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SeeDAO interview: Four times in 11 months, How can a DAO be reborn from stagnation?

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In the 11 months since it was founded SeeDAO has gone through five big changes in governance. What lessons can be learned from the newly published meta-rules for DAO organizations?

Author of the original article:Jack(0x137), BlockBeats

When talking about DAO organizations in China, SeeDAO is the first one that comes to mind for many people. It took less than a year for this young DAO explorer to build a strong community identity at home and abroad. But contrary to many expectations, SeeDAO's path has been far from smooth. SeeDAO has gone through five changes in governance in 11 months, and the community has ground to a halt.

During tough times, many experienced DAO explorers like Shawn were called in and SeeDAO was brought back from the brink. On October 6, SeeDAO announced the SeeDAO meta-rule, which has entered the new era of meta-rule after three months of confusion.

What problems did SeeDAO have in the past? What changes does the new meta-rule make? What lessons can other DAO organizations learn from this? To this end, BlockBeats conducted an exclusive interview with Shawn, a senior participant in the DAO field and head of SeeDAO Strategic Incubator.

keywords: SeeDAO, Meta rules, Strategic incubator, Community culture, DAO governance, DAO tools

SeeDAO brief

SeeDAO's establishment and development are full of all kinds of serendipitous and chaotic.

Before SeeDAO in November 2021, two SeeDAO sponsors Tang Han and Bai Yu founded an NFT publishing company CryptoC, hoping to try and explore in the DAO field from the very beginning. However, due to a lack of understanding of community establishment and governance, the progress of Dao-ization has been limited to attracting Discord users, and the community has no real members or contributors, who are mostly core members and employees of the company.SeeDAO was still running a centralised business.

Despite the NFTS boom, the team chose not to use NFTS to build a following for the community. "I can't say what SeeDAO is, but I can say what it's not. It's definitely not a wealth password sharing community," Tang said during a team discussion.

SeeDAO closed its financing in January 2022. To avoid a flood of speculators that would ruin the community, the team kept the news of the fundraising quiet. So SeeDAO is struggling to operate without any money in his coffers. Even so, the team encouraged community members to speak up and participate in governance, the community slowly developed its own cultural awareness, membership grew, and guilds were organized.

In late December, SeeDAO published the first draft of a governance structure, in the form of a coordinating committee.SeeDAO went into a mixed community and corporate operation.

In February 2022, due to the lack of financial incentives, SeeDAO members were either KOL or crypto newcomers. There was a huge cognitive gap between the communities, and effective consensus and governance had not been achieved. On second thought, the team chose to focus on education to develop the community culture. In the following three months, it was an "outbreak period" for SeeDAO content production. The Translation association, Web3 University and other content output plates were set up one after another, and the community consensus and sense of participation were gradually strengthened.

However, with the improvement of community members' cognition, the ideological differences of each person in interests and governance are also increasingly obvious. How SeeDAO governs, and who is in charge of the community, became a daily squabble on the Discord channel. The disadvantages of the mixed operation system gradually became prominent. Tang Han and White Fish, as the initiators, were also greatly impacted in their thoughts and were very painful.

After months of discussion, the two decided to dissolve the company and make DAO their ultimate career. In May, SeeDAO announced a $30 million valuation round, all of which went into SeeDAO's coffers.In June, they announced the dissolution of the company, and CryptoC was officially "weaned" to SeeDAO.

But contrary to the expectations of the sponsors, the self-governing community spun completely out of control. Financing news released on the day, there are a large number of "wool" speculators into the community, but the financing into the Treasury, but because there is no relevant governance rules, resulting in the community can not apply for funds to the Treasury.

Everyone came to Tang Han and Whitefish to make decisions about big and small matters. In their own words, the two fell into a "passive dictatorship" and became the target of public criticism. The community fought bitterly over ownership of the project and the use of the money in the coffers. At one of the loudest community meetings, many of the emotionally invested SeeDAO members cried. Soon, the contributors fell silent,SeeDAO has also entered one of the most chaotic phases.

At this time, SeeDAO, Discord channel has exceeded 8000 people, big and small 10 guild, Treasury how to apply for? Who owns the project? No one can tell. The key time, the group of nine was established. As the provisional top decision-making body of SeeDAO, the nine-member team was entrusted with the responsibility of solving community conflicts and formulating governance rules, while Tang Han and Bai Yu, the two initiators, relinquish their power.

SeeDAO Community proposal history, image from SeeDAO community

The team of nine took three months to deal with community issues and develop a new governance structure. In order to design a more decentralized, efficient and sustainable governance model, the team learned from SeeDAO's past lessons and from overseas mainstream DAOs, and held more than 50 meetings, sometimes lasting six hours.

On October 6th, the SeeDAO metarule was born. SeeDAO has successfully stepped out of the cocoon and entered a new stage.

A turbulent

Shawn joined SeeDAO when the community was in its second phase, the hybrid operation phase. Because of his previous experience in the Ethereum community translation group, Shawn went straight to the SeeDAO Translation Guild and gradually became an active member of the SeeDAO community.

It was also at that time that SeeDAO began to change and problems and conflicts broke out. With the community in disarray, Shawn was put on a nine-member team to tackle and improve the community's governance. In the whole process, Shawn made a decisive contribution to SeeDAO with his rich experience and resources accumulated from his long-term participation in DAO organization.

Jack: Why did Shawn join SeeDAO?

Shawn: I joined SeeDAO in March and April this year. Now I'm mainly in charge of SeeDAO incubator. At the same time, I'm also the chief editor of SeeDAO Translation Association, responsible for the translation and output of SeeDAO related content.

I joined SeeDAO at that time because of an opportunity. I happened to read an in-depth research paper on DeFi project of gambling, which was very good. At that time, I also wanted to write a research report similar to this, to conduct in-depth interview and research on a DAO. Just a few days ago, Tang Han talked to me about SeeDAO. At that time, I asked her if she could participate in the SeeDAO community, interview active members, and then output an in-depth analysis of SeeDAO according to the structure of that research paper. At that time, I said, "Great, welcome to SeeDAO." I took this opportunity to enter Seedao.

One of the things that I found interesting was this:Most of the SeeDAO community members I spoke to knew there was a company behind SeeDAO and knew there was a full-time company in the community involved, but the vast majority couldn't tell who it was.This shows that the employees of this company really participate in DAO with the mentality of making DAO. This is where I think SeeDAO has been very successful in the stage (from the company to DAO).

And I've been here at SeeDAO ever since. SeeDAO went from corporate dissolution, to chaos, to a nine-person decision-making team. I was also elected to be a member of the nine-person decision making team, so I spent three months discussing and making the meta-rule.In the past three months, we have had more than 50 meetings, and the longest one lasted six and a half hours"Is an argument. In the beginning, there were many disagreements and no one could count how to do it, so I didn't do anything in the first month and kept arguing. After the reason out of the eyebrow, and then each had a division of labor, began to quickly advance a lot of things.

Jack: What specific work did the nine-person team do at this stage?

ShawnThe decision group was disbanded on October 6th, and for three months it was given two tasks:One is to resolve the various historical issues or disputes mentioned earlier", because someone had already started asking too much, and many people left because of the argument. This is the biggest and most difficult task for the group of nine, to quickly resolve the historical disputes and restore the community to a normal state, not to fight every day.The second is to establish the SeeDAO meta-rule, including the simplest vault how to use, is the future SeeDAO how to govern? There have to be rules, because otherwise the people who are actually doing the work, they can't claim the money from the vault, and then there's a lot of people around who aren't doing the work and they're screaming for their money, and that's a big problem.

It took three months to resolve these two issues, and the mission was dissolved on October 6, and then the current phase of meta-rule governance has entered. These (meta-rule governance frameworks) have a lot of their own thinking in them, and also refer to the failure lessons of many DAOs in the past.

Jack: What are some of SeeDAO's legacy problems?

Shawn: Problems left over from history,One thing that people clearly feel is ownership of the project. In fact, when I first joined SeeDAO, the most common sentence I heard was that "they are so (chaotic) there. We often hit it off right away and produce a project, but we don't know what stage it is, and then produce another project two days later".There are a lot of projects, but there is no way to say how to develop in the future. Everyone says it belongs to the community, but the community is a relatively illusory concept.For example, if there are 9000 people in the community, does the team stay up late every day to do something that belongs to 9000 people? This is where questions about ownership will be raised.

SeeDAO had ten guilds at that time, which brought together a large number of full-time workers in Dachang. They felt that they could burst out a lot of good ideas in SeeDAO, and there were also a lot of highly capable people around them, so they could work together as a team just by talking. But you do it with an entrepreneurial idea, and the community level might think that it's a public good project, that it belongs to the community.

In fact, at the beginning, everyone didn't challenge this thing, the biggest reason is that there is no money in SeeDAO vault. A lot of things are generated by love and love.When the vault got rich, things started to go wrong. You requested the money from the vault, but the project is your own, so what is itSex? The logic behind it is not clear.I think a lot of people don't really care about the money. It's just that a lot of people think it's different from what they said before. There are a lot of misunderstanding. I was in charge of talking to the community about these things, and it was very impressive. Everyone thought they had a reasonable idea, so they could talk until two or three in the morning, which I think was one of the biggest disputes at that time.

The second point of dispute is who owns the money in the vault and who can claim it.If communities are contributing, should they be able to divest up the coffers? At this time, in fact, most people don't think about SeeDAO in the long term. The money in the Treasury is spent, what about the future? And when this money comes in, it is actually a certain commitment to investors, because CryptoC is the main body of financing. There's a dispute here, and there's a little bit of a difference. That was the second major conflict, and what was left were smaller issues, because it happened to be a mess, and everybody wanted to settle things once and for all.

Jack: Did SeeDAO learn from other DAO organizations to solve problems?

Shawn: I remember at the Web3 conference in Dali,We hooked up With some of the core contributors to BanklessDAO, FWB [Friends With Benefits], Gitcoin, and did a two-day event [to them] about the problems we had and how we solved them.We also wanted to ask whether these well-known DAOs overseas also had these problems. And how did they solve it? Because I know the general idea, but I don't know much.

At that time (BanklessDAO, etc.) they also came up and said: First, we have all the problems that you have; Second, the problems you have encountered, we have not started to solve, we will solve in the future; Thirdly, we have felt some disputes over these issues, and many people in the community have begun to make proposals. However, we have not yet decided how to solve this problem and whether there should be a unified framework. So we decided to discuss the problem first, and then we would discuss our own solutions and their effects later. soQuestions like this, I think, are common to all DAOs, especially as a large and comprehensive DAOThere are art guilds, development guilds, product guilds, design guilds and so on.

Jack: So the situation SeeDAO encountered, mainstream overseas DAO organizations have no experience in dealing with it?

Shawn: Yes, that's what I understand.They are aware and they don't have a solution, but their problem hasn't come up with such a concentrated outbreak of SeeDAO.They may emerge gradually over the course of six to 12 months, and for them the community can solve these problems "Case By Case." But SeeDAO's problems were concentrated within two to three weeks, which is a big difference from other DAOs.

Meta-rule Era: How is the Steel consensus forged?

On October 6th the SeeDAO yuan rule was announced after three months of work. Building on the "lessons of blood and tears" in the past, the new SeeDAO management adopts a hierarchical structure, encouraging nearby management, expert management. The node consensus conference composed of SeeDAO nodes is the highest decision-making body of the community. It is held once every three months to make decisions on important matters of SeeDAO.

The Town Hall is a daily governance body composed of community contributors that is responsible for governance at the DAO level and rotates every three months. The strategic incubator is responsible for SeeDAO's economic development and filling the community coffers. The governance principle is expert governance and the operation is in a centralized way. As an important part of the community, guilds and projects enjoy a high degree of self-determination without violating the meta-rules. The more members participate in guilds, projects and public services, the more contributions they make to become SeeDAO nodes for the next quarter.

SeeDAO Meta-rule governance structure, image from SeeDAO community

In order to design the SeeDAO meta-rule, Shawn summarized the experience of the community itself and other DAO organizations, and made a lot of thoughts on the practicability of the governance structure, the balance between mechanism and individual influence, and the cultivation of strong community consensus.

Jack: When making the SeeDAO rule, is there a specific blueprint or guideline?

Shawn:On the one hand, we learned from the successful experience of other DAOs, on the other hand, most of the nine members in the team are people who have studied DAO governance, and they will put some of their own understanding into (the design of meta-rules).There's an interesting point here. Because actually experience is a very abstract thing, a lot of younger people are especially willing to express, they will describe a very big one. And we say, "Well, you can design it, you can design it and see how it works," but then they design it, and they find out that in the end, it doesn't work.

So landing is the most important, you have to have a practical.You need to get the other young members to agree with you, but you can't convince him, so let them do it themselves. Therefore, we had quite a few teams working on this project at the same time, and eventually found that many people might talk endlessly in the meeting, but when they put pen to paper or formed a complete plan, they could not form a closed loop, and there were many gaps that could not be implemented in practice.

The meta-rules we see now are actually drafted by nine people each with a piece of the task. We also require all discussions to be open and transparent, and each guild has sent a consultative group to participate in all the meetings. When it was finally written, the first draft was made available to the community in twice-weekly evening cloud meetings in the Discord community to discuss. So the meta-rule should be made by all the SeeDAO active members.

Jack: So the SeeDAO meta-rule is designed to be practical?

ShawnYes, it must be practical. We have made repeated deduction in this process. Of course, I think there are still a lot of problems with the meta-rule, which is still a trial version, and will eventually have to pass a series of tests. The current draft is based on our own mistakes and lessons learned over the past 11 months. We hope to avoid the previous problems, but there will certainly be many new ones. So there will be consensus meetings every three months to look at whether the meta-rule is reasonable and whether it needs to be adjusted.

Most of our votes are not community-wide votes, which is too inefficient. We call for local governance and expert governance.However, the revision of the meta-rule still needs to be made at the consensus conference level, and there is a very high threshold requirement to become a consensus conference node. It requires active contributions in the past three months, so it can never become a conference node by lying on historical achievements. There are a number of other things that combine to get people who know SeeDAO and continue to contribute to the consensus meeting to be able to make decisions on some of SeeDAO's most important proposals.

Jack: Apart from the community consensus, what other experiences have the nine groups learned during the development of the meta-rule?

Shawn: In terms of the formulation of meta-rules, since I participated in many overseas DAOs, I first reviewed BanklessDAO (and other overseas DAO organizations). When the Governance Solutions group at BanklessDAO published the latest version of the Community Charter, I thought it was a good idea, so I took it as a reference.

At first they wanted to follow this framework [the BanklessDAO Community Charter], but in the end they turned it down. The biggest reason is that after considering it, we thought SeeDAO was a unique place. SeeDAO is a DAO with a strong vision and consensus. He proposes the "digital city-state", and then keeps enriched based on this idea. It is actually guided by these ideas, so it is difficult for us to formulate or rational design. What does a "digital polis" look like? How it fits together. soAt that time, we first (perfected) our culture and vision for SeeDAO, and finally sorted out the narrative before we formulated the meta-rule based on it. In fact, it took a lot of time at the beginning.

SeeDAO offline discussion, pictures from SeeDAO community

Jack: How did SeeDAO balance the problem caused by too much personal influence within the company?

ShawnThis is a particular problem we are trying to solve. I have written a lot about how to solve the technocracy of BanklessDAO, TEC and so on. However, when it comes to SeeDAO, there are still some different aspects to be solved. We have paid a lot of attention to this aspect, and adopted some methods in terms of meta-rules and governance framework.

First of all, it adopts the model of nearby management and expert management, so that the people closest to and most aware of the problem will make decisions and the professional people will solve the professional problems.After passing these two modes, Tang Han and Whitefish, as initiators, will be far away from the decision-making position, unable to make the final decision, and people will not go to them again.

Second, we are also constantly empowering communities to use tools.Whatever the decision, the community needs to be able to implement it, not rely on a small group of people. Because as long as you have a small number of people to rely on, there will be a huge effect of personal influence. If you want to put a lot of tools to use, you need to educate. The Web3 education itself is SeeDAO's strongest and has done better in the past few months. We ARE EXTERNAL OFFER NOT ONLY, THE TRAINING THAT ALSO HAS A LARGE NUMBER OF EDUCATION INTERNALLY, INCLUDE THE INSTITUTE ACTUALLY IN OUR MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION, HAVE ALL SORTS OF TRAINING OF DIFFERENT LEVELS, PRACTICAL OPERATION AND SOLVE A PROBLEM. In addition, we also cooperate with many third parties to adopt their tools, hoping to enable the community to have the ability to use tools to implement many of their own proposals, instead of relying on others.

Finally, which I think is quite important, is that Tang Han and White Fish, as initiators, are very active in retreating.At the meta-rule level, they themselves place many limits on individual influence, removing them from the front lines of governance. I think this is very important, is the initiative of the sponsors themselves. Of course, SeeDAO has been exploring the balance between personal influence and governance mechanism in DAO. It is hard to say whether it will be OK or not, a lot of it depends on the effect in the next three to six months.

I think the better part is that SeeDAO has gathered a large number of members of the Chinese-speaking community who are particularly interested in DAO governance. They are far away from money. It's very similar to when I was in the early days of BanklessDAO, and I think having that group of people is an important factor.

Jack: Well, many DAO participants have mentioned the importance of community culture and consensus.

Shawn: In fact, I personally have a very deep understanding of the community culture. Since I joined the Common Stack in 18 or 19 and was the earliest DAO to make public goods, they put forward an idea at that time:To do DAO, community culture must come first.It takes a year to build up the community and build up enough culture and community consensus to make the transition to DAO a logical one. Otherwise, like Just DAO It appeared overnight, it is basically impossible to go on. Therefore, very clear concepts were put forward at that time, including TEC DAO, the first experiment of Common Stack, which spent one year (building community culture) before it was finally dazed. So I've always been a big believer in that,It's really hard to have a strong consensus on DAOs that were created overnight.Taking the previous ConstitutionDAO as an example, it has a ConstitutionDAO, constitutionDao is a single event, it is questionable whether it can be constitutionDao long and durable.

Jack: So how does SeeDAO cultivate a strong community consensus?

Shawn: In fact, we have communicated with many DAOs before. I think if making money is the biggest consensus of a DAO, it is difficult for it to go through a bear market, especially at this stage. We all have personal experience. As far as SeeDAO is concerned, the concept, vision and mission are not empty words. I did a community survey in August, and you can see from the data,Most of the community members joined SeeDAO at three stages, attracted by SeeDAO's three different interpretations of his philosophy.

We wanted to see if the "digital city-state" narrative could gather the most consensus. SeeDAO has produced three interpretations of his philosophy in three different stages in the past 11 months, through the output of brand and article.The first interpretation is systematic text output, (content) mainly is "do not do Web2 worker", "DAO It, Build It". At that time, there was a wave of Internet layoffs in China, so a large number of laid-off employees in big factories were particularly moved by these words, and they joined SeeDAO for this reason at that time.The second interpretation suggests that SeeDAO wants to be a DAO that serves the creatorBecause it is specific, this stage is joined by a large number of contributors to the creator economy.The third stage of interpretation is the digital polis.This interpretation is an interview with Orange Book and Teacher Li Yang. Teacher Li Yang suddenly raised the (latitudes) very high, "the birth of a country", many people were shocked, want to see what happened, so at that time a large number of people joined.

Each of these three interpretations attracted three groups of people. Although there were some differences at that time, we finally found that we could use the same narrative to bring everyone together. soI think the community consensus of SeeDAO is relatively concrete, and they have their own ideas in the next three, five or even 30 years, which can really attract a large number of people who have personal experience.Gitcoin does this well, too. When Gitcoin was dao-ified, their CEO posted an article called "Rise of groupthink, What should Gitcoin do in the next 30 years?" He came out step by step with a very specific goal, and he didn't say he wanted to do everything. He said he wanted to collaborate, he wanted to be a Schelling point, so what should I do for the next 30 years?

So what SeeDAO proposes first is to serve creators and help Web2 people to enter Web3, so we need to do education, and then absorb a lot of people, we need to become a carrier of "digital city-state", so that people can have different dreams and ways to do here. Then SeeDAO adopts "PoW governance mining" from the very beginning, all tokens are issued by contribution and governance to mine, you have to make a contribution to get the Token. Then PoW became the strongest consensus on SeeDAO. In fact, it means that everyone (proves) why they don't work as Web2 workers.

Jack: According to Shawn, what's the biggest feature of SeeDAO community governance now?

ShawnThe SeeDAO Guild is full of self-determination and makes many decisions on its own. This is not true in other DAOs, even in big and comprehensive DAos like BanklessDAO, etc.SeeDAO is the only DAO I know so far whose guild has so much self-determination.

This is something that some of the core members were very insistent on, and I was really confused about this when I first joined SeeDAO, because you get a lot of pain in DAO governance, there are so many completely autonomous modules. But it's especially comfortable for contributors who participate in guilds. Because A LOT OF PEOPLE PARTICIPATE IN ACTUALLY IS NOT TO DO MANAGEMENT, IT IS THE FRIEND THAT HAS A LOT OF LIKE MIND, WANT TO DO SOMETHING TOGETHER INSIDE, IT IS GOOD TO GIVE THEM AN ENVIRONMENT ONLY. soFull self-determination (for SeeDAO) attracted a large crowd and kept the guild alive.

Jack: So when the guild decides to do a project, can they just tap into the SeeDAO vault?

Shawn: The Guild itself has some conscious right to the Token distribution, but the application for the Treasury funds comes into the management rules of SeeDAO Treasury. The rules governing the SeeDAO vault actually restrict some of the guilds' right to apply for funds directly, as the vault is owned by all guilds and is free of self-determination. Self-determination is (covering) the Guild's brand or the Guild's own for-profit projects, which are generated from the Guild's own resources, but involving the DAO as a whole and public thing, the Guild's self-determination is out of the guild's control, and is managed by the Nodal Consensus Assembly.

Jack: Equivalent to a sub-DAO with high autonomy?

Shawn: Sort of like Sub-DAO, but of course it didn't get to this stage, because after all, it was the same Token. A lot of people don't understand this. When we invited BanklessDAO's core members to come and discuss it, he was particularly confused. He said, Why can't you agree on the identity system of each guild? This is because each guild has full self-determination and will set its own identity system. Of course, SeeDAO is going to come up with a framework and recommendations that I hope you can refer to and make it easier for you.

Hematopoietic plan: A DAO without an economic engine is a limited game

With the new governance, SeeDAO also has to deal with his long-term ability to make money. Shawn often says that a DAO organization with no revenue capability is just a "limited game" and that to make the community sustainable, it must build its own economic engine. After verification and discussion, everyone agreed that the establishment of incubator is the most suitable for SeeDAO "hematopoiesis plan".

Thus reflected in the governance architecture, the strategic incubator is level with the town hall to ensure the economic sustainability of the community. Of course, incubators are not only for SeeDAO, but also for the infrastructure of SeeDAO incubation community, providing the underlying technology for the digital city-state.

The Strategic Incubator adopts the governance principle of expert governance and decides internal matters on its own. Shawn, as an experienced DAO participant, is the main person in charge of the Strategic Incubator. In his view, the SeeDAO Strategic incubator not only generates revenue, but also plays an important role in thriving the SeeDAO ecology, building the DAO2DAO network, and exporting DAO infrastructure to Web3.

Jack: Why are strategic incubators given such a high status in the SeeDAO meta-rule?

ShawnWhich brings us to strategic incubators and city halls. All of the public service jobs, the drudgery that we always talk about, we put in city Hall, which itself is a place where people are served and money is spent. butAs a DAO, he cannot spend money all the time, it is not sustainable, there must be an economic engine, it is not managed by the city hall, because the public service does not think about how to generate commercial profit.So we had already decided that there would be a parallel module, but we weren't sure at first who would carry the revenue-generating function of the module.

Just at that stage, SeeDAO incubator was in operation by himself, and we found that its paper return was OK. After some validation we don't think it is the ability to carry on the (surplus) of the module, of course, the future may have other new module, but for now we explore several ways, the incubator is the only continuous output module of economic return, that is why we put it in (a level) and the city hall. And the reason we promoted it to a strategic incubator is becauseThe project we incubated, we wanted it to serve SeeDAO firstThat is to say, the tools of incubation (DAO) are required by SeeDAO.

Jack: How many people are there at SeeDAO Strategic Incubator now? How many projects are incubated now?

Shawn: The strategy Incubator set the expectation of five people, so far there are three people involved, and all of them are mainly Chinese speaking community, running around the world. The accelerator has now incubated five projects in its first phase, with relatively successful ones such as DAOLink and Pirate Radio, and is now close to its next round of funding. Regular incubations have programs like DeSchool and Insole, which add up to about eight programs, four of which are DAO tools.

However, at the end of the first issue, we had a meeting with Tang Han and White Fish in Hangzhou, which impressed us deeply. After two days of discussion and evaluation, we all agreed that DAO tools are the direction that SeeDAO Strategic Incubator can focus on. So [incubating DAO tools] was really the direction that was set at the end of the first phase.

Jack: What are the funding sources for SeeDAO incubator now?

Shawn: Part of the funding source of SeeDAO incubator is the financing money of CryptoC at that time. At that time, some of the financing money went into the vault of SeeDAO for the use of the community, and some directly went into the incubator, because SeeDAO put forward to be an incubator at the very beginning of financing. So part of it is earmarked funding. Some donations have also come from individual investors who want to help the growth of DAOs and projects in Chinese-speaking communities. So they came up with a one-to-one donation for every amount of money that went into the incubator.

Jack: What's the specific process of SeeDAO incubator?

ShawnSeeDAO's incubation consists of two parts,One part is accelerator, the other part is regular incubationIt can hatch at any time. We will work on the accelerator Season by season. We have completed the first phase before and are now preparing for the second phase. Its entire accelerator format is similar to that of Seed Club, with the process of first signing up and screening, and then entering the program to establish a mentor network for it, to participate in accelerated mentoring, and finally to go out and join the alumni network.

We're also learning about Seed Club throughout the accelerator processBecause I think Seed Club is the most successful in Web3. In the past two years, the whole incubation process has gone through three big iterations, and each iteration I can personally see his induction and summary of some past experiences and lessons, as well as the improvement of some concepts. Therefore, in accelerator field, we are still learning Seed Club more, and we also hope to have some features in the future to catch up with it.

The second part is the regular hatching. These incubated projects, whether in Chinese or English communities, basically do not have a formed team, perhaps just an Idea. Then we mainly look at whether they are really All In and have the idea of starting a business, or whether the founder has the temperament of a CEO who can take on challenges and responsibilities. If there is, we will go and help him further. There are two levels of help.One is to help him build his team, and two is how can he be marketable at the MVP stageThis is where we have an advantage. At the end of the day, although we're not very good at it, we do our best to lead them into some opportunities in terms of financing.

Jack: How long is the period from incubation to harvest?

Shawn: The incubation process of our current emphasis on resources is about two months. In the following three months, we will have specially-assigned personnel to follow up, mainly ourselves, including the problems encountered by (the team), and help them coordinate resources to solve them. And then at the end of the three months, you go into the alumni network, and the incubator is actually supporting the entire alumni network.

As for the cycle of revenue, the main consideration is the realization.The SeeDAO incubator, after all, is only a few months old. That would normally take at least two to three years.The paper returns we can see now are very good, after the completion of the seed round of valuation may be dozens of times. The plan we have now is to incubate 20 projects in the next two years, and there may be another round of financing after that, but there is no problem if we don't.We expect to see big returns in the next bull market, but we're not thinking about revenue ahead of the bull market.

Jack: Will there be ownership problems in the projects hatched by strategic incubators as before?

Shawn: There is no ownership problem with the projects in the incubator, because the projects themselves belong to the projects (teams). Now most of the projects that we incubate, both inside and outside the SeeDAO community, we don't define the ownership of the incubator itself. This is different from the problem we had before. The problem we had before was that the project used a lot of SeeDAO resources, which led to ownership disputes.

In the past, we defined the problems left over from history in several ways. First, are you a public service project? If it is a public service and continues to require the support of the SeeDAO Treasury, then 100% ownership belongs to the SeeDAO community. Second, if it can be used as an incubation project, we would suggest that it go the SeeDAO incubator process. There are some agreements here, butMost of the ownership belongs to the team, but the project needs to allocate part to SeeDAO through the restriction principle when issuing the Token.

Incubation Project team. Image from SeeDAO community

Jack: What's the biggest difference between SeeDAO strategic incubator and other types of incubators?

ShawnSeeDAO: Seedao is not a capital incubator.We're somewhere between a Seed Club and a traditional incubator.Seed Club doesn't invest any money, it only provides acceleration services, and some early stage investors may be based on money or resources, and it can't participate in the project. SeeDAO is just in between the two, with a certain proportion of capital investment, because the initial project is definitely short of money before Seed round financing, and then it is more like Seed Club to make resource investment.The great thing about SeeDAO is that it has a strong community behind it, so SeeDAO is both giving and giving.Of course, we won't be able to pay as much as other organizations, but at least it'll help the team get to the seed round.

In fact, we have had some discussions with the Seed Club team, and I think the biggest difference is SeeDAO is that Seed Club is not supported by the community, so considering this, it chooses a different approach. Seed Club's incubation period has doubled from six weeks to 12 weeks. Since they also found themselves without community support, they were given another six weeks after incubation to find a place to practice. After the practice, the team will come back with the problem and discuss it again. And SeeDAO is different.Our incubation project has been in the community since the first day for various polishing. Many projects, if they don't feel good during the polishing process, the team will stop working on them, and everyone will save time.

I think the distinction is quite large in some detail, which is why we call it a strategic incubator. Because first of all it has to meet the strategic needs of SeeDAO, it has to be for the SeeDAO community. Because after all [SeeDAO] now has over 9000 members, there are a lot of guilds and a lot of projects that are collaborating internally, there are all kinds of strong impulses to go up the chain, there are all kinds of demands coming out. soSeeDAO will also invite the core members of the project to SeeDAO's town hall to participate in frontline DAO management, so that it can really solve the pain points of the industry and help these products find market match"Rather than making some" YY "product form.

Jack: Well, I remember talking to Shawn earlier about the importance of the community to the development of DAO tools.

Shawn: Yes, the DAO tool now has a category called"General Purpose Tool"I think it doesn't matter whether you have DAO experience or not, because DAO can be used, other projects can also be used, like DeWork is a typical general purpose tool. A lot of Web2 teams come in (Web3) and ask me what they should do (type of tool), and I recommend a generic tool.

But if you want to make a strong coupling with all aspects of DAO governance (tools), want to really solve many pain points of DAO, so that many DAOs can not be separated from you. General-purpose tools can't do that, and you need to be personally involved in the governance of DAOs so you know what they need. Such tools, which I don't think can be produced without the DAO, are called"The Community First".

I also wrote a post about "Community First". In August and September this year, the English community, including OG and project owners, was also pushing the concept. Because they feel that Web3 had two paths before, one was product first, the other was protocol first, now it should be community first. So I've been personally focused on this way of creating DAO tools out of DAOs.

Jack: Besides the community level, what other resources does the SeeDAO Strategic Incubator provide for incubation programs?

Shawn: First of all, SeeDAO's strategic incubator focuses on DAO tools, so all the projects incubated can become early adopters"Lego Integration".

Secondly, these DAO tools are also available through SeeDAO DAO2DAO networkAnother DAO was entered. We know that there are two most obvious flows between DAOs and DAOs, one is the flow of funds and the other is the flow of talents. We hope that these flows can also be carried out after the project itself becomes a node. First, their BD data is particularly simple, and second, many DAO contributors will be able to participate in their projects, creating strong synergies.

The SeeDAO incubator, on the other hand, is now focusing its resources onEstablishment of an alumni network. At both domestic and overseas events, we promote our alumni network as a whole. Of course, it's still very early days, and we hope that through these explorations, in the next one to two years, we can really form an ecology. And there's a good space for SeeDAO, for the incubated programs.

Jack: What types of DAO tools are most in demand by the DAO community today?

Shawn:The first one is Onboarding, which is how can you quickly join or trainA number of tools with different priorities have emerged.

The second is the DAO activity chainIt doesn't have to be "Blockchain". Sometimes it's Arweave or IPFS, but it's something you don't want to delete in Discord. Actually I think one of the core things is that people have the idea and the urge to move away from Notion and Discord and go as far up the chain as possible. Because today everyone is building DAOs (on both platforms), it is doubtful that they will be given DAOs (building DAOs organization) in the next decade.

Collaboration tools are also a strong area.A lot of [community] collaboration is now done by people and takes a lot of time to get into. We also expect to see the emergence of collaborative tools, such as DeWork in the form of a Bounty. But in addition to Bounty, a great deal of everyday work is done on Discord without a closed-loop process.

Jack: At the DAO level as a whole, how does a DAO organization achieve stable profitability?

Shawn: I think in terms of the revenue model of the DAO organization, actuallyAll DAOs around the world are still in the exploratory stage.Whether it's BanklessDAO or FWB, every time they come out with a financial analysis, I look at what they're spending, how some of their revenue projects are progressing, or when they're expecting to break even, which is a long way off.

And SeeDAO himself,One is to keep a very tight rein on stablecoin spending. We keep saying 'SeeDAO is poor' even though there are one or two million U in the vault. Why is that? Is to make sure the stablecoins in our vaults will last until the next bull market. On the other hand, it's spending no matter how controlled, it's always spending. SoIn the long term, we still need strategic incubators to be able to expect returns.Although its cycle may be long, but with spending under control, we are patient with this return cycle. And at least the returns on paper, even if they're not real money, actually give us a lot of confidence.

Great maritime

Two months ago, during the Dali Web3 Conference, Tang Han, Bai Yu and Shawn got together with a group of Web3 entrepreneurs and investors to discuss the future of the great sailing era of Web3. They not only talked about the project going abroad, but also how to open markets and build networks overseas. As a pioneering DAO explorer, SeeDAO is naturally ahead of the curve, with the goal of developing a global community set in September. Shawn found that different from Seed Club, there are opportunities for SeeDAO incubator to develop overseas.

Jack: How can SeeDAO incubator compete with overseas incubators such as SeedClub?

Shawn: SeeDAO Incubator is also working with some communities to help young people who are focused on Web3 or DAO. It could be a young person straight out of college or even out of college, and if they're involved in some research or project [in the Web3 and DAO space], we want to fund them.

At a recent blockchain conference we attended at the University of New South Wales, I was particularly excited aboutMany teams are particularly interested in SeeDAO's incubator, which I didn't expect before.Many projects in the English community have told us that there is a big Gap between the idea and the actual completion of the seed round. Some successful teams or star teams do get a lot of money easily, but they may be slow to do things. For them, the product is already there, but they don't have a network to launch and cold start. As we talked, a lot of them had been in Seed Club, but they had been passed over.

SeeDAO at the UNSW ASEAN Conference in Sydney. Image from SeeDAO community

Seed Club is a very different direction from us.Seed Club actually doesn't like product development projects, they're pretty much dead, they like Community projects, which is building a community.Because Seed Club has an "anti-elitist" standard, people on the product team often exhibit elitist traits. What is "elitism"? Seed Club doesn't want people who talk about what I'm going to do, what I can do, what I'm good at. So I went to Seed Club's fifth incubation review and I found out that the entire product team had been cut.

But SeeDAO's incubator is particularly focused on the product team.I don't need you to tell a good story. What we like is the kind of team that makes products honestly and can make products quickly. SeeDAO can help you with other propaganda, packaging, commercialization and so on. So after talking for a month, I found that there is a lack of such incubators in the English community, so these projects come to the SeeDAO incubator to talk and cooperate.

I talked to a team in Sydney the other day who wanted to build a version 2B Rabbit Hole to help corporate employees quickly get the basics of Web3. They want SeeDAO to incubate them. They don't care about SeeDAO's money because it's too little for them. They just have to pay for it themselves. In fact, what they value most is the SeeDAO community. Secondly, SeeDAO can help them to design a large number of Web3 training courses and the design of achievement system. SeeDAO already has formed (products), which can be directly used. This is especially valuable to them because they themselves don't have a strong understanding of this area, and it takes time.

Then there are also several leading Web3 security teams in Melbourne. Now they want to leave the university and start their own business. They are also looking for the SeeDAO incubator, hoping to help them make up for the lack of business ability of the team. This is where we feel we need to play to our strengths, because there are a lot of projects that want to start businesses, and there are obvious weaknesses in the team itself.

Jack: To incubate an English community, do you need to develop your own overseas community?

ShawnDeveloping a global community is SeeDAO's top priority for the coming year, which he has made since September. butThe development of the global community is still biased. We still focus on Chinese (team)We still want to help the Chinese team succeed. We now have a matching program called "Global Dao-Field" program, and we hope to set up an offline activity center In Real Life. We have made an attempt to establish a site called See Shore in Dali. We hope to set up See Shore in many cities around the world to provide accommodation, activities and work places for early-stage entrepreneurial teams.

When we were in Dali, we actually met most of the groups that were going to sea, and we talked about the great Age of navigation,A lot of teams are whole teams at sea. That's not a problem, but can you open the market there, can you get enough 2B resources there? That's the biggest challenge [for the team].Now we will find that when the team goes out, it is still in the Chinese community. It is difficult to enter the English Local community or find market partners, which may take several years. We here at SeeDAO have a lot of similar problems. Let's explore together.

conclusion

In less than 11 months, the SeeDAO community has exported more than 200 translated articles and produced nearly 100 Web3 courses. The SeeDAO incubator has also incubated many excellent DAO tools such as DAOLink, while the Treasury cost is only $500,000. For me, at least, the results SeeDAO has achieved have indeed strengthened my faith in the narrative of DAOs catching up with corporates in some areas.

In the process of governance and development, SeeDAO also encountered the problems of excessive personal influence and complicated distribution of community benefits. In the current market environment, they seem to be a key factor in hindering, or even killing, nascent DAO organizations. (BlockBeats notes:PandaDAO Interview: DeWork's largest DAO Organization disbanded, What lessons have we learned?"). As the most cutting-edge explorer in DAO field, SeeDAO's solutions to these problems are also full of reference significance. For a DAO organization, it is more important to cultivate a community consensus culture, find a suitable governance structure, and develop sustainable hematopoiesis capacity than anything else.

当然，离 SeeDAO 元规则公布只过去不到两周，未来元规则是否会出现新的问题，社区能否应对，都是未知数。就像 SeeDAO 发起人唐晗说的：「如果说 SeeDAO 有什么野心的话，我们希望能够在 DAO 尚未真正落地的年代去挑战 DAO 治理的边界。我们希望真正承担激进带来的痛苦，去面对鸡零狗碎的现实，在实践而非口号中寻找力量」。