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      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 0.0,
        "end": 0.0,
        "transcript": "For today's seminar, I am very, very pleased to introduce my friend, Camille Cannon, who's also someone who, I've admired a great deal and collaborated with and asked questions for of, all the time, over the years, across various iterations of her work, which, which in various ways, have explored how to build more accountable, ethical, democratic organizations in our lives. Yeah, I first met her when she was at Purpose, which is an organization that's been exploring strategies for enabling what they call steward ownership. So different kinds of ownership structures in companies that allow them to really center their mission above short term profits and and the usual stuff that kind of ruins our world in all sorts of ways. Her work with purpose has been covered in the New Yorker. I shared the article in the Slack for that. It's really worth checking out. Since then, she's been involved in, for instance, supporting the transition of Kickstarter into a more distributed ownership model through, you know, emerging technologies. And that kind of work has led her into a new project, a consultancy called APRA that's working on governance primarily in web three. So the work that Camille's been doing is integrally connected with the kind of things we're thinking about in MediGov when we explore strategies for enabling people to be more empowered in their digital lives, have more access to the to opportunities for for collective governance. Camille's gonna share a bit about her recent work in in apiary, share some lessons, and, you know, we'll have, as usual, ample time for discussion. Camille, take it away."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 15.0,
        "end": 15.0,
        "transcript": "Cool. Thanks, Nathan. I will take any excuse to be on a Zoom room with Nathan. So I am very pleased to be here. I'm Camille. Thank you all for for tuning in. As Nathan said, I'm the cofounder of an organization called Apiary. And, Nathan did a a very good job of sort of teeing up, where I came from with purpose. I really had the privilege of exploring alternative ownership governance and financing structures with companies and communities and had this, like, firsthand view into how people come together to effectively define and design systems for collective decision making now and in future. One of the profound things about the work that we did with purpose is that the ownership structures are intergenerational by design, meaning that they aren't intended to be sold. And so I got to see this context switch of what happens when you give people today the responsibility to really think about what are what are the systems, processes, and structures that we need to do this well today and think about it in future. And I made the the move into, like, Web three in a digital context really out of curiosity of how can some of these learnings be applied within larger, more distributed systems and at a greater scale. It's been a really interesting process. One of the sort of there's what's that TS Eliot poem of, like, we will go forth and then come back and find we were in the same spot with just more information. That feels like the last year of doing this work in web three. And a lot of that learning is about how relational fundamentally we are within organizations and institutions and how much, systems of governance need to be underpinned by culture and context and a shared understanding in order for them to be successful. So I wanna talk a little bit today about the process that we've undertaken with RadWorks over the last six months, and RadWorks was formerly known as Radical. It is Radical is now a product, and so this is gonna get a little confusing and differentiating between these organizations. But Rad Works is the DAO that that funded both Radical and Drips to open source projects. And our engagement with them began at the beginning of this year with a qualitative research analysis and assessment of their community. So we spoke with 30 different stakeholders from investors to direct contributors, to developers, to users of the platform, really to understand what's working for you, what's not working for you, what do you wish you could say, what are you confused about, how are you prevented or encouraged to contribute in the success of the system? Yeah. Thank you, Nathan. And the there were two kind of key learnings that came out of this. One was the organizational dynamics between having two product teams and a DAO that was making decisions was very confusing, and that led ultimately to this brand and organizational split. We're now RadWorks as the DAO that funds two separate product organizations, DRIPs and Radical. The other key outcome of the research was that people really didn't understand what the purpose of this whole thing was, and they were having a very difficult time orienting themselves as contributors as and as decision makers around this shared purpose because it wasn't there. And in many ways, it wasn't there because RadWorks as a DAO didn't exist before. So, like, what was there to be there? It had this organic evolution from two founders. They launched a token, and then they were like, well, I guess we have a DAO too. How do we make sense of this? And we undertook a process to define that purpose for them and to help coordinate the community and ultimately inform operations and governance using that found the purpose as a foundation for making those decisions. And that process looked like about three months. We gathered the key leaders and stakeholders of these various organizations together. And the objective was and I can share it in the the chat. The objective was to document in a high level way what the purpose was now and that could be oriented around in future. We did this iterative loop with community members where we created a first draft with those key leaders, and then APA area as a third party, excuse me, organization went out and gathered feedback from community members who had participated in the research that we had done earlier in the year. And the goal there was to make sure that there really was community authorship in