You see, this guy, this guy's in love with you, yes, I'm in love.
our DAOs decentralized everybody's got to vote often people are asked to vote for things they
don't even understand which functionally is not a great thing how do we bring that balance where
it is inclusive enough but we are getting the best results right that's that's definitely a
challenge i've been like studying mainly by doing these on-ground projects so i i i myself go for
these on-ground projects to really understand like how the product should be developed so in crux
i would say that the citizen app is in in a way in our pursuit of developing this DAO and you know
creating a platform that can be community governed can be community owned on what kind of social
initiatives need to happen on ground and a lot of this is guided by a lot of tools we develop
so we can't just say it has to be decentralized we have to facilitate that decentralization in
something all right thank you so much uh your tool yeah and i have to say i follow you and the rest of
the atlantis DAO team on twitter and every day you're posting pictures where you and the team
are speaking to the community working on projects on the ground uh so i think you are a great example
of uh practice what you preach and so i received some quotes from our co-host timothy who unfortunately
has some phone issues uh so timothy is uh representing the blind spot project and he's very much focused on
on culture so i want to ask a few more questions about culture um so there's this this famous quote
culture eats strategy for breakfast and what that kind of uh implies is that no matter how great
the business strategy is your plan will fail without a healthy team culture that encourages people to
implement your vision and when it comes to the projects you um decide to partner with how do you measure
the health of of the culture of these projects and how do you evaluate the value that they could bring
to divide your community yeah that's that's a great question like how do you measure the culture like
like uh definitely one thing that everyone in the team especially the core team we have really built
is like we really look for people who inherently understand team sports it's been easy for us to
operate around that i'm not saying it's the most efficient uh but uh just understanding the ethos of how
teams work uh really helped us internally but when we start going on ground and we're trying to find
partners uh often we do find the bridge where like uh their intent is something that we look at like are
they looking at like short-term projects uh this is often easy to recognize from their questions
the way that they uh show their interest in projects most of the projects that we go in for is long-term
projects where it involves restoration and then regeneration uh which means like these are long-term
projects and we get to know from the way that partners speak itself like whether they are looking
at it from a short-term point of view or they're looking at it from a long-term all these projects
that we look at we definitely need partners who see value in regenerating their land over the long-term
so that's some of the filters that we use uh and when it comes to culture another thing especially
it's quite common maybe even in in india as a whole is that there's always this aspect of
giving and giving is a measure of seeing how you know you are open to collaborate and
i think that's inherently built into a lot of us here so especially in the local context we see who's
more forthcoming in terms of like wanting to do some stuff like not really asking always like hey what
what's in it for me uh they're willing to look at the larger picture um that's been something that
like uh uh has been a filter for us uh people identifying people who are more of a giving nature
so for me it's always fascinating to see what would happen if we put like a bunch of people who are
extremely giving in a space uh what happens it's it's fascinating to see and like uh often we try
to create these avenues for these kind of interactions to happen um yeah and uh apart from
that i would say that uh like you said right like uh culture eats strategy like there's another thing
another similar proverb that goes like everyone's got a plan till you get punched in the face
especially when we're doing these projects on ground uh for the core team something that we
have developed is this appetite for uh anti-fragility like all me and my co-founders and everyone who's
here um the core team especially we have known each other for decades actually like more than
more than 15 20 years like i know my co-founder for more than 15 years i know kiran for more than 15
years and like there's there's a very deep-rooted connection and our appetite to to fail and take
the positives from it and build is uh i think something that's a strength within the team uh so we
approach everything with like you know let's go figure out let's it's always an experiment till we
are sure so it's never like hey this works for sure it's more like hey we feel like this could work
these are the assumptions let's go on ground and figure it out but we figure it out together so
that kind of really helps um yeah i don't know if i answered your question yeah absolutely thank you
so much and i was just yeah uh as timothy pointed out to me in a message just now that um you know one
of the top three reasons for most new organizations and startups to fail is conflict between the three
uh between the co-founders uh but i guess the fact that you already know your co-founders for more
than 50 years kind of helps uh not 15 15 sorry yeah my accent 15 yeah 15 but i would like to jump on
something also that uh timothy wanted to uh to to touch upon right um and and this is exactly what
