Explorer Grants - Trial

Core Issue: A lot of talented builders have Nouns on their radar, but are not sure how to contribute. The only place we actively incentivize them with ideas and funding is Prop House mandated rounds, which are retroactive, leaving builders who lose the round uncompensated for their work. Otherwise, they must figure out problems themselves and then ask for money, a difficult process if someone has no connections to the ecosystem.

Solution: Create a program to actively recruit new talented builders and pro-actively fund them to explore the Nouns ecosystem.

TL;DR

• 1 grant = 10 ETH for 2 months of exploration, goal for each builder is to have an on-chain prop by end of the period
• 5 builders (50 ETH total) in first trial run
• 3 members on operations team (mrtn, jihad, dot), lightly compensated; 2 more on multi-sig (yitong and krel)
• Transparency is key

Eligibility

• Must NOT be actively or recently funded by Nouns, or clearly an existing participant in the Nouns ecosystem
• Must be new to the broader Nouns ecosystem
• Must be working / actively exploring something directly related to NounsDAO while on grant, or it will be revoked
• Preference for people who can proactively create independently — particularly engineers, but also content creators, designers, writers, etc

Operation Details

The entire process will be transparent via a public Discord and run by the 3-person team, who will be lightly compensated to do this work, ensuring accountability and commitment. Our initial proposal had no funding for the team, but we were recommended otherwise by Nouners.

Public Application:

• Explorer Grants will be publicized via Twitter, 1:1 outreach from the team and its network, Twitter Spaces with Nouns community organizations, Discords, etc
• Candidates will submit public applications, showing past work and motivations for exploring the Nouns ecosystem, as well as a couple problem spaces that interest them
  • These applications will also benefit the community at large who can recruit builders from this group
• Candidates will largely be assessed on talent, potential, and excitement about Nouns. Reasoning for accepted candidates will be made public. The 3-person team will decide on 4 final candidates to accept.
• 1 slot in the program will be allocated to a Nouns community vote

Program:

• 10 ETH for 2 months of part-time exploration for each builder
  • Detail: Overpaying slightly is critical to attracting talent that may not otherwise come to us. We are targeting people who make more than $150,000 a year in their full-time job
• Weekly check-in call with builders. Members of the Explorer Grants team will help them explore ideas, connect them to Nouners and builders, and lead workshops
• End of Program Objective: each builder submits an on-chain or Prop House prop for continued funding

Team

• mrtn, lead organizer:
  • Previously a PM at Google and NBA Top Shot, he has now contributed to a variety of Nounish projects - Nouns Builder, AI Pod, Agora, as well as doing a 24 Hour Nounish live stream, and receiving a Governance Historian grant. At USC, he ran an organization that guided students towards entrepreneurship, whose members include several YC startups. He's a big believer in diversifying funding sources for Nouns builders, and experimenting with the patronage model. Comp: 3 ETH / month
• jihad, community & product expert:
  • Core contributor at Forefront, creating media and building infrastructure for tokenized communities. He is also a delegate and “Lil Nouncilor” at Lil Nouns DAO, a contributor to Public Nouns, one of the winners of the recent Nouns Agora delegate race, and is part of the team building Adjectives, an analytics and proposal evaluation platform for Nouns DAO. Jihad believes that Nouns must be a center of excellence for tokenized communities, and the Explorer Grants program would be a step in the right direction in attracting the brightest minds to do focused yet unstructured work in the Nouns ecosystem. Comp 2 ETH / month
• dot, technical expert:
  • Dot is an iOS dev turned nounish builder - a founding member of Nouncil and most recently Lil Nounder at Lil Nouns DAO; the first full fork of Nouns DAO. Dot started Lil Nouns as a way to expose nouns to as many people as possible. Lil Nouns DAO leverages its 8 nouns alongside its own treasury to fund and support public goods built by lil nouners. In doing so, Lil Nouns has become a builder onramp to Nouns DAO itself. Comp: 2 ETH / month

We will use a 3 of 5 multi-sig, with the core team members as well as krel and yitong.

Questions

How will you actually find these builders? Our team has fairly deep networks within the crypto and broader tech space; we'll leverage our personal connections as well as our social media presence to find more builders. Additionally, a large appeal of programs like these (Thiel Fellowship, Prop House, MacArthur Grants) is the benefit of continued funding + prestige, which we intend to lean into.

But what if the builders don't do anything? This is similar to everything in Nouns already - there's a social contract to uphold, someone could always dissapear after receiving 200 ETH on-chain. We can setup the grant via Sablier to revoke if a builder goes MIA, however.

What will they actually build? The first round will not have a particular mandate but future ones could be structured closer to Prop House mandated rounds, where there is a theme. We believe that time and freedom is key to allowing talented builders to find something meaningful to build long-term.

Why not just run this on Prop House? Decisions are not always best made by large committees. Prop House rounds do not allow for deep conversation and analysis of candidates. A transparent, small committee allows for depth and betting on candidates who might not otherwise get a shot (i.e. people who aren't good at writing a description on prop house but would be amazing builders). Additionally, we'd like to create a long-term relationship with these builders via an organized cohort.

What if no good work comes out of this? That's a possibility, as is the case with prop house rounds. However, we believe that Nouns already has a great enough brand to attract solid builders. However, if nothing goods comes out of this trial, then we will have learned that pro-active grants for attracting builders is not a valid technique for our DAO. If there are takeaways, they can be adapted into other funding sources, like Prop House or NSFW in the future.

Why are you being paid? Our initial proposal did not include payment for the team, but it was suggested by Nouners that we should be getting paid to create accountability, as well as allow us to dedicate more time in making this more of a full-fledged program than one-off grants with no support from us.

Total Funding

5 Builders x 10 ETH = 50 ETH Team Comp: 14 ETH Total: 64 ETH

Questions? Contact mrtn on Discord (mrtn#7388) or Twitter (@anquetil)