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DAO Meeting (Structure)

Date
December 14, 2021
Timestamps

00:00 Intro • 03:13 Hugh's Background • 06:43 Learnings From Hugh's Experiences • 16:56 Organizing Across Departments • 21:27 Autonomy vs Centralization • 28:14 Setting Priorities • 33:40 Goal Making & Accountability • 40:01 Contributor Compensation • 57:52 Hiring Decisions • 1:03:39 Publius' Thoughts

Type
DAO Meeting

Recording

Agenda

  • Discussion of current thoughts on organization on the DAO
  • Hugh to talk about his experience working on Olympus and KlimaDAO

Recap

  • lots of operational structure to build out in the DAO: departments, documentation on Notion so that eager new contributors can get started seamlessly, etc
  • interesting discussions around paying contributors upfront for ongoing work vs. bounty-based work where pay is already decided up front and paid out afterward
  • make it known if you need particular help or info or guidance in order to work on a given thing for the DAO! This is how we identify the gaps and figure out what processes to improve and documentation to write
  • thank you Hugh from Klima for joining and sharing your wisdom!

Minutes

Dumpling

  • Hugh was involved in both OHM and Klima who can give some DAO advice!
  • What would it look like for Beanstalk DAO to be as successful as possible? When someone wants to contribute to the DAO, we want it to be as smooth as possible for them to add value.

Hugh

  • Long time bean fan!
  • Background—recently left full time job. Lots of 0 to 1 experience. Product manager.
  • Helped out with OHM, they needed help setting up different projects. Klima was a fork that I got involved in, running operations over there. Setup Discord/Notion instance for them, getting a lot of traction and contributors wanting to join.

Dumpling: what advice do you have for us + pitfalls you saw at Olympus/Klima?

Hugh

  • joined when OHM was ramping up onboarding of contributors
  • there wasn't any consistency around tool adoption—projects were hard to manage. How do you bring someone in who isn't full-time, into an environment where they need context, be able to work across departments, etc? There's a huge benefit to working in as few tools as possible—Notion is good for this. When decisions are only logged on Discord for example, knowledge transfer breaks down.
  • Retention is important: a 10 hour a week employee that lasts a year is better than a 40 hour a week employee that lasts a month. Onboarding is an expensive process
  • Notion is the single source of truth for gaining context—Discord is for communicating. At Klima, if a project doesn't have a doc associated with it in Notion, it doesn't happen

Dumpling: How should we self-organize across departments? How does Klima do it?

Hugh:

  • Klima core team was 8—core contributors are around 60, with around 15 full time.
  • There are a few depts:
    • eng
      • frontend, backend, analytics
    • creative
    • marketing
    • partnerships
    • community
    • operations
      • setting up processes, contributor payouts, etc
  • it's good to have a "project owner" which a project spans across multiple departments

0xEvan: how do you balance autonomy vs. have guardrails in place for what people are able to work on and do? Who is keeping an eye on others to make sure things are getting done?

Hugh:

  • depends on the maturity of the DAO. Without proper structure/leadership, the romantic idea of a DAO being 100% flat and self-organizing doesn't work well.
  • in an early DAO, it can be helpful to have a department coordinator that gets alignment with the core team—at an early stage you need a little more centralization
  • Need alignment on the high level direction of the DAO (values, OKRs, whatever you want to call it) and making sure that projects align with that vision. Having a good idea of what behavior you want to reward and disincentivize.

A One Ser: What do you think a new DAO/community needs the most? Marketing, etc, something that might be missed by early communities

Hugh:

  • depends on the DAO—tends to have a tighter eng team in the early days and grow community after. Beanstalk community has been bustling and that will be critical to keeping the protocol going

ereal: Could you talk about setting long term goals as a DAO? How do we hold the org accountable towards those?

Hugh:

  • think about it as a hierarchy: like what is the 6 month vision, and which 1 month goals that help you get there. Enforced at the department level
  • OKRs with quantitative targets: retention rate of X, contributor engagement score of Y, etc

beanology: Some proposals are asking for money upfront before people have done the work. With anons, it's hard to do the traditional HR interview before paying for work. But if you have targets you can hit and metrics you can meet, you can get paid accordingly.

Hugh:

  • different types of work: bounties vs. projects vs. long term work etc. Definitely a hard problem that I don't have a great answer to regarding the longer term work. The project/bounty type that is assigned a value in advance however are a bit easier

Dumpling: How much can you share about comp structure of other DAOs you've worked with?

Hugh:

  • department level budgets
  • maximum pay per role is important

jman: We could define OKRs for a specific project with bands for compensation depending on performance

Hugh:

  • Having a salary for a contributor requires a lot of trust and is definitely something that probably happens more often as the DAO matures

George: along with figuring out who can do the work, we need people to figure out who can figure out who can do the work

  • Dumpling is generally first point of contact to talk to new folks, generally chat with Publius next, and from there we eventually refine what the role would be and put up a Snapshot
  • Engineers for example go through Publius at the moment

Publius: George had a great idea to spin up Beansprout, an accelerator, funded by the Q1 budget and then have that org fund many other projects (easier operationally than having the whole DAO vote on each proposal)

Transcript

Yeah. Let's go ahead and get it started. I think we have a pretty good group here and the beginning will be just a bit of a ramble. And then the intent is to kind of open this up for people's ideas, to kind of get as many as many people's ideas as we can so, well, maybe we'll have a structure of, you know, I'm going to say a few things.

We also have kind of a guest we'd like to bring on who is was instrumental in the development of both Owen and Clemens Dao. And so we're pretty excited to bring on Hugh, who's going to you can give us a little bit of a little bit of advice, a little bit of advice. And then after that, we can be, you know, kind of open up the floor a little bit.

So. Okay, I see you there. So yeah, as far as I wanted to chat a little bit about what we have set up so far, who we are, who we have, and then just well, I was going to read some notes from a conversation that we had with you, but since he's here, it might be better to just to bring him up so we can chat a little bit about kind of high level structure, you know, what works and what doesn't work.

