The Ownership Economy

In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we speak with Staci Warden, the CEO of the Algorand Foundation. Staci previously ran the Center for Financial Markets at the Milken Institute, and before that worked as an executive at JPMorgan and Nasdaq. She started her career as a development economist at the United States Department of the Treasury. In the episode, we discuss how Algorand works, it’s unique value proposition, and some real world applications of this blockchain. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we speak with Jessica Van Meir, Co-Founder and COO of  Mintstars. Mintstars aims to build a more sustainable creator economy that puts creators first. The team is  building a platform to combine non-fungible token subscriptions with marketplace resales. Fans subscribe to receive content and the NFT model allows for value to accrue via restrictions on content supply and access. The company is an interesting new model that solves many of the problems with sites such as OnlyFans. Jessica brings her extensive work as a researcher and current doctoral student on labor rights to her viewpoints on product/market fit. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we speak with Molecule Protocol’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Tyler Golato. Molecule is creating collaborative ecosystems, where stakeholders in drug development can work together to expedite the process of bringing novel therapeutics to patients. The company is connecting leading researchers to funding by turning intellectual property and its development into a liquid and easily investable asset. We talk with Tyler about the model, how the company isapproaching progressive decentralization, and where algorithmic rules of governance intersect with the need for human decision making. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we talk with Charlie Fisher, a researcher and entrepreneur that is working to build regenerative communities through an interesting new model based on the concept of “proof of presence”. Charlie walks us through the history of community land trusts and how this legal and economic structure is being reimagined through shared governance and ownership. The discussion then turns practical with an overview of a recent case study on a community project in Portugal. In the discussion, we explore how to optimize for active vs passive stakeholders and shareholders when creating local ecosystems. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In this week’s episode of the Ownership Economy, Jahed and Martin connect with Daniel Ospina from RnDAO. RnDAO is an innovation center funded by DAOs to serve DAOs, with a mission to empower humane collaboration. The organization works with projects to deeply understand DAOs and user challenges, so they can build tools that make decentralization fluid and natural, thus facilitating mainstream DAO adoption. Listeners who are trying to figure out what decentralization can actually look like on day to day should listen to this episode.

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In this episode of the Ownership Economy, Jahed and Martin connect with Golda Velez, the Co-founder of WhatsCookin, an activity planning startup working to strengthen communities, create opportunities and democratize corporations. Golda comes from a background working as a senior software engineer in some of the largest web2 digital platforms. She worked on data at Uber, risk at Postmates, and held a variety of other roles leading teams in building complex, scalable platforms. She is now taking that experience and applying it to building a stakeholder owned and governed platform for community engagement. We dig into the business model, how she started, tools she’s using for ownership and governance, and other aspects of team building in this early stage venture. For engineers interested in transitioning from web2 to web3, we also recommend episode 5 with Kevin Owocki from Gitcoin and Episode 8 with James Young from Abridged. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In episode 032, Martin and Jahed chat with Gregory Landua, CEO of Regen Network. Gregory has a long history in regenerative finance before it became the web3 incarnation of #ReFi. He covers the roots of regenerative finance in the permaculture movement, traces its intellectual history, introduces key concepts necessary to understand the new economy being built in natural assets, and introduces us to what Regen Network is enabling communities to do with their natural asset resources and commons management. This episode will be of interest to companies and protocols in the regenerative finance space, and those seeking to understand how the emerging ecosystem services economy.

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In the middle of the current bear market, DAOs are still surviving and sometimes thriving. One of the keys is social, emotional, and operational support, and in this week’s episode, Jahed sat down with Jeremy akers of Regens Unite, GravityDAO, Commons Stack, and LS DAO to discuss how the framework for unleashing team innovation, Liberating Structures, can be used by DAOs to get themselves through this rough patch. Along the way, Jeremy touches on patterns from LS that can be useful to new DAOs, how DAOs can manage conflicts inter- and intra-DAO, we touch on Gnosis Guild’s new pattern library for DAO organizational structures, and what new data in complexity science suggest for hierarchies and organizations.

