YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Wang

lines on the record: 73
first: 2021-12-07
most recent: 2021-12-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So Constitution DAO, we're finishing shutting down official activities, refunds are going. Everyone's dispersing to different projects. I have a day job as a software engineer at a very different, but I would say just as exciting part of the tech industry. So people are working on what they've been working on, but I expect we'll see more from this group in the future. It was really incredible. I'd say one of the best parts of this experience is I made some new friends. And that's really fun where people you know from the internet, you can now pick up the phone and say, hey, do you want to go hang out? Want to go grab a coffee?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I could go another hour on this. I really want to know if the lobbyist DAO gets to pick what steak restaurant they take elected officials to. Can you vote on that? That'd be really interesting. But you've given us so much time. What's next for you? What's next for the core members of the Constitution Dow Group?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you look at a Tao today, there's a few things that a DAO can actually do. And I think the thing we need to bridge the gap with is what can a smart contract actually control? Because that's the source of a DAO's power. For a lot of DAOs today, the majority of what they do is just sending treasury funds. We want to send $20 million to start a crypto lobbying group. This is a real world example from Uniswap, which is a decentralized exchange that had a vote to start this crypto lobbying group. However, I think over time we can build out more functionality for the powers of DAOs, both from the voting power, what the actual token holders can vote on, but also, let's say, elected representatives that the DAO gives very specific concrete and audible powers to.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's end where you started, which was the interface between the crypto world and the DAO community world and the real world is not yet built out. I understand why it's happening in financial institutions first. That's all just computer stuff. Literally, we just had an Excel influencer on the show. Like most of that industry is people using Excel or computers to do stuff. And you can automate that and re-constitute those contracts on decentralized databases right away. When you're talking about prisoner form, that is bodies in the world doing things fundamentally. That is not computer work. Where do you think the next steps between, okay, we want DAOs to come together to form governance collectives and impact in the real world is what's the next most important step?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the latter. I think the takeaway is what things do you want to happen in the world and how do you make that happen? And is this the right tool set? And there's been a proliferation already of really interesting DAOs that are doing lots of exciting projects. A few examples, there's a DAO that's now working on prison reform. There's another that's working on how do we create more public scientific research. There's one that's working on acquiring actually another document, one that acquired an anti-slavery document from US history. So I think we're already starting to see the effects of this. And I think in the long term, we're going to see more DAOs for people that are trying to do things that don't fit in the structure of a company and a nonprofit, but more of a community collective. And we're going to see lots of people take the lessons from what we did and build better tooling and better best practices.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You introduced a lot of people to these concepts for the first time. Now, some of them have taken their refunds, some of them are waiting on gas fees, some of them are just happy to have participated Do you think the takeaway for that group of people should be? Oh, I can spend money on cool things and it's kind of a meme and there's a community or here are some new instruments of fundamentally corporate governance”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's going to take some time to figure out what the right thing is. That's one thing I've actually really appreciated about the way that kind of the US government, compared to some other governments, is approaching crypto regulation is they are giving the industry some space to breathe. And they're saying, all right, let's kind of watch what's happening in the depths here and try and understand with this more limited group of people that know they're getting into a very highly risky asset class. What are we going to learn? from this smaller group. And I do want to emphasize again that what we were doing was a donation for governance. It's something to vote on the future of this document, and the intention that we had was how can we make this document something that's governed by the people? So, yeah.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really good philosophical question and also a very concrete question. I think for this A big part of my belief with technology is people will do what they can. And people are going to be curious and they're going to try things. And I think it's our job as a society to figure out what things do we want to come from that and what things do we not want to come from that. So I do think it is interesting to be pushing the boundaries. I'm not talking about this case specifically, but with, you know, how can we repackage and organize information and value and governance and all that sort of those mechanisms?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The layer on top of it is financializing the bazooka of money in extremely surprising ways, in ways that move with momentum that breaks my brain too. It breaks your brain. Do you think that's good? Like, I find that financialization of everything. I look at it. I'm like, now there's a secondary market of a token that was meant to govern the physical copy of a constitution. Now we're just like playing in the wreckage of this project. Like, there's something about that that seems not great. Like, it actually cuts against your goals. And I'm wondering if you think about that tension.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is where I kind of want to end it, right? There's a lot of really big ideas here. I think it is fundamentally cool that people try to raise a lot of money by a copy of the Constitution. It's just fundamentally cool. At the end of the day, though, the internet has always been good. It just like firing a bazooka of money at things from almost the first day. Like, you can go back to the ice bucket challenge when people fired a bazooka of money at the ALS Association. They were not necessarily ready for it. You hoped they would do good things with it and that they actually invested in research. And in this case, thankfully, they did. But the internet has always found a cause and fire to bazooka of money and things. There's a part of this.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, people like the memes, they like to have fun. One thing that I've learned from kind of exploring the crypto world is that it's very hard to rationalize a lot of the different momentum things that happen with memes and with kind of the memetic transfer of information. I think if people are having fun and they're doing their thing, then I don't try and interpret it too deeply because I'm just going to break my brain”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were choosing which platform we were going to use, there was a series of trade offs we had to make. And the thing that we really wanted to optimize for the most was the refunds. And part of that was choosing Juicebox, which JuiceBox has the tokens, and you can claim the token even if we don't win the auction. That was not something that we had advised people to do. We were telling people just to claim their refunds. With the blockchain, you can't really stop people. So it is nothing that's affiliated with the team anymore and we're sunsetting the project. It's something that exists out there, but not something we've been endorsing.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Refunds will be available indefinitely. The smart contract is on the chain, and it can't be modified, so someone could come back 20 years from now and say, oh, I realized I still had funds here. I want to pull them out. And I expect a lot of the tooling to get better here. One thing that's really popular nowadays is you have those apps that tell you how many subscriptions you're subscribing to that you don't know about. We're going to start to see that with a lot of blockchain-based things because people are going to realize they have money and nooks and crannies all over the place that wasn't worth a lot when they first put it in there and then way down the line it's oh I should really go grab this”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are you going to do if five years from now? There's still, I mean, it could be more. You've got however many. On the wallet right now price of Ethereum moves quite a bit five years from now, if that 45% of Can be worth $50 million again. What's the plan?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to clarify, I think the gas fees are a big part of it. And I think it's not a let's see what happened, but rather a not paying attention or haven't made the time to do it yet. It's very exciting and you want to jump right in when it's like, hey, I want to donate to buy a copy of the Constitution, but it's, oh, I want to claim my refund. It's not as fun. So I think people are in less of a rush.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it is the gas fees, as we were kind of talking about. I think part of it is people not paying attention as much. You know, there's a lot of people in the crypto world that move very fast and they miss things. This is mostly people that are crypto natives and they've got 30, 40, 50 different things that they're paying attention to at once. So I expect over time that number will continue tapering off. But there's a lot of people in crypto that are kind of just throwing bets everywhere and seeing what happens.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's why we've still been active in the Discord providing support to people that are trying to figure out how to do this. So the dashboard would be great, I agree, but I'd rather engage with people directly that are asking me, both individually in direct messages, but also in the general Discord. Hey, I'm struggling to do this, or, oh, I'm not sure if the fund's transferred out, can you check? I think that's the really important part is it's nice to have a dashboard that we can share with other people, but I would much rather work with those individuals and actually get them those refunds.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't this sort of implicate everything we've been talking about, right? Like this is all about trust, it's about transparency, accountability. The mad scramble of things to do The lowest level of priority. I understand that At some point, knowing who your donors are and taking care of the newest ones should have risen up that priority chain, right? Is that on your mind? We should go figure out who the people. Care of because”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wish I had those stats for you. So actually, the dashboard that we had for who contributed how was a community-built dashboard. And that's one of the really cool things about this technology is someone who is totally unaffiliated was actually just able to pull the blockchain data and make this dashboard on what's going on. I'm sure it wasn't as exciting for them to do the refund dashboard. So they did a little bit but didn't put details on who and how much per wallet and that sort of thing. There was an overall refund dashboard. So yeah, we don't have that data, unfortunately, but I do think the fact that it wasn't even someone on our team, it wasn't someone affiliated. It was just a third party that wanted access to this data. And because it was publicly on the blockchain, they could share it with us and share it with the world.