EthCC journey and learnings

My EthCC journey and learnings for Honey DAO

EthCC was my first crypto event and it was so awesome, learnful but very tiring. To be honest, I didn’t even attend the main event. The reason was that I organised myself at the last minute and couldn’t get a ticket as they were all sold out.
In the end it didn’t really matter, as a lot of people were in the same situation as I was and the magic happened at the side-events organised by the different crypto protocols and DAO’s.

In my life before crypto, I used to work for a big tech company, which made me go to a ton of fairs and events. Despite my experience with these tech fairs, I was blown away by the energy and open mindedness of the people I encountered last week.
I really felt I was in another world and I’m feeling blessed to be part of this.

Going to Paris, I had merely a vague plan of some side-events I wanted to attend and I knew literally no one who was going to Paris. I told myself you’re a social guy, you will figure it out.

Arriving at my AirBnB I joined some TG group and asked if anyone wanted to meet, have a snack and talk crypto. A guy named Daniel posing with an AK-47 in his profile picture replied and sent his localisation.
Meeting him sounded like a not so bad plan. I hopped onto a metro and went to his spot.
Against all odds it was a sound guy and he told me that his picture was to scare off scammers and rugpullers. I guess everyone has his own tactics, perhaps I should try it as well.

After the first day of events on boats and rooftops we ended up with a nice group of degens, influencers, founders, and geeks hanging out the whole week together. We went from one event to the other and from party to party. All with our own objectives whether it was to network, have fun or build the future of Odessa. We all helped each other out to achieve our goals and it felt really good.

My main objective was to promote honey DAO, which I’ve been working on as a volunteer on a full time basis for a few months. I guess I can pitch the DAO one last time for the people who don’t know us, since I’ve been doing it for a week straight after all.

We are basically a fair launched investment DAO looking to help projects bootstrap their community as we have about 150 DeFi power users, founders, influencers and crypto developers. Our goal is to give our members the ability to invest in carefully selected projects and in return they should use their specific skills to help the investment forward. Our funding proces and philosophy is in great lines the same as Kain is describing in his blog https://blog.synthetix.io/dao-first-capital-formation/

If you are a new project looking for funds, I highly recommend you to read his blog!

The DAO was created in April and since I have read a lot of things about VCs on our Discord. It went from they have no clue that we are coming for them to f*ck the suits etc. I’m not going to lie that I might also have dropped something along those lines.

But why so much hate on them? Why did my friend Garry literally had to puke after talking to one of them outside of the conference? Was it because of the alcohol from the day before or was it because he used to work for them?

Besides seeing them coming suited up from miles away, I think the answer is quite simple. We crypto users and founders have escaped the corporate world to create something, which is going against the current status quo. Openness, trustless and permissionless are values and terminology which are so important for us.

Today, we have the feeling that so many deals are being made behind closed doors, within the same network of people. This is revolting us, because it’s going straight against what crypto stands for, openness. That’s why I spend so much time on a voluntary basis working for the DAO. I believe passionate crypto users can offer so much more than just capital.
Of course we want to see the number go up, but more importantly, we want to see the crypto industry evolve into the right direction.
And so we nourish and defend our investments as hard as we can and because of our intrinsic motivation, I believe we are way more loyal to our investments than people coming outside of the industry.

Since young I’ve been taught to look at myself before judging others, so I went talking with different VCs with an open mind and without any judgement. They are humans like you and me after all. My intention was to see how they operate, how they differ from honey DAO and in which way I could learn from them.

I must admit that I had some great and insightful conversations. One of those conversations was at the rooftop party of rAAVE. The bitter truth was that the person I spoke to had better business skills and was a way better negotiator.  I told her I wanted to learn from her and explained to her the value proposition of our project. Even though I was drunk ( with the little alcohol available at rAAVE) she made me blush. I blushed because I have given sales training in my previous jobs and what she said made so much sense.

As a salesman and trainer, I learned and taught that a service or product you offer has just a few unique selling points, which can differentiate you from the competition. In a negotiation or sales pitch, you don’t list them all, but you focus yourself on one or two. You want to come over as the expert in that specific field, eliminating all forms of hesitation of the counterparty. When they see you as the expert in that field you’ll have an entry and will be close to have a deal.

To translate it into a crypto/trading analogy: it would be something like exploiting your edge to the full extent. You go as deep as possible in one thing and exploit the ton out of it.

We have as a DAO so much knowledge and skills coming from a wide and talented pool of members. This gives us the ability to deliver on different fronts, but naming all of our possibilities in a sales pitch doesn’t work. On the contrary, it works counterproductively. Investment DAO’s are relatively new, so when summing up all the things we can do, we may sound as if we are overpromising.

For the time being, we need to focus ourselves on being more commercial until we gain more credit from the industry or until the true value of DAO’s like ours is acknowledged. By being more commercial, this means for us to shift gears and concentrate our efforts and communication towards our strongest proposition. That’s the ability to grow DeFi communities in an organic way, because of our large and talented DeFi member base.

It will help us forward by being more detailed and by quantifying how we are able to achieve building communities. I’m thinking about sharing best practices we had and detailed numbers, but that’s something we would need to work on internally.

Once DAO’s like ours have more time in the market and become more professional, I predict that VCs will have a harder time and will have to adapt themselves. Having a strategic connection at a CEX for a potential listing or knowing some key programmers will no longer be an edge or sufficient.

In a fast evolving space as the crypto market, you can use your edge that many times. Like in trading, you can exploit your edge just that many times.

If you want to be part of this and are willing to put the effort in it please apply on our website. www.honeydao.com or scan the QR code in the image.
We will review your candidature and pass a vote on it.

Ps we are allergic to freeriders. I was used to giving tips on paycheck grinding and will spot you immediately :).

Rick Crosschain.