Background
Name: JoJo
Position I am applying for: Advisor
TG: @jojothecow
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jojo17568
Affiliations (Currently I am working with, invested in, etc.): Working full time for JonesDAO as risk analyst and strategist, working in the grant committee of Questbook, working in the grant committee of the Uniswap Arbitrum Program. I am also contributing, part time, to Aura Finance.
Why You
Why would You be the best candidate for this position?
As stated, I’m the domain allocator for the Questbook Arbitrum Grant program, for which I manage the “New Protocols and Ideas” domain. Here, I have already evaluated on my own more than 40 applications in the last 3 months. At the same time, I am in the broader committee of the Uniswap Arbitrum grant program, selecting the projects to move forward to enhance the value in both the Arbitrum and Uniswap ecosystem.
This, alongside the participation through the Jones DAO STIP request in september in which I contributed on both crafting the proposal and talking with delegates, has given me a decent amount of experience in the grant program.
The experience has not only translated in approving up to now grants for more than 10 protocols, but also helping protocols, that had both a good team and good fundamentals but a not-so-good idea for the grant, to rewrite their proposal, or even, to apply to different programs that were more suited compared to the ones I am running, like applying directly to the Arbitrum Foundation.
But, I am already participating in 2 programs: can’t realistically be in the committee of a third one due to too much power concentration. So it makes way more sense to participate as advisor, to help evaluating proposals, and to be the communication bridge between all stakeholders (grant committee, protocols and delegates), to offer my evaluation, all of it without having any decision power.
Finally, as I did in other elections, I will always keep advocating for having, in governance positions, more people that are directly involved in protocols: these are people that have a different point of view compared to governance-only entities, that have a constant eye to the markets in terms of what users want, and also have a more interactions with the user base in general.
While there is a merit in having both governance people and protocol contributors, I still think the latter category is really under represented in the Arbitrum Dao, and this to me is something worth addressing.
What do you think a good incentive application looks like?
A good application is one that takes in account:
- the current PMF of the product to which the grant will contribute
- the impact of a certain amount of capital plugged on top of the product
- the metric of the current product, with no grant on top, in relation to the grant requested. Equivalent of being able to ask a proper amount, that is neither too much (AKA moon request) or too low (detrimental because might not have any meaningful impact)
- the ability for the team to leverage any meaningful increase of KPI (tvl, users, others) to further boost the product at the end of the grant OR the ability for the team to pivot the product itself once it reach the critical mass. Basically: a way for the team to keep the momentum of the grant, after the end of the grant itself, and so to have a follow up.
What are your goals for this program?
The LTIP is an interesting program. Starts from the experience of the STIP, plugs in a few key changes to address some issues (re: scalability → committee + advisor program), and has the goal to be an “improved” version with the stip that, through a potential few iteration in future, might lay down the base of the framework to have an always open program.
This intrigues me, because in the end, while we can all keep lifting, month over month, quarter over quarter, with new program, it makes just a lot of sense to consolidate the experience over time and to find a way to extend and generalize this experience to reduce the friction in building new rules, new frameworks, tackle conflicts and so on.
Personally, my goals for a program like this are not only to give an educated opinion on the applicants and their proposals (and, eventually, help them if needed), but also be able to abstract all the experience that we already have and that we will also accrue to have a direction for a more general, broad, open program that the community can tap into in future.