this process. We were balancing this need to have efficiency in how we were designing it and not have sort of design by committee, but also feeling very strongly that those who were responsible for the community had significant input on the outcome of this process. We selected those people basically based off of who were the dissenters and who were the the, like, proponents of the organization throughout our research to try to balance those and make sure that we got input from across the board, but really from these, like, two sectors that we felt like were really important to have key key say in the process. And and then we we we ratified it. We had this ceremony together and, the link that I shared, there's an ongoing ceremony around people signing this purpose or constitution. The approach and framework oh, I should say, because it's important. Their purpose is very important. This is generally not only an interesting case in how to, you know, support a community in designing its purpose or constitution, but also RadWorks is a radical organization and an incredibly aligned group of human beings who have really decided to come together to do something really, really ambitious. And so RadWorks' purpose is to fund new, resilient, permissionless technologies to cultivate in independent freedom. They focus on funding and supporting the creation of censorship resistant and decentralized technologies that empower builders and creators to collaborate. And I think what's what's interesting, just as a side note in the framing of that, is this not only gave a purpose, but it also kind of breathe life into the DAO as an organization. If prior to this process and clarification process, it wasn't really clear what the DAO was doing. Like, there was no notion that, like, RadWorks is funding. This is the purpose of this organization to do this thing in practice. And so as a result, before, it was kind of doing everything all at once. It was supporting the product leads. It was, you know, working to, like, manage the community in more granular ways. It was all over the board, and this really has concretized, like, this is what we do and this is what we don't do, and it's had a massive operational impact. The indeed. And so the the sort of the framework or or approach to designing this was to keep it really high level in the sense that we don't really know. This is emergent technology, two young product orgs, a DAO that literally just found its purpose. This will evolve over time. Right? And by this, I mean, the organization, the people who lead it, and its approach to doing its work will evolve. And so thinking about this purpose statement, our objective was to define the really high level, elements, values, and approach to the work that we believe was going to remain consistent, that would provide guardrails around the organization, both with the intent of not having it change that much over time and with the intent of having the language remain applicable as those changes took place. And then the yeah. I'll pause there for a second. But I think the interesting part around this process is, like, it it created a lot of momentum within the community. It was very impactful to have the community feel like, hey. We we we shared this insight that this was missing, and there was a consequence of us having shared that insight. The process was successful, I think, in the sense that the outcome is very clear. The community felt bought in. And the interesting work now begins in that with this purpose, there's a lot of reflecting on what are the operational dynamics and approaches that are aligned or misaligned with this purpose. And so as I shared before, there's this real clear delineation between what we do and what we don't do now. And on the governance side, there's a lot of reflection happening around now with this purpose defined and question becomes, are the right people in the room in decision making, both informally off chain in conversation and formally on chain, are the right people there to actually steward this purpose, which is not really about just maximizing the value of a token. It's actually about affecting free and open source technology going forward. And how do we think about the balance of that from the power side and how we approach future funding decisions, from a from a more operational perspective? Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 30.0,
        "end": 30.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. That's a that's a great start. Bobby, could you, get us started? Looks like you have a a question to, to lead us off."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 45.0,
        "end": 45.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for for the presentation. I'm sorry I was, a little bit late, but, super fascinating, to to look through it. And I was wondering exactly what you were just talking about too about, yeah, connecting that high level to the more operational and what did that look like, and if you could share any examples. Yeah. I think that a lot of what happened here was actually more on the side of the organizational divide and splitting up the product teams from the DAO. A lot of the confusion from the operational side was, like, who do who this is all one soup, but I'm on this developer team. But over there, there's that developer team working on a totally different product, but we're trying to collaborate. We're not really sure why we're collaborating and what unifies us. And so on a day to day granular level, I think that the product orgs having their own identity, their own set of leaders, and their own decision making processes really clustered operationally within each of those teams has solved an enormous amount of the, like, granular day to day confusion that happened. I think what's happened on a higher level, that has connected that is that now the two leaders of each product org, when they think about decisions, whether that decision be we're going to go seek more funding from RadWorks or we need RadWorks to make an update on our protocol, the perspective and presentation of that information is viewed through the lens of, okay. We just defined this purpose. How is this fulfilling this or not? And so I think in that way, it is it is successful and that it is being operationalized at a level up from the day to day and that the the folks who are really leading those organizations are responsible for making that translation to their teams. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 60.0,
