We need to kind of step up our game
on how we professionalize those components of it.
And you mentioned using the Pareto Principle
and getting it close enough.
when I worked in a pharmaceuticals division,
it's like, you had to have the period in the right place.
And if you didn't have the period in the right place
on the document, your operations could be shut down.
How do you manage the Dow world,
which is kind of like the wild, wild West,
to a professional sustainable organization
so that an investor might come in and say,
you know what, I see what you're trying to do.
I don't need accounting level details,
but I need to believe in what you're doing.
Joe, how do you think about where you go
from having that accounting level detail
to we're building this thing as we fly it.
And I'm asking that question a lot
for the people who are listening to us now.
And if they've got projects that they're trying to fund,
if they've got ideas that they wanna fund,
how do they balance getting the,
giving people the details and the,
versus just building the thing and making stuff happen?
You know, first, I think you have to look
at the reality of the situation.
Like we're not, you know, just like delivering another KPI
for like the middle of an organization
with a hundred thousand people.
We've all seen companies like Johnson & Johnson
or Proctor & Gamble or whoever,
go and try to buy innovation.
They'll buy a hundred startups
and they'll kill the innovation at every single one of them.
We know there's a fundamental trade-off
between like the innovation that is required for startups
and what is required for those types of organizations.
So when we think about the reality of this situation,
Arbitrum is a cutting edge technology
in one of the fastest growing markets that exists.
It's highly competitive and it moves fastest all get out.
help and be a part of the solution
to keep Arbitrum in the lead,
if we're gonna keep fueling financial sovereignty
and spearheading this evolution
of decentralized technology and governance,
we are going to need to keep our foot on the gas
and be on the edge, right?
Innovating and bringing new solutions.
That's just fundamentally where we are
because there is nobody who can say
that for sure Arbitrum's going to be in the lead,
whether you're referring to against other L2s,
other L1s or even the technology like leader
for just scaling people's access
to digital public infrastructure
that is credibly neutral and not owned by one corporation.
That's where we wanna get to.
So the reality is we have to put our foot on the gas
because anytime you're building a company
that's a startup and you have competitors
and you have other markets that are moving against you,
you have to keep your edge on the innovation side.
That is fundamentally why nobody else has been able to do it
is because you have that experimentation
and freedom to be able to do it.
And if what you do is you take your foot off the gas
and say, hey, we're gonna spend the majority of our time
dotting the I's and crossing the T's,
well, you're not looking at the big picture
and the field right then, right?
So it's a very delicate balance.
But what I would say is you have to keep your investors
happy, they have to be communicated too well
and understand why you're taking the risks
and trade-offs that you are.
So in the Dow case, that's your delegates.
One thing that we didn't do well was,
we didn't hire a dedicated communications person
with a nice cycle and cadence where delegates could know
every month, here's the decisions we're making,
here's why we're making them
and here's the outcomes we're expecting
and the impact we expected to have on the ecosystem
And then here's where we were successful,
here's how successful it was, why, how we measured it
and what the impact actually was after each one.
So there's that little piece of advice
for like the startup people.
I am the one who's gonna keep the foot on the gas
and I'm always gonna select the bigger, go bigger.
Cause I think that's what like the startup side
of this needs and I think anybody looking at,
even plurality labs should be looking at,
okay, we gave them a seed investment.
They have given some 80, 20 solutions on some things,
but they've gone way over on a lot of other things here.
Just like a startup in your first investment,
you don't necessarily know, you could not write down,
these are the exact things we're gonna do
over the next six months.
And to your question, Sean, around like,
in that company, I was expected to dot every I
and every period must be perfect.
That's why those companies can't innovate, right?
So we're covering so much Joe, this is such good stuff.
I wanna take a pause here and say that if there's anybody
that have any questions that's related to the grants
programs at Arbitrum, and that could be the foundation
program, we can try and field any questions there,
how to get a grant at Arbitrum.
We can talk a little bit about that, but more specifically,
if you've got questions about how Plurati Labs has executed
any of the challenges that we've run across,
go ahead and feel free to raise up your hand
and I'll ask Fiends and Anna to help pull you
into the conversation and we'll have some time
for some questions, some Q and A.
So if you got a question, go ahead and raise your hand up,
ask to be a speaker and Fiends and Anna
But in the meantime, Joe, I told you
I was gonna ask some hard questions.
And Joe, let's say then, right?
One of the hard questions that I've heard
or one of the things that I've heard is that
Plurati Labs or Joe has captured the Dow.
And what that means is like people would say,
hey, if you want a grant, you gotta go talk to Joe.
And if you can talk to Joe, you can get a grant.
How do you respond to that Joe?
I think it's hilarious because let me tell you
a quick story about this.
There's a grant that went out to a company called Sidechain
and Sidechain was just giving out NFTs
to every attendee of New York City's Winter Jazz Festival.
This is a huge win for arbitrary being used
in the real world, right?
You know, there's word on the street
that they're gonna be doing some of the major festivals
this summer as well, which could be really cool.
Now, Sidechain is somebody who was pushed over
to talk to me about grants.
Why did the person send them to me?
Well, they sent them to me because I'm out there
talking to people in the ecosystem.
I'm leading workshops consistently.
I'm communicating with people in the Dow
and the delegates and have a pulse
and mostly because I'm willing to.
Like when you refer somebody to go talk to somebody,
are you gonna refer them to the person that never responds
or are you gonna refer them to the person
that you know will take that time, right?
And so people send them to me
and then I try to figure out what is best
for them to be successful in our ecosystem.
And Sidechain got that grant after two months of me
making introductions with the Offchain Labs,
partnerships and technology team.
You know, when they came to me,
they were thinking they were gonna build on optimism.
I introduced them to a partnerships person from Offchain.
They showed them technology reasons
why they would wanna build there.
They said, okay, well, what kind of support would we have?
And I introduced them to the foundation
and the grant they got was from the foundation.
And I ping the foundation every two weeks,
hey, what about that Sidechain?
And finally, I was super happy
when I saw that grant came through.
So the reason I'm telling this story
is people are sending them to us
because we're some of the only full-time people
that are paid by the doubt
that are 100% invested in Arbiturum
and have the time to work with everybody.
And we have the name recognition that people can say,
In addition to that, like I said,
we had 12 programs that we ran
and only two of them were managed by us.
And those two were very specifically needed
and caused outsized impact.
The STIP likely wouldn't have happened
if the Firestarter program wasn't there.
And the open block labs work,
monitoring STIP likely wouldn't have happened.
There's a lot of little pieces where we saw gaps
and we're able to help out.
whether it's doubt building or granting or whatever,
we're allocating resources to this ecosystem.
And I can't find one good explanation
that says we shouldn't allocate the funds
or try to find grant programs
that will allocate funds towards the most immediate
and dire needs of the doubt.
So whatever that need is,
that's where our programs should be funding.
That's what a pluralist program should double down on
is solving the most impactful problems, whatever they are.
Joe, I'm glad that you brought up that example
because the other piece of this is that
it doesn't matter kind of which meeting that we go into,
I think there's a lot of goodwill around the work
that Clarity Labs have done, right?
But I think a lot of that goodwill comes around to the fact
that there are examples of Gavin and the Sajjan, right?
And Sajjan, how much, I don't know,
I don't even know how to add it,
but how much extracurricular work did you really do
that was not related to delivering
the Clarity Labs promise?
It's like, if you could point to a couple of the work
that got underway, what else did you do?
Because at some point in time, Joe, I'm like,
what are you doing when you're focusing on this?
But what are the conversations that you pulled into?
Yeah, in December, I took a week
and met for a full hour with 20 different delegates.
And then have probably done that again this month.
But I've also spent a good number of time,
you can look through the crowd here
and there's Klaus, there's Miggy out there,
there's Alex, there's Jordan on the analytics.
There's plenty of people who are contributors
in one way or another who I will take the time with
and try to find a way to get them paid,
get them involved, get them whatever it is
to be a part of this ecosystem.
And there's hurdles to it.
And it sometimes, you see people doing good work out there.
Like for example, when Joseph was working
on the ARC proposal or the ARDC proposal,
the procurement committee,
he's putting a ton of hours
and maybe when he goes into a forum and shares a DAAP,
people might put a thumb up on it, like one thumb up.
And I'm seeing he's putting like 10 hours a week
to make a fair thing and progress the DAO.
That's somebody we need to get paid.
So sitting there and talking to the different people
who are in the ecosystem and making sure
that we're not losing talent,
before trying to attract the top talent,
we got to not lose the talent that we have today.
And we lost top talent already
and talent that we had today,
they had to go and find another job somewhere,
that they've gotten burnt out
because of the requirements of how much it takes.
And this is part of the reason,
people don't understand that building this framework,
it's not being the program manager.
We don't want to be operators in the DAO.
We wanna facilitate the DAO
in helping it to build itself
in ways that will sustainably decentralized
and create value and be efficient.
So when we're thinking about like how this works,
I said there was a lot of complexity
around the 12 programs that we did.
And what we wanna do is narrow down
and find somebody who can maintain context
around specific high level like priorities.
We all know bringing builders and developers to Arbitrum
And we've done countless workshops
and different things on calls and telegrams
where people say, hey, here's a great idea,
But who actually is paid full time by the DAO
to call it all of those ideas and prioritize them
and present them and let us vote on if there's a need.
Like right now, we have to rely on somebody
who obviously has self-interest
doing all the discovery work in four months for free
and risking like reputational damage and personal attacks
to go and be able to give value to the DAO.
Why can't they just show up to a Dwork space or a GitHub
and see that there's these things that they can do
and get paid a fair value if they do it well today?
Why can't they do that and double down and participate,
get paid and level up with their skill right away?
It's because we don't have somebody
holding context in between.
So that's when we talk about like work streams,
it's like we need to actually relinquish the role
of being the program provider
and even being the program manager
in the two programs that we were
and continue being the facilitator of the framework
and have these work streams be the allocators.
Because this won't scale if it's just us, right?
We need those work streams to take the lessons that we learned
and now there's four groups that are scaling.
But what if they wanna fund the same things?
Well, you need a framework and a governance process
that says, well, this work should come over here
and be allocated to this work stream
and the credit to go to them
so that we don't have redundant work
both at a grantee level and at a program level.
That's what the framework for the pluralist framework does
is make sure that at every level,
the grantee, the grant programs themselves
and the program providers are all equipped
and coached to scale and not have those redundancies.
So I think that that makes sense
and I recognize that like the process
that we've been trying to do is to like
create a pluralistic mechanism
so that we can allocate money in as fair a way as possible
and using many different mechanisms
so that we get the best ideas out of people.
Let me stop here as like, if there's any questions,
have anybody have questions about the proposal
or a question about what we're trying to do,
please go ahead and raise your hand.
We've got time for a question or two.
But Joe, before we do that,
I think it was 11 days ago,
you dropped the proposal on the forum
that was ultimately asking for 30 million ARB.
And actually, let me take that.
It's like the outline of the proposal with 30 million ARB,
but you even put in a temp check to say,
hey, how big should this be?
And people could go into the forum
and discuss that like a different ideas, right?
And we had a ton of traction on it
and a lot of people participating in that.
Where do we go from here, right?
And I know it's a 30 million ARB proposal.
But where do we go from here?
I mean, how do we get this thing across the line
or what are some of the next steps
to get a decision on this?
It's a big proposal and it takes time
because we have a very sophisticated
and thoughtful group of delegates.
The power is pretty well spread
that there's no one delegate
who really makes that decision.
It could be better spread,
but compared to most hours,
you have to get 10 or more people
before you can even think about moving forward, right?
And part of that comes from talking to those people
and part of that comes from the community speaking up
and sharing their sentiments as well.
Our next step is really to make a decision
on what we should put to Snapshot,
which is either letting the community decide
how much we should allocate
or putting one idea up there
that is best interpreting and combining
and creating compromise of what we've heard.
We have to make that decision.
We've definitely gotten a lot of feedback
and there are some things we can change
and some things that we just didn't communicate
But fundamentally, we can't move this forward
as just us doing a small grants program,
which is where one side of your delegates wants us to go.
I think the vast majority want us
to just go with the full amount
and it goes to a multisig with a bunch of delegates anyway,
so it makes it slightly more accessible.
It's not like it all goes into a lab's pocket.
But the fundamental problem that Arbiturum's having right now
that could cost them everything in the Dow at least
is that they have one decision-making modality.
And we've seen that when somebody goes to the Dow
the politics and the culture as it is,
it takes that when they say
we need another decision-making modality
it pops out the same answer of this council
plus a paid multisig and all these things.
What it doesn't do is come up with novel
and different on-chain ways
of selecting what should be allocated,
creating different allocation strategies
and different accountability strategies.
Ideally, the Dow should be set up
kind of like a chess board
where every piece is protected.
There's an accountability behind each one
and there's an X move like planned.
And we absolutely don't have that on-chain yet.
And there's no way to design that
where you need like constant,
small iterative design changes
without someone having the freedom
and flexibility to experiment.
And that's really what Ferrari Labs role
as this framework architect
is that we actually have many different decision-making
modalities that we can experiment with.
And when one of them is successful,
the Dow can choose to use it in other things.
Like for example, if we decide to fund a program,
let's say we want to fund applications
Like I always get pissed off
that CowSwap isn't on NoSIS safe.
If you look at my tweets like once a week,
how can we get you to deploy on Arbitrum?
But imagine there's like 30 or so apps that are there
that other people probably wanna use.
And we said, we're gonna put 10K per application
And then we're gonna use quadratic voting
where all the delegates can put their conviction
on which one they want the most.
And so maybe some of them like CowSwap
end up getting 50K and others get like 2K.
Have you seen that done before?
If you've seen that done before, put a thumb up.
Like has any ecosystem done that to attract applications?
Now, the thing is, that's a novel way of doing it
that also could be potentially applied
to step or other future grant incentive programs.
There's data-driven techniques and so forth.
And none of these are accessible to the Dow right now
because that one decision-making modality that they have
keeps popping out this council.
And we have the opportunity to provide the access
to these different ways of doing things
that can provide better outcomes.
And Joe, I think kind of to your point earlier
is like there's so many of these different modalities
that we're trying to execute.
And I think the license is to try and continue
going down this path, continue with the execution,
doubling down on what we know is working well.
And I think what you said
as far as the proposal goes is the next steps for now
are to decide how big is the scope
that we take to Snapshot, get it on the Snapshot,
get community, some sort of community consensus on it.
And then from there, go on to take it to Tally
for an agreement with the community.
Yeah, and this should happen in the next week.
Hopefully by the end of the week,
we have something up on Snapshot
because right now we're kind of at the point
where we've had all the conversations we can have.
And there are some people, some delegates
who are on one side of the spectrum
and some who are on the other side of the spectrum.
And we're trying to catch up and make sure
that we have that at every I across every T.
But there's also like the reality of,
we are about as long as to the end of this month
and that's what we have payments for.
So like the Arbitrum ecosystem,
they also deserve us to put something up
and make sure that we keep active
and are funded to continue working
if that's what they choose.
So it has to happen this week.
Cool, okay, so we're gonna wrap up here
Themes, are you connected?
Because I knew you had a bit of a,
you had a bit of a rough connection earlier.
Do you wanna do kind of quick summary
of like what action steps we're asking people to take
in terms of what I think joke race is coming up.
We've got more on thank ARB.
Anything that people in the community should be aware of
and be looking out for in terms of the execution
So as you mentioned, there is a joke race contest
for this week on Play to Earn Reimagined.
You don't have very much time to apply and submit.
I'd also like to thank our decentralized council
for participating and providing valuable feedback
to our program manager, Diana, who's leading the program.
Along with that, we have a thank ARB contributions
listed to the active initiatives
such as completing a survey on CARMA
from the grants that are already there.
Kind of one that would maybe be best
is that if you wanna review CARMA itself,
that has been completely completed.
On Thursdays, we will do an onboarding on CARMA gap
for grantees and reviewers.
And of course, we would love a request for comment
on our current milestone to proposals
so that we could reiterate and also provide something
that is valuable to the Dow.
Oh my gosh, thank you very much for that.
So plenty to do, plenty of ways to get engaged
in the arbitrary ecosystem.
Remember, we're on our way to let 3 billion crypto users
and we think ARB is one of the ways to help us get there.
Joe Feeney, Anna, is there anything I forgot to ask?
You guys hit me up, let me know if the guy's missing.
and it wasn't you forgot to ask,
but I just wanna really clarify this.
We've been pretty effective and efficient
at distributing funds specifically
because we've been highly targeting Dow needs.
We're not funding just whatever happens
We're looking at needs and assessing the needs
and then funding things based on that.
So we've talked about the friction of somebody
being able to bring a vote to the Dow.
So how many great builders are just scared away
And what we're able to do is sensitive the needs
and actually fund those things.
So I think we're like a super important R&D partner
in the way of both like optimizing for speed
and learning in the ecosystem.
And we're like a partner to the governance process,
but we don't wanna be the governance process.
We can move fast, we can experiment,
we can acquire data and decentralize
our terms contributor pool in ways that are possible
for the current governance mechanism to do,
but that do make it possible for voters
to have a much better sense of our needs,
what's working, how we should grow.
And therefore we can find the competency at the edges
and get them involved and get the community involved
in ways that unlock potential.
There isn't another equivalent option right now.
And I think it's really important for us
I mean, it's a good point if you look at,
there's only been a handful of proposals
that have actually passed on Snapchat.
And if you look at the number of proposals that have passed,
the even fewer of those are actually related to
treasury disbursement, so it's a good point.
Cool, okay, hey, Joe, Annie from your side,
thank you so much for allowing us the time
to come into your space and your time
and to talk about the work that Plurality Labs is doing.
We do have more Twitter spaces planned,
especially to talk about some of the great grantees
But, Anna, we really appreciate the time
and everything that you and Patrick and Cliff Clifton
and also Andrea and the entire team at the foundation.
So thank you for all the work
and being such great partners as we've gone through this.
I think we've all learned a lot
and you guys, the foundation,
has been a great partner to help us learn through this.
So I really appreciate that.
Okay, I think that's it for us, back to you.
Yeah, of course, I totally wanna thank you all too
because you've been doing a lot of stuff
in the Arbiturm now helping to get,
at the end, building Arbiturm together.
So yeah, it's very cool to see you and have you here.
And yeah, thank you, Fims, Sean, Joe,
here, Sarah, as well, for coming and talk
about all the impact that you've done
and for sure all your learnings.
For everyone, I just want to share this team,
the Prairie Labs team, they shared a proposal
in the Arbiturm now since months ago,
like in June, 2023 to build this grant program.
And they have a lot of initiatives there.
So yeah, now they have a new proposal.
So it's time for you, the community,
to go have a look in the proposal,
give your feedback when it's time to vote as well.
And for sure, if you have other ideas
to create a grant platform, a grant framework,
you can go to the Arbiturm now and suggest it.
There is actually a proposal
where the Arbiturm Foundation can help you
to fund it, and let me put it here.
But yeah, thank you everyone for joining us today.
It was a great conversation, to be honest.
And yeah, hope to see you in a new AMA for sure.
And thank you for building the Arbiturm now
and Arbiturm together with us.
Do you have any questions?
I don't have any questions.
Do you have any questions?
Do you have any questions?
Do you have any questions?
Do you have any questions?