Simone Cicero 

Welcome everybody. Welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations podcast. On this podcast we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers and entrepreneurs and we speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in this rapidly changing world. I’m Simona Cicero, and today I’m alone with no co-host. But I’m joined by Justice Condor. Justice has been a developer and Agile lead for more than a decade and at some point he got obsessed with DAOs and he was part of the launch of Bankless DAO where was involved in the building of the governance structure and is now doing DAO ecosystem development at Polygon. Hello justice, it’s great to have you.

Justice Conder 

Hello. Hello. Happy to be here.

Simone Cicero

Justice, first of all, I think it would be great to give a bit of context to the listeners to explain how and why we have got to this conversation that we want to host today here. So I leave it to you to maybe tell a bit of the story of how you bounce it from the traditional world into the DAO world. And now you are discussing with me all these questions about merging.

Justice Conder

These towards yeah, I was a full stack developer in 2009 and I had a couple startups that got acquired and so my role transitioned into more like building teams and actually writing code. And so I kind of found myself in the space of how do you determine when releases will be done? How do you measure effort? So that got me involved in Agile Kanban Scrum and so that took me into that whole Agile PM world. And then when Bankless DAO launched, I’d been really interested in Web3 early bitcoin days and Ethereum and all, but there’s something about being able to do something with it besides just buy something and hope you get rich. Right? And with the launch of Bankless DAO it was finally so easy that a person you could just say I have an idea for an entity, I can launch a token token gate access to some communication channels, set up multisig accounts and kind of build out organizational structures. And so I came into Bankless DAO and got involved in their Ops Guild as the project champion on redesign of the website. So a lot of it found itself back into governance as one of their first governance solution engineers and helped write the bring together the constitution and the BDIP the Bankless DAO Improvement Proposal process. So to bring this to boundary list the thing is I’d come from a DevOps project management side and so even though I was really interested in DAOs and getting involved in obsessed and all I saw like there were just misses on every point on in my experience was the right way to do things. And I thought man there has to be some education here both to the DAO natives on this is how you can do stuff. But then also my imagination started exploding and saying these are some of the problems we deal with in traditional companies and DAOs kind of unlock this whole other thing. And so naturally I kind of found myself in the boundaryless mind share and your material and then exposed to Rendanheyi the Haier corporation and all these and suddenly some connections started to happen. I was like, we have alchemy and so that’s how we connected.

Simone Cicero

Well, thank you so much. I think I already see from your introduction how you tended to work on these convergences between the DAO world and the traditional world. So for example, if I think about you working on governance processes and also in the proposal improvement process which is again about innovating an organization, innovating its technological structure, innovating the processes through a disciplined approach, right? So you said it was all about trying to do things in the right way. And I think this is one of the key points that often come up when we engage with these decentralized teams that seem very naive with respect to maybe the traditional word that can maybe be considered more boring. But it definitely has some doctrine, let’s say, that has been standing the test of time and is worth integrating in more innovative, let’s say more revolutionary organizations that DAOs tend to consider themselves.

Justice Conder 

It’s been amazing but also a challenge because almost like in the history of philosophy, there was continental philosophy and then analytic and they turned into these two schools. It was like I’ve been involved in DAOs which up to this point have been strongly kind of continental philosophical equalization and then all this and I’m coming from the analytic side of programmability and statistical predictability and basically trying to boil governance down to pull requests that are very dev heavy. So there’s been a strength but also a challenge there. And so that’s why I think there’s kind of a unique and a new way to look at these things.

Simone Cicero

Why, according to your experience, is the DAO World and Web3 and Blockchain World so disconnected from the common organizational models and practices that most of both the startup and the corporate world tend to adopt?

Justice Conder 

I imagine there’s a few factors here, but the one I think that we could draw most strongly from because it’s happening right now in the realm of DeFi decentralized finances. And if you think about how movements start, movements have a shared enemy. It’s the proletariat or you have some entity, the bourgeoisie, you look to them and that creates your unity. For DFI it was like the banks, the banks are evil. Be your own bank, right? But here’s the thing at the end of the day, no one actually wants to oh, I forgot my password. My entire network’s gone, right? So now it’s like, oh actually financial institutions internalize DeFi and have that as an offering, right? In the same way DAOs were born as an antithesis and as a reaction to traditional organizations. They say, hey these meat grinding, extractive corporations we don’t need this. We want a more egalitarian, more democratic and this is going to be the DAO way. And so that meme is so strong that if you come in you’re like, hey, we should have directly responsible individuals. We should have kind of a separation of concerns and everyone can’t be involved in every detail. There’s no efficiency here. Then you sound like you’re bringing in the corporate structure. And I’ve actually been in a lot of groups and meetings and stuff that if you suggest there’s like a fear to say hey, if you say you’re going to show up, you should show up. And you’re like hey man, this ain’t the corporate world. There’s a hegelianism dialectic at play of the shared enemy. Now it has to be modified. And this is where I think there’s a new messaging here on DAOs as a complement, not a conflict with traditional organizations. And I will say lastly too is that there was an early kind of mental shift between a lot of people think DAOs were invented by Vitalik but it was actually Dan Larimer and his father who invented the original idea of decentralized autonomous companies and then Vitalik did at the same time, maybe several months later, whatever. And their personalities like Vitalik is a strong personality genius, right? His kind of more nonprofit public goods thing kind of took over and the traditional company structure on chain never got the mind share.

