Sven · Incented

[0:00]You better call.

[0:08]Okay, welcome. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Better Call. All Yap. We're here with episode, episode five with spend from Incented. Really excited to have you here today, Spen. How you doing? Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me. Quite excited about what we're gonna talk about today.

[0:28]Well, other than, you know, my own thing, but what we're doing with my thing is gonna be pretty cool. Yeah, no, a million percent. I'm really excited to chat about, incent, about what we're gonna be doing here today and what we're showcasing. Um, but why don't you. Give us a little background on yourself. Like how did you come into this like Web3 world?

[0:47]What's, what's your background? And, uh, share, share with us a little bit more about yourself Span. Yeah, certainly. So, uh, I'm just like a random nerd living in the desert really. So don't pay too much attention to me or what I'm saying. But if anything I do say sounds interesting. I'm always open to riff on it more.

[1:05]And I am, I live in the States by way of Germany and. I really got to Web3 because as many of us in the early days of COVID, I started reflecting on my life and what I wanna do with it. At the time, I had a company that was in the advertising space and ads are part of the devil's plan, really, with consumerism and all that.

[1:26]But that's a whole different story for a different day. Um, and I decided that I really wanna focus on, you know, startups, team building, helping other founders, which was always a passion of mine. And ask myself questions like, why are we using open collaboration principles only efficiently for open source right?

[1:45]Software? And I think the short answer I come up with is, is that we have git, right? We have to write tooling for it. And then fast forward, um, quite a, a a bit of time. I, I dabbled in crypto 'cause you know, I like tech, right? I'm, I'm an, uh, an engineer and, uh, a nerd by heart, like I mentioned. I realized there's this thing called DAOs and, and that people who are kind of talking the same language to me got really excited about that, right?

[2:11]Like permissionless autonomous team building, working toward common goals. Got me really excited and ran a bunch of experiments into space. I had a podcast about DAOs for a while and eventually landed on, um. The problem statement around human coordination, right? Like ultimately it's all about finding consensus to work towards whatever our common goal might be, is that that's an open source project, if that's, you know, an artistic project or if that's funding a company, founding a company together, right?

[2:47]Or anywhere in between and. Long story short, we basically settled on a, a protocol approach that we, we believe pretty strongly that we need to incentivize and reward everyone involved in any type of project really, because most of us do not have the luxury of having been very early in crypto and having bags that we can rely on.

[3:09]So, you know, there's opportunity costs we need to consider and, and participation in any project if it's. If it's at all serious and more than a hobby that you just hop into whenever you have time, you should be rewarded for that. Right? And that's sort of informs the what has become the mission statement of my life and in turn for my company, which is that I want to live in a world where everyone can work on whatever they're most passionate about while being rewarded equitably for their efforts.

[3:36]Uh, if you heard me talk before, I say that every single time I speak because that informs everything we do. And you know why we are building incentives. Amazing. I love it. I like that it's that boiled down to, to that sentence. I think that's really important challenge that I've gotten very excited about exploring in now the, um.

[4:01]The, the, the crypto and blockchain space. Um, I was never into quote unquote politics before. I actually wanted to say the farthest thing away from it, but I realized it's because there is so much challenges there with like toxic human coordination, right? Like in a sense. Um, and, but like that human coordination and.

[4:21]Like you look at like big corporate companies. I've worked for a couple big corporate companies and now in the crypto space, I'm getting more involved with startups and seeing like big differences in, I mean, pros and cons on both sides, right? Like with human coordination specifically, it, a lot of the time boils down to, um, communication between individuals and human coordination like.

[4:44]Is one, like communication is one of the many things that like involve that human coordination layer. So I'm excited to see how we can build in this interoperable world together so that we can build tools for people to build coordination layers that all the people in the future that come, come into can, can try out and be a part of.

[5:04]Um, and I love that you guys are trying to bring. That, uh, goal of doing what you feel most passionate about and finding a way to reward those individuals about it. So why don't you tell us more, a little bit more about in incented? Yeah. So, you know, again, the, the, the core. Idea here is to usher in or do our part to usher in the world the future of work, right?

[5:27]Like we sometimes call it, I mean, if you look back over the course of our lives, even, it has changed so much, right? Like my parents, they, for the large, for large part, like that generation, they. They got lucky. They, they found a company, they stayed with that company for the rest of their lives, right? Like, that's never been true in our life.

