Travis Wyche

Let's start by describing how it is that you transitioned to working in Web3, and what you were up to before.

Jaclyn Lenee

The last 10+ years of my career - really since I graduated college - I have put my design skills to work for lots of little startup teams here in the Bay Area. I worked for a web dev shop called Pivotal Labs at one point and I just fell in love with working on really scrappy teams solving weird problems. And not just the normal ones like “how do we optimize an e-commerce website,” but more like we are creating a brand new interaction pattern that's never been done before! That kind of project is really exciting to me.

I first fell into the crypto world about seven years ago when a design-mentor of mine connected me with a little startup that was doing some stuff with Bitcoin. I had experience designing some crypto interaction patterns through my work there and got the chance to work with this other designer named Darren who is a really amazing designer and writer. He was the one who pulled me into the guild. After we had worked together for a while, we went our separate ways in our own freelancing journey as we worked for different clients. I pinged him one day asking if there were any cool projects to work on and he said, “Yeah, you should really join RaidGuild.”

Travis Wyche

Darren, your trusted colleague, wrangled you in; it seems like a really good way to recruit. Can share a bit about what your average workday looks like?

Jaclyn Lenee

I wake up, make a coffee or a smoothie, put on my slippers, walk down to my studio (which is my garage in my house) and start my work day. I listen to a lot of music constantly throughout the day. Usually the first thing I'll do is throw on an energizing electronic music playlist and catch up on messages that I missed overnight. Then it's usually back to back meetings with clients, meetings with my teammates, and fitting in time for Figma wherever I can. So these days, I spend a lot of time in conversations with people running user interviews, helping to drive the direction of projects. I would say about half of my time is spent in detailed design work.

Travis Wyche

Hopefully you find some time for catching up on your painting too. It looks like your studio also doubles as a painting studio.

Jaclyn Lenee

It does! I'm here this summer and I don't know why I've been extremely busy. I've been all-in on tech 100% of my time, but I am planning for a sabbatical in October when I plan to spend a lot of time painting and gardening.

Travis Wyche

Nice! Can’t wait to see what you produce! How do you typically go about finding new raids to join? Can you even remember the first raid that you were on or the first raid that you spearheaded? How do you go about finding raids these days?

Jaclyn Lenee

The first raid I was on? Well, it was a RIP. Darren had pinged me and said, “Hey, we could really use help with the RaidGuild portfolio.” Well, we didn't have a portfolio as part of the website at all back then so I said, “Yeah, sure, let's do it!” I was pulled into a channel with him. Then we collaborated, started chatting and just dove right in from there. After that project was complete, Ven pinged me one day and asked if I was available for another project. I said, “Sure, I would love to know more.” From there, he pulled me into a project that he was leading through Odyssy actually.

My experience in finding raids has really come from personal invitations from other raiders.

Travis Wyche

You don't actively seek them out yourself?

Jaclyn Lenee

Not currently. I'm at a point now where I’m between the RIPs as well as all of the other client work which I still have going on outside of Raid Guild I am at 100% full capacity. I have the opposite problem where I'm really having to be choosy about which projects I spend time on.

Travis Wyche

That's a good problem to have. I think I remember you mentioning that many of your clients are Web2 clients.

Jaclyn Lenee

One main client is Caresplit, a female-founded team; they are on a mission to help solve the pain of unexpected gaps in childcare. They help working parents be able to do their work when schools close, which I've learned is a very common occurrence.

Travis Wyche

Very cool. What would you say is the biggest challenge that you've personally faced in pivoting into or transitioning into Web3?

Jaclyn Lenee

Great question. I think coming into the Web3 world, I was fortunate to have some context of what Ethereum is compared to Bitcoin. I had collected Ethereum since the early days as an investor and I've been interested in projects, but I had never really interacted with Dapps on my own, with the exception of CryptoKitties, which I could tell another story about! So I wasn't super familiar with the pattern of logging into a product or service using my wallet. I was a bit surprised to learn that that's what basically everyone has started doing these days! That was a bit of a learning point for me.

The second thing that I found confusing was how to switch between networks to do different types of transactions. For example, our DAO is on the xDAI network & MetaMask doesn't have xDAI baked in - it's not obvious exactly how to switch between them - so that was a bit of a learning curve as well... How to not only get onto the right network, but figure out how to move assets over and play the game of doing it at the right time to save on gas costs, etc. Bridging and dealing with gas to get assets from one network to another was another big learning point for me!

