How we think about DAO Governance

This transcript has not been edited — please listen to the podcast to confirm any statements made by speakers. 

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Brian Shields:, CEO & Co-Founder of Sprinter:

Everybody, welcome back to future at work. I'm Brian shields. I'm here with my partner Alex Ford. Carter. Alex, we're gonna talk about today.

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Alex Ford-Carther, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Sprinter:  

Today I want to talk about sprinter dough. Okay, first, I want to talk about why we started to doubt to begin with.

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Shields

Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, I think that you and I specifically, we've had a lot of conversations about this. For those of people that don't know, like, you know, we're 100% of the board of our company, you know, we built sprinter, it's, you know, we're Delaware C Corp, and now it's like, Okay, now, how do we actually set up the DAO? When why now, so, you know, we've both been in crypto now, for years, you know, you know, going back 2017 a little bit before that. And, you know, we've been kind of around the world on this, you know, we've been from, you know, Chicago, to Switzerland, to Ukraine, and back, you know, building teams are all over the place. And we kind of see a lot of issues with the kind of traditional model of just, you know, traditional venture backed go public, you know, you keep your super shares for the founders, they can control it forever, as you know, fucking space emperors. And I just don't think that that's really the best way for businesses to operate, I don't think it's the best thing in terms of sustainability. You know, we've talked about this, you know, my father ran his own business when we were and then he passed away when I was young. And it was kind of like, now all of a sudden, what happens to the business? And so I've always kind of had the idea of, you know, generational planning in mind in terms of setting up a business and operating a business. And so the idea of like, how can you make sure that when you build something, it can last beyond yourself, right. And so the best way to do that is to decentralize governance and to distribute control over whatever it was that you've built. And so for us, the the optimal way to do that is through Dow structure, and it's not, because it's the only option that's out there, by any means, you know, there's still a lot of uncertainty around it, there's still a lot of growing pains, we've seen a lot of problems and, and successes with other dials. And so we want to make sure that we are very thoughtful about how the way we set up this one, and that we're making sure that we can transition the governance of the Sprinter platform from a centralized corporate structure to a decentralized Dao model, and do that in a way that is transparent, that is supporting the early adopters, and early membership of the community in a way that encourages them to help support the, you know, the growth of the platform.

