• At Techtree we are building a mycelium network of Web3 Talent, helping DAOs hire and monetize on their community's talent network

• This network is made of individual talent branches i.e. local talent pools

• Every DAO branch owner can set up a talent branch and invite its community members to join

• Talent pool can be shared between communities to increase chances of successful hire

• DAO branch owner can set up bounties for its roles to generate additional revenue for the DAO when a member gets hired

• Techtree ranks talent so DAOs get access to high quality prospects coming from Web3 Communities, Web3 VC Portfolio companies and other DAOs

• Always low cost thanks to decentralized nature, no need for intermediaries

• Get in touch with Andy to have your DAO talent branch up and running

About Techtree

Techtree is a platform, where users can monetize their personal assets such as personal networks, knowledge and reputation by helping other members of trusted networks (such as DAOs, VCs and their portcos, communities) they belong to. Our initial focus is one of key Web3 challenges - hiring. We believe we can scale the workforce of DAOs and Web3 Communities by making it easy for their existing permanent workforce and larger community to refer talent to open positions while getting systemically rewarded.

We are already working with a number of VCs and their portfolio companies as well as Web3 Projects and are excited to pilot the model with top DAOs to help grow their workforce.

• Founding team : Pawel, Stanislas, Laurence

• DAO Head of product : Andy (author of this post, an ex-MakerDAO)

• TechTree is backed by Notion Capital, Frontline Ventures, StakeDAO, Move Capital as well as the ex-CEO of Skype, ex-CTO of Workday, ex-CTO of Nutmeg, co-founder and ex-CFO of Monzo and ex-Head of Sales of Stackoverflow and additional great angel investors.

What are Talent Branches

Techtree started with Bounty Boards - sharable lists of open jobs with corresponding bounties. With a clear reward flow covering referrer, sharer and creator roles in the system. Here's an example of a bounty board .

This summer we introduced a new concept - Talent Branches. Every talent branch is a talent pool of referred talent accessible for its select members e.g. hiring parties in the DAO or its sub-projects. It is a micro-scale double sided market with job-seekers and potential employers getting access to vetted, high quality candidates. The currency is the bounty value.

The most exciting part though is this: by adding a community managed two-way valve between talent branches we can defragment the current hiring market massively reliant on hiring agencies. Talent can now be available locally and globally increasing trust factor of the entire talent ecosystem as members of the talent branch are validated by the community itself.

Here is a live example of the MakerDAO talent branch - currently at pilot stage as seen by the candidate. Values presented there are fully customisable.

Turning community skillset into a DAO revenue stream

Here, we assume every community is a talent pool. Even with bear market, many companies, communities and ecosystems are looking to hire.

When a talent branch is created, DAO can invite their community members to join the talent branch. This is possible through applying directly or referring others to generic roles, that the community can customize to fit most represented roles.

Talent can be matched with a job in the community itself or can be made available for other communities allowing DAO to generate revenue stream from bounties.

We are currently working on the paywall feature that will enable branch owner to set subscription fee for external employers to be able to view the talent pool.

Nevertheless, Talent Branch Owners (DAOs, Communities etc) can start generating revenue from Day 1, when someone from their talent pool gets hired.

Revenue Flow

Candidates enter the talent branch by getting referred or through direct application. Most candidates across our talent pools are direct applicants, hence leaving almost entire bounty to the talent branch owner as follows:

Hiring trusted talent faster, without intermediaries

In this scenario, the hiring parties within the DAO or a portfolio of its projects are able to fill vacancies faster through setting up their talent branch and/or setting up job-specific bounties for talent to get recommended to.

By referring and applying to generic jobs, candidates become readily available to the invited hiring parties in the DAO or its ecosystem. This way, it is much easier for larger communities to successfully map their community members with available jobs while the value in for of bounty reward stays in the ecosystem.

Since Techtree aims to create an ecosystem, where talent can flow across the IT/Web3 space - the DAO talent branch would not only hold talent referred directly there, but also coming from other talent branches - web3 communities, DAOs, VCs and their portfolio companies. This increases chances of hiring and makes the whole hiring market much less fragmented. Needless to say, no middlemen are needed to match talent and jobs any more.

