The inception of the FiRSt Pod with its three facilitators (pvl, Exa, and Bernard) was decided on by the DAO on Dec 22, 2022.
The goal of the Strategy, Finance, and Risk Pod is to secure the long-term viability of the Gro DAO. To accomplish this, we will focus on establishing transparent risk management (Pvl), finding new tangible products (Bernard), and setting up a sustainable treasury management system (Exa).
Operations for the FiRSt Pod officially began on Dec 28, 2022. It has been over two months since the inception of the FiRSt Pod, and here is a brief update on its exciting journey so far! What’s particularly noteworthy about the FiRSt Pod is that it’s the first to have one full-time facilitator role shared in terms of capacity and compensation while managing three essential workstreams. It is not only a functioning Pod, but also an ongoing experiment that is generating many valuable insights for the DAO.
Pod Structure
- Currently, the pod consists of pvl (Risk Management), Exa (Strategic Finance), and Bernard (Strategy) who all act as co-facilitators for their specific workstreams (see Gro DAO Org Chart 4).
- To keep expenditure low the Pod currently equally shares one full-time role between the 3 parties.
- With the OG Programme starting this month the FiRSt Pod will soon be working closely with additional contributors in efforts to make use of additional capacity for its work.
Scoping of Priorities
- Conducted interviews with current Pod Contributors to understand existing pain points and observations regarding the DAO - in order to inform the scope of the FiRSt Pod’s priorities.
Gro DAO Exploration Questionnaire
- Created and distributed a DAO exploration questionnaire amongst core contributors and OGs to get a pulse check on the DAO and guide our Pod output. We have shared the results in Discord and sent specific learnings to respective Pod facilitators. Find condensed learnings (here) and raw answers (here).
Risk management
- Researched an adaptable framework for DeFi DAO risk management given a broad web3 risk profile, incl. market, technical, organisational, legal/regulatory, decentralisation, 3rd party risks, and objective constraints of Gro DAO, incl. financial, organisational, and yet-to-be-found sustainable business model; should provide safety, composability, flexibility both risk domain-wise and product-wise, with the mid/long-term goal of increasing automation and decentralisation.
- Developing a proof-of-concept solution based on Sentio processors for managing core market and dapp risks for the Gˆ2 product; should include affordance for pluggable input from both active community members (e.g. through the revised OG program, hackathons etc.) and independent contractors. Later on the approach is to be scaled to other risk domains and Gro DAO products.
- Performed Launch Readiness Checks for G^2 to walk through the steps required to increase the confidence level of the launch process prior to the migration process from Gro protocol into G^2. Readiness vectors follow: smart contract, services level components, website and web application, external documentation and communications and marketing.
- Drafted a proposal that outlines and agrees upon the ownership model of each smart contract deployed within the new GSquared protocol.
Strategic Finance
- Started with a high level framework for stable coin exposures within the assets allocations within G^2
- Drafted a playbook for conducting an emergency exposure reduction within Gro to standardise process as a preemptive measure against qualitative market data ie. regulatory risks
Product Strategy
- Set up competitor analyses for three ideas (marketing analytics, wallet onboarding kit, payment link)
- Conducted 10+/- customer interviews for range of product ideas (wallet onboarding kit, RWA tokenization, marketing analytics, and payment link)
- Developed economic model for onboarding kit idea
- Developed product ideation process incl. ideation scorecard
- Further supported with range of different tasks (e.g., market sizing for onboarding kit idea, progressing Problem-Solution tree, drafting Product Hunt/Medium articles for onramper idea, etc.)
Drop any questions you may have below!
Thanks,
The FiRSt Pod