 We are a 75 million fund just closed recently and we are looking to actively deploy in interesting companies in the web 3 space. We already have 50 plus companies in the portfolio and we are looking at more emerging tech type of startups in the recent times including like MEV, ZK. Before this previously I used to work with Trash Vista financial services and then started my VC journey at TK and advisors. I come from a business and finance background and yeah that's a quick intro about me. Over to you Badri. Yeah, good morning everyone. My name is Badrinath. I am founder of Cointrack. At Cointrack we are building various blockchain based products including BitSpan, Soilium and some other products. So before Cointrack, before coming into the decentralization and the blockchain technology I was working on digital adoption and now since last two years I am focusing on blockchain adoption and decentralization. Yeah, over to you. Hi everybody, my name is Shashwath. I've been a marketeer in web 3 for close to three years since before it was called web 3. Before that I was a founder in normal human world in the food space but then COVID killed that and before that I was a novelist self-published and I learned marketing basically to try to sell that first book of mine. Currently I am CMO at this company called NFT3 where a decentralized identity platform backed by Animoca Brands is lead investors with the product live already and 400k plus users and I'd love to talk about culture and web 3. Essentially that's my stick. I think there's a lot of tech talk, there's a lot of investment speculation talk, not enough culture talk and I think even when we speak to the DAO topic that's where really the solution always will come from but that's me in a nutshell. Okay, great thanks. We are ready for Rosh. Once he's here he'll be on the stage as well but if you look at DAOs as well, the decentralized autonomous organizations, in fact it started with the controversy back in 2017, 2018 where it was hacked and they were actually want to have to roll back Ethereum just as history of what happened but that did not dent people to go ahead and start creating DAOs. So in a very, very basic sense we are looking at how we could make decision making decentralized. Look at a corporate structure, we have a chairman, we have a managing director, we have board of directors. Any resolution that needs to be passed or any decisions that we've taken go through a voting process and then you will get a chance to see that out of 10 people we need to get 6 votes to pass the resolution. But because we are talking about blockchain space here it will be good to understand We have different profiles here, in fact we have Sanchi from the investor part of you, Blockchain Founders Fund and we have Badrinath was next looking to raise some funds which is an interesting topic. So we've been discussing about what happens if he's and he's been humble enough to talk about his other ventures but he runs a crypto exchange called BitSpan and also has his own L1 protocol called Soil, we'll get into that. But from a founder's perspective, why there's a need for DAO and then if you look at Chashvat bringing in the actual culture of a corporate asset, how does community respond when you talk about the DAO, let's talk about the basics part, I'll start with the one. I will leave to now maybe Shaspat to start to say why there's a need for a DAO at all, first of all, if you look at from that sense maybe you can throw some light and you can get on this. I think one of the things that, there's a lot of debate about why are DAOs not working, why is the, say just in token terms entry barrier so high, like say suppose you have to ask some, any proposal on compound, right, requires a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of compound tokens, it's insane actually, like it's not really very, it's not giving you the democracy that it's supposed to, hey Raj by the way, but so I think that speaks less to the brokenness of the DAO model or blockchain itself and more to the brokenness of democracy itself, there's a size problem and what blockchain is trying to do is scale democracy now through technology, you know, and we're in the very, very initial floundering steps, so it's kind of like, hey well you know the French format of democracy was not perfect, yeah but we're still struggling onwards in the process of trying to build democracy, so if a piece of technology for the first time comes in that says, hey you could theoretically do what Switzerland has done with democracy, again what helped was the smallness of scale, of course they're incredible people but there's also the scale issue, say with the country like India, but when you bring in blockchain, can we now start to scale democracy using technology? Exactly, yeah. But again the key is people, the technology will not start running democracy. Correct. The people vote, not all of them vote, same in all democracies as well as DAOs, that's kind of my take on it at least. Good, we have Raj, take a minute to introduce yourself, I believe you went to the wrong Hilton and obviously got a chance to see the Bangalore traffic, comes from Mumbai today morning, Raj, you have to introduce yourself please. Oh, okay, thank you for your patience guys, I'll blame it on the Bangalore traffic, I'm sorry. I'm Raj, I'm the founder permission list, under