Vetting and credentials

Vetting is now performed manually by Techtree based on CV, GitHub status, source and recommendations, but as time goes, we will steer the product increasingly towards self-sustainability through versatile reputation scoring system.

Next Steps

We believe many DAOs and communities to have an established brand and a vibrant community. As Techtree we can help realize that potential, speeding up hiring and creating additional bounty revenue while connecting members to other Web3 ecosystems. Here’s the steps we normally take with DAOs reaching out to us:

• Present Techtree to the community in more details (during one of the community calls)

• Create the DAO talent branch with community-agreed customizations, a set of generic roles and bounty size

• Start accepting talent in the talent pool

• Actively promote the talent branch throughout Techtree network

• (Optional) Help projects that are currently hiring set up their bounties

If your community is interested in creating a talent branch, fill in the form here and we will get back to you shortly.

For questions please contact andy@techtree.dev or join our Discord server here and look for @synesthesia

Thank you for reading the post.

References:

https://techtree.dev

Tl;dr summary

• TechTree is a bounty platform, where people can monetize their personal assets such as network, knowledge or reputation. Its initial focus is hiring referrals for tech roles.

• It is based on a fairness-first incentive model that enables success based rewards  depending on the degrees of impact in the hiring process: creator, referrer and sharer

• Employers within DAO can deposit bounties and create open jobs visible via bounty boards

• Talent can be referred to DAO-wide talent pool through generic referrals and shared with employers

• Community members can earn various rewards by referring candidates or sharing bounties with their network to help a successful hire and keep value within the ecosystem

• DAOs can add a revenue stream by activating community as a source for talent by means of referrals to open jobs in the DAO and broader Web3 Community

• TechTree is looking for currently hiring DAOs willing to participate in a test program

Background

As TechTreewe’re building a platform where communities (“trusted networks”) leverage assets of their members such as their professional networks & knowledge to make an impact and get rewarded.  Many such networks provide financial incentive to specialized service providers - for example recruiters -, while often asking their members for help without any incentive being offered. Hiring is an obvious example of where it happens and it’s the subject of our initial focus as it’s a critical problem for many tech businesses.

TechTree has created a value exchange engine based on bounties - rewards which are due when value impact is made. TechTree's model is currently focused on hiring referral bounties. We believe that very often and especially in specialized areas such as web3 & tech, community can be a much more effective source of talent than hiring agencies. We also believe that such incentives in the form of recruitment bounties should be transparently available to everyone.

About Techtree:

Founders

Pawel, CEO & co-founder has sold his previous company to Publicis Groupe in 2011 - whichhelped companies like Google, Amazon and Intel to build a strong reputation in the developer community. He was also an early team member of Coinfirm - AML software for blockchain based assets which he joined in 2016.

Stanislas, CTO, is an  early contributor to Solana, and prior to that he was a CTO & co-founder of a hardware tech startup.

Laurence, VP of Partnerships & co-founder, spent 6 years leading business development for Jobbio - provider of job board technology plugged into media companies, events, etc.

Vision and Mission

As TechTree we believe in a world of sustainable communities, where members can share value and get easily rewarded by the community for their impactful contributions. The initial focus of TechTree is on the challenge of recruitment of tech people as this is one of core growth inhibitors  for the Web3 space.

Capital

TechTree is backed by Notion Capital, Frontline Ventures, StakeDAO, Move Capital as well as the ex-CEO of Skype, ex-CTO of Workday, ex-CTO of Nutmeg, co-founder and ex-CFO of Monzo and ex-Head of Sales of Stackoverflow and additional great angel investors.

Track record

• TechTree bounty boards were launched 6 months ago

• Over 50 referred candidates have been hired via TechTreein the last year.

• Over 600k USD worth of bounties has been paid out.

• Candidates hired via TechTreeare based in over 10 European countries.

• Our biggest client (and oldest) is Advent PE, who has hired for 15 job positions, including VP of Engineering, 2 VP of Products, Data Engineers, Front End engineers, Full Stack Engineers, and Product Managers.

Used by 8 VC  companies along with over 25 business organizations:

• Portfolio companies of VCs i.e. Sequoia, Index, NFX, Balderton, EQT Ventures and more.

• Launched VCs include Notion Capital, Polychain Capital, Inflection and Frontline Ventures with a wait list of 21 VCs pending onboarding.

• Businesses including Advent, Wayflyer, YuLife, Tessian, Secret Escapes, and Shawbrook Bank.

Web3 / crypto project early adopters:

• Ramp Network, Oazo Apps (spin out from MakerDAO) have all hired talent via TechTreein the last 6 months. Recently TechTreehelped Oazo Apps with acquisition of a CTO and a Senior Full Stack Engineer through bounties.

• Inflection.xyz - one of the top European VCs backing crypto & web3 has launched its bounty board & talent branch and gave access to all 20 portfolio companies (July’22).

Disrupting the display-based reward model

Getting people’s attention in the spammy web has never been more  challenging. At TechTree, we are focusing on tech people - the most important resource fueling global economic growth.

The spammy internet originated with Google, who persuaded users that content should be free and built a click-based revenue model. Unfortunately, this motivates all users to maximize reach at all cost, bringing misinformation, polemical content and clickbait. It also sucks value out of users who create 70% of all online content, yet get back less than 1% of all revenue generated.

As a result:

• Finding information is harder (everyone can create content).

• The costs of verifying content is increasing.

• People cut through this noise by relying on biased filters.

Challenges in Hiring

Hiring is a huge challenge for Tech, but primarily Web3 projects as the talent is still scarce and often afraid to make the jump into the Web3 space. As a reminder, there was a great report  put together by the MakerDAO SES core unit on the WEB3 Workforce situation not so long ago. It nicely summarizes what motivates and demotivates devs when attempting to join the Web3 Space.

So to sum up here’s what the current challenges are:

• Display based payout models are still prevalent, preventing users from capitalizing on their assets. The almost exclusive way for an individual to capitalize on their personal assets is to get a job and get paid for it.

• Organizations are paying agencies to hire talent while their own communities have an immense source of quality candidates as part of people’s personal networks.

• However, without a robust systemic referral and incentivization model, there’s not much motivation for the individual to look for and make referrals.

• Apathy in potential candidates due to quantity-oriented hedging strategies by recruiters.

• A lot of great talent is still reluctant to join the Web3 world and actively contribute, even more so if there’s no one to pull them into it.

• People respond to recruiters depending on the financial package offered as they lack trust and remain agnostic towards potential employers.

Solution - Impact Based Hiring Bounty Model

To alleviate the underlying issues we propose as following:

• Hiring bounties through bounty boards with powerful multi-tiered reward system to engage the community

• DAO Talent branch UI - Shared talent pool for general and job specific referrals in the DAO

• An ecosystem of communities where talent flows across Web3 space instead of being siloed to a particular community

While many communities are going into considerable efforts to acquire high quality talent, most of their community members have great talent in their personal network. They would more likely recommend them for hire if properly incentivized by the community.

The TechTree Model utilizes game theory and takes the community inherent trust and loyalty factor as its foundation. Here are some immediate benefits:

• It is fairer as the incentive goes to the members of the community that make impact instead of external agencies. Usually the bounty amount stays in the ecosystem instead of leaking outside.

• Time-to-hire is usually faster as a community swarms to fill the position utilizing their personal networks. The average time-to-hire is 2.5 week.

• It’s more engaging and helps the community build a new degree of internal trust.

• It motivates towards quality as opposed to quantity.

• Members of the DAO can easily get matched with open jobs at the DAO or broader Web3 Community

• Low fixed cost as the trust-based crowd-sourced model takes over agency-type models.

If one is paid for sharing information about jobs regardless of whether anyone gets the job at the end, one will be incentivized to hedge to increase chances of a candidate actually getting the job. On the other hand, If one is rewarded only for an impact in the form of a successful hire (continued 90-day engagement with the new employer), one will focus more effort on fewer people. This also raises the potential bounty amount as perceived quality starts to overtake quantity.

Essentially, based on the game theory logic, a loyal member of the community will always choose to recommend talent from their network to the same community (DAO for that matter) over another community. Such a decision would translate into higher payoff as the workforce of their home DAO and the DAO itself grows and scales up.

How the TechTreemodel works

TechTree is organized into talent branches and bounty boards.

Bounty Boards

Bounty boards are at the heart of the TechTree model. They represent a front-end where employers post bounties and where community members can refer a candidate for hire or pick the individual link and share the board with their network using preferred media streams. Custom bounty boards can be curated by individual members from the existing ones.

