gm DAOpunks. Welcome to Full-Time DAO. This is part 1 of a 6-part series chronicling my journey toward going full-time DAO. I was recently a recipient of a 1 ETH grant from the DAOpunks NFT community, and I am currently part of a 3-person cohort, working individually on projects that we have proposed to the community. In Part 1, I'll provide context on what this is all about (DAOs did you say :/ ), and how did I land this freakin grant.

I initially published this newsletter on LinkedIn (on November 5, 2022), a web2 platform that is usually not considered a go-to place to find web3 content. I mean, we're just about 100 or so words in, and you are already having to hear words like NFTs, DAOs, Web3. Vague acronyms aren't fun, especially so if they expand to Non-Fungible Tokens or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

Web3 on the other hand is not an acronym, but an important idea for a new iteration of the internet.

In simplistic terms, DAOs are commonly defined as a chatroom with a shared bank account. But that doesn't sound exciting. Allow me to take the simplicity away, and give it a different definition:

DAOs are full-fledged digital native organizations you can think of as community-driven companies that often operate in the open - that you are able to join today (literally), observe the work that is happening, find where you can add value, permissionlessly contribute your labor and potentially earn in crypto. What it unlocks is an entirely new way to imagine what you do with your career and life.

I know - that was a loaded sentence. But hey - was it intriguing? If yes, I would love to hear in the comments your reflections, questions, or thoughts that come to mind about these digital organizations and the idea of working in them. I'll of course reply, and maybe feature your comment in the next edition of the newsletter.

On the other hand, if it did not sound interesting, I must tell you right away that the rest of this article isn't going to get any better. But hey, you're most welcome to follow along.

Through this series, my intention isn't to teach you about DAOs or web3, but rather, to attempt to paint a picture ... you know .. that thing I said earlier .. as I work on my projects alongside the DAOpunks community. If you are simply looking to learn more about web3 and DAOs, there are plenty of resources online for that, and my channel Salman Needs A Job is the best of them. ahem. I mean .. one of them. <plz subscribe>

I am going to try to keep it brief, so by all means, post your questions in the comments whenever you have any.

So - let's get to it. I'll first do a quick introduction about myself, and explain to you how I have found myself in the DAOpunks Cohort 1 with a generous grant of 1 ETH in my wallet.

I am Salman. A Level 2 contributor at BanklessDAO, which is a media and social DAO that I absolutely love and will talk to you about in another edition of the newsletter. At BanklessDAO, I do a few things one of which is a Producer of a Podcast called Making Bank, and second, I lead the demos initiative within DAOlationships guild.

#SalmanNeedsAJob, which I mentioned earlier, is a project I started 3 years ago as a humble effort to identify what's the right job for me, through conversations with people about their jobs. After over 100 such conversations across YouTube, Twitter spaces, etc, spanning various careers from a magician to a police officer, to YouTuber, wine consultant, DAO contributor, and more, I seem to have found my footing, and possibly a career within web3 and DAOs. You will find that reflected in my content where I now focus exclusively on Web3.

I wanna take this a step further and really commit to the DAO ecosystem, one that I have enjoyed being a part of, and have benefitted greatly from, and I want to bring this knowledge and spread the good word about DAOs while helping everyone #getinvolved.

Sounds fun. How am I going to achieve that?

DAOpunks is an NFT collection, that is dedicated to the mission to enable humans to liberate themselves from the soul-sucking drudgery of default world work and lead them to the rewarding, expansive freedom found in meaningful DAO work. The project started out of BanklessDAO and is a community of its own of rockstar DAO contributors from across the space.

I joined the DAOpunks community about a couple of months ago when I listened to a podcast on Crypto Sapiens, featuring Crypto Bushi and Livefast, and everything they spoke resonated so hard with me that I made the instant decision to get on Opensea and find myself a DAOpunks NFT - archetype ANON. You can listen to that episode here.

One of the core tenets of the DAO that's governing the DAOpunks NFT project, is to give back to the community, and one of the initiatives is in the form of grants that are meant to flip corpRATS into DAOpunks, and essentially benefit the entire DAOsphere with rich new talent and vision from all niches of the world.

