Earlier this year, we quietly stepped over our two-year anniversary and concluded our fifth Accelerator cohort. The cohort joined the ranks of over 60 projects in the Seed Club alumni network. Our sense-making network is not only expansive, it’s also mature (or weathered): when the experience of the many collaborators is figured in, the network’s cumulative age easily surpasses 100.

We decided it was time to try another experiment. This past November, we launched our newest builder-focused initiative: Greenhouse.

Greenhouse is a collaborative, experiential lab for early-stage builders to grow and convert their ideas into execution. Stemming from the success of our flagship Accelerator, Greenhouse addresses the large, unmet needs of builders at varying stages of development within the CLUB alumni community. These are operators, contributors, and members interested in exploring what it takes to build their own community, or to contribute as a DAO operator in a leadership capacity.

The inaugural Greenhouse cohort is a group of twenty builders curated from Seed Club’s alumni communities. This alpha cohort (GH01) culminates this Friday, December 23, 2022. The four-week journey provided the foundational knowledge and mindsets required for web3 success.

Greenhouse is primarily facilitated by its participants who are encouraged to explore the edges of their curiosities, while leaning on real-world case studies and experiences from the communities where they contribute. The desired outcome of bringing the best builders together is to expand their collective point-of-view, deepen the connections among the strongest web3 communities, and develop each builder’s thought leadership on a desired topic.

While this was our initial experiment in supporting and engaging a deeper layer of our network, we know this is only the beginning. This Greenhouse cohort will culminate in a GH01 report, which will include various reflections from our builders on a spectrum of topics and our takeaways from working deeply with contributors across our alumni network.

Our team is eager to learn from the feedback of the builders who’ve participated in this cohort, to continue iterating on the design of the program, and to expand its offerings in the future. We’re so excited to see the experiments and partnerships that will naturally emerge from gathering the best web3 builders in the same room.

Stay tuned for a deeper look into Greenhouse, and our next design iteration of this experience. LFTG!

Introducing: Greenhouse

The Product team presented their build report last Friday: hello, anon. Product team now features a consistent mix of part time and full time contributors streamlining a cutting edge discovery and delivery process with founder involvement from 0 to 1. Team members 

 provided an overview of the existing Seed Club product landscape, insights from recent launches, and alpha on what’s coming for Q4.

The Product team Call to Adventure: “We build products that allow our broad network to better serve our builders, and products that allow our builders to better serve themselves.”

The Product team aligns with Seed Club’s three strategies:

 by building experiences that break down barriers for our builders and help them form critical connections across the network.

 by building product experiences that scale membership and project success.

 by building experiences that support authoritative meme propagation for Seed Club and our builders.

Some of their key learnings over the past few quarters:

Building Seed Club-native tools can drastically improve community participation

. They saw a 400% increase in accelerator selection participation using a native tool for SC05 vs a third party tool for SC04.

. Access to the selection portal was gated to members and as a result drove a 30% increase in $CLUB holders over the two weeks of community selection.

Team alignment, context, and focus is critical for impactful product building in a DAO

. Building product in a DAO is different in many ways, but the need for a highly-aligned team working against a clear strategy remains the same.

They also gave us a peek at some of the products they’ll be shipping in Q4 🤯. Builders, don’t go anywhere.

Product Build Report Q322

An ongoing challenge for DAOs is information asymmetry. The result of which is a lack of clarity and alignment on vision, a sense of feeling behind, and disconnection within the organization at large. Most significantly, contributors feel as if the current way of working is not resulting in their best work.

DAO coordination is arguably the richest design space in web3

We’ve run a handful of experiments that attempt to course-correct for information asymmetry. These included weekly written team updates, new communication platforms, and bi-weekly community calls. While we had mixed success with these touchpoints, we continually felt the same unmet need: more context, more connection. If we desire to have a cross-collaborative and active network, then we should run experiments within our working groups to discover how we might fractalize these models to meaningfully scale community-building. Quarterly Build Reports are our latest coordination experiment.