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And so, you know, we've looked at this, and whether you go internationally, and like all these different options, whether you structure or not. And, you know, for us, it was the idea of like, we think that what Wyoming's doing in terms of Wyoming LLC structure in the US, it works very well with what we want to do with sprinter, we'd like to keep this within the US regulatory structure, we think that that's going to be the toughest one to operate within. And so it certainly wasn't easy to engineer the entire platform to stay within the those bounds. But at the end of the day, like these are all rules and regulations that pre existed before crypto, right, so it's, uh, you kind of have to play within the sandbox that you got. And I think that what Wyoming's done is really smart, I think other states are gonna be following through. And so for us, it's making sure that we have the initial membership of the dial between the individual members and the agency members. And we're gonna do the allocation that Ron tokens, and that anyone who wants to purchase Ron tokens afterwards is also a member of that Dow. But what we want to make sure is that we can actually have some kind of governing commission elected by the community to take leadership over certain capacities, right. And so we want to have a nine person governing commission, where we want to stagger the term limits of each of those seats. So we want to have three seats with three year terms, three seats with two year terms and three seats with one year terms. So that way, every year or two, there's like a certain number of people that are kind of up for reelection. And then for us, as the founders that have helped launch this thing, we're going to be on there with some of our with Vladimir and some of the members of our team. But after a few years, we'd have to get reelected by the Dow to stay on that commission. So we want to make sure that like we basically have skin in the game, and we're not, you know, walking away, and everyone knows that we're committed in the long run for this project. But the same time, if we screw up, they can replace us. And that's how it should be right? It should be if we don't like the way that the CEO of Facebook is operating the shareholders and the board could replace them. And somehow we've had that broken in capitalism. And so I think that we need to make sure that we can actually let people have that kind of stakeholder control over over the system. And so for us it was do we give away control of the shares and the board of the company and then have to go public and do it all the VCs want in order to build this thing and take it up to the level we want to? Or can we just punk rock this shit go crypto, set it up with a Dow and like give it to the people. And at the end of the day, I think that's really what what we've wanted to do. Because we've built something that we think is a tool for people to kind of enhance their own freedom online in terms of running their own businesses, running their own client relationships, making their own money, and working with people all over the web. On the way that they haven't really been able to, with some of the disjointed systems that we've seen today, you know, we've talked to too many people that have, you know, they've got 20 different pieces of technology in their tech stack, or they're trying to optimize their business or whatever. And so for us, it was the idea of kind of like taking almost like the historical structure of like a, like a merchant guild, or like a carpenter's guild or something like that, and bring it into the 21st century in terms of technology, where it's like, now you actually have this die, where everyone has their own unique specialties. And they all have, you know, their maybe, maybe their technical, maybe their creative, but the idea is, like, all these people need to collaborate, you know, we've ever built the software project that didn't have creativity and technology, right. And so it's by bringing everyone together into into a data structure where people can have that data, they can elect a governing commission, that commission can contract with the accounting firms and oversee paying taxes and whatever they need to do in terms of operating that legal structure. But making sure that the community can replace the people on the commission, making sure that the Commission needs to be reelected, making sure that they need to be transparent and be reporting and everything can be kind of, you know, aboveboard, and and like I said, transparent for the community, we think is really important. So we've looked at how some other companies have kind of operated in the past, you know, we've talked a lot about buffer being like, you know, a year of radical transparency as a core core kind of tenant of the business. And that they, I think they they actually bought back their VCs at one point. And so it was, hey, we're doing so well, we want to run this business the way we want to, and so we're gonna buy it back. And we think that that's pretty, pretty cool. But then specifically, within, just like the Dow governance model is like, let it letting the users decide, letting the users vote, like the idea that good ideas can come from anywhere. And talents can come from anywhere tell it's not evenly distributed. And neither is the future. So just because some guy, some kid might be, you know, the far corners of the world, like he's got an internet connection off a hotspot on a cell phone, he can use a laptop, but he might be the next best coder on the planet. So how can we make sure that that person can operate on a level playing field globally? In an open market? That's, you know, that's that's borderless and isn't determined by a currency?

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Ford-Carther

Yeah, I mean, in 2017 DAOs weren't a thing. Really. Right.

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Shields

Yeah. Well, there was like that die was like, kind of kicked the whole thing off. But yeah, I mean, it was just getting going.

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Ford-Carther  

Yeah. And so but for us, it was always about opening up to the community. And we always talked about, you know, whether it be, you know, open sourcing sprint, or like, it was always about figuring out a way to give it to the community. So I think we can get around like, nonprofit structures and whatnot, but obviously, kind of as the crypto in the space evolved, and, you know, Wyoming started to kind of do their Dao thing like, now there's some structure around it. You talked about kind of the governance model that that you specifically want to implement. But, like, why that model and kind of maybe give, you're obviously a part of a couple of different dials in like, kind of talk to some different structures. But why we chose the governance model that we chose.

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Shields

Yeah, I think that So like you said, I'm a member of a couple of different DOAs. And so we've seen how they've structured their operations. Good. DOAs great ones. Great. Absolutely. And so like, a lot of them have, like, the, the natural governance of these individual communities has kind of grown organically, in a way that like, almost like you think about, like how society is organized, right? And it's like, if you jump everyone out, you know, a new island together, like what happens and like, you know, whether that's Lord of the Flies or loss, or like we could pick pick your analogy on that one. But the idea is, it's like, how can we figure this out? How can we communicate? How do we submit proposals? What's the proposal process? How do we approve proposals? How do we kind of advance the bill through committee to the to the floor and vote on it, right. And so we've looked at a lot of the different methods, we think that the most successful guys are the ones that are able to set up kind of like working groups and pods within the community to focus on or to do marketing, we're going to do social we're going to do in real life events, we're going to do merch design, like I think that that, from what we've seen across other communities has been the most successful operating model. But just in general, again, like making sure that the community can control the Treasury, I think is everything, making sure that if you don't want to be a member anymore, you can leave doors always open, right, and you can always come back. I think that's really important. And just making sure that everyone can kind of communicate, we can streamline those community communications is really important. A lot of dials, you know, obviously, Discord is pretty, pretty prominent, like groups also use telegram. But at the end of the day, it's making sure that people can communicate, and making sure that we're on the same page in terms of like, what the goals are.

