Nadia Asparouhova on public goods and peer production
August 2022
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Show notes
Nadia Asparouhova is an independent researcher. She previously wrote about her research on open-source communities in “Working in Public”, and more recently, has been researching the history of and approaches to philanthropy - which she defines with this phrase “if venture capital is risk capital for private goods, philanthropy is risk capital for public goods”.
In this conversation, we talked about public goods from this broader perspective. We talked about how previous generations have thought about this question, and how the tech ecosystem outside of crypto are grappling with this today. We talked about the second-order effects of wealth booms which have happened in both tech and crypto, how peer production happens, and the role that intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards might play in the development of crypto protocols.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:00) intro
- (00:02:01) working as an independent researcher
- (00:06:09) understanding wealth booms in tech and crypto
- (00:13:01) the unique perspectives of each successive community
- (00:25:46) the right (and wrong) question to ask
- (00:34:41) the landscape of public goods provisioning
- (00:39:22) innovative philanthropic funding models
- (00:45:35) the first wave of open source communities and crypto
- (00:54:42) different classes of stakeholders
- (01:05:00) research methodology and tools for thought
Links:
Transcript
Sina: How do you define being an independent researcher?
Nadia: Yeah, it’s sort of a funny label. I feel like if someone asks me at a cocktail party what I do for work, I try to keep it simple. I’ll just say I’m a writer or a researcher. Then they’ll ask, “What university do you work for?” and I’m like, “Well, I’m independently funded.” I start to realize that this isn’t a concept people are super familiar with; it’s kind of a weird, made-up idea.
Honestly, I believe anyone can do research. Why do you have to work at a university or have some sort of institutional support to be considered a “real” researcher? I tend to cycle between working at companies and then diving back into my own writing and research. Right now, I had a topic that’s been sitting in my brain for a long time. I was working at Substack until last summer, and this topic around philanthropy just kept tugging at me. When I get to that point where something is stuck in my head and I can’t get it out, I need to drop everything and focus on it.
So, I’m very led by my own intuition. One thing I’ve noticed among other friends who are independent researchers is that we all seem to share this interest in staying close to the “real world” or real-world applications. One of my fears about working in an academic institution is that I’d get divorced from the populations I want to work with or the people I want to understand. Being independent allows me to be embedded wherever I want to be and then think about how to translate the work I’m doing. Publishing on my blog, for instance, versus publishing in a journal, feels like I can reach more of the people I want to connect with, rather than being stuck behind a paywall.
Sina: Yeah, I mean, thinking through what an academic institution provides, at some level, it’s funding so you can focus on what you’re doing. But in today’s world, as you’ve written in your book, you can source that from your audience themselves, or you can find organizations aligned with your research who are happy to fund a deeper study of it in some dimension. Then, academic institutions also provide a network of potential thought partners to bounce ideas off of and evolve your thinking together. But even that isn’t really confined to the walls of an institution anymore. We’re all connected in group chats and on Twitter, and you’re like one degree away from anyone you might want to talk to anyway. Where you publish also seems better if you do it on a blog, reaching a wider audience instead of putting it inside a PDF that people have to download somewhere. So, it really makes sense.
Nadia: Yeah, it feels like there are definitely certain types of research that you can only do in academic institutions, especially if you have high material costs or need a lab. I can see why you’d need institutional support for that. There are also some fields where academia really excels, and it makes sense to work within one. But in my case, I feel like you have to start with the impact you want to have on the world and then decide where the best place to do it is. For me, I haven’t felt the need to affiliate with a formal institution. Even when I was doing open-source research, I worked with plenty of academics. It’s not like there’s some dividing line where I’m not allowed to talk to people just because I’m independent, and vice versa. It’s like the entrepreneurial analog of what it looks like in the research world.
Sina: That’s the favorable interpretation. Is it fair to say that the topic you’re really going deep on right now is philanthropy? Is that your current research interest?
Nadia: Yeah, although as I’ve been diving deeper into it, I feel like it’s even broadening. I’m starting to realize how the term “philanthropy” evokes a lot of different topics or associations in people’s minds that I don’t always intend. So, I’d say even more broadly, I’m interested in looking at the recent wealth booms in both tech and crypto and trying to understand what their public legacy will look like. To me, that means philanthropy, but to other people, it might mean something else.
Sina: And why is that interesting? What about that compels you?
Nadia: I think I can answer that in two ways: why I find this topic interesting at all, and why it’s interesting right now. More broadly, we talk a lot about cultural production as this bottom-up endeavor. We discuss trends, social movements, and this mass of people that move in different ways to shape and influence what our society looks like. But I feel like we don’t talk as much about the top-down version of cultural production, which is shaped behind the scenes by private individuals. This is maybe the elite concept of cultural production.
When you look at a lot of the public institutions we take for granted right now, the more obvious ones are things like funding for the arts or parks and other public spaces. But then there are things like public libraries, the state of American higher education, our public school system, and scientific research. So much of this has been historically funded by private individuals.
Nadia: I’ve been really fascinated by individuals who have wanted to see something happen in the world, something that might not have occurred without a large private funder stepping in. I’m particularly interested in philanthropy as this kind of risk capital for public goods. It’s a term people sometimes use, and I see parallels with venture capital, which is risk capital for private goods. So, why don’t we talk more about the equivalent for public goods, especially in tech? I think it’s a really under-discussed and maybe misunderstood topic.