Last Friday, the Media team presented the inaugural Build Report to the contributor base. Quarterly Build Reports are a mid-quarter opportunity for working groups to candidly reflect on the quarter’s progress, surface challenges, and identify opportunities ahead. Below is a readout from the Media team’s Q3 Build Report.

The Media team is a new working group, spinning out from the Community team at the beginning of Q3. Our work is split into four distinct workstreams, each with its own lead: Productions, Social & Publicity, Editorial, and Brand.

- Refining operational strategy and workflows in order to successfully facilitate Seed Club’s dynamic media strategy.

- Taking a fresh look at previous initiatives, sunsetting efforts that no longer align with our evolving media strategy.

- Onboarding a new contributor to lead Social & Publicity.

- A 13-page mid-quarter Media strategy update. (Yes, you read that right 🤓)

We closed out S2 of Club Pod and transitioned into S3 pre-production, adjusting our podcasting strategy to focus on conversations. Planning for S3 revolves around two questions: what are the conversations we want/need to be having, and who are the best people to have those conversations with? We have an exciting announcement about S3 of Club Pod later this month. 

We plan to dramatically increase our publishing cadence across all mediums, with an emphasis on editorial. This increased publishing cadence puts particular pressure on our visual asset needs. We’re leaning into AI to facilitate “pouring from an empty cup” as our brand lead calls it. AI image generation has significantly improved in the last six months – we see this as an untapped area of opportunity for both the Media team and media at large.

We’re bringing a new focus to publicity efforts, looking to both deepen existing partnerships and build new ones. To lead this effort, we onboarded a Growth Cultivator to lead Social & Publicity. We’re thinking deeply about what meaningful growth in web3 looks like – while highly effective, web2 exponential growth tactics don’t align with our community-building thesis at Seed Club. We see this as an opportunity to define what growth means for us, and how best to pursue it.

An ongoing focus for Media is the development of Seed Club’s point-of-view (POV), which will continue into Q4. As both Seed Club and the community token space mature, we see an opportunity to further refine and clarify our POV. This process takes time, and involves many conversations with contributors and the community.

Finally, we’re deep in the weeds of a Club Press reboot. We launched Club Press in Q2 to serve as an archive of what we call our “canonical editorials.” We leaned into building a site that offers a visual break from the current trends in digital reading experiences – but this has its limits. As our Media thesis evolves, we’re feeling the itch to realign our Club Press thesis along with it. Stay tuned for a big announcement in Q4.

Media Build Report Q322

DAOs have figured out how to pool capital quickly, and communities continue to experiment with novel means of value accrual. Yet the most promising – and most elusive – innovation lies in how we collectively allocate that capital toward meaningful outputs.

We have centuries of inspiration to draw from on collective decision-making – from democratic nation states to trad corporate structures to the natural world. The DAO governance design space is ripe for iteration, driven by the core value proposition of web3: democratized ownership enabled by tokens.

As a space, we imagine tokens as a self-regulating path to aligned incentives. Our collective thesis is that if we all have a stake in a community represented by a token, then we’ll act in the best interest of the community to consistently raise the value of the token. But it turns out incentive alignment is a slippery thing.

Web3 governance conversations generally focus on governance frameworks and the tools that facilitate them. We wanted to go the next layer down on coordination to explore possible answers to the question: What is the governance layer 0?

In our new Club Pod miniseries At the Edges of Coordination, Jess Sloss – instigator and co-creator at Seed Club – chats with four web3 governance practitioners and operators to explore both the challenges and opportunities of DAO coordination. The series includes:

Decentralization is not synonymous with leaderlessness. It’s our belief that we need leaderful organizations even within our pursuit of decentralization. In our conversation with Pet3rpan, investor at 1kx, Jess and Pet3rpan discuss the usefulness of governance constraints toward governance minimization. Decentralized coordination and community building are developable skills, and yet there is no replacement for the experience of running and failing experiments.