the new intervention of the Web3 space in India, I was active in Silicon Valley and the Meena region from the last two years, flew back to India because I think we are in a very, how do you say it, in a very good spot as a country where we can supply a lot of talent to the world, we are like constantly, if you look at the trends that are happening outside, we are like constantly democratizing half the value people used to perceive, so I think that it's a very big opportunity for entrepreneurs like me to come back to India and build here, like supplying, market may happen, but we can always supply outside. So I'm the founder permission list, we do crazy things, you are the creators of, you might be seeing Geeta Jeebidi today, you were the ones who invented Krishna AI with us, so we are an AI company, we use blockchain as a settlement layer for a lot of transactions that we do. Do you have to speak something about the DAO? Yeah, we'll talk, I'll come to you, I just want to introduce yourself, we'll be talking. I think the traffic has confused you a little bit. Not everybody, you'll be a bit distorted. Now coming back again, so aren't you right? Now if Badri wants to do a DAO, and he comes to you as an investor, I say I need to raise two million dollars. Now look at the blockchain space, what happens, you need to have that initial kind of investment you've got to do, at least to get the community involved, because it's so democratized, we need to have the community coming in and say okay, now while he could start issuing the tokens, the governance tokens for one of his say soil protocol, but what would be your thought right, when he comes says okay, I met you at this W3 summit, can I have a coffee, I want to understand, if you could write me a check for one million dollars, what would be your thing from an investor perspective, do you support anybody with the DAOs, it would be good to understand your perspective actually. That's a really good question and my first question to anyone who comes to me with like an investment deal and saying that hey, we're going to start a DAO, I'm going to ask them why, why do you need a DAO, tell me exactly why you need a DAO and then we'll talk, so what happens is people don't understand that DAO is not a very small thing, it includes a lot of responsibility, a lot of complexity, a lot of infra, it's not just a couple of people coming together, voting and then working together and it's just like, you know, all hype, no substance, it's not going to be like that, so the first question I'm going to ask is why do you need a DAO, where are you on the decentralization spectrum, decentralization is not a yes or no answer, it's a spectrum, where are you on that, if you're on the lower and the higher end, why are you there, why then do you need a DAO relating to that spectrum and then another thing is there's a lot of synergies that come into picture when we invest in deals, right, so the philosophy and the basic motivation behind your company and what they're trying to solve is very important for us, like for example, we are a Web3 native fund, we for example don't have anything to do with climate, but if, you know, if one day like a company who's creating a climate DAO, like Klima DAO for example, comes to us, we might not be that interested because our interests don't align and what will then happen if we get a voting, like a governance rights or the tokens give us voting rights, we wouldn't be the best people to vote for that and we wouldn't be acting in the best interests of the DAO, so overall it's very important for VCs to also see their own synergies, own thesis, own motivation and own, you know, interest areas and skill sets and then choose which companies to invest in. That's interesting, right, do you see a conflict of interest, you say that okay, now I've given two million dollars, taken 20% of the governance, right, unless somebody who is contributing, so by the way DAO, the way it works is it's all community based, right, so the more you contribute to the DAO of success, you keep getting more tokens, at some point of time if there are 10 million tokens, if at all Sanjay writes a cheque, she would have got 2 million tokens already, which means she can start voting against everybody, but somebody needs to come back to cross that 2 million and 2.1 million at some point of time to be able to, you know, we say okay, I can now vote right, but from a VCs perspective, do you see it's kind of a conflict of interest that okay, I don't know what to do, I've got the tokens, but I don't know what to do with this token, so you said what you were hinting at? Yeah, exactly, that's exactly what I even mentioned in my previous point that, okay, so tokens, tokens are always not going to give you voting right, there are different types of tokens as well as you all know, right, so it's very difficult for VCs to get those voting rights and voting tokens, even if they do get, a lot of times it's not like equal, it's not one is to one, so a lot of times VCs, like startups are quite smart in that sense that not to give VCs so much control, at the same time, if the VCs, for example, I'll just give you a simple example of what we saw recently this last week, there was a DAO who came to us with an investment opportunity and they are an investment DAO, so now it makes sense for us to go vote or like for us to