tl;dr: what one of the world’s greatest investors can teach decentralized communities

I was chatting with a friend of mine who used to work very closely with Ray Dalio, the famed founder of Bridgewater Capital.

Create Conflict and Solve Amicably

I asked him, “what would Dalio say is something that you should know if you want to succeed in business?”

My friend responded, “you know, he’s written books on this.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’m talking with you and you worked with him, so I’m looking for the Cliffs Notes.”

Then, my friend thought for a moment and said,

“He’d probably say,

‘surround yourself with people who have very different perspectives than yours, but have a way for peaceful resolution of disagreements.'”

He went on to explain that, frequently, as you become more senior in an organization, you either surround yourself with ‘yes’ people or people are just too afraid to confront you.

You’re always missing something, that’s what happens in business, so you NEED to have people around you who see the world differently, but you also NEED to have a way to make sure you can move forward without people being pissed off.

The Lesson for DAOs

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a bit as I build out my own circle of advisors and I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

There’s going to be no shortage of differences of opinions about the direction of a DAO. [After all, the primary tool that many of these communities now use is called ‘Discord.’]

But, at the same time, as the stakes get higher and higher, there’s got to be a way to have a peaceful resolution so that the project/community can continue.

In a nice twist of serendipity, an article hit my inbox right around the time I was thinking of this post about one of the more well-known NFT projects, Pudgy Penguins.

It read:

NFT influencers clash over the fate of Pudgy Penguins, raising governance questions surrounding non-fungible token communities.

The core issue, it seems, is that there are those in the Penguin community who think that the pseudonymous co-founders are not doing their job and want to abandon ship.

Throw in the fact that every sale of an NFT gives a cut to the founders and you can see why there’s some bad blood.

We’re going to see a lot more of these types of issues as DAOs become more commonplace. I suspect that, in a future version of Messari’s Governor dashboard, there will be some on-chain metric that gives us a sense of a DAO’s relative health in terms of conflict resolution.

We’ll transparently know which DAOs have a Dalio mindset and which do not.