Tl;dr: DAOs are more like watering holes & companies are more like rivers. The main KPI for a company is productivity, the main KPI for a DAO should be number of relevant, actionable opportunities provided to its community. That has profound implications for the way we build for & with DAOs.

It is the year 1996, August. 3 years after Tim Berners-Lee released HTML which made the internet more publicly accessible, Google launches its first search engine as a stanford research project. Soon they would find themselves in fierce competition with the rest of the market to become the defacto search engine. Of which one of the most important contenders: Yahoo, which launched in 1998.

Yahoo opted to go the skeuomorphic route by building a directory. “The jump from the white pages to a search bar seemed too far fetched”, is a sentence I am guessing must have been said in conversations around what the design should look like.

What’s skeuomorphism? Skeuomorphism is the design concept of making items represented resemble their real-world counterparts. Skeuomorphism is commonly used in many design fields, including user interface (UI) and Web design, architecture, ceramics and interior design.

Google went the non-skeuomorphic route, by building on the foundations that the new paradigm of the web enabled, Google was able to create an easier solution to solve the same problem: finding relevant information asap. Sure, it required a different way of thinking + interacting as the tools people were used to before but look where we are now 🤷🏼‍♂️.

Ultimately, it’s about letting the thing be what it is. You wouldn’t expect a fish to climb a tree.

But when we don’t yet know what it is yet, how can we let it be what it is? “Real world counterpart” implies that it’s already part of our collective frame of reference — which is how we try to understand it. A bit like a 150 years ago people were explaining cars in terms of horses. “They also bring you from A to B. Except they don’t poop & can carry a lot more a lot further.”

Our monkey brains needs those anchors to make sense of the world. The reflex to go for that is what ends up tragically underutilizing the new paradigm. And that underutilization is what ends up costing you in the long run. Ask Yahoo.

To understand the non-skeuomorphic way, let’s begin with the skeuomorphic way of looking at DAO’s.

You’ve probably seen it as a headline somewhere: “DAOs are the 21st century companies!”

Great companies are productive companies. They provide the best products and/or services in the fastests, cheapest way possible. Productivity requires streamlined coordination & communication, clear accountability lines & often a (benevolent) dictator at the top that is able to accelerate the speed of decision making. Everything is tied together towards one goal: achieve profit through productivity. And we’ve really gotten that one down. Companies work, really well.

However that doesn’t mean that DAOs should be like companies. That kind of skeuomorphic thinking leads to most of the DAO tooling that’s being built today being focussed on making DAO’s productive. I would argue that’s a mistake.

If you’ve been part of any DAOs, you’ll agree that it’s not a place with streamlined coordination & communication, clear accountability lines & (benevolent) dictators. Trying to make it so would not make it a DAO anymore, or rather a DINO (a DAO in name only). Some of the key elements that make a DAO a DAO is the community governance, the permissionlessness & pseudonymity. So how can we let the thing be what it is?

In that light, it makes much more sense to understand a DAO as a watering hole — if we must use something out of our current reference frame. A watering hole doesn’t have the cadence, clear direction & carry of a river — but it does have the ability to gather, support & be a resting & restarting point for many different “animals” & their journeys.

It’s a fertile, rich space that has the ability to bring together & birth new encounters & collaborations on a global scale — regardless of age, ethnicity or social bubble. It’s a space where things that can’t be a river, but are immensely useful, such as public goods — for example a palm tree for shade at the watering hole - can be willed into existence by the community.

DAOs can become amazing places to reset, re-orient & reborn. As the rate of change accelerates like crazy — this will make more & more sense. A place where community & purpose provide you with a space to learn, earn, collaborate & connect. Whether it’s used as fertile Soil to launch a new company or project or for you to launch your second, third or fifth career. You will have a place to truly reinvent yourself and — while you’re at it, why not the world.

Impactbilli is building www.edenprotocol.xyz - a talent coordination protocol.

