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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Jesse Bryan and I discuss the power of storytelling when leading an organization of people. This conversation dives into not only how a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) can reinforce vision and mission with story, but also how traditional corporations can (and should) conduct themselves when interacting with customers. We talk about how a Commodity + Story = Product, how to keep the main thing the main thing, how stories + status are the two pedals of moving an organization forward cohesively, and how/why to tell stories in conversational language as a business.

Check it out: Leadership via storytelling in DAOs and traditional organizations :: with Jesse Bryan

“People like us do things like this”

This is a quote from Seth Godin.

The whole episode this week with Jesse is extremely powerful, but his point toward the end about how stories are reinforced with status to drive an organization forward is mind blowing.

Jesse is the co-founder of Belief Agency (← check out the videos on their site). He and the Belief team help companies uncover their “true stories that work.”

What I find endlessly fascinating is how this approach can be applied to help DAOs move forward together. Instead of command and control, DAOs move toward “sense and respond”, and the stories that are reinforced in a DAO are even more important than in traditional corporations.

Simply put, similar to how parents tell children “we do things like this” and then use positive reinforcement (“Nice job!”, “Well Done”) to encourage cohesion, so brands that are compelling tell stories and reinforce these stories with their employees (and customers).

At BanyanDAO, our underlying belief is that a community of entrepreneurial leaders learning and building in Web3 together can help humans flourish. We believe in the power of technology and venture-building to unleash latent human potential, and these beliefs lead us into values such as accessibility, transparency, simplicity, curiosity, and communal positivity. In the same way we dropped the price of official membership on DAOHaus to 0.01 wxDAI (equivalent to $0.01 USD), so we are looking for ways to bring more people into Web3 and provide an environment where people can learn and grow together.

What I find compelling from today’s episode is how important it is for a community to tell these stories and reinforce the culture and values with encouragement. This is so simple, and yet so many companies get this wrong. I’m excited about how DAO culture can change not just a small corner of the Internet, but corporate culture worldwide.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will