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[Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to another episode of the how to ceo show i'm your host murray newlands i'm delighted to be joined by
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jonathan from cavendale he has an amazing project building uh cities of the future uh for creators uh jonathan welcome to the show please do introduce yourself on your project
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awesome thanks so much for having me my name is jonathan hillis and one of the founders of my official title uh with the dao is caretaker i'm the uh the caretaker at cabin and we are a
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community of online creators building a decentralized city so i can tell you a little bit more about what a decentralized city is uh but might be helpful just to start out by showing you a little bit about what i'm
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talking about this is one of our first cabins out here at neighborhood zero in the texas hill country this is where i live um and it's a beautiful you know day out here
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we're just starting to get the nice spring uh green is is coming up around the property and just up the hill right now we've got uh about eight or nine members of the
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dao who um have just gotten out today to participate in a build week where they're going to be helping us build a sauna um so that's the sort of thing we like to do out here at neighborhood zero and
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what we do more broadly as a dao is help other folks build properties like these and connect them together in a network that that is this decentralized city where we can have shared culture and governance structures
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but not all be in the same place at the same time so for those very quickly for those who don't know what is a dao just to explain to them yeah definitely so dao is a decentralized autonomous
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organization there are a lot of types of daos and even i think the way people would define dao's is is pretty hotly uh debated right now but one way to think about it is just
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that a dao is essentially an internet community with shared resources to sort of like a bank account but usually represented in in a multi-sig treasury which is a crypto term for just a way
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that we can collectively govern resources together and your doubt has been very successful why do you think what what what for someone who wants to
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launch a dao wants to launch a project what do you think makes the dao successful and why does it take off yeah so i think dows are all about communities and i would not encourage
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anybody to try to launch a dao cabin did not start out as a dao cabin started out as a community of independent online creators after i left my my job at instacart i wanted to come out here to the texas
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hill country and build a cabin it started and i started inviting you know some of my internet friends we were part of a group called the creator co-op they came out here and we started running a residency program we tokenized it um and
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then literally months later we realized oh we've started a dow and so i would not recommend anybody sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say i'm starting a dow today what i'd recommend is that you uh you meet other
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great people online you start building a community and then when you have something that you want to collectively govern that's a good time to start thinking about daos so i have no idea someone was trying to randomly call me on discord so
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it's not expecting but that is uh that is also the uh experience that's totally part of the weather experience so um so how did it uh but you've also
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been successful right so so what what makes it successfully transition from a group of friends doing a project to suddenly being able to become an entity that um that has value that
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yeah i i really do think it's about the people in the community first and foremost and just attracting uh other wonderful humans and the way that you tend to do that is around
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very big audacious specific highly memeable goals um so for us you know that was building a decentralized city and that's what we you know get excited about waking up in the morning
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for other people you know we've got uh our friends at kraus house are um working on collectively owning and operating an nba team that's another example of a very specific audacious goal you know that people can form around and
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build community around and i think most of the the great dows that we'll see emerge will have that sort of um purpose and goal that pulls people together now why specifically a
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creative community and do you have to be created to be part of community how does how does that work yeah so that's really our origin that's where we started i was a group of friends called the creator co-op that
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came together to build this thing i think what's unique about independent online knowledge workers is that they tend to be very location flexible um and they're interested in
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exploring new ways of working together in this world of decreased transaction costs and so um i think that's why you know we found a lot of of success in bringing online creators together in the form of
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a dao and that's that's our mission we hope that there will be many types of you know decentralized cities of the future and so i don't know if you want to go build a decentralized city for uh
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oboe players or something uh you know we'd love to help you figure out what that looks like particularly if you have a really strong community that you know is united around that goal we're here to help enable anyone on the internet that's interested in coming together irl
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to to have the tools and resources to do that now people who create content online in order to be successful to certain extent you have to build an audience build a community do
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you think it uh having a group of people who are already doing that along the journey do you think that helped to kind of supercharge your project that's a great question yes absolutely
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so a lot of us in the original co-op uh had gone through a an online writing course called building a second brain and another one called rite of passage and rite of passage in particular is
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really about not just writing but building in public and i think that's become a really core tenant of our community is doing everything we do in public so as we you know talk about how to create the
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right operational structures for our dow as we think about governance as we think about you know uh budgeting these are all things that we not only try to do for ourselves we try to then turn into resources and
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um you know information we can share with others to help them on their journey and i think that value of building in public has been super important not only for the individual creators within the dow but for the dao itself
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now as you build a community it's not just a and a city it's not just building community it's then building the dao which has all kinds of uh all
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kinds of management to it and then effectively if you're going to be the caretaker for this there's the the voting system and uh the management of people and community
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uh it's almost like becoming um it feels like almost you're gonna become the mayor of the sicily or whatever how how do you feel about that knowledge
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that uh that learning uh experience and that knowledge and how that's going to be handled by a community as well yeah so we we don't know uh exactly you know how this all works but everyone in
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dallas is trying to figure out what the governance structures of the future look like what i do know for sure is that i'm not a ceo and i have no interest in being one maybe mayor ends up being a
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reasonable type of position we have in a decentralized city of the future but i think it's just too soon to tell what i do know is that we practice the principle of progressive decentralization
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and so what that means is you know any project like this is necessarily going to require a small group of focused people to get it off the ground but we see
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becoming a dao as a verb and we see decentralization as a verb something we constantly need to work on and something that you know requires the community's input to figure out what those governance structures look like
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and so um while we definitely have a core group that's helped you know get us from zero to one here you know the the goal is to continue to progressively decentralize continue to improve our governance structures and
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continue to create opportunities for all the new people coming into the community to engage and find their role and you know quests within the within the dao
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and how do you how do you think about what that community looks like and how you communicate that because in many senses you could say obviously you're hoping to build utopia
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not dystopia right but but utopia and dystopia are different things with different people right and you could start out on this journey with uh with everyone saying we're going
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to go to here point point a and then actually they decide their life changes they have a family or whatever they want to go over here and they put a lot of time into this or and equally point a could actually end up not looking like what they want to to be
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part of how are you managing that journey for the people as part of the path yeah another great question so i think this is one of the real benefits of dowse is the forkability and
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sort of what you described there is built into the basic nature of how i think these organizations are structured so we are not trying to create some monolithic utopia um i would say you
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know uh there's been plenty examples of people trying to create utopias in the past they don't tend to go very well what i would say is is that we're actually trying to create lots of very autonomous local communities around the
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world that then have this mesh network of you know shared culture maybe some shared governance certainly shared memes but you know ultimately we think the way that you solve this problem is by
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putting as much control and autonomy into the edges of the network as possible and make sure that you know instead of creating one monolithic attempt at utopia we create thousands of
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attempts at small groups of people living together that's that's excellent if people want to experience this who are you looking for to join this
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experiment how do they how do they become part of it how do they engage do they have to be creators can they because presumably a community needs all kinds of people not just creators to to be part of it and how to and then also
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if they want to start their own decentralized um living space or community how does this how does this work yeah so the first thing to do uh like with many dow and web3 projects is come
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hop in our discord and say hi um we have a sort of immigration process for joining uh you know the discord joining an onboarding call getting into the community we welcome everybody but we just want to make sure people
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have that the context uh when they're joining about what we're all about and then you can join a guild you know if you're maybe a a creator who's looking to meet up with other writers or
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videographers or programmers or um whatever you're looking for we also take the word creator pretty broadly um we we see anybody who is interested in this uh
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future world of you know making money independently uh through the internet to be a great fit for the dow and you know this week is a great example we've got uh about eight folks here at
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the cabins uh for a physical build week folks that have never built things before and uh literally a licensed architect you know who's helping lead the build and so uh we we take you know we're
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interested in anybody who gets excited about this vision of of decentralized cities we'd love to have them in the community and we think there's probably a spot for them so to talk about some of the people who are active in the in the
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community in the discord um in the twitter group who who if i go to the to the community who will i engage with yeah uh it really is a pretty broad spectrum of folks at this point we
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organize ourselves into guilds so we have a media guild that takes care of all of the writing a lot of the building in public that we do as well as a podcast uh we just started
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a youtube channel we have uh product guild which is building you know software products for ourselves we have uh you know we're we have a physical passport card with a
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chip embedded on it that can hold nfts representing your visas to access parts of the network so that's an example of a project out of our product guild which includes engineers and designers and pms et cetera
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we have a place makers guild which runs things like our physical you know build weeks as well as our operator residency program where we bring out dow people from the ecosystem to collaborate together irl
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and we also have our community guild for people who are excited about you know helping build out our community within the dao so if any of those sound like uh interesting spots would love to have you
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uh come jump in and and introduce yourself and meet some people and so what are some other communities that you see that you think are doing great job and that you endanger so i mentioned kraus house earlier they
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are uh great friends of dow we think they're doing a really cool thing and we're huge supporters of their mission they have a little bit of the overlap of you know how do we take uh online communities that now have shared resources and start applying that to the
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real world in their case buying an mba team you know we're also collaborators and participants with seed club which is an amazing accelerator for 1000 web 3 projects
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and you know we we think that social dowels many of which are coming through seed club are going to be some of them the most important uh types of dows uh you know that that emerge in
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over the next few years so there's tons of other great projects i i i could probably talk for an hour just about that question but i'll i'll stop there from like a uh
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uh sort of dow perspective i think the other thing we get very excited about is groups of people that you know we say are dao's they may not realize it yet though and so this is a lot of the groups who we work with and on board as as
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neighborhoods and nodes in the cabin network there's an amazing group called montaya base camp that has been running creative residency programs in the eastern sierras in california for years and you know we were very excited to welcome
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them in as a cabin node they were a dow they just didn't realize it yet that's that's fantastic so so what's the what's the vision for this how what's the in ten years time will there be a
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million people living in uh in cabin down notes well what's the what's the grand vision for this yeah i i think um it's exactly that if uh you think about cities and their ambitions there's a great paul graham
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essay with that title you know if you want to be an actor you go to la if you want to be in finance you you go to new york city if you are an online creator uh you know we we hope that in the future you want
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to be a part of the decentralized city that we're building that we're already starting to expand the nodes all over the world and we think there will be thousands more of them that start to form these decentralized uh almost
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city-states that we're larping as and you know ultimately uh i think that over the last century we've seen cities built around the dominant technology of the era which was cars and we're very
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interested in cities that are built around the dominant technology of this century which we think is the internet and blockchains that's fantastic if people want to connect with you how do they do that
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sure you can find us on twitter at creator cabins and from there you can also get the link to join our discord uh which is really where all of the activity happens so we'd love to see you in the discord have
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you on an onboarding call and get you plugged into one of our guilds jonathan thank you very much for being on the show yeah thanks so much for having me murray this is great i'm murray newlands your host of the how to see your show i'll
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see you next time
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