Thanks for your interest in learning more about Cabin and the time you’ve invested in talking to community members. I had the chance to get to know you better over the course of our 4.5 hour call this week. As a person who showed up recently, I can tell you have a lot of excitement about Cabin and desire to contribute.
I was surprised in our conversation by your lack of understanding of how Cabin operates, and I offered to answer any questions you had. You said you didn’t want to focus on asking questions about the past because you weren’t there and couldn’t pass judgment on it, and have proceeded to ask many questions.
I am happy to try to answer your questions, but I think there are a lot of broader misconceptions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations in this post. You’ve spent a lot of time talking to a small but vocal group of community members who are dissatisfied. Cabin is in a period of transition and is grappling with real, hard questions. Those community members’ opinions are valid, but they do not represent the whole picture.
But it’s much easier to show up and ask dozens of questions than to do the work of building and providing comprehensive answers to questions, and you seem to have grown frustrated with multiple members of the community that you aren’t getting detailed answers at the speed you are requesting them. As far as I can tell from your Census profile, you aren’t a token holding member of the DAO, and multiple members of the community have independently reached out to me to share that your conversations with them have come across as aggressive, harassing, accusatory, misleading, and unproductive, especially for someone who recently showed up and has no prior history of contributing to or participating in Cabin.
Ultimately, Cabin decides what to do via our governance process. We don’t always all agree on a path forward, but people who have been involved and earned our governance token get a say in what we do. We approve proposals, and those proposals create scoped pods to execute on a specific direction. I can only speak on behalf of the pod I steward, Cabin Labs.
I will try to address your core questions about Cabin Labs below:
Cabin Labs’ plans, experiments, and priorities were discussed within the community extensively and the DAO overwhelmingly approved Cabin Labs to execute on them.
Here are some of the forum posts where we discussed and iterated on what we were planning to focus on:
- Fall '23 Strategic Update
- Fall 23 Product Directions
- First Fellowship retrospective
- Cabin Labs
- Winter 24 Roadmap
- State of the Network: Winter '24
- Cabin Labs - proposed bets
- Cabin Labs - Spring 2024
In Fall 23 Product Directions, we asked:
In Cabin Labs’ approved proposal to the DAO (Cabin Labs), we shared our intended focus areas:
Cabin Labs’ Spring 2024 Roadmap update (Cabin Labs - Spring 2024), which received and incorporated lots of positive feedback from the community centered on discussing these questions:
I only used the phrase “burn the ships” once, in the Cabin Labs 2025 Roadmap Planning Kickoff, referring to a post from Kevin Owocki about Gitcoin DAO. I then reiterated that Cabin Labs’ roadmap was planning to deprioritize the things we’d already said we were planning to deprioritize (to very positive reception from the community, and incorporating further community feedback) in the previous roadmap update:
Cabin Labs is only one contributor pod at Cabin, and I can only speak for its roadmap and what we did and didn’t focus on. Anyone else in the DAO could have focused on and worked on these other things, if they put together their own proposal to do so. I highly encouraged and supported some of the people you interviewed to create their own proposals to pursue the things they wanted to do that Cabin Labs wasn’t planning to do, including things on this list. No one submitted a proposal.
Cabin Labs is still active, and Cabin has never asked contributor pods to publicly publish all of the things you’re asking for. We have provided many updates to the DAO (I shared a laundry list of some of them above) and operate as an onchain organization, with all contributor pods operating via independent onchain multi-sigs visible publicly to everyone in real time.
Cabin Labs did not oversee these other proposals. The goal of Cabin Labs has been to run experiments and spin out projects that were ready to create their own proposals to the DAO, and that’s exactly what we’ve done. Both of the other proposals you referenced are examples of that.
Those are also not accurate representations of 2024 revenue or the NAP’s plans for 2025. We don’t have our final 2024 revenue numbers yet because the year isn’t over and we do our full accounting annually. For the NAP, Savannah is best suited to talk more about the 2025 plans, which she wrote about in her extensively discussed proposal.
I wrote about our pilots and experiments over the last year, including explanations of which ones succeeded and failed and why here: Cabin Labs - First Year of Experiments, Oct 23 - Oct 24
Very little of Cabin Labs’ money and time was spent keeping the lights on. When we started Cabin Labs, Cabin had just shut down its core product due to lack of product/market fit and had no contributors, very little DAO engagement, and no clear path forward. Most of our efforts were focused on rebuilding the pipeline of experiments, the network of neighborhoods, the DAO, and the contributor team from the ground up.
Here’s the retro on what we said we would do, and what we did: Cabin Labs - First Year Retrospective. Given where we were a year ago and what we said we’d do, I think we met our objectives and helped set Cabin up for its next chapter.
There is more work to do, and we as a community are doing the work of figuring out the path forward together. I have been heartened by the community conversations happening about the path forward recently, and I expect them to continue to blossom as we navigate this path together in the coming weeks and months.