Samudai, DAOs and Labour Lego

From TheDAO to the Asana Board in the Sky

In June 2016 just as TheDAO, the first decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), was raising (and then losing) $150 million, I wrote that it was an experiment that would likely fail but that it hinted at a new organisational form. A first new take on the firm since 1811 when a general limited liability law was passed in response to the US trade war with the UK and France. In time, DAOs will be seen as the result of the 2008 financial crisis and a loss of trust in traditional institutions.

In March 2020, I wrote:

“I think DAOs will have the most significant impact in the short term as they become formalised as new productivity software. An Asana Board DAO where each completed task executes a smart contract to draw down a bounty”

But before we dive in for the muggles out there, DAOs are just a bunch of smart contracts on a blockchain controlled by some wallet addresses that can only execute based on agreed voting rules. It’s not wildly different from a limited liability company which is a bunch of contracts controlled by a number of directors that can only execute on agreed voting rules. I mean that’s not exactly right, but it’s not exactly wrong either. The simplest way to think about DAOs is just like an internet-first way for people to coordinate resources (capital and labour).

So here we are in 2022 and the Asana Board DAO is near. Today, Lunar Ventures are pleased to announce our investment in Samudai, a productivity and freelancer platform for the future of work.

Not Getting Things Done (N-GTD)

So where are we? 4000 DAOs deep with over $8 billion in collective control. PleasrDAO, a DeFi collective, has $100 million in assets. FlemingoDAO, an NFT DAO holds a portfolio of over $1 billion. BadgerDAO, a defi product bridging Bitcoin and DeFi, has 24,000 members. We have DAO operating systems, investment DAOs, collector DAOs, social DAOs and media DAOs. Not to mention protocols that have gone fully DAO like Maker, Compound, Uniswap and many many others. One of the most innovative DAOs, VitaDAO (developed by Molecule, a portfolio company), funds drug development.

We have 4000+ DAOs and thousands of members all basically using Discord, the communication platform, to run a complex, global, well-funded business. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to project manage a DAO. The idea that these DAOs don’t have a master GANTT chart makes me wonder how anything gets done on time and on budget? You have fancy crypto rails to pay people to do stuff but no-one is actually doing stuff.

First, you’ve got a task management problem and we’re now at the scale where that’s a bottleneck to growth. Second, you’ve got the problem of finding, onboarding and offboarding talent. In normal times this is just recruitment, but in Web3, talent is well… weird. People are freelancing across lots of DAOs and are often anonymous, too. Don’t be a boomer — don’t ask for a CV.

Finally, rewarding people is hard. Yes you can use magic Internet money but it’s hard to track and measure contributions. People aren’t clocking in from 9–5. So we need new tools to measure contributions (output) rather than time spent (input). These tools are one of the many DAO-related innovations that we will likely see jump out of crypto as traditional businesses search for remote management and rewards tools.

It would be unfair to say it’s broken, it’s just no one has built native productivity tools yet. And Microsoft isn’t going to win this one with superior distribution. I would love to be on the first Microsoft sales rep call to Metacartel.

Getting Things Done (GTD) DAO-style

The first opportunity is to give DAO admins and members tools to do their work. Give DAO admins task management and activity tracking tools; reliable talent management tools; and rewards management tools to measure contributions. Give DAO members a dashboard to manage multiple DAO tasks and communications; a way to prove credentials across DAOs; and a way to track cross-DAO communication. Over time direct payments for completed tasks, reminders of upcoming governance votes, and reputation building will all make Samudai something like a homescreen for Web3 work. That’s the individual level, but it’s what the platform can do at the aggregate level that’s so exciting.

As you get more DAOs and DAO members, you will get useful data about what sort of work members want to do and what they are good at. Imagine being able to track every trello card you’ve ever completed. Not only that each trello card had a price of completion. But with DAOs, members collectively benefit from a more valuable network not Linkedin or Glassdoor. More on this from Packy McCormick. Matching workers and tasks gets better and better as per network effects and data network effects. Even better, by tracking the posting all the way through to completion and payment, the network, unlike traditional recruitment, can learn and improve the matching process more quickly. You don’t have to rely on interviews or CVs to see what people are good at. You can look at exactly what people have done directly on the platform. Or rather Samudai can do that for you and match a member instantly, cutting out the costly recruitment process entirely. It’s hard to overstate what a massive opportunity this is: imagine Trello + Linkedin + Glassdoor.

Labour Lego

It’s over five years since TheDAO and the “hint of a new organisational form”. Since then The #futureofwork has begun to take shape. Ridesharing and grocery delivery firms took advantage of regulatory loopholes leading to a reemergence of labour laws around the world. Remote work became a thing supercharged by the pandemic (I was a digital nomad in Vietnam 2016 like an OG). The ‘Great Resignation’, the term for the cultural shift towards a better work-life balance post-pandemic, forced businesses to rethink working practices. The 4-day work week has found renewed interest with even notoriously workaholic Japan experimenting and even the Chinese are ‘lying flat’.

The industrial era model of employment is falling apart. 40-hours a week, in an office, for the same company; it’s over. I mean we’ve known it’s been falling apart for decades, but Covid was a powerful accelerant. The shape of a new knowledge era model is emerging. Part-time, roleshare, flexible, remote, for a few different companies. The binary split between full-time and part-time is turning into a flexible spectrum. The split between worker, management and owner is blurring. Replacing this model will be something we’re calling: labour lego.

Labour lego breaks down what a firm does into smaller units. Not just business units or product lines, but specific tasks: design a product launch campaign, grow social media followers to 10k, or fix the latest bug report. A job is really just a set of tasks bundled up into a title. Labour lego means anyone can complete any task, it doesn’t have to be the person who has the title or was hired 10 years ago. The most suitable person at the exact time can complete the task. Those tasks can be limited to a birthday party or organising a friend’s holiday. Those tasks can be selling complex software.

So look, TheDAO was an experiment, and in the last 6 years has proven that it’s viable. We have a new digital-only structure to coordinate capital and labour. Today they are only usable by crypto people. Samudai is building a platform to bring DAOs to the masses and by doing so ushering in a new era of configurable labour legos. And look I’m not saying we’re reinventing capitalism out here, but I mean, what else are we doing if not changing the balance of power between capital and labour?