In our conversation with Julia Rosenberg, co-founder and chief pod officer of Metropolis (formerly Orca), we deep dived on the concept of pods. Pods build on the embedded socialware within small groups of people, creating an automated container for coordination. Jess and Julia discuss current governance experiments, both successes and challenges. Recent DAO shakeups demonstrate an over-indexing against centralization and corporate structure. As we move toward scalable trustware, there is one socialware that cannot be automated: leadership.

What if we incentivized contrarian governance? David Phelps is the co-founder of JokeDAO, a governance platform for decentralized, bottom-up governance. In a recent essay collaboration on Not Boring, David takes a stand against consensus in DAO governance. He argues that forking — more specifically, contrarian opinions — presents a more interesting opportunity for governance innovation. Jess and David touch briefly on the value of community curation, the complications of off-chain + on-chain coordination, and the persistent challenge of the attention economy.

We return to the evergreen challenge of allocating with treasures, with Jango from Juicebox. Web3 coordination often exists at the intersection of large treasuries. Innovative means of capital allocation is one of the most promising crypto design spaces. Jess and Jango discuss automated funding mechanisms, the use case for frequent proposal and discourse periods, and how this could unlock more DAO experiments.

Listen to the full series now on your preferred podcast streaming platform.

At the Edges of Coordination

The web is in crisis. The value created by communities on the internet is currently captured by platforms – and we believe this is a failure of the web. Web2 social unlocked unprecedented connectivity, but this came at the expense of our digital agency. We were forced to surrender our value in exchange for distribution.

We believe a brighter future is possible, where people, creators, and builders maintain ownership over the value they generate digitally. Web3 enables this alternative future through composable building blocks that unlock limitless possibilities for networks owned by the community that builds them. Yet we have work to do to discover the full potential of this novel technology, and to ensure that we don’t inadvertently recreate the wrongs of web2.

Seed Club is building a future where community-owned networks are the most powerful organizations on the planet. Through the Accelerator and our community we are the leading network for web3 DAO builders and operators who are assembling this bright future. Web3 technology gives communities super powers. It’s our job to figure out what those super powers are and how best to use them.

We’re committed to accompanying our community of builders for the long haul, which is why we recently onboarded a cohort of new strategic partners to resource Seed Club through this next phase. This network expansion accomplishes two critical milestones for Seed Club.

The first milestone is our continued ability to support web3 builders and operators regardless of market conditions. Our new strategic partners allow us to strengthen our commitments to existing alumni, deepen our support of emerging DAOs, onboard and retain the best talent, and initiate exciting projects – all in service of enduring community-owned networks.

The second milestone is an expansion of our network. Our new strategic partners will propel the Seed Club network by providing both alumni and contributors with mentorship, connections, and hands-on implementation. These strategic partners are motivated to be engaged community members, and we’re equally excited to welcome them to the Club.

The strategic partners invited to formally join Seed Club are:


“Web3 gives us a powerful new set of ‘Community Legos’ that have the potential to empower online communities with increased agency, ownership, and value. This set of tools is extremely exciting but also nascent. What we need is rapid and focused experimentation, informed by an engaged and growing community of practitioners. Seed Club is exactly that. USV is thrilled to support the Seed Club community as it pursues this important and transformative work.” - Nick Grossman, General Partner at Union Square Ventures

“Crypto uniquely enables companies and communities to build their foundation from the bottom up, versus top down. This presents an entirely new structure, one that's more participatory, engaging and equitable for individuals to contribute to and strengthen the companies and missions they support most. We believe Seed Club-- through the community they've built, their incredible people and their work to date-- will be on the forefront of pioneering the best ways to build these organizations of the future.” - Jarrod Dicker, GP @ TCG Crypto

"Web3 is a social and community technology -- and there is no stronger team thinking about the products, pain points, and potential of web3 communities than Seed Club. Collab+Currency is proud to join Seed Club on the journey as they power the most innovative and forward-thinking communities in crypto over the next decade." - Derek Edward Schloss, Partner at Collab+Currency

