Thank you for the constructive feedback @links
I definitely agree with you that we can benefit from experimentation.
My opinion here is that the projects which I have mentioned already have been working in an incubator style to some degree. We can do a deeper dive into Hatchery and IMN to gain some insights and produce a report for the DAO. What do you think?
That’s correct we (the GC) are an early stage body, but compared to other best case practices in early stage investing, we do not engage in the same deep level of analysis with teams. As you can find later in my post, the idea is for the GC to offer grants so that the project in question can prove PMF before going to seasonal matching rounds.
I do encourage you to read Justice’s post on Customer centric funding. The rationale here is that, we want this to be a popularity contest to understand which projects exactly are popular amongst our customers. We want our customers to vote with their wallets as opposed to 7 people deciding on seasonal funding since this allows everyone to see which projects have an early user base and then these projects can use it as a lever to apply for other funding opportunities.
Academy incubates educational content. Recently the GC passed a proposal to produce an educational course for the DAO Tokenomics Leveling Up Proposal In the same way we can produce other educational courses in other relevant topics. In this case, the academy team has already produced several courses, so they have the data and expertise to inform new course makers on how they should structure their content, offer help in marketing the new course as well as other support in the form of talent and resources.
Yes, you have identified the purpose of incubators correctly and I agree with you that we should envision to make them more self sovereign, my only hesitation was how this will work in practise in the transition phase and hence I stated the points above as a potential solution. But I agree with you that, in the long run, incubators should become more sovereign
The GC sets criteria on which projects it accepts. My opinion is that the GC should considers these points and adds some combination of membership status, past performance etc before accepting projects. Since there is no formal agreement on the scope of the GC, one can endlessly debate on what the GC should or should not do.
I am not critical of the GC budget, but generally the way GC spends its budget. The rationale is that, the budget spent today is not measured or spent with a long term concerete goal in mind. Ofcourse we have the DAO mission, but that’s too vague. If we were to set up these entities, then our expenses would have a clear goal and we have a way to track these goals.
This statement is only in the context of seasonal funding and not for new projects. Let me say it again if it’s not clear, new projects are not being asked to prove PMF, only seasonal projects. For new projects, (as you can read in the post above) the idea is to agree with them on what a graduation criteria looks like and fund them 1 time = give them a grant.
Today, projects approach the DAO every season for funds, but how many of them are able to produce consistent detailed reports on their progress? The amounts requested by projects is used to pay contributors, but there is no accountability on the results. The bottleneck is that the GC/DAO keeps funding projects on whatever they ask as long as it’s 1kBANK/hr but there is no consideration on the objective value that any project generates, as well as no comparison to similar other projects in the DAO or in the greater web3 ecosystem.
Not a MUST. But if they don’t it’s difficult to justify admin expenses. Going back to the earlier point of self sovereign incubators, once they are sovereign we don’t need to worry about it, it’s the road between now and then that needs solutions.