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Ford-Carther  

So specifically, how the DAO is going to operate within kind of the ecosystem, kind of, I guess, talk to that there's obviously the platform and the Dow and the, the runtime, like kind of just walks on.

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Shields 

So I use, I've used the analogy that it's like we're creating, you know, Major League Baseball, and we just want to have one of the franchise teams, right? So it's like, at the end of the day, like the company that built the platform, we're setting the setting of this platform up or giving control of it to the Dow and then We're basically going to the company is just going to be a member of the community just like anyone else. So we're just gonna operate, we just want to play ball, let the kids play, right, we just want to play ball with everyone else, because we came up with the rules of the game, we want to make sure that we can all contribute. And so it's making sure that the Dow is the definitive voice of authority, right of the community, is the definitive control over the Treasury, and making sure that, you know, we as founders are just, you know, we start with a seat on the commission, but we have to earn it to hold it. And anyone else can take that seat, and that making sure that the company is treated just like any other agency within the network. And I think that that's really important. Because we, you know, we're not hanging up our spurs, like, we're still looking to build stuff for the rest of our careers. And, yeah, we're builders and operators by nature. So we don't think we're gonna be done with that anytime soon. But we want to make sure that, you know, everyone knows that it's like, we're not here to, to, you know, Zuckerberg lord over everything forever. We want to make sure that the DAO is the governance unit is the definitive voice of authority for the platform for the community, that there's that there's a clear process in place for community action, collective voting, and making sure that everyone who's a stakeholder in the community, whether you're a client, that dev designer, product manager, or an agency owner, everyone's able to contribute to kind of continue to operate the spectra network, build this sprinter platform in a sustainable manner.

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Ford-Carther  

We talked about last episode kind of the rewards and being a part of the community. So if you're a part of the Dow, you obviously don't have say so and kind of some roadmap items for the platform. How do you giving the community voting control and ability to kind of dictate the roadmap? How do you see that as a better user experience for? So making sure that the dowel can vote on and make sure that the user experience is what the doll wants?

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Shields 

Yeah, I think some things and the user experience it, like we talked about for years about how like, blockchain has got a UX problem, right. And so some of these tools, like tally and snapshot have really come along and made a lot easier for people to do to do voting. You know, you've seen some of these airdrop of governance, whether it's uniswap, or ens, kind of going through this process. So there's a little bit of a roadmap there already. And we're obviously you know, we have plenty of, you know, future features that we'd love to have get built out. So we're gonna be submitting those as proposals, just like any other member of the community can. So it's not that there's, it's not that it's done by any means. It's just that now it's like, there's so many different roles, we can go down with it. Like, we want to see what everyone else thinks we should do with it, right. And I think that that's really important, because at the end of the day, there is a wisdom in the crowd. And so it's not about dictating the roadmap, it's about informing the roadmap, and then it's about communicating from the users, to the product managers, to the designers to the engineers, right? It's like an office space. Right? So what do you do? It's like, I talked to the clients, because the engineers can't aren't good at talking to people, we want to make sure everyone's talking together.

