4/28 - The State of DAOs in 2023

Notes by TPan

Jess Sloss - Founder, Seed Club

Jeff Kauffman - Founder, JUMP

Raihan Anwar - Founder, Friends with Benefits

Joon Ian Wong - Founder, ACJR Network

Jess - Fundamental question of ‘what are we building, and what’s the value?’
- Lots of changes on DAO structure to focus on providing value when you have 20, 100, 1000 contributors
- Thinking about intent of the DAO vs. an organization with job opportunities. Most interesting DAOs are ones that are consumer products
  - Eg: Forming a DAO to purchase a sports team
Raihan - Balancing native token with the stable currencies (ETH, USDC, etc.). Tokens can be volatile and you’re running a business
- Shift in view of these are just tokens, to these have value and need to pay my rent and food
- Pricing the rate for the token for the work
- Shift in semantics and ways to work together
  - As scope increases, the DAO becomes more nebulous. More people want to contribute and work, but sometimes you just need to hang out
  - More specificity in terms of how people show up and
  - There will be DAOs that have a specific goal and once the goal is achieved, it will dissolve
Jeff - Analogy of the human body
- Different body parts are smaller teams that have specific goals and focus

Jess - Building up product is very hard to do as a DAO
- Requiring voting at every step decreases the likelihood for success
- DAOs can come in during the funding and go to market phases
Jeff - Creating fast feedback loops between community and product. Token models and ownership help to facilitate that in a more productive way