Building At The Edges

David Phelps is the co-founder of JokeDAO, a governance platform for decentralized, bottom-up governance. In a recent essay collaboration on Not Boring, David takes a stand against consensus in DAO governance. He argues that forking — more specifically, contrarian opinions — presents a more interesting opportunity for governance innovation. Jess and David touch briefly on the value of community cu...

Pet3rpan is in an investor at 1kx, an early-stage crypto fund. DAOs have a strategy problem, conflating decentralization with structurelessness. In practice, Pet3rpan sees an opportunity to start with governance constraints and then build toward governance minimization. Decentralized coordination and community building are developable skills. And yet there is no replacement for the experience of r...

Julia Rosenberg is the co-founder and chief pod officer of Metropolis (formerly Orca). Metropolis is the trustware layer for scaling socialware: pods. Pods build on the embedded socialware within small groups of people, creating an automated container for coordination. Jess and Julia explore current governance experiments, both successes and challenges. Recent DAO shakeups demonstrate an over-inde...

Jango is a developer at Juicebox, a protocol for community fundraising. Web3 coordination often exists at the intersection of large treasuries. Innovative means of capital allocation is one of the most promising crypto design spaces. Jess and Jango discuss automated funding mechanisms, the use case for frequent proposal and discourse periods, and how this could unlock more DAO experiments.

Joy and I discussed how her mindsets from her time as a musician inform her current work as a founder in web3, her philosophy on what a member-owned apparel community will look like, her approach to good growth, and the way they are iterating with their community as they bring their physical products to market and their digital tokens to community with their upcoming NFT launch. This episode has s...

In this episode, Nicole speaks with Deana and Natasha from the Boys Club founding team. Natasha and Deana shared a multifaceted look at the evolution of taking a DAO From 0 to 1, including the genesis of a leadership team, the work behind their first membership NFT launch, and lessons learned from putting their first proposal through governance. As Boys Club moves into its next stage of developmen...

For our final episode of Season 2, we return to web3 first principles: community tokens create yet-unrealized opportunities within an immeasurable design space at the intersection of culture, ownership, and value creation. The realization of these opportunities is inevitable — but the timeline and cadence remains unknown. Derek Schloss is a partner at Collab+Currency and a regular guest on Proof w...

"The next generation of internet protocols and platforms and applications will be owned and operated by their users." Mason Nystrom is an investment partner at Variant Fund, and he – like Seed Club – firmly believes in this bright version of our collective future. In this episode, Jess and Mason explore emerging trends and challenges in web3, and what they mean for community token networks. Govern...

In this episode, Nicole speaks with Bas Grasmeyer and Jeremy Grinberg from the COLORS DAO founding team. Colors is a global community of creatives supporting each other across disciplines, building off Colors Studio, the global music talent showcase, and discovery community. Bas and Jeremy discussed the importance of building cadence, basic structure, and predictability in a community and how that...

We've got a special episode of Club Pod with Seed Club Co-Creators Jess Sloss and Nicole d'Avis. Jess and Nicole recorded the episode late on a very hot summer Friday to bring us a comprehensive exploration of what we can expect for SC05. We hear about the thoughtful, significant changes to the Accelerator (shoutout to interval training), the updated selection process (double shoutout to the Accel...

The core value at Seed Club is our network, which traces its origin to its nascent days in crypto. Wong Joon Ian is one of Seed Club's earliest co-conspirators. He's a shining example of the "thoughtfully" in lets f*cking thoughtfully go – integrating historical insights from the physical world into the high-velocity design space of web3 community-building. Joon runs Amplified, a web3-native premi...

In this episode, We spoke with Gabriel Tumlos from the Mochi founding team. Mochi is a team-based goal-setting game focused on collective accountability and growth. Gabriel shares how the idea for Mochi evolved through multiple crypto cycles and the different approaches to building community market fit he is currently exploring. Mochi is experimenting with in-game economies in novel ways and leani...

