I want to assemble and present the decentralization in venture-building space brought upon by web3 while laying out the opportunity for us, the entrepreneur, the investor, and the builder. Why? I have been building ventures for others, schemed and executed for the last ten years, and failed a few. And I have made it my job to dream of organic bottom-up venture stacks for years. I have been observing, and there is a venture spring. We have been talking, financing and founding ventures with web3 frens, which I think will be the tipping point that unlocks something anew. 
And I thought I should let you know.

I have written it for Content Guild which I am part of. I tried to cover the whole venture value chain from accelerators, incubators, funding, and the execution of venture building.

I link here the detailed article. Brace yourself it is around 5000 words. I would love it if you collect the article as an NFT so I know it was well received. Or comment here.

https://tally.mirror.xyz/5DluWNO3zXm8RHioXN9TtR7M6HlC7jhxG1R-oOQ3U04

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I am currently in Ethbarcelona, a gathering for regens (regeneratives) talking about impact DAOs, ReFi (regenerative finance), culture and togetherness.

I have never felt this comfortable so I want to spread it to you fam. Some of the snippets I had from conversations.

seek positive consent - silent might not be it.

the process influences the result, regen practices, embodying and the self understanding is where it is at. Embody the system you want to buidl,

objective versus subjective thinking. What is lost ? is objective focuses on othering.

I am realising it is hard for me to distil the conversations and put them in right words which are still alive and vibing. While I absorb, I want to thank Vivian, Andy, Nikholas, Klaus, Niklas, Kaidlyne, Numa, Sabrina, Lena, Evin, There will be more conversations and I am looking forward to holding them.

Let me direct you to an article on the topic that we published anew with tally.xyz, a DAO operating system. Thank you Frisson for the amazing edit.

Read it here! 👇

Have a great regen summer! 🌞

Gaia

Personal share alert! Trigger alert!

The text deals with death and catastrophes. Please do not read if you think that might impact you negatively.

I have been thinking about this and was not sure whether I should overshare it with my professional network or simply go to therapy. :D I will write it now and might delete it later.

I have not really realised up to now how resilience can be because of unwanted learning. I rarely remember a major event in my life timeline and that tells me there is something there. Sometimes a deep sound or the smell of the cement will make me remember it.

I survived a major earthquake when I was very young with my whole family. Several people I know died in dire conditions and my mom lost all her stock and shop, a big part of her wealth. My parents wanted to remain in situ and help others so we ended up very close to major sites which were my hometown. Soon after the event, still in school we lived and went to school in tents. I was in major hardcore studying because where I grow up you enter university exams and you need to rank to get in the best ones. Me being me I studied in containers and tents and got in the first 0.07%. Processing what is that?  Whoah, I am getting emotional even now. Perhaps I will stop explaining the details. Somethings are never processed.

The point was that having such a disruptive event in my life where several things were lost with a quick twerk of the earth in the middle of the night, I think I have learnt about resilience and going on. I have never feared starting anew. The safe was an illusion anyway. In business I was ending up in skunk work teams, new initiatives and there I was mostly riding the wave of the major changes.   Whenever things were looking stable, I was pondering about the next and I was seeing patterns of potential futures. It was my unfair (literal! ) advantage as it was natural to me. Stability was only a point in time without change, and to keep things stable over a time period you needed to be in constant motion.

Why the need to stabilise you ask, I never know! I think humans need it we are too fragile. My plants keep on coming back every spring, mycelium gives an eff about nothing, but we have a more composed, fragile existence with boundaries.

Creating new things, and forging new paths one needs to be comfortable. To be comfortable in the unknown and whitespace comes with practice. And perhaps it does require a tremendous amount of self-belief you will figure it out.  To equip yourself with this I do not think you need to go through an earthquake. If living once in disruption is a must, all of us have now been through covid so what a great opportunity of a crisis <insert irony! >

Hopefully, you are aspiring for better systems, structures, and meaningful creations too.

One thing I realise as the economy loses its perceived stability, more people are also freer to think. I am performing such privileged thinking here I know. I apologise. I do not know where it comes from as there will be situations where individuals might lose the freedom to think about their future for economical reasons, their rights being taken away or wars.

I want to create and buidl with humans who can when I still can work towards the futures we want to be in. Not the future I personally want but for everyone to have the freedom to choose. I keep thinking about this, as my mission.  And I am not sure if this is a trauma response or simply it is what drives me. But for a very long moment, this is where my drive comes from.  Freedom to choose, being able to create options.

I will always remember the young guy, our neighbour– perhaps 20 who lost all his family. He was away from the region so came to a nightmare of collapse. On the 5th day, the younger sister was rescued out of the 3 siblings inside. He was smiling saying that he is grateful and will make the most of the life they are given.      

3 years ago, I wanted to help a group of people create a DAO. We could not succeed to make it last but succeeded to learn a lot in the whitespace. At the moment it was ok to not define what a DAO is, there were only a few DAO tools. It now is many and easier to leverage templates.

I will now attempt the most futile and also useful task in human history. Categorising things that grow organically, hold complexity and change very fast.  Let me take the short stick. Someone had to do it to understand and map the territory. What I do will change tomorrow but I hope it gives a template for you to partition and think about DAOs, while also understanding the in-between and the emergent ones.

Well let me say it first before anyone

-          Your DAO can have several or one type of activity. That is ok.

-          Yes defining the future by the things that exist is skeuomorphism. A new construct like a DAO can go beyond what exists, what we knew.

-          Categorising DAOs is hard, and can never be MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive )

-          It will change the moment you defined it.

Let’s do it.

DAO in the end is an organising structure for humans (and non-humans) doing things together. Listing the type of DAOs is even more complex than the type of a company,  type of a network or type of industry. They can be all and beyond

I am having second thoughts but let me do it anyway :D

Dao categorisation by activity (not MECE)

Service DAO – The people in the DAO are there to provide a service. Examples: Raidguild, IndieDAO

Impact DAO - The objective is to create an impact economically, socially, policy, and environmental. Some examples are All4climate, Commons Stack and Kernel

Product DAO –  DAOs that create products. Some examples are Aragon and IndexCoop.

Investment DAO – This is the one that started first, pooling money and investing into a portfolio of assets. Art, land, startups, crypto, whisky you name it. The LAO, Flamingo DAO, Komorebi collective

Collector DAO. We could argue that it is like an investment DAO, but collecting can also include specialisation and appreciating the item itself. The collectables can be art, pokemon cards, footballer, in-game assets, and NFTs. FlamingoDAO and PLEASRDAO are two examples.

Public good DAOs – DAOs that focus on public goods whether owning, investing or building. We could say it is a subset of Impact DAOs.   Public goods can be things like housing, education, or virtual goods like Ethereum. A few examples of DAOs are Gitcoin, CommonsStack, and Moloch.

Incubator/Accelerator/Venture DAO:  a DAO set to achieve any of these tasks, fostering venture creation FTW.DAO, Magnet DAO, Metacartel and BitDAO are some examples.

Grants DAO – DAOs that are set to give grants. Moloch, Gitcoin, HerDAO, VitaDAO

Membership DAO – DAOs that are set up for a membership plan, a members only club or a community membership. Some examples FWB, ManorDAO, DinnerDAO

Social Club DAO – It is a subset of membership DAO. FWB is a good example.

Location based living – These DAOs are focused on IRL and location. cabinDAO,  cityDAO, Akiya DAO

Content DAO  - Producing content for journalism, media, education,  opinion pieces, research. I know I covered a big ground here. Some examples are MolochDAO research, DirtDAO,  Bankless DAO, mirror.xyz, tally.xyz content guild (TBC DAO)and forefront writers guild.   

Creators DAO – This could be several creators coming together, or clustered around works of one artist. IreneDAO, herstoryDAO,  Moda DAO, Create DAO and RAW DAO are a few examples

Curator DAO – The task is the curation and there might not be an investment element, hence participation is not with funds. FingersDAO is an example

Acquisition DAO – a DAO that comes together to acquire artefacts, assets. ConstitutionDAO was an example of acquisition DAO

Patron DAO – this is similar to Creators DAO, the only difference is that there are patrons that support an artist, project

Social DAO – This space will develop and fork as we are just starting with social protocols. I could call this out social club DAOs, however, I think we need a different category for DAOs that are not social clubs. To be defined.  

Research Dao – DAOs that are set up for research. VitaDAO, Molecule, Lab DAO, MetagovDAO, Research DAO, and Moloch DAO research are some examples.

Education DAO – Bankless DAO, Odyssey, CCS (crypto&culture&society), and Rabbit Hole are some examples.

Upskilling and Reskilling DAOs:   Developer DAO, HerDAO

Gaming DAOs – The objective of the DAO is to team up and advance gameplay, share and own assets. Games can also have economic returns to the DAO. The concept has been native to game ecosystem as gaming guilds before web3. Some examples are Merit Circle, Play it forward DAO.

AMM DAOs -

Protocol DAOS -

Entertainment DAO -

We are going obscure – name a thing that can be done with many people and benefits from governance. ThatcanbeaDAO.

We could also categorise Dao by Industries.

BioScience

Social Science

Fashion

Entertainment

Media

Insert the industry you can think of here

DAO categorisation by treasury – I will go binary here. Yes, I think DAOs do not always need to hold treasury.  

With treasury

Without treasury  

I know this will change almost tomorrow, but I hope it gives a template for you to partition and think about DAOs, while also understanding the in-between and incorporating the emergent ones.

I live for the moments, those moments that one dives deep and comes up with pearls of insights and shares with the rest. And I was gifted plenty of those pearls last week.

Let me share one.

It was day 1 of DAOist GGG, an unconference for the DAO humans and humans from DAOs, I was pulled by Jeremy and Leen for a “Regen meetings“  workshop, a way to meet in a more human way. It must have worked as I met someone who inspired me. I met Juan Carlos Bell who works in conflict management in DAOs (token engineering commons and Gravity DAO) and I understood through his words how a conflict is a beautiful thing.

Well, now I admit. It was impactful to me because I am one of those who prefer no friction whenever possible. I will always flow to the least friction path if leading to the same point. But was I losing out on opportunities?

Here comes a new lens. Conflict arises when there is diversity.

Later in the day, I get to opportunity to listen to Juan’s talk about conflict management and their work in Gravity DAO where they help individuals to equip themselves with conflict management tools. I am definitely going to learn more. Here is also an OG in conflict management Juan introduced, J P Lederach. Here is an article he wrote changing resolution to conflict transformation.

Follow Gravity DAO for the 3rd cohort opening. https://token-engineering-commons.gitbook.io/tec-source/working-groups/gravity-wg

However, the conflict trip was not finished yet. On Daoist GGG second day when it was open to public attendance, I was listening to Chris Eberle from yearn.fi , He shared their governance journey and in the end, the learnings of governing yearn finance. They nailed it for a longer duration than many. One of his takeaways was that the turning points. They coincided with conflict or friction moments and he highlighted his luck to be working with the most courageous and clever people who never shy away. They are transparent and voice the areas when things are not working. That way they remained alive, successful and grew better.

…

At this point, I am reflecting on why companies do not have KPI and metrics that address the number of conflicts arised and resolved. What an essential factor? How many times there was an opportunity to make it better, more inclusive, and how many times the individuals in it embarked on the opportunity to resolve the conflict.  Maybe that is the right lens to look at growth.

…

DAOs and conflict management goes hand in hand. The situation arises naturally as there are no established power set ups, hierarchies and anything of that ilk. Aragon was the first DAO tooling entity to address this and reward dispute resolution with Aragon court, launching a specific token for the court as well.

DAOist was the event that kept on giving. The closing panel was on collaborator experience and flow attendance of Leen Schelfhout from all4climateDAO and Vengist from Raidguild.  The insight was you can design think the best collaborator experience for a group of people at a point in time, and there will still be people who will be left behind. Whenever one more person joins everything changes, and your design might not be relevant anymore.  

…

Let me opinion plug ( I have written before about how in evolutionary systems,  design thinking does not cut it. Do you know the quote “ we have word only for things that are dead in us”. I think the same for evolutionary systems. The moment you have a design, the system is already changed. You can not design think a DAO. You might ask what then? I try to stick with ecosystem mapping that I had to create for working with complex systems and products)

…

So, what does the panel think about what is required?

Leen drops the gem. The tools should enable continuous communication, and whenever there is conflict, an eager way to resolve it.

👏

In the panel, there was also tension about some background I did not know about, it was something to do with the ENS domains delegate system and decision making. Obviously, the tension was not resolved and seeped into the physical space long after it happened. The panel and the audience settled on utilising the 101 DAO approach. If something is not working for you, everyone can propose. Simona Pop from gitcoin and ENS said it is not always the flow, and there is opportunity in the ebb and the flaw. Love it. Ebb and the flaw is a part of the flow.

