Tell me something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you?
The average person in a developing country like Cuba has a higher quality of life than the average person in the United States. Per capita GDP is bullshit. Americans work too hard, chase material things until they die, and have lost sight of the most important things in life, like family and community, which are free and which are more abundant in Havana than in Washington.
How did you get interested in web3 and what you are currently working on?
The concept of community ownership led me into the rabbit hole, and the never-ending opportunities to build have led me further and further down. Currently I am focused on building Bankless Consulting, the world’s first web3-native professional services consultancy, which was born as a sub-DAO within BanklessDAO.
What do you focus on to differentiate Bankless DAO from other social DAOs?
We strive to give all of our new joiners real opportunities to contribute. No stupid tasks like completing a checklist or retweeting something. Incredibly talented people who are fleeing the prisons of McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Ivy League universities find us because they want to work in web3, and it’s our job to get them to work as quickly as possible before they find somewhere else to contribute.
What soft & hard skills have been most helpful in helping you succeed in web3?
It is amazing to me that I was voted to be the CFO of Bankless Consulting barely a month after stumbling into the BanklessDAO Discord server. To be honest, when I started, I didn’t think I would have much value to add in web3 because I’m not a software engineer and I never worked in finance. But my experience building nonprofit organizations has proven to be very valuable. The skills I bring to web3 from the nonprofit sector include:
-Hard skills: strategic planning, budgeting, partnership cultivation, team management, governance
-Soft skills: empathy, resourcefulness, optimism, mission-driven, self-starter
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What are the best decisions and the worst decisions you have made in this industry?
Best decision: focus on building within a single DAO rather than chasing FOMO.
Worst decision: buying NFTs when gwei is over 100 and wasting my hard-earned money on ETH gas.
In one sentence, why join a DAO?
Join a DAO if you hate bureaucracy and want to experience the opposite of it!
What quote has actually stuck with you and changed your life?
The quote I remember most is actually my paraphrase of the last few lines of the poem by John Donne which Ernest Hemingway borrowed for his novel of the same name, For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Therefore, do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
Basically, it’s saying that when someone dies, you die too. You are connected to every other person on the planet. Their plight is your plight. That’s probably the most poetic way of stating the desire I have to help other people during my short time on this planet.