        "end": 60.0,
        "transcript": "Chase has a question. Give Chase a moment to unmute if you wanna speak it, but I think earlier, Chase was just doing chat. So maybe, otherwise, I'll read it. Chase asks, how large is the DAO, and how is voting power distributed? How does this affect power and influence for the DAO?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 75.0,
        "end": 75.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Great question. So in terms size is a funny thing. In terms of market cap, I think the market cap of RadWorks token is currently at, like, 68,000,000. I the distribution of that is really hard to measure at the moment. And so I'm gonna, like, hand wave in my response of, like, we don't entirely know, how how distributed that is from a participant perspective. The delegation of those tokens remains really low, and that's a big chunk of the work that we're currently working on is how do we increase the amount of of tokens that have been delegated and the diversity among those delegates? And then how does this in it has a massive effect on power and influence for the DAO, like a huge one. The, you know, the founders still own or hold a majority of the of the tokens between the two of them. There's a whale that came on the scene a couple of months ago that has influenced the dynamics. There's a bunch of and I think this has been one of the main pain points for the community. When they launched the token, unsurprisingly, a bunch of financially motivated investors came in who have no context, who, like, kinda create a bunch of spam and noise and all of the chats and really distract from, what is the unifying principle among the community. It's a cautionary tale of, like, when to launch your token and why, and how to do that. But, part of the work that we are doing with Radworks now is to figure out how can we create, a power distribution or community engagement or reputation system that more equitably distributes power among those who are contributing to value creation and what does that look like in the context of a DAO that has already launched its token and and has, you know, power dynamics that are kind of preset as conditions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 90.0,
        "end": 90.0,
        "transcript": "There was a moment there where you said own and then you transitioned to hold, and, you're talking about tokens. And that made me curious just about your reflections on, on the relationship between this kind of work and what you were doing before purpose when you were dealing primarily with, like, ownership of shares of stock. You know, the old the older conception about what an organization is, Still trying to innovate on that and and transform it in some regards, but using the tools of, you know, the legal structure. You know, we talked a lot of in during that period about, like, you know, questions we need to ask, you know, that we wish judges would rule on, you know, and, and, and and sorting out the law. Here, you're working with this new technology where, you know, ownership holding what what are we even dealing with? You know, all kinds of questions come up. I'm just curious about how much you see this the context of the DAO introducing new challenges and opportunities or whether you find yourself, you know, to some degree, like, coming back to just the same old lessons. Like, is there is there anything new that this is opening up the more you get into it?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 105.0,
        "end": 105.0,
        "transcript": "I think it's harder in a lot of ways. A couple of key ones is that in the work with purpose, particularly on the corporate side, those organizations usually many, if not decades, years old. And so all of the issues of product market fit and, like, baseline coordination and collaboration within a team and knowing who your stakeholders are and having somewhat mature relationships with them, that's not true in this context. And so the next question, in the chat is around, like, how do you break down the different aspects of governance? A lot of our work has focused on what I consider, like, more operationally oriented. Hey. How do we get you into a position where governance even matters? And so there's this question of maturity, I think, that's that's at play within these organizations. And I I think that that's I think that's hard because there's this forcing function as a result of having launched a token that I think puts organizations into a much more complex and complicated system of relationships and of of power and of decision making, then I would argue is probably appropriate for an organization of that size and and scale, size, maturity, and age. That's one part. And I think the other is I vastly underestimated the, like, psychology of belonging prior to this. And, like, what the the brilliance of corporations, not only as, like, a I had been viewing, as you know, Nathan, like, corporations as a form of, like, a code of capital that is inequitable inherently and creates a logic structure around profit maximization and all of that stuff. I had really been on sort of a systems level that had been the view through which I had been, thinking about corporations as a form. Within the context of these organizations and networks, it's really, like, the role of the psychology of belonging and not belonging and the clear delineations between that and the identity of collaboration, although imperfectly formed in corporations, is, like, brilliant as well. And that there's a lot of confusion and therefore static and cost, like energetic expense that comes with trying to imbue these systems with the type of identity that makes people feel secure in their roles and clear on their contributions and what collaboration means. And I just, like, didn't think about that prior to this. And so, you know, I read a lot of, like, sociology books on, like, friends now to be like, well, what is this very, very human set of dynamics that, that we're