[Partnership Project Intro] Scaling workforce in MetaCartel using decentralized hiring bounty model

🧸 DApps & Projects
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Hi MetaCartel community,

My name’s Andy and I’m the head of DAO product at Techtree, a startup company working on an bounty based value exchange platform.

About us

Techtree is a platform, where users can monetize their personal assets such as personal networks, knowledge and reputation by helping other members of trusted networks (such as DAOs, VCs and their portcos, communities) they belong to. Our initial focus is one of key Web3 challenges - hiring. We believe we can scale the workforce of DAOs and Web3 Communities by making it easy for their existing permanent workforce and larger community to refer talent to open positions while getting systemically rewarded.

We are already working with a number of VCs and their portfolio companies as well as Web3 Projects and are excited to pilot the model with top DAOs to help grow their workforce.

Team and Investors

  • Founding team : Pawel, Stanislas, Laurence
  • DAO Head of product : Andy (author of this post)
  • TechTree is backed by Notion Capital, Frontline Ventures, StakeDAO, Move Capital as well as the ex-CEO of Skype, ex-CTO of Workday, ex-CTO of Nutmeg, co-founder and ex-CFO of Monzo and ex-Head of Sales of Stackoverflow and additional great angel investors.

Successful Acquisitions & Bounties paid

  • Over 400k USD paid out in bounties
  • Companies backed by top investors such as A16Z, Sequoia, Index, Northzone, NFX, Advent or ecosystems like MakerDAO or Solana have hired tech talent through us .

User base

  • Live:
    • Inflection.xyz - leading Web3 European Fund
    • Tech Nation - Top UK growth programme whose alumni include almost 200 top tech companies including unicorns like Revolut, Monzo, Tessian, Paddle, Eliptic and many more
  • Waitlist / onboarding
    • VCs: Notion Capital, Polychain Capital, Frontline Ventures + 21 other VCs

Hiring Challenges in Web3

Effective, time and cost-efficient hiring of quality talent has been a challenge for Web3 space. A few most challenging issues are:

  • Slow and high cost to attract and hire Web3 Talent using agencies
  • Low trust in jumping for Web2 to Web3 for many talented developers
  • Apathy in potential candidates due to quantity-oriented hedging strategies by recruiters.
  • No systemic flow of talent between DAOs, Web3 Communities and VC Portfolio companies

Techtree Bounty Boards and Talent Branches

At the heart of Techtree are Talent Branches. It is a talent pool of referred talent accessible for its select members e.g. hiring parties in the MetaCartel community. Talent can be referred by the community itself or can flow from other communities, DAOs and VCs based on candidate opt-in to get visible to other talent branches.

Candidates apply directly to the Talent Branch generic roles or get referred via sharable bounty boards - a simple listing of open jobs with their corresponding bounties.

Techtree talent branches are interoperable which means, opted in talent can be made visible to ecosystems creating one overarching talent network.

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Here are live examples of a talent branch and a bounty board

Clear bounty reward flow

Techtree model offers tiered rewards depending on the role you play for getting to the candidate who gets hired (Creators, Sharer, Referrer rights) .

Untitled

Additionally there’s a flat fee model. As Techtree we’re charging 15% on top of the bounty once talent gets hired. More information is available in the Mirror post here.

Potential Benefits

It’s all basically about effective hiring while rewarding community for help.

  • Hiring is faster and cheaper with a systemic hiring reward system empowering the community
  • DAO members’ can start monetizing their personal networks
  • Value is retained within the ecosystem instead of paying intermediaries
  • Additional DAO revenue streams can be created by referring talent and collecting bounties within broader Web3 space
  • You help build an ecosystem of Web3 talent flowing seamlessly across different DAOs, communities and VC portfolio companies

Future of the Project

We are thinking of a number of features to include in the future releases. Here are some of them:

  • bounties locked in DAO native token (currently FIAT and USDC only)
  • profit pools shared among communities as Techtree starts generating profit
  • applying bounties to other ares including knowledge, sales, asset acquisition and more

What we ask of the community

We are looking forward to hear from the community about current DAO hiring needs and the potential of running a pilot project to help make hiring more effective across different projects in the MetaCartel ecosystem.

To run a pilot project we:

  • Create MetaCartel talent branch (or DAO-wide talent pool)
  • Help projects that are currently hiring set up their bounties
  • Actively promote the talent branch throughout Techtree network

Since we already have a huge pool of talent sourced from a number of active talent branches, talent can flow from in and be readily available to hiring managers in the DAO.

We are of course more than happy to present Techtree to the community in more detail.

Thank you for reading the post.

References:

Techtree Website
My mirror article detailing the Techtree Concept.

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Thanks for the post. It looks like a very interesting project. Meta Cartel itself doesn’t have any hiring needs per say. Certainly projects that are part of our ecosystem definitely hire though so hopefully there will be some interest.

I am personally interested in learning more and will check it out. Perhaps in the near future we can book you in for a demo at our townhall. Product testing is not a normal activity for us as that takes a certain amount of time commitment that is difficult to impose on members. If we schedule for a townhall though and see what happens.

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Thanks for your reply @boilerrat . Indeed where I think Techtree could create synergy together with MetaCartel is with projects seeking to hire. Using individual and DAO-wide social channels these positions could be filled in much faster, also de-fragmenting the hiring landscape to create one common pool of talent.

Also, there is no “testing” overhead really. All we need to do is to create a talent branch ready to take in referrals and direct applications. Projects would be able to immediately access that talent pool and proceed with candidate reachout as the pool grows. But for that it would be helpful to understand the current hiring needs for projects in the ecosystem. Is there a source of truth for that?

We’ll be more than delighted to present at the townhall to bring the project closer to the community.
Have a very good day!

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Hey @boilerrat - I’m one of co-founders of TechTree. I think in your case what could be a good value for the DAO / community would be to make it possible for individuals that you’ve gathered to either make themselves visible for the projects that are in your ecosystem and are hiring or referring people from their network to the projects in your ecosystem that are hiring (and getting rewarded for it). This would help you to grow the ecosystem, enable your community to get value for meaningful contributions as well support projects by helping them hire truly mission-driven team who is part of the community for a while.

We’re flexible when it comes to the form of interaction - the most important thing for us is to see if we’re addressing problems that you currently observe and get more insights about your actual problems.

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As I am understanding this, and forgive me if I’m weird but it is what it is, you are building a mycelium network of sorts, a skill graph in which the right people surface based on needs?

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That’s a cool way of putting it - and generally yes, that is the case. What we’re also focusing on is the addition of “relationships” (personal network) and “reputation” into the mix. Another way to put it would be a network of networks.

To put it simpler less graphic terms:

  • every user on TechTree can create their talent (network) database - individuals (i.e. experienced CTO), creators (tech blogger), community (meet up), DAO, Venture Capital firm
  • such database would be known as “Talent Branch”
  • people who join Talent Branch, self describe their skills across technology as well as share other relevant details (location etc.) AND give Talent Branch admin permission to share their profiles with whomever they see as relevant
  • Talent Branches can invite different organizations or even other Talent Branches to get access to its database of talent. For example MetaCartel could share its talent with portfolios of top VCs in this space - such as Polychain Capital or Inflection
  • When a company accepts the invite to the Talent Branch they can see the list of candidates that are available for them, with skill tags and other relevant info they’ve shared. They can also add their own roles to get matches to this talent (I.e. you add a solidity engineer role, 2+ years of experience, based in US and you see the list of candidates who fit into that).
  • Companies are forced to reach out to people on the talent branch with a concrete offer - once people express interest their contact details are shared with the company.

The last piece we add is also really important: Monetization

  • Talent Branch admin’s can set the price (bounty) for talent from their Talent Branch - currently it can only be a fee paid upon successful hire, but in future we want to enable them to set up a subscription paywall (i.e. monthly fee required to pay for their talent).
  • The Bounty is always displayed in the dashboard next to the candidates (you can see it on the picture below)

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It was a long answer to a short question :slight_smile: but I hope it was useful.

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Yeah, this is pretty cool. How are credentials verified?

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I’d really like to get you in for a pitch at one of our Tuesday townhall meetings. Can you DM me your Discord usernames?

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@boilerrat Perfect! Sent over Discord handles . By credentials do you mean, how user credentials are verified on the platform?

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We’re working on a few layers here, but on day 1 we’re relaying mostly on reputation.

  1. Talent Branch admin’s are going to be able to:
  • include written references for people they know and worked with
  • include a relationship status - i.e. how well they know the person

Anyone looking at these candidates would have access to this information (+ Talent Branches would have credibility as well - see more later)

  1. Talent Branches would have profiles:
  • except of simple statistics related to the profiles (how many people, how experienced, geo split etc.) we would have “behavioural data” [how many people from a given talent branch was hired / invited to interview / rejected etc.] + “badges” - i.e. if you help to hire 5+ people to Polychain portfolio you’ll get a badge saying just that
  1. Skill data is declarative, but people include a broader set of data:
  • their CV
  • links to github etc.

  1. In future we also want to integratate technical tests from one of the leading providers

  2. Community based vetting - we’re also discussing a community based vetting - one of the early iterations is that we want to enable companies hiring on our platform to leave a positive review of a person they have not decided to hire. We would like to create an incentive system for such reviews.

  3. We’ll enable candidates to “add” their peers / ex-bosses etc. who worked with them who can confirm their skills and make it easily accessible.

This is a hard problem to solve, so we’re open for suggestions :slight_smile:

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