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It’s summer for us at the Ownership Economy Podcast, so we’re bringing you a short series of wide-ranging episodes, which are more conversational in nature. We start this week with anonymous GitcoinDAO contributor @8octopuso, who is a mathematics PhD and worked on the systems for public funding distribution and governance at Gitcoin. In the conversation, we cover sybil attacks, how they can be a threat to democratic systems and why they’re important, systems that can prove individuality, and how this fits into measuring DAO contributions and broadly distributing the wealth generated by ventures. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that will get into the meat of Gitcoin and other DAOs governance best practices and pitfalls, as well as pedagogy, psychology, and behavioral science, from an operator’s point-of-view.

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In this episode, Martin & Jahed sat down with David Lidz, an entrepreneur building an impact real estate company that employs those in recovery and convicts looking for their way back into society. David has managed to innovate at the intersection of real estate, technology, and social / political realms by finding a way to give people upside in restoration and ownership of properties in the cooperative, co-design governance and share distribution with the stakeholders, and address the consequences of redlining and other discriminatory practices in historically marginalized communities in the US.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed connect with Dr. Melyn McKay, the founder and CEO of CoalaPay, a direct funding platform that connects users to trusted, grassroots actors working to sustain and strengthen their communities. Dr. McKay is an anthropologist by training and has spent years working in emerging markets with some of the largest institutional donors in the world. She is now bringing that knowledge and expertise to make sure more grant money makes it into the hands of expert local actors. Listeners interested in the intersection of international development, impact investment and blockchain should also check out episodes 11 and 26 with Dr. Hamid Rashid, Episode 25 with author Brett Scott, and Episode 13 with entrepreneur Dr. Shaun Conway. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this week’s episode, Jahed and Martin sit down with Brett Scott, author of https://www.harpercollins.com/products/cloudmoney-brett-scott?variant=39727615180834https://www.harpercollins.com/products/cloudmoney-brett-scott?variant=39727615180834 In the book, Scott guides the reader through the undercurrents of the banking and technology industries to create a compelling argument on how the two are mutually reinforcing market efficiencies that threaten the existence of cash. Risks of the decline of cash go beyond concerns of surveillance, loss of privacy, and declining market competition to a world where “hyperconnected markets burrow into the deepest parts of being”.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin sit down with Dermot O'Riordan, a Partner at Eden Block who is focused on supporting and building what they refer to as the new Open Internet. In the course of the conversation, we dive into how new, efficient markets in compute, machine learning, and other sectors of technology can actually democratize access to the services that result from innovation in web3, the role of culture in company building and innovation, and the role that DAOs can play in spurring organizational innovation. This episode will be of particular interest to new founders looking to organize their companies in a decentralized fashion, as well as those trying to understand the implications of blockchains for more functional, efficient markets.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin sit down with Luuk Weber of Kolektivo to dive into the opportunity for regenerative, non-extractive economic designs built on tokenization of natural capital assets and localist economic principles. Luuk's story starts in Curaçao where he experienced the consequences of living on an island whose currency is pegged to the dollar, and the vicissitudes that come along with it. He was among the first people experimenting in the DAO space, using his learnings to bootstrap a local currency called CuraDAI, enabling local Curaçaons to keep their economy local in times of massive inflation. In the conversation we cover how Kolektivo is working with Celo and other entities to create new economic models that value ecosystems, land, and water for their regenerative capabiltiies, and not just their extractive, priced capabilities, with an eye to building markets that can price and provide liquidity for natural assets for people to take regenerative actions. This episode will be of particular interest to folks interested in the intersection of climate, impact, and web3.