When I mention philanthropy, I’ve noticed people immediately think of charities or nonprofits, or direct services to help those less fortunate. I feel like that’s an overly simplified, and in some cases, inaccurate model of what philanthropy can be. I see it much more as a type of freedom of expression. It’s the ability for private citizens to experiment with things that benefit society without needing permission from the government. I think that’s a really cool concept that we should be exercising more. That’s why I’m broadly interested in this space.
Sina: That’s interesting. One part of what you said is that government and centralized planning can be good for taking something that’s working, scaling it, and sustaining it with more firepower. But a lot of the innovation around the institutions we rely on historically has come from individuals, right? Like Benjamin Franklin starting the first firefighting brigade or something—he did a million things. And the second part you mentioned, which is also intriguing, is that these wealth booms can be a time for this to happen. I guess the reason is that if you’ve already made money, you’re decoupled from the need for whatever you do to also generate income. You can explore a wider space of, “What positive impact do I want to have on the world?” whether or not that fits within a for-profit business model.
Nadia: Yeah, definitely. I think when we talk about individual acts of philanthropy, it’s often analyzed through a very personal lens. Like, someone has made a lot of money, and then they have this second act in their career where they think about the legacy they want to leave behind. A lot of media analysis or academic research focuses on the role of the individual in that.
But something I think gets under-discussed is how these cohorts of wealth move in groups. What’s interesting to me right now is that a ton of people in startups, in the traditional tech sphere—separately from crypto—have made a lot of money in the last five to ten years. I don’t think people even realize the sheer magnitude of wealth that has been created. These are people who made their money by betting on something unconventional or not obvious at the time.
If you’ve read Carlota Perez’s work on technology, she talks about how technological innovations drive changes in the financial market, where suddenly tons of people are making money off a new innovation. Then there’s a reckoning—innovation becomes mainstream, there’s a frenzy period where everyone tries to do the same thing, followed by an inevitable crash. But eventually, that new paradigm solidifies as the mainstream, and the cycle begins again. I think in the startup cycle, in the traditional tech world, we’ve had that frenzy period and the backlash starting around 2016. There’s been a backlash against tech, and now they’re in this moment of, “How do we define our place in society?” Startups are no longer counterculture; they’re entering the mainstream. Crypto is still further behind in that cycle, but it feels inevitable that they’ll get there too.
So, it’s not just that an individual has a personal motivation to figure out what they want to do or how to leave their mark. It’s almost a defensive mechanism. Everyone else has noticed that you’ve amassed quite a bit of power and wealth, and now you need to defend that or figure out your role as a steward of society. To some extent, the broader tech community is being thrust into this position, almost despite its will.
Sina: Definitely. I think if the tech backlash hadn’t happened—though it was kind of inevitable—tech wouldn’t have had to stop and say, “What are we all about? How do we present ourselves to the government or the media?” That forced self-reflection has naturally made people in tech wonder, “How do we create cultural institutions that reflect who we are? What does all this stand for?”
Kind of a big question, but what do you think the answer to that looks like? How are people thinking about that today?
Nadia: I mean, it’s still early days, and I feel like we’re seeing some emerging behavior now, so my answers might be different in a few years. But I’ve been trying to go back and re-examine what unique insights tech had that the existing paradigm didn’t. I think the predecessors to tech wealth were probably Wall Street wealth and the Davos cohort, very focused on a globalist worldview.
Whereas with tech wealth, especially in traditional tech, there was this trope of the young founder that we take for granted now. At the time, you had these college students with no real-world experience starting companies and disrupting major industries like Airbnb or Uber. That was very counterintuitive. One of the learnings that came out of that was a strong belief in meritocracy—this idea that if you find the best talent and point them toward a problem, you can overturn decades-old or even centuries-old industries.
Thinking about how that plays out philanthropically, you can see in some newer initiatives a big focus on finding top talent, bringing top talent to America, and aggregating the best people into one place. In some ways, that can play out really well because they’re trying to find interesting people and empower individuals to do interesting things. But you can also imagine the flip side, somewhere down the line, where people might say, “You’re spending all this time supporting…”
Nadia: So, when you think about top talent, it can be very unique, almost exclusive, in its focus on super talented people. But then, it can also feel exclusionary. Let me try to piece this together. What I’m saying is that each larger narrative of success or progress in history—whether it’s Wall Street, tech in Silicon Valley through the 2000s, or crypto right now—the people building these companies and projects, within their relationships with each other, embody certain unique insights and ways of looking at the world.
In the case of tech, this was a belief that I can do it. Just because someone else has been doing this for 40 years doesn’t mean they’re smarter than I am. I can figure it out. There’s this focus on talent. Then, as one of these waves reaches its peak and achieves some level of success, these groups start reckoning with how they want to engage with the world in a more intentional way. These values and points of view find their way into how they even think about that problem.
Definitely, when you think about the Davos cohort, which is like the predecessor to tech, or the Gates Foundation, which I’d put in that cohort, there’s this focus on global public health. That’s also a weird defining trait of people from that cohort of wealth. Why do they care so much about fixing global poverty or addressing global public health? It comes from a worldview tied to the McKinsey consulting mindset of, given a set of parameters, how do we find the most interesting problem in the world to solve? They’re sort of divorced from any locality; they just want to find the quantitatively best opportunity to pursue. That feels like a defining feature of that era.
Whereas in tech, it’s much more locally focused. You see people talking about the importance of immigration in America, bringing the best people here, which is completely inverted from the previous generation of philanthropy. I’m curious what you think about the next generation in crypto. Some things I notice are that they’re not so obsessed with breaking down institutions in the way I see in traditional tech. In traditional tech, there’s this obsession with the David and Goliath model—one person disrupting an entire industry or institution. But in crypto, it feels much more about doing lots of different experiments, enabling a pluralistic multitude of ideas to flourish. They’re not aiming for one monopoly. They’re giving people the tools to do things themselves rather than seeking out the very best person and dragging them into an institution.
