Adam Gall on how DAOs can function as venture studios
In this episode
Ashton Addison speaks with Adam Gall, CTO at Decent, on their DAO based venture studios, how companies can properly function within a DAO, the intricacies of DAO's from treasury management to hierarchies and voting, and more.
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decentlabs.io · bit.ly · coinjar.com
- Decent operates as an on-chain venture studio organized as a DAO with transparent treasury management and democratic decision-making through voting.
- DAOs can maintain hierarchical organizational structures while increasing transparency in decision-making and resource allocation rather than pursuing complete equality.
- Treasury management in DAOs works best with tiered decentralization, where top-level token voting controls largest funds while sub-DAOs have less decentralization for operational efficiency.
- ShapeShift provided a useful model for Decent's transition from traditional LLC to DAO governance, having navigated similar challenges with higher regulatory scrutiny.
- DAO infrastructure and governance models remain largely experimental with few established precedents for sophisticated multi-layered organizations transitioning from traditional business structures.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have adam gall the cto of decent adam welcome to the show and it is great to have decent back once again thanks ashton it's great to be here you're very welcome a lot's happened since we last talked to your team in january of this year and a little bit of a downhill market
since then but a lot of building going on and the the future of gaming new protocols scaling and dows are all taking huge strides forward since then as well so i'm excited to hear your insights on what your team has been working on for the people who didn't see the first interview with decent i'd love to just get an intro on uh the main solutions that your your team's
providing and adding value to the blockchain space and then we'll dive into everything else yeah sure thing so decent these days is a on-chain venture studio and so what that means is that we're we're modeling ourselves after the traditional venture studio but doing it in a way that really leans into the crypto culture as an organizational structure we've
organized ourselves as a dow so a lot of our processes are becoming a lot more transparent treasury on chain you know transparent democratic decision making through you know voting uh and figuring out how to run a you know sophisticated organization that has many different layers and levels and people doing different things but in a way that's more in line with the ethos of
crypto and the ethos of uh you know worldwide organizations that don't have a central heart but more so a bunch of different arms of people working to build stuff together very cool and great intro and you're right i feel like there's a lot of companies sort of uh touting the future but the the the infrastructure and the technology has always set back in the past and with dao
specifically and autonomous organizations they are the future moving forward but there is a lot to be done to to fix out the little problems and running a company there's millions of different things that need to be done how do you automate all that and get it into smart contracts and and work out the governance to be perfect so that everyone gets a fair democratic
say you know it's like trying to run politics inside of your company um how has that been that uh trying to get the the functionality of a dow structure into a venture studio and and sort of the setbacks in that as well yeah great question i mean you used the word perfect there uh certainly nothing about this is perfect uh perfection is what we're after but there's a there's a
long way to get there um i don't know of too many other organizations that are um attempting to build you know sophisticated organizations in quite the way that we are and so a lot of this is um i don't want to say trial and error but you know figuring out how this works best as we go there there aren't many models for us to rely upon um so yeah i mean it's it's been
uh it's been a process of learning we have some um you know we have our own goals about what we're trying to achieve so we're not looking for i think a lot of people traditionally hear dao's and they think of a very flat structure where everybody has an equal voice that's not quite like our main objective here we still believe in a
hierarchical structure within an organization but one in which there's a lot more transparency throughout that structure and transparency and decision making in resource allocation and one in which anybody within some arm of that overall structure can understand you know how the how the overall organization fits how they fit in and most importantly what they can do
to affect better decisions moving up that chain so if all those decisions are transparent and made in the public eye instead of behind closed doors in a boardroom it allows ego to leave the room and allows pure efficiency to take over and if people have better ideas and can and can promote their ideas to the greater good of however decision making you know happens within that structure
then they can get in and affect change in a better way than somebody that might already be there yeah very well said and i completely agree about the hierarchical structure i feel like it's uh it would be this perfect utopia if every single person in the company of a thousand people had the same uh you know responsibility and and everyone was exactly equal it would be really
hard to decide uh on for a unanimous vote of 1 000 people to get things done i feel like uh it as dows continue to grow there's going to be this sort of transition of like certain functionalities will all of a sudden become automated and more transparent as you're saying open doors but there will still be as there is now in in blockchain a lot of sort of web 2
or traditional structures sort of like helping support that along as each piece transitions and and not just the whole thing overnight uh because it is a bit a bit of a trial and error i'm curious if you've looked into you know the history of other companies uh and uh using dao's you know whether it's in in d5 or in governance um and if there's anything to model you know what is the
what is the right way to do this off of yeah i mean we've we've looked uh we've definitely spent a lot of time seeing how other you know popular dows big dows with lots of members organize how they work and i mean i said earlier that there's not that many models for us to use um i mean that's not entirely true there are plenty of popular dows out there that
