A brief history of PartyDAO
- the project starts with a tweet from Denis Nazarov that Anish Agnihotri builds over the weekend.
- there’s lots of interest, it feels worth pursuing further! Folks are even willing to put in some money to see it come to life
- instead of a Kickstarter campaign, which can take weeks to put together, Denis uses Mirror to crowdfund 25 ETH in a matter of hours ($60k-ish)
- Denis transfers control of the assets to a multi-sig wallet, to be managed by the backers of the crowdfund
- a Discord server is created to organize further
So a week after the initial concept, the startup has closed their seed round.
Platforms like Mirror (for crowdfunding) and Snapshot and Boardroom (for governance) combine beautifully with GitHub, Figma, Discord and other pieces of the modern product development stack. They are all remote, async, and open-source/”work in public”-friendly.
Next up:
- one of the PartyDAO members volunteers to manage the project (John Palmer aka jpalmz)
- along with other backers, he drafts a short project overview and draft budget
- the plan and budget are voted on and approved by the other backers using Snapshot
- folks apply for the various jobs – design, frontend dev, solidity dev, security review, etc. This is all done asyncronously, via Discord
- team members were unanimously approved in another vote, and work begins
So less than a month later, PartyDAO is a brand new, cooperatively-owned, collectively-governed startup. There’s a team, there’s money in the bank, and the development engines are firing on all cylinders. The code is all open-source, the process is all open to the public. The team is doing livestreams and recording a podcast. I am impressed.
In particular, John Palmer has been an excellent organizer and communicator for the project. Among other duties he’s been sharing weekly updates that are dramatically better than what I’ve seen at both venture-backed startups and comparable open-source projects. His What is PartyDAO post does a great job capturing what is special about this group:
PartyDAO has two primary mandates.
- Ship PartyBid, a product for collective bidding on NFTs
- Build PartyDAO itself into a long-lasting organization that can fund its own continued existence
PartyDAO is different from many DAOs that have come before it. To date, DAOs have mostly been synonymous with a treasury of funds + group voting on where to send those funds. PartyDAO aims to be something more fun: we are a fully decentralized organization that actually ships products.
- PartyDAO by @jpalmz on party.mirror.xyz
Time to ship