EP066 - The role of DAOs in the future of work with Tom Dewhurst at Growth DAO
About the episode
This episode focuses on DAOs and how DAOs can change or influence the future of work and the future of business. This new concept is coming from the blockchain world and allows contributors to equally benefit and direct a company’s future, in essence. To discuss, we have Tom Dewhurst, who’s active in the crypto and blockchain space.
About the guest
Tom’s entrepreneurial instincts started young. In his teens he started a small venture selling child identification cards to parents and got the taste for running a business there. He studied the boring-sounding but infinitely practical Business Administration course at the University of Bath, and after a couple of stints as a product manager at Accenture and Vodafone came back to what he really wanted to do - starting a business and growing it. Ordoo was the result - a mobile ordering app - perfect for the Pandemic Age, only he had the idea back in 2015 when most restaurant owners hadn’t even heard of QR codes.
Tom grew Ordoo with the help of Tristan, and they experienced the UK start-up world on the ground and in the trenches. One of the biggest headaches they noticed for founders was finding and properly validating channels to market - enter: Growth Division. A growth marketing consultancy working with high-growth companies to bring innovative ideas to market.
Tom’s a positive, dedicated, committed team leader with a restless need to find new and creative ways to make the agency work better. Outside of work you’ll find him testing side hustles, flogging himself half to death doing IronMan challenges and occasionally sipping IPAs and whiskys (maybe at the same time).
Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome to the leadership anywhere show. Today we are going to discuss a unique, a new concept on how to build an organize teams. This concept is the Dao or distributed autonomous organization, and it's coming from the blockchain world. I believe we can learn a lot from the principles of DAO and apply to the future of business and the future of work.I invited Tom Dewhurst, who's active in the blockchain and crypto space to talk about this topic. So welcome Tom on the show. I'm so happy that you are here. Thank you for that. Yeah. Thanks for having me and excited to be here.
Cool. So tell me a little bit more about the audience. What are you working on and how did you end up working remotely?
Yeah, sure. A bit of background. I'm in London at the moment. I've been in this kind of ecosystem since 2015 started a mobile app back then where you could order food and drink to your phone. So I've been in the kind of trenches building technology startups. We raised a bit of money and grew that throughout the UK. Just before the pandemic hit, we actually sold that to one of our investors and start growth division to help other founders and technology startups with their go to market strategy and execution. Something we're really passionate about is working with technology companies. And at that time, obviously it was the pandemic. So that kind of kickstarted our working remotely dynamic. So growth division was built remote first from day one. So whilst we had a lot of the kind of learnings about working remotely previously, we had to just jump in fully with growth division and growth division is quite unique in the sense that it uses a kind of remote network of freelancers and marketing specialists across the world that we pulled together on specific projects and yeah, build these remote growth teams. So it was important for us to have remote first at the core so that we could operate effectively as a team. And yeah, we've been doing that for four years or so. I've been building the company. We work with over 100 startups now. Some have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars in series A. What we're working on now, I suppose the kind of angle we're going down this conversation, I think it's around growth DAO, which is a sub brand of growth division. We launched about a year ago focused with the same kind of principles and business model as growth division, but more focused on the web three space. Yeah, got a lot of experience working in that area as well, which is remote first. Yeah, that's my most plotted history of where we are now.
That's a great journey. Thank you for sharing and I think we have a great commonality in terms of a background. We both worked in and you still work in web3 so I do understand what the DAO is, but maybe the audience, is not really familiar what DAO really means in that sense? So I think that's can be a like a starting point to our discussion. Can you explain what DAO means in your case, for example?
Yeah. I suppose theoretically speaking, the DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. So that could be in a lot of different things to different people, but essentially it's trying to create this human organization that can operate in a very decentralized way. So everyone has ownership some sort of centralized to be like a treasury or some sort of shared asset pool that people can vote on. And normally in the web three spaces, it's tokenized in some capacity. There's lots of different methods, there's weighted voted tokens and that sort of thing. So everyone has that kind of share in the governance as well. There's a lot of different forms of it, especially in web3, you know anything from like investment DAOs that kind of vote on certain decisions to even like gaming kind of DAOs and anything in between really. So there's a lot of variation, but I'm really interested in the kind of more the human side of it now and how you actually organize kind of humans at scale in a really flat organization.