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin connect with Julia Lipton, the founder of Awesome People Ventures. Julia cut her teeth in venture capital on a first fund working on the future of work. Her exposure to crypto and blockchain inspired her to position her second fund at the center of the ownership economy. Julia’s experience in web3 goes beyond her investment fund and she is also the founder of a DAO and a platform that sources talent for web3 companies. In her work as both an investor and operator, she is constantly thinking about how to empower value-creating stakeholders in her ventures through unique earning mechanism and governance rights. This episode will be relevant for both investors and operators trying to figure out how to align incentives in progressively decentralizing companies.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Winding Tree founder Maksim Izmaylov and learn how the travel and hospitality industry works. It's not pretty—we dive into the economics of online travel agencies (OTAs), how they work, where their take rate comes from, and how consumers win while most community businesses and even airlines lose. Winding Tree is building a multi-stakeholder platform to reduce the rent-seeking behavior in this marketplace, and this episode will be a fascinating listen for those who are thinking of using web3 technologies to disintermediate legacy rent-seeking players, as well as those studying complex market processes and how they might lead to unintended outcomes.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin sit down with Christopher Goes who is building Anoma Network with Heliax. In the conversation, we cover definitions of money, what new definitions of money co-designed with local context can unlock in terms of value for communities, what the design space of money is, and promise and perils of privacy-shielded transactions.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed connect with Austin Robey, founder of one of the first platform tech co-ops Ampled, and a prolific doer and thinker when it comes to self-managing organizations. We cover the full gamut of self-management, from Austin's formative experiences with co-operatives in his neighborhood in New York, bootstrapping and sharing ownership in the music platform Ampled, to his learnings working in Forefront DAO and then forming his own digital community in Metalabel. This episode will be of particular interest to founders and investors interested in how DAOs and Co-ops fundraise, fund their ongoing activities, and coordinate their labor to ship new products.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin spoke with Dr. Jaya Klara Brekke, a researcher on the political economy of blockchains at Durham University and Chief Strategy Officer at Nymtech. Nymtech is reimagining a world where resilient digital platforms and ecosystems and individual privacy are not mutually exclusive. We connected with Dr. Brekke on a variety of topics including identity, security, control and power. Dr. Brekke’s work is guided by both political economy and anthropology and she brings a discerning eye to both the potential and limits of blockchain applications.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin connected with Tamara Helenius, who is a Program Manager at the Commons Stack and Steward in the Token Engineering Commons. In an earlier episode, we spoke with Jeff Emmett at the Commons Stack about token engineering. In this episode, we discuss the human side of building ecosystems, commons and companies that embrace decentralization. It builds on the conversation we had with Richard Bartlett on the human work of how to create culture, and how technology can support this work rather than undermine or replace it. Anyone working on thinking through how to pragmatically decentralize a part or an entire company or build for the commons will be interested in this episode.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin talked with David Casey, the Founder and CEO of Resource Network. Trained in political economy, David spent nearly a decade thinking about how to build local, mutually supported communities in the real world. He is a co-founder of Numundo, a network of ecovillages, intentional communities, permaculture farms and retreat centers. That experience informs his current work on Resource Network, a marketplace and ecosystem that is using blockchain technologies to bring mutual credit onchain. We talk about the history of complimentary currencies, how they worked before blockchain, and why the composability of web3 solves some challenges that historically limited the ability of mutual credit to scale. In doing so, we dive deep into Resource Network as a case study in decentralized finance. We hope you enjoy the episode.