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Refunded about 55% of the money. Right, we've got all the great stats about the people who contributed for the first time or among their first time. In terms of refunds, do you have stats on? Were the same first time wallets requesting that refunds is the 45% funds left over? Is that for your first time donors? Because that to me would be very telling.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's why there was transparency from the start. And it's unfortunate. I wish there could have been lower fees. There are scaling solutions, but they didn't have the contract with that refund feature, which was really important to us. So we felt like just from the start, we needed to be super transparent, especially when we were just targeting people that are what we call crypto native. They understand that fees are part of it. And for those that weren't crypto native, that's why we wanted to make very clear in our education, hey, there will be fees. This is part of using the network.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into that card. And that's the era we're in right now with crypto, is we still haven't gotten all of the scalability and all of the bandwidth figured out yet. So right now we're still in those early days of trying to pack in as much as we can at the lowest fee cost. And that's part of technology. A lot of things start off as a slightly worse experience than the technology of the day, but as they improve over time, they become significantly better. Another example of this I bet we'll also see in the upcoming years is self-driving cars. Worse than a human now, eventually I hope to never drive a car again.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So this is a really important criticism. This is something we were transparent with from the start. And we were telling people, hey, the gas fee is part of it. There is this transaction fee. And if there's refunds, there's also going to be a transaction fee. And people were aware of that. It's part of any new technology. And what it really reminds me of is actually a story that's kind of very near to my heart about Satoro Iwata who worked at Nintendo. And Iwata was developing the Pokemon Gold and Silver games. And what was very interesting about Pokemon Gold and Silver is they had two different regions, right? There were two different broad areas to explore. Now, the cartridges they used at that time were very constrained in terms of storage and in the software world there's a legendary story of Iwata basically figuring out a way to do compression that fit both of these regions.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the challenges now is people have paid $100 in gas fees to donate $100. They might pay $100 in gas fees to get their $100 back. There are some people who've already paid more to get their money back than they put in. This is one of the core challenges of this entire project that the transaction fees actually outweigh everything else that's happening.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a few different options not really worth getting into the details there, but we essentially decided that all of them had sufficient technical risk, and with technical risk comes the risk that we lose people's money, and that was unacceptable.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So there are a few options that we explored. We actually hadn't fully settled on one, but the plan that we had was essentially we redeposited the funds back into the contract on juice box, and then people were able to do a withdrawal of their refund.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just to clarify here, we actually didn't change it. We were exploring another avenue that we decided not to approach, and we went back to the original plan just because we felt like that was the simplest and that was the safest.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely more people to crypto endows. I think a lot of people knew what the Constitution was, and I think their interest was peaked because they were familiar with the Constitution. I think people also really liked the Nick Cage memes. I think people had a lot of fun with those.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of doing my job. By no means is Constitution Tao something along the lines of this is something I absolutely need to do, but it's a start that piques people's curiosity and it gets more people asking, what could I do with this thing?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the coolest parts is I get to meet a ton of people in person that I knew from the internet. Friends of the internet IRL, which was such a fun experience. And even though we lost, you know, people were sad for a little bit, but there was so much hope about what we accomplished. We got DAOs on some of the largest news publications in the world and teaching people about this technology. We got all of these new people to actually try this. And I think that's a big part of new technology and of crypto specifically is people often understand it better when they actually try it out. One thing I like to think about as a student of the history of technology is that the way that people adopt things is because they have to. If you think about email, for example, right, a lot of people were in the 90s, why would I use email? This is ridiculous. And then you fast forward and it's, oh, I'm going to get fired if I don't use email because I'm not capable.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a group of us actually ended up getting together in New York to watch the auction together. It was exhilarating. Internally we knew who was the person that was bidding on our behalf, but obviously we were not able to release that until after the result of the auction. I felt internally during it when the number was creeping up like I was going to puke. And then I think if we won, I might have cried. So it was a very intense experience, especially after this crazy week.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think it's frustrating, but that's the way the world is. And if we can't win based on our own merits, then I think we just need to work harder to build a stronger ecosystem. I see this as a moment of inspiration. I want to wish Ken also a congratulations. I know he has some really great plans to display the document and make it so people are able to see it and engage with it. And I hope that after this Ken also takes the opportunity to engage a little bit more deeply with what we're doing.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very, very shortly before, so we did our proof of funds about three hours before the auction. We were hoping to be able to continue fundraising throughout those last few hours, but totally understand that we had to go through the process of making sure that they could verify we had the money they have. This was something very new for Southeybees, and we're really grateful that they chose to partner with us and work with us to verify these funds.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you're right, it's a lot of people trusting us with their money. That's why there were two things that were really important here. One was transparency. We were upfront with everything that was going on throughout the process. And two was refunds. It's a big reason that we chose the smart contract that we did for the fundraise because it had that built-in refund functionality. And we did exactly what we said we were going to do. We were going to raise money. We were going to bid at the auction. And had we lost, which we did, we were going to offer refunds. And the refunds are available for people to claim.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That can solve that problem. And I think the thing that makes this really clear and what's really interesting with this software is you can essentially define what are the hard capabilities of someone in an organization, right? Do they have control over a certain amount of funds in the treasury? And I think some of these more cutting edge, more developed DAOs are much more interesting case studies for looking at this because they've been actively working on this in the example of IndexCOP over a year with people working full-time on that project.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think actually for looking at the software, it's actually better to look at more established DAOs because there's some really interesting innovative things that people are working on. An example I can give is there's a DAO called index co-op, index co-op makes index funds, right? So you can buy, for example, the DeFi Pulse index, which has 20 different DeFi tokens. This organization is fully a DAO. The votes on which products do we release, who manages the products, funds for marketing, all that sort of thing is managed on chain. But what they're finding is more complicated organizational structures are needed to be able to keep pace. So there was a really interesting discussion in their forums recently that led to an organizational change where they essentially have what they call wise owls, which are council members that are basically dedicated to stepping in when there's a lack of clarity and either figuring out a way to solve the problem or bringing it to the person.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I think this goes back to the fact that the speedrun DAO infrastructure or the DAO infrastructure is still very early. We did use some great trustless technology such as Juicebox, which let us do the fundraise. And people were able to look at the juice box contracts, see how they worked. So that part was really important to us, was that that was done in a contract. It wasn't just a multi-sig for the fundraising. There were a couple other features that were really important there, but this goes back to the fact that we're still early, and this technology is still so new. And we're really, you know, people like to compare it to the early era of the internet, the 1990s. And I think that's pretty accurate”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were plenty of internal politics. The thing I think was most interesting was the pace at which we moved and how that really bred trust and how it made it so people really had to choose if I'm doing this thing, you know, who has control here, who has the decision-making power. And a lot of that was very often unclear. One thing that would very frequently happen is we would have a vote in our Discord and you'd have maybe an hour in the core team to get your voice in. And some of these were very big decisions. So a lot of it was being in a very high trust environment. There are a lot of people that people didn't know, but pretty much everyone had at least one person they had known previously. So it was this very loose network of people that were vaguely aware of each other that came together. The internal politics were mostly disagreements on direction. There was nothing actually kind of truly political in the way that you get in a company because everyone”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, that was part of our budget. And you're right. There was a lot of trust baked in here, but we were very transparent from the beginning that this is a very trustful process. This is not something that at the point where we started was fully decentralized. You know, there was a core team and we were working as fast as we could. Towards progressive decentralization. So you are right that there were those trust assumptions there. And we were very transparent with those from the start. And people felt they could trust us and they came along for the journey. And we're really grateful for that.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it would go either from FTX directly to Southey's or to Southeybees via endowments. I was not directly involved with that process. As I said, I was more involved on the newbie onboarding and the marketing side. So, I don't have an actual concrete answer, unfortunately.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I was saying is it's a problem of both technology and regulation and trying to tie those two things together so we can figure out how an on-chain entity can hold on to a physical document. From a very concrete...”