It’s still too early to really know what crypto’s public legacy will look like, but there are already some differences that are very apparent.
Sina: That’s a super interesting point. What you said about the crypto mindset not being as much about growing from David to Goliath, dominating, and then changing how things are done—that might be downstream of the fact that all these protocols are small, modular, on-chain smart contracts designed to interface with other things. The corollary is that they’re designed to be composable with the rest of the ecosystem. So, there’s much more of a notion of, how do I build this thing in a way that it lives in harmony with everything else? It’s super interesting.
Even organizationally, these organizations don’t have very well-defined boundaries. They’re much more permeable. There’s a core team, but they look more like open-source communities, as you’ve written about. I bet that influences the mindset of, how do you rally a force behind a particular idea? Is the best mode to recruit everyone into an in-house team, or is it better to do some of that but also build a broader belief and narrative about why this is something worthwhile that we should all go after? I’m just kind of spitballing here.
Nadia: No, I think that’s right. That’s what I’ve been noticing as well. It feels like so much is going to change in the next couple of years. Anyone pretending to know what the future will look like is just wrong. But from the vantage point we’re at now, it feels like tech is actively grappling with the legacy institutions built over the last century or so. Whereas crypto is building a parallel universe entirely, doing it all from scratch with the benefit of a blank slate. They don’t seem as interested in capturing or building the next Facebook. They want a dozen different Facebooks or something. I don’t know.
Sina: How do you find people—whether in tech or previous eras—approach this question of, what legacy do I want to have, or what impact do I want to have on the world? How is that different from what someone asks themselves at the beginning, prior to even building their company? For example, the Substack founder—I forget the origin story there, but I recently listened to his interview on Joe Rogan, which was pretty cool. He was talking about things we’re all familiar with, like journalists not being able to express themselves fully in legacy institutions, realizing there can be more of a direct connection with your audience, and the confluence of all these things. He realized that this thing would be good for the world with the view that he holds, and it can also make money at the same time, becoming this self-propagating, for-profit entity. How is that second reckoning moment different from the first?
Nadia: That’s a really important question, and I wish more people would ask it. To me, this is why I don’t think philanthropy can be defined as just an interest in doing good, whatever that really means. Part of why I’m intrigued by the topic of philanthropy within a tech context, in particular, is that I’ve noticed among my peers—and I’m sure you’ve noticed among yours as well—a few observations. One, tech people are not very active philanthropically in the classical sense of donating or doing public charity events and galas. They just don’t do much of that.
But the second observation is that tech people really care about making an impact on the world. It’s not that they’re just sitting on their wealth and actively disinterested in shaping the world. It seems more like they see their daily work as the best manifestation of that impact. So, I think the distinction I’d identify comes back to these wall cycles again, and how people think about their role in shaping the world over time.
Nadia: I’ve been thinking about how people shape or influence the world, and what vehicles they use to do that. If you look at the trajectory of the Industrial Revolution, the Auto Revolution, and even this recent wave of startups, your business often becomes a manifestation of your influence in the world. But early on in these cycles, you’re still counterculture. You’re the underdog, the counter-elite. Tech people, I think, are still trying to transition out of this mindset where they see themselves as the underdogs, working out of garages, doing the real work, separate from the establishment.
There’s a shift that happens, though, when there’s backlash. You realize you can’t just use startups to change the world because suddenly the government and media turn hostile. If you keep all your eggs in the startup basket, you risk being over-regulated or vilified. So, I see philanthropy—or at least a darker interpretation of it—as partly about optics, about acquiring positive reputation points by doing something good.
On a lighter note, it’s also about no longer being counterculture. You’re now mainstream, the prevailing elite. To truly become elite, you start influencing the public sector, government, academia, or media. You’re not just a business person running a company; you’re spread across all these different sectors. It feels like a necessary shift from changing the world through the company you build to changing it through everything you’re doing.
Coming back to crypto, I do feel there’s a bit of that dynamic too. Some might talk about caring for second-order effects, public goods, and such in a reputation-gathering way. But I also think there’s a newer generation of founders, or maybe just an early idealism in crypto, where people have intrinsic motivation for asking these questions. Not every problem can be tackled with a for-profit model. Take Substack, for example—if your audience can’t pay for content and you can’t find a multi-party marketplace model for someone else to pay, there’s no business model to square that equation. Some things, like providing education to underprivileged kids or malaria nets in Africa, as effective altruists often discuss, fall into the category of public goods. They can’t be serviced any other way.
So, I’ve been approaching it by asking: what are the problems that can uniquely be tackled through this lens, problems you can’t even get at through a for-profit model? I think the distinction should be between public versus private goods, rather than for-profit versus non-profit entities, which is what people often focus on in philanthropy. Honestly, I think we spend way too much time debating whether something should be for-profit or non-profit.
Even in philanthropy right now, there’s a trend away from using 501(c)(3)s for initiatives. It started with tech, with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative structuring itself as an LLC, and since then, many other funds have done the same, using LLCs or other for-profit entities. These initiatives are still doing philanthropic work, even if they’re not legally non-profits. So, I feel like that part of the discourse is broken—it’s not pointing at the right thing.