Was this the end? Not yet. I was staying with a dear childhood friend of mine who has two kids, and she is so into psychology and child development. She read books and researched intensively, all while raising reasoning and communicating little cuties. Without even knowing my unexpected journey of the week in conflict management, she mentioned over coffee… When there is a difference between what the child and parent want, (oh, here comes conflict again), the only tool to hold is communication until a peaceful state is reached. She said if you do it another way, i,e “that is what I say”,  play the parent card, or impose authority,  the kid will change their behaviour in many ways that you do not expect and destructive.  So she took the long path every opportunity on consensus making, with the littlest kids.

In a span of a week, why was I gifted the same insight into conflict management with very different contexts and so much love? I think the hint is we collectively are transitioning from a parent and child archetype to adulthood. There are no managers to parent you into the work, and there are fewer influencers, and there are fewer followers. All that is left are nodes in a decentralised way where each node has to negotiate, communicate, and harmonise, including conflict resolution.  Be it individuals, technology, collective, or organisations. And when we are conducting business we might need a metric for this.

From now on, I will shift with these learnings. Whenever there is a conflict, I will embrace the opportunity. That also does not mean trying to solve everything ( I know I know… I am guilty of it too dear fellow problem solver! ) Only if it is on the path you want to lead, for you.

Another word magik from Daoist, snap from Felipe Duarte.

“As a guest, be a host.”

Did you ever think that we are collectively maturing? And That is why maybe we can now think and build with decentralisation?

(Read this if you are in, into or against DAOs.

Also if you are in a corporate, looking for inspiration for your challenges)

Finally, I have joined an already existing, functioning DAO. Hurray!

Instead of researching, scheming, setting up one I joined an existing DAO.

It is such a beautiful experience to see the workings, efficiencies, connections, inefficiencies, psychology and observe myself going through it. I must highlight each DAO will be different hence the experience.

I stand with DAOs are for normies.

However I have seen there definitely chaos involved. Decentralise responsibly. Here you can find some of my suggestions to approach hybrid decentralisation.

Now because I think Daos are for normies and that I have onboarded to DAO in 2021, I will write about onboarding to DAOs. All Hand Hoy!

In the DAO I joined, we had a cohort experience which I think is an amazing approach. A batch of people starting together and going through a sequenced set of episodes. There is a heartbeat, there is camaraderie, there is condensed excitement and an “onboarding community manager” who is helpful and checking up on the milestones. I want to have hats of to Raidguild and Tae.

Yet I get lost! As a normie, I am the “user” type who does not read your app screens, only focusing if i know i will get something. Yet I am capable of thinking decentralised naturally as humanly as possible so why the little shock? The constant FOMO? (Well we find out later I actually did not have access to a distro list , that explained the fomo). Long story short, I have casted the onboarding as an opportunity to tackle.

Well, my objective was to experience to exist in a functioning DAO. Here I was willing to be sucked into the nooks and crannies so I live the glory and the shadow for you and translate it into a human form. And I must say I have achieved my objective.

Let me get a bit personal.

I did have a hard time juggling the discord channels, notifications, what I must do next, or whether I am missing something, yet again. I had a hard time putting the 10 activities required into my already full schedule. How to prioritise what I must do, and why were we here again?

I had a fabulous time when we were in a project call with people from new Zealand, US and London trying to solve the problem off onboarding for the cohort atfer us. I had a great time when my community manager pinged me that i am missing the cohort merge and even send me xDAI to get onto the season DAO. I had joy when I discovered and understood things as I go along and watch my expectation dissolve as things do not really work the way I am accustomed to. It was great to understang the amazing projects that the DAO has been working on like FRACTAL and SuperFluid and METL.

Enough waxing lyrical!

Set your objective!

Here I highlight the first most important thing. The objective, your objective, and why you are there. DAOs can be complicated if you do not have your own map. This is so much different from an existing organisation, who sets objectives and paths for you. That hired you because they need something done. Nothing wrong, just wildly different.

The experience is NOT linear, but you must go forward.

Set your own journey, but ask for a map. Be ready to chart the map. We are accustomed to linear in organisations. That the progression can somewhat be traced. in DAOs it is mostly uncharted territory and there is no linear path defined for you. This is liberating. But also puts more work on the individual to do your ecosystem mapping, understand the context, understand the value and choose the best course of action. All while most of the information is temporal, ever-changing, and hence out of date. The quest is promising in my opinion. The solutions and the maps productised from onboarding DAOs will help the traditional companies liberate themselves as well as making the DAOs thrive. I am excited.

Collaboration, Me hearties! Mycelium<3

If you told me we would be able to seed a gathering in 5 minutes, bringing together many OG DAOs together I would think it is a dream. I lived it in the second week. it was possible because all experienced it, and because we want to make it easy for others. Because of the nature of DAOs, we are collaboration natives! Inter DAO is fast and easy and powered by individuals who act like the Mycelium. Now, this has a lot of individual efforts not compensated enough, however I believe it will mature into a way that will help the DAOs and the traditional, rewarding fuse algorithms and the actors. I am grateful to Gama from DAOist , and Ben from Aragon for kicking this off with me.

I have also started to work on a project focusing on the onboarding experience with my cohortlings in RG, Govinda, Sean dB, BorrowLucid, and Ustwschill. I can share that next with you and the assemblage we are going to do with DAOist, RG, Aragon , Commonstack, PrimeDAO and Bankless.

I see opportunities everywhere!

It feels like there are opportunities everywhere! I have worked in opportunity scouting and venture building for corporates, startups and I can say my radars are overloaded. I am happy for us however I can not provide clarity at the moment. We need to meditate on the opportunity for who, when and how to seed it.

I need a Mycelium SPA!

I am working on Mycelium strategies, guidance cards to help people exist in a decentralised fashion. It feels like we also need a Mycelium SPA on how to adjust our emotions and senses to a decentralised world. I will be searching for this. Psychological, emotional wellness applications that are not trying to prevent but embrace the change as well as equipping us. Ping me all you find.

DAOs are full of book people!

well, I am guilty of tsundoku but seems everyone is and you are aggravating it, folks. Most DAOs i follow have a book club. I want to link one I saw as well as my stack.

I think I will finish here with these images of stacks of books.

Last week it was my archaeology to DaOs. 

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What are DAOs about? Wait for it. It is too simple.

People doing things together. So what other names we have for those? Teams, network, collectives, community, club, coop, organisation, society, clique. For the ones who are for words and communities, here are all the words. They have differences in the network types and connections, but we will leave it to people who are also keen on ecosystems and networks (hello fellow👋 )

What is another word for community? | Community Synonyms - WordHippo Thesaurus

So all those things do exist, so what further DAO offers here on top of what we had?

I will tell you the story of digitalisation. We started digital 20ish years ago in our products and services first. A digital "voice", digital money transfer, digital art, then the organisations became digital. We were eventually migrating all the cloud. Enter decentralisation. It started from products and services. Most heard was Defi – decentralised finance services. We had the art moment.  Decentralisation went mainstream with a craze - digital assets tokens, how we represent, store and own value. And as before, here comes next, the organisation. How could you scale decentralised organisations in a manner where there is no profound trust. Enter DAOs

Are DAOs mainly about tooling the trust? This is my first response. YES.  And then there are more which I will get next.

 Parentheses here

I saw this research on trust recently, the neuroscience of trust. And it is oxytocin.

http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/images/pdf-files/2004-2005/ZakatalH.pdf

Also, Trust to the algorithm. This is a thing.   I remember the founder of Oxbotica,  a company that focuses on self-driving cars, talking about their research almost five years ago. People would stand in front of the self-driving cars on the campus they were testing in. You would not stand in front of a person driving. They trusted the algorithm more. Think about this. How profound this is that we trust an algorithm more than a human. I am no cyber techno shaman mania, I am for human, and this behaviour is the most human thing I have heard.

Close the parentheses now, Back to DAOs.

I do not think DAOs are fully autonomous machine lords we work in, unlike what it sounds to some people. It is a roadmap, and a decentralised organisation can have layers and parts. The most important is that people do things together, and they need decentralisation in one of the categories below. So you could have layers of decentralisation, something I always advocated in my corporate job as well. You decentralise what you need, and you can layer it. You can compose it. Enter hybrid, not the chaos.

Some categories I can think of dissecting which I do not claim to be MECE. MECE principle - Wikipedia. You do not need all to be DAO, you might have some parts of it. I feel this will be helpful to the people who want to start a DAO, or corporates thinking what DAOs mean for them.

-          Communication & collab tools – These are pretty mature off-chain. And most use them, and that is fine. However, if you have the other parts like voting on chain, you can integrate perhaps.