As you said, there are different interpretations and not that's the interpretation, the use cases of this model, but on like bare essence it is that those who are part of a DAO as a member, which is maybe more like a community. I think that's like something that everyone can grasp on within the community as a community member, you have. Almost full authority to vote and govern that set community. Meanwhile, you also get some incentives or values out of the community, which are not intrinsic, but actually financial tokenized or actually, plain as simple money finance incentives so you are also an owner, a shareholder and the governor, pretty much and at the same time, you're part of the board of directors, you're part of the shareholders, and also a worker within the within the organization, right?
Yeah. Again, it depends on the circumstances, but yeah, broadly some combination of those. Yes. I'd say, you can look at it as a shareholder. I really I think this is potentially where it could go over the next 10 years where more and more companies tokenize their cause essentially a company is a made up entity, something that a group of humans agree on has a name. They give it some sort of legal.
We tend to forget that, but yes.
Yeah, exactly. Like I've started a few companies and you forget that it's at one point it was someone's idea conjured out of nothing, but then has value cause everyone agrees it has value. So I think moving forward, more and more companies might just start off as like tokenized, like organizations and it means you can actually give employees or people working on it ownership from day one. Whereas we see a lot of companies in this day and age are very centralized around founders and investors, but actually the employees don't get really their fair share of what they're building and it's a big argument to say that would flip in the next, let's say 10 years or so, which I think is really exciting. You can look at it from that point of view, which is like a tokenized organization as a company. I think it works really well when there's at least 20 or so people. So I think there's a whole nother angle to go down, which is the challenges of the DAO, which I see a lot by these web three startups trying to start as a DAO. But when there's only a handful of people, it doesn't really have the same weight. So actually, I think it's most effective when you have, like I say, an organization of at least 20 or so. That's a bit of a finger in the air number for me. But, the principle is it's not as effective in small groups. So yeah, you can look at it as a shareholder, as you say, you can look at it as a community, if you're a sports club or something like that, you could all tokenize the, the community there and, you get access to tickets or merchandise and you can maybe also buy that token. So it's also a way for the community to raise money through the kind of token mechanism, which I think is really exciting. So your members get it ownership, as you say, like they're actually an owner there, which is really cool. So yeah, there's a lot of different applications popping up now and there's a lot of exciting innovation going on in this space.
Sure. Sure. In terms of employment and like the future of work, I think it's important to discuss the DAO principle because, so if you, let's say you're an agency owner which is pretty much you are, I think I wouldn't box you into that segment but you provide growth services to companies and you have a community of people around you who are helping you to provide said service. Now if you do have this community around you, which are made of freelancers or contractors or fractional leaders, or how are we call it and what terms it's a pretty, it's a kind of a simple mechanism because everyone is familiar with it. Client pays you and fraction of that payment from the client goes out from your pocket as fees to the suppliers or the members of the community that you have. It's a pretty straightforward model, which everyone is familiar with compared to that model. Can you spot some or describe some key differences how a DAO is different compared to that?
Yeah, to be honest, we've tried to keep it quite similar to the model. Growth division is, yeah, probably what you're saying. It's more like an agency than not. We charge clients for growth services and we pull the team together for a remote sources, freelancers. So in some ways you can look at that as like an agency and a lot of agencies do use freelance talent as well. I suppose we've taken it like a step further within the growth DAO model where we've almost written that into code through our kind of smart contracts and we're actually beta testing a tool at the moment that like, yeah, actually allocates a percentage of the retainer fee to the team working on it. And it's all done for our smart contracts as well. So it's, I suppose it's just codifying. You know the same model that we have proved to be successful in the web 2 space which is arguably still quite unique but Nothing groundbreaking there and we've just tried to codify it in web 3.