Travis Wyche

That's fascinating. It seems like the most challenging aspects of your experience also seem to be the most poignant design problems of Web2 designers attending to Web3 products more generally, which is to say that there's this propensity to really smooth out some of these barriers to entry: the onboarding, volatility of gas prices, Etherscan integrations or other txn crawlers, and all of the minutae of web3.

I was just reading an article about this recently that I think Dekan posted. There was a UX research group and a group of designers that smoothed out a Web3 interface and made it much more approachable and familiar to a Web2 user. In critiquing their own work, they realized that by removing the Etherscan links, the network switching capabilities, and by removing the gas prices, they were removing the users ability to interact with the functionality that makes Web3 what it is. The “learning” was that there's a different set of design problems inherent in this ecosystem. It's not necessarily about abstracting all that stuff away, but attending to it differently on it’s own terms.

Jaclyn Lenee

Yeah. I'm a UX designer and I'm always trying to find ways to make products accessible to more people.

I often find myself thinking, could I get my best friend to use this? Am I going to need to coach them through how to use this thing? And if the answer is yes, then there's a part of me that lights up and I see that this is really an opportunity for us to make things more accessible, whether that's through changes to the UI or just creating educational resources like you're doing now to handhold people through their first few encounters.

That's where my brain immediately goes.

Travis Wyche

Can you recall any a-ha moments as you were being introduced to Web3 or Dapp design? Or maybe through participating in DAOs or as a member of Raid Guild?

Jaclyn Lenee

I had always heard people speak of Ethereum as something that is driven by the community. At first I kind of wrote that off as marketing fluff. I thought, ‘Well, any group of people using a product is a community.’

Stepping into the DAO space first, starting with the Raid Guild Discord, meeting people who were brilliant, generous with their knowledge, wanting to help me learn and succeed, that left me with a feeling of family.

We are not technically like a corporation and this feels more like a scrappy startup team, like those I had worked with in the past.

You can feel that the people you're working with are your friends and everyone's trying to help each other build up their skills.

I really loved that. It really clicked for me that Ethereum is community driven.

I was also surprised to see how DAOs are building on top of other DAOs work! This is open sharing of technology and innovation. I don't see the same hardcore competitiveness that exists in the normal tech world, where you don't want to share your company secrets, because other competitive companies are going to steal those secrets and profit from them. In the DAO world, it's the polar opposite! The questions are:

How can you benefit from information so that collectively, we are building things that are more advanced, more helpful, more automated and more impactful!

I really love that and I think that's why I got sucked in as deeply as I did and why I continue to be really excited to explore other DAOs and join other DAOs. That generosity is something that I really appreciate.

Travis Wyche

That's good to hear. I've only been in this community for a couple of months and I have that inclination too. It is sometimes hard to tell how to weed out the industry jargon or lingo from tech communities. I'm personally really motivated to strengthen DAO-to-DAO relations. I thought there would be some pushback but I’ve experienced just the opposite! It's more than just open-source software or code sharing. There’s really an air of open community support and collaboration; I personally haven't experienced anything quite like that in a long time. I keep remembering my days in the underground music scene - there was that mentality there, with bands helping other bands and everyone understanding that if we don’t help each other this isn’t going to work out.

If you had to do it all over again, do you feel like you would do anything differently?

Jaclyn Lenee

This is a very small thing, but if I were to do it all again, when I joined that first discord server I would have muted all of the channels that I don't care about. One of the early issues I dealt with when exploring Web3 communities was feeling overwhelmed with information! There are so many projects, so many problems and several ideas for solutions that I could spend time on, but then my brain can’t physically keep up with processing everything. So I felt a bit lost in the beginning. Now I realize that

I have to be very specific about which channels I'm following and which notifications I allow to come into my awareness, because if I don't do that my productivity really dries up.

My brainpower is working on just keeping up with the chitter chatter. Now, I'm very intentional about where I place my focus in Discord.

Travis Wyche

Yeah, that seems like very sagely advice for life on the internet. Do you have any more tips or tricks that you might offer? Let's say specifically to the new cohort of Raid Guild apprentices or future seasons of freelancers that aspire to join the ranks.