Simone Cicero 

Could it be that DAOs have gravitated towards different things so more commons oriented, more enabling layers, more infrastructural layers? The biggest success of Web3 or in general this blockchain world certainly will be a success in building infrastructure. For example, pulling money around grant programs to build the commons. So could it be that since we at least the movement so far has been focusing on building different things? So for example, there’s not much focus on the product? So could it be that the focus being on more enabling layers and more commons kind of implies that you really need to have a different doctrine and a different approach and different ideological and political reasons? Could it be that we’re trying to normalize DAOs and tame DAOs, let’s say. But in reality they shouldn’t be tamed. There should be much more thinking in terms of revolutionary ways for example to building common infrastructures or commons in general.Justice Conder 

Yeah, I’ve gone through a phase on this where I thought, hey, that way doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable. This is the thing. And it’s kind of like you choose your battles. Do you want to say hey that’s out or do you want to say there’s also this and so I’ve defaulted to that. There’s also this and also this is like any type of company organization for profit. You can build on chains and there’s tons of advantages and a strategy and like you say, doctrine around that. And this is also for people, too, so it’s kind of a both and and I find that’s an easier palatable thing for people to hear.

Simone Cicero 

And what do you think? That DAO’s didn’t learn or are maybe intentionally ignoring when it comes to the body of work that powers modern organizations? And why?

Justice Conder 

It’s hard to say what was ignored. All of it was ignored. It was the same kind of idea of when you buy $1,000 in crypto and suddenly it’s worth 140,000. The smart person says, I think I’ll sell some. Right? But what happens is it gets in your mind that there’s a new paradigm. It’s a new paradigm. And I’ve personally lived through this. Right? And I think in the same way, you kind of get drunk on Reimagining organizations and teal and everyone can do everything, and you’re kind of so sold on that. It just becomes too hard to come back and say, let’s do some more traditional organizational stuff. Because they’re like, well, if you want to do that, why even have a DAO? There’s a story to tell. There and here’s the thing. There has to be a competing appealing lore. Okay. And just doing business is not exciting for a lot of people. Even if you say, hey, it’s on a chain. The traditional classic DAO type stuff is exciting. And so what’s? The competing lore that does make this cool. And for me, it’s programmable organizations. Autonomous programmable organizations. I think this is awesome. This is cool. Anyone who’s done any development or as a technologist, they can’t deny that there’s something that tickles the brain in that. That is something different than the tyranny of structurelessness that we’ve seen, like, so common up to this point.

Simone Cicero

I mean, a couple of things that you said which are very interesting. You said there are also many traditional organizations that are ignoring the basic elements of doctrine around being agile or not wasting your time or managing decision making in a consistent way. Being accountable. The typical doctrine that powers high performing organizations, right? So the point is, there are also off chain organizations that ignore doctrine. From what you said, it seems like I would say at least during the quantitative easing age, there’s been so much capital putting into this world that somehow the DAO Web3 world didn’t have to become more disciplined. Right? And this is something maybe we can make a parallel with existing incumbents that have such a solid, maybe business model and market share that they can sit and complace, ignoring that they need to improve their doctrine. Right? Their capabilities, their discipline and so on. The first point is, maybe this didn’t happen. But now it’s going to happen because they have much less capital. And now, in this perspective, organizations including DAOs need to be much more to the point, much more disciplined. Another Thing That You Also Mentioned that May Be Also Interesting To Dive Deeper is the role of leadership team because traditionally, at least in my experience, we talk a lot of merge and transformations in organization, whole system change. And I like it. I’m fond of complexity and so on. But in my experience, lots of radical transformations start with a strong leadership push. Okay, so may also be that since you lack these hierarchical, I would say leadership driven waves, that these kinds of doctrines are not embraced. So these two things. One is that this didn’t happen because there was so much money that efficiency and doctrine weren’t priorities. And on the other side, maybe it’s also a matter of leadership.

