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In particular, we plan to discuss:
What constitutes a minimal viable product, and why you should do user research
The difference in building a single-use consumer application and an enterprise platform
Why product development methods, like Agile and Waterfall, must be adapted to the right problem at hand
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Ok, back to regular programming!
In this conversation, we chat with Kaito Cunningham, Co-founder and CEO of Utopia Labs, the modern system for managing contributor payments, expenses, and more for your DAO, supported by communities such as FWB, Sushiswap, and PleasrDao. Kaito dropped out of Simon Fraser University with just a few classes left, and had experience in all different roles since then – whether it was being one of the first employees at CoPilot AI, accounting at Ernst & Young, to working as an investor at M31 Capital – a crypto fund.
In May, 2022 Utopia Labs raised $23 million in a Series A fundraising round. Backed by Paradigm, Kindred Ventures, Fourth Revolution Capital, Distributed Global, Coinbase Ventures, Gusto and have over 75+ angels and operators backing them.
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1’18”: Kaito’s founder journey - entering the Web3 space and his learnings from failed startups and content creation on social media
6’07”: Finding Utopia Labs’ CTO on LinkedIn & how an interest in Web3 evolved to a focus in DAOs
9’38”: An intro to DAOs - What they are? How they differ? What they are for? and some compelling examples
17’19”: The concept of Liquid Labor in the context of DAOs & characterizing the last six months of governance structure evolution
26’51”: The future of governance - Breaking down the idea of voting driven by identity and the individual human and democracy rather than by financial holding
29’47”: Utopia Labs - The evolution of its purpose, Kaito’s journey to date, and who the main clients are that are utilizing Utopia Labs’ tools?
34’43”: The process of fundraising and financing the company to date & building relationships with investors
38’42”: Channels to use to connect with Kaito & learn more about Utopia Labs
Sneak Peek:
Kaito Cunningham: …I would argue that when DAOs were growing quite a lot in terms of their market and new DAOs popping up every day last year, I'd say everything is a spectrum when it comes down to the way we think about decentralized. And if we want to unpack each of those word, decentralized autonomous organization, I think we can remove the organizational piece. But especially on the DA side, I think the idea of a spectrum is really, really important here. Because even in DAOs that we see today, well a lot of them might not run fully on chain, meaning that when a vote is executed to basically say, hey, we want to swap ETH for USDC, right now there's a lot of DAOs that do that through Snapshot, which is off chain, and then basically do that manually where there's an element of trust indicated there.
There are some really cool on chain use cases with Nouns and some other DAOs that are out there. But I think that's just the first thing to caveat, which is I think the definition of what we call a DAO is still something that I think as an industry we have to work towards. But if I wanted to maybe zoom back a tiny bit, I think DAOs are an interesting case study for a few things. I think just this random thing that I had in my head was like, what has actually hit PMF in crypto? Well, it could be DeFi, stablecoins, and one of them could also be human rights. And the way we think about being able to allocate capital to needs or projects that are extremely valuable where people need it.
So, one specific example of a DAO that I think works and is actually quite functional and is actually doing the right things and is actually operationally efficient is…
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Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
