Michael Mazur

Using Web3 Technology to Make the World a Better Place with Michael Mazur, COO at Colu

In this episode, Tim is joined by Michael Mazur, the COO at Colu, a fintech start-up that fosters urban livability and economic prosperity on a local level. By connecting and engaging local governments, local businesses, and citizens, Colu’s objective is to create a better city for the people, by the people.

Together, Tim and Michael discuss how web3 technology can make the world a better place, how governments can be more transparent, and how incentives have driven local prosperity in Akron, Ohio.

To find out how Grindery is building a Swiss army knife for existing DAO frameworks, head to grindery.io.

 

 

Transcript

Tim - 00:00:01: This is Tim Delhaes and you are listening to DAO Talks Podcast. Over the last couple of years, we've seen DAOs go through a roller coaster ride from being nowhere to everywhere. But what exactly are DAOs or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations? And how can we use them as a lens to view the wider world? What is happening to them now in the beer market? Is at the end of it, or are we just normal hype cycle? All of that and much more is what we want to find out together. Joining me today is Michael Mazur, the COO of Colu and Co-founder of UrbanChange. Michael is passionate about transforming the world one city, one neighborhood at a time, using technology, Web3 technology to get people to recycle, walk more, or do whatever it takes to make the world a better place. We will help you understand what the low hanging fruit are to drive change in your community, how government can become more transparent, and how all of this can drive business activity. Don't miss out. Michael, how are you? Great to have you. Where are you?

 

Michael - 00:01:11: Hi, Tim, great to be here. I'm in New York City and the wonderful location of Manhattan.

 

Tim - 00:01:16: Well, city city looking at your background, obviously, you're passionate about Internet technology, Web3 specially, and you're involved hands on in Colu, right, which has to do with cities. And you're involved in UrbanChange, which also has to do with cities. Tell me a little bit what's driving your day? What are you doing in those projects?

 

Michael - 00:01:42: Yeah, so I've been working in sort of the intersection of technology and Cities in Smart Cities for the past eight years now. Initially, more in the mobility and transportation space of figuring out how to get electric vehicles on the road and how to get cities to electrify their streets and to bring in also shared cars there, so reducing transportation footprint. And then about over ten years ago, I joined Colu. And what I've been doing here has really been working on different ways to figure out how we can use technology in cities to enhance social and economic prosperity. And what that really means is seeing there's all these technologies out there and ideas and examples of things that companies do, but there really isn't much intersection with when does the technology, when does the rubber hit the road? And often there's a big disconnect there. So what I've been doing a lot is figuring out how to take the technology and implement it in the public sector and in the communities and figuring out how to use it to make life better. So more people shopping at local businesses, more people walking and riding their bikes, more people doing things to promote wellbeing and health. So a lot of focus has been on the United States and recently also, I've been doing a lot of work in the emerging market places like in sub Saharan Africa and Brazil. And things like that.

Tim - 00:03:00: So let's start there. When you say, hey, it can be better and there can be more participation and so on, what's wrong today? What's not happening that should be happening, or what's happening that's going totally sideways? What's worth fixing?

 

Michael - 00:03:15: So one of the biggest problems, I mean, I'd say there are a few pretty systematic problems, but number one is that cities are becoming much bigger, meaning that urbanization is happening, right? People are moving to cities, and as cities grow and become more congested and populated, people are starting to see vertical buildings. Our cities are bigger. And that comes with challenges. How do you bring so many people into one area? And a lot of the issues that we're seeing is, number one, with transparency and trust. People often don't necessarily trust their local government officials or the politicians. And what ends up happening is that, first of all, budgets. We don't know necessarily what happens to budgets that are devoted in our community, to, like, economic development, to social prosperity, to getting people to be healthy. We don't know what's happening with these budgets, and there often isn't accountability, right? Governments are there for it's a cyclical nature. They're there for four years, eight years, whatever it may be, and there often isn't accountability. So what we see as a big challenge is that as these communities grow this sort of issue of having a centralized government that deals with all these funds and is doing it in a way where they're not necessarily accountable gives people who are, let's say, young or older or whatever, and innovative and entrepreneurial and want to do things to benefit their community, they are limited with what they can do. And so what ends up happening is that you become, to an extent, isolated from your community intentionally, because then you can go online, right? So instead of going to your help your park and helping support your neighbors or whatever it may be, and volunteering your community, you end up going online. Obviously, there are benefits, but we also should neglect our own community that surround us and where we live and where we live our lives. So we see that as a big challenge, and you can see it in cities all over the world. And then you think about the way our work lives are changed now as people work more remotely and people aren't necessarily going to the office five days a week. So your living environment suddenly has another meaning, right? So suddenly. Your neighbors, the local cafes. It's not like you're coming there if you work in the city and you come live in the suburban. Or maybe you come home at 7:00 pm, where it may be, and then, fine, you go have dinner, go to sleep, and then you go back to work and you spend ten to 12 hours outside of your home. So things are changing, and we see that there is a big gap now in a lot of those different factors that I was mentioning.

