Wanted to gauge interest on putting together a proposal to create a Strategic Finance Unit (SFU) for Aavegotchi. If there is interest, I would put together a more detailed proposal on the topic. The main areas of focus for the SFU would be:
-Preparation of historical financial statements
-Creation of a monthly budget for the current year
-Long-term financial forecast
-Treasury management (reporting snapshot, diversification, yield strategies)
I have 7 years of experience in investment banking and worked closely with finance teams dedicated to building out the tradfi equivalent functions of the above.
Having a streamlined strategic finance function can help dramatically in making key decisions that impact revenue, profitability, cash runway, token price, etc. and I’d love to spear-head this effort
Would you be actively managing funds? Or simply creating a strategy for the funds?
More the latter. By putting together historical financial reports and a longer-term forecast you can help determine how funds should be managed (i.e. what yield strategies should you employ based on forward-looking cash burn, how might diversifying your treasury impact your cash burn based on different token price scenarios, etc.)
Maybe I’m a bit dense, but I don’t really understand what you’d be doing. Is it creating a budget for PC to spend on servers etc?
What we would propose is pulling together a long term business plan projecting the trajectory of the operations of the DAO. This would include looking at the historical performance of the DAO (operating KPIs, revenue, expenses) as well as budgeting/projecting potential future performance cases. Operating models like this serve as the basis for analyses that inform strategic decision making, a few examples being: potential ROI of large grants, expense decisions given DAO cash runway based on various operating/price performance cases, or any treasury diversification decisions.
Can you share a bit more your intentions and what this would look like?
As a next step, it would be great to schedule a call with some of the folks in the DTF to ask some questions and learn a little bit more about the DAO and the community. Post that, would figure out next steps which could include applying to join the DTF, making a grant proposal to begin building the SFU, both, or neither
To the extent we were planning to set up and manage all aspects of the SFU, would want to get paid for the work because it is a pretty material undertaking.
That being said, we would be happy to propose a small grant for one piece of the SFU as a “trial-run” of sorts. Then, assuming the community and DTF is happy with the work, we could determine if it makes sense to do a larger grant to set up the SFU.
As a next step though, it would be great to connect with some of the folks on the DTF. Will ping on discord and see if we can get something scheduled.
Putting together historical financial statements and a budget / forecast model for the business is hardly techno-babble. Every single tradfi company does this and they do it for a reason. If the community wants to make informed and educated decisions around treasury composition, operating spend, etc. they need to have some sort of picture of the financial ramifications of those decisions.
As it relates to an easy payday, that is why I proposed a small grant to prepare historical financial statements as a first step as opposed to requesting a large grant to do the entire thing. Given that there is no software in existence for DAOs today to prepare historical financial statements, this is a manual / tedious exercise and will imply a very low hourly rate. I would be doing it more as a first step to get involved in the community and start to add-value
I’ve been gearing up to start the DAO Aarchivist Taskforce for a long time here, and my process has been to prove that it works, before asking for funding. I have done that, and am ready to submit an application, using the last two months of us doing the work on a voluntary basis, as my “case study”
Maybe you might get less pushback if you started by doing some analysis, and showing us what it is you are adding to the mix.
Fren, I’d advise against voting OP to the DTF. I flipped through the general 'Gotchi discord and saw some scattered commentary. I’m curious about your Aarchivist Taskforce. Where can I find specific details?
