07: A Journey Through DAO’s // AMA #1 – Bryan Petes

Welcome again to the CityDAO Podcast. Today, you are going to hear a different format than the usual one-on-one interview. This is a recording that was done on our discord channel with Bryan Petes, who is involved in numerous DAOs, such as Bankless DAO, DAOPunks, Polygon DAO, and CityDAO. Bryan is also the Co-Founder of Sobol, The Organizational Accountability Platform. The Sobol mission is to accelerate the business transition to decentralized and humanistic work. This episode is a question-and-answer series that was recently done live on the CityDAO discord. And, if you want to know more about Sobol, just visit their website at: Sobol.io

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

• 1:47 Bryan Petes is from Canada and he describes himself as someone who apologizes a lot. Also, he is always interested in innovation and how things work so he went into mechanical engineering.
• 3:43 Watching startups in the Web 2.0 space scale-up, Bryan became disillusioned with the relationships between founders and capital and between founders and employees. He was disillusioned with seeing startups turn into traditional corporations.
• 4:42 In 2017, his disillusionment with traditional corporations led Bryan to become interested in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs.
• 5:41 When Bryan saw Bankless DAO for the first time, he was convinced that DAO is going to be a huge possibility.
• 6:55 The concept of sub DAOs, is one of the emerging patterns and practices that genuinely excites Bryan today.
• 9:47 Bryan shares his view on the challenges that DAOs will face in becoming more accepted by the general population.
• 14:50 According to Bryan, he believes DAOs shouldn’t even have a legal entity. He also answers his definition of guild and sub DAO.
• 19:17 Another interesting thing that Bryan points out about sub DAOs is that it can incubate inside of a DAO but may eventually transform into an independent DAO.
• 21:26 Bryan talks about DAOPunks. He shares his story of why he fell in love with DAOPunks.
• 25:37 There are some things that DAOs can learn from traditional startups and Web 2.0 that could tremendously help them.
• 29:24 Bryan shares the origin story of his company, Sobol, and where they are going in the days ahead.
• 35:06 A series of techno-thriller books inspired the name of Sobol.
• 36:51 An audience asks Bryan regarding the topic of regulations and governance.
• 42:27 In his Twitter account, Bryan posts about DAOs and different topics related to DAO.
• 45:37 Bryan provides updates on guilds in CityDAO.
• 50:26 For Bryan, CityDAO elected councils acting as curators and authors is a very smart mechanism that he has also seen in other DAOs.
• 53:11 Bryan discusses his ideal vision for on-chain contribution payments.
• 59:11 Maven invites people in the audience who are interested in building a network state to contact him on Twitter.

Key Points from the Interview:

1. “I love thinking about how DAOs grow, scale and fulfill that vision for like more meaningful work and fairer and equitable reward distribution schemes compared to the world I come from.”
2. “I think the mechanism of the elected council to act as curators and authors is a really smart mechanic and I’ve seen this work in other DAOs and non-DAOs.”

Resources Mentioned: