42: Structuring a DAO // Origami DAO Launcher

Matt is one of the Co-Founders of Origami, which helps ambitious communities create the world’s most valuable DAOs. Origami supports these groups through their open and effective framework for growing DAOs. Matt and his Co-Founders got together to talk about crypto projects, fun NFT investments, and what would happen if networks could be owned and governed by people, instead of corporate giants. To organize their relationship, they formed a DAO called Orange. The early days were full of challenges, while complying with regulations, creating a scale system to ensure thousands more founders could join, and keeping their Discord from melting down to chaos.

As they overcame each challenge, Orange DAO grew to over 1,300 founders, raised $80 million, and invested in over 130 crypto projects. They even created a Fellowship program to educate future web3 entrepreneurs. As it all came together, other DAO creators asked for advice. They need guidance, introductions, documents, and user-friendly software. That’s why four of the DAO creators founded Origami. They realized that together, they had all the skills needed to help other communities create and grow their DAOs.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

• 3:06 Matt’s role in Origami is more on the operation side.
• 3:42 Origami is structured as a company instead of a DAO.
• 5:15 Matt sees DAOs as a new way for people to interact with communities.
• 6:00 Eric predicts that the word DAO will evolve into something different than what its acronym represents.
• 7:48 The word DAO will be less relevant in the future, according to Matt.
• 8:45 Matt discusses their process of launching a DAO in Origami.
• 10:15 Origami is currently getting thousands of applications.
• 11:31 It is important for Matt to see engagement within the community in order to be considered in Origami.
• 12:54 All the Co-Founders of Origami went through the Y Combinator with different companies.
• 17:02 The main philosophy of Origami is to preserve optionality. This means that their fundamental building blocks are built to change over time.
• 18:12 Origami has two DAO tokens, which are the membership NFT and the governance token.
• 22:34 One of the biggest reasons why people go to Origami is because there are so many pitfalls in starting a DAO and Matt and his team are here to guide them through the process.
• 24:04 Right now, they are more focused on communities that want to be DAO for the first time. They can also work with existing DAOs that want to change into a new system.
• 25:18 It’s hard to start a DAO because you should have the right approach and sequence.
• 26:46 Matt enumerates some of the achievements of Origami.
• 28:37 For Matt, the wallet issue is one of the biggest challenges for DAOs in 2023.
• 29:56 There are going to be more exciting DAOs to watch out for this year.
• 31:10 Matt offers his view on quadratic voting.
• 33:32 Origami is doing a $20,000 grant to different DAOs.

Key Points from this Interview:

1. “We always want to be on whatever leading-edge technology is, what works and is secure, that’s what we’re going to go with. We’re always building to preserve optionality and we advise our DAOs to do the same.”
2. “There are so many pitfalls in starting a DAO and there’s no instructions included. So, this is probably the biggest reason why people end up working with Origami is because we guide you through that process, so you don’t make those mistakes.”

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