It's all it's very important to start out with the idea of what does success look like and what would it look like if we were super successful? Like beyond our wildest dreams, we were just bringing people in like crazy. How do we, you know, how do we get everyone in to in Beanstalk? How do we get everyone's individual contributions?

We want to get the best out of people and we want to make it a really open experience to be involved in Beanstalk. We also need to be able to handle that and we don't want to have pearls cast before swine, you know, like we don't want to have wasted energy, wasted effort. So when someone comes to us and says that they want to work for the Dow, we need to be organized and we need to be ready for their for their contribution.

So I think that's sort of a fundamental idea that that that I have and I think that most of us have. But going from there in a organized way, you know, it's is is the goal. So this chat is part of that. So here I'm going to bring you up on stage that you can chat for a little bit and then I think we'd like to keep this conversation, you know, around an hour.

I think if we end up going for an hour and 15 or even an hour or 30, that would be okay. But, you know, let's try to when you have something to say, come up on the stage and then we'll kind of take people up in order. But first, we're going to bring up you just invited you up.

Oh, hey, everybody, can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear it pretty well.

Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you. It's it's an actual privilege and an honor. The, um, I was on, on a call with the guys here a couple of hours ago, and I, I mentioned that, yeah, like a long time Bean fan essentially got it, got my NF and f t been o being t and yeah, I'm stoked to have this alignment between, you know, my experience and background and the needs of the Dow.

It feels like there is there is an opportunity to, to contribute in a meaningful way. Maybe the world starts with this. Part of the conversation would just be like, first of all, to share a bit about myself and my background, how I came to do what I'm doing right now and then are like potentially just put, put together some thoughts on or some initial thoughts.

And what I think, you know, good looks like for for this next phase of the Dow so bid it out myself I recently left my full time job actually my last day was on Friday and the role that I left was a a job in which I would go to companies. And this is with the bigger organization, but we would go to companies and say to them, Hey, here are all these different start ups that you could be building.

And they would recruit us to basically come up with a whole range of different startup ideas, and then if they liked them, they would go and they would ask us to go build them. And so like a lot of the 0 to 1 experience in terms of startups and my role that was like a product manager role I got into, I got into crypto through this, through this company actually case we tried to build a while we looked at building something using like TerraForm Labs, actually like a payments app and that got me down the rabbit hole.

But yeah, I think, you know, just sort of contributing into the down world around July of this year. So I mean, in the grand scheme of things, pretty short, a pretty, pretty short timeframe. But in Defi, that's seems like a long time and yeah just jumped into the Olympics started helping out that and then realized that you know, that DAO needed support on setting up these like projects where they had people from different skill sets coming in and contributing and working on the same things.

So that was, you know, that was my experience at the beginning, setting up kind of like their, their notion. And then when one of the folks that that came out of Olympics was called Klima Dao and I, yeah, managed to find my way there and now I'm running operations over there. And so we've recently just set up like a full kind of discord in notion instance for them, which is really exciting because is starting to get a lot of traction, a lot of contributors wanting to join.

And yeah, it's, it's like a, it's a very vibrant culture and very vibrant community by like along the way. There are a lot of learnings, a couple of them that I think may have already been top of mind for a lot of people on the call. There's going to be I mean, that that whole point around, we should look at what, you know, what it would look like to be really successful as opposed to, you know, looking at where we are today with respect to where we might want to be.

It's almost like you don't think of the ways that it could go wrong and try to solve it. Those think of like the problem will arise when we're really successful, when we have hundreds of people wanting to join the Dow annually, like how do we scale up that? The processes surrounding the Dow from everything from, you know, onboarding like recruitment and onboarding through to granting permissions and getting people aligned on, you know, what value what what is valuable in the Dow like do we want people to be working on X, Y, Y and Z or do we want people aligned to the sort of overall objectives and how to do that in a scalable and

decentralized way that's, you know, fit within a mostly flat hierarchy, I think is a really important goal. But along the way, there is a lot of, you know, pitfalls that I've seen in terms of how these daos structure themselves, how to make the best use of the the contributors that we have and there's a whole load of other things that too.

But I mean, maybe I'll just pause there. I'm not sure if you can hear my microwaves going off in the background, but maybe, I suppose they're at sea before or going into any of the details. Like are there any any thoughts or questions or anywhere you want to you want me to talk to going from here? Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. We can. The microwave is not a problem. We can hear it a little bit, but it's fine. But if you could, I guess maybe just give us a couple of those pitfalls, a couple of the things that since we one thing that's really great is we have the time now. Are we hopefully we have the time before things really, really blow up.

As far as you know, as far as it's getting more and more popular and used to take this time to structure ourselves. So what advice do you have for us? What pitfalls did you see at home? And Klima and yeah, can you just give us a little bit of a high level on that?

Yeah, absolutely. So around the time that I joined Olympus was when they were starting to ramp up their like onboarding of contributors. And it worked pretty well to begin with. But one of the main things that that really broke down was the use of the tools that people were coordinating work and communicating with each other. There wasn't any consistency around that, and it led to all these issues around, you know, like projects were hard to manage, like people were misaligned and a whole bunch of other things.

I think that, you know, one of the big learnings for us was it's really important to have and this is this sounds super obvious when it's said, but like it's really important to have, you know, people who are coming into this now will come in with a, you know, an alignment to a function, whether it's engineering, you know, graphic design, business sales, etc., in marketing.

But when they come into this world, you're working on projects most of the time there's definitely be work that's siloed. But there's this big challenge of like, how do you bring in a and like somebody who's not a full time employee into an environment where they need to work across different departments, they need to have context and they need to have, you know, fluid, transparent communications.

And that is a really big problem that's hard to solve. It requires a lot of, you know, training in terms of how to use how to use a specific tool. I know that like engineers would be most familiar with JIRA, but there's a benefit in working completely on notion, or at least like working on one talks specifically. That's something that's a really big thing where you can you can find this tool, which it works just as well for somebody who's a designer as it does for a person who wants to, you know, strike up a partnership, that's really good, because what it means is like all the information now is captured and stored in this

one location. And, you know, historically what happens is people manage projects on discord and decisions get made on discord, and they're not documented anywhere except for these like long threads of communication and that that just like breaks down transparency because people who work in different timezones wake up with hundreds of missed messages and they don't really understand what the latest and greatest is.

So the big challenge of like project based work and how do you create transparency of communications for people that are coming in and out. That's like a really big one. Probably the second. The second big one is the kinds of contributors that you want to bring in continue. Winning is incredibly important here. I was thinking like having somebody who can contribute 10 hours per week is is better than somebody who can contribute 40 hours per week, provided that the person who contributes ten can do so over a longer period of time.

If the 40 hour per week person is churning after two weeks, that doesn't really help us. There's an enormous amount of overhead that comes in with training and like, yeah, onboarding that you don't want to do that activity very often. You want to err on the side of quality and consistency over yeah, like mercenaries. It's almost analogous to yield farming where you get mercenary DAO contributors coming in and they just like jump on the discord.

They, they talk in a whole bunch of channels and they don't actually do that much. And when, and it's, you know, there's this report that I'll share for everyone who's interested where they look at like the average number of daos that people contribute to. And it's about three, but that number goes up to eight. And I'm sure, you know, like Cooper Kruger, he's in his in like 100 discord, I'm sure.

So does that lead to impact is a question I, I don't think I think focus is a really valuable thing that is like highly underrated. So yeah, focus and continuity, that's number two. And thirdly, I'd say that kind of more specifically on the notion and discord is just like having clarity of what the purpose of these tools are for.

Like, as I think I mentioned this as well, but like, you know, discord is for well, communicating, for organizing, you know, asking questions and stuff. But frankly, we're at a point in Klima Dao where if it's not written in a project spec or in a requirement stock, it's just not going to happen. And so our conversation has become much more, much less about explaining things for every single person who just who happens to not have context, to pointing people to a file or a location on notion so that they can get up to speed.

The fact that like notion is the single source of truth is like a huge game changer when it comes to giving context. So yeah, that's that's the clarity. And then I think that the final one is just around the structure notion itself needs to be conducive to scale. Yeah, like this is a multifaceted problem, but you can imagine any structure would work fine provided people know how to use it.

But some structures work better than others because of their simplicity and the ease in which you can communicate the purpose of them. So I think there's a a bit of work around, you know, like what is the optimal, you know, what is the optimal framework that we want to run with? And there's definitely there's definitely optionality there. And I know that like I've just been given access to the to the instruction and it looks like, you know, some of the foundational bits are in place.

But then what would be what would be important or more important? And it's like, how how does this work when you have 50 contributors and how does this work when you have like 500 contributors down the line and you know, juristic definitely still around. On whether does scale that much. But yeah, it's it's a it's an interesting thought experiment to have.

And you want to be set up correctly from day one so that you you don't need to think about this. It's just like evolutions because yeah, with Olympus down, it ended up being let's just throw together something and it will be fine to four months down the track. Oh, this doesn't work. We need to completely change everything. And it's going to be a huge exercise of like change management to get that to be implemented.

So that was a lot of that was a lot of rambling. I apologize for everyone on the call. Does that answer your question?

It does. It does. I think it was very helpful. And as far as to just get us kicked off, can you give us an idea because we're also talking about structure as far as, you know, how we should how we should organize or self-organize among, you know, departments, you know, do you have an idea of would you be willing to share with us?

And Klima is kind of department structure as kind of a jumping off point so that then maybe we could, you know, chat among the Dow if that if that would make sense for Beinstock. That's kind of weird. Yeah that's the reception up and let everyone in to, you know, see what their ideas are.

Yeah. And for context on this Klima very new. It launched in I think September or October, but yeah, this is reflective of a of a fairly young Dao which has, you know, room to change. So the way that they are currently structured is that there are six departments, there's engineering partnerships, creative marketing, community and operations within. And so some of these are pretty some of these are divided into sub allotments.

For instance, with engineering, we have front end, back end and data analytics. Within creative, we have graphic video design and we also have UX and UI design, which I know it's more in the sort of product world, maybe more aligned to engineering, but that in the future will be split off in anticipation of being more kind of like a product like organization.

Marketing is its own beast. That's a big team in terms of the number of people, community is also fairly large and operations is the way that we've conceptualized it is. It's three types of activities. It's one projects where you're setting up a process from 0 to 1. So things like, you know, setting up our notion or like setting up how we do contributed hangouts, etc. to kind of the bar you, you know, like let's just run this process, you know, you're the point of call for any requests on, on discord, permission changes and blah blah blah.

And then where this role potentially evolves is playing this role of like a project owner or project manager, I suppose where there's let's just say there's a project that requires marketing, community, creative and partner chips. I see that. I see it as an opportunity for a person to play kind of like a coordinator role across that, and that could come from anywhere.

But yeah, at this stage that's where clean it. I was thinking of moving operations toward is that is that coordinator kind of or facilitator role for a project. Yeah, that's that's it.

Okay. I think that's great. Could I.

Ask a quick.

Question? Go ahead.

How big is Klima Dao and what did it like the growth from September to now in terms of the Dow itself? They currently have between 50 and 60 contributors, but I would say in terms of full time, you would be looking at eight core that have been building the products from scratch and probably I'd say 15 to 20 full time contributors with the remaining being people who contribute between five and 20 hours per week.

That's a good piece of context. Thanks for I haven't. Okay. Well, I think now I think it's time for to kind of open up the stage and see what people's overall thoughts are and yeah, floodgates are open. Raise your hands.

I guess I have another question and I guess I don't need to raise my hand. So I was wondering what the how do you kind of balance the level of autonomy with. Yeah, like how does the practice of balancing the autonomy with kind of like centralization like asking for. Yeah, I guess like how do you define like what people can do and what they need to talk to other people about or get approval for or like draw that line in.

Like, how does that work in practice to And did you have an example in mind of like a situation? I guess I don't have a specific situation in mind more so, you know, we're trying to be as autonomous and decentralize as possible and recognize that we do need centralized areas that will greatly benefit the growth and structure of the dial and within those structures.

How do people kind of like I understand like, you know, you you start kind of self volunteering at a Dao, you have your specific skill set and you try to find where you fit in and you're able to contribute and everything. But if there is, I guess like so like once you're done, I guess there has to be some sort of, I guess like coordination where you like report or like who validates your work and how is how does like, I guess like performance, performance judgment.

What's the word I'm looking for performance reviews, I guess work month to month. Like who is kind of like keeping an eye on other people and making sure that like things are, you know, getting done? Yeah, man, great question. I think this has, you know, it depends on like what stage of maturity the Dow is. There's a you know, there's a utopian view of daos, which is that people can self coordinate and work towards a common goal really effectively.

And then there's the the lived experience of being in details like that and seeing how without proper structure and without proper leadership that can fall apart really quickly, I think in an early, like a low maturity. DAO What's you know, what I've seen work in the past and it's definitely not the only answer is like you have people who are almost tasked with leading or at least like coordinating the departments that they're representing and, and building and getting alignment with the core team.

So, you know, in practice that would be you would have somebody who leads the marketing function and their role is to ensure that the priorities of the marketing team are well aligned with the with those set up at the core by the core team. And then are they being executed according to those priorities like the work? Is it being executed would be, you know, that person working with the contributors in in that department.

So that is like that is a very yeah it's it's a bit of a reality of like an early stage. You need a little bit more centralization. But the, the process in which you would become a department leader would be something that you would, you know, make incredibly transparent. And, you know, it's not like a akin kind of role where that where that like becomes more autonomous and self-organizing is where you get agreement at the level on what are the kind of overarching objectives that you're looking towards.

So in like in other organizations, they would call these okay as but you know, call them whatever you want provided that the projects in the work and the tasks that are being worked on are aligned to these like overarching objectives, you should feel comfortable compensating for that. And as a, as a contributor, the expectation should be like really, really clear.

But like what, what do you reward and what do you reward? So, you know, for instance, like you reward impacts, you reward like delivering a project against one of the, one of the overall objectives of the Dow. What you don't reward is jumping into these discord's and being a mercenary contributor and, you know, chatting a whole bunch but not actually doing anything.

So setting up these objectives and then tying the contributor allocations to those objectives in a meaningful way is is one kind of like important step on becoming more self-organized? And I think like as the Dow gets bigger and bigger, then, you know, then you can start thinking about, okay, how do how can we build more, more autonomy with these teams to reward contributors but make it in like a more kind of not codified way, but somehow more clearly defined?

And I think that's just a factor of maturity. That's really.

Interesting. Thanks. No worries. Okay. We brought a few more people up. Let's see. I think it's Simon. He's got two beans. I'll let you go with that.

Actually. Q Sorry, it was just a really quick can you state again like the size of the Dow couldn't? I think they cut out just the size of the tower and then the core structure team that you have, again.

Absolutely, yeah. So the core team, the developers that built the protocol, I think there are seven or eight and I think one of them is a lawyer and one of them is a businessperson. In terms of the contributors, there are between 50 and 60 of those. I would argue 10 to 15 of them are full time and the remaining folks are people that contribute between ten and 15 hours a week.

Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you.

You're welcome. Okay. A one, sir.

Hi, Hugh. Thank you for providing your insight. Just a couple of questions for you. In your experience, where do you see the the most efficiency or if you were going to let's just say, have a community that had low maturity? What what what sector would you put the most emphasis on into? And in which in which sense are you talking about?

Sure. So like, you know, for example, is it, you know, marketing or, you know, where where do you see that there is, you know, like this sounds like you've been in a couple communities, but where initially do you see that there's a disparity and something that needs high emphasis for a for a newer. Yeah. Well this this is like very much dependent on every dollar.

Like every dollar we have the areas where they need to overinvest. And there might be strategic reasons for like whether you would overinvest in a capability or a team for being. I wouldn't be able to say for sure. But you know, what I can generalize and say tends to happen is you you tend to have a tighter engineering team which which means, you know, like fewer high quality full time engineers.

But then in terms of the business functions of community marketing partnerships, you know, clean is not a great example because with Klima it's heavily reliance on partnerships. So partnerships is fairly big, marketing is also really large and there's a there's a strategic reason for that and there's a reality of that, which is many people can make a website and can use Squarespace or whatever.

And so marketing is just, you know, it's something that many people put their hands in the ring for. But but I would argue, like where where the emphasis should be played is on the community side. And, and depending on where you put this like this would be, you know, it would include communicating how in Clemens case, it's like prior discussion is not important because it's a rebasing token and like communicating the fundamentals of market value.

How do you manage public relations if something, you know, a report comes out that is unfavorable? How do you get on the front foot of that? How do you create these really engaging experiences like, you know, that that that, you know, mobilize the community? And this is one of the things that Bain's doing incredibly well. So so I think, you know, to answer that question in the context of Bain, we would definitely need more like discovery.

But maybe just to throw that question back to use, like, what do you think is, you know, where do you think is the gap? And like, what would you kind of see as the need to invest more in as the as the Dow grows? It's a question. I mean, I am still I mean, I'm still new in the community.

But, you know, I think engagement is is probably one of the the primary things to keep the community growing.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I just got to get the door just 1/2 to be back.

We'll let you get the door. And then following following a one service question will go to Israel. And then by analogy back. So just finishing up on what A1 Ser said he was saying that engagement, community engagement I think was probably the the thing that he sees would be the the most missing. Is that right? I wonder?

That's that's correct. Or something that I feel is essential to to to community growth and and, you know, keeping the protocol going.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, the vectors of competition are very different in web3. It's like community. And given the fact that your code base can be forked like so easily, you're much more reliant on having a strong community that can carry that carry that community for and carry that down for.

