MetaCartel Ventures: Viewing DAO Building Through the Lens of Romance – How to Create a Sustainable DAO?
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MetaCartel Ventures: Viewing DAO Building Through the Lens of Romance – How to Create a Sustainable DAO?
How can DAOs transition from the genesis phase to a sustainable second stage?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOriginal author: twoirtter.eth, MetaCartel Ventures
DAOs are like romantic relationships—easy to fall in love, hard to stay together. This is a challenge all DAOs face, and will continue to face. How to build a sustainable DAO is a problem every DAO must solve. MetaCartel Ventures was the first Venture DAO after The DAO, followed by MetaCartel Ventures China and The LAO. This experience-sharing piece from MetaCartel Ventures is worth our careful reading and reflection.
— Typto
I want to talk about the second phase of DAOs. MetaCartel @VENTURE_DAO was created in February 2020, so we can consider ourselves pioneers in the long history of DAOs. We’ve been through a few cycles now, and I’d like to share some lessons learned along the way.
It’s often said that DAOs are like romantic relationships.
In the beginning, there's an ambiguous atmosphere—an almost escapist infatuation. Launching and funding a new community, holding your first group call, is powered by that exhilarating rush of "Ah, I'm doing a DAO!"
But just as the initial heat of romance eventually cools, so too does the energy behind launching a DAO fade when novelty and idealism wear off. Reality begins to set in. This can be an unstable period.
Key members may ghost out, power-seeking operators might go into capture mode, and temporary contributors may be tempted to shift their coordination skills to the next hot DAO.
Our experience—and that of other DAOs—shows mechanical incentives and token models alone aren’t enough to overcome these centrifugal forces. Because while self-interest is human nature, only genuine care and commitment can sustain and nurture a thriving community.
So how can DAOs transition from their founding phase to a sustainable second stage? Here are several coordination tactics that have worked well for @VentureDAO:
Have Lots of Voice Calls, Especially Early On
@trentmc0 volunteered to randomly generate groups of three members each month. Each group has unstructured voice chats. These calls build personal connections, strengthen internal communication within the DAO, and help shape our collective culture.
Survival Rituals Guide
This is a living document that records, shares, and iterates on how we actually get things done: where and how we communicate, how our transaction workflow system operates, onboarding new members, dispute resolution, etc.
The key insight behind the Survival Rituals Guide is recognizing that a DAO’s culture and daily operations cannot be predefined—they must emerge through lived experience.
Having this regularly chain-approved, constantly updated document helps establish social consensus, enabling us to operate without needing to put every decision to (expensive) on-chain votes—which would otherwise carry maddening risks.
Governance Weekly Calls x2
A DAO doesn't grow through on-chain transactions, but through real collaboration among its members. We hold weekly governance calls—one for the Western Hemisphere, one for Asia—to check in on coordination as a regular process.
View Pain as Opportunity
Early on, we found many operational roadblocks and undeveloped paths between where we were and where we wanted to go. Identifying and overcoming these pain points strengthened our collaborative capacity and built foundational trust.
This is part of how we transitioned into the DAO’s “old married couple” mode. The early sparks have given way to a quieter, deeper atmosphere, with mature norms and solid pathways.
Of course, every DAO is different. What works for @VentureDAO (a sub-Dunbar’s number group with membership barriers) won’t work for every DAO. But the lifecycle of a DAO is an under-explored yet universal dynamic. Let’s plan for growing old—together!
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