The Quick and Dirty Guide to DAOs For Busy People

I’ve been working with various DAOs for over a year, and I thought I’ve give a quick rundown of what they actually are.

DAO is an acronym for Distributed Autonomous Organization, and members of DAOs take each of those words very seriously.

Bitcoin’s development is actually a perfect example of a DAO, when Bitcoin’s creator left, a core group of people continued to develop Bitcoin. There was no CEO or defined roles, simply a team of people working towards a common vision.

There are examples of DAOs, they vary from experimenting with building Internet Reserve Currencies, to Digital Art Curators.

DAOs: The Good Stuff

Wikipedia has already proven the power of passionate contributors.

DAOs attract many passionate contributors, and (unlike Wikipedia) compensates them appropriately. Details like your chosen profession, location, age, etc. are all irrelevant, only your contribution matters. In fact, members can work in multiple parts of the DAO, across various disciplines too (e.g. a developer who also loves copy-writing)

Every part of a DAO is open and transparent to everyone else, even your compensation.

DAOs: The Bad Stuff

Product Market Fit is incredibly hard to find for startups, so the lack of clear leadership and direction lead to many DAOs “fizzling out”.

The lack of formal commitment like employment contracts, mean that it’s not uncommon for people working on projects to fade away as their interest wanes or real life interferes.

Conclusion

Like most things in web3, DAOs are not without their problems and they definitely struggle to motivate people at scale. But don’t be too quick to write them off. Like most technological advances a lot of these problems are a function of how new they are, and experiments are being run relentlessly.

If nothing else, they provide an excellent way for people who are looking for their next side hustle, switch careers or just to develop a new skill.

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