[5:45]And, and it has evolved so much since. And especially with the advent of the internet and now Web3 and, and AI and what have you, um, how we earn a living, quote unquote, will change drastically. Right. And I mean, how much. Better off a world, could it be than, than you just actually do what you enjoy. And being paid is sort of a byproduct, right?

[6:09]I don't know if we can quite get it to that level, but that's the, that's the the point, right? So it starts with, for incent it starts with that everything needs to be incentivized, hence the name of the company, right? So even making decisions, voting on questions, right? So let's start with the, the, the lowest layer of finding consensus around anything is we have some sort of question.

[6:30]Let's pick a simple one. What should we post on Twitter tomorrow? Right? Well, how, how do we, how do we agree, right? And now of course with smart contracts, we have programmatic approaches to encode that kind of process to find consensus. And many people have built many cool systems around that over the last couple years.

[6:49]But what I think is that we over indexed on the incentive side and we forgot about the disincentive. And, uh, in turn, the alignment of the intention of a contributor. To what the actual goal is. Right? Because you know, in, in, in crypto especially like you have all these airdrops come in, do something, we drop, we airdrop you some stuff, but no one cares actually about what they're interacting with, right?

[7:13]They're just coming there for the tokens and that's a problem. So we're, what we build is basically the carrot and stick mechanism. So everything's incentivized, even voting on anything, right? You can get, usually this is all configurable of course, because we're protocol. Um, but you can get an upside by just choosing voting for or against certain applications or submissions, um, and being rewarded for that, right?

[7:37]And to stick is if you are making a wrong decision. If you're coming in and making uninformed decisions in a community you don't know anything about. We slash your voting state essentially. Basically, that's it. Awesome. Boom. Um, I think the beautiful thing about incentives is that they drive a lot of people in, but the retention is really low with a lot of crypto, um, places out there.

[8:02]I think the incentive model works really well to help prevent, uh, people from just coming in for the sake of that. And then. Continuing to act in that way, um, they'll either have to leave or, uh, adapt. Right. And I think there's a lot of people that are willing to adapt, but they just don't necessarily know why they or what op other opportunities are out there other than going, you know, spam, crazy and x, y, Z places.

[8:35]Or like, that's the way they know how to make money in the space versus like. Adding something that is of value rather than just being out there being, um, you know, a brand ambassador for, for another brand that's, that's not that individual's. Um, but yeah, no, I, I'm really excited to, um, to see more of incentive and have our first, uh, uh, incented program with the Zal.

[9:00]I think it's gonna be really fun. Um, we're going to hopefully be one of many, um, communities in here that. Uh, that starts programs because, um, I know there's a couple really cool ones, uh, in mind that could do some cool things, but we'll share. Um, I'll, I'll let Finn share a little bit more about the specific, um, application and how it all works.

[9:23]And then we'll go over to my screen, um, for, for an example demo of how to.

[9:32]Oh, you're muted. Unmuting helps. Yeah. I just pulled this up while you were, were talking because I think we wanted to show a little bit, right? So, 'cause like theory is always fun, but you know, what, what the fuck does that actually, excuse my language, but what does that actually mean in the real world? So what we are looking at is, is just our platform right now that sits on top of our protocol and you, you get there by just going to incentive Co, um, click the button or forward slash explore.

[9:58]And what I wanted to start with, so these are the different programs. There's uh, two currently live and there's already sneak peek. Um, and two have settled on since we launched. And I wanna show off what we currently have live as kind of our own dog fooding program. Right. Which we launched. Uh, is the coordinated creation challenge, right?

[10:19]Very simple use case here. Basically decentralizing, uh, asset generation for our social channels, right? So we, we have, I'm not gonna go through all of this. Don't worry if you're watching, you don't have to read all of this. You can, uh, it's pretty straightforward if you are interested in participating in this, but in a nutshell.

[10:38]We are putting the call out to the community to create anything, anything creative that is aligned with our brand or mission or what we are doing overall and submit that. Right? So we are currently in cycle number nine. Uh, our cycles are very fast. There are two days of submission each, two days of voting.

[10:58]And so every four days we want to reward four people of create for their creations, right? And they're in our program, they're making five bucks each, right? Five USDC. So right now we have, like, this one's kind of cute, right? Someone created an image of, uh, you know, a bunny who, who gets the point of carrots, right?

[11:18]Obviously the carrots are our logo. That's the incentive. And at the end of this submission period, we'd be voting on, on all of these, right? So our token is to seed token. We're also incentivizing voting, as I mentioned. This can be, doesn't have to be part of the program. But if you're voting here, if you have seeds and you vote on any of these, either four are against, you can win additional seeds, right?

