---
title: "ECWireless Interview"
excerpt: "A healthy DAO, and especially any DAO that’s doing Web3 stuff, has to have a good community. They can be incredibly technically talented, but if the community is weak it’s not going to go anywhere."
name: 'Elliott Conway'
username: '@ECWireless'
interviewer: '@traviswyche'
---

#### Travis Wyche
How did you transition to working in Web3? What were you doing before?

#### Elliott Conway
I was freelancing before with Web2 stuff, doing Web2 web development, plus I had a full-time job managing a media studio and doing web development for that company.

I first became aware of people working on Web3 stuff in late 2017. I spent 2018 researching as much as I could and conceptually trying to get a hold of what it actually was, which takes a surprising amount of time to do! Maybe it's easier for people starting now, but there's a lot of conceptual work that has to be put in to even get started on this kind of stuff. It was a year of really being interested in the concepts surrounding Web3. I really liking the stuff that Web3 people were talking about.

I don't think I made any real contributions to any open source Web3 stuff until 2019. I really loved Aragon in 2018 and 2019 and thought it was the coolest project that ever existed. In 2019, I really wanted to contribute some sort of cred to that. I think near the end of 2019 I started getting commits pushed into their UI. That was pretty exciting and along with contributing to a couple of other projects like Metagame and Web3 hackathons I eventually stumbled upon RaidGuild. I didn't really do full-time Web3 freelancing until I officially joined RaidGuild. It's difficult to remember exactly how I joined RaidGuild, but I have been doing that ever since.

#### Travis Wyche
Nice. That's actually the next question. I'd be very curious to hear how you joined the ranks of RaidGuild.

#### Elliott Conway
I remember it was a year and a half ago. I was contributing to Aragon and they had a program called *Aragon experts.* In 2020, my goal was to quit my full-time job and just do freelancing. I told myself that *I'm going to spend one year doing 50% of my time as Web3 and 50% as Web2 and hopefully the Web3 stuff will eventually equal the web2 stuff in supporting me financially.*

Aragon experts was a way for other people to hire out developers to develop on top of Aragon. I thought this would be a great thing to apply to. People who want to build on top of Aragon could hire me out and I could build on top of Aragon for them. Then I saw that Yalor put RaidGuild down as an organization for that program. I checked out that application, found RaidGuild, and immediately loved it.

The whole space has a lot of crossover with people and ideas. RaidGuild has a similar ethos and community to MetaGame. There were different pockets of people working almost interchangeably between these different projects. After applying to be an apprentice, I started by contributing to two projects and also did a hackathon for Near shortly after that. After that hackathon, I think Yalor asked me if I wanted to join and he championed me. This happened rather suddenly over a month.

#### Travis Wyche
In what capacity are you contributing? Are you a developer? You mentioned UI. Are you working on UI/UX?

#### Elliott Conway
It's primarily front-end work, back-end work, Web3 stuff, and project management.

#### Travis Wyche
Are you still working in the Web2 sphere as well? Or have you transitioned to full Web3 now?

#### Elliott Conway
It's pretty much full Web3. I can't just drop the Web2 stuff that I've worked on. Things will come up. It's hard to say *no* to like making additions to something that I basically built. So there's still stuff like holdovers from previous projects from the past.

#### Travis Wyche
I hope that's a positive remembrance, not projects coming back to haunt you!

#### Elliott Conway
It depends. For some projects you go back to the codebase and you have to determine whether or not you want to change everything or just keep it. If it's a two-year-old project, you have to decide whether or not you want to upgrade everything or keep it as hacky as you made it at the time.

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

#### Elliott Conway
It is usually waking up, reading emails and messages I missed in the night - because everyone has different time zones - then, at least in the last couple of months, it's just meetings in the morning. Usually I move from communication stuff in the morning to then PR review stuff. Finally, because of the business recently, I can't actually do any development until late afternoon or in the evening. That should be changing soon as projects close.

#### Travis Wyche
Time is becoming a scarce resource in and of itself. So much communication and coordination is required.

#### Elliott Conway
It's amazing how much time meetings can take up.
>**I definitely have learned recently to hone in on particular projects, rather than being a part of a bunch of projects all at once.**

It can be pretty taxing trying to spread yourself between it all. Even if you're not doing a lot with other projects, just having that kind of mental space and keeping up with updates every day or a couple of times a week is taxing. It has definitely been a struggle trying to figure out what to kind of focus on recently.

#### Travis Wyche
That seems like a solid tip for any Freelancer, but especially here in Web3 and with RaidGuild. Are you actively seeking new raids to join or is your plate full?

#### Elliott Conway
I've promised myself not to take on any new raids for one or two months.

#### Travis Wyche
That's good that there's such an abundance of raids. I think that really speaks to the culture that is developing here.

#### Elliott Conway
It's definitely a unique circumstance to be in. Most people have problems not getting enough work, so it's a weird problem of having way too much work and figuring out what to say no to. It’s a perfect time for more raiders to hop in from the cohort.

#### Travis Wyche
On that note, what do you think has been the biggest challenge that you have faced since pivoting into this community?

#### Elliott Conway
I think the biggest problems were conceptual. It takes a lot of time to read through stuff and understand particular concepts that are totally foreign. The second big hurdle was that many things are not documented very well for developers in Web3, especially new stuff. We are getting better with documentation.
>**I think there's a difference between Web3 and Web2, in that you have to learn to find projects to mimic rather than Googling or looking at the documentation of stuff that you might be able to do in Web2 more easily. There's a lot more you have to dig into.**

Finally, the biggest hurdle is trying to figure out stuff to focus on, because it's been a bull market where capital and projects are abundant. Now the challenge is figuring out what is worthwhile to spend your time on.

#### Travis Wyche
Absolutely. I appreciate you describing that kind of steep learning curve of the conceptual on-ramp. One could spend a lifetime rummaging around in the concepts. As you were onboarding did you experience an *a-ha* moment in relation to Web3 or with your participation in DAOs or RaidGuild? Did you recall a point where everything began to click?

#### Elliott Conway
I think this might be the case for everyone, but there are endless a-ha moments. It's hard to say from a non-developer perspective. All of my a-ha moments had to do with implementation of certain ideas. One was about finally realizing what proof of work actually was. I had it explained and I read about it endlessly, but I think it took a year and a half to really get it. It took a while to understand that it it literally just a useless number; that it is something that the computer has to do to prove that it's working on it. From a developer perspective, I feel like there's a ton of these kinds of things in smart contracts and if you are learning Solidity.

#### Travis Wyche
Looking back on your experience, if you could do it all over again is there anything that you would do differently?

#### Elliott Conway
I would want to begin grappling with conceptual things earlier so I could start contributing earlier. Maybe I wish that I got involved earlier.
>**I think the only thing I would do differently is starting earlier.**

I'm pretty happy with at least having achieved the goal to do Web3 stuff full time. I feel pretty happy that has happened.

>**If you want to get involved with something don't wait on it.**

#### Travis Wyche
That's sound advice. Are there any other tips or tricks that you might offer to the next cohort of apprentices or freelancers coming into the Web3 space to ensure their success?

#### Elliott Conway
In this space, I feel like you have to have your own management system. Everything in RaidGuild and generally with Web3 is seems voluntary and free, associative, and everything's kind of loose. I've heard a lot of people get lost when they first join RaidGuild, not knowing what to do and feeling like they were supposed to get direction on where to go next. I think I tend to be a little bit more towards the end of a filtering system where, if people figure out how to make their own way in this more free-associative organization, then you end up with better people. Figure out how to manage all of your stuff independently.
>**Figure out your own system, because the organization is never going to tell you how your schedule should be, how to log hours, or how to figure out how much time you're spending on something. You are never going to have to report any of that kind of stuff or input it into a system or have it tracked.**

Succeeding in RaidGuild requires a strong personal management system.

#### Travis Wyche
You're triggering all kinds of ideas. I feel like we could jam on that notion for a long time. On one hand, filtering mechanisms are essential while working in a space where many utilize avatars and protect their anonymity. It's hard to build trust and that's one way of weeding people out. On the other hand, we're trying to execute these non-fragile systems.

#### Elliott Conway
I think two things that would work really well that have been talked about are if you champion someone you serve as their guide during the first same month of being a Raid Guild. They basically have their reputation staked on your success. I also think having onboarding resources available is super important.
>**Having more resources available for people to orient themselves is a good idea.**

It's hard to know what will work for others. At this point it's a cultural question. What kind of culture do we prefer? That's an ongoing conversation based on who's currently in the guild.

