In this episode, we sit down with David Phelps—co-founder of JokeRace—to trace his journey from Craigslist tutoring gigs to designing experimental onchain voting systems with real users and real incentives. David shares how building a Stripe-powered tutoring DAO before DAOs were cool helped him see the future of crypto, and how a silly game about bad jokes on Twitter turned into a full-blown governance product used by the Ethereum Foundation.
We get into the weeds on distribution, incentives, and why rivalries—not kumbaya—are the key to real community. David also explains why most crypto tooling forgets the user, how founders should think about power users vs. normies, and why vote-and-earn is a controversial but necessary experiment in finding PMF for crypto-native governance.
👀 Topics:
– Building pre-Ethereum DAOs with Stripe Connect
– The surprising origins of JokeRace
– Onchain incentives vs. community vibes
– Crypto Twitter as your harshest and best validator
– Power users, product scope creep, and when to ignore feedback
– Why AI might be overrated for great devs
– The Ethereum Foundation’s role in app distribution (and why it should fuck up more)
Whether you’re building a governance tool, trying to make voting less boring, or just thinking about what makes online communities actually work, this one’s packed with insight and real talk.
Link from the talk: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/five-lessons-from-scaling-pinterest-6a699a889b08

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