-          Value representation – This is where tokens come in place, the ones that represent the work, the ones that represent the company value, remuneration. Without this, you can still be a DAO

-          Value connection to the bigger pot- you might be doing things temporal, gig, long term.  How do you extract the value? How do you design so that it will grow in value? Tokenomics and markets come here into play.

-          Decision making – Voting algorithms and design comes into play

-          History&Bookkeeping &Reporting- This is where you need everything for trust, transparency, history, retrievable facts that can not be altered. This is where crypto is a must, and the most important because that is what crypto solves uniquely

-          Governance – Well, it is more than decision making or bookkeeping, I will let Grace tackle this, she has a book on it. SO, YOU'VE GOT A DAO ...: MANAGEMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY eBook : Rachmany, Grace, Houwen, Marco: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

-          Workforce – Well the autonomous in the DAO is generally and mostly not there and do not need to be. When I think of this, I think FETCH.AI, a network of economic agents that transact, sets pricing and accepts transactions. I have simplified it utmost. This also exists in Defi, where there are agents that do the actions. You might not need those, bu consists of mere humans working together and can still be a DAO. Well may be a DO :D.  

Paranthesis:

You see me changing the name a bit from DAO to DO. I apologise. I'm not particularly eager to tackle the naming just yet before the tipping point. The naming of DAO will change and multiply to several things wait for it to become mainstream and marketing teams to tackle, but “what shall we call this thing ?” I feel we are still in the naive stages, we have the luxury to label these loosely coupled things with the same name which I call a "container label", like IoT, blockchain or AI.

Close the parentheses and lets go back to DAO hybrid decentralisation .

Or you could also categorise and dissect by functions to decentralise.

-          Onboarding

-          Training

-          Delivery

-          Testing

-          Funding

-          Strategy

-          Operations

-          Product development

We have already started to tackle some of these functions, mainly where the bottlenecks are such as hiring, delivery or funding. Crowdsth anyone?  

 I will give an example of when I had to decentralise something keeping the operation central because of the maturity of the blockchain applications for the enterprise. We built a layer where we had a distributed ledger for reinsurance admin contracts the application layer lent itself very well as well as the ownership of the nodes, however operating nodes at scale on every level maturity organisation was a showstopper. So we just had to have centralised operations where the whole product and the platform were decentralised.  These types of things are fine—sorry purists.

We have so much more to think about. I want to write about what DAO as a thought challenges on what businesses are next. But we will see. What are your thoughts? Anything you want to talk about in particular?

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I know I was going to write about games this week and the product portfolio I am currently building using games in finance technology. So we will hold on to that. I can tell you we have finalised the prototype and starting to share or demo. I will write about it in the following weeks to come. If you are in personal finance, investing and/or saving business, we would love to talk with you.

For now, I will write about this day, that I have waited for so long and am proud and I am celebrating. 

My approach to things are generally visceral, and I must say the current business and organisations structures I have been sensitive about,  from the moment I have started in the business. I enjoy working with people and building amazing things, and I love the teams, but you could smell the dying parts all along. So there was something inherently to change. And I have worked in consultancies, agencies, product companies, startups, service companies, B2B, R&D, B2C, partnerships, decentralised organisations.  I have observed.

I am always the one foot on today and one foot on tomorrow. As Es Devlin once said, I work in corridors, not the rooms. So I shall tell all the modalities of organisations will perhaps prevail, but there has been something mega brewing that will shape our futures.  

I did not have a name back in the day. I researched different organisation structures like art collectives to understand whether they were it. I developed a toy project called House of Dadabit, thinking maybe, I could experiment with it. I was tackling the longevity of companies, as well as the participation and remuneration. Why it has to be forever? Is there a successful thing that is temporal? And could it be contribution-based? How could the value be shared more granularly? After scheming on it so long, it took some time to talk about it. So here I mention a little bit on my birthday 2017. Which I said should be the birthday of this too.

 house of Dadabit on Pecha Kucha London

I kept talking about my observations in the arena for my paid work, as the head of emerging technologies, I had to deliver that corporates' future was a hybrid. The sooner we integrate decentralisation into the main, the longer we thrive. i built this toy model to tackle chaos in a humane way. I called it Minimum viable ecosystem,

All you need is a minimum viable Ecosystem

Here is a recent keynote on organisations and corporates,  on getting affluent on fluent organisations.