 

Tim - 00:05:38: Actually, my question has just popped up, while you're saying that, are you actually thinking primarily about what happens to cities or are you thinking primarily about what's happening to neighborhoods?

 

Michael - 00:05:50: Good question. So I'll Zoom out for a second. Our work with Colu and with UrbanChange is really creating localized currencies or local coin to help drive different actions. So to extend creating this element of a circular economy where each community or each city we work in, about ten cities in the United States has their own coin. And essentially what that means is that when you take different actions to promote the strategic goals of your city or community so shop local, recycle, walk 10,000 steps per day, get tested for a disease, right? From a preventive perspective, you can earn these local coins. Each one is worth often a dollar. So let's say City of Akron, you shop local, you earn these local Akron coins. You can then only use them at local businesses in the city. So we prevent that leakage. And essentially that budget that comes from the local government's budget in this case is used to promote an initiative, let's say again, recycling in this case. But the money comes back to local businesses in the community. So we promote the sort of elements of a circular economy. Communities now we see a huge opportunity, especially in emerging markets, and that's what UrbanChange is about. So we found that UrbanChange, which is essentially taking it onto Web3 and doing it in a way that's much more decentralized. So instead of working directly with the local government and having to deal with all the different things, which is again, there's tons of upside there. But we saw huge opportunity in working with community leaders in even a much smaller scale who want to help support recycling in their communities, who want to help support do good things for the people around them and create a decentralized incentive mechanism that gets people to what we call co-production, get people from your community to be the ones who make change and not just rely on a centralized government to do it, because that ends up not happening. Right? So that's where we see this huge opportunity. And the difference is communities obviously can be on a much smaller scale, and that's what UrbanChange is all about.

 

Tim - 00:07:40: So UrbanChange was kind of born inside Colu or inspired by or did you see the opportunities or limitations of how their model works? Tell me a bit more about that.

 

Michael - 00:07:54: So UrbanChange has been what we call incubated by Colu. And so the Colu team has been part of the founding team of UrbanChange. Colu is currently working a lot with local governments in the United States. So what we're trying to do is to take all the lessons learned from working with cities, working with local governments, working with budgets and applying them to different decentralized communities in a way that will be much easier to set up. And UrbanChange has a mechanism, I won't go too much into detail, but has a mechanism which is a dual coin mechanism or dual token mechanism, where on one hand you earn local coins for your community for taking actions. And when you use those local coins to pay for goods and services within your community, you then get what we call an Impact token. So unlike the stable local coin, the Impact token is something that its value can go up and down based on supply and demand. And the more action is taken in the community and the more funds that are there, the value can increase over time of these impact tokens. But more importantly, it's a government’s token and by holding them, you'll be able to vote on new initiatives in your community. You'll be able to maybe get benefits, like maybe you'll get access to cool events or maybe you'll get a cool t shirt and you think of airline points and things like that. The more you get, you'll be a community leader, community hero. And we have this sort of feedback loop from a behavioral economics perspective, which is again important. So we see this as something that as more communities come up and I don't know if you're familiar with the network state and all the different startup cities and startup communities that we're seeing gradually come up, particularly in emerging markets. We see this as an amazing tool for them to be able to create a localized economy that helps boost their strategic goals. And so we see that as a huge opportunity and that's what UrbanChange is truly focusing on.

 

Tim - 00:09:53: It sounds very interesting. How do you envision that from where you guys are today, like in the projects and not just you, but as a network and community and people in working the space to get from where we are today to what you kind of mentioned in the beginning, which is increasing transparency on government spending. Right? So this all sounds very nice. Like it said, hey, you can get a t shirt and your local community leader. But the big problem, obviously, and especially, I guess looking into emerging economies is a lot about in a positive way, a lack of transparency in a negative way, total degradation into corruption. How do you see being able to tackle that? Or if we think about this from a Web 3%, what are the incentive mechanisms for this to kind of creep into really the government structure and government spending, if it's possible at all?

 

Michael - 00:10:51: Yeah, I would say the first thing is when we talk about transparency and we talk about accountability, it's saying how do we look at budgets that are being allocated towards specific initiatives? Right? You can look at local government budgets. They have a budget for sustainability, they have a budget specifically for recycling. They have a budget for health and wellness or whatever it may be. And what you see is like, how many people within their city really have ever looked at the local budget and have ever held their government officials accountable, necessarily? And when you ask why? Right, why so because we don't have time. We have other things going on. It's not our priority. It's something that's very easy to not think about as part of our daily busy lives. And we have no sort of sense of ownership, right? It's sometimes like it's so far away from us, we have to maybe go to council meeting or like 07:00 p.m. And a weeknight. And you have kids, you just don't end up doing it, right? So what we see is, in terms of the transparency element of it and the accountability element of it, is that with UrbanChange, you'll be able to find budgets for different initiatives. So you'll be able to say, you know what, I have a community here. I'll just give an example. Let's say in the Upper East Side community here and in Manhattan, you'll be able to get a budget, right? So the budget can come from the city. That's potential. The budget can come from a foundation, the budget can come from a corporation, the budget can come from community members. So there's a budget towards an initiative that's meant to promote something that will positively impact the community. And that budget is fully transparent. Everyone can see and everyone can also see what the impact of that budget is. So if there's $10,000 towards recycling, people will only get rewarded if they did that action, which is in this case, recycling. So now you'll see, you know what, this $10,000 budget for recycling actually got 10,000 people to recycle in the past two weeks. Wonderful. So you have this sort of accountability and transparency with budgets and that's where we see a big gap as well.

 

Tim - 00:12:47: And how do you get local governments to actually participate and open the doors to that transparency? I think where ultimately the question is, like, because I've lived in so many different places over time and looked at how different let me put it like this, a I think you guys are totally right from the outset that getting people involved and identifying where the barriers are like time and making it complex to see what's going on and actually vote. And I would second the idea that if you can get people to participate, then that's the first step no matter what you do next, right? Like, even if you never get the government to run on the blockchain, if people are asking what's happening with the money? That's the right starting point I've always seen in comparison. Like, I remember we did an over land trip through Africa during the COVID time. And if you talk to people there about what's government is this bunch of people that sit in the capital doing some stuff that's completely irrelevant for us. They are not even pissed off at the government. They just consider it as something that is remote and irrelevant to their daily lives. Like the government is making no difference for me today, tomorrow or next year. They don't exist. I rely on myself. And if you go into the Alps in Austria and go into a small town there where obviously the level of wealth is completely different, it's at the level where the terrain that's there is not being converted. So you can put housing on it because it's all still farmland. Why? Because the power to change the zoning laws in the hand of the local government and the local government is elected by the people that own the houses there. And they basically go, why convert any land? Like, who do I want to move here and why do I want to build more stuff? It's against my price. So for them, government is something they control. Like you go, that's the guy that works in my interest to protect my investment in my neighborhood. And if he doesn't do his job, I got to get him out of there, right? And it's like very immediate and it's a big sense of ownership like the other way around. And what I'm wondering is how do you see this dynamic? Because I think this is the big difference, right? Like, if you believe government is something remote and far away, people are not doing anything and really the government is doing even less, right? And that's where the conflicts come from. Any ideas to that?

 

Michael - 00:15:13: So I would say a few things. So in terms of if you look globally, different governments mean different things for different people in different ways at different times. There's so many different variables. And so what I would say is that, of course you can take one edge case and you can say, great, maybe in more of the Nordic countries, trust in government, everything is working, it's great. People are happy, fine. That exists. I'm sure we can talk and find communities that it's perfect. But if you look at, I would say the majority, or at least a significant amount, there are those governments where, like you were saying, the people don't feel like they truly have an impact, and to an extent, they write off. Right. Their government, okay, it'll change. It's not going to benefit me. And I'm here for myself. Right. For better or worse. And so what we see as the opportunity, actually, is that when you have a cohort or, you have individuals who want to be community leaders and you can think about a community leader, by the way, think about a building that has 200 units, 500 units, and maybe has 750 people living in it. That, to an extent, right, is sort of a community, as an ecosystem. So when you look at different communities of different sizes, we kind of think of them as hyper localized communities within the larger community of the city. And as you can imagine, it's like you think about, great, the federal government controls X and then the local government controls Y. But often that Y now is so big, right, that you also maybe need to look at other approaches that are much more organic that come from the people. And I think that there is where the opportunity lies. And we've been speaking to many community leaders all over who are super interested. They just don't have the tools. It's like with all technology, it's like, what problem are we solving for people that they have today? We could solve a problem for someone in ten years, but that won't be relevant, right? Like, it wouldn't be helpful for us at our stage. So what we're saying is, how do we use our technology and solve the biggest problems that people are facing today in different communities? And the problem that they have, I think, to go to how we started the conversation is that they don't have necessarily the tools to get their community and get people to take action in their community and to get what we call co-production. So we see this as a tool to get there. And how does the government contribute to an extent is the government may say, hey, you know what, if this is a better way for us to achieve our goals and this is what our constituents want, is for us to put in X amount of our budget in this initiative, great, right? But it doesn't have to rely on the government because there could be a foundation, there could be a corporation, there could be different groups that want to support and, you know, we can start talking about the United Nations and WHO and all these budgets that are going towards the UN goals. What is happening with those budgets?

 

Tim - 00:18:00: I don't even want to ask.

 

Michael - 00:18:02: Okay, so we don't even want to get there, right? But if we had a way to create accountability, to get people involved and to have this sort of world where things are driven by community members and there's accountability and action speaks louder than words. Like what drives me crazy? I would say more than anything, you hear these quotes and these different announcements about all these things. And the announcements are always huge, right? They make the press and it's great. But do you hear when to think about it and what happened to it? Do you hear about this initiative meant to give people financial literacy and in 100 different community centers, like, did it really happen? We don't know. We hear about the announcement, we don't hear about the outcomes. So outcome driven approach is where I see that there's a true opportunity and that's where we see the gap. And I am very fascinated by the different ways people can do it and especially with technology that people have today, which we didn't have ten years ago, and have this, like, cell phone that we could literally do anything with. 

 

Tim - 00:18:56: Obviously, and this is where I was getting at you can always find the edge cases, right? Like, on that side or that side. It's multi-dimensional, but let's turn this around and say, okay, the opposite of the edge cases is, like, the best possible cases where you see opportunities for your technology to produce significant and rapid value and change. Two questions there. So in what kind of community? With what outset, with what kind of government do you believe? Or have you seen the best cases? So to anyone that's listening to this, also say, oh, yeah, that sounds like us here, right. And two, then how does rollout as an example, then, actually talk us through how this progresses? Like, what is a typical first step and where does it go and where do you see it already going in real other cases in your network?

 

Michael - 00:19:48: So, from ideal communities, I can tell you from the United States, we've worked with different types of cities that have different types of median income, socioeconomic statuses, and different disparities, also amongst the different population groups, right? So what I can say is that we've seen that in cities. I'll give you Akron, Ohio, as an example. Akron, Ohio is a very typical U. S. City, Midwest, like, they call it the All American city. So they really wanted to, in the onset of the pandemic, get people to shop local, and they wanted to use incentives, right, as a way to get people to shop at local businesses. So what we saw is that as we put in more incentives, giving people a percent back for shopping local, we saw that the number of people who shopped local grew. We saw that their average ticket price, meaning the amount that they spent at local businesses, increased by about 20%. And eventually what happened is the city out of about $150,000, or I think it's $200,000, has generated close to $3 million of economic activity. So we've seen that their budget of about $200,000 created $3 million of economic activity. And we can all see exactly how that economic activity worked. How has it impacted, let's say, minority owned businesses, women owned businesses, and so forth. So it's really able to focus on that. So that's been an amazing community. Let's give another example. Here in the US. We've worked with San Mateo County, which is a county on the West Coast by Silicon Valley, and they wanted to promote walking steps. So any county employee that walked over a certain amount of steps during each week, then they got these San Mateo County points and people walked. I think they doubled right the amount that they walked because of the incentive. So we were able to see that different communities are sort of receptive to different things, but we've learned it has to have some element of scarcity and I'll tell you why. If you tell someone here you're getting 10% back for doing something, or you're getting a reward for recycling, it's open for the next year. Just do it whenever you please. People won't do it. So what we've learned is, like, to create a month long promotion and then you're a week long weekend and have a more frequency of the different types of promotions and different use cases. And so that's been one in terms of communities today that we're seeing a lot of potential. It's really in Sub-Saharan Africa, countries like Nigeria, Ghana, where we see amazing leaders, truly amazing, amazing leaders who are so ambitious and really want to make a change in their community. And also in Brazil, we're seeing a lot of very interesting things. Like, truly, I'm very lucky to have been meeting these amazing people. And then you ask, how do you start? Like, what's the first step? And so for us in the United States, we sign with the local government, we work with them and provide Colu provides the services to onboard the merchants and launch an app. You know, cities usually don't have that experience, right? To launch an app, talk about user acquisition, onboarding marketing, go to market, all these things. So that's where we really come and support and provide those kind of advisory consultancy services with the Web3 communities, we're now speaking to a lot of community leaders, and we're going to be doing a kind of a challenge where we're going to select about five community leaders and give them a grant to start a community. So starting and the objective is beginning of Q1, to really start that process and to get our first pilot communities going globally.