have have made a lot of progress building things in the space i i guess for for our transition from a llc an organization in the you know regular uh business world to one where this this governance happens on chain while still like transitioning or existing um you know contributor staff into this model and figuring out what new you know
new contributors look like um that has been yeah that's been tough for us to find organizations that have gone through that transition other than like shape shift honestly shapeshift has been a a pretty good model for us they've done it and uh they've had a lot more risk than us in terms of they were a pretty regulated company beforehand doing you know money
transmission so a lot of a big spotlight has been on them to do it right um so yeah uh shapeshift has been a a good model for us actually and speaking of new contributions and mentioned at the beginning about treasury management uh how do you see the the decent dao at least approaching uh the the governance of treasury management maybe you can give a
comparison into how a venture studio would work as an llc with sort of managing where the funds go versus with a dao yeah that's a great question so um i think the best way i can approach that answer is to first talk about transparency as maybe even being more important at different layers in that dial than decentralization so
within decent for example the way that we're modeling that is that at the topmost layer which is where the biggest treasury funds are that should be the most decentralized um so that that's the layer where it's like token voting token holders you know wide set of token holders you know voting on on-chain proposals can dictate how treasury funds get spent and then as
you move further and further away from that and there are like sub-dials for different work streams like an engineering work stream or an operations work stream or a product or design or marketing or legal or whatever those different work streams will have probably less and less decentralization the further down they go and that's because there are people in charge there
who have to figure out what their budgets will be what their plans for the next quarter or half year year will be and submit proposals to that larger treasury to get the funds they need to do the work that they need to do and then even within those work streams there might be further sub-dials for you know different initiatives in there which might become
more you know or i should say less decentralized the further down you go so that's where this you know hierarchical structure of our dao and you know different uh i guess different objectives or different goals for each one of those levels really comes into play where decentralization matters a lot at the top level and probably less so as there's less and less funds
to manage you know throughout each of those arms great insight adam and that makes sense you know obviously in the accounting department you're going to want to have some people with the qualifications and not just choosing at random because it's a doubt um in that you know on mondays lucy gets to do the accounting and on wednesdays is bob is i don't think that would work
very well now i'm curious on how decent has been approaching investing in you know the blockchain projects that are uh looking to revolutionize uh blockchain over the next five years how has the dow and and decent been focusing on certain types of investments whether it's in protocols gaming nfts or is it
sort of scattered around you know what's the thesis for investing for sure so the investing that we do at least right now is more focused on investing in our team to build new things so we're not at least as of right now we haven't made any outside investments um as a venture studio we're investing in building products
um that you know we've done research on and that we view as being important to the space um i can i can get into a couple of those uh if that makes sense yeah i would love to hear about it yeah for sure so um we're very heavy into development on a our first our first venture studio project our protocol which is called fractal
fractal is a it's a a dow governance framework so it's a framework for both creating and then managing and using dao structures much in the way that decent is attempting to build and model our own dao so it's been used as like a we've been dog food in it to our own organization as we've been building it
and using our own organization as kind of understanding what kind of features the mvp of fractal needs it's a very flexible framework so it allows for you know any kind of different hierarchical structure that one could imagine with any kind of you know permission schemas between those different levels super flexible on chain and the the front end for that project
has been built with different templates to support what you know we view and our market research has indicated are some uh different types of governance structures and organizational organizations that you know will probably be used uh to start it's it's built in a way that allows anybody to you know configure it in any way they want but you know we're definitely attempting
to to give the market what they're asking for first very cool i i think that's the perfect first example as obviously showcasing uh the value that that decent created within itself in being able to replicate that as more projects and and platforms are looking to incorporate functionalities of a dao i feel like there's going to need to be
some easier ways to do it than starting from scratch as the way that that decent has and being able to implement that easy into other projects yeah absolutely there's there's another another protocol that's in pretty heavy r d you know product discovery phase right now which we haven't uh started building yet but there's uh quite a few people scoping out what that
project's going to look like i think it's still a little bit underwrapped so i won't talk about it quite yet and then another program that we're working on right now is kind of the more community focused side of deciding what to build so you know as decent we are attempting to be as inclusive as we can with you know the decent community but we don't want to be
just like inundated with ideas on things to build we want to make sure that there's a good process for proposing ideas to the dao that you know should get funded and resources allocated to be built so we're finishing up a program right now to understand you know what that process looks like and to present that to our community so that we can have a good
inflow of quality ideas that have had a lot of research done to them um so that we can actually you know start to open up our our doors a bit more on understanding and deciding upon uh the things that the things that we build i also like that a lot i i feel like there could be a lot of low value proposals if there's not some kind of filtering system