you're talking about so we're going to talk about alignment at scale um so it's like he says he
expresses it's it's quite uh easy to be value aligned in the beginning but it's very hard to
stay value aligned at scale so how do you ensure even though you know each other for a long time
that your egos your need of recognition your power or money do not take over uh the projects and
you guys can stay value aligned at scale like how are you planning on doing that um at a at a large
scale because right now it's it's small it's possible to do it this way uh but how would you do
this at scale how would you keep everything in check all right so it's the value alignment at scale
yeah i think this is where like we could start calling on like digital tools to come in
uh the way that we are experimenting is we are developing a manifesto that is co-authored by
everyone in the organization and the people who work on the ground uh this basically gives us a bunch
of values that we can hopefully program but the idea is that once we program it how do we look at
a feedback system that can fix this uh initial foundational values if they are skewed
and in terms of like building you know uh an organization that works in water food energy
it always felt wrong for me for it to be a private limited uh because inherently you're doing public
good and uh how do you find a sweet spot between being the government and being a private organization
right this is where i think cooperatives definitely resonated with us so the same kind of model where
people who are power users in the platform eventually should have more skin in the game because they're
leveraging it they're creating the impact now it comes down to a design challenge how do you design
that experience how do you ensure that everyone gets a stake in things right uh for me one of the
particular challenges with atlantis that i'm trying to solve is uh incentivizing connectors
which is very very core for developing any kind of social platform often we meet people who introduce
us to other people and we go on to do great things together but the upside of the person who is
introducing you is often lost and this is also the challenge of modern society because we operate not
at a tribe level we operate at like 150 plus human beings at a time so we often forget to acknowledge
people's small small small actions so how do we design a platform where the inherently the actions
in it have a net positive effect on ground this has to be algorithmically programmed now we live
i don't know if it's for the good or the bad in the world of ai which means you could leverage
ai assisted hand holding for people to give a personalized experience though your platform
could be massive and people can get lost in dows which often happens to all of us right we have
discord dows where we don't even go check in now because it's overwhelming uh so how do you build that
personalized experience how do you uh anchor people to the values that you have this is where i feel like
digital tools like dow dow tooling really comes in uh and people inherently know how to operate
cooperatives i think everywhere in every part of the world there is a successful cooperative and
we're just giving them these uh new tools that will enable them to collaborate cross pollinate cross
border which means we solve things and operate at faster pace right like shared knowledge is something
that i feel is very valuable that atlantis can really generate it's projects that work on one
place you share that knowledge with other people they might be able to do the experiments again and
figure out few little nuances and it works better in my region this is collective intelligence we can
share which is impossible if we were a cooperative in a rural village uh with a dow tool on top of that
now you can share this and like really like propagate that idea
all right yeah that's that that's quite interesting and can you give us do you have some perhaps um
some values and beliefs in your core principle of atlantis dow that you could share with everyone here on
how uh you will you know add these values and belief within these tools that you're talking about that can
help you keep this culture um in place there's a really beautiful actually yeah i don't think
people are gonna like this but uh airbnb uh had there's a paper by their ex-ceo that's called don't
fuck up the culture so basically peter feel told told uh the ex-ceo forgot his name right now that
actually the reason why he invested in airbnb was because of the culture it was like just don't
fuck up the culture what you're building is not that crazy keep keep building your values and
belief right and so how are you building that knowing that there is a challenge that you're in
a decentralized governance or decentralized uh way of working so how are you how are you building that
um and if you can share a bit your values and belief and the core principles
and philosophy that are guiding atlantis dow and you guys to be so so well you know in line together
uh yeah i think we'll begin with like what led to wanting to create um atlantis like
i think between all the founders we really did appreciate that we had the opportunity to
uh live life like experience human life at a much higher order than a lot of people around us
uh this realization dawns on you in a country like india where the extremely rich and the extremely
poor rub shoulders very often and uh this got us thinking about like what would it take for humanity
to enable a full experience of life for everyone like the dream scandinavian life that we all see
or we seek uh how do you arrive at that and it was pretty obvious that we couldn't just follow what
was happening in uh in north america where you know they were really amplifying on the material