really operating within? The other is around founders. This one is same. Like, founders are same. As a founder, I, you know, will admit that I'm also the same. But there is this whole psychology of, like, I don't wanna be empowered, but I do wanna be empowered, and I'm gonna confuse myself and everyone else in the process. Like, that is consistent whether your company is 40 years old or six months old. And, you know, the again, in part the psychology, but then also the systems that then get built in reflection of that are are hard to get around. And I think the last piece is, you know, I'm like a a a very logical but naive person. It's maybe, like, my greatest strength and my greatest weakness is I'm like, yeah. This can totally be fantastic. And I think that the when I came into this space, part of my reason was, like, this is an opportunity to do really interesting experiments around governance. And when I think of how institutions in a nondigital space evolve or even our, like, big d democracy institutions, the opportunities for experimentation are very few and far between. And the feedback loops for those experiments are basically none. Like, we have a massive governance experiment once every four years in this country, and we do absolutely nothing with the results of that experiment. Right? And I I came into web three thinking, like, oh, joy. Like, low cost changes, you know, a culture that's, like, about innovation. And the reality is that the combination of, like, organizational immaturity and I don't mean that in a judgmental way. I just mean it, like, practically in a time spent together way. That coupled with the incentives of tokenization have made that that experimentation feel less possible in the short term."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 120.0,
        "end": 120.0,
        "transcript": "You you mentioned Amar's question, but I wonder if, Amar, you could say more about what what is behind it and what you're thinking that you're curious about."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 135.0,
        "end": 135.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Sure. This is the first time I hear I hear about governance on a consult consultancy level, like a service to provide. And we've been doing that with a couple of syndicates in Syria and Lebanon who's been interested in exploring, like, ideas in the blockchain's feed about governance. So my question is when you start working with a new client as a consultant, how do you break down the concept of governance into different aspects and elements, and how do you navigate them with with your client? If you can walk us a little bit into the process."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 150.0,
        "end": 150.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. The the dangerous thing about being in governance consultancy, which is, like, something that sort of have opted into really mostly to learn rather than being crazy about building consultancies. I I I I don't do well when things aren't applied. And so both with purpose and with APRA, this is sort of the phase one approach that's taken. One of the challenging things I think about offering governance as a service or, like, consultancy or, you know, process, facilitation, all these things is that people don't really know what governance is. And so, typically, you get invited in to solve a problem that I wouldn't qualify as a governance problem. Right? When I think of governance problems, I think of what are the processes, structures, and systems that allow a group of people to direct and coordinate change as they make decisions. And often what happens is there is a power conflict between people that is at play, or there is an operational problem that doesn't wanna be named by the group. And so instead, they gravitate towards calling it a governance problem because it prevents anyone from having to stick their you know, this is, again, nonjudgmental. It's just like the the the dynamics of groups. Go, I think this is a governance problem when, actually, it's not a governance problem. It's just a problem that they don't know how to handle. And so from a process perspective, typically, what we do is just talk to people. Like, what's actually happening here? And depending on the the format of that, whether it's an organization or a community, we try to talk to the people who are would be impacted by decisions and make sure that their voice is being integrated into how the systems are designed. We typically then, like, review that with whoever is leading the process from within the organization as well as questioning whether those people should be really leading the process. And then in in the from the perspective of DAOs or or or networked organizations, we ask the question of, like, well, what are you doing, and how do you know if you're doing it successful? What is the purpose here? And then what decisions within the system have to be made in order for that purpose to be achieved successfully? Are you talking about decisions that have to be made once a year? Are you talking about decisions that have to be made every three months? Who needs to be involved? What information is necessary for those decisions? How high risk or low risk are they? And so we do a large mapping of the system. In many cases, there are no processes for the actual decisions that need to get made in the system, and so then it becomes a question of, well, what is the process of actually developing these? And then what is also the then it becomes a question once those are established of what are the metrics and accountability and and systems to actually preserve transparency that we need to have in place to be successful in this."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 165.0,
        "end": 165.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. This is quite insightful, especially that you can send you in, like, governance beyond just decentralized shape. Decentralization is is about governance in general, so that's really useful to think about. Thanks."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 180.0,
        "end": 180.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 195.0,
        "end": 195.0,