This grant is open to all (not just the NFT holders). The applicants are selected through a form submission, and winners are voted in using a weighted snapshot vote from the community of DAOpunk NFT holders. (snapshot is a governance system universally used within DAOs). You can take a look at the voting page here, and please do comment and ask if you wanna find out how all of this works.

Needless to say, I won the grant, and I along with my co-cohort mates Jomari and the team from TradFitoDeFi, are working towards the commitments that we proposed on our grants application.

What are those commitments? How about we save that for the next week's newsletter. If you cannot wait, you can take a look at my submission (applicant #3) on the attached document in the snapshot. And follow on twitter @salmanneedsajob, where I am actively posting about this stuff.

The 1 ETH grant is by no means life-changing but is significant enough to finance some of the initiatives that I have going on, on #SalmanNeedsAJob, AND allow me to think beyond my shackles of individual contributorhood.

More importantly, I consider this grant a celebration of a milestone in my journey as a creator, where for the very first time, a community that I very much admire, has instilled belief in my work and motivated me to pursue my aspirations for what I want to do in web3.

In next week's edition, we will go over the project and the development over ~ 2 weeks. Thank you my fren for reading this <3

Now let's do some rolling credits -

Thank you to the team from DAOpunks for bringing to life this novel grants program - Crypto Bushi, hirokennelly.eth, Livefast9986.eth, GarrotTheParrot.eth, and BryanPetes.

Thank you to everyone from the DAOpunks community that voted for me, and to my frens from BanklessDAO who were generous in supporting me. I so appreciate you my frens.

Thank you to my fellow applicants for taking the effort to apply for the grant, and contributing to the DAO ecosystem. A special shoutout to infinitehomie, who I was also rooting for, for also supporting her frens during the process. Likewise to FINE who was a fellow applicant and has tweeted support for me.

Finally, to my wifey and family who's been very patient with me through my DAO life. That's not going to last long, so .. time to get to work

gm DAOpunks. Welcome to Full-Time DAO. This is part 1 of a 6-part series chronicling my journey toward going full-time DAO. I was recently a recipient of a 1 ETH grant from the DAOpunks NFT community, and I am currently part of a 3-person cohort, working individually on projects that we have proposed to the community. In Part 1, I'll provide context on what this is all about (DAOs did you say :/ ), and how did I land this freakin grant.

I initially published this newsletter on LinkedIn (on November 5, 2022), a web2 platform that is usually not considered a go-to place to find web3 content. I mean, we're just about 100 or so words in, and you are already having to hear words like NFTs, DAOs, Web3. Vague acronyms aren't fun, especially so if they expand to Non-Fungible Tokens or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

Web3 on the other hand is not an acronym, but an important idea for a new iteration of the internet.

In simplistic terms, DAOs are commonly defined as a chatroom with a shared bank account. But that doesn't sound exciting. Allow me to take the simplicity away, and give it a different definition:

DAOs are full-fledged digital native organizations you can think of as community-driven companies that often operate in the open - that you are able to join today (literally), observe the work that is happening, find where you can add value, permissionlessly contribute your labor and potentially earn in crypto. What it unlocks is an entirely new way to imagine what you do with your career and life.

I know - that was a loaded sentence. But hey - was it intriguing? If yes, I would love to hear in the comments your reflections, questions, or thoughts that come to mind about these digital organizations and the idea of working in them. I'll of course reply, and maybe feature your comment in the next edition of the newsletter.

On the other hand, if it did not sound interesting, I must tell you right away that the rest of this article isn't going to get any better. But hey, you're most welcome to follow along.

Through this series, my intention isn't to teach you about DAOs or web3, but rather, to attempt to paint a picture ... you know .. that thing I said earlier .. as I work on my projects alongside the DAOpunks community. If you are simply looking to learn more about web3 and DAOs, there are plenty of resources online for that, and my channel Salman Needs A Job is the best of them. ahem. I mean .. one of them. <plz subscribe>

I am going to try to keep it brief, so by all means, post your questions in the comments whenever you have any.

So - let's get to it. I'll first do a quick introduction about myself, and explain to you how I have found myself in the DAOpunks Cohort 1 with a generous grant of 1 ETH in my wallet.

I am Salman. A Level 2 contributor at BanklessDAO, which is a media and social DAO that I absolutely love and will talk to you about in another edition of the newsletter. At BanklessDAO, I do a few things one of which is a Producer of a Podcast called Making Bank, and second, I lead the demos initiative within DAOlationships guild.

#SalmanNeedsAJob, which I mentioned earlier, is a project I started 3 years ago as a humble effort to identify what's the right job for me, through conversations with people about their jobs. After over 100 such conversations across YouTube, Twitter spaces, etc, spanning various careers from a magician to a police officer, to YouTuber, wine consultant, DAO contributor, and more, I seem to have found my footing, and possibly a career within web3 and DAOs. You will find that reflected in my content where I now focus exclusively on Web3.

I wanna take this a step further and really commit to the DAO ecosystem, one that I have enjoyed being a part of, and have benefitted greatly from, and I want to bring this knowledge and spread the good word about DAOs while helping everyone #getinvolved.

Sounds fun. How am I going to achieve that?

DAOpunks is an NFT collection, that is dedicated to the mission to enable humans to liberate themselves from the soul-sucking drudgery of default world work and lead them to the rewarding, expansive freedom found in meaningful DAO work. The project started out of BanklessDAO and is a community of its own of rockstar DAO contributors from across the space.

I joined the DAOpunks community about a couple of months ago when I listened to a podcast on Crypto Sapiens, featuring Crypto Bushi and Livefast, and everything they spoke resonated so hard with me that I made the instant decision to get on Opensea and find myself a DAOpunks NFT - archetype ANON. You can listen to that episode here.

One of the core tenets of the DAO that's governing the DAOpunks NFT project, is to give back to the community, and one of the initiatives is in the form of grants that are meant to flip corpRATS into DAOpunks, and essentially benefit the entire DAOsphere with rich new talent and vision from all niches of the world.

This grant is open to all (not just the NFT holders). The applicants are selected through a form submission, and winners are voted in using a weighted snapshot vote from the community of DAOpunk NFT holders. (snapshot is a governance system universally used within DAOs). You can take a look at the voting page here, and please do comment and ask if you wanna find out how all of this works.

Needless to say, I won the grant, and I along with my co-cohort mates Jomari and the team from TradFitoDeFi, are working towards the commitments that we proposed on our grants application.

What are those commitments? How about we save that for the next week's newsletter. If you cannot wait, you can take a look at my submission (applicant #3) on the attached document in the snapshot. And follow on twitter @salmanneedsajob, where I am actively posting about this stuff.

The 1 ETH grant is by no means life-changing but is significant enough to finance some of the initiatives that I have going on, on #SalmanNeedsAJob, AND allow me to think beyond my shackles of individual contributorhood.

More importantly, I consider this grant a celebration of a milestone in my journey as a creator, where for the very first time, a community that I very much admire, has instilled belief in my work and motivated me to pursue my aspirations for what I want to do in web3.

In next week's edition, we will go over the project and the development over ~ 2 weeks. Thank you my fren for reading this <3

Now let's do some rolling credits -

Thank you to the team from DAOpunks for bringing to life this novel grants program - Crypto Bushi, hirokennelly.eth, Livefast9986.eth, GarrotTheParrot.eth, and BryanPetes.

Thank you to everyone from the DAOpunks community that voted for me, and to my frens from BanklessDAO who were generous in supporting me. I so appreciate you my frens.

Thank you to my fellow applicants for taking the effort to apply for the grant, and contributing to the DAO ecosystem. A special shoutout to infinitehomie, who I was also rooting for, for also supporting her frens during the process. Likewise to FINE who was a fellow applicant and has tweeted support for me.

Finally, to my wifey and family who's been very patient with me through my DAO life. That's not going to last long, so .. time to get to work