Okay.

Israel hey you. Good to meet and thanks for doing this. Super appreciative. I was hoping you might be able to spend a couple of minutes talking about setting long term goals as a DAO. I think the bit that you touched on a few minutes ago about OKRs and sort of department level project goals was super helpful. But how do you think about coordinating long term goals, whether it's from the core teams perspective, what are the best mechanisms to set those goals and then also hold departments and the organization as a whole accountable towards those goals?

Yeah, it's a really good question. The way I think about this is that it's the hierarchy at the top. You've got your, you know, your overall mission and objective. That's that's almost like your vision as a, you know, maybe it's like a five year long term vision. But then underneath that, you would have these goals that are set at at the Dow level.

So and the way that, you know, the timeframe that you would look at would be more the one year timeframe or in, you know, in crypto might be more like six months. And then beneath that, these these are the these like DAO goals are the ones that are going to inform how you develop at the at the department level.

So beneath that you would then be setting up quarterly or. Yeah, I mean any, any earlier, any less than quarterly. You're probably, it's probably more effort than it's worth. But yeah, you would set more frequent goals that ladder up to those DAO wide goals. So yeah with, with your account you would have, you know qualitative statements that are descriptive of what the objective is.

And then beneath that you would want to substantiate that with quantitative targets that say, you know, okay, we want to, we want to we want to be the like the best dao there is in defi, but like what does that actually mean? And so it can be quantified. As you know, we have a retention rate of X, we have a, we have a a contributor engagement score of 90% or something like that.

That, that quantification puts everyone who's who's signed up to that. Okay. On the line to achieve that. And it also informs how you would review and understand success. And then the process would be that you set up these times periodically throughout the year where you can capture the information that helps you substantiate the goal and then you review it.

And how far off you are is basically your, you know, like the success or failure of that of that objective. But it's always important to just be like more ambitious than you think you can achieve, if that makes sense. It's it's good to.

Have like.

Almost to do something that's going to be much harder to actually get done than you think is reasonable. But yeah, that's that's insane. It's a lot of process, a lot of coordination. And yeah, yeah. Does that answer your question? Yeah. No, that that that was great. And just one quick follow up on it. So one thing that I think about a lot is as organizations grow, it becomes harder and harder to attribute a single R to a single individual or a single team.

So what are some what are some ways that a growing organization can that over time they're able to accurately and effectively pinpoint performance or improve lack of performance before it's too late? Yeah, I think this is something that every company or organization struggles with at the individual level. You know, one of the interesting things is that you have a lot of you have a lot of people who are contributing part time and maybe they're working on projects and fewer people that are full time where it's a full time, you know, it's a bit easier to say kind of like, okay, you know, last month this is what this is my expectation.

And here's where you here's where you like left handed. But for kind of the people who are working part time, it's it's much more like it manifests in the contributor pay out because it's much more impact led right on a project so let's say it's like a project we're doing you know launch launch being F2, you know, that project would be tied to a to an okay.

And in an ideal world, you could then tie a value to that. So you could say that this seems like to be really successful in this project. It's worth, you know, you could put a dollar figure to it or you could put like a just like a high, medium and low. Like it's really important to the success of the doubt that, you know, we achieved this.

So then you can start out like understanding how an individual contributed to a really high impact project and then pay out accordingly. So I think this is an evolving space. I don't have the perfect answer because I don't think anyone has really done this well in Web two. It's it's like it's a different story because, you know, it's called human resources.

But yeah, in this space, it's it's very nascent. I think it's a bit of just we just learn along the way as both. Great. Thanks. Super helpful.

Biology cook. Hey there. Thanks. Everybody thinks you for your insights and your clarity about everything you talk about. That last little thread was actually perfectly good. Lead up to what I was going to ask about, which has to do with the idea of people pitching projects for pay and a couple of the a couple of the projects that have been pitched, including that being F-2 and then earlier on the marketing bit that didn't pass are structured in a way where it seems like people are asking for money upfront for work that hadn't been done yet.

And it's very it's sort of odd in this space where people are anonymous and they're not sharing their real names, and therefore it makes it more difficult to share portfolios and interview and just do the traditional human resources interviewing process. But what you're saying, what you just said about kind of flipping it around and making it more target oriented, where if you can hit the metrics, then you get paid, seems to make more sense.

Right. And any if you don't hit 100% of the metrics, you can at least say after you're done, well, hey, you know, we only got 70%, but would the community be willing to fund 70% of the of the amount that we talked about? But it's sort of like flipping it is on it on its head so that the community doesn't have to put their trust in somebody that nobody knows literally who they are at all.

And and a lot of the pitches don't have a lot of detail about exactly what the process is going to be or what the deliverables are going to be. Or it's just like, hey, and some guy that say says, I'm good at something and here's what I'm going to do, and can the community give me $100,000 or beans?

So I'm not not to say that those people are not good at those things that they're saying they are good at. But it's like, does it make sense in this evolving space to say, hey, go for it? You know, like if you can define what you're going to try and do, we will support you try to do that.

And then if you do it, then you get paid.

Hmm. Yeah, that's a really interesting it's a really sad thought. But like, I think that there are different flavors of it. There's the, you know, the bug bounty and then there's the okay, what is we need to we need to run a social campaign this month to support the launch should be like, you know, this entity project. Some of those are going to be coming out of like a treasury potentially just a as a as a, you know, it's permissionless in the sense that you don't need, you know, quite a price at the front and then do the work.

And then once it's done, you know, release the funds. It's much more of a fluid like load ticket item. And then on the on the other side, you have these like bounties or, or like define project work. That's yeah, you could actually write up to ride out the spec and pitch it to the team. I think in the first version, that's probably where I have more experience and it's definitely more of an organic process where ideas emerge from the door and then they get prioritized and then put in the backlog and then as they get assigned a value and that can be that in value, high, medium and low can be, you know, generally it's

something that's like a discussion that you're right at that, but provided everyone agrees with it, it's yeah it's like generally understood that that's, you know, roughly indicative of how much it's worth from from the perspective of paying a contributor out for that thing. But yeah, there's, there's definitely different versions of all this I guess.