Here’s a live example of this Bounty Board. An overview of how the Bounty Board works can be seen here as presented by Techtree’s Laurence.

Talent Branches

New feature in the Techtree product. These can be described as recruitment landing pages for an organization (e.g. a VC or DAO). They also represent liquidity pools of aggregated talent. Any community or organization can have a talent branch activated (UX example below), aggregating all bounties and talent referred through general referral to the talent branch.

General referrals are accessible to all opted-in members of the branch. Here’s what it looks like for one of our VC customers:

Community members can easily recommend candidates from their network through general referrals. These incoming candidates would be available to reach out to for all opted-in branch members (e.g. VC portfolio companies or workgroups in a DAO). .

Talent Branches can enable DAO’s to create an exclusive talent pool, helping them:

1. Add value to their community by sharing job opportunities within core units or suitable roles in the broader Web3 space.

2. Help members of a DAO monetise their network by referring their friends to roles in the DAO.

3. Support the growth of core units that are hiring in the DAO by finding top talent in the shared talent pool.

4. Generate new revenue (which can also be donated) when candidates are successfully hired through the DAO Talent Branch.

5. Keep value within the DAO ecosystem instead of paying intermediaries to help them grow.

Talent Branch interoperability through TechTree

The power of the model is in the conditional flow of talent between talent branches to broaden the talent pool and the potential of successful hire.

• Referrals made through general referral to the talent branch are visible to all opted-in members of the branch

• Applicants may opt-in to be visible in other talent branches (e.g. a candidate from GnosisDAO or Inflection VC talent branch could become available for MakerDAO and vice versa). Techtree will help that talent to become available and also provide additional matching services to fit open jobs.

Reward System and corresponding reward flow

Rewards are paid out depending on the role and its impact in  the hiring process. Apart from referrers getting rewarded with the value of the bounty , individual creators of content leading to the bounty get 25%, board sharers: 10% on top of the original amount. As expected, there are multiple scenarios in which users get rewarded.  More examples of current user logic are available here for reference and here from an employer’s perspective including fees.

Potential Use Case Scenarios

1. Bring Top Talent to your DAO - Techtree can help your DAO find much needed talent while rewarding your community for referring talent, tapping into users’ personal networks. Techtree can bring valued talent from other ecosystems, DAOs and Communities.

2. Add a new revenue stream to your DAO while activating community networks - Techtree showcases bounties from Web3 ecosystems. Using DAO’s community networks people refer their talent to existing bounties from VCs/DAOs thus generating an additional revenue stream for the DAO. We’re tapping into DAO community vast personal networks.

Future of the Project

As we’re testing the solution with other communities, mainly VC portfolio companies, we are already planning the roadmap to include:

1. User reputation scoring system based on e.g.

   1. The number of candidates recommended who were positively rated

   2. The number of candidates brought to the Talent Branch

2. Profit Pools - One of the key challenges of the bounty based system is that the initial low frequency of the reward is making it difficult to keep users engaged. This is also true for communities such as DAOs. As TechTree starts to generate profit, it will be shared with users on the basis of their impactful contributions. At a later stage each Talent Branch will be able to create and distribute such a value pool via TechTree.

3. Bounty locked in DAO’s local token (currently it’s FIAT & USDC)

4. Applying bounties to other areas where crowd-sourced model can be effective e.g.

   1. Knowledge - short term projects focused on knowledge sharing

   2. Sales - introduction to the entity who makes a purchase results in a bounty payment

   3. Asset acquisition - introduction to someone who collateralized their assets via DAO receives a bounty payment

Call for DAOs to discover hiring related partnership potential with Techtree

TechTree represents a partner in hiring that can help DAOs find the right talent and optimize its spending on talent during a challenging time of budget cuts. The DAO still needs to support the growth of its initiatives, but must do so in a way that maximizes the return on its investment, and limits the spend of cash in the short term.

We’re also looking into discussing additional revenue streams for DAOs, coming from successful referrals from its members and their networks.

Let’s talk!

We’re inviting DAO members and contributors to a conversation. Please join our Discord at https://discord.gg/N4nKN863 and look for synesthesia!