As groups from around the world have begun organizing as DAOs, Seed Club has cultivated the strongest community and brain trust for solving the early challenges that come with this new organizational framework. We’re thrilled to join Seed Club and the rest of the community and do our part in helping navigate the new frontier." - Aleks Larson, General Partner at Blockchain Capital

These new strategic partners join our existing network of collaborators:

Kristen Stone (Balancer), Jacob Horne (Zora), Trevor McFedries (Brud), Cooper Turley (Fire Eyes), Stani (Aave), Denis Nazarov (Mirror), Scott Moore (Gitcoin), Pri Desai (The LAO), Marc Weinstein (Mechanism Capital), Nima Ashgari (SCV), Patrick Rivera (Mirror), Packy McCormick (Not Boring), Andre Anjos ($RAC), Alex Masmej (Showtime), Connie Digital, Brian Flynn (Rabbit Hole), Carlos Gomes ($FF), Wong Joon Ian, Jordan Lyall ($MEME), Joyce Yang ($GCR), Louis Giraux (TwoPlus), Richard Kim ($RNG), Gmoney, Dave Smith, Brett Shear (Palm Tree Crew), Seth Goldstein (Bright Moments Gallery), Daniel Maegaard (SeedPhrase), Matthew Ferrick (NiftyGateway and 6 Agency), Reuben Bramanathan (IDEO CoLab), James Duncan (SZNS), Bradley Miles (Roll), Pet3r Pan (MetaCartel), Kevin Chou (Rally), James Young (Collabland), Bobby Ong (Coingecko), TM Lee (Coingecko), Lawson Baker (RaRa), Fire Eyes DAO, Eric Ashdown (Covalent), Ian Lee (SyndicateDAO), Andrew Steinwold (Sfermion), Zack Honarvar (One Day Entertainment), Matthew Shaw (Yolo Build Co.), Jake Brukhman (CoinFund), Megan Hannum, 0xElle, Launch House, Sfermion, Nascent, Lemnis Cap, Betaworks, Meta Cartel, The LAO, IOSG, Taureon, and Delphi Digital Ventures

Most of us at Seed Club have lived through previous market downturns, and many of us are students of history. Our collective lived experience is why we’re fundamentally optimistic about the future, and it’s why you often hear us saying, “Let’s 

As we approach the application period for our next cohort of the Accelerator, we’re thinking deeply about how Seed Club will sustain the most promising DAO builders and operators behind incredible community-owned networks. If this sounds like you, we invite you to join our network of brilliant individuals building the brightest version of our future.

Seed Club Welcomes New Strategic Partners

The success of web3 projects will be measured by the depth of their community – which is why robust community is a critical component of the Seed Club flywheel. Community is how we cultivate trust within a trustless system, and it’s how project teams persist through any market condition.

Project builders, operators, and high-insight leaders comprise the Seed Club community. While they represent a range of industries and expertise, these individuals have a crucial commonality: the belief that the brightest version of our future includes more community-governed networks.

We design our community as a place for project teams, collaborators, and contributors to thrive as they build, with project teams as the bedrock of the Seed Club community. Everything we do revolves around these brilliant web3 builders and operators. Project teams enter the Seed Club community via the Studio or the Accelerator. These flagship programs provide discrete support to project teams at varying stages of maturity. While each of these programs is distinct, the end result is the same for both: projects transition into alumni, where they are sustained by the Cultivation Team.

Our flagship program, the Accelerator is an eight-week immersive education cohort that establishes the foundation for launch. A few times a year, we gather the most promising community projects to learn from other top builders, operators, and thinkers within the ecosystem. Learning modules cover web3 building from end-to-end, including tokenomics, legal, media, and community.

Our second project-facing program, The Studio provides bespoke support to emerging community-governed networks. More incubator than accelerator, projects receive tailored attention as they prepare to launch.

Once projects launch, teams engage in the rigorous work of building their own enduring community networks – but they don’t go it alone. Cultivation is our emerging working group to sustain Studio and Accelerator projects once they “graduate,” so to say. Cultivation is where the magic of building community-governed networks truly takes off.