 

Tim - 00:23:12: Very cool. So I'm just thinking my time when I lived in Chile, at some point in Santiago, which is city with 8 million people that have a river running across the entire city, nothing to do on the river. It's mostly empty. It used to be dirty. It's not actually that dirty anymore. It's not full of water. There was a lot of projects around it, but it literally crosses the city. And they had a park with, like, people to walk, and you could ride with your bicycles at every intersection. Basically, it was a boardwalk that they had to get off the bicycle. And then they rebuilt the entire park. They took the highway, they put it underground. Okay, this was crazy project, like an entire highway crossing the city into a tunnel. And they built the retire park, so they took the trees out and everything. And I remember being this ten years ago or more, 15 years ago, and I looked at it and it's like, wow, you're going to do this? I was always riding on a bicycle, and it's like, now they're going to put in decent bike paths, and you can cross the entire city with the traffic jam and just go end to end and don't ask me why, but they put the same stupid park back in and you can still not ride your bike properly. There was just a total disconnect between a billion dollars spending and infrastructure and the right thing take the street away, but no one thinking about transportation seriously and going like, what are other developed cities especially looking to Northern Europe, looking to Denmark, like, what are they doing with the infrastructure? So when I read what you guys are doing and how you talk about this is just like, great if you can organize people that ride bicycles around. Coming up with better ideas and helping little lead to decide on how 0.5% of this like, billion dollar project of underground highways, like when you put the ceiling on, just please put a bike path like hello would have made, you know, not a huge, only a difference to the people. That ride the bicycle there, but it would likely have risen the entire city and Quality of Life index by, like, a point or so. Also, unfortunately, typical for a lot of these countries and a lot of governments, we got to do this new thing and then don't follow through with it.

 

Michael - 00:25:24: And by the time if there's accountability or by the time that this project is ready, then there's already a new administration and they are picking up the pieces from the previous one. So it's hard when there's a horizon of a four year or limited term in terms of a horizon to really make decisions where you will end up being accountable for them, because you're not accountable in many cases. And that's, I think, what it may seem like it's not a big deal, but if you think about it and if you really tie that to decisions that have been made and you give a great example, but think about systematically how many decisions have been made because of this. Even if it's not even a conscious right, it's your subconscious that you're not going to be accountable. So the way you're going to make decisions isn't going to be necessarily commensurate with what's best for the community. And I'm not saying everyone is like that, but I'm saying that there definitely exists. And so if you can get what we call civic engagement right, you get the communities. And that's what I love about Web3. It's that you have ownership right in many cases. And when you have a sense of ownership in your community and you have governance rights, then you are much more inclined to vote on should we put in that bike lane? Where should we put that bike lane? And the power of the people in that sense is very strong if those individuals are invested and know that their choice can influence these bigger decisions, whether it's again and it could be a tiny one such as recycling, but it could be a much larger one such as. An infrastructure project here in the United States. They have all these new bills coming in, the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill that are meant to help create infrastructure for decades to come. But ultimately my fear is how is it going to be planned and who's going to be part of that decision-making process in different communities and is it really going to benefit? Maybe some will and some won't. But I think the best foolproof way is to get the people who are the beneficiaries of it to be involved in that process.

 

Tim - 00:27:19: Think one day, ultimately, governments will run their budgets on-chain? 

 

Michael - 00:27:25: It’s a tough question. Do I think someday? Yes. When is that day? It's interesting today, right? We're talking sort of in the midst of the crypto winter and all the different changes that are going on. And it's always very hard to innovate within governments and what catalyzes innovation. It's often like big problems, right? Like if there is going to be a huge fraudulent activity within local governments in the current system, then maybe, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think often with governments that's probably the rationale. So I think that maybe some very innovative ones eventually will. I think particularly in more emerging markets where there will be more demands coming from within and from the community. So I think eventually, yes, there will definitely. That is a used case. And by the way, I've spoken to many government officials about this. They are often, yes, open to blockchain in some shape way or form. And I think that, yeah, on-chain records, I think will probably be the first. Right? Like recording different transactions or like real estate identities and parcels and all that on-chain, yes. Budgets maybe. But budget is just hard because it's like, what is the currency? What's the denomination? Is it going to be fiat? And that's where I'm a little bit like USDC. Is it going to happen? I'm very interested to see what's going to happen in the upcoming years.

 

Tim - 00:28:40: Could be a big difference. Right. It's one of the things that always fascinated me about the idea and having seen how government handles budgets, and especially in emerging economy, how much corruption there is. Not only corruption, but how much waste there is. And there's transparency. Right. And I always thought it would be absolutely incredible and likely totally impossible. But when you have a budget, whatever to do economic support. Like, I remember this Angela's Big program to help startups. And just by the fact that you can have the money that you're going to hand out in a multi-sig wallet and that every transaction goes on record and you know where the money went and you can account for who received it and who authorized it. And it's publicly available. I always thought that it's likely too big of a change and idea to hope for, well, half, but it's worth hoping for. And I would agree very much with you guys approach there, as much as I'm ultimately like you as well, a big believer in Web3 being Pragmatic and doing stuff today, and Web2 makes a lot of sense. And ultimately, change doesn't happen without people. So if people don't care about what's on the blockchain, the blockchain is irrelevant, right? Like the public ledger, it doesn't matter. It's likely more important and more difficult to get people to care, which means there needs to be incentives of monetary or recognition and so on that allows people to go like, wow, this is actually worth doing, right? Like, it has an impact on others and has an impact on me. So very interesting, actually.

 

Michael - 00:30:29: Yeah. I love the whole element of behavioral economics and what we call the feedback loop. I was mentioning it earlier, but ultimately, when you do something, you should get some sort of appreciation for doing it. If a tree fell in the woods and nobody saw it, quo, did it really happen? And I think that as human beings, whatever it may be, we want to get also this sense of feedback for doing it. If we supported our community, if we recycled, and if there were badges or there were different ways that we could then share with our friends, we could get some what we call like social credibility. And you think about Gen Z, and I think about the upcoming generations. Everything is virtual, everything is digital, everything is shared. Right? You go on whatever TikTok, and you share, consume media in seconds, right? So how do you also give people the sense of, okay, I'm contributing. Here's how I've helped my community, here's how I've supported, and then I can post about it, I can share about it, I can brag about it, I can get a T-shirt. So I see that is actually one of the things that maybe is overlooked, is actually the feedback loop in those behaviors. And then also with the new generations, how do you get them involved? How do you get these people out of college and people who are educated and hungry and excited? How do we get them motivated to be those who make change? Again, like you're saying, the worst is that if nobody says anything, then the status quo will continue. But if enough people say, hey, let's think about different ways to make things better for all of us, that's how you move the needle, right? And so that's where I see a lot of interest in behavioral economics, I would say is a big part of that too.

 

Tim - 00:31:58: Michael, that's it. I appreciate your time. Was very insightful. Learned a lot about society and change through technology and bring this into the dream of the future and the reality of the present and getting that implemented. Very exciting projects. Thank you so much for joining here. Really appreciate your time.

 

Michael - 00:32:17: Thank you, Tim. It was a great pleasure.

 

Tim - 00:32:20: DAO Talks is brought to you by Grindery. If you enjoyed this podcast, consider subscribing to DAO Talks on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google or any other platform you fancy. To find out more about Grindry, visit grindery.io. Thanks for joining me. Tim out.




About the Show

Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are all the rage. We’re seeing explosive growth in this sector as people experiment with building companies on top of tokens and smart contracts. If you want to get a better understanding of why this is happening, listen to the people that work, build and invest in them: the members.

Join me on my personal journey of discovery, a series of talks with the Web3 builders about DAOs, Life and everything else.

Graham Spencer

How people share their availability and generate stronger commitments via token staking

Spencer is a product manager for DAOhaus, and a RaidGuild contributor. During his Web3 travels, he's noticed that there are usually 2 kinds of people in DAOs - those that dip their finger in multiple projects, and those who focus on one project only. Now, he's championing incentive based mechanisms that make people share their availability and generate stronger commitments via token staking. That, and he thinks that DAOs can be an answer to climate change.