Keynote on fluid organisations, insights from startups, corporates, DAOs , community businesses

Then came a name, The DAO, in 2016. I now had a name for what I was trying to do. But it would take another three years until I attempt to build one, considering House of Dadabit was a toy project.  In 2019, we wanted to set up a DAO with fantastic folk. Bowen, Dale, Vijak, Florian, Bridgette, and others! After 4-6 months, the funds to run the DAO and the objectives of what must a DAO do, made me depart and continue on a preseed startup business,Yes the one about gamification in finance :D.

These two aspects, what the DAO does and the funding, will ever be relevant to solve and tackle.

I feel celebratory because it is disseminating more than ever. And it is also coming to my birthday again. I want to talk all about the current day now. But in the following weeks.  How DAOs might be the following structures for us cryptos and normies.  :P

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This is my theory. We need more “games. ”Especially “serious” ones in “serious” industries. For things that are long term investments. For things that are a process rather than a one time doing, for things that require routine, consistency, repetition. Where the iteration might not even be gratifying in itself, and the “achieving” takes a long time. What is that, you ask? All healthcare, wellness, gerontology, fitness, finance, mental health. Add yours. There is plenty.  

What is a game? I have not asked this myself until five years ago. The same goes for play. Words that attain themselves to childlike behaviour that might not have a purpose. That is how I used to define them.  

I was young and not mature enough to see the seriousness of it. However, I now understand more why these words are essential for us humans and other organisms representing intelligence. 

That is right, games and play arise where there is intelligence, and they have a purpose. Sometimes a purpose of survival. Read here on the games animals play, evolutionary and behavioural games. https://thinkingthursdays.substack.com/p/games

 Let’s focus now on us, humans.  

The dictionary says that.  

“an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun”. 

That we know all. We also see this one 

“a complete episode or period of play, ending in a final result, like a baseball game” 

Well, the following one is interesting. Although I use casually “I am game” the definition is still surprising.

“Eager or willing to do something new or challenging. “ 

Now it is getting interesting. Well, we will not take to full journey and hop to end. This one summarises it all. It is not about winning. It is not about the rewards.

“When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.”

— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Why do we play games? 

Yes, for fun, to pass the time. But also for learning, to achieve challenging items. To understand the new. It is a bit different from play in that play does not always have a purpose at all. The games have the utmost purpose, from fun to survival. 

Here are some serious games from the world of humans put together by Growth Engineering.  

https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/10-serious-games-that-changed-the-world/

And should the game process need to be so explicit? 

No. Then we go into the territory of games where it blends for life for strategic purposes. Some games we do are so in disguise that the real purpose is forgotten. Here are a few examples from the outdated but relevant book from Eric Berne“ Games people play”. We talk about the psychology of transactions.  

https://www.universalclass.com/articles/psychology/understanding-relationshipsthe-games-people-play.htm

The games we play in real life do not need to be so heavy and psychological—a straightforward example of me in the University economy 101 exams. There were multiple choice answers. Beginning of the exam, I raised my hand and asked what the rules were for having wrong answers. Did wrong answers costed us? The teacher replied, wondering why I was asking. I said I would risk my responses accordingly. And he said “good answer”. I remember this because I thought, “what a random conversation”, and wondered why he was amused with my question. It makes sense that he made a point out of it because, duh! he is an economy teacher, and I was behaving in the game theory, which I did not know by then. You can find more examples of it in this book for example. And everywhere. Tell me your examples of life

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2423424.The_Art_of_Strategy

So do we need more games? I will maybe talk next about how I am for introducing games into finance. 

And here is an absolute creative joke of a book. The book starts with…

“Let’s go. We are off. We have games to play. And by we, I mean you.” 

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So I need to highlight.  I use behavioural science as a way to explain the WHY and arationality, as well as "games" to nudge and explain our behaviours.

I, with my team @ Merlin, have been working on the create the "games" of savings. We will talk about that another time.

Going back to behaviours, games, nudges, the WHY and the HOW, Here is a long time favourite video sent to me by a fellow enthusiast Alexis Mather. The speech is called "Games animals play", by Nick Davies, prof of Behavioral ecology at Cambridge uni. Although the setting is dry, the content is mesmerising, tackling something a bit simpler, the animals, because,- as the professor says - humans do not know what the hell they want :D:D:D. Why interesting? It gives an insight into our behaviours and the ingenuity of life.

Here is the link.

https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/2188191

 #thinkingthursdays #games #behavioralscience #behavioraleconomics #behaviouralecology #evolutionary #fintech #startups
Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash