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Greetings all, in this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Andy Chatham and I talk about Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects (DIMO, https://dimo.zone/). We discuss the background and story of the project, why giving people an open platform for mobility data matters, the journey of creating and shipping a hardware product, parallels to the Helium network, keeping OEMs accountable, and the future vision of DIMO to create a positive impact on our world.

Check it out: Web3, Open Mobility Data, and the Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects (DIMO) story :: with Andy Chatham

Greenpilled & Impact DAOs

The Web3 Impact book club that I mentioned last week is now deep into these two books by the founder of Gitcoin (Kevin Owocki): GreenPilled and ImpactDAOs.

It’s fascinating to think about making the world a better place by focusing on solving human coordination problems. Kevin et al. believe that most of our problems in the world (climate change, lack of access to clean water / education / health care, etc…) stem from humans not being able to have an effective means to coordinate. The promise of Web3 - and DAOs in particular - aims to help change the game.

While I certainly believe that Web3 will usher in a new set of technologies that will make the Internet a better place and empower people - rather than turn them into mindless data-generating machines - I do think that more attention needs to be aimed at effective leadership through these human coordination issues.

As one of my early mentors once said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership”.

So, how is this possible? Even though DAOs enable flat structures, CEOs are still valuable. Instead of one CEO, however, an effective round-table of people gifted with CEO-like skills is needed. In order for an organization to maintain quality and operational effectiveness, these CEOs need to effectively “hire and fire” (i.e. manage) great teams around them.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of great DAO examples to turn to. Great CEOs tend to want to be CEO over their own thing, with the right incentives to keep them motivated to do their work. In the fractional, often-chaotic setting that is DAOs, perhaps CEOs aren’t as keen to dive in. So, is this a fundamental problem with DAOs?

I don’t think so.

Instead, what we need is a movement of skilled leadership willing/able to see how coordination with other CEO-gifted people can rise the tide for everyone. As long as DAOs figure out how to properly compensate these people for their time and talents, then - I believe - we can indeed set ourselves up to be effectively Greenpilled and make the world a better place with orders of magnitude more ImpactDAOs than exist today.

If you aren’t yet a part of one of these ImpactDAOs, then I’d highly encourage you to check them out. (Also, I’m partial - of course - to BanyanDAO. We’d love to have you join us, and - yes - our book club there). :)

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will