And also on the governance I think that's also interesting because In, in most cases, when you operate a knowledge based business and you sell the kind of like a strategy to the client and you procure the implementation to me and make sure that strategy gets implemented in that case is it's a straightforward fee. For the freelancer and the freelancer gets to choose yes or no, if they want to, work on that project based on different terms. But in a DAO, I think the fundamental difference can be sometimes maybe not on your case, but in generally can be the case is that when the freelancer actually has some governance option to decide if you want to pursue that client anyway, on the first place.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of exciting things, I think, looking at it from the freelancer's perspective, as you say that, we vote on any kind of client that we take on, as a DAO. So yeah, you could if you really didn't believe in the client or they're doing something bad that you didn't want to work on, you could vote no. So that's quite cool. I think that's quite, quite a bit of power back into the freelancer's hand. But also I think one of the really exciting things that we hope for within our tokenomics model is for the freelancers to also benefit from the upside of the projects that they work on. Because I think the challenge at the moment is if you're a freelancer got a couple of projects on, say they're startups or high growth companies, unless you're in the Web3 space, you often don't get like any ownership within those projects. So you often just get paid a project fee to do some work or retainer to do some work. And that's great, you pay your income or you pay your bills or whatever. But, that startup goes on to do really well. And you were a big part of that. You don't see that upside. So I think what's really exciting with tokenization and the DAO model is, we're trying as a DAO to like, get tokens from the projects that we work on, maybe invest in them ultimately as well. And then everybody is then aligned to the upside. And it might not be like a direct equity that you might have as an investment, but if the DAO does well, you do well, maybe the token gets more value, et cetera. That's the theoretical idea behind our tokenomics yet to really see that manifest in practice. But that's one of the potentials of this technology is by giving away ownership hopefully that aligns incentives more effectively across the community.
That's so interesting that you said that you can expand that ownership to the client as well, not just to the.
And we do that. Yeah. So the client also owns like a percentage of their retainer or any fees in growth tokens as well. So yeah you're trying to align incentives as best you can use this technology.
That's really nice. And tell me a little bit more about your members. So I guess those who are joining this like an agreement of the of a DAO they might have different preferences, right? Have you seen anything like a particular type of people who value this kind of relationship, this kind of this level of ownership in terms of project and also from your point of view, it's like a follow up question. Is it harder for you or more challenging for you to actually manage these people or manage the DAO?
Yeah, some good questions there. Yeah, I think, Looking at the kind of members abstractly, I think even within growth, like we started growth with a lot of the members from growth division who were also wanting to work in the web three space. So we kickstarted the kind of ownership that way and then built up more web three expertise over the time. Yeah, we always had that kind of culture of remote working and, autonomous control from day one. And yeah, I think that's permeated our culture and everyone's on board with that. We've tried to keep it deliberately small. Like you see a lot of projects go from to like thousands of users overnight, but we really wanted to interview everybody, make sure the quality was really high. We have a kind of a tier within the community, which we call a growth plus member, which everyone, that's another kind of thing you get to vote on with your tokens is who we accept as growth plus members. And those are the ones who show up in our platform and also can do kind of client work as such. So we've got about 44 of those at the moment. But we've tried to keep it, as high quality as we can. Yeah, just in terms of managing that, that community, it is a challenge. I'm not gonna lie. And I suppose, the elephant in the room is it's the kind of the bear market within web three at the moment. There's a lot of struggling businesses out there and not a lot of marketing money floating around. So keeping the community commercially viable and earning money is a challenge and had a few projects fall through and that sort of thing in the web three with the growth DAO. So you know, that's one big challenge, I think, we've seen from growth division, if you can provide opportunity and provide work for the community, it obviously engages them because they can paid. So we've struggled a little bit with that in growth DAO. Hopefully that will pick up in the next bull run when there's a bit more money investment going into it. But We'll see. And then, yeah, it is a full time job, like managing the community and we are juggling a couple of different things and some of the team are as well. So it's important to keep focused on engaging the core community members and trying to keep everybody moving in the right direction is a challenge. But as I said, everyone is quite autonomous, so I don't feel, we don't feel that much pressure to like fulfill someone's capacity or that sort of thing, you wouldn't have a typical agency owner or whatever because everyone's responsible for themselves Anyway, and they've got their own kind of gigs going on or projects or startups or other freelancer ideas. It's an interesting just going back to the future of work, like you're saying I think this is what's really exciting is, a lot of our members have fingers in different pies and self sustaining in that way and take ownership for their own income and lifestyle. We're just trying to support that.
Sure. So I also worked with again, web free companies and and I usually said this statement to literally everyone I worked with, that web 3 will grow up when they are starting to sell, not just to web free companies. And, address the wider market gaining a little bit more popular in terms of you, for example, in terms of any kind of DAO. Do you think that this model that you are doing, which is pretty unique and interesting could work for non web 3 companies as well? And if yes, what parts of the governance and ownership and these kinds of principles can be applied to the wider audience.
Yeah, it's a good question. I think in principle, yes, because, we're already doing that with growth division in a similar way. So if any of you think it's gone the other way that we've applied principles from Web 2 into Web 3. So I suppose the question more is can we actually do this successfully in Web 3? There are like unique challenges that we're still again, like trying to figure out within web three, like the marketing strategies are different. The kind of mindset of the buyer is different. So there's a lot of challenges we're working through. But yeah, a very high concept I believe that it can work. I think, another kind of extension of that question is really like, where is the DAO going to go? All the kind of DAO model going to go into more web two companies or like structures, like I was saying, are more companies that are going to start now going to, tokenize from day one, maybe even. I've had an idea that like, rather than IPOing as a, like a reasonably sized business on a stock exchange, you could essentially IPO onto a decentralized exchange and tokenize, your equity and raise money through the crypto world, that is a plausible idea for a business owner to create liquidity in their business. And that's not happening at the moment, but that could be something that happens down the line and as it becomes a bit more like safe and secure and accessible. So that's the sort of thing I'd be really interested in seeing happening, more web 2 companies transitioning into the kind of web three model for the various benefits that it provides, as I said, around like governance and ownership and that sort of thing.
Sure. I believe, too. I think we can learn a lot from DAOs if we are focusing only on the very fact that it's a community of experts, community of committed individuals who are seeking not just opportunities to work on, interesting projects, but also would love to get ownership within that said project as well.
Yeah.
And self govern their own expert network of community if we don't call it DAO and we just call it like within these principles it's something that I think people would crave for.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point because I think the whole, the sort of coining of the term DAO might change, I think.
Yeah.
I think the autonomous part of that is sometimes off putting. Because within a more human organization setting, because, the kind of DAO purists argue, it's all done by code and yeah, but I think there's probably a softer version of the DAO, which might be like a tokenized organization or something like that is like using web three blockchain principles, but it's still by all intents and purposes, a web two type company doing web two type services, or products or whatever. Yeah, I think that terminology might shift, but also DAOs, I think haven't had the limelight in the kind of mainstream. So like NFTs had a real run of things a couple of years ago, I guess of mine is that the kind of DAO organizational idea would take off in the next full run in the next couple of years or thing. And, people start to understand what a DAO is and the power of governance, the power of employee ownership and the power of these like remote first organizations, which a lot of web two companies are doing now anyway. And then like we found out 18 months ago, we were like, wow, like we're basically building a DAO we've got this network of 50 or so experts. We should give them ownership and incentivize it with this way and give them governance and it was a big decision, because technically Tristan and I gave up a lot of our, because we were like 50, 50 partners of growth division. We are and the principle behind growth now is that we it's significant we reduce that to 20 percent and give the ownership away to the community, which is it's a crazy decision and see where that goes, if we give ownership to people rather than trying to control it all ourselves what are the implications of that? And maybe more and more business owners will see that and do the same.
And they see the value in it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying that sometimes it just starts with with embedding the basic principles into how you work with your clients and how you work with your teams together. And you just suddenly realize that, oh, I think I'm building a DAO here. Yeah, you just don't know the name or sometimes it doesn't have to be the name.
Yeah, I do remember reading about it and maybe someone listening to this will have the same experience and be like, wow, that's exactly what we've got as an organization. And especially also when you've got people in different countries as well to employ everybody is a nightmare. Also to actually give out ownership of a company. So I sound based in the UK, even to give out, like to give out like a share to an employee is actually crazy hard, pay tax on it at that point in time. So everyone goes down the options route, which aren't technically shares, there's still ways you can get out of options.
Yes.
Most people working don't see through that. And when you're on the other side of it, giving it out, you feel a bit wrong, really. It's here's an option to our share in the future. It's an exit opportunity, but you're still not really owning the project. And actually I think a lot of employees don't really understand the implications of that and then try and do that in, south Africa or Brazil or whatever you like is an absolute headache to try to figure out all of those legal systems and how to do it there. So I feel that this technology is global potential that we have behind the blockchain will enable like us collaboratively to work on a global scale in a remote way. Which I think is also really exciting. And I think also a lot of I've also seen a lot of people from developing countries working more on Web3 and its technology as a result of that, because they can actually earn much better wages than they can in their own countries.
Totally. Let's let's discuss a little bit more about the future of web3 then. How do you see the future near term...
I hope it picks up. I think, the last couple of months have been good for the kind of general token prices and whatnot. So there's a bit better sentiment in the air. Yeah, I hope it just matures a little bit like I'm relatively late to the party around crypto. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm like, being here since a lot of other crypto people have been even though it's a very fast paced. fast moving kind of industry. Yeah we've been dabbling around for a couple of years and so much has changed already. And I think the kind of pace of maturation of the whole space is really exciting and there's just so many opportunities. I wish I had more time. I could could start other ideas and other, so I think as a really, as an entrepreneur, it's a really exciting kind of place to be. And I think if you start reading about it more and getting interested in going to the conferences and stuff, you can really start to see lots of ideas and lots of potential. And I still feel that it's not had its heyday in terms of like consumer level applications. I think Bitcoin particularly has been a good like currency store of wealth, which has obviously been successful. But now I think we're seeing a lot of these newer chains and the layer twos on a theory and enable like consumer level applications that can use the blockchain technology with no gas fees. So there's no like kind of charges for like micro transactions, which just enables lots of opportunity for loads of consumer level applications, and I think that's going to be the next kind of way for web three is actually like mass consumer adoption of Certain apps where it actually adds value to use the tech the blockchain technology versus just it being there for the token sake so excuse the pun. But yeah, I think yeah, I think that's where it's going and that's where, if I'm a technology entrepreneur, but I think anyone listening around that kind of sense, like who has the capabilities to build new products, I think it's such an exciting place to be. And hopefully the kind of venture capital and the kind of investment will pick up in this space where there'll be more investment going back into the space. Cause as we know, there's boom and bust cycles and I do feel that there was another boom to come. And you're going to be taking some risks and I felt like it's a good place to be taking risks at the moment.
Perfect. You're building a really interesting organization and in a really interesting market. I think it's super, super important to share if someone is trying to join or wants to join your DAO or just hit you up with some messages where people can find you.
Yeah, sure. I'm still on LinkedIn probably where I still do a lot of my activities. So yeah, just Tom Dewhurst, D E W H U R S T on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'd start from there or just check out, yeah, the growth DAO website, which is growth hyphen DAO. com. And there's a application form there, which still goes to me. So I still see that if you submit that yeah, I can always be in touch.
Cool, thank you for your time. Thank you for coming here and explaining some really serious and super interesting topics to our audience. Thank you for your time.
No problem. Yeah, I've enjoyed it. Thanks for the invite, Peter. And yeah, I hope that was useful.
