Nadia Asparouhova: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's really fascinating. The Straussian message in that book is very strong. [Laughter] But in general when you're thinking about something like corporate governance, there's a big question. And I guess even more interestingly, if you think DAOs are going to be a thing, and you think that we will have to reinvent corporate governance from the ground up, there's a question of — Should these be run like monarchy? Should they be oligarchies where the board is in control? Should they be just complete democracies where everybody gets one vote on what you do at the next shareholder meeting or something? This book and that analysis is actually pretty interesting to think about. How should corporations be run differently, if at all? Does it inform how you think the average corporation should be run? Yeah, definitely. I'm not a corporate governance expert, but I do feel we're seeing a little of this backlash against shareholder activism and extreme focus on DEI and boards and things like that. We're seeing people starting to take the reins and take control again because they're like, “Ah, it turns out that doesn't really work so well.” I think DAOs are going to learn this hard lesson as well. It's still maybe just too early to say what is happening in DAOs right now. But at least the ones that I've looked at, it feels there is a very common failure mode of people saying, “Let's have this be super democratic and leave it to the crowd to kind of run this thing and figure out how it works.” And it turns out you actually do need a strong leader, even in the beginning. And something I learned from open source projects is that it's rarely the case, if at all, that you have a project that starts leaderless and faceless. Usually there is some strong creator, leader, or influential figure that is driving the project forward for a certain period of time and then you can kind of get to the point when you have enough of an active community that maybe that leader takes a step back and lets other people take over. But it's not like you can do that on day one. And that's an open question that I have for crypto as an industry more broadly. Because if I think about what is defining each of these generations of people that are pushing forward new technological paradigms, I mentioned that the Wall Street finance mindset is very focused on globalism and on this efficiency quantitative mindset. You have the tech Silicon Valley Y combinator kind of generation that is really focused on top talent and the idea of founder mindset, the power of individuals breaking institutions, and then you have the crypto mindset, which is this faceless leaderless, governed by protocol and by code mindset, which is intriguing to me. But I have a really hard time squaring it with what I’m seeing. In some sense, open source was the experiment that started playing out, 20 years before then. Some things are obviously different in crypto, because tokenization completely changes the incentive system for contributing and maintaining crypto projects versus traditional open source projects. But in the end, humans are humans and I feel there are a lot of lessons to be learned from open source. They also started out early on as being very starry eyed about the power of hyper democratic regimes and it turned out that just doesn't work in practice. And so how is Crypto going to square that? I'm just very curious to see what happens. That raises an interesting question. You've written about idea machines and you can explain that while you answer the question, but do you think that movements can survive without a charismatic founder who is both alive and engaged? Once Will MacAskill dies, would you be shorting effective altruism? Or if Tyler Cowen dies, would you be shorting progress studies? Or do you think that once you get a movement off the ground, it can survive on its own?…

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