Justice Conder 

Yeah, I love this and it’s true. Pain causes change, right. During a bull run and when everyone’s just printing money out of thin air and being able to pay everyone and we’re on the new paradigm kick, it’s kind of hard to listen to someone who says, hey, we should diversify, cut back or whatever. I think you’re right. I’m telling you, every day I hear more news of certain groups coming up in hard times. And that’s why I think partly people are more open to hear about sustainable business models. And I mean, there was a DAO in particular that I was working with in Tokyo in April and they were starting out and already have a lot of money and mind share and capability and they’re like, what should we focus on next? And I was like a gamified business model and it was the most novel thing for them to hear on what to do next. And I thought, we are living in strange times if that’s a strange thing to hear. So the pain causes change and that’s good. It creates an appetite for desire to change. The other thing you mentioned in the leadership, 100% true. One of the memes for the strength of DAOs is Slaying Moloch. Moloch is a personification of the god of coordination failure. And so we can’t have nice things because if we have a failure of coordination, we can use token engineering and DAOs to coordinate to have mutually beneficial ends. And the funny part is all of that is supposed to address the tragedy of the commons, okay? Like we token engineer our way out of it, whereas most DAOs, when there is no ultimate leadership, it’s a magnifier of the tragedy of the commons because, listen, I didn’t put any money into this thing. I got AirDrop some tokens, every proposal that comes through. Yeah, it sounds pretty good. I mean, it’s not going to hurt me to vote yes. It’s my friend who wrote it. So you kind of vote yes and so you end up with this amplification of the tragedy, the commons. And this is one reason why I strongly advocate for protocol First DAO strategy, right? And a simplified version of that. Start with a solvent product, something of an engine of value, and then build up a greater community and stakeholders around that rather than just starting with what’s typically called the community first, which is to raise a bunch of money from a ton of people and then figure out what to do. Because when you do it the first way, you can adopt and practice progressive decentralization, not presumptive. A decentralized worthless chaos is not worth capturing. The reason why you bring in decentralization is to prevent capture, to prevent exploitation. Okay? And so this whole changing of the idea of how these things should work is like what’s on chain coordination tools? Look for startups with strong leadership. How do you grow out those roles on a chain in a programmatic gamified way, introduce more stakeholders and so you kind of grow into, you start with strong leadership and you grow into a leadership that can’t be captured or exploited.

Simone Cicero 

You fascinated me a few weeks ago by making this parallel between the role that DevOps had with the role that smart contracts and DAOs can have in expanding this idea of programmability and automation into other pieces of the organizational pie. So what do you have in mind when you say, for example, that DAOs can produce similar outcomes? Similarly I would say what can I say? Similar benefits? Yes, effects than the DevOps movement produced.

Justice Conder 

Okay, I love this, right? Because I’ve been an agile practitioner and I’ve seen kind of the fork between what are typically thought of as agile practices and methods and then the DevOps, which is more technical on chain automated type code execution. This kind of picture of where I think all this fits together, to me, it suddenly opens the eyes of what we’re playing with here. Okay? And so I’ll say it like this. I was talking at a meet up last night and not everyone knows what DevOps is. So I gave you a simple example. I said, hey, it used to take a long time to write code, months for these large projects. And then developers got together and said, hey, let’s do this differently. We’re going to put out new features every two weeks. Okay, great. But then once they had those features written there’s, like, okay, take it live. And that got sent to a different department of like, hey, we’re going to check all the boxes and make sure this is secure code we’ll secure. Then it goes to business people and say, hey, is it exactly the thing we want? We want a different color button. Then it goes to the regulatory compliance and it goes up to the person who’s in charge of that. And so by the time it actually gets to the people who want to use it, it’s like months have gone by when the team is producing new features every two weeks. And so developers get together and they say, hey, let’s consume everything that they’re doing in code itself. And so we’ll write code to check our code. If it satisfies the constraints, it automatically deploys it to the user. These are operations consumed by development. Okay, now fast forward to today. My experience for the past many years has been showing business leaders and saying, hey, if we adopt these specific practices, we will instantly be 30% more efficient. I can show you the data. I can show you with the cycle time analytics. And yet there’s not the appetite. Without the appetite, nothing can change, right? Or hey, we agreed to this type of informal API about what the team does and batch size, and yet none of this is followed and everyone’s frustrated and upset. And so programmable organizations in the form of DAOs, they say, you know what, we’re going to take all this and consume it with code as well, just like we did with the deployment practices. We’re going to now build on code taken from informal to formal APIs of our engagement. And if you think about the benefits that can come from this, it’s the same benefits that came from DevOps. DevOps deploying a couple of times a month through thousands of times a day. This is kind of the unlock here. I’ll look at it this way. DevOps ate the last mile of the process, and DAOs can eat the first mile of the agile process, right? So we get the whole value stream of delivery as code.

Simone Cicero 

When you say DAOs, are we instead maybe in this case talking more about smart contracts?

Justice Conder 

This is the thing. If you just ask what the DAO does? I’d say it’s decentralized in the sense that the code is not running on one person’s machine, right? At the execution level, it’s decentralized. It’s autonomous. It’s not asking different nations, states to act whether they can execute or if someone doesn’t do something. It’s running autonomously. It’s an organization. So it’s a network of actors or stakeholders, participants that are organized to do something of value. So to me, this is a DAO. But the term DAO has taken on so much baggage that it now so often includes preconceived notions of governance and this and that. And so I also like the term DAC, decentralized autonomous company or DO, decentralized organization. But for the sake of simplicity, I still use the word DAO. But you can see there’s a different flavor to what I’m describing than what we’ve seen a lot of.