Jaclyn Lenee

Be brave and speak up in conversations, even if you feel like you're a little out of your depth or just showing up asking those beginner questions you have or offering ideas, even if you're not sure if they will work. Be bold and brave in the present. Be seen and share the value that you think you can bring to a project; just go do it because you're going to make friends that way. Once you get your first project under your belt, you're probably going to have a network of people who will pull you into others.

I've seen that the people who are most successful at making themselves known in Raid Guild are those who have been proactive about sharing ideas, organizing projects, and really just pushing the ball forward versus those who are a bit more quiet and reserved, waiting to be asked to do things.

Travis Wyche

That makes a lot of sense. Let's switch gears just a little bit and fill out your Raid Guild origin story a bit more. What are your roles in Raid Guild and how might you describe those roles to an apprentice?

Jaclyn Lenee

I'm primarily a ranger, archer, monk, bard, and healer. I would say I'm a generalist, a designer who leads a lot of internal projects. I love improving processes, improving user experience of the websites that we're using internally and the bots we are using internally. I really see my role in Raid Guild as helping to organize and lead a lot of the internal projects that will help our raiders and raids be successful. I do go on raids, but it has to be a project that I'm really passionate about and on those projects I tend to do design direction, helping to organize research and prototype.

Travis Wyche

Excellent. Are you a member of any other DAOs?

Jaclyn Lenee

Yes, I am a part of Meta Gamma Delta. I recently created my own DAO; it’s in the very baby stages. It's called web3designers.org. Our mission with that DAO is to help onboard designers into the web3 world; people who are really skilled at design, maybe coming from a research background or tech design background, and equipping them with the resources they need to get jobs in Web3.

Travis Wyche

Would care to elaborate about your own experience falling down the crypto rabbit hole, as they say? You mentioned being interested in Ethereum for a long time and your bud Darren onboarding you to Raid Guild; is there any aspect about your crypto rabbit hole experience that you'd care to share?

Jaclyn Lenee

I originally started working with Bitcoin by accident. I fell into a project that really needed design help. I noticed that there weren't very many designers working with cryptocurrency at all! I was trying to find friends who knew or had some understanding of best practices for things like scanning QR codes and paying for things in crypto, then dealing with the delay and the transaction fees, so it just kind of sparked my interest there. I thought, ‘This is an area where I think for me, as a designer, I could really make an impact.’

That's when I sort of drank the Bitcoin Kool Aid and told myself that I'm going to go out and try to learn as much about it as I can. I was very lucky because I was working in a room with a lot of Bitcoin protocol developers. I absorbed a lot of that deep technical knowledge simply by being in the same room. That set me up to be curious about how a lot of these other cryptocurrencies were working. In the case of Ethereum, there were a lot more possibilities because of the unique functionality such as smart contracts that are supported on that network.

So in terms of going through the Web3 rabbit hole, I started by collecting tokens for projects that I thought were interesting. I bought some CryptoKitties way back in the day that are now worth nothing. It was a kind of backburner interest for a number of years until I started working on these regular projects. As I read more I started realizing that the rabbit hole is infinitely larger than I could have ever imagined. I think the part that I am most obsessive about now is really the DAO frameworks and how DAOs are completely rewriting how to create an organization and what it means to work for an organization or be a part of an organization.

Since I was an angsty teenager I've really been rallying against capitalism, specifically predatory capitalism. The fact is that CEOs of huge corporations are making millions of dollars and have multiple yachts, while the people who are actually doing the work on the ground are making minimum wage and can't afford childcare or health care! I had a lot of rage with the existing systems for how a lot of companies operate. Most of the profit goes to the top and what about everyone else? Average Joe-anne’s are working their asses off to make these rich people even more money!

When I learned about how DAOs operate and I had experience being in Raid Guild, seeing exactly how much money we have in the bank, being able to vote on proposals, how we are spending those resources, being welcomed to share ideas, and argue against ideas in an attempt to channel our energy into really productive ways; once that hit me as I was totally dedicated and now I never want to work for a traditional org ever again.

Travis Wyche

I wish you luck on that. I wish that for everybody reading this. So tell me, then, what constitutes a healthy DAO?

Jaclyn Lenee

DAOs needs to have a very clear vision of their purpose. What are we really doing here? What is the goal? I think one of the advantages - and the thing that's working really well for Raid Guild - is that we're very specific in the kind of work that we do. We're a web dev shop using Web3 tech making projects for clients. We are using funds to earn a living, but also building up the organization so that we can work on really awesome public goods projects that don't necessarily have a monetary incentive.

A healthy DAO is one where every member feels encouraged to contribute in the way that they can with the skills that they have and the current level that they're at.

Big decisions, especially monetary decisions, coming to a vote, having discussions beforehand, having regular meetings, regular chats, and being active on Discord are all necessary for making sure that everyone has an opportunity to use the power that they have to influence the direction of the DAO. I haven't had too many experiences with unhealthy DAOs to have a succinct list of what the opposite of that would look like.

Travis Wyche

That's very encouraging. Certainly trust and loyalty must be a strong factor in encouraging people to participate. How might we think about this? This seems like such a gargantuan problem, not only for people transitioning into Web3 or from remote work from regular 9-to-5 corporate jobs where there's physical accountability. What has your experience been and how have you considered trust and loyalty? Do you have any advice for people that are venturing into this space, where building trust and earning loyalty might appear so perplexing?

Jaclyn Lenee

That's a wonderful question. I had a bit of hesitation when I first joined Raid Guild, because I really only knew one person. I knew Darren as a friend and we worked together in an office for years. On the one hand there was this built-in trust I had in knowing Darren. He's an awesome person and he's skilled at his craft. I had this implicit trust that because he was in this org I could probably trust other people in this org, but I was still a little bit skeptical, because I have had experiences in the past, in certain dark corners of certain crypto circles, where I felt that for me, as a woman, or as a female presenting human, that there were people who've made assumptions about what I know and what I don't know. I'm always scanning if people are looking at my posts and considering my ideas and my art; can they have a real discussion about pros and cons of what I have proposed and throw out what I look like or how I present myself?

I started participating in conversations and observing how folks were interacting with me. I joined a roundtable and folks were very welcoming. Hearing voices of real people in conversation introduced more of a human to human connection that was really helpful for building that trust for me. It wasn't really until I had experience working on a project with some Raiders when I realized that these guys know what they're doing. They're very skilled. They're kind. They are collaborative. They are cool to work with.

I always just want to hop on a call with someone and actually work on a project with them, first to know how they're thinking about problems and then how they are collaborating. Then I decide if this crew is cool to work with. When they produce really high-quality work, they get my stamp of trust. They are added to my list of people who I am going to call or ping when I am on a project or I need someone with that skill set.

Travis Wyche

From your experiences, how do you imagine the future of coordination?

Jaclyn Lenee

We have so many new tools for coordination. Things like voting in a DAO based on the amount of power that you've accrued, correlated to the amount of work that you've put in. That creates a new way of gaining consensus or at least measuring consensus for specific topics.

Ultimately, coordination is gathering human beings to understand the goal, align around the goal, and then transmute all of that energy into furthering the collective mission. It's very similar to how I would coordinate a project in a web tech company, but we're using very different tools now. In a way, these new coordination tools enable us to be even more open with the team that we're pulling together from all around the world. It doesn't matter where you are, what country you live in, what time zone you're in, what your background is; we can lead with the mission, we can lead with a problem that we think is really important. We define the skills that we think we need to help us make the change we want to see and open opportunities for a more diverse net of contributors. This way we can be even more effective at reaching the goal that we've set for ourselves. The future of coordination is going to be global. It's going to be more online than in person. Fundamentally the structure of defining a goal, aligning people around it and directing our collective energy to solving it is the same.

Travis Wyche

Excellent. Is there anything that you might like to add?

Jaclyn Lenee

Based on more than a year of experience of working in Raid Guild and comparing that to my experience working at a traditional dev shop, I've realized that in a DAO such as Raid Guild there is an unlimited stream of ideas that we could explore. There’s an unlimited amount of things we could do on our website, events we might organized, ideas we could draft blog posts about, etc. We have so many ideas! What's rare is a contributor who is willing to take an idea and carry it all the way through to completion.

That leadership is demonstrated by taking ownership over an idea that you think is really valuable, coordinating the team around that, and transmuting everyone's energy to making that thing happen.

That's where the magic is. That's the kind of person that I'm always going to pick for projects going forward. We don’t have managers and simply having an idea doesn’t matter. We don't have any directors responsible for making your ideas happen. Someone's gotta do it. Someone's got to pick up that torch and make it happen. This is my advice to someone joining us today: don't just be the idea person! Be the one who finds the idea that's going to make the greatest impact and put all of your energy into making that thing real.