---
title: "Dekan Brown Interview"
excerpt: "You have to be able to follow through on things that you say you're going to do and find tasks that need to be filled. If there's something someone doesn’t want to do, then sometimes you gotta go do it."
name: '#### Dekan Brown'
username: '@Dekanbro'
interviewer: '@traviswyche'
---

#### Travis Wyche
Let’s start with you laying out how you transitioned to working in web3. I take it that you were working in web2 before?

#### Dekan Brown
I went through different phases. I worked in more ops kind of roles back in the day; it was called network operations.
>**Then I worked in a computer room basically and that's where I got introduced to things like Unix and server infrastructures.**

Eventually, I kind of got over it because it was a big corporate company. I went and became a construction worker for a while, very much like the Office Space guy. I worked as a land surveyor, but even then I was kind of drawn to the more technical side of things. I started writing some geospatial mapping apps - GIS kind of things - and started getting more experience with databases. I was also keeping an eye on the geeky computer space, because that's kind of what I've always been into. Then Bitcoin came out.

Let me just forward a little. I was working as a web2 dev, as a freelancer, and had a couple of different clients. I was often working with either Ven or Sam. We would have shared clients or we would bring each other on to things when our projects were missing something. Around 2016 we decided to make this official. I was really big into ethereum at that time. Sam was working for a firm and Ven was a freelancer. We all joined together to form a group called Odyssy and ran it like a co-op.

We decided to focus on the web3 space.
>**We combined forces with all of our connections - clients and our networks - and joined together using a gnosis multisig as our base for anything we got paid for through web3 clients. We decided all the money was gonna go to our multisig and we would distribute that total evenly, regardless of the role that we were performing. We all understood that we each had important roles and that we were trying to build our network together.**

The initial idea was inspired by some of the stuff that had happened in the early days, but on a super small scale with three people. One of the things we really wanted to explore was how DAOs work and how they might translate into smaller groups. As more people began using blockchain tools to enable better coordination we started doing more side projects with each other. We received a couple of grants, would go to hackathons together, and gathered support through winning prizes.

It was ETHDenver 2019 when the Moloch contracts came out. Ameen did a presentation in Denver while we were building an NFT generative art platform, which I guess was before it's time in hindsight. We really liked the ideas behind the Moloch contracts like rage quitting and thought that it fixed some of the issues we had with DAOs and multisigs. We also couldn't join Moloch DAO at that point, because it was just way out of our means to pledge 100 ETH.

We made a very small name for ourselves as a crew of devs and after Denver we were approached by Peter Pan and James Young. They told us about MetaCartel and what they were trying to start by forking Moloch DAO to focus on community-first building and DApp development.

#### Travis Wyche
Did RaidGuild form from the initial MetaCartel members?

#### Dekan Brown
RaidGuild was like the next level of Odyssy. We joined MetaCartel with Peter, James, and all the other folks that were there. We also noticed that other people were wanting to do the same thing and the ideas were catching fire. [The DAO scenario](https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists) made us all have PTSD, but then all of a sudden MolochDAO came along and then MetaCartel, and then all of these different groups started popping up. RaidGuild was working with the same ideas as Odyssy, but working from within a Moloch DAO.
>**It started off really small; there were five of us that started initially. In the beginning, we were really just trying to figure things out.**

That was probably close to the end of 2019.

#### Travis Wyche
How would you describe your role in RaidGuild?

#### Dekan Brown
When we first started I was just a dev, straight up Front End warrior. I think over the last few years, I've gotten more comfortable with the solidity wizardry side of things. I don't know if I can call myself a wizard, but I’ve always been a community supporter. I really believe in the power of community. When we were starting up RaidGuild, or when we were starting MetaCartel, there was a lot of community building needed. So I ended up performing that role, even though I wouldn't say I'm very good at it.

#### Travis Wyche
What does an average workday look like for you?

#### Dekan Brown
It's similar to being a freelancer.
>**People that have been freelancers for a little while adapt quickly to the DAO flow because when you're a freelancer you have to wear a lot of hats. Sometimes you have to be the biz dev, sometimes the client manager, and sometimes the dev.**

Working in the DAO space is much closer to the routines of an independent freelancer. In a traditional firm or agency a problem is put in front of you and you’re given a deadline and then you do it and then you go have beers afterward. In the DAO space, it's all your choice and personal initiative is extremely important. You have to be able to follow through on things that you say you're going to do and find tasks that need to be filled. If there's something someone doesn’t want to do, then sometimes you gotta go do it. It’s a good thing as you end up learning a lot more instead of specializing down to a single function, a single file, or a single operating system. You learn a little bit of everything and that's true as a freelancer, right!