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So it's both a technology question and a regulatory question. We had some partners that were ready to actually take physical custody of the documents. Salabeese was willing to hold it for an additional 30 days. One of the reasons we didn't bid our full amount is because we needed money for things along the lines of custody, this document. We needed money for things along the lines of paying fees, taxes. So it's both a question of regulatory and technology and trying to figure out those structures. There are so many great organizations right now working with regulators to make this a lot easier. And I'd say that's one of the things that makes crypto different than a lot of the rest of the tech industry. There are organizations like Coin Center, the Blockchain Association that are working very hard to get regulators to understand. You know, a lot of this isn't, hey, we want to convince you to let everything run Buck Wild and free, but hey, let's think very thoughtfully.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is, as we've kind of gone over, a very highly experimental technology. This is something that we've done in a very lightweight fashion because it's so new. This is something we've done in a very trustful way. Endowment is very well known within the crypto community, and I'm sure they wouldn't want to risk their reputation on doing something negative. So that's kind of the structure that drove this. In the future, I would love to see better legal structures that enable this sort of thing. And I think one of the biggest lessons of Constitution DAO is the technology is so close, but we're not fully ready yet. And there's a lot of rough edges that need to be sanded for this to have gone so much easier in two to five to ten years from now.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, kind of as I went over earlier, we had this idea of doing a 501c3. None of it was hammered into stone, but the concrete plan was endowment was going to custody the documents until we had a legal structure together.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I want to push back on that it was just to troll. I think there was legitimate excitement and curiosity around owning this document. I think a big part of the narrative was around the technology because it's such a new thing and it's something that's very misunderstood and people are still trying to wrap their heads around it. So that's why I think the narrative was really driven by the technology. All great technology exists for one reason and it's to enable people. And so that's kind of why I was saying the people in the story is what drove me. But you're right. The technology was really important because it drove the narrative, because it said, hey, these crazy crypto people are going to buy a copy of the US Constitution and what's a DAO and why are they raising on chain? What does on-chain mean? So I think those two things combined are kind of the really important things that drove that.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was interested in both of it, you know, and I think what really interested me was the story. And I think there were so many people that were interested in this for different reasons. And I'd encourage you to actually look at our fundraising site. We used a platform called Juicebox. And people could leave messages of why they were contributing. And there were some really beautiful, heartfelt things. There were people that were talking about how they were descendants of slaves and they were really excited to now own this document despite some of the horrible things that were in it. There were immigrants, there were parents that were excited to share this with their children one day. So I think the story and the different emotional things that had evoked in people was really the thing that pulled me in. There's just a very strong emotional pull here. And I'm also very curious about the technology, but that's a secondary factor.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think a lot of people got really curious. One of the most rewarding parts of this experience was the number of museums that we're speaking to that now want to learn more. They saw us raise 40 to $50 million depending on the ether price. And they said, you know, we take six months to raise this amount of money. Let's talk. How do you do this? And obviously, there were some very specific dynamics that were happening here, but they are very curious now about DAOs, about collective ownership, and all the different things that we explored with this organization.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we really didn't know until the end. You know, there was a lot of things happening up in the air, a lot of uncertainty. What we really saw also is as we raised more money, our legitimacy became greater and greater with different institutions.”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny, newbie onboarding, it's why you're on the show now. That's me. I appreciate the expertise there. Tell me when you're talking to vendors, obviously need banking partners. You have this partner called endowments, which another great name, it's DAO in the middle instead of DOW. That's perfect. That's a lot of people trying to do a lot of things all at once. How did it actually come together? Did you not know that it was going to come together?”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of this was super vague, and we were moving very fast. What I kind of ended up specializing in was newbie onboarding. So how do we teach people that are new to crypto, how to get involved with this, how to do it safely, providing support. We also had open discord rooms where we were helping people troubleshoot. I also contributed a bit to marketing and some things strategically. What we found, and especially because we were moving so fast, is people were”
2021-12-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · From a meme to $47 million: ConstitutionDAO, crypto, and the future of crowdfunding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT