COMMON QUESTIONS

Answers You Need

WHAT IS A DAO?

For those unfamiliar with a DAO as a form of organisation the following is an edited form of two excellent articles by The Generalist and Cooper Turley.

DAOs are entities geared towards a shared purpose: the creation of value. They are internet communities with a bank account. Members work together to create, distribute and capture value relative to a shared mission. Ownership shares economic, social and political components, creating best practices for digital coordination.

DAOs seek to:

Provide members with a voice through governance.
Flatten hierarchy and create fluid workstreams.
Allocate resources to achieve a core mission.

Regardless of size, DAOs look to solve core missions – evolving a group chat into a success-driven community.

WHY A DAO AND NOT A COMMUNITY?

At the core of We the Founders is the idea that it should be founder-led, but also that founders and start-up businesses should benefit from participation. That benefit might come from social or financial capital. Start-up communities already exist right across Australia and many start-ups will participate in global communities. We the Founders is not seeking to replace such communities. We are seeking to create a data layer upon which any number of partners can build products, services and whole businesses which support, develop, and accelerate the start-up ecosystem in Australia.

DAOs can be defined as an internet community with a bank account. In this case,the purpose of the bank account is to collect any revenue from monetising the data and collect it centrally for distribution according to the wishes of the community. That could be a dispersion of any revenue aggregated into grants creating new sub-DAOs or investments into specific start-ups. It could be a combination of these things. That would be up to the DAO community itself as expressed by proposal voting.

In its first phase, the concept of We the Founders is the collection of survey data which is then monetised. It may be that the collection of this data is sufficient and the community decide there is no further need for the DAO to exist. Equally it may be that the community decide there is a further need for the DAO but perhaps not in it’s initial form. All of this is possible and would be up to the community to decide.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The team will create the necessary infrastructure for the DAO. This will include the creation of a social token
A base survey will be created and presented to DAO members as they join, based on a small number (ie.less than fifteen) of basic questions
The team will contact key ecosystem businesses briefing them on the DAO’s existence and purpose, and inviting them to take part in the survey by distributing and promoting the survey to their start-up founders
The team will work with a PR agency to create and distribute a press release to make entrepreneurs and other ecosystem members start-ups themselves aware of the DAO and the survey and invite them to take part
A participant will need a crypto wallet to take part. The wallet which will be used to sign up to the survey
The successful completion of a survey would be rewarded with a token which would confer membership benefits including voting on DAO proposals
A secure database will be created using a cloud supplier
The DAO members will form a customer panel. Members would be rewarded with additional tokens when they participate by periodically verifying data accuracy, filling out more survey data, introducing other entrepreneurs or introducing a data purchaser, for instance.
In the near term, holding additional tokens would increase the member’s voting power which means the DAO would be influenced by the most involved community members
In the longer term, the intent is to add a tiered services structure where members with more tokens would be able to access the more premium propositions
Each additional survey response would add to the data profile of each DAO member which members can access and update.
The data profiles would be built on this database with a front end for DAO members to access and update their own data.Such data updates would be incentivised and rewarded with tokens
There would be a separate interface for organisations wanting to access the anonymised data in aggregate, and provide the option to create a bespoke survey or campaign

WHY WOULD CONTRIBUTORS GET INVOLVED?

Founders or potential founders

Founder driven
Solves for marketplace asymmetry
Inclusion
Diversity
Provide access
Participation in the upside
Community
Collective action
Participate in a DAO
Provide a route for funding
Provide a clear voice
Drive better products and services for start-ups

Government

Lower data collection costs
Quick response
Comprehensive response
Easy access

Investors

Provide deal flow
Lower transaction costs
Easy access

Other ecosystem players

Coordinate efficiently and effectively
Reduce duplication
Data based action
Create better products and services based on data of the unmet needs of the start-up segment