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How communities can turn themselves into DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and the benefits of DAOs.
We do it in 3 parts:
1) How gaming communities
2) Other successful community DAOs
3) Future possibilities of DAOs for communities
If you've been watching the blockchain/crypto space, you know that DAOs are the new way for people to work together.
But what is a DAO?
Why would you want to use a DAO to organize your company or investor group or game guild or other community?
What's the right way to organize a DAO?
This podcast explores those questions and more in conversations with Ben Huh, the founder of Origami, the premier DAO creation and management company.
# Introduction
[00:00:00] **Andrew:** In this session, we're going to be talking about how communities can turn themselves into DAOs and what benefits there are.
We're going to do it in three stages:
First, we're going to talk about gaming guilds because these gaming communities have already used DAOs, decentralized autonomous organization structures, and we'll see what's worked for them.
Don't worry if you're not into gaming, we're going to go beyond it. We'll talk about how other communities have done it. And there's some really amazing ones like Cabin DAO, which buys cabins and they're owned by the commute. Anyway, we'll talk about that. It's amazing. And then we'll talk about the future of DAOs and how communities can use them.
And we're going to do it with the founder of Origami. They help you create and manage DAOs.
## The ABCs of DAOs
Ben what are DAOs in relation to communities?
[00:00:45] **Ben:** Imagine that you have a community of people and you want to pursue some economic opportunity together, whether it's controlling or managing a asset, like a bunch of cars that you all want to drive together or owning a golf course. How do you actually invest in that together? And how do you manage that together so that you maximize the amount of gain, whether that's financial or personal out of that.
We've actually built successful DAOs. There have been many successful DAOs. I think it is a new technology, a new thing that people need to learn. But it is also offering something that we've never had before, which is transparency and a process around how do we actually get rich together using this asset?
[00:01:24] **Andrew:** I'm now understanding how this is different from an ordinary community or club. There needs to be some economic asset that they have in common. It can't be car enthusiasts, who just talk about the cars they love. They need to own the cars in common.
# Guilds: I’m not your Donkey Kong
Okay. So we're going to do this in three steps. Let's start with step number one, talking about gaming guilds. What is a gaming guild?
## Paid to Play vs Pay to Play
[00:01:44] **Ben:** A gaming guild is like a community of people who will buy an in-game asset, whether it's an NFT or some, you know, sword or some weapon or some armor. And they will either loan it out to other players to generate more income from it. And then they will split the proceeds between the investor and the player.
[00:02:04] **Andrew:** We're talking about blockchain-based games, where there's ownership of the individual players and other assets within the game.
[00:02:12] **Ben:** Yeah. The idea of gaming guilds have been arm for a long time. Especially because gaming is such a huge industry and there's so many gamers. And there are actually a place where if you want to go professional , become a professional gamer that people actually show up to guilds and basically show off their skills. And you rise to the top.
play-to-earn, which is a blockchain game system or type of a blockchain game, has really changed the economics around that.
So everybody I'm sure has heard of Axie Infinity, which is a play-to-earned game in which you can breed these characters and have them battle each other. And you actually end up with this token called SLP, Smooth Love Portion. Great name.
It's claim fame is that it had this incredible, massive run up during the last bull market. Unfortunately it's crashed and it's lost 99% of its value. But at one point there were people who were playing on their mobile phones in the Philippines, feeding their family, using SLP that they sold on the blockchain.
This phenomena tells you just how exciting it can get. It also tells you how volatile it can get. So what people are doing is coming together into communities and saying, " Let's pool our assets together to see if we can do this better."
## Guilds say, “you don’t own me”
[00:03:16] **Andrew:** They've been doing this without DAOs, how? And how are DAOs helping them do this well?
[00:03:21] **Ben:** Prior to DAOs, the governing of this process was done by a management team. And so it was really more like a traditional company. now as DAOs have come into prominence, what people are saying is the thing that matters the most in our ecosystem are the players. Because without the players, without the scholars who are learning to play these games and actually generating yield, that system doesn't work.
