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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Lindsey T. H. Jackson and I discuss the journey of anti-racism and anti-oppression work in ourselves, in venture capital, and in startup ecosystems. We discuss the nuances of dismal representation numbers in venture; how to approach Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) conversations in the workplace and beyond; how to develop a regular practice to self-reflect, define your community, and “fail fast” on your own anti-racism journey; and how to encourage others to consider embarking on the journey themselves.

Check it out: Unlearning racism in venture building & investing :: with Lindsey T. H. Jackson

Merging DAOs

If you’ve been following my posts the last few months, you’ve heard me talk about a bunch of different DAOs and other Web 3 projects. Those efforts - at least the ones with Discord servers - are now all merging into BanyanDAO (https://banyandao.xyz/).

If you’d like to join us on Discord, you can do so here (other Discord servers will be closing down this week and all merging into this one place).

We’re gearing up for a Web 3 Product Manager training event in April that I’m excited to share more about in future newsletters. Stay tuned.

Compensating DAO participants

I’ve had a series of super helpful meetings recently with experienced crypto attorneys - and founders of DAOs who work with crypto attorneys - to dive deeper into how playing nice with jurisdictions, paying taxes, and compensating DAO participants can look going forward. While of course you should get your own legal counsel for your own projects/DAOs (i.e. this is not legal advice), it’s clear that reputable DAOs are using some form of token (fungible or non-fungible) in a “club” fashion, with “membership fees”, and then carefully working with their legal teams to get a token out in the markets more publicly to abide by securities laws.

I’m recommending a very specific path for BanyanDAO (subject to change, of course) that uses Coordinape and then DAOHaus to manage compensation and governance proposals, respectively. Stay tuned in the BanyanDAO Discord server for more details.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will