Building Public Goods in Down Cycles

A conversation between Jess Sloss and Scott Moore on the latest episode of Building At The Edges.

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Building Public Goods in Down Cycles

Scott Moore is the co-founder of Gitcoin, the leading grant-giving DAO and now grants protocol that popularized the notion of public goods and Impact DAOs in web3.

Gitcoin’s recent announcement of their Alpha Round is emblematic of their long-arc vision toward building highly impactful public infrastructure. What started as a traditional, centralized company focused on exploring the future of work, particularly for people working on open source, has now defined its place in web3 as a fully decentralized internet native organization and protocol. 

A continued open question for DAOs and internet native organizations is how we evolve through change. The risk exists at both ends: solidifying norms and values early on in centralized orgs can make future pivots painful, and yet change within a fully decentralized network can also prove cumbersome. The ability to respond to shifting market conditions and innovation cycles remains critical for anyone building in web3. 

To that end, Scott believes in the value of focusing on localized economies and optimizing with one community group at a time. Taking a page from trad startup culture, Scott argues for focusing on community member needs (analogous to a focus on customer needs). Within Gitcoin, the early days of governance were spent working with grantees to collaboratively design something that would bring the most value to them — something they would actually use. 

A foundational component of compelling governance is building something that people actually want to govern. Scott and Jess point to Nouns as one of the more recent, highly visible experiments in governance at the intersection of meme proliferation. The question remains how many of these flash social experiments will convert to enduring institutions.