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In this episode, Jahed and Martin talked with Jen Horonjeff, the Founder and CEO of Savvy Cooperative. Jen has a truly interesting background, having worked in academia after completing a doctorate in Environmental Medicine, subsequently working as a consumer representative with the Food and Drug Administration in the USA, and even as a scout for an early stage venture fund. Dr. Horonjeff took her experience as a life-long autoimmune disease patient and cancer survivor and channeled it into building Savvy, a cooperative owned and governed by its patient members. In this episode we get into the details of life as an entrepreneur and the challenges of starting and growing a multi-stakeholder digital platform. Hope you enjoy this episode.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Dr. Shaun Conway of IXO Protocol, to talk about the future of measuring, verifying, and delivering social impact with new mechanisms and designs enabled by blockchains. In the conversation, Dr. Conway leads us through his history working as a medical doctor, then transitioning to HIV / AIDS impact projects in his native South Africa, to working with the WHO, UNICEF, and other NGOs on policy measures. This experience led him to conceive of an impact marketplace long before the current ReFi space brought together off-chain impact with on-chain data. We cover the possibilities for better incentive design, governance structure, and real-life impact measurement through the IXO protocol. This episode will be particularly insightful for those working in NGOs, sustainability and social impact projects, and social impact entrepreneurs.

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In this episode we speak with Richard Bartlett, co-founder of the tech cooperative Loomio, and The Hum, management consultancy for organizations without managers. In the conversation, we cover his history and experience with patterns of decentralized organizing picked up from the punk scene and Occupy Wellington in the early 2010s, what he learned from those patterns, and how he co-created new organizational structures that put them into play with his co-founders and fellow workers. This episode will be particularly interesting for listeners who want practical advice on how to organize in DAOs, cooperatives, and other organizational forms that seek to work in non-hierarchical ways, but still get meaningful work done.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed talk with Dr. Hamid Rashid, a former director-general for multilateral economic affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh, is Chief of Global Economic Monitoring at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. We take a bit of a detour from web3 and blockchain to discuss macroeconomics with Dr. Rashid. We dive into the functioning of the fed in the US, and how its policies impact economic opportunity and inequality in the US and abroad. We then use this framework to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of the fed introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency. 

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Joshua Tan, executive director of the Metagovernance Project and the DAOstar One, building standards and infrastructure for digital self-governance of communities. He also conducts applied research on collective intelligence and the governance of online communities. In the conversation, we cover institutional innovation in web3, modeling patterns for decentralization in digital communities, and what the worst DAO dystopias could have in store for us.

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In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jeff Emmett, who is a prolific researcher at the Commons Stack, Token Engineering Commons, and BlockScience Labs, studying how to build community collaboration tools with blockchains. In the conversation, we cover how new forms of voting mechanisms can help communities make clearer, better decisions, measure and aggregate their own preferences, and execute and measure their impact, so they can ultimately achieve their goals. This episode will be of special interest to people working in impact assessment in NGOs, people building DAO governance tools, and communities looking for new, inclusive forms of democracy to experiment with locally.

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In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with James Young from Abridged, the developers of the popular Collab.land software that many digital communities are using to engage, grow, and coordinate their members. In the conversation, James traces his arc from software engineer on Farmville in the early days of Zynga and how those experiences with Web 2.0 companies shaped his focus on the promise of user-owned digital communities, eventually settling on tools that help communities own their own data and experiences. This episode provides a peek at the future of work enabled by data economies in web3 and will be useful to founders and entrepreneurs who want insights into how the unique interactions enabled by web3 wallets can create new trails of data and economic value both for users and platforms.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed chat with Mark Beylin, co-founder and CEO of Myco, where communities can bootstrap themselves with labor, co-own the business they launch, and not be beholden to the platform economics of the last wave of the internet. In the conversation, we cover how communities can use Myco’s unique LLC structure to protect themselves from liability while they extend ownership and upside to the people who contribute to it, how governance in these communities works, and how to build communities that last for decades by taking a long term, dilutive view of stakeholder ownership. Founders, entrepreneurs, and DAO contributors will get a peak at how an ostensibly web3 community is building front-end products that do not require any of the clunky UX that we’ve become accustomed to in web3, and can learn from the myco blueprint on how they might form tokenized digital communities.

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In this episode, Martin and Jahed sit down with Jason Prado, Director of Platform at the Driver’s Cooperative, to chat about the history of worker-owned cooperatives, the failure modes of the gig economy, and the challenges of building a cooperative in the current funding ecosystem. In the conversation, they cover the market competitiveness of the cooperative form, access to financing options that are uniquely available to cooperatives (and barriers to accessing them), and what governance innovations in web3, such as DAOs, might indicate for worker-owned initiatives in the future.

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In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder and CEO of Gitcoin, a community developing digital public goods that has put $52 million in the open source ecosystem's hands since its founding. In the conversation, Kevin covers how Gitcoin's mission came to be, why its important to fund public goods, and the bleeding edge of democratic governance innovations Gitcoin is spurring on with quadratic funding and quadratic voting with Gitcoin Grants. This episode provides a unique view behind the scenes of a thriving, well-funded community experimenting with new democratic methods that politicians, technologists, and founders seeking to expand the agency of their community can borrow from.

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In this episode, Martin & Jahed sit down with Jordi Riulas, angel investor, entrepreneur, and board member at EthicHub. In the conversation, Jordi covers how EthicHub's DeFi platform is leading the regenerative finance movement by helping investors provide loans to unbanked coffee cooperatives in Mexico, creating a circular economy for their products in the EU and the US, and turning over ownership and governance to the farmers themselves with the Ethix platform token. It's a fascinating case study in co-designing products with communities, learning and iterating, and picking objectives that benefit not only your company, but the community that contributes value to it over the long term.Here are the show notes: