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:
These changes created unnecessary harm within the community, alienating people who were excited to be involved.
I received this message from someone at Neighborhood Zero who had recently purchased Citizenship when they saw @jon’s roadmap post about the pivot:
And later saw this discord message from someone asking why their outpost was removed from the city directory:
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)