So my day is a lot of sitting at the computer, programming when I can, but with a lot of gaps where I'm identifying holes where I think to myself, “Okay, well, someone needs to do this, so I'm just gonna go do it real quick.” If you see something that needs to be done, just do it. It may not be perfect the first time, but people will appreciate that it's done and it's not blocking everyone else's production.

#### Travis Wyche
This is a key takeaway from the last DAOhaus hangout. Don't ask for permission; ask for forgiveness. Someone might freak out about the way that you did it, but at least there's proactive energy.

#### Dekan Brown
In a really flat org like RaidGuild, there's always going to be tasks that no one wants to do. There might not be enough incentives, or the tasks aren’t cool or sexy or fun enough, but someone has to go answer the support questions or update a doc or write a test or whatever it is. There are people that really like those things and are attracted later, but initially it just has to be done. It's similar to an early startup.

#### Travis Wyche
Do you ever find yourself looking for raids to join? Or do you find that projects come your way now at this point?

#### Dekan Brown
At this point in RaidGuild - and this has happened to a lot of the early members - they've gone on to start their own projects. I think it speaks to the power of RaidGuild that early members have seated their own side projects or realized the resources needed to expand on a passion project and dedicated themselves in those ways. My involvement in RaidGuild is that I try to provide as much support as I can. I'm not directly involved in any raids, but I come to every meeting every week, I'll do consultation with people, and I point a lot of work towards RaidGuild.

#### Travis Wyche
What has been the biggest challenge that you faced while integrating into the web3/DAO ecosystem and this decentralized way of working?

#### Dekan Brown
The challenge is you're still working with people and a lot of them. The community side is the challenge and people might not recognize the importance of community building skills and social skills. This has always been a bit challenging for me as a code monkey sitting in my dungeon all day, but I've gotten more comfortable with it over time. I think it’s a challenge for a lot of us in the DAO space and it might not even seem important to a lot of people. I don't think it needs to be important to everyone, but I believe that making sure people feel engaged and ensuring the momentum of the community is strong are incredibly important. There's also a challenge in dealing with highly dynamic technology and the need to follow trends in the different programming spaces.

#### Travis Wyche
It’s incredibly complex! The rabbit hole goes so deep, but that's what I personally love about it. It's infinite novelty at your fingertips. Can you identify an a-ha moment where a realization really clicked?

#### Dekan Brown
It was probably at ETH Denver. After we were in RaidGuild for a little while and we had maybe 15 members we decided to go public. At ETH Denver we decided to make some shirts and see if we could recruit some people that liked this idea of the future of work.
>**People understood the vision that we were putting together and everyone we talked to was really excited about a freelancer guild operating as a DAO. Seeing that people were into it was really powerful and pushed our ambitions to the next level.**

#### Travis Wyche
It is a powerful idea that speaks for itself. There's more apprentices in this cohort than ever before it seems.

#### Dekan Brown
Each round there are more and more people trying to get involved. It speaks to the environment and the space; everything keeps getting better, more diverse, more global. All different fields of expertise and professional people from around the world are wanting to get involved. That signal and validation is really cool.

#### Travis Wyche
If you had to do it all over again, is there anything that stands out to you that you might do differently?

#### Dekan Brown
I probably would have bought more PFPs lol. It's hard to look back and say what I would have done differently.
>**Everything has happened organically with no single person leading the way a new river pushes its way down the mountain. The river veers and splits and spreads out as it goes; there’s no controlling that.**
I don't know if there's anything specifically I would have done differently. Maybe I would have tried to speed things up even more, but maybe the way we have slowly built momentum has been good.

Initially the idea of a DAO was very theoretical. There weren't people putting in the work to make a community function. When I look at things now it’s like all the things we were saying we needed back then are happening with DAOs everywhere. If we were starting over on RaidGuild there might be more things we could integrate right away. There's also always going to be cultural tension as a factor. Looking back, I probably would have tried to handle certain situations a little better. When I get passionate about something it's easy for me to flip over to angry Dekan.

#### Travis Wyche
I can't imagine that side of you, since I've only ever encountered convivial Dekan! This is an essential part of the human coordination problem space: the judiciary, how we build consensus, and how we code in dissensus. How do we design inclusivity into the conversation by allowing people to disagree, to productively diffuse disputes in public, and allow divergent perspectives to flow back into the organization so we can all learn and grow from those experiences?