Collaborators as the Heartbeat of Collaboration

Collaborators are a crucial component of the Seed Club community. These high-signal, proven leaders are curated to support both Seed Club projects and the Seed Club team. Collaborators are selected based on their proven experience, expertise, support of Accelerator projects, and commitment to Seed Club.

Seed Club is where these groups – project teams, collaborators, and contributors – come to cross-pollinate. Proven operators and builders impart critical lessons to emerging project teams; these project teams in return provide novel imaginations to demonstrated leaders.

Creating containers for project teams to surface challenges and celebrate successes is nearly as important as the work of building. The Seed Club team – composed of contributors and Stewards – are constantly building the containers to hold the critical connections between all three of these community groups.

The Seed Club community flywheel unites multiple forms of capital, but our value proposition is principally knowledge and social capital: the Seed Club team, collaborators, and projects reciprocally employ and return resources to the community. This looks like a Seed Club collaborator providing leadership development to a Seed Club Steward, a seasoned alumni project bringing a current Accelerator project onto their podcast, a Seed Club contributor collaborating with a Cultivation project on their Hello World post – the possibilities are endless.

Community is the DAO. With that, all contributors and Stewards at Seed Club facilitate our overarching community philosophy. We’re witnesses of the ways that connection naturally wants to emerge, thoughtfully removing barriers to collaboration and holding space for dispersed digital intimacy. We consider ourselves the eyes and ears of this dynamic ecosystem – we watch, we learn, we listen. Together, we decide what to do, how to do it, and when it needs to be done.

As we navigate this new market reality, we find ourselves simultaneously ushering in a new chapter for Seed Club. We’re principally responsible for building, operating, and facilitating space for all members of the Seed Club community – from the project teams to collaborators to fellow contributors – to support one another. We will design, collaborate, build, collect feedback, iterate, and provide immense support along the way.

Somewhere along our 300,000-year journey we became hyper-independent. Within our post-industrialized economies, geographic unity is a rarity; we hardly look to our neighbors for support or care. The pandemic exacerbated our individual and collective isolation.

Yet we’re not built for isolation. We’re built for interconnectedness — which web3 technology enables in an unprecedented way. At Seed Club, we hope to co-author this next chapter of human evolution as one that embraces the future of technology, and also brings us back to our roots – which is each other.

“Our individual success will be a symptom of our communities.”

Community Philosophy

The Seed Club product team exists to build amazing product experiences that serve founders of soon-to-be wildly successful web3 communities. We call this building for 

: deeply understanding who founders are, with their needs and desires as our North star. Everything we ship deepens the felt experience of Seed Club as a significant sense-making network – all in service of community-owned networks.

This motivating ethos is an active rejection of the web2 doom loop of constructing MVP after MVP…after MVP. Web2 product teams designed for conversion to influence and coerce user action. Gamification morphed from a tool to enable user behavior into the thing we valued. The obsession with growth, escape velocity, and conversion left us disillusioned.

We innovate product experiences that solve core problems for DAO builders and operators throughout the entire Seed Club ecosystem. This function is dually internal- and external-facing, serving both Seed Club contributing teams and all of the incredible projects and founders that come through The Accelerator and Studio.

Our existing social platforms leave us physically, mentally, and emotionally wrecked. We believe the next wave of product innovation will be generative and fluid, an oasis amidst the arid landscape of web2 social. We envision this oasis as overflowing with applications dedicated to context-building and sense-making, expanding both an individual’s thinking and creating the mechanisms for social connection.

We world-build with the Seed Club network at the center, running novel experiments at the intersection of communities and tokens. Every design decision and technical consideration centers our desire for connection. We’re no longer designing to extract user behavior as many of us did in web2; 

A Regenerative Accelerator Selection Process

As we’re on the cusp of our fifth Accelerator cohort selection, we’re called to design a project selection process that invests the $CLUB community’s knowledge capital, and integrates the brilliance of the wider Seed Club ecosystem. We want the very act of applying to the Accelerator to be an immensely valuable experience for projects, through exposure and meaningful community feedback.

The Seed Club landing page is our network’s terminal. We splashed the original landing page during the whirlwind of our founding. We’re rebuilding the site to more effectively transmit our identity as a massively valuable sense-making network, motivate teams to invest their time with us, and connect newcomers to our various digital experiences.

We imagine a world where Accelerator alumni have access to a digital space for meaningful conversation, curated resources, and direct access to experts. Think of this as an extended group chat with some of the most innovative, brilliant, and wild thinkers and builders in web3. We want project teams to feel deeply supported and – most importantly – inspired to build.

The Product Team builds to deepen community collaboration across the Seed Club Network. We’re in pursuit of product experiences that enrich context, and build social cues to aid founders in making sense of resources, social trends, and markets, and to lovingly invite the spontaneous connection we get from physical gatherings.

We’re building digital containers to hold the magic that inevitably manifests when the great minds of Seed Club project teams, collaborators, and internal team members crash into each other.

TL;DR: We’re hungry to write this next chapter of digital social coordination.

, concept + deep collaboration from Josh Cornelius, David Espinel, Estella, Peacenode, and 

Hello Product World

What’s the German word for the unshakable suspicion that you’re standing on the threshold of something transformative? The sense that if you gather the right people in the right place at the right time, something incredible might emerge?

Many of us arrive at this moment wrung out by the pursuit of escape velocity. Web2 prioritized explosive growth at the expense of users. Centralized brands extracted our collective brilliance for the sake of their balance sheets. Social network monoliths captured our attention while robbing us of our creative agency. The gig economy broke us.

But we’re more than just users: we’re builders with a grand vision for a different kind of future. A future that centers collaboration and coordination, not competition and consolidation. We envision a future where community-owned networks are the most powerful organizations on the planet, and the builders are the heroes.

In Summer 2020, the social token landscape was sparsely populated. Friends tinkering at the edge of crypto, separated by time zones, craved a space to jam on questions they were otherwise investigating alone. When Jess instigated the Telegram chat that morning in August, he had a feeling that something momentous was materializing, but he — like all of us — couldn’t yet comprehend the depth of the ensuing reverberations.

We’re living through a period of unprecedented innovation. Like a fern unfurling at the edge of spring, interdisciplinary capabilities that were previously unimaginable reveal themselves to us every day. And the extraordinary truth is that we find ourselves here 

, builders enabled by blockchain technology and composable smart contracts. By pooling our unbridled brilliance, our social and creative capital, we can — for the first time in human history — generate shared cultural assets via community tokens. These tokens give communities super powers. At Seed Club, we’re hungry to discover what those super powers are, and how best to use them.

The Accelerator was born out of this hunger.

Through four Accelerator cycles, each successive cohort investigated increasingly complex questions. Together, we pushed the conversation from the technological tooling that enables basic DAO operations to the human dynamics that ultimately give communities meaning. We progressed discussions of bonding curves, staking, and marketplaces to this fundamentally human consideration: what if we released our obsession with scaling and instead invested in intimacy?

While we’re still uncovering the infinite potential of this new technology, we acknowledge that we’re collectively shaping culture for the next generation of digital builders. That next generation of digital builders is us.

Digital communities create the containers for intimacy on the internet. We’re no longer limited to simply following one another via obtuse algorithms; tokens enable us to find meaning through shared purpose, capital, and even meme. While Seed Club originated as a container for friends to explore technical blockchain mechanics, it has since evolved into a gathering place for web3 builders to cultivate the future of member-owned digital communities.

The significance of the group chat represents the role of friendship not only within this community’s origin story, but also within the fundamental operating principles of Seed Club. Our community is bursting with adventure. Consider Seed Club to be your extended group chat of thoughtful and curious friends along for the raucous ride that is launching a tokenized community. Are you with us?

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