[11:42]50 seeds per cycle. And I don't know if you look back like some of these cycles, like it's really cool what people come up with. You know, here we had six submissions, four winners, and like one of my favorites is this manifesto, kind of this hacker manifesto inspired like riff on and sent it sort of a like very.

[12:04]Poetic kind of way of talking about what incentive is about. Super cool. So you just get like these, these things you can't even imagine yet, right? It's a very creative program and, and inspired by our own. Um, Zal took the opportunity to launch one for your own community, and that's what we're looking at here, right?

[12:25]So it's going live today. Submissions are open. Um, three winners each cycle. Weekly cycles for now, two weeks to start, and then we'll see how successful we are if we go further or not. But it all committed 30 bucks per cycle. So three of you out there who will come up with something cool about the saval will win 10 bucks each.

[12:49]Amazing. Yeah, no, you said it. Awesome. I'm very excited to rock it out with everyone and, uh, see what people submit. Uh, I'm gonna show an example of how to submit as well, so show that it's super easy and, uh, really wanna see what, uh, what people. What people want to dive more into. And I think, um, after our first two weeks here and we, uh, after we do a test, we can definitely iterate and continue, um, in specific content, um, veins.

[13:20]I think that'll be really fun. So, um, yeah, let's, uh, let's get incented and, uh, I'll, I'll share how easy it is to pop over to incented and. Oh, uh, while, yeah, while you're pulling this up and we have the white and dark theme, of course. Uh, fun to see that your system settings are on white. Yeah. Um, let me go back to the main page just so I can show it.

[13:48]But I have filled out, um, I think you had it right there. There was a submit, um. Yeah, on the upper right, on the, in the upper right. And, uh, I've pre-filled out some of this information to make it a little easier. So you have an option to add a banner image, um, for your banner. Um, add, make sure you add in your wallet address, um, for the rewards, your title.

[14:11]Um, you can see that you can do different, um, fonts with the markdown format here in your summary. Um, you can submit links, so I'm only submitting a link here, but you can also add files and, you know, make sure you share what, what project type you have. And it's that easy. Um, we're gonna submit this application and, uh, and boom, that's all it takes.

[14:31]I. Let's see it. So that's the submission right there. We can go to the main page and see it there. So definitely make sure you guys, uh, get your submissions in so that, uh, this one doesn't win. Um. And, uh, I appreciate, uh, everyone who you can vote against it too, so that's awesome. Um, so actually I wanna mention, uh, what's important maybe for the people who consider submitting to this, right?

[15:02]So as of now, uh, this is a, a project kind of in Z as a Ball Z, better call saw universe. Um, and, uh, you decided to just let the existing community members, uh, specifically south token holders vote on this, right? And. I think we are planning on maybe doing a space on Monday or Tuesday as we get into voting, and we'll talk a little bit more about how that all works, but.

[15:26]Should be pretty straightforward. You know, if anyone has any trouble, uh, reach out to me or is all, and we'll guide you through it. But, and if you find bugs also let me know. Um, get you some seeds for that and reward everyone. Amazing. I love it. Do you wanna add any last things after, uh, before we get off and get ready to see what people submit and come back to meet for the voting.

[15:53]Uh, yeah. Well, I'm super excited to see what, what's coming out of your community, right? Like so far, uh, we had a a, we still have a, a ton of fun in our own program, which runs till February, but maybe what would be fun to talk about for just a minute or two is the kind of the breadth we we put into our product.

[16:13]So far, uh, I'm an engineer. As mentioned before, I have a tendency to over-engineer things for better or worse, and so we can launch. Quite a few different kinds of programs already. So for anyone who, who thinks this is cool and wants to chat afterwards about maybe doing their own thing, right? Besides these kind of co-creation challenges, what our other use cases we can handle really well are.

[16:38]Sort of grant funding decisions. Maybe, you know, if you, if you're wanting to, uh, like reward people for just submitting proposals, right? RFP kind of, uh, programs where you, maybe you're an ecosystem or a community and you have a couple things in mind that you want built, but you don't have anyone to build it.

[16:57]We can structure milestone based programs where people submit their, their take on what, how they would implement it. Um, we can do like sort of p portfolio management type programs. Um, and we have different award systems. So your program is a top three, right? So we can either decide on who wins by a finite number.