#### Dekan Brown
I think that's still something that’s really lacking in the culture.
>**We try to advocate that disagreeing and dissenting are good things that we should all be able to do, but as with any kind of group, when you get a lot of people in a room, it's a lot harder to disagree than it is to agree. I think this is something everyone in every DAO needs to work on more.**

#### Travis Wyche
Are there any tips or tricks that you might impart upon new apprentices or freelancers that find their way to RaidGuild and are being introduced to the web3 space?

#### Dekan Brown
People that are coming into these cohorts are already down the rabbit hole and that is very cool. RaidGuild seems to be doing something right in attracting and filtering these people. If they find it interesting enough to go through the onboarding pipeline and then show up to the meetings to stay active, then that shows they're probably doing the right thing.
>**I hope people have confidence in their own initiative. Your opinion as an apprentice is very important, even if it doesn't seem to mesh with the people that are overseeing the meetings. It's good to speak up and make sure that people listen to you.**

#### Travis Wyche
You're a member of numerous DAOs at this point and continue to spearhead some of them. Would you care to list them?

#### Dekan Brown
I would count the permissioned DAOs. I own tokens in other token-multisig-snapshot DAOs and I vote in them sometimes, but I wouldn't necessarily list all of those. The main DAOs that I'm active in are MetaCartel, RaidGuild, DAOhaus, and UberHaus.

#### Travis Wyche
I'm hoping that you might comment on that unique position that you are in, at the nexus of where all those DAOs meet. Maybe I could put it like this: What do you see as the relationship between those DAOs? How would you describe it?

#### Dekan Brown
The relationship is very aligned. It all started with the foundational ideas discussed in MetaCartel. These are our cultural roots. At the first MCON, the original MetaCartel members met up to talk about our purpose and what we thought was really important in the space.
>**These discussions all pointed to the importance of people interacting with other people, human collaboration, and supporting community building in this global space. The community's first manifesto was born out of that, which was focused on providing guidance and insight on community building and what community-first means. This has become the cultural bedrock for all of our DAOs. Community first is why we're here.**

#### Travis Wyche
What constitutes a healthy DAO? We've talked about the human element and now it's being defined further as putting community-first, but is there anything that you would add concerning what constitutes a healthy, truly decentralized, autonomous organization?

#### Dekan Brown
To put specific metrics on things is hard. Some members have emphasized that observing the number of repeat proposals from the same group is a good way to evaluate community engagement. That's really big in DAOhaus, because we basically have a core team that continues contributing and they continue making proposals for what they're doing. It’s also important to consider how this internal group interacts with their edges and how they wield a gravity to pull their edges into the inner areas.
>**I'd say momentum and gravity are two really important things for DAOs. Often when I'm using the word DAO I could interchange it with community, because they're so tied together. If you have momentum, a mission, a roadmap, and it feels like you're pushing forward, that's really good. If you're engaging the outer circles and bringing people into the inner circles, I think that could serve as a gauge of a DAO’s health.**

I often see metrics of how many people voted on a proposal or something and I think that's total bullshit. You can't measure community engagement through how many people vote. The voting mechanic is just one of the mechanisms and to rely on that metric alone is totally wrong.

#### Travis Wyche
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Certainly in dealing with people and in building community, trust and loyalty are absolutely essential.

#### Dekan Brown
Trust and loyalty are two of the most important things for me. It seems to vary with different people and I think that's why we still have a really tight alignment between MetaCartel, RaidGuild, and DAOhaus. There has always been a feeling in our community that we are the underdogs and it’s important to help leverage each other to become more visible to these groups that have seemingly infinite resources. The freelancer side of me learned the power of relationships, loyalty, and a strong network as investments that pay off 10x pretty easily over time through the value they generate. It’s not necessarily about monetary value. People remember when you're loyal and it's important for us to remember that sometimes there's an easy path to get exactly what you want, but you're already standing on someone's shoulders to get that upper hand.

#### Travis Wyche
From an outsider's perspective it can seem quite perplexing, specifically pertaining to web3. Before COVID, before remote work became ubiquitous, there was real facetime with humans and these IRL interactions allowed us to build trust organically. The autonomy and the anonymity of web3 freelancer coordination might seem really perplexing from someone just being introduced to it. There's all kinds of tools connected to various philosophies about social credibility that seem to be widely accepted and embraced by the DAO community, but it also sometimes has flavors of social engineering. As you have said, you can't evaluate the health of a community by numbers alone. For these freelancers that are just beginning to fall down the rabbit hole, how do we generate this trust? How do we build it? How do we prove loyalty?