be in that DAO because we are also in investments, they are in investments and what we can do is create a lot of synergies in terms of sharing deal flow, sharing deals, you know, sharing all types of resources, et cetera, et cetera, so when that comes into the picture, there will not be a conflict of interest for example, but if there is like something related to business which we think is different but the DAO thinks differently, and of course there is conflict of interest that's going to arise and that's exactly what we're trying to solve through DAOs and DAOs popularly are known as replacements for VCs but funnily enough, VCs are investing in DAOs so that's like a hilarious point that it's an irony like how it's happening and like the conflict of interest doesn't even like people don't even think about it, and there's money, there's everything they just want to go with the flow, I mean that's an unfortunate situation and people want to buy the flow, but by the way that brings an interesting perspective, right, how would you defend that? I would completely agree with Sachi, because the companies it makes sense for investment DAOs where the DAO itself is investing in other businesses and companies and all, but for companies where like we should not look at DAOs in the investment perspective, we should look at DAOs where group of people, no matter it's as you said like a bunch of four, five people, no matter it's a small group or large group coming together and taking decisions with DAOs which are hard coded in the DAO and that allows them to operate whatever sort of business they are doing in decentralized way with fair chance to anyone to come up with ideas and come up with their own sort of things for that particular business, it can be business, it can be business, it can be non-profits, it can be anything but we should look at DAOs in that perspective instead of looking it as an investment opportunity obviously, investment in DAOs for VCs like VCs want to operate like a DAO, they definitely can go and operate like a DAO or invest in DAO and create a fund out of it, but we should look for small problems like local, in India there are hundreds of different small groups you see micro finance groups those village ladies create a group together and they put some money and they give that money to create a business out of it so these sort of groups can use DAOs and that will remove the trust deficit that is out there in those sort of small groups small businesses, it can be small, it can be into cooperatives, it can be into any sort of business formation where the decision has to be taken unanimously, everyone has to be given fair rights to take part in the decision making so DAOs should be looked with that perspective instead of looking it as an investment like perspective I really want to add on to this as well I think the phrase properly you know would just be interest groups the idea is again if we look at blockchain in the abstract it's allowing you through technologically allowing democracy without physical barriers to scale interest group size so a climate DAO can exist and members can be global on the complete opposite end of the spectrum is essentially the Blitzkrieg business model that is venture led businesses you need a spearhead running a business to scale it rapidly so a DAO is very much a contradiction in terms as far as running a business initially is concerned so when you get to the size of a compound of a curve you know and even that is a very hyper specific application within the web 3 space where it can possibly be done because it's all DeFi there's not really any other information involved it's just smart contract level finance so it's very easily automobile and even that only when it reaches a certain scale can it be turned into a DAO and again getting through tokens is an issue there's a bunch of stuff even there but I feel like where DAOs initially will shine is interest groups that can be empowered through technology to reach a new phase where like Badri very well said you know removing trust from the equation is one core job of blockchain so if we can do that to organizational structures that's what a DAO really is and I mean speaking to Sanjeev's point too an investment DAO is a very specific application where it will make sense that's actually more like let's use blockchain to democratize investments and that's what we saw through idea platforms and through a DAO maker and all of these things so that's where I think again it's the culture thing man what are you really interested in and it can't be Web3 Web3 DAOs is like funny to be honest because you can you know the Web3 person is a sovereign individual they don't really want to be out here joining a bunch of DAOs the person who will be in a lot of DAOs is a normal person realizing community is finally scaling to the global level and I can you know much like how Yahoo messenger used to be back in the day I can find tennis enthusiasts in Austin now because there's a tennis DAO or whatever so I think that's the future of DAOs at least for the next couple of years and I mean investment DAOs are just a very small honestly it's the speculative side again you know it's a little bit of a fight yeah I think I'll tell you more on like why the conflict of interest will come in when the companies are really young they need a lot of centralization they do not need decentralization because no one knows anything they are just trying to build their come together and then when VCs enter there's like absolutely no decentralizing decentralization that's going to happen because like there's a principal agent interest now you know startup founders are accountable to VCs VCs are accountable to LPs LPs are accountable to their own whatever so like the principal agent problem is something that DAOs are supposed to solve but it's not going to get solved VCs are involved at that early stage when it makes sense is at a later Rush we did speak about coming back to basics right now we've been talking about what are the implications and now why should we atomize that but I think we did speak about you know what is the basic thing that you need to do to create a DAO if somebody in the audience or somebody looking at this and after couple of days if they start a DAO where would they start and what are the recommended steps to start a DAO I totally believe that our industry organizes a lot because DAO as a structure has been existing from prehistoric times if you look at Lijat Papad you have Kudumbash Rees in Kerala you know all these kind of things what we have figured out because of the blockchain is to create like you know having on-chain operations it's very transparent stuff like that so I would suggest a lot of people is that do not take like the solution and look out for a problem like how to create a DAO so we will go and create anything on this of that but I would suggest is that if you really think that technology is that good so Lijat Papad will definitely want internationalization right so they will want people from outside as well this is the first approach you as a POC company technology company go to them and tell them that this is a structure that you can follow now so Lijat Papad can be international or Kudumbash Rees who do a lot of things they can be international they can be an existing corporation and tell them that how being on-chain because these for example the RWAs of societies one of the most corrupt people they are very bad people they give a lot of place to tenants so bringing this like I joined blockchain because I totally feel like the industry because I totally believe that you know shared ownership and transparency and going to be the two like the most important variables in all consumers tomorrow like if you have two options like for example we belong to a certain economic strata for us we were like us we will definitely look out to see that what are we consuming so with this thought process if you approach to like creating a DAO or like Lijat Papad or like all these organizations then it makes a lot of sense otherwise as a technology we are still improving like there is not any breakthrough has not happened with all the people I have one question for you by the way since we are doing a panel on DAOs the way that permission less raised funds was very interesting and actually very aligned with crypto principles and also the possibility of a DAO running because you are not raising through a VC now where there is a fistful of money coming in speak a little bit on why you took that choice is that why you can call yourself a DAO from default because there isn't one I tell you why I shouldn't why you shouldn't take that choice so basically it's crazy so in the beginning it was all good everything is good as soon as the market crashed the entire like you know people coming out for refunds so it's actually I totally believe that when we wanted to like I flew back to India to start permission less like you said I have all this thought process in mind de-centralized company we will have people telling us what to do and stuff like that down the line in a month we realized that nobody is interested like people buy the tokens people buy the equity they own and then they chill like they have their own important things in life but I think like you said it's a very good approach for early stage companies I think most of the companies in India can be started with 25,000 dollars means more than that nobody needs that receipt man if you are asking for more than that it's very bloat 25,000 dollars you can you have a runway of six months you have three co-founders one is a DAO one is a marketer one is like the product guy you can start anything in this country you can make anything so I think in that case starting like a DAO as in like having raising funds through tokens is a very good approach and people can't follow but in large amounts of life it's just not true more than 50,000, please don't cross it I also have a little bit of more context I will add to this because NFT-3 is now my third project right so I have also seen a couple of projects actually try and scale raise through VCs through a token token comes out so now obviously the actual value capture of a token is supposed to be that anybody that wants say in the protocol especially if it's a governance token buys off of retail right so I have seen so many projects try and transition into a DAO kind of like a curve but they didn't have the user numbers you know it's an oracle project you know and you suddenly start trying to transition into a DAO and then it happens this is a very because VCs people say exit liquidity has come so there are so many conflicts of interest that suddenly come up if you have taken up only smaller checks as a project and the market dumps like anything you're gonna face this refund issue and either way is a bad option like for example for NFT-3 we are pre-TGE right now you know but that's why I was talking to Saachi earlier we rescinded a couple of allocations we were like if you're this under confident in us now when we do have TGE we can't imagine that you will hold so there is I think transitioning to DAO is not as easy as anybody thinks especially if you've taken venture money you know okay now look from the community angle right now we are saying again same example of 10 million tokens we have not taken the VC money so the 10 million still exists second thesis I'm talking about now you talk about doing your now talking about the project start now engaging the community and say okay now let's start inviting them let them start buying some tokens let's say at 10 cents per token because there are governance tokens now where would they benefit right now if they come in the early stages and if somebody was only investing thousand dollars out of this 10 million that's available right how do you create the engagement because we are looking at the founders from VC perspective you Gen Z you know your perspective given you one thought but we need to look up from community perspective what do they think of DAO and why should they actually come in right you have to say hope to them like most of this how it works is like we have did a lot of data analysis and we have figured it out that give up is something that constantly you can do second is that if you can involve your people that people are working and like start paying them something for being a part of it so it could be like that is why we built DCing as a product as well you can actually get your community to do things for you like manage products and stuff like that so if you can get that done from them like you know constantly pay them something in return of you doing something you know these kind of things structures work like it's very common across like industries if you have community with respect to Web3 or there is only liquidity in Web3 it turns out that if people are getting something from that community something it should be either money it should be clout it should be something like you know some ways to prove that they are like one step ahead they will constantly be a part of this if you look at BAYC they are like I have been in a world of long back long back but then when they say sell a lot of money because it made no sense like there is no value it's a JPG but when you realize in a long spectrum you know other side is good other deeds are doing better you know these kind of things these kind of engagements you can only bring when people believe that they will get clout they join a crowd so usual way is that if there is an ambassador like we had a call and if we have an ambassador if that person gives you a shout out for being in the being in the DAW and stuff like that makes a lot of sense so the only way to engage people is work across industries I think I will take a step back and start from a very simple area of hiring I am a Gen Z we know the problems that we face and typical traditional corporate structures there is the great resignation there is like rage applying, quiet quitting, moonlighting and all the trends that you have been seeing so far so it is extremely clear that Gen Z and the next generation coming ahead is not going to be okay with the you know 50 or 100 year old corporate structures and like HR models and hiring structures and like basically the organizational structure is not well suited for us what we need is a shared ownership to be a part of a community that we really want to be a part of and have equal equitability equitability is very important more than equality equitability like the amount of work that you are doing should be equal to the amount of responsibility and incentive that you are getting and that is something that a DAO brings which a normal corporate we have the Hooter now that is what we are talking about it so this is the last question to you may be I actually want to continue this this is a very fertile piece I think you know I think it is a very simple framework and it will kind of add what Sachi and Rosh were saying find a problem firstly find a real problem secondly understand the different pillars of web 3 one of you know you have used uber you have gotten cash back imagine that but preemptively in something and it is not just money it gives you control over that thing also that is a token in most cases if it is a governance token but that is only one sliver of it the other sliver of it is instantly being part of something ideologically that is the other piece so marketing in web 3 is not about speculation if that is all you will do you will die in a bear market absolutely you will die and hundreds of projects have died you know marketing in web 3 is going to be about that problem that you chose how do I make people emotional about it how do I remind them how big of a pain in the ass excuse my friends that problem is and how hard I need it to be solved now you add into that somebody working on it and an incentive mechanism for everybody to come join the cause now you really have a snowball effect in a virtuous cycle of incentives as well as alignment I think that is the ultimate goal for any doubt