Here’s the progress we’ve made against each pillar in the last year:
1. Run Experiments
This more detailed post includes a comprehensive look at the 11 experimental bets we took in the last year & the results of each of them:
I’m very proud of the progress we made against the set of experiments we committed to running, and the overall progress we made towards finding a winning approach to double down on with the accelerator program. Check out the post for detailed updates on the experiments we ran and results we got from all of these bets:
First wave (Fall 2023 → Winter 2024)
Software for Network States Deep Work Club Solarpunk Sandbox Supper Clubs
Second wave (Winter → Spring 2024)
500 Citizens Family Neighborhood Map Eclipse @ N0 Merch Store
Third wave (Summer → Fall 2024)
Neighborhood Accelerator Network Society Camp L2 neighborhoods
I’m also excited that we’ve been able to spin out 2 independent contributor pods from Cabin Labs so far, and have a live proposal for spinning out a third one:
2. Refine Vision & Strategy
We’ve taken some major steps towards refining vision and strategy in the last year. In late 2023, we had pivoted away from rural coliving for nomads, but didn’t know where we should go next. Since then, we have updated our vision, Obvious Truths, strategy, roadmap, and goals to reflect what we’ve learned from the experiments we’ve run in the past year:
Keeping the Lights On includes dealing with all of the boring administrative work of operating Cabin. Here’s what was in the original proposal mandate:
Complete necessary database migration to keep app running (by Feb 2024)
Take care of DAO’s legal and tax needs (legal structures, tax filings, etc)
Manage digital footprint
Manage community gathering spaces (discord and discourse)
Manage social media (twitter & instagram)
Manage content (newsletter, blog, website)
Develop partnerships
Serve as the point person for inbound partnership requests
Source opportunities for new partnerships
Support proposals
Provide feedback on all proposals submitted in Proposals
Coordinate execution of multi-sig for all approved proposals
Provide support and feedback for all approved proposals
Help hold approved proposals accountable to outcomes
We’ve completed all of these tasks, and in all, they have taken up probably 20% of my time over the last year. I wish the boring administrative work took less of my time, but I fear it is an inevitable time suck, no matter how efficient I try to make it.
Additionally, as we see more independent proposals spinning out, more of my time goes towards mentoring and supporting contributors, recruiting new contributors, organizing and running contributor retreats, and reporting contributor work back out to the broader community (eg this type of post). I’d estimate that these activities now take up at least 1/3rd of my total bandwidth. While this is a large time commitment, I think it is one of the highest leverage buckets for me to invest in.
Conclusions
Overall, I think Cabin Labs has fulfilled its original promises to the DAO in the first year, and is starting to fully see the fruits of our labors.
In the past year we have gained a core growth and support mechanism for our network of neighborhoods with the accelerator program, an amazing group of contributors operating in semi-autonomous pods, a clear sense of direction for Cabin Labs and associated pods, learnings from our previous experiments and a new set of hypotheses to test, and a stronger and more engaged community and DAO than we had a year ago.
We of course have plenty of work left to do. We are playing an Infinite Game, and we’re in the early innings of building our network city. In the next year, I hope we can grow our network of neighborhoods to more than 100, refine our business model and generate revenue, and continue to be a clear frontrunner and leader of the network society ecosystem.
I’d love to hear any thoughts and feedback about how we can better serve the DAO in the next year.
Jon- thanks for putting this together. This is a solid high level overview of year 1, but I’m not seeing a lot of reflection in terms of how Cabin Labs as a three person team has been performing. Cabin Labs in some ways is also an experiment that the DAO has funded- it would be helpful to hear more about what you think this structure has done well, where there’s room for improvement, and what might change going forward? It’s expected that not everything is perfect, so it would be helpful to learn more about the challenges Cabin Labs might have encountered in year 1.
Hey @Ktando, thanks for the reply. I want to make sure to provide an answer that’s what you’re looking for, and I’m not 100% sure I understand the question. Let me know if this answers it or if you’re looking for something else.
Re: how the team is performing — @grin is currently on his own independent proposal (which will be up for renewal at the end of the year, and for which he will do his own retro) and @savkruger has shared many updates about her work on the accelerator and plans to spin out her own pod. I think they have both been excellent contributors this year and will leave it to them to cover their own areas in more depth. I’d also love for them to share their thoughts about my role in supporting their work via Cabin Labs.
Cabin Labs’ goal is to spin out pods when they are ready to operate independently so that we can give the DAO more granular control of proposals, and so that we can progressively decentralize our contributor network. We have 3 examples of independent proposals that have spun out (see Live Contributor Pods) and 2 examples where we brought contributors into Cabin Labs and they didn’t spin out/are no longer contributors. In all of these cases, I think our incubation and spin out process is working well for providing a strong onboarding and acceleration process for helping contributors get up to speed, figure out if there’s a good fit, and then bring their work directly to the DAO for evaluation via an independent proposal.
Even after pods spin out their own proposals, contributors continue to work closely together. We have a weekly contributor meeting, I have weekly 1:1s with each contributor, and we have constant async chat channels where we coordinate. I think that the full time contributors to the DAO over the past few seasons (@grin, @savkruger, and myself) have formed the strongest group of contributors we’ve ever had at Cabin.
Thanks for the response- maybe the last part of my question got lost or wasn’t clearly written. What are the areas where Cabin Labs can improve in year 2? Would love to hear from @savkruger and @grin on this too.
I think the first year of Cabin Labs was essentially 0 → 1. We rebooted most things about our core product & focus, how we operate as contributors, and how we interface with the DAO. Even this forum didn’t exist until a year ago! While I feel satisfied with the strides we’ve made in the past year, we are certainly still early in the journey and have a lot of work to do. If Year 1 was 0 → 1, Year 2 is probably about going from 1 → 10.
I will write a more in-depth post about forward-looking plans, but here are some of the biggest opportunities I see for improvement in year 2:
Network of neighborhoods
Improve neighborhood retention after program participation
Improve accelerator curriculum & cohort structure
Invest more in pre- and post-accelerator support networks
Improve neighborhood content creation and distribution to ensure a consistent, predictable flow of new applicants for each cohort of the accelerator
Make the cabin.city app more useful on a day-to-day basis for neighborhoods & their stewards
Meta/Cabin Labs
Continue to narrow focus and depth of experiments
Figure out a viable business model for the network of neighborhoods
Improve the process of finding, screening, onboarding, coaching, and retaining top talent in a DAO structure
Figure out the right ways to keep the DAO informed about contributor activity without it sucking up too much time from Doing The Thing
Figure out how to more effectively channel community energy into productive contributions
Are there other areas where you think we could improve?
The hardest part of most large creative endeavors is recruiting, retaining, and supporting top-tier contributors: people who have ideas, energy, skill, focus, and determination to make things happen. This is doubly true for DAOs. @jon’s proposal does not explicitly mention it, but these are existential problems for Cabin. Cabin Labs is our solution, and I think it’s worked really well.
Cabin Labs is close to the ideal structure: an agile, focused team with lots of autonomy and context that’s also accountable to the collective at major milestones. This places the minimum viable decisionmaking burden on constituents and strikes a great balance between efficiency and oversight. It combines the best of both traditional companies and community-run orgs. Cabin Labs mirrors the typical team<>board relationship, but here the board is the community.
Recruiting and Hiring
One huge benefit of this structure is recruiting and retaining contributors. DAOs are often bad at this. Hiring is a high-context process, and it’s really hard to get that context via proposals alone (or even forum discussion plus proposal). Cabin Labs serves as the bridge. @jon can advocate for Cabin to potential contributors, bring them on quickly, let them focus on adding value, see how they best fit in, and then help them present their work to the DAO as part of a longer-term proposal (along with his high-context evaluation of their work that’s impossible to proposal-ize).
Onboarding
This bridge has benefits in both directions: to the DAO and to contributors. Most people are not ready to work in a DAO structure when they first join. I wasn’t. Cabin Labs, and its predecessor The First Fellowship, provided the organizational and cultural training wheels to let me do what I do best (technical and strategy work) while I got up to speed. Not everyone is generalist enough to excel at their main work and also at the DAO process. For example, I’m personally learning I need to provide much more public insight into my own work. That’s something @jon’s done for me for my first year.
Supporting
People do their best work when they can focus on areas where they excel. Every tedious distraction kills performance and motivation. But every job has some overhead that cannot be avoided – accounting and legal, answering emails, paying bills, managing service accounts, etc. There’s also the work of fostering relationships and unblocking people who are stuck. Cabin Labs serves as our back office. Jon smooths all these details away so the rest of us can run full-speed ahead without tripping over any obstacles. The thousands of mundane tasks he does are hard to showcase in a retrospective, but they are absolutely crucial to our productivity and happiness and Cabin’s overall success.
Where to Improve
To me there are two main areas for improvement. First is that there’s more to Cabin than Cabin Labs. Right now the Cabin Labs crew (me/jon/savannah/kaela) has almost all the energy within Cabin. It’s hard to get other initiatives started. But one strength of DAOs that we’re underusing is that they can contain multitudes. Cabin could be pursuing more initiatives outside the necessarily-narrow focus of Cabin Labs.
My second concern is the balance between team unity and separate proposals. While I have my own prop and am accountable directly to the DAO, my day-to-day experience is being part of a team of contributors that all fit together into a coherent whole. I could not work well without them. Nor should Cabin want me to – I’m far more effective when part of a group that amplifies each others strengths and supports each other when we need it. So there’s a tension between spinning out individual proposals while maintaining team cohesion and a singular purpose.
Edited to add: wow this turned into an impromptu public performance review for Jon. thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Thanks for this write up @jon, i’ve shared some more practical questions on the experiments post, with my retrospective on Cabin Labs’ 1st year below:
Overall my experience of Cabin Labs’ execution has been one filled with disappointment, primarily due to the dramatic Cabin Labs’ pivots which unnecessarily excluded past community members while creating limited opportunities for people to engage with Cabin.
This is illustrated through the burn the ships pivot:
and by @jon’s decision to delist outposts and exclusively prioritize “walkable” urban neighborhoods as he changed Cabin’s vision and strategy to suit what he and @grin wanted to build, with little regard for the existing community that has been involved and contributed to the DAO for years.
I joined the Cabin Labs team as a paid contributor at the end of 2023, excited to help lead efforts around content and community building. After a couple months I wrote this perspective pov in February 2024 which was an attempt to communicate various issues I saw manifesting and opportunities to address them. While I tried over 7-months to help address them, @jon’s leadership style was authoritative and left me feeling unsupported in my role as a contributor.
While the Supper Club program was amazing to help run and we connected with hundreds of interested people around the globe…
… the centralized approach of having all hosts flow through me, coupled with lack of bandwidth due to competing priorities and an undersized team (@jon, @grin & I) resulted in a lower amount of repeat hosts and created unnecessary bottlenecks in the funnel. I was sad to see this program all of a sudden stopped as we had all just spent so much time getting people excited about Cabin while offering support and reimbursement to Cabin Citizens for hosting local gatherings. From my perspective, this was Cabin’s most successful marketing outreach to date based on the scale of IRL impact. I had started working on a separate proposal to help continue this program, but this was before the NAP had fully launched and Citizenship was just on pause, so it was hard to articulate what business goals the program would address.
Downstream in the funnel, the Citizenship value proposition was lackluster, focusing tangible benefits on access to Neighborhood Zero in Austin, TX, with barely any content being shared from the existing 20+ neighborhoods in the network, even though Cabin Citizens were actively living at them and working on awesome projects, and almost no effort allocated toward adding new neighborhoods.
In response to this, I suggested that we gather neighborhood hosts to create content about what they are involved with locally to help attract more people to get involved. @jon agreed that this was a good idea, but had asked me to prioritize other efforts ahead of this, along with organizing the entirety of our ETH Denver activations. I didn’t join the Cabin Labs team to be an event planner… but I accepted planning ETH Denver to help create an awesome experience for the community, helping Cabin interact with 500+ people over 2 weeks while hosting 5+ events and housing 20+ people.
During ETH Denver, Jon let @grin and I know that this would be the last ETH Denver Cabin Labs would be supporting, articulating that he didn’t think the crypto crowd was the right target customer market for Cabin to sell things to, and that while we’ve made great friends and connections over the past 2-years, we need to prioritize finding our target customer that we can build products to solve a burning need.
In a 3+ hour long team brainstorming session, Jon asked Grin and I to articulate the 1 thing we would like to build, and who we want to build it for. Not once during this conversation did Jon bring up any mention of how we could build on top of what Cabin had previously accomplished, in fact, when Grin and I asked why @jon thought we had to remove outposts from the City Directory, Jon reiterated the need to follow the start up playbook of only choosing one target customer to prioritize building a product for.
It was during this meeting that my morale really started to shift. Watching the internal recording of the meeting, I can see my facial expressions droop and sadden as the meeting went on. I had joined Cabin because of all of the amazing people I had met who were involved with it, with the hope of contributing to an inclusive DAO that supported a variety of community projects. I didn’t realize how much @jon thought of Cabin as a start-up first and foremost, and I was saddened to see @jon as a leader willing to walk away from community who were eager to be involved.
@jon made an attempt to share these updates with the community in the Spring 2024 memo:
While these are just two examples, if you read back through Cabin’s history and past proposals, you will see a culture that fostered an amazing community coming together to collaborate on projects. Under @jon’s leadership as the sole remaining co-founder, it appears to me that this culture has changed, with community engagement on socials, in Discord, and DAO proposals is down across the board from where it once was, along with a lack of visibility or transparency into other community health metrics, or the inner workings of contributor pod activities.
But I digress… one of the best things to happen at ETH Denver was that @savkruger was able to volunteer support for the event, leading to her getting a job offer to join the Cabin Labs team.
As the summer rolled around, @jon made the decision to burn-the-ships and pivot towards Neighborhoods for Families with the launch of the accelerator program. I believe that this decision should have been something that the DAO voted on, but @jon saw it as within the mandate of the Cabin Labs proposal scope to do so (please chime in in the comments to share your perspective if you have one).
As we followed Jon’s mandate to roll out the first iteration of the neighborhood accelerator program, I was eager to gather a group of ecovillage-esque builders, with commitments from 1 existing neighborhood host, and 5 new neighborhoods to participate in a cohort for more rural neighborhoods. What ultimately led to me quitting Cabin Labs, was @jon’s repeated assertion that he did not think Cabin should invest any energy into rural communities, as:
Cabin was unable to monetize products in the rural coliving setting before
Urban neighborhoods have more people living in them, so hopefully more potential customers
Rural communities have a stronger sense of self-organization, and would be less likely to want to share profit with Cabin in any given business model
I don’t think Jon ever publicly communicated these perspectives, but this decision making process that prioritized profit seeking motives over community building ones was something that did not align with my values… so, one sad morning on a team call I announced that I think I need to reassess my role at Cabin, as the Cabin Lab’s focus no longer felt aligned to what I joined to support.
After some deliberation, my role at Cabin Labs was ended.
Emphasis on a rural cohort not being a part of Cabin Labs roadmap.
Thankfully, since @savkruger has been leading the NAP program, I’ve seen her describe the NAP as focusing on “place-based” neighborhoods, regardless of whether they are rural or urban, prioritizing a focus on community building first and foremost. This is a large reason why I am back and ready to keep building within the Cabin ecosystem, as the narrow scope that @jon defined is being broadened. I am in strong support of @savkruger spinning out the NAP intro her own pod through the Neighborhood Accelerator DAO Proposal to continue the awesome work she’s been doing, and am excited for what @Dahveed, Katya, @eileen, Daniel, @KathiInPorto and others are cooking up with the Ideation Pod proposal to create more opportunity for the community to be engaged with Cabin beyond what @jon wants to support through Cabin Labs.
While I am vocalizing my criticisms directed at @jon, I want to share that I still consider Jon a friend, and that despite my critique, I know he has good intentions at heart and is trying his best given the circumstances of everything. Perhaps my perspective is rooted in a misunderstanding about Cabin, so I recently asked some questions about Cabin’s origin story here to better understand things, and I have shared all of this feedback with @jon directly, most recently as of a 1-on-1 call we had 11/8/2024 this past Friday, but alas… I’ve chosen to share this all publicly with the hopes that the community can learn from these experiences and chart a more inclusive and collaborative path forward.
In retrospect, I think that instead of excluding members of the community, @jon should have submitted a proposal to launch a new business focused on families that he could incubate alongside the broader DAO activities. This would have given the DAO a chance to truly weigh in on these decisions and their impact.
Cabin grew to popularity by encouraging folks to connect with people IRL and to build things in nature. The pivot that @jon is trying to force fit does not resonate with the Cabin brand as I know it, but I’m optimistic that as a collective community we’ll find a successful path forward.
“We believe that the only way to make progress is to experiment, fail, and learn together as a community.” - Moloch DAO(I’m not affiliated with Moloch DAO, just a fan)
Software for Network States
Deep Work Club
Solarpunk Sandbox
Supper Clubs
500 Citizens
Family Neighborhood Map
Eclipse @ N0
Merch Store
Neighborhood Accelerator
Network Society Camp
