profile

juliette_chevalier

Nerd camp, teenagers, and made-up stories

Published almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

Hi nerds -

I salute you today from a very special place: MetaCamp.

Surrounded by 40+ DAO leaders across the space, I’ve been spending the week geeking out in Playa Negra, Costa Rica.

In many ways, it feels like a revolutionary gathering - as if the leaders from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others got together in their early days on a paradisiac beach to discuss industry pain points, disruptive ideas, and philosophical, ground-breaking paradigms over beer, sunsets, and board games.

3 brain farts

Teenage humanity: If you think about the history of humanity in 24 hours, modern humans have only been alive for 1 SECOND.

Throughout that time, we crafted globalization, invented the internet, built a decentralized network, and survived a few pandemics. The world is objectively better than it was “a second ago”, but so much more complex.

The pimples and hairs coming out of strange places are the shaken industries and global social unrest. And they’re merely the reflection of the increasing amount of hormones and innovative technology pulling us in so many different directions.

Humanity, much like teenagers, is in a transition period - where everything is open for questioning and rebuilding.

So how do we want the world to look like as adults? Here’s some of my utopian thoughts.

teenager

📈 Dunbar Rituals: Dunbar’s Theory suggests that humans can only have, at most, 150 meaningful relationships at once. A bigger network is unlikely to last long or cohere well, which essentially limits the complexity a social system can handle.

Until rituals and fictions gained popularity. Although they are essentially “made-up stories”, rituals enable enough trust among strangers to slowly increase Dunbar’s number.

💡 Countries, currencies and companies have enabled humans to collaborate at a global scale - something that was unthought of only a hundred years back.

And the benefits of rituals also apply at much smaller scopes. It’s the reason why fraternities and even cult groups feel such a strong community.

We can add “made-up stories” anywhere. DAOs, companies, families, and communities can use rituals to heighten trust among members and build a sense of belonging.

Examples:

  • Onboarding ritual as people join teams,
  • Starting meetings with a bonding event, like fun Zoom background images, meditations, or mood checks,
  • A graduating tradition after people cross a certain path like x amount of time in the team or a new seniority level.

🎙 Signal filters: Every time we voice our ideas into the world we are acting as a lightbulb, signaling to whoever is aligned with our mindset to come join our community.

The narrative we build around our interests and our goals acts not only as a network-in-reverse mechanism (where like-minded people find us), but also serves as a self-selecting filter for the kind of people we want to have around.

And this works for organizations as well. The narrative we publish around how and why we’re building what we’re building determines the type of people that join our community. We measure a signal's effectiveness based on how aligned the people coming in are with our north star.

2 intellectual goodies

“DAOs move at the speed of trust.”

~ MetaDreamer

“If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second.

And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ.”

~ Wait but why

1 funky audio

The music I work to is largely dependent upon my mood and task. But no matter what, this playlist always does the trick, paired beautifully with your caffeine of choice.

workbeats by juliette_chevalier


Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️

juliette_chevalier

Learning to code is 21st century super-power. I work as a Software Engineer and teacher around the world. My purpose is to empower others by showing them what we can do with our brain, a computer and wifi.

Read more from juliette_chevalier

Hi nerds - I salute you from Berlin, a city that strangely feels like a home away from home. This week, I spoke at DappCon, a conference for developers building crypto infrastructure. In a classic Berlin style, they had deep house playing in the yard, vegan food, green juices, and a wellness conference running on parallel at the top floor. Needless to say, one of my favorite crypto conferences so far. 3_brain_farts 💪🏽 Impact-effort matrix: The impact-effort matrix is a prioritization mental...

over 1 year ago • 2 min read

Hi nerds - I salute you from ETHCC in Paris, where I just presented a keynote about the smart contracts behind DAOs. We’ve been working hard at Aragon to launch our new product - a permission management system - and today was the first time we were sharing it so widely! Exciting time to be building in the open 🚀. 3_brain_farts 💖 How to find the one: Image you’re an employer looking to hire a Secretary and you need to hire him/her right after the interview. How do you know when to stop...

over 1 year ago • 1 min read

Hi nerds - I salute you from the Panama City airport, about to hop on a flight to Athens, Greece. Something interesting about bear markets is that they have been breeding ground for some of the most renown names in technology today: Square, Stripe, and Uber in 2009, Airbnb and Groupon in 2008, Facebook in 2004, Adobe in ‘82 and Microsoft in ‘75. But to build successful solutions teams need to run research - so that’s what we’re doing at Surge! If you have 1-2 minutes, please fill out this...

over 1 year ago • 1 min read
Share this post