Everyone's watching
Building in public, crypto's not-so-secret weapon. By Daphne Kwon
Today’s issue was written by Flipside’s GM of DAOs, Daphne Kwon. For more Web3 insights directly from the Flipside executives, subscribe to Bears are for Building.
What if everyone in the world could see everything you did at work?
One of my mom’s favorite sayings is, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant!"
Wow, this post got personal fast. We haven’t even been introduced yet — I’m Daphne Kwon, and I’m the GM of DAOs at Flipside. Great to meet you.
I’ve served in several executive roles helping to build multiple organizations from strategic, financial, and operational angles. At Flipside, my team and I are doing that same work, but without the net of a safe, tried and true corporate structure.
We’re taking the job of spinning up sustainable, productive, valuable communities to be able to control their own destinies. Decentralizing them, giving them Autonomy, Organizing them.
“We’re helping to write the playbook on DAOs,” I was told on my first day.
Easier said than done.
Which brings us back to the question - would you choose to have everyone see everything you do at work?
Having someone breathing down your neck every minute at work would be terrible. Thankfully, DAOs don’t go quite that far.
In decentralized organizations, the standard of “building in public” is critical. In order to have a community take responsibility for everyone, transparency is not just an important word you stick in a mission statement. It’s the bedrock foundation of the structure - newly enabled by blockchain. DAOs apply an “open-source” mentality applied to organizations, not just software. Important output, discussion, and planning should be recorded publicly.
My old boss once said to me, "Don't do anything you wouldn't want to see in a headline in the New York Times."
Generally, I think the takeaway is, having eyes on your actions creates a stronger outcome.
In DAOs, "Building in Public" is our sunlight.
You don’t need to share your every waking thought, but whenever relevant to the DAO, you put your work, conversations, development, and discussions out in public.
Tech, product, biz dev, HR, finance. Nothing is sacred.
It means that you invite new thoughts, let your own be tested, and develop together.
As a colleague put it, "It means as a business, you've made yourself vulnerable."
And yet, I’m convinced the degree to which they “build in public” is correlated to the strength of a DAO.
It creates a more informed and engaged user, and builds trust. One of the easiest ways to investigate a DAO is to join their discord server where all these conversations happen.
(Sometimes getting in there feels a little...overcomplicated...but hey, remember dial-up?)
As an example of building in public, we recently made available our bylaws (a normally internal document) for voting by the DAO as part of our incorporation process.
But rather than explain it all in my first post, I wanted to invite you to come check out the MetricsDAO Discord and get a taste of DAO building from the inside.
In my next posts, we’ll dive deeper into MetricsDAO and explore the challenges and opportunities of DAO building, but for now,
let the sunshine in.
_
If you want more executive perspectives on building in public in Web3 tech, finance, NFTs, DAOs, blockchain, etc., subscribe to the Flipside newsletter Bears are for Building.