resources to achieve this fuller life experience and on the other other spectrum we had the eastern
way of doing it where you know people just leave everything and go to the mountains and meditate
and that's how they achieve nirvana our full life experience we were like you know we see there's a
middle path where you know you could get your resources in a respectful manner where you're not
really impacting the environment in a negative manner this was the foundation that we wanted to operate
and like all the projects all the work that we do in atlantis has to be in creating net not net zero
but net positive impact that means uh the humans in a region are able to as much as possible
experience the full life experience which in our context a lot of people especially women in our
country do not achieve that they do not have financial freedom which means they do not have
freedom to do most of the things so how do we solve for this so everything that we do on ground
often is targeting this can we create net positive impact in the region if that's possible then we
go ahead and do that and that's strongly rooted in our culture and to contextualize this right like
it's it's multi-dimensional right you're looking at societal economical and multiple spectrums when
you're trying to say uh how do you draw these values we are working on something called an oracle
which basically is a sense making tool which looks at some of these values like people's access to good
food water energy do they have access to opportunities education do they have access to local communities is
there a strong uh community uh culture in that region these are things that is measurable today and we
feel like by giving measurable context to people uh we'll be able to convert these values into
actionables right so we're building this uh oracle which encompasses this multi-dimensional values uh but
if i had to like simplify it like really it's it's all about like how can we go to a region and
create net positive impact there thank you so much uh i think that answers sina's question very well
and i want to go back to your two as the person not the the founder and so what are you working on
uh currently on a personal level uh that might help you improve in in your role as um ceo of
atlantis if anything uh wow this yeah i think i i if my advisor was here i don't think he is here
guido keeps telling me that like you know i need to slow down a bit and get bored which i think is a
luxury right now because of um there was a lot of deep thinking that especially i me and my co-founders
were able to put in during the lockdown and during 2019 to 2021 phase where now we have we are at this
like in an operational stage where it's all about like just do do do do because there's so much that
we have thought of developed and we just want to implement on ground uh personally i would say that
like it's the opportunity to slow down a bit is always great um it helps clear thinking and
just uh some beautiful things happen when you're really bored you should let some everyone should
allow themselves for that i'm trying to seek that balance now let's see uh we've been having
back-to-back events a lot of friends coming down to india and like doing a lot of projects together
uh i am hoping like during august it gets a little slow and i'm able to take some more break
yeah and so let's talk about like you know with all this energy you have um and this is also coming
from timothy um he's interested and it reminds me a lot of regions unite and i know when we gather and
we talk about things that are a bit outside of only the technicals right and it's what is your
spiritual path and personal inner work practices because for someone like you that's such a high
performer and i've seen you by the way i've been to india for everybody to know so i've seen how
either to works i've seen his team so i can say that it's quite impressive uh everything that
they're doing okay so yeah what's your spiritual path and personal inner work practices you do
oh that's yeah i think i lately realized that working on your breathing as a superpower
uh definitely like in different stretches it's helped uh that's something that i often go back to
uh mixing that with a little bit of meditating helps apart from that i think uh i've consciously
tried to surround myself with people that i like to be around uh that helps me uh be in an environment i
can work and uh most importantly internally i look at all of this in in some way a sense as a game
so it doesn't feel like work for me uh i know a lot of people feel when they look from the outside
it looks like you know this is going beyond 10 hours and stuff but a lot of it is play for me like
i i i'm a strong advocate for work and play and uh you won't believe it like my first co-founder
like nakul who's one of the co-founders of atlantis when he first uh knew that i was gonna start
doing something on my own he didn't believe it and uh it was when he noticed that i stopped gaming a
lot that he realized i'm serious and he invested a little bit of money in me and then eventually
became my co-founder and we have two companies together now we've started uh so i somehow find
that possibility to play in what i do and i and i really advocate the same for my teammates every
person who comes joins us one question that we asked hey what do you really like doing like what
is that one thing that you like doing where you feel like you know you lose track of time and you
feel like it's your a game can we really talk about that like and can we somehow bring that to the
workplace if that's possible i feel like you unlock something in humans like they're very it becomes