#### Dekan Brown
That's a good question. Web3 technology lowers some of those barriers, but it doesn't solve the issue. When we're talking about transactional relationships we can have some trust in the blockchain and in the code that's running on it. Also, some of my best friends are people that I've met through RaidGuild and DAOhaus and MetaCartel. It's pretty crazy that it’s through these online digital communities - where I haven't met half of these people in real life - that I have met some of my best friends.
>**It feels like family, where there's good and bad actors, but we're all in this together. With family, you might not like someone but you can't just throw them aside. With DAOs, you work closely with someone and you get to see how they conduct themselves, you talk with them through these different conferences, and maybe they're still anonymous, but you learn to trust them and they build a reputation with you.**

I don't know how to bridge that gap. In the corporate world there are structures to force it, but it has to be organic in order to build a tighter bond. It's not something that you can just put on the HR rails, go to a team building meeting, and then feel like these are your friends.

#### Travis Wyche
It's a huge question and I think it's probably best to address it collectively as a hive mind to learn how to develop our social practice. On that note, how would you envision the future of these coordination efforts? Where do you see it all going?

#### Dekan Brown
If you would have asked me that question a year ago, or two years ago, I would have said everyone's going to be a DAO eventually. Now that everyone is, it’s funny to consider what's next.
>**I think we are going to see more blurring of the boundaries between collaborative groups.**

The fact that I am a member of MetaCartel, RaidGuild, and DAOhaus - and I'm not the only one in this position - I can witness the talent flow between these DAOs. I think what we may see in the future is a trend towards this blurring of the lines between communities or it'll be the exact opposite, where the borders will be enforced to become "the one DAO that rules them all".

#### Travis Wyche
This creates an excellent transition for us to talk about Uberhaus as a DAO of DAOs. A DAO to rule them all? It's more like a democratic Round Table of DAOs where the ruling is really called into question. Maybe you could sketch it in your own words.

#### Dekan Brown
That was something that we discussed upfront. We're creating this DAO that’s composed of many different DAOs, but we don't want it to be a parent DAO to its members. UberHaus needed to continue to be on the same level, as a sibling, as a coordination tool for the other DAOs while maintaining their own purpose and their own missions and their own incentives about why they do things. UberHaus is a way for DAOs to meet and to discuss topics and collaborate. It’s a tool for DAOs to align with each other.

#### Travis Wyche
What is the relationship between UberHaus and DAOhaus?

#### Dekan Brown
DAOhaus was summoned to help coordinate a team of people that were working on a single open-source product. As we grew we had different parties interested in supporting us and eventually we realized that a token could add some interesting community dynamics and mechanics as we moved forward. Even though we were the developers of this product, we knew that it was being used by a much larger community and our control over the token supply was skewing the power dynamics for our users. That's why we started UberHaus as a DAO of all the DAOs that were using DAOhaus, and we distributed the token to our contributors. We ended up with some funds from the initial community contribution period and then UberHaus ended up with the entire supply of $haus. It has made things a little weird, because we intended to use the token to incentivize product development and now we have to go ask our users first, but that is actually a cool thing. We created UberHaus to serve as our checks and balances.

#### Travis Wyche
The position of UberHaus to provide oversight for the distribution of $HAUS constitutes the technical part of the equation, but then there's also an identity for the DAO that's akin to the United Nations, if I may be so bold as to suggest that. The democratic roundtable is certainly a unique DAO modality within the ecosystem. How do you consider the relationship between these two sides of the organization?

#### Dekan Brown
It's a really good point and not something that we necessarily thought would happen. We wanted a third party to be able to manage the token supply, removing our ability to do anything really crazy in the future. It's still really early and it started off very slow.
>**What we've seen in more recent meetings is more of that federation of DAOs thinking focused on how to make the DAO space better for everyone, which is really an interesting thing that's emerging. We're talking about how to have vacation time built into DAOs and more of a zoomed-out perspective of how all DAOs could work together.**

When you're in RaidGuild or in DAOhaus it’s a zoomed-in perspective of what your DAOs mission is, but when you get a bunch of DAOs in a room together, they all have their own motivations and things that they want to see happen. It's interesting to find ways to coalesce these ideas and build some action around them.

#### Travis Wyche
Do you have any announcements or goals or milestones that you'd like to share? Concerning either projects that you know of on the horizon, or a vision or aspiration that you might have for UberHaus?

#### Dekan Brown
In our last meeting we started to build a roadmap. I think that signifies a level of maturity in the community. I think a roadmap is something that should happen early, but not too early, and it’s great that UberHaus is maturing into a state of questioning the collective vision. It's still in process and it will be interesting to see what happens. The one thing I really want to highlight is that this has been a community effort. There's a lot of people that aren't as active in RaidGuild at the moment, but were very active upfront. There's a lot of pieces to this puzzle and a lot of people that made this all possible.