how do you get you know the smartest minds to uh produce the best proposals and and not have them lost in the noise of all of this other uh uh options um and now exactly with that i'm curious on how there's a lot of different ways you could approach you know voting and determining where to spend the funds or you know what to move forward on um
you could do like a you know one person one vote or you could have a seniority hierarchy where you know the founders or people that have been there for longer have more uh of a say in the vote or you could just have like one coin per one vote um have you looked through this and is there a way that you're approaching it with decent yeah exactly that's that's definitely
one of the um one of the challenges that as a team we're attempting to figure out right now well yeah what's what's the best way to to vote on what gets built as of right now the plan is token voting so it very much is you know your stake in decent dictates your stake in making good decisions for decent's
future which is how we're allocating resources and deciding what to build there's definitely no reason why that can't change in the future but that's just how we've been approaching it right now good to know and uh what um as we move towards uh probably a lot more companies uh moving into like a dab structure do you see anything as a catalyst movement that
will sort of help more quickly convert at least to start blockchain companies before we get to you know all companies of of moving into dows know what will be that that key turning point that sort of makes everyone transition into this model is just it actually being better and easier yeah that's that's a that's a great question i i don't you know i don't know
if i can speak for other people other organizations other companies i know that for decent for ourselves um we've definitely identified and realized that this dow model this thou organizational structure is what's best for us and our goals right our goals are to curate the best people that we can find to work on the most important problems that we can
identify in this crypto space and to do so this dow model encourages the best minds to show up prove their value prove their worth and then take over you know key processes within this organization to build the best things the most efficient ways that they can um that's you know that's our goal as an organization so we've identified that this down model is the best way to
approach that from you know organizational decision making process um you know i think that if other organizations are also after the same thing which is you know um building the best things with the you know most efficient resource allocation that they can and you know founders and leaders are willing to like risk their own jobs to
uh you know at risk risk somebody else coming in and making a better proposal than they can about ways to run the run the organization or the sub organization that they're currently running then yeah great then dows are probably a good model for them um is it right for everybody probably not but definitely like even for those organizations that you know do identify
that it's a good structure for them there's plenty there's plenty to be done to make it actually more user-friendly or more efficient like even for us we've been going through this transition for the better part of the year and there's still plenty to do i mean we're building a lot of these tools and processes ourselves just to make it work for us um
and yeah i mean the the goal is that as we keep doing this we'll keep publishing what we're working on what we're building sharing our knowledge sharing our tools to make it easier for others to use us as a model as they go through without transition process amazing adam and thank you for that uh and and you're right i i feel like the current structure you know if you have
something to propose that might be better than your boss uh you sort of have the short end of the stick because the hierarchy just isn't set up for that but in in reality if you have the best uh proposal and value to to bring then you should be able to put that on the table and have everyone vote on it and and that's one of the reasons i really do like dao's
and i'm liking seeing them growing and moving into organizations where they need to be uh so i'm really looking forward to seeing how the whole industry grows into it and i feel like we're still really early because this is a multi-decade process so with decent and following along with the updates of the dow and seeing uh the the new functionalities that you guys
are coming out with and also potentially getting involved what is the best way for people to to learn more about decent yeah for sure so um a couple different ways i mean we have a twitter decent underscore dao um we have a we publish a blog on mirror.xyz i think you could find it under decent dash dial.eth our discord is great we do all of our work in the public on discord
so that's you know it's a it's a general community gathering place and it's also where engineering design product teams are doing their work so you can come join us there on discord discord.gigi that or slash decent dash dao and um i think that's that's probably about it with the socials um another way is if you're traveling to any of the ethereum events
throughout the rest of this year i think there's like four upcoming um m-con in denver uh devcon in bogota then there's a couple more in lisbon and sorry let me pull up forget i think there might be one more but we are hosting anti-events at all at the cities in all
of those conferences um for builders to have a place to uh just like get away from the noise and have a place to like work and network with each other and connect and share what they're working on in building they're not you know alcohol infused events they're they're they're filled they're you know filled with good food and and good drinks and good people talking and
working about what you know what they're working on and place to chill out um you can catch us there our i think our pinned tweet on on twitter right now has that schedule um and you can more about those different events and where they are if you join our discord very cool and i like that adam i will leave the the website and the social links as well in the description box below
thank you so much for your insights into dows and everything you're working on with decent sounds really cool i'm looking forward to following up again to hear the updates and how you're helping build the future of organizations and companies so thank you for that and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you ashton it's great to be here you
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