effortless and you'll just see them weave magic and i try to keep myself in that zone where this
due to which i'm sure my engineering team doesn't like it but i get involved in product a lot though
i shouldn't uh and because i really like designing stuff and like uh that's some way of like doing a
lot of deep work because my role mainly requires me not to do a lot of deep work sadly right now but i
find that to be that sweet spot and fortunately i'm able to like i'm lucky that i can like
give that balance to myself not as much as i like it but uh yeah so i think these are the
things that i look forward to a little bit of breathing ensuring that everything is more of a
play for me and for everyone around
that's great and that's that's very good to hear that you still find the time and space to do that
um i was just wondering if some of our listeners have additional questions for you too now's the time
to grab the mic and request a speaker slot
any questions for you too or the rest of the atlantis team
i think you're just very very we got we got a questions already we got a question already but
it was written so it's by timothy um he says he asks how do you dance between short-term financial
imperatives and long-term goals and vision between the get shit done startup mindset and
the walk to talk activist mindset but uh are you done with the question can i go yeah yeah it's
the question of timothy uh he just wrote it and for everybody else yes just ask for the mic and just
come on up and ask questions to you to do before we wrap the space up
uh yeah so if i got that right like you asked like what's the difference between like
startup and like uh activists who get on the ground and do stuff like the get shit done startup
mindset and the walk to talk activist mindset so how do you dance between short-term financial
imperatives and long-term goals and vision between the get shit done startup mindset and the walk to
talk activist mindset yeah uh i think this this again i think involves a bunch of deep work and some
shallow work the shallow work is where you go on the ground and get stuff done um but especially
for people who have a lot of creative power you feel like you know anything is possible so
it's always nice to draw a boundary around what your objectives are so though i feel like you know
there are a lot of problems we want to tackle for example at atlantis it's often like i try to play
the role of a gardener where i'm trying to cut down on a few of the things so we are able to draw
a boundary around what is the larger goal and once that's well defined then it's all about just
acting right so allowing yourself to have that freedom of not having to worry about hey am i going
in the right direction or not you ideally want to draw that frame and then you just operate within it
which means like for me for example the western gut in india was my first region that i wanted to do
all the kind of work that i was doing on ground so the moment things emerged in this region i was like
responding very fast for it there were things that were emerging in other regions but i was not taking
them up at that speed so allowing yourself to draw that region where you want to operate really helps
you uh find that balance you know and in terms of like uh the short-term goals and long-term
um stickiness like i call it because i'm a product guy uh it's definitely something that's
required for sustaining any kind of uh at scale anything like you asked me earlier on like how do
you achieve this kind of uh ideology at scale when you're decentralizing uh i really really always i try
to identify the short-term incentives for people who are involved in our project which means nobody who
works with us works on free no volunteering at all like a lot of dows have that everybody who
works with us and somewhere the other gets paid always and but on the long term we are trying to
give them equity and trying to keep them in the game and we are also like the people who are in the team
we have an option to increase their equity in the project uh as as their involvement increases so
we feel like not presenting this esops and rather like giving them like the same kind of equity
that investors or founders would have goes a long way in showing that trust to them in terms of long
term um but short term yeah we we might not be the highest paid but we feel like even at the climate
tech space small team that we have everyone's pretty well paid and that's part of the journey
yeah yeah i'm interested sorry i'm gonna jump on what you just said um yeah i think this is the right
time can you explain to me also like what is vanurastra technologies private limited because this is where
i get a bit confused so you you have the llc which owns the atlantic citizen app right and then you have
the dao from what i understand and then you have the atlantis network can you just explain to me how
these three yeah with each other so because i think it's super interesting the way you're you're
building it because also you're speaking of equity so is equity of the varunastra technologies private
limited or is it tokens from the dao which can be converted perhaps afterwards the money i'll let you
the floor yeah so this is an interesting question so initially when we go into the web tree like this
during like peak bull market everyone was racing into like converting their organization into tokens
and issuing that uh but like most of the advice that we got was that like till you find that real
product market fit operate as a normal startup would issue equity to people and eventually when you feel
like you have found a product market fit then you look at tokenizing it and once you have a token then
you transition all the equity into token uh this is the ideal flow that we felt made sense because
uh rushing into a token doesn't make sense and that's why we have never like looked at that aspect
yet uh and now coming back to how we operate like when you're operating in india you need to have a legal
entity in india so varunastra is just a subsidiary that we have here our main organizations set up in
singapore it's not an llc it's a private limited right now uh it's singapore based and eventually
when we issue tokens it'll be from the singapore organization actually
okay great and so when you say that you're giving equity to members that enter and have skin in the game
and are showing anti-fragile uh let's call it anti-fragile uh how can we say this like people who are not
getting paid the amount you should get paid so they're staying with you because they believe in
the mission and they're staying for the for the common of the for the common good and for the
ideology you're telling me that they're getting shares of that company and then you were tokenizing
this company and then everybody's just going to use the tokens is that pretty much just said yeah
so let's so so this way what we are able to do is that we are able to build a stability around
actually creating value as an organization and as a dow uh and eventually launching a token
premature launching of a token puts a lot of pressure and actually creating value for it which
is not currently something your team has achieved so what happens is it puts the entire organization at
risk um there's possibility of it completely going down and in terms of even like attracting investment
uh this we felt like when we were speaking to people it made sense to initially go with equity
and once you achieve that product market fit you explore tokenizing it so uh that's why even in
terms of like the product we are designing a lot of community oriented decisions for the platform
happens right now initially in tokens but that's completely in network so even the token that we are
coming out with which will be part of the citizen app called karma it is an in network token it cannot
be traded outside the platform so that's how we are starting off okay that's that's super cool that's
super interesting so um when you speak about the atlantis network uh are you speaking about the blockchain
that you're using for when the token is uh being transferred uh from the bounty to the
person there's a bounty okay no so so in terms of like how we are developing the architecture is
uh there's going to be a protocol layer and then there's going to be application layer uh so think
about like you built a protocol layer which could be built using multiple chains or you could have your
own you know you create your own l1 not going to be doing any of that our idea is to build a protocol
layer which will have elements of open source to it and on top of that we have application layer so the citizen
app is just the first application we're building because again here uh creating a protocol before you
actually even identify one single value that your products can give is again premature you ideally
want to find value at application level and then you build backwards into a protocol so the network that you're
saying is going to be like an atlantis network protocol um it's uh how is it going to look um too
soon to say now we are still at an application layer where we are developing this initial application
and uh the at first step we are building it in solana uh now we are currently we have an entire team
working on an evm uh chain mostly in polygon we are doing it so that we can bring this interoperability
because we identified a lot of refi community is strong on the evm side but in terms of like
the cost of operating on ground issuing a lot of impact certificates to people uh the cost adds up a
lot and solana was a good fit for us because the cost can be capped there and uh it's practical
operationally and we knew that like we believe in interoperability so initially this application that
we're building is going to be interoperable but eventually there's going to be a protocol layer
that's being built out it's a long-term vision um probably in four years i would say that we'll be at
a point where we have a protocol layer where others are able to tap into it and like build on top of it
all right that's that's very interesting i'm gonna just ask one more question because i'm very
interested in in how you're you're building all of this um can you just have you talked with
investors in india because i think this is also an issue with india can you explain to us
why did not why didn't you guys start with a cooperative models because as we know cooperatives
are are closer to private companies and what they are to ngos in general at least this is what i've i've
i've i've i've seen you can also create models where you can get actually uh more people in your
cooperative and actually build it and also give some sort of equity to the people who are entering
um did you guys decide to go private limited in singapore because it was easier to get private capital
is it the reason or is there something in india perhaps that's very complicated if you started as a
co-op and doing all of these technicality no no i think it was most straightforward like we were
looking to raise capital and i was a very experimental model which means most of the investment
thesis in india is purely like drawn from silicon valley so uh anything that's a little different
uh it's very hard to raise capital for it and we knew that eventually what we were developing
uh could not really also just scale in india because india's regulations are challenging especially
off ramping and we knew that if you're going to build something that's blockchain based
because inherently for us the thing was when we built this initial model as a private limited we knew
that bad actors could bring us down very easily we were like hey if it's on blockchain it's so much
more harder so that was the thesis on which we were operating from the get-go and when we were merging
these like it was very clear that it was very hard to raise capital in india and we set it up in
singapore so in some ways on the long-term goal it made sense and uh if in terms of the short-term
needs also it made sense so it was a go with singapore though singapore was not the first
preference there were a bunch of other ones like dubai cayman islands and stuff like that but we knew
that like we wanted to build legitimacy and like singapore is a very very very good place to do that
like um and yeah that's where we ended up in singapore recommended by ear two
that's awesome man no honestly it's uh it's super it's super insightful everything you've you've told
us right right kelly i find this um year two is is quite a special man he's uh he's a man of many
um so i guess we can start doing a checkout because it's already nine and no one is asking
wants to ask questions so um perhaps we can start with a checkout with ear two uh ear two how do you
feel about this discussion how are you leaving this space tell us all how you feel and what are the next
steps for atlantis yeah uh firstly uh you know thanks so much for calling me to this uh impact
zone and uh as usual like though i got a taste of how you host these uh events during the
gitcoin radio uh it's always good to chat with you because you have these fresh questions
uh make me think as well like think about like things that probably i never have conversations
about uh so that way is definitely useful i'm hoping like the audience was able to
get some uh idea into the way we are approaching this there are a lot of different approaches happening
in the space uh we are operating from a different approach and i'm not sure how many of others do that
but i hope i share a lot of insights on that and uh yeah in terms of uh what's next for us like it's
my to-dos don't end right now which is a great thing especially in terms of like the citizen app
we have a lot of projects in the pipeline not just in india we're looking at turkey and a lot of other
places um we just want to bring the product out and like we're just squashing the final few bugs
getting really impatient uh with it but uh yeah hoping that teams like really working hard and
it's a very very small team and uh yeah there's a lot of work to be done uh but yeah it's it's great
to build with all of you and a lot of familiar faces here a lot of well wishes so this has been great
yeah over to you amazing all right kelly how do you leave this space how did you feel about this
conversation yeah it's been really great super insightful i enjoyed diving into the whole
governance side of things as well because often this is something that's not necessarily
explained on a dao's uh website right so it was great to to get some insights on that and i'm looking
forward to uh doing another space with year two in six months to see how the citizen app
has progressed i think that'd be really cool check yeah absolutely absolutely and so
uh we're gonna get them all back uh next week we have a special guest called pierre alexon klein
most of you don't know him because he's a region that actually has uh built a community farm uh where
actually regions unite uh core team which i'm a part of we've done some uh retreats and um he has
a lot of projects and he's really into cooperatives and decentralization i know him for a while he's a
biologist very very smart guy on top of that he really walks the talk um and uh he knows a lot about
crypto and once i went to the farm and he was explaining to all of these cooperatives how we went
from web one to web three and the way he did it was perhaps one of the best explanations i've ever
seen in my life and i think these type of individuals need to be invited because they
can teach us a lot he raised about three million dollars to buy this beautiful land and yeah it's
regenerative and he's built 50 projects on top of that of them and he has an accelerator as well
always with his mindset in the community first and he's going to be on twitter space and when we spoke
he thought that twitter space was uh was a software so anyways i thought it was a bit funny to say to
everyone but he's a great great guy um and so he's coming next week so uh same time at uh 8 pm cet i think
it's uh 6 uct um if uh there's a mistake i'm sorry anyways we'll have um the space so that you guys can
set a reminder um so i would like to thank everybody for joining us today it was a remarkable
session um exploring the work of atlantis dao guided by irtu was absolutely insightful and we
realize how you know collective organization are truly important and even though uh sometimes we we
have to start perhaps a bit more centralized we all kind of like are in the game together and like
irtu says you know we have different approaches and his approach to me uh personally i really like
it and so yeah let's keep on carrying the torch for initiatives like atlantis dao uh we need a future
where we can collaborate more and where we have more shared ownership like he's trying to do because
yeah i think uh collective organizations are at the core of sustainable progress right and i think most of
us here agree so thank you very much to everybody stay connected for future impact zone sessions like i
told you before next week and let's continue on covering and of it in uncovering innovative
ideas that are reshaping the world thank you everybody for being here and goodbye thank you everyone
goodbye and hopefully speak thank you bye thank you so much here too thank you everyone have a good night