# Communities vs DAOs

**Published by:** [jzavala](https://paragraph.com/@jzavala/)
**Published on:** 2022-02-02
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jzavala/communities-vs-daos

## Content

Visiting the General Channel in Discord of Seed Club is a regular activity for the members of the community to get uptodate in the day to day operations. Some times the information is boring, other times it is amazing the amount of information available in a chat among several participants in a conversation in a way that this information could be very valuable in the future or maybe a good material to write a whitepaper or just to share among people outside of the community. Conversations in a Discord produce a lot of information interchange among people that maybe never met before. Suddenly a comment or a question from one person triggers an impromptu conversation that is found in the middle of several people commenting on other subjects. Learning how to read a chat in Discord is an art that we need to develop, to follow the thread of conversations, despite that today Discord is capable of creating threads to split conversation in a more orderly way. We need to learn how to use the new functionality available as well to anticipate that a specific comment or question will trigger a deep and long conversation among several persons. Today, I found a unique discussion about the differences and the sequence that follows the creation of a DAO. From one side DAOs imply to have a community already created and structured opening the way to focus in creating first the community and then the DAO. The question in this way is how much we should think that the roadmap is building a community with a purpose in mind or to create the community to work on how to define the purpose. In this way one sequence of events has different paths to execute. Looking in this way, I can believe that there is not a simple way for execution. As a consideration, the decision on how to proceed and explore will be part of the serendipity process of building companies. There are too many alternatives that the creators of the project must take some risks and work according to best practices available from reading success and failures of previous projects and trace a chart for action according with the belief that are available. Each creator has its own context and the creation of a DAO is part of the uncertainty conditions that any new endeavor holds. @Pandy share us: TLDR: Start with beliefs —> values —> objectives. Shared beliefs will encourage objectives. Existing objectives will need existing beliefs to band members. When we are talking about beliefs, we can assume that the first step is to create a community of people that share the same beliefs in order to work toward the objectives of the community and the community will define a clear objective and the result is when the objectives are set by people that shared the same belief a ground base is established to move forward to execute the project to build the DAO with a very well integrated community. David Spinks, a well known community builder, agrees in the concept but his experience in startups and community building makes him skeptical. It feels a bit like an unrealistic ideal. Without a clear goal, I’ve seen too many communities become a solution in search of a problem, and become financially unsustainable as a result. David thinks starting with a community and letting it figure out objectives can work if the end goal is community, and the objectives are all focused on making that community sustainable. But it’s insular. The value is all within the community. If the goal is to build a successful business, then I think starting with business objectives is critical. So I guess a good question to ask might be, is the goal of a DAO to grow a business or to grow a community? And if the answer is “both” - then what happens when the good of the business clashes with the good of the community and vice versa? Ultimately, one has to be the priority. The point of view of Nicole from Seed Club is that seems like there's 2 distinct models - that have both already existed- and work much better now with DAO tech: One is parallel to or derivative of coops and exits-to-community. I feel like ENS is a great example of this, where there was a business, and they opened to the community via the airdrop, and now they're in the process of becoming a DAO. One is parallel to cultural/community movements, where the structure is well-tested, but value capture is much more novel (fwb is prime example). The interesting question, in my mind, being that either one can veer toward the other once the community starts driving. And then governance, mission, values, membership structures, all determine how much deviance from the original roadmap is ok. For a business, the deviance may be a problem (e.g. if ENS started as an address management tool, and became a social group). For the community, deviance may be the whole point (e.g. FWB started as a social group and is now spinning out products/businesses). The conversation keeps going and cosmicblend give us a couple of thoughts. I do product direction consulting for a small start-up group like Betaworks. The end goal for each product team is a thing you pitch to sell to a group of people based on the product team's interpretation of that market's need or pain. The product team has financial constraints; prove viable iterations in a somewhat timely manner, or the money dries up. A DAO there for me (as I currently understand it) feels less exciting and more like an HR tool—probably a viable use case but maybe a little more straightforward to implement. A community that's found itself organically and identifies with grander and potentially society-changing goals sounds fascinating and more complex to me. Over the long haul, these communities might build revenue streams specific to their pains through products, events, etc. Those, to me, are supporting tools that exist to further that community's larger ideological drive. I think daos are a fascinating mechanism to explore inside of those groups (again, based on my current understanding of daos). I also feel that those communities will likely have an ideological passion that can outlast seed money granted by a start-up studio to prove the viability of a go-to-market product. I am glad that I was able to reach the conversation, explore the ideas sorting in between other conversations in the same chat. At the end, I want you to ask for your ideas on how to approach this scenario: What is the best way to create a DAO, start for a community as a starting point to convert into a DAO once the community is ready? Share you ideas by keeping this chat open in twitter by mention me at jzavala The full conversation is available in the Seed Club Discord** **

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