Yeah. Real quick, I was just going to hop on, I'm back on that question and then sometimes I'll let you go right after, if that's okay. Q How much would you be willing to share about the compensation structures of other guys that you've worked with as far as, I guess just really as much or as little detail as you care to go into.

But I think that that's pretty important for this discussion. So I'm curious how much you can share.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm yeah, I'm curious to know what part of the compensation structure you're interested in. But like at a very high level.

I'll just add I'm just sorry to cut you off, but I think it was it was oh seven who shared that there was like a maximum pay structure for I think it was for Olympus, but they had kind.

Of like, yeah.

And I found that kind of interesting and I just thought you could elaborate on that a little bit maybe.

Yeah, it's yeah, it's really topical. So they released, they had like an update to their compensation structure recently. The way that they now do it is that they have like a maximum allocation per contributor. So what tends to happen is you get people who contribute across multiple teams and that's like that chain is to go actually now from a deeper level budget where each department would say how much each person should get from their department budget it to a world where it's actually let's, let's set a cap to the amount of money that a person can earn in aggregate that that like basically function that's a force function for focus.

And it's a really important thing because yeah, everyone can jump into chats and, and contribute in a whole range of discussions, but does that actually lead to value? Is, is a different story. So like setting kind of contributor level caps is really important the of the thing it was on my mind I might have just lost it but yeah, like that.

The other thing to mention is just that the whole process that you go through to say what is something worth from like what contribute, like what is a contribution worth and like the types of contributions and how does that kind of like the weighting of it that all the way through to how the allocation decision was made should be like really, really transparent across the whole team so that there's no ambiguity in people don't go, I didn't get it.

Why did I get this? And, you know, so that that's like another part of it as well.

Sure, sure. Yeah. I can definitely, definitely understand where being algae is coming from. I think that is important piece. I think there has to be certainly has to be accountability and certainly has to be. You know, it's a little tricky, too, because there are some people who, you know, where maybe if I'm theoretically, you know, we're really trying to encourage full time people.

And, you know, if someone could leave a role and then could come on as a full time person, it's a little tricky when they can only be paid, you know, retroactive tively after, you know, they do a certain work. But at the same time, I can also see the argument for that. But I think that could be kind of a balance between like the bug bounty approach and then also something along the lines of like a scaled approach depending on the quality of the work that was done.

So I don't know, but I do want to bring in somebody actually.

Dumping one thing on that to actually be analogy that that was the and if people possibly drafted actually and for what it's worth the initial one didn't have the payment upfront shifted that was bye week whenever we talk about that offline. But I also think that as as police is working on the budget dumpling you know, and you kind of pass the Dow up into these separate, separate sections and budgets allocated, it seems like it will kind of naturally gravitate towards like a 1099 versus like full time or part time space.

So I think like and then obviously, you know, like if you think of like an operations budget or marketing budget, it's allocated like half a million beans or something like that obviously is ever kind of spearheading that will have to make sure that the spend, you know, an allocation of the beans is representative of the actual budget. So I think over time the analogy will actually see a natural progression away from like abundance of dumps that you see the way that they are now because you'll probably have like one central member in clear direction of like, look, we really need to get this done, you know, jump in, really need to get this done for

X, Y or Z. Hence this is coming out or B really needs to be done for marketing and hence this is coming out. So I would guess that pretty soon, you know, as promised to say, the next month is really infrastructure month. But then after that you'll probably start to see much clearer, less wild, less proposals coming back.

Thanks. And I'm sure your project is going to turn out great. I think that what is part of what I'm getting at is like it's the trust factor because, you know, you don't have that the standard real world trust mechanisms to verify who people are, in some cases what their portfolios are or anything like that. But that might kind of lead you to think about like a stepped a stepped system where it's like somebody can come in and do a small project and then everybody can see what they delivered and what it was and say, well, look at that.

Let's now prove twice as much funding for that. So it's like you don't need the identity or a big portfolio to invest in somebody. You just need to have a track, an increasing track record like Pugliese There's a good example. We're all willing to kind of approve almost anything that they propose now because they've done such a good job and communicate so well and have a good track record of success.

So it's like the little versions of that where you have more people that instead of saying, Hey, allocate me 300 K right off the bat without knowing who I am, why don't I do something for 5000 and then everybody can decide how that looks and now you're kind of accruing trust, you know, as you go and establishing yourself in the community.

And that's a way to kind of build your involvement as opposed to just kind of coming out of nowhere. So I think it's all these things together are just different ways to think about judging all the proposals that are going to be coming at us.

And I think actually that was kind of an organic thing that happened with the bit that came in for, I think it was around a quarter of a million. You know, there was a lot of conversation in the community about that was a big spend up front. But I also think that the even with the VP's and the BNP, as we put them out there, like the integrity of the of the proposal itself also might be a reflection of the output of the work.

So for example, with the NFT proposal that I did put out, like we have 14 deliverables and I'm frankly we've been working on it for over a week now and haven't even talked about the pay or anything like that. So that I think pay and ensuring compensation, that's a whole different conversation. Like I myself have a very strong work ethic.

So slightly different but like not different but like meaning I don't care about the money, but I think the proposal, for example, like I in this sense, yeah. I mean obviously you're trusting the integrity of the people that's putting out there. But like if we don't hit those 14 things, like I've hired plenty of contractors in the past and if that's not spelled out exactly what the rules are, we just wouldn't bring them on board.

So there might be something else too is I mean, we could even as they start to come in, you can scrutinize it. And that actually happened quite a bit, I think, with a handful of them, including the one that was was pushed out for the NFT. So I think like that that's something that is kind of great about the deal that I've seen is there's been a lot of scrutiny internally as well.