Simone Cicero 

When you frame the impact of smart contracts as essentially extending the scope of automation into different elements that go beyond deployment into production and go maybe towards other bureaucratic elements. Certainly in a software centric world, I would say there is not much more than that than putting software in production. If you think about a world where increasingly our production capabilities get softwarezed, let’s.

Justice Conder 

Say again, there is not much more.

Simone Cicero 

Then putting new software into operation when you think about a business. But what do you think?

Justice Conder 

That is a good thought. You’re like, okay, well, we’re just deploying code faster. But here’s the thing it’s about in the DAO context, you internalize the stakeholders and the economic model that was not part of the system previously. You could model, simulate, source control test, you could do all this on the functional code. But now in the DAO context you can say wow, even what gets updated and how and by who and what are the thresholds and then how it creates value and distributes that value to the stakeholders. Suddenly you’ve entered the DAO realm. So I would say that, yeah.

Simone Cicero 

If I think about Agile and DevOps, right, it was like a bifurcation of the conversation on Agile, right? Maybe we tend now in retrospect, after so many years, to look at Agile more as a cultural element, right? More as a way to make a decision, a way to involve the customer into the development, a way to reduce waste. And on the other hand, DevOps was really about automation, And this was very empowering for developers, right? Because DevOps really powers the developer and cuts the bureaucracy and so on. So I tend to connect these two faces like Agile on the left, DevOps on the right and Agile. I connect it very much to the idea of social wear and DevOps is more in the world of trustwear and DevOps seems to be a bit like a precursor of smart contracting, right? And as you said, you said basically what DAOs being on top of this, it’s about including stakeholders and economic agreements. And if I look at the world as it is evolving, right, and I’m looking into increasing modularity on the market, increasing composability and modules and protocols emerging, it looks like the idea of DAO will be very much demystified, right? So now we have this idea of a big DAOs for achieving big things. But shouldn’t we maybe think of a DAO for a library or a DAO for a small protocol that we use as a component so something like decentralized autonomous software modules, right? 

Justice Conder 

The crazy part is we were already seeing the shrinking of companies as far as new kinds of innovation, as far as how much money they were producing revenue per how many people were in the company. Until you get to something crazy like Uniswap where I could be double checking on this like 14 people. And so it’s almost like our idea of a company or whatever I suspect will collapse down into the agile version of a team cross functional like all the internal team dynamics that will be kind of the company. But then there is a second order thing where you can say well, there’s a way to bring several of these teams AK like micro companies together and have them do something that they couldn’t do otherwise and so maybe pull their funds. And this is where you tie back in the public goods some advantage and this is I think that all of them benefit from and they can step into the economies of scale to do this. And this is where I think the Rand Nahi is so powerful because there are certain advantages to being a member of that network you participate in. And so I think there’s a model that connects these things.

Simone Cicero 

I think it’s good for you to introduce Rendanheyi. And for those that are not familiar, Rendanheyi. I mean, pardon for the pronunciation, which is definitely not good Chinese, but Rendanheyi, the management model of Haier Group. And for the loyal listeners, you will know that Boundaryless  is a partner of Haier Model Institute since a while now. And we are developing this framework of organizational approaches called the 3EO that stands for Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization. And I think the fascinating connection between the world of smart contracts and DAOs and this management practice allows me to introduce the topic of why we should move on chain. So basically why organizations should integrate on chain capabilities. And I must say that this is not a wish, I mean this is something that is happening already. So for example, hire itself to really embrace the Rendanheyi model which is heavily based on clear agreements, clear rules and shared commons between the employees. Clear contracts is much more like a contract based organizational model versus hierarchies based. So to really embrace this model, they already had to develop a smart contract platform. Right. For example, imagine that you have two teams that need to make an agreement between them to bring a new product to the market. They use a smart contract to regulate how the revenues of this product will be split between these two teams in a way that is very similar to what you can achieve with software like Zero X Splits. So the first motivation for us to embrace chain capabilities that I see is really to build the middleware that exists in between two spaces where you use social wear. So there are two spaces where you use social wear. When you connect these two spaces in the middle between these two spaces, there can be two teams there. Maybe you can use trustwear to reduce the bureaucratic element. So you keep social wear inside the teams where it is needed. But then in the middle between these two teams, you can use trustwear on chain capabilities, smart contracts, and shared governance. So besides that, what are the other motivations that you can or maybe also expand on from your point of view on why organizations should move on chain?

Justice Conder 

Awesome. Yeah, I’ll give a few ideas that have been percolating. They really kind of, I think are powerful memes, right? And so the first when people ask me this I’ll say programmability. Like, I think on my Twitter people say, oh, they’re decentralization maxi or they’re ETH maxi or whatever, whatever. I’m like a programmability maxi, programmable orgs. That’s what I want. Right. And what’s really interesting, and I think this is a cool way to frame it, is smart contracts introduce a third law of nature. And I think it’s that dramatic. The first laws were physical laws where we have gravity and light. And these laws are great because they cannot be broken. You cannot break a law of nature, but we can’t create new ones or change the ones that exist. Then we have the second laws, and these are man made laws of certain rules that we try to enforce with police and courts and we say you can’t do this or can’t do that. And we have contracts. And these arose as cities arose and they even existed in previous times in the form of covenants. Right? But these are rules and agreements and laws that we can make, but they are breakable. We can make up new ones, but they’re breakable. Right. This third law of nature with smart contracts are laws that we can make any of them and they’re unbreakable. Now, I know someone will say, well, what about a bug in the code? Well, that’s not by design. I’m saying by design they’re unbreakable. And we’re seeing trillion dollar asset classes built onto this and we’re not even as halfway into this as we are into Bitcoin. Okay? So I would say the first motivation is programmability. You can set up staking that people get slashed. If they violate insurance, you can set up programmability that if certain things are met, these other unlocks happen. All the advantages that come from programmability you get now with on chain agreements. Okay. The second is digital ownership. Blockchain introduced digital scarcity. That’s effectively what it did. And ownership. So not just scarcity, I can have two of something and send you one. Now I only have one, but also ownership. Then this is very unique to DAOs is that I can have a claim on an organization. Think about prior to this, there was no such thing as organization except through a particular third party. Okay? Now we could come together, kick off some shared contract, multiSIG governance contract, and also distribute claims on that treasury or claims on the governance. And so we have programmability digital ownership. And the next, I would say stakeholder segmentation. The main dominant view of DAO governance tokens up till now has been like, here’s one token, we do everything with the token. And if you have more tokens, you do more stuff that’s dead. The future is segmentation of different stakeholders. What do they want? Long term, short term, middle term, and they have some representation that gives them a claim on that. So you have programmability of returns, right. And then the next you have complex incentives and compensation. Really. It’s almost like the lower in the socioeconomic ladder do you get? Do you get like, hey, we’re going to give you this amount of money per hour? The higher you get, it’s more like if the stock reaches this, you get that. If you reach this, you get that. You also get a revenue split. You get the more complex mechanisms. Everyone can enjoy that because they’re not so easy to copy and paste and produce in a smart contract. Now we can, we can have very complex revenue splits and all these things. And it’s easy because it’s been consumed by code. And I would say probably the biggest, and this is the most compelling narrative because it was so strong for Bitcoin. Is DAOels do for business what Bitcoin did for digital assets? Bitcoin has disintermediated value. It’s been almost 15 years now. DAOs disintermediate organizations, they both separate the thing from the state. And I think that’s the true unlock. Even our current idea of what we think of as securities, oh, I buy a stock, there’s no programmatic connection between the value of that company and whatever that stock is. In my opinion. It’s almost like traditional stocks and securities are like memes. You kind of hope that there’s a strong correlation, and typically there is, but there’s no kind of company that doesn’t have. It’s not a programmatic engine of stock value accrual. Whereas when you’re doing this in pure math on a blockchain in the way we’re describing, you actually get that pre bitcoin. You had a record of ownership. Hey, the bank says I own this amount of money. Post Bitcoin it’s like you actually have it self custody pre DAO you had a record of formation. If the state decided your company doesn’t exist anymore, it no longer existed and you had a record of a claim on future value of a company post DAO you basically have smart contract formation and would amount to bearer bonds of future treasury value, an actual claim. And so this programmability of this whole thing is a total game changer and some people will revolt from this and they’ll say but some of that stuff I don’t know if that’s legal and all this and that I’m a technologist, I’m a programmer, right? We probably would have been having very much the same conversation in the early days of Bitcoin if we had some explicit rules that said you cannot do anything like what Bitcoin is doing. But it was such a new novel it didn’t even exist and that’s not the case with the DAOs. Definitely see some competition there but I hope there’s some good, I think compelling points for building organizations on chain.

