Origami talked with Aragon about the attack on the use of treasury funds.

https://joinOrigami.com

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) come with a unique set of tax implications. To help DAO members and creators navigate these implications, I talked to Matt Graham, a tax consultant and blockchain innovation lead at Moss Adams about DAO taxes.

This podcast will

1. show you how to handle taxes for token purchases,
2. explain how to calculate taxes for earnings from your contributions to DAOs,
3. explain the sales tax implications of NFTs and other digital goods, and
4. list software that will ease the work involved.

Kift is using van life to create a new virtual city

Part of what I do at Origami is talk to new DAO creators who have great ideas, well-written white papers, and some money—but struggle to find members. web3 projects are hard to market because the ecosystem was built in response to the mistrust of institutions.

To learn how to promote with respect to the community's ethos, I interviewed Emily Rasowski, founder of web3 marketing firm Pop Agency. Emily is a former Amazonian who built the go-to-market strategy for Amazon Care, the tech behemoth’s major healthcare initiative.

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To connect with us, go to https://joinOrigami.com

Understanding the organizational and management structures of traditional corporations is considered so important that it was a required class when I studied business as an undergrad at NYU, as it is for business students around the world.

But when it comes to DAO management and organizational structure, many communities expect to lead with vibes and good intentions. talentDAO wants to replace that with a scientific approach to DAO leadership. I invited its founder, Renee Davis, about how it operates, what they learned about DAOs, and how she grew talentDAO.

Listen to the podcast interview or read my notes below.

Could you give me an example of the work talenDAO has done?

Gitcoin, the crypto-based fundraising platform for raising money for public goods and open-source projects, jumped into our Discord.

They essentially said, “We have a people operations team and we want to start surveying our contributors to better understand the health of our community and the progress we’re making on our goals. We want to make sure we’re boosting engagement overall.”

We developed the DAO Health Survey last year, funded by Ocean Protocol. We open-sourced it and hosted it on GitHub. Gitcoin forked that and asked us to facilitate it, which we did.

Ultimately, that’s what we want to do. We want DAOs to approach us after seeing the research we post or content we created and ask us to help apply it to their DAOs.

What would Gitcoin have done if they hadn’t worked with you?

The alternative is probably to create their own survey, which is more time intensive. And I think people miss good survey items. There are statistical analyses that go into building these instruments, it’s a whole field of science called psychometrics.

DAOs have created their own engagement surveys, but they’re not confident they’re measuring what they meant to measure. They’re not doing analyses to better understand whether their surveys are actually predicting performance. They’re not doing correlation research.

So without us, Gitcoin might have spent more time creating a survey that may not have measured and predicted what they aimed to. And six months later, they would have been disappointed that they implemented onboarding and other practices that didn’t move the needle on engagement.

What are some management techniques you’ve seen work in DAOs?

I think having a dedicated experimentation group is really important for organizations that want to be nimble and prepared for the future of work. I think the People Ops or HR team need to be embedded within tech and not isolated from it.

From my previous days at Deloitte Consulting, I learned that companies that want to be better tech companies need to be better people companies.

How do you do it?

At talentDAO, I ran every single onboarding call. I onboarded members and shared my knowledge and vision with them.

If you look at traditional organizations, the founder or CEO would never be the one to do employee onboarding, like personally sitting down and talking with every single person.

I did that for about the first thousand people. It helped us create a cohesive understanding of our North Star. Now, when I’m on a community call, I know people. I think that’s a level of intimacy that DAOs should pursue.

What changes have you noticed about how DAOs are perceived in the past year?

It went from “DAOs are the future of work! So exciting!,” to “DAOs are not the future of work, but they might be.”

Even my excitement changed. In my first article about crypto from a year or two ago I was very optimistic, maybe even naive. I still believe in the opportunity, but we have to build more for that to happen.

I have a lot of friends who were big in DAOs who just left. They went to academia or FinTech.

To build we need revenue. We can’t operate on good vibes and altruism.

How did you get your early members?

Two places: BanklessDAO, where I was an early contributor, and LinkedIn, where I spent 10 years telling my story about wanting to become an organizational researcher. At least a third of my network is organizational psychologists working in consulting. They thought it was cool and hopped in.

One talentDAO member leads data science at SpaceX. Another works at Microsoft. Another taught at the University of Minnesota. I came from Deloitte.

It’s unheard of to have a founding team this big, from all over the world, without previous connections to each other. How many businesses can say they started that way? That’s what happened here.

Interviewer: Tell me about the people you’re helping.

Michael: Imagine someone with a notion that a DAO is global and frictionless. Then they want to do normal things, like rent an apartment, get health insurance or have benefits for like paternity or maternity leave. And they’re blocked.

When a landlord wants income verification, they can’t say, “look at my wallet.”

And then there’s health insurance, the #1 thing people look for.

A DAO can’t do all those real-world things, much less in over 100 countries, but that’s where the contributors are. So we step in and make sure those people are officially compensated.

So they could handle income verification, insurance and taxes.

People shouldn’t sacrifice interoperability with society just because they work for a DAO.

Interviewer: Can individuals join WorkDAO or just DAOs?

Michael: We actually can help some individuals.

We can’t always do it because sometimes the contributor isn’t really a contractor, by the local government’s definition. They’re an employee. In those cases, we need both the DAO and the contributor to sign on.

Interviewer: How do you handle taxes?

Michael: Our first product is Token Payroll, but it extends to fiat and includes cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Doge, or a DAO’s native token. We allow an organization to compensate in any combination of payment options.

Governments generally expect some kind of withholding and don’t accept crypto. So we take tokens, assess how much taxes are owed to different authorities, and transmit that money.

We also handle all the forms.

All of that is our bread and butter.

Interviewer: What about token price fluctuations?

Michael: There’s an issue with compensation in assets that appreciate or depreciate.

Whenever there’s an income event, we immediately do what’s called “sell to cover.” We convert it into some fiat and withhold the amount that has to go to the government.

Interviewer: Doesn’t your business have a marketing problem because people only feel the pain once per year?

Michael: Typically, when people experience pain and look for a solution, we can’t solve their problem. We can solve future problems.

But that’s damaging to a DAO because the contributor who experiences this pain could say, “forget this. I don’t want to ever contribute again.”

We market to DAOs because individuals could have this problem once, but DAOs that are aligned with their members will experience it many times and in many different countries.

Interviewer: Your name has “DAO” in it and there’s a whitepaper on your site that explains the mechanics of a DAO, but WorkDAO isn’t a DAO, right?

Michael: We intended to be a DAO, but in the process of being one, we realized we need a progressive approach to becoming a DAO. We have one of the most expansive corporate structures in web3. We have over 100 corporations right now. We’re trying to get to every country.

Everywhere there is or could be web3 talent, we have to have a corporation, a bank account, and a license. We have to comply with all local regulations.

The most important part of our business right now is real-world corporate compliance.

Interviewer: Why aren’t there clients on your site? Who uses WorkDAO?

Michael: We haven’t been focusing on marketing, but we have well-known clients, like Gitcoin, mStable DAO, Astar, dYdX, and API3.