The questions motivating Arkive are not distinct to the needs of a decentralized museum — they're universally resonate considerations for anyone building community-owned networks in web3. Tom McLeod is the executive director of Arkive, the self-proclaimed "last museum" and simultaneous first-ever decentralized physical museum. Arkive's design space exists at the intersection of physical objects, d...

In this episode, we sit down with Matt Medved, co-founder of NFT NOW. We talk about his experience building media brands in the legacy world, having worked at Billboard and Spin Magazine, and how that has informed what he is doing with NFT NOW stepping into the web3 space. We talk about how DAOs and communities can be effective media organizations. And how to build great founding teams and culture...

Nicole d'Avis sits down with Jonathan Mann, aka songadayman, aka the founder of SongaDAO. It turns out they have been in the same music/crypto circles for 5+ years, on similar tracks, though just connected in the last year, so it was cool to look back at shared history. They explored the genesis of SongaDAO, including the early inspiration for the DAO, as well as its start in the last bear market...

Today we have Seed Club's very own Ben Jacobs on the podcast. Ben was one of the earliest contributors at Seed Club. In this episode, we talk about his inception and involvement in SC. We talk about some big lessons that we've learned. Some contrarian points of view. This conversation feels like one that Ben and Jess would often have which is trying to create space to broadly make sense of the wor...

In this episode, we sit down with Steve Klebanoff. Steve is a developer. He's worked at 0x protocol. He's been involved with several NFT experiments in the generative artspace and is an advisor to Artblocks and, most recently, a core contributor at Party DAO. We talked about his early days getting in the space and what he found so appealing about Ethereum. About what enamored him with generative a...

Today we have Brian Flynn, CEO, and co-founder of Rabbit Hole. Brian is a dear friend who helped inspire the birth of Seed Club. In this episode, we dig into reputation, DAO tools, what we get right, and what we get wrong. How do we ultimately scale DAOs from 50 people collaborating with each other to 5,000?  We spent a bunch of time talking about Nouns DAO. The bull case, the bear case. We also t...

Today we're joined by Devin Lewtan, the co-founder of Mad Realities, the world's first interactive dating show where the community decides what happens. We get into Devin's educational background and journey from creating NYU girls roasting tech guys on the clubhouse app to building Mad Realities. We explore the potential and value there is in creative commons projects. We talk about their goal to...

Today we are joined by generative audio-visual artist DEAFBEEF. In this episode, we get into how DEAFBEEF got into creative coding and making generative art. What makes gen art so special, especially when paired with the blockchain. We dive into lessons from zero to one and how he has navigated that. And finally, we learn about Frank Zappa's role in his life.

Today we are joined by Stani Kulechov. Who is the founder of Aave and the Lens protocol. Stani has been a builder for years in the Ethereum ecosystem and today we explore the value of constraints when building products. How to create open permissive contribution opportunities in DAOs. The role narratives play when building products. Why we need web3 social and the economic business models that cou...

Today we have Joey DeBruin on the podcast. Joey is the co-founder of Backdrop and has been a long-time conversation thought partner of Jess Sloss. We talk about Backdrop's initial intention when building and has that has evolved. The idea of impermanence when building web3 products and platforms vs. web2 platforms keeps users locked—the next season of tokenized communities and what incentive struc...

Today we bring you a conversation with Tina He, product designer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Station. We got into some big topics: reputation, governance, token economic models, and Station. A web3 data toolkit focused on showcasing contributors' history of contributions and making that visible to DAOs.

Kristen Stone is our guest on episode two of the Seed Club podcast. Kristen was an early employee at Coinbase, has recently spent her time at Balancer Labs, and works at Seed Club on operations. In this conversation, we get into some of Kristen's hard-fought lessons being the 50th employee at Coinbase, about her early time in crypto since 2014, how Jess redefines his role at Seed Club and the impo...

Welcome to season two, episode one of the Seed Club podcast. In this episode, Jess Sloss sits down with Mike Dudas, Instigator, and creator at LinksDAO, a DAO aiming to buy and operate a golf course. We learn about the Links DAO origin story and, how they operate given the regulatory grey market of NFTs that have utility, why we need more DAOs rather than DAO tooling.  And what DAOs need to break...