        "transcript": "Seth is next, and then Daniel."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 210.0,
        "end": 210.0,
        "transcript": "Hi, Seth."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 225.0,
        "end": 225.0,
        "transcript": "Hi there."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 240.0,
        "end": 240.0,
        "transcript": "It's a a really, yeah, really wonderful to see you in here. Kinda where things have gone since we met at DWebTamp, like, two years ago. I'm really, yeah. I said, yeah, I still, appreciate all those conversations. If it's okay, I have two questions. A sort of quickish framing one and a meteor one. On on framing, like, I've sort of understood what you're doing as sort of maybe DAOs. But hearing you talk, I'm hearing much more that's a DAO inflected, you know, trad, like a DAO inflected traditional organization, like the same kinda processes, structures that you see just in any organization. Slightly more open maybe and maybe with more volunteer bent. Is is is that fair, or am I yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 255.0,
        "end": 255.0,
        "transcript": "No. If I would necessarily categorize it that way. I think that there are, like, fundamental systems of information access and communication that are needed for people to coordinate and collaborate, and a lot of the focus from an organizational perspective depends on that. I think the place of probably greatest overlap is, like, who who's contributing more? And, like, what is what does does, like, logical hierarchy look like? Like, decentralization does not necessarily mean not in hierarchical, and it's, I think, hard and emergent context to have hierarchy emerge in, like, a healthy way. And so a lot of the process is really around that. I don't know if I would say it's, like, one to one with traditional organizations, though."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 270.0,
        "end": 270.0,
        "transcript": "And then more substantive. Let's see. You know, it it could a lot of early decisions are early and cursory and easy to undo. But a lot of them end up, like you know, they were made very flipply to get something done, and then they end up channeling your entire organization during a path that's really hard to undo. So hindsight being twenty twenty, what would, you know, what would you what would you do with your time machine if there's some early decision that you could just, like, change or say, hey. Let's think about this a little bit more before committing. What what what's some early kind of thing that you just find yourself having to work around or deal with all the time because of some kinda early mistake?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 285.0,
        "end": 285.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, there are many. I think a big one is, like, around capital. Like, how much capital are you raising? Who are you raising capital from? What's that process when you do it? And that's true in traditional organizations. I think if we view tokens as something analogous, it's also view in this the same in this context as well. And that just has massive implications on what comes down the line because you are making a set of assumptions and integrating into the system's design a set of parameters around who has power and who benefits from the value that's generated. And once power is distributed, it's difficult to undo that And then it ends up dictating a lot of, you know, decisions and processes further down the line within a system. So that's that's definitely one part. I think the other is, again, like, very psychological in that people, like, tend to have a small conflict. It's, like, five people in a room. They have one conflict. And then nobody wants to talk about that conflict, and so they avoid it. And then this really weird thing happens where that conflict reverberates out as the organization develops. And so you can be two years down in the process and say, is this the main conflict? And they'll say, yes. That's the main conflict. And you can see how it plays out within a much larger organization. And there's something about, like, nipping it in the bud early on and and actually having processes of conflict resolution very, very early that and I would advise, like I I mean, this is just, like, universally true maybe in any group that we live and operate within. Like, we should probably be more willing to have difficult conversations with each other because it has a much, much bigger impact, on on what happens within a system than I think we would like to believe as, I don't know, as somebody who's, like, relatively sometimes likes to veer into the element of, like, technocratic. Like, how can we make this work? It's, you know, quite humbling to realize, like, well, we could have made it work by having had a three hour uncomfortable conversation six months ago probably would have saved us a bunch of time and effort and money in this whole process, and, you know, that that that could have been key. So both the, like, very complicated and strategic and the very baseline and psychological."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 5",
        "start": 300.0,
        "end": 300.0,
        "transcript": "That's really cool. I'm especially yeah. It feels kinda provocative with how resource limited, you know, small organizations, early organizations are. It feels like a big claim and and really worth thinking about to say that, you know, one of the things you should invest in despite having very little, like, resources or capacity is conflict resolution in your early stages of an organization. That that that's that that field is really substantive, and I'll think about it. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 315.0,
        "end": 315.0,
        "transcript": "K. Now we turn to Daniel."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 330.0,
        "end": 330.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. So thinking about your earlier comment about, you know, how with with Rad, there was a big power accumulation among the founders. I remember, you know, so circa, like, '21, there was in in the in the web three space, there was a big round of airdrops."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 345.0,
        "end": 345.0,
        "transcript": "I don't know if"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 360.0,
        "end": 360.0,
        "transcript": "you remember that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 375.0,
        "end": 375.0,
        "transcript": "You know?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 6",
        "start": 390.0,
        "end": 390.0,
        "transcript": "Like, a lot of these projects were saying we wanna decentralized meaningfully. We're gonna basically airdrop large six significant amounts of tokens to our users, and we're gonna have a real, you know, day zero distributed membership. And I remember receiving a number of these, and I was like, wow. This is cool. I can't believe they actually did that. And then, you know, pretty immediately, almost all the tokens were sold on secondary markets and reaccumulated in the hands of whales. And so it was meant to be, like, a meaningful power distribution became essentially a wealth transfer to the users, which, like, arguably was a fine thing, but I don't think that was the intended goal of the process, or maybe it was. So I'm curious how you reflect on that episode in light of your comments about power centralization in DAOs."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 405.0,
        "end": 405.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. It's just like the the mechanism didn't accomplish the goal. Right? And so then my question is, like, if you want to have your community participate in the organization and effort over the long term, what's the mechanism that would best serve that objective? And so it's like airdrops didn't work in the way that that was intended. And I think the the question of how to do that in a better way relates to, like, what is the incentive of why these why people are in participation anyway? Is it just as users? Is there more to it? What does the value add to them for sticking around over the long term? Is it really just about giving everybody tokens today and assuming that they will stick around? Is it about creating, you know, more stickiness of belonging and of participation? And how do you basically reward both for past contributions, but also then incentivize future contributions, whether that be, like, a holding period, whether that be creating a reputation system and having those who, like, participate really be valued for their participation. In some ways, I think that, like, the objective of the intent was good, but the outcome just doesn't, I think, reflect the nuance of why people are actually participating within a system. And so if you want wanna encourage that, you need something that's like a bit of a a different tool. Does that answer your question? Cool."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 420.0,
        "end": 420.0,
        "transcript": "Val has a question about raising capital. Val, do you wanna raise that question?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 7",
        "start": 435.0,
        "end": 435.0,
        "transcript": "Sure. Yeah. Hi. Thank you so much. This is such a great presentation. I'm curious, like, when you were speaking about capital and kind of, you know, getting stuck in some contract, you know, early on from raising and then being you know, having this kind of very set stagnant concentrated power within a a company or a start up, especially a software company. I'm curious, like, what are the alternatives that you've seen that you're most excited about? And I guess, you know, you spoke a bit about the token toke like, token fundraising and stuff, but I'm curious if there's, like, more so in the, kind of early investments, pre revenue investments, from, like, less people. Like, not a crowdfund, but something like a investor cap returns or, yeah, other kind of alternatives because I think just in general from my experience at least, like, crowdfunding, you know, is is just really hard, honestly. Yeah. And and I think it's, like, always worth doing, and it should be in addition to, you know, whatever else you do for fundraising, but kind of that whatever else you do for fundraising bucket. Curious what you've seen that you're that you find promising or hopeful."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 450.0,
        "end": 450.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I mean, I have, like, advice coupled with bad advice for you. I think, like, the advice is, like, raise capital carefully and looking at the organizations that found themselves decades into owning a business and really the founders who then got to make decisions about what to do with the company and how to distribute value over time. Those people had raised capital in a smart way that put them in a position of having majority control and were able to make those decisions. And so what does it look like to be smart? It looks like two things in my view. Like, the cost of capital matters, and so, you know, proving out product market fit and having, derisking the company early will help. Right? That's the reason why it's bad advice is you can't necessarily control that. Some products are gonna be riskier than others. That's not like a generalization that can be applied to how to raise capital, as a startup. I think the other is that we think about this in terms of, just in terms of the capital side, and I think the governance side is really a really interesting lever that is often overlooked because people don't really know how to have that conversation with VCs or don't feel comfortable because a lot of the time when you're raising capital, you feel like, ah, shit. I just need capital, and, you know, I'm not really in a position of power. And the other consistent theme around founders, and this is also true in the tech space who find themselves in a position of really getting to make decisions, one is they didn't raise too much capital, and the other is that they were very, very careful about how they negotiated rights, whether that be board seats, whether that be veto shares, whether that be, you know, whatever else. They were they looked at governance as an opportunity to program and control over time as they raise capital. The in terms of, like, actual terms and