From Corporate to Crypto: Why I quit my day job to work at a DAO

For my entire adult life I have been studying humans at work. There's just one problem: work sucks. Traditional working environments have become unnecessarily hierarchical and painfully political. Many organizations want to go faster. They want to be adaptive and agile. They want to leverage their network of teams and become the type of organization that can stand the test of time. Unfortunately, the present systems our traditional work institutions operate under is not to designed to do these things. This has always been frustrating to me.

As an Industrial Organizational Psychologist much of time has been spent studying theories of what an optimal work environment might look like but the reality is our current institutions and structures are incentivized to fail. In other words, we design work to suck and that is on us.

Okay so works sucks but what is my actual point I'm trying to make and how does it relate to DAOs? To answer this question we have to step back for a moment and cover some basics of Web3 and crypto and what it means to operate as a DAO.

Overview

First off, WTF even is a DAO? For many of my readers this concept may be foreign so some explaining is in order. A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. They are self-organized internet communities with a shared interest and bank account. These DAOs operate with a more decentralized version of decision rights than what you would see in traditional organizations and to some extent function as permissionless work systems.

A DAO is an internet community with a shared interest and bank account

Most DAOs leverage some form of democratic voting process to make decision making more distributed and less reliant on a centralized few. This type of organizational structure can be more inclusive and promote better information flow, a precursor to innovation but that is not the only superpowers DAOs unlock. What is the real game changer is these DAOs leverage the blockchain and crypto to power both their infrastructure and financial economies.

I could talk about DAOs forever and perhaps will do a deep dive in a future post but for now this high-level description should hopefully suffice. This post is more about my journey to DAOs and why my outlook on what work is suppose to be is so aligned to the ethos the crypto community represents. If you want to learn more about DAOs I recommend the curated reading list by a16z as well as the State of The DAO newsletter, which I am a writer for.

With a very basic, albeit unclear, understanding of DAOs we need to get philosophical for a moment to really get at the heart of why I believe DAOs are the real future of work. You see, our traditional Web2 perspective on the future of work is all wrong. The future of work will not be about work at all. It will be about community, culture, storytelling, and human relationships. The more AI that comes along and automates work the more important work that only humans can do will become. Humans build culture. That's what we do and Web3 gives us the ability to make a living from it.

Let's dive into a couple key points before I explain my personal motivation for making such a risky career move during such an uncertain point in history.

1. Web3 is a paradigm shift for how we think about what it means to create value

Alright so we have a basic description of a DAO but what makes this different from a traditional organization in Web2? To answer this question we need to understand what makes Web3 different from Web2. Where Web2 is focused on consumption and exploiting workers to the benefit of a corporation, Web3 is about empowering creators to operate as self-sovereign workers that are community funded rather than corporate dependent. The beauty of Web3 is that it aligns the incentives of the user and the creator. This has powerful implications for business.

The beauty of Web3 and crypto is that it aligns the incentives of the user and the creator

In Web2 many products are free to use because you are the product. Traditional technology companies generate profit by selling your data to 3rd parties and advertising companies. In Web3 you are paid to use the product because you are the one generating value for the platform. This alignment of incentives is made possible by the gamification of monetization models using cryptonomics. In Web2 your personal data is currency. In Web3 culture is the currency and crypto is what makes it possible to monetize in a worker neutral way. Worker neutral meaning profit can be created without exploitation of labor.

In Web2 data is currency. In Web3 culture is currency.

By now I hope you can see just how truly different of a paradigm shift Web3 philosophy is. Rather than sitting in a board room thinking about how to make profits for your shareholders you need to start thinking about how you can use DAOs to build community. You need to think less about competition and more about stewardship. These new types of DAOs will allow workers to leave traditional organizations and go earn a living off doing things they already love to do because there will be a community which finds value in it.

Your hobby will no longer be a passion you use as an escape from work but a way to capture economic value so you do not have to work. Web2 companies will have to become Web3 companies or watch as all their talent migrate to this new alternative work arrangement. It will be hard to convince a person to come into an office to do something they do not really like that much when they could just make money hanging out playing crypto games with their friends.

Your hobby will no longer be a passion you use as an escape from work but a way to capture economic value so you do not have to work.

2. DAOs are digital communities that leverage the power of cryptoeconomic networks

Many may challenge DAOs are no different than professional working groups or special interest communities that already exist today. That it is a fair critique but it is completely wrong and a misrepresentation of what it means to build a business in Web3. DAOs are able to leverage network effects in ways traditional organizations cannot. These network effects are made possible because of cryptoeconomics, which provides a way to gamify business models to encourage value exchange networks to form but this is more than just about new business models.

Web3 creates opportunities for a new paradigm within economic and social systems to emerge. It gives you the potential to create monetization mechanisms that encourage behavior changes traditional monetization strategies have struggled to achieve. It allows you to create wealth without exploitation of labor and reward your users in the process.