Instead, I’d start with the question: are you working on a private goods or a public goods problem? Then, you can figure out the best way to fund it to have the impact you want. There are plenty of public goods, like roads or schools, that aren’t purely government-funded. They’re often funded through public-private partnerships or even privately, like private schools, even though education is a public good. So, you ask: I want this thing to exist in the world—how do I fund it, and who funds it beyond me?
Philanthropy is often meant as early-stage, experimental funding, and historically, the pipeline is either commercialization or it becomes a government program. So, philanthropists are always trying to understand the long-term impact or sustainability of what they fund. I can dedicate three years of funding to something, but who takes over after that? That’s a tough question with public goods, and I think crypto can help solve that better than other spaces.
The common failure mode in philanthropy right now—and why so many people in tech and crypto are turned off by traditional philanthropy—is that people aren’t asking enough: does this really need to exist? What kind of goods problem is this—public or private? And what’s the impact I want to have beyond just funding this for a few years?
Sina: That’s really interesting. I totally agree with what you’re saying about for-profit versus non-profit not being the right distinction. It’s fascinating that some of these philanthropic organizations are now incorporated as LLCs, like you mentioned. Roads are a great example of a public good that can have a sustainable, scalable model around it. As someone who’s studying this question broadly, what do you make of crypto’s emphasis on public goods and how it’s discussed in this sphere? What’s unique about it? What catches your attention?
Nadia: Well, any sort of funding model for public goods automatically makes crypto distinct from, say, traditional tech. In traditional tech, there are plenty of public goods—like open-source infrastructure—that companies rely on to build commercial products. Everything is built on top of public infrastructure, but I feel like that’s not often acknowledged or prioritized in the same way.
Nadia: I’ve noticed that in traditional tech, you often have to really convince people to even consider the public good side of things. In contrast, in crypto, this perspective feels much more native. People seem to understand the importance of public goods as a foundation for enabling other commercial opportunities to be built on top of them. I think it’s really cool that there are native public goods funding models emerging from crypto.
When I zoom out even further, beyond just public goods, I start thinking about the cycles of wealth creation and aggregation, and how that wealth gets redistributed back into public society. I wonder if crypto’s efforts around public goods funding are just the beginning, or if they’ll be the endpoint. In a similar way, tech folks once saw startups as the way to change the world. Some of these startups even replaced public industries or sectors—Uber, for instance, competes not just with taxis but also with public transportation. They viewed startups as a way to do government better, in a sense. So, it’s not so different from the public goods provisioning question that crypto is tackling, just approached with a different vehicle.
For tech people, the vehicle was startups. Right now, it’s tempting to say that what we see in crypto is encouraging because public goods funding feels baked in from the start. But I wonder if it’s the same kind of pattern. Are we just using crypto as the tool to solve public goods problems in the same way we used startups? In five or ten years, will there be an expansion of those efforts? I’m curious about what crypto’s public legacy efforts might look like—maybe not just using crypto as the substrate, but public goods becoming a focus in their own right, almost like a movement born out of crypto that takes on a life of its own.
It’s hard to predict. A lot of the public goods funding efforts in crypto are still largely directed toward funding protocols that are useful to crypto itself. We’re starting to see some experiments in cause areas outside of that, though. I think of something like Gitcoin’s vision, as I understand it, where they’re inventing new mechanisms for funding public goods and using those to fund other types of public goods as they grow. That’s one trajectory I can see. But I can also imagine another where crypto ends up in a similar situation to startups today, where we realize we need to engage with other public sectors in ways that aren’t crypto-native to build our own public legacy. Maybe both trajectories happen in parallel. I don’t know.
The idea of a public goods movement growing out of being very crypto-centric to touching more of the world excites me more. The way I think about crypto, there’s crypto as a technology and a set of values or ways of thinking, and then there’s crypto as the current instantiation of the community and ecosystem. The latter feels like the perfect testbed for running these experiments. It’s a bunch of early adopters who know how to use these tools, and the stakes are lower, even if we’re talking millions or hundreds of millions of dollars—it’s still not the whole world, you know.
We’re running all these experiments in parallel with the hope that someday they can grow to touch the rest of the world in positive ways. That’s hopefully the case with public goods, with governance experiments, or with privacy tech like zero-knowledge proofs. A lot of these are being prototyped and first implemented around crypto use cases, but hopefully, they’ll go much beyond that.
Sina: I really hope so too. It’s definitely intellectually stimulating. Outside of crypto, there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much innovation happening around how people think about public goods provisioning. It’s refreshing to see all these new initiatives, and I hope the two sides integrate more over time.
I’m curious about how you view the public goods provisioning landscape. I probably have a very crypto-centric lens on it, but I’d love to learn about what other thoughtful people are doing out there. Can you point to distinct ideologies or methodologies that are alive in this space right now, broadly speaking?
Nadia: When I think about it, I see two main sectors: philanthropy and government, and how they interact with each other. Philanthropy is often the place to experiment with new ideas, and then government adopts and scales them if those early experiments prove successful.
I see immense potential in crypto, something I touched on in my book, Working in Public. One of the problems with having a central entity manage an open-source project is that you run into the limits of physical jurisdictions. Typically, when we think about who funds and supports public goods, we start with government. But because so many projects in crypto—and in open source more broadly—span across different governments and jurisdictions, there’s no clear beneficial owner. Who do you even go to? There’s no one.
That’s where crypto is forced to invent entirely new models. They can’t just fall back on working with a government because which government are you supposed to work with? It’s frustrating in open source, but it’s also kind of elegant. That limitation is going to force innovation. It might even make us rethink what those jurisdictions are. Maybe it’s not about our traditional nation-state governments. I find ideas like the Network State very compelling because they might force us to ask, okay, someone needs to provision these public goods—who is it? Maybe the natural next question is whether there are new governments or entities we could form to help steward these public goods.