#### Travis Wyche
Your perspective is very astute contribution to that conversation. Perhaps by putting it all out there we'll be able to understand how it all melds together and exactly what kind of culture is being built.

#### Travis Wyche
What are your roles within RaidGuild?

#### Elliott Conway
I do Paladin, Monk, and Warrior stuff. That means project managing, back-end stuff, and also front-end development.

I do a lot of Web3 related stuff as well. Sometimes with project you have people who are really good with React or TypeScript, or can work with Express servers, but then don't know how to work with ethers.js or anything like that. There's a little bit of a jump between someone who's just a front-end person and someone who also knows how to work with Web3 libraries.

#### Travis Wyche
Are you a member of any other DAOs besides RaidGuild?

#### Elliott Conway
I used to contribute to MetaGame. I am still a patron, because of the seeds I earned from that. RaidGuild does a good job of bridging with other communities. We have the whole MetaCartel community so it intermingles really well and I don't feel insulated only doing RaidGuild stuff.

#### Travis Wyche
I would be very curious to hear how you fell down crypto rabbit hole more generally.

#### Elliott Conway
>**I think a lot of people who end up joining Web3 come at it from both an ideological point of view and a technical point of view like I did.**

After college, I worked at *America's Funniest Home Videos* for a year. I had a moment of feeling like *Hollywood is just this grouping of companies that do a really good job of attracting talent to that physical location.* I felt that there probably wouldn't be a central location for any media from now on because of distribution. Hollywood is just a center, it's just a collection of distribution companies, but you don't have to be next to the distribution company anymore to produce media. It's all distributed now. I also felt like most organizations were super slow, stringent, hierarchical and non-transparent. As a kid, I had a cynical view and was determined to start a VR company. I wanted it to be a co-op because I thought co-ops were the answer to this fundamentally non-transparent, hierarchical and centralized form of organization. I thought the only way to start a new kind of organization would be to start with a new technology. I had just used VR for the first time around 2016 and it was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. I want to do this forever. Through that ideological and technical seed, I started getting more involved in web development.

In college, I did Code Academy and some self-learning in school. The college I went to didn't have a good programming course or a video game department, which I probably would have been involved with. I started studying the logistics of starting a co-op. I eventually joined a startup in Pittsburgh, where I was managing a studio and building their website, redesigning the websites from scratch, and doing freelance web development work. Ethereum hit its peak and I was like *Oh, this is the thing that is going to allow scalable co-ops to exist in a way that competes with other companies.* Aragon seemed like the perfect example of that Ethereum use-case and I got drawn towards it. Aragon seemed like the only other thing since *The DAO* to really make their focus DAOs, these transparent organizations where people are self-sovereign within them and share ownership and manage it all democratically. It was the only organization that made that its focus, so I started contributing to that. Then I remember reading an article around 2019 about MolochDAO. My central ideological and technical focus followed those two strands and I still really wanted to work on WebXR stuff, like VR and AR for web browsers, and mix that with Web3 stuff.

I remember reading MetaGame's manifesto and being like *this person just took a transcript of my thoughts and made a blog post out of them, articulated better than I ever could.* It's amazing how many other people in this space follow the same mental tracks. I still don't know anyone in my geographic area or have friends who are totally on board with the ideas that are shared in the Web3 community. It's been cool to see everyone share the same seeds of thought and the same pathways of thinking about organizations.

#### Travis Wyche
I relate to that a lot. MetaGame's manifesto was one of my first introductions to the DAO space. It's equal parts psychedelic rant and a critical theory manual for post-capitalist life. Based on everything that you've seen, what do you think constitutes a healthy DAO?

#### Elliott Conway
The thing RaidGuild does really well, that other organizations often miss, is to focus on community. I feel like a lot of it has to do with RaidGuild's weird symbols, color scheme, and overall style. It's another filtering mechanism that informs the culture. Many organizations have this "tug of war" with many different parties over what the culture is going to be while RaidGuild continues to build strong community through it's memes.

>**A healthy DAO, and especially any DAO that'sdoing Web3 stuff, has to have a good community. They can be incredibly technically talented, but if the community is weak it's not going to go anywhere.**

#### Travis Wyche
Indeed. A community is built upon trust and loyalty. These core cultural values form the bedrock of this DAO ecosystem. Would you describe how that trust and loyalty is generated and maintained? What are you thoughts on trust and loyalty?

#### Elliott Conway
To a great extent it's the most important thing, especially whenever you are interacting with avatars on the screen.

>**When I first joined there were moments where I thought *holy cow I can't believe it works like this!* Everyone somehow works together, even though we don't really know who everyone else is. It feels like a dream come true.**

There are still moments of difficulty working with people that you've never worked with before, people whom you have never met and whom you've never talked to other than once a week.

>**It seems like the reputational system is missing in DAOs right now. A huge aspect of trust within an organization is having a reputational system that people find fair, democratic, and is automatically generated in real-time.**

Without that kind of real-time reputation being displayed to everyone, there are moments where it can be hard to trust some people. Still, it is amazing how the vast majority of the time it does work. I think it works well in RaidGuild because it does have that difficult barrier of entry. If you get to the point where you feel like you can do stuff full-time, then you probably care a lot about it and you're not going to throw it away too easily.

#### Travis Wyche
I'd love to hear you elaborate on your particular vision of that reputation system at some point. It's a hot topic in this community that's being approached from various angles with different perspectives on what it should consist of culturally or technically.

#### Elliott Conway
I really liked SourceCred for the last few years. It's more of a value-like distribution system, but I feel like it was the first system where I thought *this is super well done* in the context of keeping track of all that stuff, especially through GitHub contributions. It's pretty unique. At some point we were trying to add it to the regular repos. It would be cool to see a future cohort try to tackle a RaidGuild-ified type of SourceCred thing or to simply implement SourceCred in RaidGuild.

#### Travis Wyche
This brings me to my final question, Elliott, and it's a big one. What do you think the future of coordination looks like?

#### Elliott Conway
There's no guarantee. Everything could go completely south and everything in Web3 could fall apart within a year. It would be awesome for scalable co-ops to exist in a way that better competes with traditional companies. If co-ops can generate more value at scale than traditional companies, then traditional companies would start moving towards co-ops and integrate systems where decision-making is shared among everyone. It's more egalitarian and everyone has a stake in what they're building. I hope that it continues in that direction.

My ultimate hope is that legacy companies understand that they need to shift gears, fundamentally shifting internally with what they are doing, or even die out altogether. That's the only way they would ever supersede traditional companies and become better at treating consumers, owners and contributors as a single entity where the distinction between all three of those groups of people is completely dissolved. I'm not sure if that's a coordination problem.

It'll be interesting to see what RaidGuild does as it gets bigger. The cohorts do a really good job of onboarding quite a few people and getting them involved in these organization efforts. I hope RaidGuild just keeps testing out small things here and there and continues to figure out ways of growing without breaking themselves. I hope that things continue in a way where organizations that share ownership and have democratic control at scale become highly competitive with legacy companies.

#### Travis Wyche
Or maybe we will get better at breaking ourselves faster, and better, and more often, in order to continue building out the weak points.

#### Elliott Conway
I remember when I first joined, when there were about 60 people, thinking it could fall apart right around Dunbar's number. If it did, people could still go to our Discord, our repos, and people could pick up the pieces in some way and figure it out. I'm sure people in RaidGuild would spawn off and do their own thing, which would be built on the past learning.

>**There are so many passionate people in RaidGuild that even if it fell apart, the people that stuck around could continue the culture and build better things. Maybe it is worth trying to break and iterate as fast as possible, even if it means breaking up a few shards or sharding entirely.**

#### Travis Wyche
It just seems to be getting stronger and stronger.

#### Elliott Conway
I agree. I think my default is to be pessimistic about this stuff, but my honest opinion is that I don't think it will be going anywhere anytime soon.

When you are trying to get into Web3 stuff there are just dozens and dozens of times where you'll feel like you've hit a wall and think *I'm not gonna be able to figure this out.* Whether it's building or designing or something else, it sometimes seems like the problem is just impossible or way too clunky or conceptually difficult to ever solve.

>**Just keep with it. You just have to put as much time into the difficult problems as you can. The more time you put into it, the more likely you are to get past it. Keep going!**