Cryptoeconomics and monetization strategies in DAOs is a key differentiating factor that make them different from traditional professional working groups and special interest communities. Some of these concepts are difficult to understand and I am not going to be the best person to explain them. I recommend a quick watch of this excellent talk by Ali Yahya on crypto business models and to read through some of the other resources I referenced earlier on in the article.

Alright, I think the previous two sections does a decent job at setting the stage for the remainder of the post.

Let's go back to my original thesis: We designed work to suck.

Why I quit my job to work in crypto

By now you probably have realized traditional work environments have been rather frustrating for me. I enjoy innovation, adaptation, and flexibility in my work. Something traditional organizations rarely offer. More recently I've desired community, connection, and purpose in my work which are virtually nonexistent in the corporate world.

In many ways I felt trapped. I needed to work because I needed to live and I could not live without work. This felt backwards to me. It seemed like feedback loop of dread that I could not control. So I decided to figure out how to take back control. That journey led me to the crypto community and the decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies that came with it. Once becoming more familiar with how these DAO workers were using DeFi to take back their financial freedom. I was hooked and knew I had found what I was suppose to be doing in this world.

So without further ado here are the three main reasons I quit my day job to work in crypto:

  • I wanted to be a self-sovereign worker and have the ability to live a life truly freeing

To be a self-sovereign worker is a term that is not commonly used and you may have even never heard of it. What does it actually mean? In honesty, I am not quite sure but I can give you an example which depicts what I believe it means to be a self-sovereign worker. When I quit my job at Deloitte Consulting I knew things like health benefits, pay stability, and retirement funds were still essential to my financial well-being but how would I obtain these things at DAOs?

In the DAO world I get paid in tokens that many DAOs offer as a native currency for that particular DAO's economic environment. In some scenarios I get paid in ETH or USDC but in all cases commerce is taking place on-chain and so my proof of income can be somewhat difficult to document. Enter the Opolis Commons which is a DAO for DAO workers and provides payroll, health benefits, and a community that can support you in your transition from a corporate worker to DAO worker. I now have insurance and payroll just like a regular worker would. So I guess you can say a self-sovereign worker is a an individual who does not rely on any one institution for employment but relies on the power of community networks as a place to do commerce. This definition will need to be improved as my thinking evolves but for now I think you get the point.

The era of the self-sovereign worker is upon us and now is the time to learn how to become one.

  • I wanted to make work better for humans but traditional work was too broken to be fixed

I already mentioned this point several times earlier but it is worth reiterating: work is designed to suck. If you talk to any Industrial Organizational Psychologist in the world, and I mean any, they will tell you work is broken and that organizations do not seem to know how to fix it. This is because the norms enforced by Web2 incentivize a winner-take-all style of work that is governed by institutional structures instead of guided by community values.

When I was working in applied consulting my specialty was organizational network analysis and organization design strategy research. I had the opportunity to co-lead the Bersin by Deloitte High-impact Organization Design (high-level overview), which is still one of the largest industry studies on organizational strategy to date. In this research study, we talked about moving away from the profit mindset and towards the purpose mindset. We talked about the evolution of business structures with the assertion that traditional organizations needed to migrate from a rigid business design to flexible design. In many ways, the ideas in the organization design study were correct. It was the organizations who had it wrong.

Working in DAOs gives me an opportunity to apply my training in Industrial Organizational Psychology to a worker context that is actually flexible enough to change and is not hindered by the traditional financial systems of Web2.

  • I see DAOs as the biggest opportunity since the .com boom and did not want to miss out

I first got involved in this space when I heard about BanklessDAO which is a media and culture digital organization focused on helping 1 billion people go bankless using decentralized finance technologies - I was sold. After joining BanklessDAO part-time I began to dabble and learn more about the crypto industry. After a few months I realized it was the opportunity of a lifetime and so I left my day job. I quit without much hesitation at all and while my income has been unstable I am fully confident I made the right decision.

The DAO landscape is already a trillion dollar industry and is just getting started. Just look at the growing number of DAOs in the ecosystem already.

Conclusion

I am on a mission to become the bridge between Industrial Organizational Psychology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. DAOs need IO Psychology and IO Psychology needs DAOs. My goal is to create space for new conversations at the intersection of DAO work and IO Science.

That is why I started talentDAO and have been building up a community of researchers who are interested in pioneering with me in this new frontier.

If you are as interested about these new types of digital organizations and decentralized communities as much as I am then please join me as we pioneer a new type of a research model on a new type of organization.

We are growing fast and already have several studies underway with some prominent DAOs in the industry. Join us in pioneering the real future of work and lets help 1 billion people become the self-sovereign workers they deserve to be.

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