I think crypto is going to have to grapple with that much more quickly than the rest of us in the real world.
Sina: Hmm, interesting. So, Network States could be these long-running collections of people who care about a particular thing or hold some cohesive set of values?
Sina: Yeah, right. Like when the network becomes the state, what is their role in sort of government’s role in the rest of the world, which has been around provisioning public goods? So, the network state might have some sort of parallel role there. Even on a more tactical level, what are people doing outside of the crypto world to fund public goods, to mobilize around these issues that you find interesting? One of them that rhymes with certain things happening in crypto is this idea of re-granting programs. I’ll let you describe it, but I’m curious—are there things like that you feel are interesting seeds of models that should be explored more?
Nadia: Yeah, I mean, in the end, I think they all still fit into the structure of philanthropic funding. But that’s also why philanthropic funding is really interesting because it can seed some of these new experiments. So, re-granting programs and scout programs are one interesting model we’re seeing.
It sort of came out of the effective altruism and rationalist communities, but I feel like it’s starting to spill over a bit into science funding. It’s where, instead of the foundation going out and finding a bunch of opportunities to fund, they create this network of scouts. Scouts are people deeply embedded in the different communities they want to impact. They give the scout a budget of, let’s say, $200,000, and say, “Go off and make these grants to whoever you want.”
It’s really cool because you’re seeing a kind of decentralization of foundations themselves. Historically, foundations have program officers—full-time staff working at a foundation, spending a lot of time trying to uncover these opportunities. Program officers are basically like investors at a VC firm, same concept. But instead of having just the in-house investor do it—and we see this at some VC firms that do have scouts—they can give a budget to people who might be able to find those opportunities more quickly, uncover them faster, and just have a better sense of taste.
I feel like a lot of these programs are still limited and constrained by real-world laws around profit-giving. They’re still pretty small experiments. It’s hard to imagine—could you have a scout program that dispersed billions of dollars? That seems less likely to me. It just can’t happen outside of the crypto paradigm because who’s going to fund it? Governments aren’t going to interface with a weird network of scouts who aren’t credentialed in traditional ways.
That’s sort of the open question I have for a lot of these new experiments. If they are successful, how will they end up influencing government? You can see some of the innovations happening around rapid grant-style programs, where it’s just about dispersing funding more quickly. Fast Grants is the biggest example of this, but there have been a bunch of rapid grant-style programs that have emerged from there. You can imagine that positively influencing government programs if it can lead some of these government funders to think about how to disperse funds more quickly and use some of the processes these programs are using to move faster.
So, there are indirect ways in which philanthropy can influence government funding, in addition to just literally copying the models.
Sina: Yeah, I feel like both re-granting programs with scouts and Fast Grants-type things are areas that people in crypto could explore a lot more, and we’re not currently. With Gitcoin Grants, we have this model where each individual votes with their own donations on what they think is a good that should receive funding. In some ways, that’s maybe the most extreme version of this re-granting idea, where each individual is a scout, but the amount of leverage they have is somehow limited—also limited by their own funds.
I feel like building a more delegated version of Gitcoin Grants or quadratic funding, where people delegate their voting power to specific individuals who are embedded in different communities and have a point of view about how certain public goods should be funded, could give those people much more leverage. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to explore. It feels fully within the realm of products and protocols that can and should be built with crypto.
Nadia: Definitely. It’s interesting to think about the differences in generational worldviews of how tech has implemented these ideas versus how crypto might implement them differently. As we’re talking about quadratic voting, I was just thinking about this. One of the things I’ve noticed with both rapid grant programs and scout programs is that a lot of it is really about high trust in one individual. You’re trusting the scout to say, technically, their budget recommendations are non-binding, but the foundation is trying not to get in the way. It’s like, “Fund what you think is best.” It’s a very high-trust model.
With rapid grant programs, a bunch of the ones I’ve talked to use this champion process instead of a consensus review process. You have a group of reviewers, and you’re not trying to reach a perfect majority vote among them. You’re just trying to find, “Does one of the reviewers really want to champion this?” And then let them lead the round, so to speak. It feels like that rhymes with the top talent thing I was talking about, where it’s like, we just believe in the power of one person who’s really competent to figure it out.
Whereas, when I think of crypto, at least, I think of more of these ideas around how to prevent any one person from gaining too much power, or how to decentralize and diffuse the power. I wonder how they might adapt those models differently based on those views.
Sina: Well, okay, maybe we could shift gears at this point and move to a second topic. I read your book, which was really good. I was reading it purely thinking about open source, and as I was going through it, I was like, “Wow, this is like you’re talking about crypto as I’m reading this.” One of the themes you talked about—and you revisited it multiple times—was this idea that at the beginning, in the ‘90s, when open source was first starting to get some real traction, people had this dream that it would look like truly many-to-many peer production of code. It was going to be this fully decentralized process where these communities are working on and evolving these open source projects together. But then, what happened naturally over time was that it skewed from this collaborative model to more of a solo developer at the center of it, or maybe a core team at the center of it, and then a loose network of people maybe contributing with pull requests, and oftentimes even creating issues for the core team.
Sina: I’ve been thinking about how in crypto, at least some segments of the community hold this view that these protocols are going to be built by collectives, by decentralized networks of individuals, companies, and entities. To some extent, that’s working. Take the example of Ethereum itself. In some ways, it’s still a protocol, and it is being developed in a more decentralized context. There are many core developers across different organizations and all that. But I feel like that’s maybe an example of that side. Then there are also many examples of seeing DAOs and the dysfunction they have in their ability to actually move things forward. It’s a bunch of people with no context commenting on things. There’s a less charitable view of what’s happening too. Obviously, the truth is somewhere in between, with cases of both. So, why did this happen in the open-source world, and is there any reason to believe that it might be different in crypto?
Nadia: Yeah, gosh, why did it happen in open source? I think the simplest answer is just the sheer volume of adoption. It’s a lot easier to talk about this when there were fewer open-source projects, and open source wasn’t the default. It was this counterculture thing that some people were doing. You had a smaller group of people even interested in it, not as many consuming or using open source. Back then, if you asked a question, you were expected to at least try to solve your own problem. It was very much a roll-up-your-sleeves and get-involved mindset. No one was a passive consumer; you were always expected to contribute.
But then, with sheer scale, open source just became free code that anyone can use, to be totally blunt about it. Now you have millions of people using these projects, and there are so many projects out there, thanks in part to GitHub. More people are just putting their stuff on the internet. So, you have a developer uploading a project they didn’t expect to get traction, and suddenly it blows up. Some random company picks up their project, puts it into their code, and now they want support. They’re just expecting help. There’s this lost context where, instead of having a couple of huge, monolithic open-source projects where everyone kind of knows each other and you have a strong contributor community, you now have this context collapse everywhere, just like what happened on the internet more broadly.
And yeah, there’s no reason to think that wouldn’t happen with crypto to some extent. As you pointed out, we kind of see it happening now. With DAOs, for example, they can be really spammy and noisy because so many people are just flooding the projects. I’ve also seen a lack of willingness from DAO leaders to step up and run the DAO. A failure mode I’ve noticed a lot in crypto is people being like, “Well, I want to embrace the decentralized ethos, so I’m just going to give it to the community and not do anything with it.” But if you look at what happened in open source, even with decentralized leadership-type projects, they start out centralized. You have the author or creator of the project, and you need to lead the community, grow it, and shepherd it a little bit until it gets to a place where they can step back. You can’t just start on day one with literally no one in charge. That’s much rarer.
It’s funny, when I wrote Working in Public, I was thinking about it a lot in the context of what open source has to say about social media and content creators, and how our world has evolved. But since publishing it, I’ve realized it also has a lot to say about crypto today. A lot of the challenges I see in crypto can directly parallel what happened in open source.
But I guess a bright spot is this: in the book, I separate the idea of consuming an open-source project versus producing one. Open-source projects can continue to be open source in the sense that anyone can use it, download it, inspect the code, and use the code for free. That’s a totally separate behavior from who should be producing or contributing to the code. Historically, those two things get intertwined where people think, “Oh, because I’m running an open-source project, I have to let everyone contribute.” Then they get either totally overwhelmed by the number of contributors or no one contributes because of the free-rider problem. But it’s okay to say, “I’m going to continue allowing anyone to use it, but I want to be a little more careful or put up gentle barriers to prevent newcomers from spamming my project.” It’s okay to recognize that some contributors are extractive, and you don’t want them there, while still producing an open-source project.
So, I don’t think open source is going anywhere, and I don’t think crypto is going anywhere either. I think it’s just about being more realistic. The laws of production are still subject to basic human behavior. You don’t have to fully embrace this completely open-everything approach. If you don’t, it doesn’t make your project not open source or not freely accessible. You can find this sort of in-between.
Sina: Yeah, there’s this spirit of inclusiveness that’s alive in crypto. Everyone wants to come in and contribute, and I think that’s a beautiful and admirable thing. I’m hoping there are different gradations of it that can work. But there’s also this tension between inclusiveness and exclusiveness, actually allowing people to come in further as they demonstrate their level of engagement, their competence, and that they’re contributing worthwhile things. That’s a harder thing to say. You’re kind of saying no to people and drawing boundaries around what you’re doing, but I feel like it’s a natural direction things need to go in.
Or maybe there are mechanisms to explore in a more fundamental way, without the core group deciding who contributes and who doesn’t, that allow everyone to contribute, and there’s choice at another layer of the stack. That’s also happening. But yeah, if you give people a hypothetical example that’s not about open source or crypto, like a club or something, where it’s the same five people always in this club, and then one day a new person joins, you’re like, “Cool, we have another person in the club.” But then that new person starts talking about changing the direction of everything, you’d be like, “Whoa, hold on.”
Sina: I know you just got here, and maybe you want to figure out what’s going on before jumping in with all your ideas. But online, there seems to be this hesitation because of these strong social norms, which, as you said, are a good thing at their core. People want to be inclusive, but there’s also this fear of going against the ethos or the spirit of crypto. It feels almost wrong to kick people out, but realistically, you’d do it in a smaller, real-world context. So why wouldn’t you do that for your project?
Nadia: Totally. If you’re hosting a party and someone comes in and starts moving around the furniture, saying, “The vibes are better this way,” you’d be like, “Hey, wait a minute.” I think another interesting thing is how you’re distinguishing between consumers of open source versus producers of open source. In the context of these crypto protocols, when it comes to governance and decision-making around the project, those groups can get conflated. There’s something to the idea that we want the platform to be governed by its users—users are a real stakeholder—but they’re not the developers. They’re not grappling with the technical design or the parameters of the project. So, there are different classes of stakeholders who should all have some say in the future evolution of a project, but I don’t think there’s a clean way to do that yet.
Sina: Yeah, and I feel like the questions get more tangled in crypto, where sometimes users literally have ownership in the project in a way that a user of a non-crypto open source project might not. There’s probably even room for another role to describe that. It’s not that users aren’t helpful to a project—they can still provide feedback, answer other people’s questions, and contribute in positive ways. But there’s a difference between giving feedback on something that’s not working or filing a bug report versus making technical decisions about the architecture of a project. It’s healthy to be able to draw those kinds of lines.
Nadia: Yeah, absolutely.
Sina: Have you thought about what it would be like to revisit the topic of your book in the context of crypto? I’ve thought about it, and I can’t tell if it’s a nightmare or a fantasy. There’s definitely room for some kind of update to talk about it in the context of crypto. Are you planning to revisit that topic?
Nadia: I’m not sure I’m going to be the one to revisit it, but I think a lot of the general principles of open source project dynamics still apply. People can translate that themselves as they read. It’s kind of too soon, though. The dust hasn’t settled yet. I’d want to wait another 10 years before revisiting that topic.
Sina: Exactly. The hard part of writing anything long-form or more permanent about crypto right now is that it feels way too early to definitively say what’s happening. Everything is changing so fast. You don’t want to write a book about something that’s going to be out of date in a year.
Sina: One other thing that caught my attention in your book was this idea—I don’t know if this was a sensible takeaway—but you cited Yochai Benkler, and he talked about commons-based production. He identifies intrinsic motivation as a requirement for this model to work, where contributors intrinsically care about moving the project forward. But extrinsic motivation coming into the equation can detract from how well it’s working. This made me think of crypto, where there’s a lot of extrinsic motivation. The current wave of protocols and foundations helping those protocols grow often rewards developers who contribute, integrate, or help grow it through grants, airdrops, or various programs. In some ways, it feels positive because you’re allowing someone to sustainably work on a particular direction with incentive alignment. But I wonder if that triggers anything for you. How does that shift things when financial value is interwoven into this web of contributions?
Nadia: It’s been really funny to watch. It’s a strange conundrum. I spent so much time talking to open source developers outside of crypto who say they’d love to be paid full-time for their work. They don’t understand why people don’t financially value open source. Then crypto happened, and you’d expect they might be excited because suddenly people are getting paid very well for their contributions. There’s a lot of money available, even just through grants to contributors. But what I’ve perceived is quite a bit of hostility toward it. Maybe it just comes from spending decades thinking one way, and then someone comes up with this magical solution, and you’re inherently suspicious of it. I’ve been kind of disappointed that within the world of non-crypto open source, there hasn’t been more interest. In some cases, there’s outright hostility toward the idea of people getting paid for their contributions. You’d think they’d be intrigued by how we could do that for their projects.
On the flip side, as you pointed out, it raises the question of how good it has been to have all this readily available funding. In some cases, it seems like it has been a demotivator for contributions. It’s like watching a real-time experiment play out. I don’t really know what the answer is. One thing Yochai Benkler said about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation was that he was operating under the assumption of contributions to open source projects that are modular and granular—easy to review, not requiring much time, like picking up a Lego block, sticking it in the project, and walking off. He believed these kinds of contributions should be intrinsically motivated.
What I think he failed to account for is that maintenance is not a modular, granular kind of contribution. Maintaining a project or being a core developer requires a broader overview of what’s going on. It involves looking at lots of different people’s contributions and figuring out how they fit together. It’s a very different kind of role that, frankly, isn’t that fun for a lot of people to do. In some cases, it does require extrinsic motivation, like getting paid or some kind of reputation boost, to keep people going. Crypto has done a tremendous job in many ways of helping pave a path for that type of work to be funded. I’d love to see more of that.
Nadia: I’ve had more experience with that, and we see the flip side where casual contributors can make a ton of money on a project they basically know nothing about and don’t care about. I think both Yochai Benkler and I would probably say that’s not the right place to be financially rewarding people. It feels at odds with the crypto-native model, though. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I like that we have these two extremes to look at and can try to figure out how to move forward from there. It definitely doesn’t seem like financial rewards are always a great motivator. We haven’t reached a steady state in how protocols reward their contributors in crypto. Over time, the amplitude of the reward might more closely approximate the actual value created.
I also wonder whether the fact that many open-source projects converge on a solo or small core team—overwhelmed by the requests of a somewhat unhelpful contributor community—plays a role. That core group and others often lack the financial resources to properly dedicate their time and attention to these questions over a long period. Looking at the Ethereum protocol, for example, there are multiple organizations building clients, and they have a vested financial interest in making this work. That transitions them from being people who care about this and do it on the side to saying, “Hey, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to hire people and approach it more professionally.” So, I wonder if there can be a state change, a different model of the whole thing working out with financial value available in the system.
I think it just needs to be figured out, as you mentioned. When thinking about what the crypto version of working in public might look like, there’s a section I’m writing about the different roles in an open-source project. You have users, casual contributors, maintainers, and so on. I feel like crypto projects would have a few additional roles to throw in there. What is the role of an investor? Not every user or token holder has the same motivations when they get involved. What are the motivations of miners in projects? There are different types of roles that might not exist in other kinds of open-source projects. If we can classify those roles and understand their motivations, it’s easy to be cynical about their presence—like they’re just in it for the money. But since they are in it for the money, maybe they actually care about a lot of things we can design for.
There’s also the aspect of different funding mechanisms. I was thinking about retroactive public goods funding, where you’re getting funding after the fact instead of upfront. Can that help mitigate some of these “get rich quick” feelings?
Sina: Totally. I have a couple of questions that are more just for fun and things I’m curious about. Going back to this idea of being an independent researcher, I’m more curious about how you go about this right now when you’re trying to build a landscape of how to think about these big-picture questions. I’m curious about your process for that. How do you spend your time? What do you read? Who do you talk to? And to the extent that you want to nerd out, I’m curious about how you keep notes. Do you use any specific systems? I’ve always thought that taking on a massive research project or writing a book requires leveling up on this dimension—having a proper system for collecting all the relevant bits of information, quotes, and weaving them together into narratives that make sense. As someone who’s doing this all day, I’m really curious about how you do that.
Nadia: Oh gosh, we can transition into the “tools for thought” portion of this. I’m allowed to have other interests too, you know. I feel like every project and every topic is different. Even comparing my time researching open-source projects to my time researching philanthropy, it’s been totally different methodologically. It’s been interesting for me to learn on the fly. In some ways, this process feels really familiar; in other ways, it’s different based on the specific topic I’m tackling.
For example, with open source, I felt like there wasn’t a lot of academic or deeper research on it. There were, however, a lot of public artifacts because they’re open-source projects, so there’s plenty of available information for me to dig through. I got great response rates from developers I reached out to because people want to talk about their projects and are disposed to sharing public information. It felt like a really green-field opportunity in that way.
With philanthropy, it’s way older than open source. Even modern philanthropy started in the late 1800s or early 1900s, so there’s a lot more to dig through. It’s already a well-established academic field, and philanthropic advising is an entire career path. So, there’s a lot more to work with, and I had to spend much more time just getting myself up to speed.
Broadly, I have these periods where I go really deep, heads-down, trying to understand a topic and familiarize myself with it. Then I might write something to help myself compound or compress what I’ve learned. I need to document this for myself, and then I just publish it because other people can read it as well. There’s often this cycle of spending time deeply researching—reading historical stuff, stuff on the internet, talking to people when I need to access knowledge that isn’t publicly available. I have to do a lot more of that with philanthropy than with open source, for obvious reasons.
For this particular project, I think I spent a good six months or so when I started just getting up to speed with what was already out there. Having that historical framework now has made it so much easier for me to interpret and understand what’s happening today. Also, I don’t want to repeat things that have already been said. I don’t really know what my whole process will look like until I’m done with it. I feel like I’m still in it. So far, there was a period of getting myself up to speed, then forming my own thesis or theories about what’s happening here, and now I’m trying to go on a couple of different deep dives to understand. I think I have this working framework, and I’m building on it.
Nadia: I’ve been working on a model to understand what’s really happening. I spent a bunch of time digging into science philanthropy this summer. I was working with Schmidt Futures on a deeper science research project, which hopefully we’ll publish soon. Testing it against that specific model helped me understand whether the things I’m noticing are true or not. I also plan on doing other deep dives moving forward, going into different topic areas to figure out if my observations hold up. A lot of this is motivated by my own open questions.
I try to form a group informally. I have my own sort of advisory panel—not that I would call it that—but people I find myself going back to over and over again because they have really useful insights. For the past few months, I’ve had a weekly reading group with a few people who are also into these topics. We bounce ideas off each other and try to figure out if things make sense. That’s been enormously helpful for getting feedback.
I think there are a few different categories of people I engage with. First, there are the actual subjects I’m trying to understand—people I talk to for insights. Then there are other researchers or folks who share the same context on a topic, and I can regularly bounce ideas off them. Finally, there’s another group of independent researcher types who are doing completely unrelated things, but it’s just nice to know they exist. Research, especially when you’re independent, can be very lonely. You’re in your head all day, so emotionally, it’s helpful to know you’re not the only one and to have people to discuss the meta aspects of research with.
Sina: Do you have an ongoing writing practice, and do you find that it’s an important part of the sense-making process?
Nadia: Yeah, definitely. In terms of my notes, one of the most painful things about writing is that I only publish a small fraction of what I actually write. I’m sitting on hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes that may never see the light of day, but they’re part of the process. I always tell myself I should just publish my unfiltered notes, but it feels very vulnerable.
I use Obsidian to manage my notes. I feel pretty low-tech about note-keeping, though. For example, when I wrote “Working in Public,” I did the whole thing in a Google Doc, which was the worst idea. I don’t recommend it because once your Google Doc gets long enough, it starts being really slow and crashing. I didn’t organize it well at all. For most of my writing, like personal blog posts, I do everything in a text editor. I like having a very simple setup—black background, white text, using something like Sublime. It’s just really minimal.
I wanted something similar for my notes. I don’t like heavy interfaces—Notion feels too much for me, and Google Docs is obviously too heavy. I just wanted my markdown files with the thinnest layer of UI to organize and see them, which is why I ended up using Obsidian. I haven’t really made full use of all the things Obsidian can do, though. I keep all my reading notes and personal notes there, and the bi-directional linking is helpful. If I have a cluster of ideas, I can link it to a related cluster.
I actually like being low-tech about writing. The most important ideas naturally keep coming back to my brain. I don’t want to force them to re-enter my mind because maybe they’re not that important. But if I keep obsessing over them and returning to them, then I know I need to write something about it or focus on it. Having all my notes in one place is nice, but I believe in the natural filtering of your brain. It’s like a natural wine kind of analog. The mind does its own spaced repetition based on how often an idea comes up and how much resonance it had the first time you encountered it.
Sina: Yeah, exactly. It’s like how much of a shock to the system it was. I could probably do another whole podcast on this topic, but I think we’ve come to the end of our time. Thank you so much for taking the time. This was really fun.
Nadia: Yeah, likewise. Thanks!