider and to take away.

Speaker 1: 1:20:22

Cool. Thanks so much for coming on. I think people can find you and follow you on, like most places, including Twitter, not Scott Moore.

Speaker 2: 1:20:33

Yeah, not Scott Moore on Twitter, but, like I think increasingly, feel free to just go to like publicworksfm. Send me a note. I'll be sort of like available on any of the channels that are in there and in general, would love to chat to folks just that are interested in these concepts, trying to start to do a little bit more writing on these as well. So if you want to collaborate on some writing, feel free to hit me up.

Speaker 1: 1:21:01

Cool. Thanks a lot.