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This is the third of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.
Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized
When Cabin DAO co-founder Jon Hillis started building cabins 45 minutes outside of Austin in Texas Hills Country, his initial presumption was that he would simply list the properties on Airbnb. When he was ready to trial run his new spaces in March 2021, he invited members of the Creator Co-Op, a group of 30 people he knew who were all making an independent living online to join him.
Like Jon, the participants of that co-op didn’t have full-time jobs, or work for any single company. The members of the collective – writers, consultants, people operating businesses – would meet up periodically to talk about what they were working on, what was going well, and what wasn’t.
Zakk, one of the co-founders, was quick to point out that the existence of this co-op preceded the now broad use of the term, creator.
He observed: “This kind of work can be very lonely; you don’t have coworkers. At the time it wasn’t only lonely in terms of your work, but all of us didn’t have friends working in that way or people who understood what we were doing.
But when Jon’s soft launch coincided with a time when people were just starting to think about crypto, they started to pay attention to other pathways. A month earlier, Mirror had announced their crowd-funding tool, and ZORA had just launched. Excited by the possibility of exploring an alternative use case for their physical property, the team stayed an additional week at the Cabin to answer one foundational question: “Can we use crypto to scale a creator co-op?”
Ultimately, they decided to take the Creator Co-Op and open it up to anybody who wanted to contribute. The first iteration of the project would include a residency program for people to spend time at the Cabins who wanted to become creators themselves, and a crowdfund campaign to make it happen.
In short order, they raised 17-18 ETH (at the time, approximately $50,000) from about 100 contributors to support a month-long residency program for 12 aspiring creators. Each contributor was awarded $CABIN and thus, the DAO was born.
Today, CabinDAO has even bigger ambitions: To become a global, decentralized city, complete with neighborhoods, events, and other engagement opportunities for their community.
Despite just having one official physical location today (outside of Austin, Texas), people have joined from all over the world. (I first learned about Cabin DAO from a friend in Australia.) As the community grew, it became clearer and clearer that being geographically agnostic was a feature, not a bug.
“It’s easier to join an internet thing than an IRL thing,” Zakk said. “We didn’t want to limit ourselves just to people who can reach the Cabins. As we grow, we want to have locations all over the place.”
CabinDAO doesn’t own any of their physical spaces outright; they simply provide the infrastructure for others to offer their properties as part of their decentralized city. New participants join Guilds that oversee different workflows for different components of the project. For instance, the Placemakers Team is a group of people with physical places where they might spin up a new neighborhood.
Today, they have 2,000 people in their Discord server (with about 100 active participants) and ~300 token holders: each identifying as a new age creator in the new era of creation. Weekly onboarding calls for new members (largely 20- and 30-somethings who identify as writers, designers, architects and builders) lean heavily into the idea of fostering emergent, bottom-up behavior and self-organizing efforts among community members.
“As it turns out, when the internet builds a city, you don’t necessarily build the most logical thing first,” noted Jackson Steger, the onboarding leader on my call. “We built a sauna.”
One thing that stood out to me right away was the fact that everyone who participated in the initial crowdfund did so without any expectation of personally benefiting from that investment. The funds raised went directly into the pockets of the “creators in residence” that the DAO selected (they have since run 3 cohorts of 4 creators each).
As Zakk told me: “There was no liquidity pool. This was not an investment opportunity. People saw it as a donation they were making. People who are established in this way of working who wanted to support other people in doing so.”
(He also referenced Paul Millerd’s book, The Pathless Path as a framework in how to do just that.) Their focus on intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) rewards may appear counterintuitive to the preconceived notion that every action in web3 must be appropriately incentivized in the form of compensation. But that’s actually not the case.
Another standout element has been their deep level of discourse around the psychology and game theory of community engagement. They recognized that the high-velocity growth cycles of many DAOs is actually at odds with maintaining the quality of the people and community output.
Drawing their inspiration on decentralized communities from four different groups (the U.S. Marine Corps, Amazon, Valve, and co-living communities), they now lean into 5 core operating principles:
Recruit the best people
Help members self-organize
Empower mission-driven leaders
Have a bias towards action
Play infinite games
Human interaction stands above all else for this crew. As Jon wrote: “Working with great people makes your life easier. Great people are smarter and more competent than you at the things they spend time on. They see around corners you didn’t know existed. They deliver excellence in ambiguous situations without guidance. They have strong vibes and attract each other with these vibes.”
core team: sees themselves as “service providers to the DAO”, currently working together on one fellowship to further neighborhood development
city council (holders of at least 500 tokens): WIP, just spinning out this new layer
members (holders of at least 10 tokens): big decisions voted on via Snapshot
Innovative idea (they were among the first to integrate the IRL world with the web3 world)
Connection & shared experience by tapping into the “lonely feeling” of being an independent creator
Accessibility & thoughtful organizational design (to DAO members, in terms of affordable price point to join)
“We realized that we, as contributors, are not the core of the DAO we were building. We are merely a service provider to the DAO. And our online community, while an important part of the organization, is also not—in and of itself—the DAO.” – Jon Hills, core contributor
Special thanks to 0xZakk for their help on this narrative. You can also view the complete repository of articles and references across all projects as part of this study.