Tl;dr: DAOs are more like watering holes & companies are more like rivers. The main KPI for a company is productivity, the main KPI for a DAO should be number of relevant, actionable opportunities provided to its community. That has profound implications for the way we build for & with DAOs.

It is the year 1996, August. 3 years after Tim Berners-Lee released HTML which made the internet more publicly accessible, Google launches its first search engine as a stanford research project. Soon they would find themselves in fierce competition with the rest of the market to become the defacto search engine. Of which one of the most important contenders: Yahoo, which launched in 1998.

Yahoo opted to go the skeuomorphic route by building a directory. “The jump from the white pages to a search bar seemed too far fetched”, is a sentence I am guessing must have been said in conversations around what the design should look like.

What’s skeuomorphism? Skeuomorphism is the design concept of making items represented resemble their real-world counterparts. Skeuomorphism is commonly used in many design fields, including user interface (UI) and Web design, architecture, ceramics and interior design.

Google went the non-skeuomorphic route, by building on the foundations that the new paradigm of the web enabled, Google was able to create an easier solution to solve the same problem: finding relevant information asap. Sure, it required a different way of thinking + interacting as the tools people were used to before but look where we are now 🤷🏼‍♂️.

Ultimately, it’s about letting the thing be what it is. You wouldn’t expect a fish to climb a tree.

But when we don’t yet know what it is yet, how can we let it be what it is? “Real world counterpart” implies that it’s already part of our collective frame of reference — which is how we try to understand it. A bit like a 150 years ago people were explaining cars in terms of horses. “They also bring you from A to B. Except they don’t poop & can carry a lot more a lot further.”

Our monkey brains needs those anchors to make sense of the world. The reflex to go for that is what ends up tragically underutilizing the new paradigm. And that underutilization is what ends up costing you in the long run. Ask Yahoo.

To understand the non-skeuomorphic way, let’s begin with the skeuomorphic way of looking at DAO’s.

You’ve probably seen it as a headline somewhere: “DAOs are the 21st century companies!”

Great companies are productive companies. They provide the best products and/or services in the fastests, cheapest way possible. Productivity requires streamlined coordination & communication, clear accountability lines & often a (benevolent) dictator at the top that is able to accelerate the speed of decision making. Everything is tied together towards one goal: achieve profit through productivity. And we’ve really gotten that one down. Companies work, really well.

However that doesn’t mean that DAOs should be like companies. That kind of skeuomorphic thinking leads to most of the DAO tooling that’s being built today being focussed on making DAO’s productive. I would argue that’s a mistake.

If you’ve been part of any DAOs, you’ll agree that it’s not a place with streamlined coordination & communication, clear accountability lines & (benevolent) dictators. Trying to make it so would not make it a DAO anymore, or rather a DINO (a DAO in name only). Some of the key elements that make a DAO a DAO is the community governance, the permissionlessness & pseudonymity. So how can we let the thing be what it is?

In that light, it makes much more sense to understand a DAO as a watering hole — if we must use something out of our current reference frame. A watering hole doesn’t have the cadence, clear direction & carry of a river — but it does have the ability to gather, support & be a resting & restarting point for many different “animals” & their journeys.

It’s a fertile, rich space that has the ability to bring together & birth new encounters & collaborations on a global scale — regardless of age, ethnicity or social bubble. It’s a space where things that can’t be a river, but are immensely useful, such as public goods — for example a palm tree for shade at the watering hole - can be willed into existence by the community.

DAOs can become amazing places to reset, re-orient & reborn. As the rate of change accelerates like crazy — this will make more & more sense. A place where community & purpose provide you with a space to learn, earn, collaborate & connect. Whether it’s used as fertile Soil to launch a new company or project or for you to launch your second, third or fifth career. You will have a place to truly reinvent yourself and — while you’re at it, why not the world.

Impactbilli is building www.edenprotocol.xyz - a talent coordination protocol.