A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a group organized around a specific mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain. DAOs themselves are just organizational structures that control shared economic resources and/or protocol rules, and each DAO can be different in how it operates. Some DAOs are private and others are open for anyone to join and contribute. For some DAOs, active contributors can get paid by the DAO for their work.

"Come for the tool, stay for the network" is a classic strategy for bootstrapping social networks. It aimed to solve a hard problem: how do you convince people to join your social network when there's nobody else to socialize with?

If media companies are record labels and creators are rock stars then the audience are fans — and that introduces an entirely new business opportunity. Media, like music, can only thrive when the audience and the creator travel down a path together, giving each other the opportunity to define one another. It’s a two-way street, not a top-down dictum. But what happens when a creator or artist gets so big that their audience starts building products on top of their work?