structures, the ones that you mentioned are the ones that we have seen most often in practice. So some kind of a revenue share, a capped return structure, A capital provider's willingness to go along with any of those structures will really, really depend on the team, on the product, on the, on the risk profile of it, on the industry, and the industry both in terms of the risk, but also in terms of the culture of that industry, whether there will be a willingness. There's, like, a lot of a lot of veins of of how honestly, like, how it is difficult to raise alternative capital as someone who's definitely supported a fair number of startups and and trying to pursue it. And I think the the from the side of investors, I think one of the biggest hurdles is less about extraction, less like I'm a venture capital, and this is exactly what I need. Yeah. Sure. That plays a role sometimes, but a lot of it is just that there doesn't feel like there's a proven viable alternative. And so they have a fiduciary duty to their LPs to make sure that they're making prudent investment decisions. And at times, it can feel like they're taking a concessionary return even though, logically, it won't play out that way in the math over time because there aren't a lot of demonstrated examples of funds being successful in the alternative VC investment and of startups that have, like, successfully grown to equal size, which is a big thing that it's just hard. It's hard to move money in the direction of potentially less money, when there are other alternatives available to them in the market. Yeah. Oh, I think you're muted, Nathan."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 465.0,
        "end": 465.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, I'm sorry. I believe Denver is next."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 8",
        "start": 480.0,
        "end": 480.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I was just wondering in the vein of collective intelligence and decision making, where do you believe the space is currently underinvesting from a technical or tooling perspective, and what tools or frameworks do you think would really help to make an impact on the work you're doing today?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 495.0,
        "end": 495.0,
        "transcript": "I don't think we have a tooling problem. I think we have an organizational and governance and framework problem, in the sense that the I believe, and this is, like, part work, part reading, part, like, intuition of having worked with organizations now in this way for for over six years is that, we often gravitate towards tooling or, like, mechanistic solutions to how to solve the problem of governance, which is in inherently complex. Right? And particularly within the context of of DAOs, which are, like, emergent and complex adaptive weird, you know, systems. I often think that, like, tooling or a focus on voting or the aspects of systems that are more visible are in part a reflection of the fact that we don't feel comfortable sitting with the complexity of the whole of what it means to actually govern. What does it mean to, like, socially orient people around a common purpose? What does it mean to belong or not belong? What does membership mean, and how does it actually support or not support that purpose going forward? And then how do you how do you make decisions together? How do you organize information? How do you create opportunities for collaboration? How do you do conflict resolution? Like, these things are not we don't feel comfortable with them. And so I don't I I currently, like, a little over a year into this space, I don't feel like tooling is the problem. I feel like the I feel like the system's design part and the understanding of the elements of that system, that's the main challenge and problem that's that's really being faced. Kinda wish it were a tool problem. That would make the whole thing easier."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 510.0,
        "end": 510.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. You you and so many of us, like and despite all the evidence, we might tend to act as if it's a tooling problem even if we might know better. Yeah. Yanis, you had a question earlier. I'm sorry. I passed over it. I was a bit confused and picking apart what was chatter in the chat from what was the question for the for Camille. So go ahead."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 525.0,
        "end": 525.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. Thank you, Camille. I mean, you you are touching the the and the core of governance. Now I I my first question was about a comment you made a little bit towards the end of, like, what point, which is the the problem, the governance is actually information, like knowing what you are deciding upon. And then, of course, I'm wondering how this lack of erudite participation, I call it. Okay. Like today, you say you think just think of us as as voters in our society, not political systems. We we know very little. And on from what we are actually, deciding upon. And that's actually also happens in smaller scale organizations. So I'm wondering, how does that problem of the gap of Erudite participation emerges as the scale and the size of the community grows? When we start an organization like three people, like, no nobody can hide anything from anybody. Everybody knows everything. Right? But then that gap emerges, that gap of information, which sometimes which is not always intentional. Quite often, people do not want to know. Like, I'm paying you, so you're gonna handle it. Like, the either the the operational team or the management team or the board. I don't wanna know. I just wanna see results and then make assessments. But then the the the demon is in the in between, in that gap. Do you have any comments on that? And and and and how can that be addressed when you write, like, at the constitution? Because somehow, it has to be streamlined that information passing and receiving. The dialectic has to kind of, like, be safeguarded into the governing principles from the get go, not halfway through?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 540.0,
        "end": 540.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. That's a great question. I think that the answer to this varies depending on what the community is trying to do together. Right? So, like, what we need in terms of relational dynamics and information sharing and accountability and conflict resolution, which are really the sort of structural governance elements that you are referencing, is gonna look really different for, you know, my I don't own this home, but, like, let's imagine I own this home a homeowners association than for my, you know, local co op than it is for the company that I work at than it is for the community of, you know, my alumni association, right, from college. And so depending on what the intended output, learning collaboration market value that a group of people are trying to achieve together through, like, collaboration will also dictate what kind of systems and social relationships are needed between them to be successful and and what kind of governance is needed. And so I say that just because I think that we can kind of I do this. Like, I default to thinking like, oh, this is just how it should work, and then it actually is a reflection of, well, what are you trying to do? We we may need different things depending on on what the purpose of of this coordination is really. And I think that the I feel like I've spent a lot of time talking about relationship dynamics in this conversation. This is not always my Ben, but this is the Ben for today, Wednesday. I'm at 10AM. I I think that part of the things that make it really difficult is that we are really, like, societally so undertrained in our relational dynamics with each other to even be able to, like, handle things like, hey. Who should have information, or how do we resolve conflict? And so it actually to, you know, to your point, like, it is good to be intentional about how we design these systems because we can assume a default of them kind of going off the rails just because we as human beings are are messy. Did that answer your question? Basically, it it depends as I pretend to be aware of"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 555.0,
        "end": 555.0,
        "transcript": "your opinion. I know. And and and that leads me to to to the seg to the segway to to my next question, which is how do you find the sweet spot between the the needs and also the urge to change? And usually, when you scale up, the new stakeholders, the new clients, the new members of the community naturally brings change. Right? And then how how do you do you do you do you do you establish a framework for a for a for a for a for a for a for two of this, let's say, interplay between legacy, which is what your mandate started to be, and then the tendencies for change or transformation. How how how do you make"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 570.0,
        "end": 570.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, you muted yourself."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 585.0,
        "end": 585.0,
        "transcript": "That that that that that that that one doesn't negate the other. You you understand that the change that happens with time doesn't like transform your your your entire mission and direction to be, like, against what the mandate that you started with, which is actually something that you could be legally bound to. So if you if you diverge from that, then you actually you may end up actually destroying the entire thing. Because people say, well, what you are doing is actually negating your initial mandate."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 600.0,
        "end": 600.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I think And and"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 615.0,
        "end": 615.0,
        "transcript": "then you have you have this, like, kind of one strike. It could be constructive, but it's mostly destructive dynamic between the the tendency for change. Right? With the legacy and the foundational principles mandates that that we are tied with."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 630.0,
        "end": 630.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I think this is one of, like I don't see this as a problem. I feel like it's a great opportunity for friction within organizations or institutions because what you're fundamentally describing is how do we balance progression and progress with conservatism, conservation in its truest sense? And how do you get these two dynamics to be in play with each other in a way that is generative rather than destructive or preventing necessary change from happening or having too much change happen, then an institution or organization can actually withstand to continue to move forward. And this is like I I I think it's like a balancing act between, you know, and how we how we build and and then ultimately steward institutions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 645.0,
        "end": 645.0,
        "transcript": "We're coming, to the end of, our time here. Thank you for a fantastic discussion so far. There's also been some really excellent conversation in the chat around, for instance, sharing citations and, discussions around, psychology of belonging and and this sort of thing. So, Camille, you've you've spurred our thinking a lot and and spurred our conversations. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you'll, you know, continue being a a friend of of the Medi MediGov community. To to express our gratitude, let's try our our usual thing of unmuting and and applauding altogether and see if we can beat the Zoom algorithm that tries to prevent us from all being heard together in three, two, one."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 660.0,
        "end": 660.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. What a sweet tradition. Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Nathan, for for organizing this."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 675.0,
        "end": 675.0,
        "transcript": "Absolutely. Such a pleasure to have you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 690.0,
        "end": 690.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Bye, y'all."
      }
    ],
    "summary": null
  }
}