But the players are the ones with the least amount of power. And so, can we create a DAO that would allow players to have a broader say or bigger say in their own success and how that community should be managed? Because we're really because they need to be successful.
So we're shifting the power and structuring it away for management and investors and towards a group of people who've been underrepresented before.
[00:04:06] **Andrew:** Can you describe one of these DAOs as it exists today and how they're structured?
[00:04:10] **Ben:** There is a company that we are working with at Origami. They are a Latin American gaming guild. They're traditional sea corporation gaming guild, and it has a hundred thousand members. I mean, just think about the scale of this . A hundred thousand gamers who want to learn how to get better at play-to-earn.
And they actually want to migrate their company into a DAO structure. So people who are already in charge are saying, "Hey, we think that the future of gaming is not in centralized organizations like a corporation and a guild, but really decentralized where we want to make scholars, the people playing the games, our first class citizens. And we actually think that we can raise more money to get more players to play these amazing play-to-earn games because they believe that play-to-earn is the future of eSports.
[00:04:57] **Andrew:** And more games in the future will give financial rewards for doing well in them.
[00:05:05] **Ben:** It's not like a tournament where you just get paid out. The idea is that the economics of a game is such that as people play and get better, they will win or earn assets that they can choose to keep, rent or liquidate and sell. So the idea is that the ownership economy that is being enabled by the blockchain means that you are no longer just a surf who just like farms the land and, and hopes that, you know, you get some grains from the Lord, right.
That you're actually a entrepreneur, who's using somebody else's borrowed assets to go build your business and have your own treasury and your own set of assets that you can use.
[00:05:41] **Andrew:** So more like poker, where at any game you can win money that you can take back and buy groceries or play more with, than like Donkey Kong, where you're supposed to just keep giving up quarters in addition to your time.
And if you're going to do that, just like in poker, where there are these groups of people who say I'll back you, so you can get into a, a bigger game. And then in return, you give me a share of your winnings and we're going to do it for each other. Same thing is going to happen now with online games. And that's what you're talking to gaming guilds about. How can they not just have one person say I'm going to back all of you and you do the work and I'll pay you, but how do we all, co-own the rewards that we all earn together and decide how we're going to function.
[00:06:24] **Ben:** That's right. So part of a part of the earnings from the scholars go to the scholar. Part of the earnings, go to the people who loan that scholar these NFT assets to use. And a part of it actually goes into the DAO's treasury, the collective treasury of the community and the DAO governs the process and the amounts in which this is distributed.
[00:06:46] **Andrew:** A treasury is like a shared bank account owned by members of the DAO.
[00:06:52] **Ben:** Yeah, it's usually a shared wallet, so it's a crypto only thing. And so it only exists on the blockchain and it holds the DAOs NFTs, tokens, stable coins and things like that.
[00:07:02] **Andrew:** Are there any reasons for a gaming guild not to turn into a DAO?
[00:07:06] **Ben:** I think that we will see the crypto based gaming guilds, the ones that are actually using play-to-earn, adopt DAOs faster. But I think eventually the entire gaming industry that will have to move to a play-to-earn model as it is just financially much more beneficial to the people who are involved. And so the network effects of play-to-earn is actually massive. And we've seen that already.
## Can we DAO now?
[00:07:27] **Andrew:** And so now, if someone were going to start a guild, or they have one in the early stages, does it make sense for them to start off as a DAO right away?
[00:07:34] **Ben:** I think so. Yeah, absolutely. Because if you're going to migrate, the cost of migrating from a traditional format to a DAO is never guaranteed. Like you have to convince the management or the leadership of the guild to say, we're going to make this transition and effectively give up some of their power.
And so I think it's really difficult to design a good gaming guild from a get go. There just aren't enough advices and experiences. People just don't know enough how to do this. That's what we help people with that Origami, is to design the system so that you preserve the future options you have. So you don't pigeon your hole yourself and end up, you know, killing the DAO.
[00:08:07] **Andrew:** But not all gaming guilds can work with Origami because you're limiting yourself to a small number of top guilds top DAOs that you want to work with.
[00:08:18] **Ben:** That's right. Yeah. We obviously would love to open up our services and our platform to more people as we get more funding and more traction to do so, but right now we are really only working with the most ambitious DAOs and gaming guilds who want to actually commit to creating a decentralized more democratic structures.
[00:08:35] **Andrew:** Is there a way for someone to create a DAO today in a simpler level and then grow into Origami?
[00:08:42] **Ben:** It's really difficult in our framework to do that. What we recommend people is that they build a community first. Whatever Discord you've created for your gaming guild we can start to actually help with a community to say, "Hey, if there's an interest to become a DAO, then we can help you go from community to tokenization, to governance and all the things that you need to actually run that gaming guild as a DAO.
We do actually help companies turn their gaming guilds into DAOs. So we've done that transitional work. It's just that it's much easier if you start with a community first.
[00:09:13] **Andrew:** Okay. So what you'd suggest is anyone who's getting started now with whether it's a gaming guild or other community, if they're not big enough to work with Origami, they could, of course go and start a smaller DAO on their own there are resources to do it. But you'd recommend go bigger. Get your community big, focus on that with the idea that you would eventually create a big DAO instead of starting with a tiny DAO that you eventually hope to grow. Start with a tiny community that you grow and make one of the milestones along the path is once we hit this level, we will convert into a DAO.
[00:09:46] **Ben:** Yeah, very much so we recommend that people start their communities first and come apply at [joinOrigami.com](http://joinorigami.com/) and then we can actually help them even if we don't accept them into our portfolio.
## Future of guilds and play-to-earn
[00:09:55] **Andrew:** So that's gaming guilds. Anything else before we move?
[00:09:58] **Ben:** Yeah, I think we're going to see an absolute explosion of gaming guilds. The amount of money that gamers are missing out right now, because they're stuck on Web2 and not being able to own their own assets is actually pretty massive.
And the play-to-earn industry is figuring out more and more sustainable ways of actually, um, making their economies work. And so they're literally designing a little micro economy. It's like a little world of like currencies and tokens and training fun to watch.
[00:10:21] **Andrew:** That's why, even though I said to you, gaming is very polarizing. People either love it and see the future of it or they hate it, and they feel like this is just too amateurish and too childish for me to care about. And I suggested that we'd not even spend time talking about gaming. And you said, "no," this is going to be huge. Even if it polarizes people, even if it means some people are going to tune us out because we start out with gaming, start out with it. It's too big to ignore.
[00:10:47] **Ben:** Yeah, the gaming industry is bigger than I think the movie and the music industry combined, and they have not moved to a ownership economy yet. It's, it's only going to get bigger as people realize that gaming provides professional living potential for a lot of people.
# Present: DAOs are really here, like today
[00:10:59] **Andrew:** Okay, let's move on to the second topic, which is other communities that are run as DAOs today. Give me a sense of what's possible.
## Cabin DAO: I’m a vacationer and and owner
[00:11:07] **Ben:** I've got a couple friends who early or founding members of Cabin DAO and Cabin DAO is buying cabins around the world that are available to its members to use. So like, if you want to do a retreat, you can be a member of Cabin DAO and go access one of their cabins somewhere in the middle of Wyoming and you agree to help each other, maintain the place to govern the rules around it. And so this is the perfect example of a community coming together and using the blockchain and the DAO infrastructure to manage a co-owned asset.
[00:11:42] **Andrew:** Why would it make more sense for the creators of cabin DAO to start off with the DAO instead of starting off with the traditional LLC, where they own all the upside of it.
[00:11:52] **Ben:** In an LLC, you don't get to really take advantage of the features of software that we have been developing in the DAO world, where you can actually have formalized proposals, agreements that are on chain. And so the amount of trust that you can build by using transparent systems that DAOs bring to the table makes remote groups of people trust each other better and to build a better community using DAOs.
[00:12:18] **Andrew:** Why would they need trust? If they've got the cabins, they put 'em on a website. They say, "if you want a cabin, just come and rent it from us. We'll also put it up on Airbnb. We'll make money that way. If there's a community, people want to chat about their stays there and like each other, we'll start up some kind of Discord group for them, for them all to chat."
What's the upside for the creators for turning this over to the community?
[00:12:42] **Ben:** There is an economy being built here. The tokenization of these cabins means that you can effectively use economics to create and balance the demand and the supply. And you can say things like, "Hey, if you leave the place in a clean condition, then we will, return you some of the tokens."
Whereas the incentive of like an Airbnb is to maximize the extraction of money from its customers, but in a community based system, all of the economics really stay within that community. So you're getting wealthier by being able to access each other's properties and assets.
[00:13:15] **Andrew:** I could see that being a better benefit for c ommunity members. Somebody is going to stay at a cabin that they own because they own a piece of the DAO, they own some tokens. Versus staying at one that they get on Airbnb. And, so why not keep the money in their own community and have an upside? I could see that.
For the creators is the upside that they then have easier, easier. Investor pool because a lot more people have access to the cabins and want to own the business behind them is that it.
[00:13:50] **Ben:** Yeah, I think something else happens when you bring together a community of like-minded people and you say we're going to co-invest. Or we're going to have people who can invest, who are part of our community. And we're all really part of the same pool with slightly different economics, because one's an investor and one's not.
So it's this ability to curate and craft a community that I think makes that entire experience feel very different.
[00:14:13] **Andrew:** Because then every community member can see the problems in the community and suggest improvements, can see other locations can have an incentive to recommend it to their friends instead of Airbnb, that kind of a thing.
### Customer knows more than the MBA
[00:14:25] **Ben:** Yeah, I think in the last, you know, maybe 50 years of human history, we are starting to realize that the people who are spending the money actually know what's best for them. Right? If you are actually at the front lines in a cabin, understanding how it's being used, you're much more likely to be a better steward than someone who's remote and far.
And then how do you actually connect those dots together? So that there are four cabins around the world, you're sharing them together. And how do you actually improve on them? How do you make the system better? If you have a vested interest and you're not just a one sided player, like a customer or investor, you'll look at the problem more holistically and you're going to take community input and actually put it together and say, "This is how we actually build an ecosystem, a network, not just a single asset that's nice."
[00:15:16] **Andrew:** Okay. So where Airbnb were one of the pioneers of the sharing economy and sharing means "everyone gets to share each other's resources, but we really keep the profits from it, the majority of them." Here, we're looking at the ownership economy. We all get to own a piece of this, and you could either be a renter on Airbnb or an owner on say, Creator Cabins.
And that's the change the offer to the community is: "you get to own not participate or rent."
[00:15:46] **Ben:** So, yeah. So imagine that you are a massive Airbnb user and what you're doing is you're paying into that system and people are taking profits outta that system. In a Cabin DAO like world, if you are a user, you are also an owner. You might not have put your cabin into the system, but because you own a part of the network, your participation and your patronage as customer translates into some sense of ownership or actual ownership of the tokens that govern and control the network.
This is the dream state of crypto is that if we're the customers and we're the ones paying for the service, why don't we own a part of the service.
## Sharks buy pics
[00:16:23] **Andrew:** I can see the value there. Can you gimme another example?
[00:16:26] **Ben:** I belong to a DAO called SharkDAO. They are a NFT collecting DAO. They collect a very specific type of NFTs known as Nouns, and they're quite expensive. SharkDAO was literally formed to create a DAO that will purchase a Shark Noun.
[00:16:44] **Andrew:** Okay. That's another NFT, an image.
[00:16:47] **Ben:** Yeah, it's an NFT in a collection. And what they did was they sold tokens, aggregated the money into a treasury and then a bunch of people whose job was to go bid for these Nouns, cuz they're sold as an auction. And so literally it was a global 24/7 operation because these auctions would start and stop at different times.
And so people be out in the world, you know, and they're like, we need to make a bid and they need to transfer money, borrow money, and they need to bid on a Noun and it's been incredibly successful. And now they're a big player in this ecosystem of nouns, which is a phenomenal project.
[00:17:19] **Andrew:** Okay. So instead of the owner saying, we're going to go and buy it with our own money, they said, we're going to buy it with other people's money and give them equity in these assets. Instead of saying "we're going to do it as an LLC, come on board as an investor," they said "We're doing it as a DAO, come on board as a participant. Help us bid on these. Help us decide. Help us influence how these are made. That's the upside of being in a DAO.
[00:17:42] **Ben:** That's right. And so it has tens of thousands of members. And as you can imagine, only a small percentage of that group actually is there day to day and running the operations kind of thing. What's really funny about it is Nouns is actually a DAO. If you buy an NFT from Nouns, you are a member of the Nouns DAO. Okay. So there's a DAO that was created to become a DAO member. And so, you know, it's like the snake eating its tail, or is it more like turtles all the way down?
[00:18:13] **Andrew:** All right. I think I'm seeing what you're saying here. Right now, there are groups of people who decide that they want ownership of a thing. And instead of saying, I want ownership of it alone, or my investors, and I want ownership of it alone. They're saying. I want ownership of it with my investors and with the community of users and with the community of people who know enough about it to help shape the decision making process. We're all, co-owning the thing. And we're all deciding on how to govern our decision making process in the thing. And that's essentially what a DAO is.
[00:18:51] **Ben:** Yeah, that is right. We have a clear set of rules. We know what our assets are. We are transparent about how decisions are made and how the assets are being used.
[00:19:03] **Andrew:** Okay. So anytime there's an asset that could be owned by somebody and used by others, it's an opportunity to think about how do we make this into a DAO, so that the people who are users become owners and have a better incentive to take care of it.
Anytime there's a community of somebody making decisions over something that has value, it makes sense for them to think about "how do I turn this into a DAO so that I take some of the decision making and pass it down to other people who, who are better equipped to make the decision?"
[00:19:40] **Ben:** I would put it this way: the primary use case of a DAO is a community of people coming together to govern a shared resource.
Govern, meaning: What's the process for using it? What's the process for selling? Or buying more of it? And investing into it. How do we actually conduct business and make decisions together? Or come to good disagreements?
And you can do that over any asset, whether a member has invested it or the DAO owns
[00:20:04] **Andrew:** I'm with you. Is there anything else that we missed here?
## Caddy Shack, if Bill Murray owned the club
[00:20:06] **Ben:** Links DAO. They're trying to buy a golf club and so they're pooling money together, putting together war chest that says we're going to go out and buy one of the world's greatest golf clubs. And we're going to turn that membership into a DAO membership only.
So if you right now belong to a country club with a golf club, there's a parent organization who kind of like owns it and governs it and members kind of buy into that share. And it's very like a system from the 1800 kind of thing. It's kind of stodgy. It's kind of weird. At least to me anyway. If you turn that and put it on the blockchain, you can have, co-ownership, that's much more liquid. You can sell in and out of the club of its interest. And it is a new economic model that is really for the 21st century. And so that's what Links DAO is trying to do.
How do you buy an old, stodgy way of membership and turn it into something that's much more accessible.
[00:20:53] **Andrew:** That's fascinating. That's so interesting and exciting at the same time. And it opens my eyes to other things that could be turned into clubs like that. Like, there's so many people who talk about this one bar here in Austin, that when they were having trouble, they sold mugs. And if you bought one of the mugs for a thousand dollars or something, or like that, you get to have one drink a day in that mug at that place.
And you feel a sense of ownership, but you really only have a sense of ownership if you want to go in and have a drink there. Versus you really do have ownership. If you leave Austin, for whatever reason, you can pass it on to somebody else who then gets the benefit too. And by the way, we're not just giving you beer. We're also taking your input into what to do with this place. All right. I see that.
[00:21:36] **Ben:** collectively because it use its own funds to purchase it.
# Future: Dream with me a little
[00:21:38] **Andrew:** Dream a little bit with me, what's an example of something that could be turned into a DAO today, and then let's talk future.
## DAOs in Patagonia vests
[00:21:46] **Ben:** Yeah. So let's talk about what already is happening. So lots of small groups of people coming together to form an investment club, issuing tokens and using that to actually govern themselves. A lot of that's happening.
A lot of large investment groups. This is the part that Oregami specializes in. We call them venture DAOs. And so you literally raise a venture capital investing vehicle. Um, you fund that with either your money or outside's money. There's a professional team of managers, and then they create a DAO to help them source deals and get into deals and support the investments that they've made.
And so there's a real ecosystem of companies there, or organizations that are investing large sums of money together. So for example, Orange DAO, that I helped start, has raised $50 million to deploy into startups. And it's happened within the first year of our existence.
[00:22:35] **Andrew:** I remember in the early days of social media, I would look at a sculptor and say, " If you saw the process of making this sculpture, even if you didn't like sculpture, even if you didn't like art, you would be mesmerized and he should be posting it." And sure enough people did.
There's a guy who just repairs shoes on YouTube and will show you an hour of him repairing a pair of shoes. And it's mesmerizing and it's got millions of people watching it. And I bet he's making more money from those videos than he is from actual repair because he embraced social media early on.
Do you look around and go if that person saw DAOs, if that existing framework was switched to DAOs, it would be so much more valuable.
## What if Animal House was a DAO?
[00:23:12] **Ben:** Yeah, there are so many use cases for DAOs right now. If you are in a network, an alumni group of schools or professional organizations, there's probably a bunch of people in there who are really kind of blockchain, you know, curious or friendly or want to get together and try to figure out how to work together.
Because one of the ethos of being a part of Web3 is this idea of collectivism, where we can actually pool our minds together, and be a hive, mind, something that is greater than just one of us standing alone. And so these existing networks of people are ripe in terms of some subset of them becoming a DAO.
## Ferrari DAO
There are collector organizations. And so this has obviously happened very much in the NFT space, but you could say, "Hey, I'm a car collector and I'm blockchain savvy." And I can actually say, "we're going to buy cars together and have a garage full of cars and let's figure out how to actually have fair governance." And so that members can buy into this structure and it is much more efficient than the paper meathod. You own the token. You own an ownership stake in this, uh, DAO who, which then owns these cars.
[00:24:16] **Andrew:** I think that makes a lot of sense. But you'd actually want it to be a revenue generator, not just we own it together and we enjoy it together. It's we own it together. And there's some money coming in. Maybe in the future when we sell it. Maybe now when we rent it.
[00:24:29] **Ben:** That's right. So you can actually use the tokens that you issue that you purchase into and say for you to rent these cars, there's a sliding scale of prices you have to use your tokens to reserve them. So the supply and demand that is actually built in to the governance structure of how you actually work on this club together.
## Staking fixes car crashes
[00:24:48] **Andrew:** Got it right. You don't just own it. You don't just decide, but you burn some of your ownership when you use the product. When you use, say a cabin in the woods, when you use an antique car that we're all co-owning.
[00:25:00] **Ben:** Yeah. And there's also another concept called "staking," which is you, you burn tokens because now the organization needs to pay for the maintenance and there's some real cost involved of you driving the car. So Andrew goes out, floors it for a hundred miles an hour, you know, comes back. The car is kind of damaged.
Okay. Well, what do you do well? So there's this thing called staking where you can say, "oh, I'm going to put my tokens and basically allow someone to have some control over it while I go take on a liability." And so if I come back and I, you know, messed up the car, you can take those steaked tokens, almost like a deposit and say, "cool, I'm glad you put down this deposit. Don't do this again, but we can fix this."
[00:25:35] **Andrew:** Self-insuring using these tokens.
[00:25:38] **Ben:** Yeah. So you can see just how interesting it gets when you combine tokens economy and governance and vote and all these things together.
[00:25:44] **Andrew:** How much of that infrastructure exists today for somebody to say "I'm staking, Andrew. He's about to drive this car" or for Andrew to say, "I'd like to drive this car and I want to spend some of my token. So my ownership of all of our collective pool of cars on this experience."
[00:26:00] **Ben:** Yeah. So all of this infrastructure. Uh, the Web3 has this concept called "composability" in which you can actually take two contracts and make them work together because they really work in a very standardized fashion. And so you can build on top of these smart contracts. Unfortunately, the, the skill to that's needed to do that securely is not widely spread.
And so lots of people are lots of software engineers are learning how to write smart contracts, but what you really need to do is figure out if the community will work within that structure and if the economics work before you deploy that smart contract.
## Fake your DAO
So it's like, you know, paper designing, like you can actually do paper wire frames and that's so much faster than actually coding it up and figuring out that it doesn't work.
And so we encourage communities to pretend that they're a DAO first, before they actually become a DAO. Because once you issue tokens and it's really software you've actually started incurring all this formalization. And so it's harder to change.
[00:26:56] **Andrew:** The minimum viable product is a chat tool that you use to communicate with each other and maybe a document with the rules. And you see if you could abide by those rules, if it makes sense. And then once it does, then you start to formalize it as a DAO.
[00:27:10] **Ben:** Right.
## Together we are Joe Rogan
[00:27:11] **Andrew:** I start to think about then what other resources are there that are shared? I start to think about how many comedians are able to do what Joe Rogan is doing here in Austin, where he says, he's buying a comedy club and he's going to have his friends do stand up and so on. Imagine if somebody said, "I'm not Joe Rogan, but I want to get 10 different standups to get together. And co-own a club in Austin. We all own it. We all help promote it. We all help lead it. And then maybe others who can't afford to buy into it, help do other things like promotion, like management, that would become a DAO in your mind."
[00:27:46] **Ben:** That's right. That is perfect candidate for a DAO.
## Lending and upskilling
[00:27:50] **Andrew:** Are there any clients at Origami that are interesting.
[00:27:53] **Ben:** So there is a FinTech company that is providing job placement and loan products to people in a developing country. They want to actually provide upskilling services to their members so that people can actually get better paying jobs. It makes all of their economics better.
But instead of doing it as like a loyalty program or a nonprofit, they've decided to actually do it as a DAO. So what they're saying. Again, people who are accepting the help, know how to actually improve their lives and can make decisions for themselves better than anybody else. So therefore we're going to give them the tools for them to actually create and vote for programs that they want to actually learn, so they can upskill their skill set.
## Where’d they get the money?
[00:28:34] **Andrew:** There's one thing that I feel we've left out of all this, which is where does the money come from? The money that's there before there's any other activity .
[00:28:42] **Ben:** So in this case, the corporate partner, the FinTech company is the primary source of revenue. And they're going to commit to a certain percentage of the interest rate being sent to the DAO.
[00:28:54] **Andrew:** Beyond this one example, is there a VC model that goes in where venture capitalists do it? Is the ideal model, the more common one, where the members of the DAO say "we are paying in"? And if they are, where do people get them?
Where does the money come from?
[00:29:09] **Ben:** The most common way DAOs raise money is actually using their own capital. Initially members will come together and say, "we're going to create this do and to be a Genesis member of the DAO, usually the founding members of the DAO, everybody will put in, you know 0.1 ETH, like 200 bucks, and then that'll give us a lifetime membership. And now using this capital, we will create something that'll generate more revenue or generate more investment to be put into the DAO.
[00:29:34] **Andrew:** So tends to be the members of the DAO, the people who are the early people in the DAO, who are funding the DAO.
[00:29:40] **Ben:** That's usually 90% of the case, but, um, a lot of Origami's DAOs actually doing it without that fundraise from its own members, because it's partnering with another organization that is actually providing that initial line of revenue. And so membership actually has not cost anyone any money.
## Pando is like Voltron
[00:29:54] **Andrew:** Do you have another example of that? Where an outside entity funds the DAO.
[00:29:59] **Ben:** This is the same model where you do a partnership. We have a DAO called Pando DAO, P-A-N-D-O DAO. They're one of our customers. They are some of the most badass entrepreneurs in Africa. These people have raised multimillion dollars of venture funding. They've built companies a very competitive and difficult environment to build tech companies .
And so they've come together and said, "Hey, we want to create a membership requirement that says you have to have raised millions of dollars in Africa for venture back companies. If you cross that bar, you can join our DAO. And therefore we will have some of the best entrepreneurs who will want to work with us. And now we're going to raise an investment vehicle. And the profits from that investment vehicle will actually come into the DAO, and pay for our work."
[00:30:44] **Andrew:** So if you get a group of people together who are valuable on their own, there'll be organizations that will want to give them money for access.
[00:30:51] **Ben:** Yes.
[00:30:51] **Andrew:** Give me another one. You were talking about a sports club.
## DAO a football club and make them call it soccer
[00:30:54] **Ben:** We've talked to a handful of football clubs in the UK. And so think like Championship League, Premier League, like top of their game.
Running football clubs is not a very profitable business. It's a business of passion. What they want to do is figure out a way to energize the passion of more fans.
And right now, fans can't really own clubs. They just don't have enough money to become an owner. But what they want to do is fractionize some portion of that football club and split it up and basically work with a DAO to have more owners.
I think there's something interesting that happens when more and more people own an asset and realize that there have a vested interest in it. It builds stronger ties. It builds stronger fandoms.
Not only is ownership being given out and the upside, but also that the DAO should actually control some aspect of how that experience works. And so, they could have their own gate and their tickets could be an NFT so that you can scan the NFT on your phone to access this private gate of DAO members. They can actually create their own jerseys and their own culture within that football club.
### Green Bay Packers’ fake stock
[00:32:00] **Andrew:** So the Green Bay Packers do that as shareholders. What's the difference between them using old technology, let's say, which is paper based and shareholders versus a DAO.
[00:32:10] **Ben:** I think with the Green Bay Packers, you don't hold a financial stake in it. I think it's really more like a community stake in it. It has no real financial upside from what I understand.
[00:32:19] **Andrew:** So if they were to turn it into a publicly traded company, where shareholders had a right to make decisions and then they also got benefits by like maybe having their own gate. Would that be better than a DAO or as good as a DAO? where's the DAO better?
[00:32:32] **Ben:** So in the case of sports, I think you should leave the management of the team and its players to the managers that you hire and not crowdsource all the decisions. Again, I'm not a fan of direct democracy. I think that generally leads to people not being engaged. And so you need to have like a representative system.
# Final word: Reach me on Web2 to ask about Web3
And so if you are a part owner, a minority owner of a football club, then you obviously have a say in that, but you don't have a thousand people voting on one thing. The DAO can now hire or appoint their own members who will represent the DAO's interest at the table of the football club. And so it's like Nouns and Shark DAO.
There's the football club. And they've got a bunch of fancy owners. And then there's you, who is owning or having some say through the DAO, but at least now you are at the table in a smaller way that you can actually grow your interest ownership of the football club.
And so, the world of DAOs right now is really focused on bringing communities together to learn how to actually work with each other to generate value. And I think the future innovations of being able to directly own shares and things like that will come.
[00:33:33] **Andrew:** All right. For anyone who wants to have a follow up conversation to find out more about how DAOs work or how Origami can help them set up a DAO, they can go to [joinOrigami.com](http://joinorigami.com/).
[00:33:45] **Ben:** Yep. And my email is [Ben@joinOrigami.com](mailto:Ben@joinOrigami.com)