BanklessDAO Inspires - Justice Condor's journey

We are back with another inspiring story of a BanklessDAO contributor - Justice Conder , who has gone on and done highly impactful work in #web3, and now has a very important role in Polygon Labs . In this candid and detailed interview, Justice outlines how is web3 journey started and what he discovered in BanklessDAO.

"So, what attracted me to joining a #DAO?"

"I was always a technologist, a tech-nerd. I went to school to do computer programming. I was in a startup culture, where there was this idea of creating a kind of living #organisations, who were also organisms. What pulled me into a DAO was that I got bored with #crypto from the standpoint of just buying a #token and sitting on it and hoping the price would go up. I am a developer. I want to build something. I want to do something. So, when I was listening to the #Bankless podcast and they were saying, "Hey! join the DAO", it was just easy for me to buy some BANK token and going in and authenticating, and I did that."

"In my first week in BanklessDAO, I was dropping into these groups where people where learning how to program - the Developer Guild and the Ops Guild. Then someone came from Gnosis to talk about how multi-sigs work, and I thought this is incredible. I even think I tweeted some cringy tweet about feeling like I was at the windshield of the Starship Enterprise and this is the future."

"The vision of Bankless is to onboard a billion people."

"It is a complex endeavour, like even just getting a billion people to adequately use the internet, different tools and stuff. That would be a big task, but to say, "Oh no! they are going to do stuff in crypto." That is huge! Self-custody is no joke. So it is a massive vision."

"The biggest thing I learnt was just DAO mechanics."

"The idea, and the prototype of how DAOs would work, the shortfalls of trying to do that, the difficulties and different approaches. There are many different ways of pursuing the Bankless vision. I couldn't put it any better way but to say I was getting to the lay of the land. Then there were the relationships and the friends I made along the way. I learnt so much. Just the access, which was like I being able to DM people that are plugged in from all over the place and say, "Hey, can you help me understand this?", "Hey, I have got an idea!", or "Do you want to try this?". It was like getting plugged into a different dimension."

"So, the question is, how was my experience in BanklessDAO? How did it affect my journey to where I am today with Polygon Labs?"

"I would say it wasn't easy. But when you get the #vision of what you are doing here, and where you are going, the obsession takes hold. It allows you to get your foot in the door. The path for me was from BanklessDAO to some kind of private consulting with other people, businesses and movements or trying to institute some DAO mechanics into their #communities. Then I came in at a consulting level on #tooling, #configuration, #compensation, and these kind of things."

This then helped me go from consulting to maybe doing some contract work for larger, established #brands. I was grinding so hard, and to put it under perspective, I had a full time job during that whole time. Sometimes I had meeting conflicts where I could not miss either of them. So, I would have to put earbuds in my ears, and then headphones on top of those and literally work the mute button. Any mistake in that setup was going to result in unimaginable confusion and chaos. This was like the sweat coming off my brow. Surely my beard went more grey in the process."

"These are the people we want in the movement. You just can't hire people who are good at a job. They have to be fanatics as we are about the vision and the movement. If you try to communicate this, it would be like, "Hey, this is like a job but it doesn't pay." It is a nonstop crime. It is like a cult, and I am like, "Yeah!! It is awesome and I am here for it."

"I had a very strong suspicion that the original intended construction of BanklessDAO wasn't going to work because I was coming from a strong #agile, lean #Kanban program management background."

"Ultimately the type of things you want to pursue involves elevating cross-functional teams over departments. The guild construction is the opposite of that. I had my doubts about whether they would work."

"So, if someone comes into the DAO scene today and naively says, "We will launch a token. We will have a vision. We will do meetings. We will do roles.", I have a very expectation of that succeeding, even though that was the vision that was strongly promoted in DAO circles."

"So, I became far more interested in "product first, protocol first."

"My attention was gravitating towards the chains and how they do their DAO mechanics, and also #DeFi because they have a #product. Then what is the evolution there. You could almost say that I swung all the way from democratic egalitarian to like, "Hey, let's mirror the way #corporations work on-chain, and then we will pivot from there." So, I have become the anathema of the original vision because I am like, "Normal companies work well. Let's figure out how to #decentralise them and then we will circle back to the more extreme stuff."

"In my first few months in BanklessDAO, I would come in for a month and then I would get pretty frustrated because you don't bring in your LinkedIn profile into the DAO. So, even if you have experience and you are saying, "Hey, this is not going to work, or we should do this", but if somebody has been attending those meetings for weeks longer than you have, their voice is going to be louder, even if they have no idea what the topic is."

"So, I would get frustrated and drop out of BanklessDAO for a while. But I couldn't avoid it and so I would be back. This happened for a couple of months. But then after that I got so obsessed with the #Bankless movement, that I considered quitting my job a lot of times and just trying to figure it out. Because I was just literally not interested in doing anything else but DAO stuff."

"Yeah! It is tough." Even when I encourage people who come from careers and jobs, I tell them not to quit their jobs and live on DAO stuff, because it will stress the hell out of them. You will be like more worried about how to pay bills, rather than finding the greatest opportunities to learn and upskill. But it is true, and the whole scene attracts forward thinkers, technologists and hackers."

"It is such a mismatch and if you go back to Star Trek, it is like landing on a planet before discovering flight. I think a lot of time more stuff in life happens based just on providence, like a chance than what we admit."

"In the same way in the crypto space, and you have heard this, it is not timing the market but time in the market."

"I think I just happened to be in a position at that time when I met the right people. Businesses were like, "we want to press into this DAO thing, we need somebody who needs DAO stuff beyond the general articles that we can find in a newspaper or Times magazine, how does this work etc.". I was just in that position at that time, it was definitely painful all the way through, which is a good indication that you are learning and stretching."

"Another thing that had a big impact was me being able to articulate my thoughts in a written form. Any type of project can come and go and you can say that you worked on it and you were a lead on something. That is like a bullet point on a resume. But it is the writing that has long legs."

"For instance, the first Mirror article that I wrote was on rethinking the DAO contributor funnel. To this day, I meet people who say that they have read it and have hyped on it. So, it is continuing to give returns on having that out there."

"To this day, I really prioritise my writing and even this year (2023), I am trying to make it far more serious from the standpoint of putting out a piece every month. Each one I put out there should significantly contribute to a subject, and the process of writing notches up and deepens my understanding of this whole ecosystem and the vision works. It has been very difficult. I came into Polygon Labs literally before it dropped in size by 20%."

"Blood, sweat and tears the whole way."

"To this day I work at the same level. I don't make any presumptions of working in an enterprise. It is very easy and common to settle into this as a boat and we are moving. In this scene, I always approach it like if half of this place gets nuked, I want to make sure I am not in that half. It is very competitive in that way."

"Lot of people from BanklessDAO got plugged into awesome places. Marco Grendel was there when BanklessDAO kicked off. I started working with Tommy and IcedCool who were doing treasury management, and it kicked off as well. Above Average Joe and Senad are plugged into Thrive Protocol , which is making big moves right now."

"Two things I did to try and get connected with people in the DAO was, whenever I went to a conference I found someone to stay together with and attend the talks and scheduling 15 minutes with anyone who had a Calendly link."

"I would simply say hey what are you doing to get to know them and figure out if we could jam or find some synthesis in what we were doing. To repeat the question, if someone is new to the DAO space and they have just joined the Bankless lifestyle, they would want to know how to make most of the experience. What would be the recommendation?"

"I would say my recommendation would be to first and foremost level up on knowledge. #Web3 is complex, and even understanding automated market makers, #liquidity, #treasury management and #governance is challenging. Then there are multi-sigs, different forms of governance mechanics, #organisational #design, #public goods, hyper-structures and all the other stuff. It is a whole new kind of vocabulary and getting into things that are deep. It is easy to get pulled into cat herding, where you are just running around trying to coordinate people."

"But the thing is that if something isn't architected sufficiently, no amount of operational energy will fix it."

"What you are really doing is getting strangers online do stuff. Just because it is in a Discord doesn't make it a unique, different experience. I would say level up on understanding of the tech side, decentralised social governance primitives, competitive analysis of chains, governance mechanics, Moloch etc. Level up on understanding before any cat herding."

"Second would be to keep an open mind. If you are cat herding, you won't have the capacity to check anything else. But if you avoid cat herding, you can check out a lot of things. For example, you can check out how Gitcoin work at the highest level. What are the roles? What are the incentives? You come in as a researcher levelling up your understanding, and that's going to go a long way. That is a good way to advance. There is also a strong desire to be on Twitter / X Spaces and talk this and that. That can feel good temporarily but does not contribute to the long haul. Focus on writing what you are learning, your observations, and in-depth analysis."

"The whole world operates on some fly length and TikTok type attention span. If you can dodge that and focus on going deep into fundamentals, then I think that goes much further than those chicken, rice and broccoli type meals."

Note: This article captures thoughts and perspectives from an in-depth interview given by Justice Condor. Some comments have been modified for better grammar and brevity.