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Ford-Carther  

Yeah, I mean, I've personally architected most of the platform, as it currently stands, and I'm super excited about kind of launching and then bringing the Dow in and, you know, having people say, Oh, this button should be here, you know, or we should change this user experience, because it can streamline this for this agency type, right? Like, I'm really super stoked about bringing more people into the into the mix to make sure that we are building a platform and a product that everybody can use everybody's happy with. But really, the whole point of sprinter is to make my job if I'm a designer, or engineer, if I'm an agency owner, I will make that person's job easier, right, and allow them to run their business faster, if you will. And so I'm super excited about, you know, giving it to the people, if you will, and making sure that we are establishing our goals and making the best product that we can, you know, we think that, you know, obviously has project management capability within the platform, but we really see this as operating system for the for the next generation, and how do we make sure that sprinter is the one that everybody chooses? And that's just making sure that we've got a lot of talented people within the network, a lot of talented people contributing to the Dow, we're then active in making sure that the roadmap and kind of the long term vision of of the platform and the network gets gets enabled in an act it so I guess, kind of, if I am part of the Sprinter dial, like, hey, how do I get access to it? But then like, you know, you've talked about kind of subsets like kind of how what does that structure going to look like? And then yeah, because kind of talked to that.

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Shields

Yeah. So again, anyone who purchases an NFT in the initial membership drive for either individual membership or agency membership is going to be able to get access to the run. Allocate Should at the airdrop, anyone else afterwards could just purchase the run token on a secondary market wherever they want or from an existing member. So then they'd be a member of the DAO and then the proposals would be hosted on the website, the voting will be done either snapshot tally, we'll just build it directly into the website. And in terms of the working groups, I think that we've got a couple in mind already, we might be able to do an entire episode specifically around how we want to kind of like roll that out. But kind of think of it just like if you were, you know, planning, planning a big event or you know, running a startup or a bands tour, or whatever, you know, you're gonna have, some people are gonna be charged operations or design or marketing or whatever it so we're kind of setting up those standard working groups, making sure that you know, as a team, you can kind of coalesce around the goal. Everyone can kind of, you know, define their own mission based upon their own skill sets and see how they can contribute. But the end of the day, we want everyone to be able to roll up their sleeves and pick up a shovel and get to work.

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Ford-Carther  

You've talked about the commission and governance, or the commissioner structure, kind of, I guess, specifically, give a little bit more details on I guess there's nine commissioners, right. And then there's voting for each one, I guess, how would I? Overtime? If I'm a member, right? How can I become a part of that like, well, great question would be some ways for me to then say, hey, like, I really like this, but like, I want to

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Shields

become I want to step up into a leadership role. No, I think that that's really important. So that's a that's a really good thing to talk about. So anyone who is a run token holder is going to be a member of the Dow you don't need to hold an NF t you don't need to have purchased an NF T in the early membership drive or on the secondary market, you could just hold the RUN token and be a member of the DAO you can vote, you can vote on the Commission's you can vote on the roadmap, you can you know, work on projects and everything like that. But you can't run projects without an individual or agency badge, or individual helmet or an agency badge NFT. And you can't run an agency without the badge NFT. And you can't run for a seat on the commission unless you hold one of those two NFT's. So if you're a run token holder, and you're an active member of the DAO and you start realizing, Hey, this is something that I want to contribute more of my time to, and this is something I want to be an active member of in a leadership capacity. And I want to get you know, beyond the commission, you would have to purchase an NF T from another member in order to do that.

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Ford-Carther  

And so other commission is like, do they get special voting privileges are like,

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Shields 

I think that were there, part of this is going to be set up by the DAO collectively after the allocation, because there's a lot of this that we can still kind of is up for discussion, I think that the best way to do it would be to have the nine different seats be filled in some capacity is similar to like a general corporate board where you have people with different backgrounds and skill sets, I don't necessarily think that the commission should be running the working groups, I think that they can be, you know, the pods can all have their own kind of Captain. Right. And they should be, you know, designated all within the community. I don't think that should be at the commission level, I think the commission should be more than those that are technical or, you know, from, you know, a financial, legal accounting, operating side of things they should be able to communicate with, with the accounting firms and the legal firms and stuff like that just to kind of be able to then translate, you know, accounting and legal ease back to the community to make sure that everyone's informed the general responsibility of the commission is really going to be managing the vendor relationships between the accountants, the lawyers, and any, you know, Treasury managers that they might want to bring on communicating to the, to the DAO, and kind of, you know, helping to, you know, organize the working groups. And so making sure that everyone's able to kind of, you know, work within that structure is gonna be pretty important.

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Ford-Carther  

So you just mentioned treasury management and bringing on folks kind of what is, what is the Treasury? Yeah, no, so that's, yeah, great. stablish? Like, why would we need a treasury manager? Right, like, Well, I

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Shields

think that we've seen with other dollars, and I think that this is news to a lot of the crypto savvy people that are out there. But like, if you have a, say you do a token sale, you have a Dao, you put it all into treasury, you got it all sitting in eath, and maybe eath, goes down 40%, or it's all sitting in XYZ token. And so you want to make sure that whatever is going into the treasury is actually going to be managed properly and effectively. I do think that while I believe the wisdom of crowds, sometimes you end up with camo, which is a horse designed by committee. I do think that there are professional fund managers that are out there, just like there are professional accounting firms and professional law firms and those should be engaged at that level to make sure that the Dow is responsible citizen within the broader community.

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Ford-Carther  

So the Treasury kind of, I assume that the Commission will be responsible putting for putting forth like a budget that is exactly one by the Dow and so the Treasury will be split between ongoing development of the platform marketing of the the platform and the membership base, what kind of what else would the Treasury

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Shields 

Treasury will really whatever that DAO chooses, go home at the end of the day. A you know, like, so the idea would be, you could almost look at it like an endowment to some extent where it's like, oh, let's just make sure the university doesn't, you know, keeps the lights on for a couple generations, right? And so it's like, how do you make sure that, you know, the commission is able to work with the Treasury managers, the accountants and the lawyers to be able to communicate to the community, the community can organize the working groups, they can, you know, set the budgets within those working groups, those budgets can then be submitted to the commission, who can then communicate with Treasury managers to you know, you know, you know, do all that, but a lot of that's going to be done strictly through voting. And just like, you know, click to vote type situation. So it's not going to be like meetings and meetings, like in a corporate structure, it's just making sure that we can kind of streamline that process for everybody.

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Ford-Carther  

And the initial Treasury is going to be set up through proceeds from the initial membership drive Exactly. And then we'll be continued to be filled through active sprints. And

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Shields

yeah, basically, the, the proceeds from the membership drive from the initial Treasury that will be governed by the Dow. And then every sprint that is completed by members of the Dow, there is a network fee that goes to that Treasury. And that happens, whether it's a token transaction or a Fiat transaction.

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Ford-Carther  

So the DAO and its members are incentivized to use the platform because more funds will go into the treasury, when more funds go into the treasury, we can spend that money in a way that's going to increase and grow the network.

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Shields  

Yeah, I mean, imagine if every member of if every Office tenant of WeWork was able to determine how they spent soft banks money as opposed to Adam Newman, you know, maybe they'd have a little bit of a different story.

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Ford-Carther  

And so is there any, like revenue share? I assume that if

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Shields

not, it's not a revenue share to token holders like this isn't? You know, it's not it's specifically engineered to not be a securities offering, like this isn't a currency, it's not a security, this is a non security, non currency, digital asset commodity is is your personal property. This is, you know, membership, you know, access and platform access with clearly defined utility that, you know, is for the users to actually utilize this token in its capacity as it was engineered.

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Ford-Carther  

Yeah, that's a lot to unpack, you do a great job, kind of just kind of clarifying specific governance, and the Dow structure, so just anything else you kind of want to unpack for anybody that's interested in sprinters the Sprinter down, but

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Shields

yeah, I mean, if you're interested in sprinter, you should go to sprinter.io. I'm going to spend that IO slash members. To learn more, you can sign up for the whitelist you can join our Discord. Learn more in there, we get a lot of information. I get a lot of information under resources on the website as well. You can learn more about the token economics you can learn more about the Dow governance you know, who spirituals for why it works, why people should use it. And then yeah, online, you know, follow us online on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok. Raw sprinter dial, you can find us on YouTube, we're putting all these videos up there, you know, we're trying to, you know, communicate as much as we can make sure that we can, you know, kind of get the story down so that other people can hear it and learn it and tell tellers right? So it's making sure that anyone who's interested can you know, find out the information they need so that we can kind of push this thing forward.

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Ford-Carther  

Alright, I think that's a wrap on this episode of future work. Thanks, Brian.

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