Sowing the seeds of web3 + culture DAOs 🌱 The TILT #24

We're talking Friends With Benefits (not 🍆 🍑 related...) + social fabric with Alex Zhang

Aug 24, 2021

Ep 28 of the podcast has been launched into the stratosphere. And we’re gosh darn excited because we dove in with the wildly wonderful Alex Zhang. Alex is a core contributor at a DAO called Friends With Benefits, the ultimate cultural membership where he leads DAO Operations and Community. Prior to this role, he was the Creative Director and President of Summit Series. He's a wayfinder for web3 community building and we were so thrilled to talk to him about mucho goodness.

⬇️⬇️⬇️ Read a snippet of our conversation below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Aspiring Jane Jacobs of DAOs: Alex Zhang

Considering Alex’s role at Summit Series: a global community and events company & the owners of Powder Mountain (North America's largest ski resort), and now being immersed in the web3/DAO space, Alex spends most of his time thinking about better ways to organize human coordination and achieve shared goals for cultural production. He's also an advisor at Seedclub, Republic, and other orgs where he helps think about community as a moat. He's also crazy about crocs (the shoe...not the animal 🐊).

Our conversation with Alex is über interesting and spans:

The parallels between urban design + DAO community design
Similarities between working with Summit and FWB
Why community building is akin to gardening not architecture 🪴
Designing for serendipitous experiences
The future of DAOs
Ideal IRL event locations around the world 🌍

If you missed last week’s 🔥 flamin’, hot news 🔥, we launched Frothy, our web3 community design studio, and released our first NFT, paying homage to Earth's wild ecosystems and the wild ecosystems within web3. We posed the question to ourselves and to the wider web3 ecosystem: if we're so frothed on ecosystem development, then how are we benefiting and regenerating our planetary ecosystems?

We also launched Frothy on mirror.xyz: a decentralized publishing platform. In Frothy’s first article, we share the Frothy OS/Manifesto and dive into what we mean by community design, and why it’s so necessary. Have a peep!

Podcast 🎙 Snack 🍏

ST: What are you finding some of the biggest learnings to be from working with Summit that you're now bringing into the web3 space?

AZ: You brought up engineering serendipity, and that I think it’s such an incredible point to double click on because so much of community building is quite literally engineering serendipity or, we always say reverse engineering serendipity, right. And that serendipity is the desired outcome or the sort of the end state.

How do you create the conditions that allow for maximum and intentional serendipity to occur? I really honed that craft because that was what we'd been doing for really 13 years. And we really had to boil it down to a science, which equates from creating what we called ‘shared dynamic experiences’.

So how do you take a group of humans and put them in an immersive, shared experience that really transcends networking into play state, right? Skiing climbing, scuba diving, running, music, art…types of very human, natural intrinsic experiences that allow for you to transcend your title at your company or your business card, and really just become what we call your inner child. So really entering this state where you are more just bonding with individuals on a very human to human level.

And how do you design for that in event experiences? And how are we bringing that into web3 or the digital environment? That's actually been one of my most exciting and enjoyable challenges. There are no hallways. There are no, spaces where we can bump into each other.

We can get close with ingenuity and engineering…in Discord it’s really thinking about how can you create rabbit holes of spaces. What’s the general lobby, what’s the town square? So....no different than engineering serendipity at physical events, thinking about how to create these pockets.

I use the analogy: in New York people prefer to hang out in Brooklyn over the Upper West Side…so everyone has their sort of neighborhood that they like to spend time in where the surroundings or the citizens or the public square is more values aligned with them. And how does an architect of a digital space create opportunities for those people to connect faster and with more potency?

LISTEN to more of this goodness by tuning in to Episode 28 on Spotify…