On The Ledger x FXB #1: Alex Zhang ("Mayor of FWB")

In this first episode in a series of conversations with Ledger and Friends With Benefits, we talk to the Mayor of FWB Alex Zhang about building DAOs and community business in general. We talk about the desires of communities to diverge over time and the desires of companies to make money and how to balance those two things from a perspective of community incentives and ownership. We talk about how to keep community cool, when nothing can stay cool forever, and how to put structures in place to keep companies cool through different cycles.

FWB is one of the first community owned social DAOs and it is new kind of social network. It started by asking the question, “can you contain cultural value in a crypto asset”? We talk about how to align community incentives, learnings from the first couple of years of FWB, and where the DAO is headed in the near term. We talk about how it works to govern a DAO by voting, different voting regimes, and whether you can build a successful brand “by democracy.” We talk about Network States, startups, DAOs and the parallels between all of them. Finally we talk about taking a URL community into IRL experiences. We discuss FWB FEST22 and how we brought FWB to life and what to expect at FWB FEST23.

Finally, we discuss the tools that FWB is building like Gatekeeper and the FWB App where you can track events, participate in FWB governance, and interact with other members of the FWB community with an eye toward eventually moving away from discord and into the app as the ultimate digital home.

FWB FEST is a destination gathering of new-internet communities, and a temporary network city for creating culture and exploring new ideas. FWB FEST23 is taking place in Idyllwild, California from August 4–6, 2023. For more FEST info and passes, visit https://fwbfest.xyz.