A Futard’s Guide to MetaDAO
Everything you need to know to contribute to the first market-governed organization in the history of human civilization
Introduction
MetaDAO is a new type of organization. Unlike the others, its decisions are made by markets. Despite this stark difference, you should feel twinges of familiarity as you interact with MetaDAO. We don’t have bosses or a corporate hierarchy, but we do appoint leaders of projects. We don’t have salaries, but we do receive compensation. This document aims to serve as a map, a field guide to help you navigate MetaDAO.
MetaDAO is still young. Its practices will evolve as we discover what works and what doesn’t. I will do my best to update this document to remain up-to-date as this evolution occurs.
Roles
Futards come from all walks of life and with varying skill sets. This is good: it’s why it makes sense for us to work together. Still, we can bucket futards in a few categories: analysts, entrepreneurs, and cyber-agents.
Of course, someone can wear multiple hats. Personally, I’ve been all three. When I trade the markets, I’m an analyst. When I coordinate the building of Vota, I’m an entrepreneur. And when I write smart contract code, I’m a cyber-agent. But I’d expect us to specialize more over time. My dream job is to be a full-time analyst.
Analysts
Analysts are the thinkers of the Meta-DAO. They’re the ones who trade the markets, indirectly deciding where the Meta-DAO allocates its energy and money.
Good analysts have the ability to coldly study a situation, prioritizing reason over emotions in their verdicts. They tend to think in probabilities and prices rather than simplistic “good” or “bad” labels. Unlike in traditional organizations, where the decision-makers need to have a good deal of EQ in order to ‘rally the troops,’ analysts can get by with close-to-0 people skills. Those who are good can be compensated handsomely by their high investment returns, especially if they trade on behalf of others.
Entrepreneurs
But we still need people to rally the troops. The people who take on big ambitious projects and gather the people to make it happen. These are the entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs need a little bit of everything. They need enough analytical ability to convey the strengths of their projects to the analysts. They need enough sales ability to convince cyber-agents to join them. They need to have enough product management knowledge to guide the creation of the product. And perhaps most importantly, they need to have a penchant for taking risk.
Cyber-agents
Both analysis and coordination would be useless without the people on the ground slinging code, designing and marketing the DAO’s products, and managing partnerships. These are the cyber-agents.
Proposals
Proposals are the cornerstone of the Meta-DAO’s decision-making and execution. We can classify proposals by their area and scope. Along the area axis, we have business proposals and operations proposals. Along the scope axis, we have projects and direct actions.
Business projects are how MetaDAO converts financial capital into revenue-generating products. Business direct actions operate over those products, tweaking parameters in the pursuit of customer satisfaction and profitability. Operations projects and direct actions support the business, ensuring that MetaDAO has the right people and resources to create new products and manage existing ones.
Each of these four proposal types has its own template. These are listed here:
Project proposals should generally be raised by entrepreneurs who are accountable to the DAO for their execution. Direct action proposals can be raised by anyone.
You can use any document app you want to create proposals. I recommend Hackmd or Google Docs.
Compensation
When an entrepreneur raises a project proposal, they specify a budget. That budget can be allocated however the entrepreneur sees fit. Some entrepreneurs may decide to hire more cyber-agents and pay less per cyber-agent. Others may decide to hire fewer cyber-agents and pay more individual compensation.
Still, I expect projects to follow a few common practices:
- Immediate payments for cyber-agents: quick feedback loops are good for motivation. So it’s in everyone’s interest that cyber-agents are paid immediately after they perform the work. For example, a strategy I think makes sense is attaching bounties to GitHub issues and paying out those bounties when the code gets merged.
- Long-term and performance-based compensation for entrepreneurs: entrepreneurs have a big impact on the health of MetaDAO and its projects. So it makes sense to compensate them in a way that aligns their interests with MetaDAO’s long-term health. Some ideas here are Dual Finance’s options or Streamflow Finance’s vesting contracts. We could also do performance-based payments based on hitting certain target metrics.
As of writing this, we still haven’t implemented compensation for the operations of MetaDAO. But obviously it’s in MetaDAO’s interest to do retroactive compensation on people who provide value to it. So you can imagine that you’re earning MetaDAO points every time you make a contribution!
Entering the futarchy
The above is a high-level overview of how MetaDAO operates. But how do you, dear reader, make the first steps into this world? I can recommend any of the following:
- Participate in the Discord: today, most of MetaDAO’s discussions happen in our Discord server. The easiest way to get involved is to join and listen to these discussions.
- Trade the markets: some of MetaDAO’s most influential people don’t participate in discussions at all. They simply lurk and trade.
- Contribute to projects: if you’re motivated, the best way to get started in MetaDAO is to ship something! It doesn’t have to be code: it could be a cool design for a project, a graphic to post to social media, a tweet thread, or something completely different! If it provides value to MetaDAO, MetaDAO is incentivized to compensate you for it!
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me! I’m @metaproph3t on most platforms.
