Decent presents The Builder’s Journey podcast, featuring intimate discussions with the builders behind the most exciting and innovative protocols, products, and communities in Web3.
On how a charity NFT project led him and his co-founder down the Web3 rabbit hole…
So after our second company was acquired, my co-founder Matt and I were experimenting with two different projects in China to see what we wanted to do next. We certainly were excited about web three, but we hadn't really delved deeply into it before. So we worked on a project that let you work with a set of VCs and entrepreneurs in New York City, to mint a set of redeemable NFTs. So for example, a VC could be like, this NFT represents half an hour of a zoom call to me. We did that and raised a bunch of money, 100% of the money we raised went to charity.
That also helped us get our hands deeper into writing our first smart contract, and spend more time with various token communities. And that's really the part where it got us particularly excited when we started to look around and see all the cool things that people are doing. Me being the organizational design nerd, I spent a ton of time thinking about, what different pieces of structure and processes can we optimize? How do we push decisions to the edge? How do we build autonomous teams within this startup structure? How do we align mission and goals? So when we were starting to interact with various DAOs and token communities, we realized that with smart contracts and tokens, we can take some of these ideas much further away than what we were doing before.
On important lessons from his previous two companies…
I think the big lessons that I carry with me from those two experiences are, even though we are working with Blockchain technology and there are a lot of things that we can dive into - there are a lot of technical difficulties, really interesting technical problems - but what we try very, very hard to do is to kind of really think through our customers' problems and not get sucked in by the complexity of the technology.
His advice for other founders…
I would highly recommend that you if you can find the right one, to have at least one co-founder, if not two. The startup journey, it’s just lonely, and difficult, and you know, all the things you watch on “The Social Network” are not quite real. So I think having someone that can truly share your burden that cares as much as you do about the project really helps.
I think the biggest challenge for me as a founder besides that is trying to figure out when to let go, and how to step back. When I was at x.ai particularly, I easily worked 100 hours/week consistently. And looking back, I feel like that's a lot of time, it is not healthy. And also, it actually hurts some of the more strategic thinking. So now even though I still work quite hard, I try very hard not to work too many hours, and I really dedicate time to stepping back and thinking about the larger picture because it's so easy to find work. There's always more work to do as a founder. But I think finding the right type of work to work on and the high value high impact work is the most difficult piece.
On the quickest way to explain Charmverse…
You can think of us as a Web3 Notion. We help token communities to work on a day-to-day basis. Usually post-token, so once you launch a token or launch a set of NFTs, the next thing you should think about is signing up for a Charmverse account.
The type of problem that we solve for communities is around membership management, collaboration, engaging the community, creating better governance through a more collaborative proposal process. And then finally, really helping individual members build up a Web3 identity, or a Web3 LinkedIn as an example.
On the problems Charmverse can solve…
I guess the biggest challenge that we're trying to solve for our users is for us to understand everything so that they don't have to worry. They can simply enjoy an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand place, to work together and collaborate and do what they do best. May it be an investment DAO, an impact DAO, or decentralized science. Really unlocking the capability of our token communities without all the friction that comes with being in Web3, should be easier, not harder.
[One] problem that we can solve is that within the community, members don't quite know each other. So we have just soft-launched a member directory, that enables our members to really get to know each other, and to share information about themselves. But also it has a permission system in place, so if there's slightly more sensitive information, you can give that information only to a particular role to access.
And the ones that it can’t…
The other piece that we think we can help, but the world has to change a little bit, is this idea of governance not quite working enough in a DAO. One of the symptoms is single-digit percentage voting in different proposals within some of the larger DAOs. Not enough democracy, not enough decentralization within the DAO, even though that's what it's supposed to be.
I think that structurally, that's a difficult challenge. If you look at almost any kind of voting mechanism, may it be local government, the US presidential election, etc, voter turnout is just low. I think it's more of a human nature problem, and less about people not caring about the organization. So I think the world needs to move so that it’s more small teams who trust and know each other. And then we can build tools in supporting their day-to-day work.
On the biggest differentiators between Notion and Charmverse…
In product, we like to talk about a “wow moment” right? The first time where you're like, Wow, this is something different, this is solving a real problem. I think the first couple of wow moments in Charmverse is that first, you get to log in with your wallet or your Discord ID without ever giving us your email address. Very quickly after that, the second wow moment is that you can use your token or your NFT as your membership. So we provide a token gating function so that you can actually do pretty complex role assignment logic.
And then we have a much more extensive membership management. So that’s going far beyond what you see in Notion or any other tools out there, being able to get a sense of who all members in the DAO or their communities are, what are their interests? What are their skills? And other information that will be helpful in building up a true membership.
One design principle that we have which is quite different than Notion is that even though we are seeking to provide this unified experience for the user, we want to power this experience with many of the awesome Web3 platforms and protocols out there. You know, if you're paying you can pay with Gnosis Safe. If you are creating proposals, you can send the proposals to Snapshot. If you're looking at someone's profile, some of the profile data is powered by Deep DAO. So in the coming months, we certainly have quite a large set of integrations planned in bringing more other platforms and protocols into our system to make it even more robust and offer more capability that is beneficial to the Web3 communities.
On his day-to-day responsibilities as co-founder…
Because I have an awesome co-founder who takes on the part of all things tech and managing the tech team, which really enabled me to spend a lot more time in community outreach, talking to various partners, and also doing product development. Particularly when it comes to partnership integrations and how to think through our longer-term roadmap of what we're building.
On how the learning process has been for him…
I must have spoken to at least 50 DAOs before starting Charmverse. So I will say that we had a decent sense of what some of the high-level challenges are. But I would say that we definitely learned even more, as we have a product on the market, being used by different teams, different DAOs. Or pitching to a particular DAO and getting a rejection saying, you know, maybe we will stick with Notion, or maybe we’ll do this other thing. I think that those learnings continue to help us in figuring out what we should be building. Because actually, some of this knowledge is only learned when there's something for people to react to. It's really hard if you give someone a blank piece of paper, and ask them to, draw out their ideal whatever. But when you can draw something that could even be 60%, it’s a lot easier for someone to react and say, I like this, I don't like that, I want this, I don't want that. So definitely a lot more learnings over the past months, as we have been in the market.
On his thoughts on the Ethereum merge…
I mean, I'm sad that my ETH didn't go up! But I actually think it’s a great thing for being a builder in the space where we are actually only building for utility. Everything we do is about how can we really enable the future of work and the future of community. Having the underlying technology, the underlying mechanism to be cheaper, more affordable, and more scalable, only paves the way to truly bring blockchain to the masses and not just a small group of people who are excited about crypto.
Check out the full episode of The Builder’s Journey with Alex Poon and be sure to follow for new episodes every Tuesday!
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