[17:19]We always want a reward three, or we could say we do that by quorum, right? So by net vote, uh, anyone over 51% or 75% you can pick, um, becomes a winner. And then how, how they get awarded or what they get awarded with. We can configure pretty flexibly as well. So for Sal's program, it's a fixed price and that can be milestone based where in an RFP style, right?

[17:45]Like applicants would define themselves how much they would require to execute on whatever they're proposing. And then it's up to the, the people who vote and review these proposals to make sure that that makes sense. Like, so your existing community members, they're obviously aligned with making sure that, you know, someone isn't asking a million dollars for like a landing page or something.

[18:05]Um, and we can split the award pool, right? So there's an award pool always per cycle, and we can either split that proportionally by the amount of votes, net vote, net positive votes they received, or split it equally amongst all the winners. So we have like eight different configurations of programs. And then, uh, the.

[18:25]The intent of the program's always just described in the program itself. Well said. I, I like how you put it at the beginning. It's a protocol we love seeing and building on top of protocols here at the Zow, and now there's a ball as well. Um, because the cool thing about protocols is you can build something that someone else can come in with a great idea and build something that wouldn't have been possible from just you and.

[18:50]That's the, the coolest thing. So I'm excited to try out some of these other toolings. I think, um, maybe for the next one we can do something along the lines of, you know, it's split by the whole group, but based on yes versus no. 'cause then people are incentivized to like, okay, like these are not just say yes to everyone, but like, these are.

[19:09]Not quality submissions or not highest quality as some of these other ones. Right. Um, and I think that could be really cool as well. And continuing to use the Zow token, um, will be really fun, um, as a use case for our community of like actually deciding some of these things. So, um, definitely gonna play around with this token after we, uh, we, we created and, and, and start playing around with more of these things here.

[19:33]But, um, I'm excited to see. How these first two submissions SE series go and then see how we can iterate from there. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's all about empowering your community to do more for what they believe in. Right. And I think certainly the two of us are aligned on that, that people should be rewarded if they deliver quality work or, uh, you know, what, whatever that work means to them or for your program.

[19:59]And if we, uh, if we can. Award people to not just bandwagon, you know, like don't, just don't just agree with what people seem to do. Oh, by the way, this is configurable as well in, in our system, right? That voting is private, can be public, can be semi-private, can be private, so that you cannot do that, right?

[20:19]Ideally, what's private? Uh, so you just see the stats, like there's actually four different levels. You can either just see the stats of how much overall voting is going on. Or you could see who voted, but not in which direction, or you could see, yeah, we might need to, yeah. I have a couple ideas for other campaigns and now we can launch that and maybe aren't Z ball related, but some of the things that we're doing out here, um, that it could be really fun to just, even if it's like a super low reward of a token, um, have something for like, there's currently.

[20:52]We can chat more about it after. But I'm excited to play around with incented more and I deal with my community now, like what they're gonna do, um, and what they want us to now iterate on, because there's gonna be so many cool things that we're gonna be able to, to rock out for it. And, uh, I appreciate you for, for building something that you really believe in.

[21:11]And I think that having that vision behind your, your personal ethos and your company is a huge, huge, huge part of like this space and being like. Kinda able to be consistent and just be yourself, your true, authentic self. And I think Web3 brings that out a lot. So, um, yeah, shout out to you s sp for, for cooking this up, spending the time with me, spending the time with us today.

[21:32]And, uh, I just wanna say I appreciate you and, uh, and yeah, let's get incentive. Thank you so much for having me. Uh, really means a lot. I think people who understand that, you know. You should be driven by something more than money. Um, I think is, is automatically some something that I resonate with and. I don't know if like, not to be the negative Nancy at the end of the call, but if money is what gets you outta bed in the morning, maybe you rethink your values, you know, uh, and grow up a little.

[22:02]Yeah, no, I mean, that's the challenge of the crypto space as well. More than anything, it's the most consum consumerism is it's, it's biggest everywhere, but then the dollar value of everything in crypto make makes the consumerism even more insane there. So I, yeah. I like the way we're, you're doing it where you're like, you're including that, but then you're trying to add every single thing on top of that initial, just like, okay, there's a dollar value here, but then you do this, you do that, you do these other pieces of the puzzle, that now it's not just a dollar value, and like people are incentivized to, to attack different things based on their interests.

[22:40]Right. Yep. Well, thank you for coming on, SP um, I hope you guys submit some really cool things. I'm excited to see it and um, I will see you again here soon, um, as we get to the voting period. Thank you, SP awesome. Thanks al.