I'd like to also add on a comment where this is a it's kind of like this is a proof of work concept. Like so you have to show some sort of demonstrate all value in that initial proof of work to start the dialog, to start getting paid. Because yeah, like it doesn't make sense for an anonymous person to just come and be like claim they can do this and then start getting paid before any work is done.

And that kind of like is just a proof of work concept and also understanding the community more to like, you know, you're not just going to come in, you know, spend a couple of days even like a week, I would say unless you're really vibing with people, but, you know, expect you need to spend a meaningful amount of time in the community and start to see like, oh, who's like a community member who's who's an active community member and like start to like get to know other people before I think being able to yeah, like get hired or do more work and you know, the payment and that also creates more transparency or more like

a validation, you know, when everybody else is on board and you've been talking to them in the community and interacting like you're going to know, like this is going to probably going to be a good proposal. And I know that X, Y and Z people think that this is a good idea. And, you know, if these people think it's a good idea, other people are probably going to think it's a good idea, too.

And it just kind of grows. But yeah, I just want to add that comment in there.

Yeah. And to jump in real quick, a lot of the people that we've been looking at hiring, we've because there isn't much of a queue for a budget left, we've been frankly, they've been working without being paid. And if anything, they may be paid. Well, you know, hopefully we'll be paid once the Q one budget comes out, gets approved, and then we'll be paid retroactively.

So part of what you guys are describing is kind of already starting to happen, which is I think is kind of a good thing to just show that people like like Jay WW mentioned and even like you were mentioning that, you know, you have to show a certain amount of buy in and a certain amount of involvement in the community before you just instantly, you know, get hired and get paid in advance.

So I think those are definitely good concerns, but also just know that usually those people have are kind of starting to work without getting paid, which is probably not how we always wanted, you know, open for discussion about how we want to do it in the future. But right now, everyone who's kind of coming on board, it really has their heart in the right place.

And and it's really great to see. I want to let Jay Mann. Yeah. You're on stage now and that you've been up there for a while, so I want you to have your chance.

Hey, you downplaying Isaac?

Also want to chime in on sort of the compensation thing. So something that he had mentioned was this idea of like a low, medium and high payout. But I was thinking, instead of just having that kind of be the overall value of like the project that you get paid at the end, you know, to kind of incentivize full time work, you could have that in terms of bonuses.

So for a given proposal, you know, the person would negotiate sort of the base rate and that would sort of be the low rate. So just kind of what they would get paid for, for doing the work in general. And then we would define like a series of OKRs, like he was talking about where we have like a high tier where this is exceptional or you know, medium tier where you know, this is what we want and kind of a low tier where, you know, this is kind of below our expectations and then based on that, at the end of the project, you would, you know, get a bonus based on, you know, what level

of the OKRs you reached. So that way it would kind of allow people to still be, you know, kind of getting paid as they're doing the work. So it would enable full time work, but then also transition partially to like an outcome based payment. So we're focused on really rewarding and incentivizing, you know, high quality work.

Yeah, maybe I can just react to that. It's, it's, it's a really.

It's a really cool idea, actually. I hadn't thought of it.

Like that, but you definitely, you definitely need to be. Yeah, somewhat somewhat more like set up in, in terms of yeah. Like the maturity for for for being able to like say, okay, here's a salary that requires a lot of trust and maybe a little bit more oversight. But I think that works really well.

As a.

Strong incentive for people to not only do full time work, but also to like extend themselves beyond what they think they can achieve normally, which is greater.

Yeah, I don't think that would necessarily be something that we start doing like right away, but something to kind of aim for in the future when we kind of hit that larger downside.

I think it's kind of a cool idea. Yeah, I'll just. Who's ushering in what you want? Yeah. One little final thought on that, which is I think I was just trying to protect against a phenomenon that it seems like it could happen, where the bigger the community gets, the more unknown people might be coming around pitching things. And also that the more the general community might not know each other or might not have been around long enough to be able to evaluate who has been around and who are higher trust individuals and who to go for, for thoughts on who, who to hire.

So if you have like more new people in the community and more people pitching to be hired, then there's just a higher risk that if you just leave it up to a majority vote, then you could be hiring people that maybe aren't trustworthy. So I just think that we need to evolve more of a mechanism for review and oversight and discussion of that and not just have stuff be simple, quick majority votes on a proposal by a lot of people really fast, and I don't know that it's necessarily like that right now, but it seems you could border on that if we're not careful.

So I think that's just the main thing that I see as a potential thing to watch out for. I think it's a very good point because we could easily if we right now, like you say, it might be tolerant, might be, you know, reasonable, but if we ten x from here or 50 acts in our in our community size, all of a sudden we can't be doing a bunch of hire hires by a snapshot proposal just by I think it's a very good point for something to look out for as we grow.

Judge Yeah. I mean, I think generally, you know, similar to figuring out who is the right person to be doing work, there also needs to be a discussion about who is the right person to figure out who is the right person to be doing work. So, you know, in a sense, like I have a decent technical background, but you know, if it really came to it, I couldn't necessarily tell you if somebody was an A-class solidity engineer or not.

And so I think with that, you know, both determining who should be doing work and hire or like working on the hiring process as well as we should be determining compensation, you know, you need to start to look towards these like decentralized groups. And so while I do believe strongly in the project based work, I think also there needs to be a sort of, you know, department weeds in a sense.

And even if those aren't necessarily like one person, but a few people that then determine, you know, who should be, you know, hired in like a more long term capacity versus or short term capacity or not.

Hired at all.

I think that's also something important for us to sort of consider, certainly.

And just to give you guys a little bit of background of kind of how things are going right now. You know, when someone wants to get involved in the Dow, I'm usually their first point of contact. So I will sort of start kind of a quote unquote application with them and then I'll schedule a call with them where I talk for, you know, we could talk for half an hour sometimes.

J Man, I think we were talking for about an hour and to just get to know them how they came across bienstock, where, what their skill set is, what their background is. And people have been pretty, you know, pretty open with me. And then I jot down a bunch of notes, have a chat with Publius usually, and then if they kind of make it to the next step.

