Expanding the Rari Capital DAO: Organization, Onboarding and more.

A pitch to the Rari Capital DAO on how to restructure

The Issues

DAO’s are on track to be the future of work: enabling anyone to easily work for protocols that will change the world and transcend national boundaries. The Rari Capital DAO has grown significantly in its own right, onboarding dozens of new grantees and many new contributors to join us our mission. However, DAO’s (including Rari Capital!) are quite inefficient in their current form. Some examples of issues include:

1. No accountability
2. No clear path to enter the organization or move within the organization
3. Limited organizational growth due to quick talent rotations
4. No insight into the actual work of contributors in the DAO

These issues, along with many others, result in subpar performance from the DAO. While we have been able to do amazing things with the DAO, if improved, the sky truly becomes the limit. I have been pushing the Rari DAO to explore the bounds of DAO infrastructure without moving toward a more centralized model because, well, we are a community-owned project after all.

Social & Cultural Expectations

Before we even talk about the structure of the DAO, we must get on the same page regarding our mission. The Rari Capital DAO is focused on building the future of finance. At our core, the mission is to enable people to break free. We should be empowering people to fulfill that goal, whatever it means for them, beginning with financial freedom. (I’m working on a blog post that goes deeper into this.) This is a social mission that will most likely change the lives of many (if done correctly!) so I believe social change should be at the core of the protocol. I encourage fellow contributors to engage in conversations about social issues and the role that our DAO can play in helping the world. That being said, these issues should not distract or detract from our work, it should be used to fuel us, never to divide us.

Each member of the DAO should be working at their highest degree of productivity. If not, they need to understand the potential consequences (highlighted below). Ensuring a productive team enables us to create a truly world-changing product. Communication is key in a DAO. Make everything clear to fellow contributors, if you are struggling, if you are thriving, if you need something — let everybody (specifically your bubbles) know so that we are all on the same page.

Now that we have expectations straight, let’s talk about how the DAO itself should be organized.

The Overall Structure

I propose a solution that begins with organizing all of the individuals within the DAO into “bubbles.” Each DAO will likely have their own structure, but for Rari Capital, each task we pursue can be split into three main categories:

1. Operations: Overseeing the protocol’s maintenance and conducting active management on the products.
2. Strategy: Ensuring that the protocol grows and stays competitive on a macro-scale.
3. Development: Developing and securing each of the products and protocols.

While these are the core categories, they are not very specific. For that, I propose bubbles, to function as working groups on specific goals. Think of those three categories as large bubbles with smaller bubbles inside. Below, you can find each of the small bubbles for the categories outlined above:

1. Operations: Legal, Relationship Upkeep, Marketing (Social, Education, Partnerships), Security Coordination, Design, Community Management, Contributor Management
2. Strategy: Protocol Design, Risk Assessment, Treasury Management, Bridge, Direct TVL Growth
3. Development: Security Tooling, Smart Contract, Developer Relations, Internal Tools, UI

These smaller bubbles have a few main pieces to them:

1. Mission: The goal of the bubble, what it hopes to accomplish on a larger time scale.
2. KPI’s: The key performance indicators of that bubble. These can be quantitive or qualitative but need to be outlined on the creation of a bubble. Created by the owner and consistently (bi-weekly) tracked in a public environment.
3. Owner: This person is responsible for reporting the progress of a bubble every two weeks. The constituents of a bubble must vote on an owner. This person can be voted out at anytime and if not their bubble may fork away (explained further below). This person has no meaningful power over the other individuals in the bubble.

The bubble organization pushes for accountability while maintaining a rather flat organization. I will also note that anybody can “fork” a bubble and spin off their own “working group” on any topic if they feel that the current bubble is not fit for them. All that is needed to create a new bubble is sheer motivation. I imagine that in the future there will be many, “Design” bubbles, within the organization. They could be doing different tasks, or competing for the DAO’s attention on the same tasks. I accept that there will be minor re-duplication of work (good communications should minimize this) but it will come at the benefit of a better solution. This is a future where the protocol is not reliant on one individual but de-risks centralization risks via bubbles. I strongly urge individuals in the DAO to not contribute to more than a few bubbles to prevent themselves from getting spread too thin. They should do a few things and do them above and beyond to maximize their impact.

You can view a diagram on what the current organization of Rari looks like under a bubble structure:

Our DAO (full-time members only), in bubble format.

I created the map above on Sobol which is a new tool that we are using to help bring a lot of these ideas into reality. At first, we had mapped it out on Figma but after talking to the Sobol team, it was clear they could be a great organizational partner. You can view the map here.

Just because individuals are in bubbles, it doesn’t mean that the constituents will instantly be accountable. That is where the “Log” comes into place. The “Log” started as a Google Sheet where each team puts their progress / milestones for every two weeks. With Sobol, we realized members can just leverage the Posts feature to highlight what has been worked on within a bubble for the previous two weeks (posted by owner of bubble). This is how we’d track KPI’s throughout the DAO.

The posts generate a “Log,” which serve as public accountability, something where anybody can view the posts of a bubble. We are working to make these updates from each bubble publicly accessible so all token holders can easily view it.

Posting an update to the rest of the DAO via posts

The log is not a replacement for a sprint manager. It is just a way to report updates to all token holders. The Rari Capital DAO enables each bubble to decide which sprint management solution works best for them but strongly encourages contributors to join the Rari Capital DAO Linear (only open to contributors). This Linear is synced on 2 week cycles that match with when a “Log update” is required from a bubble owner.

A picture of our Linear Cycles

General insight like this will lead to much easier decisions (hiring/firing/compensation) for the rest of the DAO. Lastly as bubbles need resources, they will work with treasury management on exploring what is possible and putting together a governance proposal for the DAO.

The Flow of Talent

The Rari Protocol needs to maintain access to the top talent in the ecosystem without making the process burdensome like some other DAO’s. There are two different types of talent that we expect to see in the protocol: part-time, grant work and then full-time salary-based work.

To begin with, the grants program that Samuel has designed here enables us to pursue this part-time talent at scale. These grants enable individuals to dip their toes into working with the current set of contributors and enable them to earn RGT without long term commitment. Completing a grant will make subsequent potential applications to work for the DAO a lot simpler as it provides a clear track record of working on protocol related activities. The DAO is likely to prefer hiring someone who has completed a series of grants over the past few months rather than someone who is brand new to the community. The grant program will continue to run and grow alongside the rest of the organization.

However for long-term talent, the process can be split into four different stages:

1. Search / talent capture: attracting the top talent and onboarding directly to the DAO.
2. Talent applications: getting data on the talent to ensure that they are a fit and placed in the right bubble(s), having the talent file for a formal application to the DAO,
3. Onboarding the talent: bringing them into the contributor Discord, etc.
4. Keeping the talent: continually providing benefits to the talent within the DAO.

I propose, that we do the following regarding how this longer term talent is handled within the DAO, split up by stage:

Search / talent capture:

• Each member of the DAO is encouraged to help with talent search by utilizing their own personal networks.
• The DAO can optionally pursue formal recruiters depending on future governance proposals.

Talent applications:

• A public (all data is public) form will be circulated to all interested parties. It is modeled after OlympusDAO’s form and you can view a draft here (fill it out if you’re interested!). A spreadsheet will be created to publicize the data to everyone as applications come in.
• An individual within the recruiting team bubble will formally review each applicant to the DAO and work with them on the next application steps to provide a “formal verification” of an individual.
• An individual, formally verified or not, may then follow proper governance guidelines to fully onboard into the DAO following the example set up by Samuel Shadrach here. In that proposal they define their pay and responsibilities. Individuals may opt for a trial period like Samuel to prove themselves (and make sure they like working for the DAO) which likely results in a higher likelihood of being onboarded to the DAO.

The DAO is unlikely to onboard any individuals who have not done at least one of the following: 1) received formal verification from a recruitment member, 2) completed a trial period or 3) completed a grant for the protocol.

I would also like the DAO to further explore the creation of a “Council” who will be able to handle salaries for each individual privately. The council’s budget and creation would be based on a future governance proposal. This will likely become a necessity as the protocol grows since DAO scaling in this capacity is difficult to say the least. Though, I will work to decrease the amount of power this council has.

Onboarding the talent:

• A member from the recruitment bubble will reach out and add the individual to the Contributor Discord (talked about later) once they have been approved.
• Once you are a part of the DAO, you will work with current collaborators on which bubbles you will join.

Keeping the talent:

• The recruitment bubble should be well funded enough to be able to reward the strongest members of the organization. These rewards can be ranging gifts all the way from an AMC Gift Card to a $RGT bonus. This proposal doesn’t dive deep into the mechanics of this but I strongly suggest diving deeper into this at a later date.

Compensation

The Rari Capital DAO should be an extremely aggressive and competent actor when it comes to compensation. While obviously, at the end of the day, it is up to the talent to decide on what they’d like to ask for from the DAO, the recruiting bubble may provide insight (based on historical data and industry standards) into “suggested amounts.” We should publish these amounts as part of the recruiting bubble so the grander ecosystem is aware.

To set the stage clear, currently, the Rari Capital DAO has little to no stables and ETH. The Rari Capital DAO is largely allocated into RGT. Though, this may change in the future via diversification. I believe once the protocol is able to pay salaries in stables, then the $RGT distributed should be vested for a minimum of 3 years when doing work for the DAO. In the meantime, direct RGT payments are the only way to stay competitive. Each dollar spent on salary should be providing exponential returns on the product.

Ending Bad Talent (aka Firing)

Bad talent can arise for a multitude of different reasons:

• Inability to perform and deliver on key deliverables
• Inability to collaborate with fellow contributors

But it is something that must be dealt with and planned around. For this reason, I propose that the DAO sets a clear way that this be handled.

It is likely that the current contributor set will be the first to realize the bad talent. It is for this reason, that the contributor set will have a monthly set of surveys that will be used to gauge key metrics: how is each contributor in their bubble contributing? how do each of the contributors get along? The survey results will be exclusively viewed by the recruiting bubble and no actions will be taken on it (view sample here).

The recruiting bubble will then consult members who have been flagged (for one of the many afforementioned issues). If a member has been flagged multiple times, either an individual of their bubble or the recruiting team may begin the governance process to terminate the flagged members. This can be moved from a governance process to the afforementioned council down the road. No matter the specific implementation, this entire process needs to be as transparent as possible and leveraging all of our current resources: data from Sobol and Linear, the forums for discussion and governance for decisions.

However, in order for this to work effectively, standards need to be created by the DAO. There needs to be clear expectations of every individual (culturally and work-related) to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Contributor Communications

There is already the Rari Capital DAO Discord. This serves as a way for members of our community to discuss and also serves as a platform for the contributors to discuss with the community. However, this is not the place for contributors to stay focused.

For this reason, there has been the creation of the Rari Capital Team/Contributors Discord. This Discord is solely dedicated to people who are somehow contributing to any part of the Rari Capital stack. Upon joining, they are able to select which series of channels they want to be part of: grantees, development, operations or strategy (or they can choose multiple; also note how these match the previously defined categories). While each bubble could have its own channel, I suggest for bubbles to try and merge and have overlapping channels to prevent way too many being created for the time being (can be re-assessed when scale is reached).

Members will onboard into this Discord server in one of two ways:

• After being approved for a grant
• After being onboarded into the DAO

This serves as an easy communications platform for all contributors. Each member actively contributing to the DAO (and being paid as so) is expected to report their progress in a sprint management solution accessible to other contributors (ideally Linear) and work with their bubble owner to report their work to the token holders.

What’s Next

With the outlined organization, recruiting and communications model outlined above, I hope that our contributors can work at peak efficiency. The talent of the protocol is what has brought us as far as we have come and setting up a standardized mechanism here will drive the protocol forward at an exponential rate. The systems outlined here are likely to significantly change as we learn what works and what doesn’t. I will be actively updating the community on these changes.

Also if you’re interested in coming to help build the Rari Capital ecosystem and DAO, join us! DM me on Twitter or fill this out. If you’re interested in the grants program, reach out to Samuel!

While this requires no contract changes, I am keen on hearing everyone’s thoughts on this. Do you have any ideas on how to make it better? I’d love to hear! Also, now that we can get back to shipping — let us know what you’d like to see next.

Thanks to Dan Elitzer, KW710, Sam Stein, Ethan Jones, Samuel Shadrach, Bryan Peters, Ben Roy, Chillzone, and many others for giving this a read and providing feedback.