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, I think this is a problem that it’s very hard to crack the idea that you said that it’s like a new law of physics, right, physics. Right. So you said you now have these new types of contracts that are not breakable, they are enforceable by physics, basically by mathematics and yeah, that’s true but at the end of the day this is bridging with the law. So with existing law it’s really a big problem because still we have companies for example that want to use these mechanics and face high regulatory uncertainty. Many people, as you said, say this is not legally valid, legally binding and yeah, definitely of course we have to recognize that there is some kind of problem as long as the rules. People always say code is law but in reality it isn’t. Right? Law is low but at the same time I can see that the world is also changing in the background and certainly we are looking into a decade of multipolar societies. Maybe at some point we will have to rely on blockchains to transfer money between states, right? That could be an outcome in the world that we live in. So at the same time I recognize that the bridge to the law. And for example, recently we had on the podcast the team of Ownco that has been pondering, for example, using Web3 blockchain based tokens to represent ownership rights in companies and at the end of the day, they ended up with doing more legal work than technological work. Right? So now they have this programmable software solution which is not blockchain based but still instead has this legal bridge with contracts that they’ve been implementing and now what you do with the software is legal essentially but at the same time I understand that I can see how in the future there will be a convergence. At the end of the day the law we left to recognize the potential in smart contracting and we have to develop, catch up. Let’s say our legal frameworks will have to catch up with the technology and smart contracts will have to become legal to some extent, right?

Justice Conder 

There’s a few things because definitely, I mean, if you’re going to advocate for coordination tooling on chain organizations, you cannot be full cyber cypherpunk to startups and to enterprise, right? So I think three things kind of say, well, there’s a softer entrance into this. The first is decentralized ID and so zero knowledge proofs where participants can engage permissionless in these on-chain organizations and still satisfy the constraints of the law via these novel zero knowledge cryptographic proofs where you’re able to prove that you satisfy the constraints without dumping your identity online. That is very promising and that’s moving along pretty awesomely. There’s also the kind of the middle ground where I’m not telling companies, hey, just turn your entire company into a DAO. But so many of these companies that Polygon is working with, like Adidas, Starbucks, Reddit DraftKings, the list goes, I can’t even keep up with it. Right? They’re all releasing digital collectibles and to them it’s like, hey, we’re kind of stepping or putting our toe in the waters. But the cool part is this is the door into the DAO because ultimately what a DAO is is the voice of the people or a large network having a voice. And so you can go from you have a collectible now you have limited access within your own community, so like a private club and then you have voice. So you see the stuff we’re building early before anybody else and you can kind of voice what you want all the way up to kind of this graduation path to governance where there’s some subset of resources that those people are actually able to autonomously direct. And we’re going to see this from somebody next week where a company has done this. They’ve taken money that would have gone towards internal projects and said, hey, all the employees compete with each other on where this goes. And this is kind of the engagement mechanism which is a progression to the DAO idea and methods. And then the third, I would say as a middle ground is also domicile competition. The United States doesn’t run the roost on how any of these things should work. And increasingly, as predicted by the sovereign individual, that book, which is probably the most prophetic book in all of these topics, he said that countries will have to compete more like private organizations because at the end of the day they need to collect taxes. And if Hong Kong is passing these amazing frameworks, then businesses will go there and they’ll pay the taxes. And even new DAO smart contracts or governance contracts are building in tax endpoints to programmatically pay taxes because it is the bargaining chip on the table for countries to make attractive laws.

Simone Cicero 

So, so far we spoke about organizations, right? And we said organizations. We have to demystify DAOs. DAO is just smart contracts with financial capabilities and governance capabilities to involve stakeholders. We’re going to see this model much more deployed into modules and to components. Trustwear is going to be used more between organizations, between teams. This is massively challenging for the traditional bureaucracy, capital structures. So what can we say instead when it comes to products? Right? And I’m also interested in your thoughts in terms of the convergence that we can see between the world of organizations and the world of products. So essentially the point I’m making here isn’t organizations becoming much more products? What’s your feeling in terms of the major advantages that we can reap as we move into a product development that can leverage on chain capabilities more?Justice Conder 

This is definitely a tough one because we all kind of have to find our place in the world. And my focus has been so much on the programmable organization side. And I recognize because I see a lot of it kind of the struggle on the web, three product development and a few things I’ll just say, like and I think we’re seeing this more and more is that regardless of the advantages of building products on Web3. It has to be admitted that the user experience as it stands right now, is nothing. What? It has to be the expectation that users are going to go to some Exchange, buy tokens, install MetaMask and then interact with your blogging platform to pay. I do that because we’re kind of a niche creative ecosystem of people who are all crazy for this stuff. But the general people are not going to do this in the same way they’re not going to hold their entire net worth on a ledger, hardware wallet in the bookshelf, right? So there is a gap there and the future will be that people don’t even know that they’re doing anything. NFTs will not be a part of the conversation. It’ll just be the concept of digital ownership in the same way. Remember when the iPad first came out and there was a video of this little girl and she found a newspaper and someone took a video and it says she thinks the magazine is a broken iPad. She was trying to move stuff around in the magazine because her mind was already in terms of interactive iPad type stuff. In the same way people will just think of digital objects and ownership and this type of stuff, right? There won’t be any talk of tokens and it’s on the blockchain and all this kind of nonsense, right? So from a product appeal standpoint, though, I would say the biggest appeal from what I see with the web two companies working in polygon is user engagement. Someone posted this picture a while back. It was like a massive music festival or something and they did all their tickets with NFTs. Now with the traditional what they had with a traditional kind of ticketing system, when that whole thing was over, what did they have some email addresses for? Now they actually know the wallets that people who purchase that because they did it with NFTs and they know what else they participate in and can send them other stuff that is digital scarcity, that grants them gated access to other events or discounts. So that’s from their perspective, there’s an advantage of using this kind of building on Web3 from a product standpoint. There’s also the whole ecosystem visibility, which means I didn’t have anything to do with that music festival and didn’t purchase a ticket, but I can see who did. Now I can market to them permissionessly, other types of associated stuff. And this is the basis of the loyalty program. Stuff that’s growing in strength, the Starbucks Voyager type stuff. And the idea is the classic example is someone is a frequent flier and they have some token that represents that status. And me, as a luggage maker, I don’t need access to the airlines database to know what I can see, looking on the open market, who has that? And then say at checkout, when you buy this luggage, you get a discount. So you get this user engagement, accessibility, ecosystem, visibility. You have the aftermarket too, where the thing that they have now can create aftermarkets of itself, where the people who are even more bullish, they can trade for more and other people, like they lose interest and they offload it because they’d rather have the $10 and hold onto the token. So you have a dynamic information feed of the more engaged and the decreasingly engaged users. And then this is a crazy one, is that every product itself becomes a platform. Because if you say, hey, you need this other thing to get this or you get this other thing with that, you kind of end up with this endless kind of composability on what things can be built. So I would say those are compelling reasons to build on Web3. But I am not deep in the weeds as other product people.

Simone Cicero 

Using this metaphor of trust wear and social wear. I think it’s really powerful because if you look at how we’re building products and the new possibilities that emerge with building products on chains and you mentioned some of them, I think probably the most interesting is really the composability angle, right? Even if it’s very challenging for those that actually are building products. Because the main impacts that building on chain will likely have is to reduce defensibility and reduce lock ins. Right? So it’s more like a challenge to not really a challenge on how we build products, but it’s more like a challenge to how we typically fund and motivate entrepreneurs that build products, right? Because defensibility is all about improving the valuation of companies and all the valuation of companies is related to how we fund companies, the venture capital tradition and exits and making big bucks, right? So it’s more like challenging for these than challenging for actually how it be products. Because maybe if you talk about you talking to a user and you say, would you like to use a product where you can use different front ends, right, and you can choose your best front end. Most of the customers probably enjoy that they can choose one front end or another, just choosing the one that they feel like it’s best for their experience, customer experience. So having competition on the customer experience should be fine for users, maybe a bit less for entrepreneurs that can protect their advantages. But the point that I was about to make, it’s really that I’m seeing how the adoption of trust where smart contracting and blockchain based solutions can really I can really see how this can eat the world. Like and Recently said once, right? So basically this is software. It is the world. That’s exactly yeah, that’s it. So it’s like if you adopt these mechanisms, you can also involve much more of your stakeholders into the evolution of the product. So the fact that committees do not innovate I agree, it’s true. Okay. But this doesn’t mean that you cannot use a committee to influence, I don’t know, maybe some of the decisions you take or maybe to adopt a particular funding policy to new features. So what I’m saying here is not the problems you may have with embracing more cooperative and collective and democratic development of products are not intrinsic. If you are an entrepreneur or a designer, increasingly you can choose where and how you can insert these capabilities and these affordances into the products that you build. You don’t have to polarize. You don’t have to be a full extremely inefficient DAO where every user is going to vote on every change you make on a platform. You just can use some of these capabilities in some parts of the product and maybe you can have a fully closed customer experience on top of it, right? So the point is this is going to happen. So this TrustWell is going to penetrate not only our organizations but also our products, I think, for the use cases for which it’s useful. So that’s, I think, a very interesting perspective. So before we move into the last bits, I would like to give you just a couple of minutes to maybe mention, first of all, a couple of things that you believe are extremely important and maybe we didn’t speak about or just tell us more of where your research is going? What’s your plans in terms of bridging the gap between these two words?

Justice Conder 

The whole theme of how I’m thinking about DAOs is to say, what have we done before that worked? And how could we make it even better and replicate it or replicate it and make it better. Okay. Because the thing is a lot of stuff that works. We haven’t even replicated this idea that DAOs are going to leapfrog tradition, leapfrog traditional organizations. They’re not even doing as good. And so let’s just start there, let’s replicate and then supercharge. In a similar way, if you came into a company and there were just papers everywhere and human processes, you wouldn’t just, hey, throw the whole business model and everything out the window. You start and you begin to model what happens now? Only later then can you optimize and do stuff that is new that wasn’t possible on the previous thing. So that’s the theme of my thinking, right? My two target audiences on who I’m thinking about and trying to think about. The playbooks for them are startups that’s the small, the micro, the six plus or minus two size teams. What does chain coordination mean for them? And oftentimes I’m finding there’s a wealth of information you can pull up from things like the Startup Genome Project for Agile Scrum Kanban. There’s cool stuff you can do, though. You can take certain data produced by that team about its delivery processes and maybe externalize it. So if you imagine many of these teams, they can kind of compete with each other, not even on what they’re building, but their way of building. And then as like micro service DAOs, you can come to them and say, hey, I want you to do my thing. And rather than kind of struggling with yourself, smart money can go to them and say, hey, this service DAO, they’re really good at this. I put money in, and they produce these valuable outputs, right? So that’s kind of the DAO tooling for startups. The other group is enterprises. Enterprises? They don’t know anything about DAOs, and the DAO people think that they’re the enemy. There’s a middle round, as you very eloquently put it. It’s more complex than that. There’s incremental steps. How can these web two companies that have stepped into Web3 in the past six months, what’s the playbook? What’s the next step for them? How do they engage their users and all that? So those are the two stories. There’s other stuff I’m in, such as what does decentralized business development look like? A lot of these chains have operated on the basis of you just paying grants for people to build stuff. And if you think about it, that’s not a sustainable model. And so say, okay, well, what does a gamified version of this look like where the ecosystem grows itself? And so so much of this comes back to, like, what’s the game design? What’s the playbook, and what’s the game design? So that really occupies my mind nonstop.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Yeah. I deeply resonate with this idea. It feels like we are transitioning from the finite game perspective into this infinite game perspective. Am I right?

Justice Conder 

That’s great. Yeah, I love that.

Simone Cicero 

What are your breadcrumbs for our listeners? What is something that you want to suggest to them to catch up with?

Justice Conder 

Okay, I’m going to put this one on here. This one is near and dear to my heart. Right. I could name off some papers or talks or whatever, but I want to take it a little bit deeper than that. My original persona online from way back, years back, my first Twitter account, right, was Singularity Hacker. It was my first blog, and that blog got picked up back in the day. This is how I first got the bug of, like, man, this Internet development, all this stuff is amazing. Where I became, to the fullest extent, a technologist. We’re having some of my blog posts picked up by, like, daring Fireball and making the COVID of Hacker News. That made my entire month, if that happened, right? And it was all based on this idea that the Singularity Hacker is someone who’s aware of the theory of the technological Singularity and what it implies, and then taking those implications and then positioning yourself currently so that when you fast forward, you’ll be in a far better position. Okay. Now what that looks like is there’s a lot of hard science fiction novels out there. One of them in particular by Charlie Strauss called Accelerando, which talks about a lot of these concepts. And there’s a whole family of science fiction about this Technological Singularity concept. And all of it kind of comes back to certain axioms of, like, computronium. The end result of computers is a computer in every particle of matter, thinking matter. Right. The next is like digital economics. Okay? Think about how some of these books were written before there was digital scarcity in the form of blockchain. But the idea that not only will all matter be thought of, but there will be a whole kind of type of economics that doesn’t have to do with humans. Like second order economics that even we have a hard time understanding. And then the third would be like augmented reality, where instead of sitting at a screen looking at screens that’s dead, you move around. You have these digital beings and scarce assets that interact with the world, right? And if you take all these together and you say, okay, if this is the future, then where do I position myself? And I’m coming back to Ray Kurtzweil who’s influenced my thinking a lot. And he says, Listen, when a baseball player catches a ball, they don’t stand underneath the ball where it currently is. They have to run to where it’s going to be. And he has this quote, it’s something like we have to be teaching students topics now of sciences that haven’t been created yet to stay ahead of the curve. I kind of butchered the quote, but it’s something like that, right? And so for me, I’m far less excited about where DAOs are now as where they’re going to be in years from now. And I can see, see it and also know its inevitability because nothing ever became programmable. That was like we went back the old way. We went back to the analog. We don’t need computers for this. The end result is intelligence in everything. Everything is programmable. My advice there is go in on the hard Sci-Fi. I’ll keep you fired up. And also I feel like it gives you a magic vision to see what’s coming.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. I mean, you’re right, totally. And yeah, that was a great wrap up of months of conversations that we had. And I hope that our listeners also caught some nuggets that can guide their interest and curiosity in the coming weeks and months. I hope you also enjoyed the conversation.

Justice Conder 

I freaking loved it, man. I feel so privileged to be able to have been talking to you over the past months to be going deeper. I just did the master class through boundary lists. Loved it. I’m getting my mind expanded so much. So it’s been such a privilege to be your friend and jam on all this stuff.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much for your kind words and for our listeners. I mean, I think the message here is don’t look at where the bull is now. Look at where the bull is going now that the gene is out of the bottle. So really, thank you so much for the inspiration today. And of course, as always, listeners, you can check the show notes on boundaryless.io/lessons/podcast. And until next time, remember to think boundaryless.