I've been connecting them with Publius for a conversation, one that I'm usually on, and then from there we kind of go, and you know, kind of continue to refine what their role might be and then eventually post it for a snapshot. So that's kind of the workflow right now. But as we do have, like as George was mentioning, like department heads and that sort of thing, that would be important because I'm not really handling as far as like for like solidity developers that's really Publius that's, you know, that ing them and yeah, so that's going to be a process that continues to evolve.

But being ology. So I just want to mention some of those proposals that were out there where you can look to see who proposed them and if the person themselves proposed them or if I proposed it or Publius proposed it, they've probably been decently vetted. You know, it's so that's kind of where the process is right now. But as we grow, that is going to be something, you know, having a dedicated h.r.

Person having these department leads. That would be an important part of that, i think. But open to, you know, what the dow thinks as well. So I just wanted to give a little bit of background and maybe to let probably us in here real quick because for over the hour, mark, happy to keep this going. But yeah, i wanted to see if we said anything to comment on this and then maybe bring a few more people up.

And I think this has been pretty fruitful, though.

Well, first off, now we've been thrilled to be able to be a little silent. It's really amazing to see everyone who's so trusted them with thoughtful questions and a few. I think Dow is good hands with you as our steward as we get things set up over the next couple of weeks, you seem to have some really strong hand on on what's necessary.

So I think just ought to necessarily close it out, although this has been going quite a while and I don't want to over overdo it with people's time. So but to wrap things up and then obviously there can be more discussion over the next month I would say so it January would be the target date have infrastructure and law and order flow in terms of tickets and work and reporting.

So we think a month is going to be it's probably necessary to get 50 plus people working in an effective fashion and coordinated are obviously things are moving lightning quick in the meantime. And so we would just encourage everyone to get as long as you feel like you don't have the stuff that you need to be working on, the stuff that you want to work on, especially at this stage of the game, but in general it will be on you just make it aware that you need resources or you need help or you need time or you have questions or you don't have access to something that you need.

And we will try our hardest to alleviate that friction or that pressure point or whatever it may be. At the same time, over the next month, this is going to be a little bit just of a learning curve. So while all this is all getting set up, we would we would encourage everyone to remain patient and just step up and contribute in whatever way possible.

And it's great to see so many of you here that we're talking to in subgroups and stuff as you're here to witness this discussion. So just as a summary, now, we're thinking about the structure a little bit. Our hope is that Beanstalk Farms is going to be, well, maybe just a digression, even Q4 from the budget was structured as a Beanstalk Forms budget and everything has been funded by Beanstalk forms.

Q1, I think we're thinking about things a little bit differently having one or some of the lessons of operating under the Q4 framework. So George had a great idea, which was to have in Sprout Accelerator funded by the Q1 budget instead and have been Sprout Fund Beanstalk as part of that initial funding. And so Beanstalk Forms is going to be a sort of like the not a company but more of like the long term for prime developers and operations people that are responsible for working on the core project, if you will, and coordinating the core development of Beanstalk with other projects like the Pot Marketplace and the Bean after years.

And then other projects will be funded by bean sprouts separately. Then the hope is that they will be able to, as appropriate or as needed, leverage the full time labor skill, set knowledge and resources of beanstalk farms, facilitate and coordinate their specific project. So something like the bean lefties can exist in their own project. But through coordinating through the notion, we'll be able to bring in someone on the UI front to design the webpage and then bring in a front end beanstalk forms developer to implement the UI to handle the The BFG meeting, for example.

So there's the general. The hope is to create a structure that has plug in place so that people can contribute on multiple projects and and know what they're doing and where when they have time, they can just log in and work on some stuff that's meaningful. But it is going to take a couple of weeks to get get that set up.

And then in the meantime, you know, we're trying our best here. So enough that on our part thrilled that we we didn't even need to speak at all until an hour plus into the meeting that's a positive indicator to us that this is heading in the right direction. You know, with that in mind, you know, continue continue on.

This is great. We're happy to answer questions about it or or just continue to listen.

Okay. Thanks for that. So who else would they come up?

And one thing one thing would be, I only have 2 minutes before I have to leave.

So maybe have to get the most of question. Sure. Something reasonable and.

Wonderful. So, Hugh, we just want to say thank you. We're very excited and we look forward to seeing how things progress over the coming weeks.

But we have one more. Thank you. One more here. GDP 630 just invited you the stage. So, fellows, how you do it.

But hey, man.

Yeah. So I worked for Olympus for a long time. Maybe like six or months. So I know, like, a lot of the stuff that you guys are talking about regarding the house and structuring and the payments and what he was talking about, how got paid and how we did the changes and everything. So if you guys want help setting the Dow up and any policy ideas because I was on the policy team for most of the time, I'll be glad to help.

I've been in. Been for wonderful. Wonderful. Okay, great. Yeah, let's let's chat. Yeah, yeah, of course. Was thinking maybe possibly somehow putting up a proposal.

To see if Olympus will help bring some liquidity to being.

Hope. That would be amazing.

Together we will. I'll. I'll send you £1,000 of beans. Yeah, yeah. But I just wanted to say hello and that's about it. You love the word. Now you joining us.

Nice to meet you. And you know, I don't want to make everyone listen to all of this micro planning, but I think this has been a great, great structuring meeting. And, you know, probably to be continued over the coming weeks as things come into shape.

Oh, yeah, for sure. It'll definitely be an ever evolving thing. Trust me. Okay. Thanks so much for that GDP. I just sent you a DM. And Hugh, this has been so helpful. You know, your guidance, we really appreciate everyone for coming. This is great. I was anticipating like ten people. We have 36 people interested in the nitty gritty of the how the doubt should be set up.

So that's pretty cool.

Thanks so much, everyone. I really, really appreciate the opportunity putting my skill sets to good use here. It's super exciting.

Thank you, Hugh. Thank you, everyone. And we'll talk soon.