Gitcoin Contributors recently met in Lisbon for a 3-day retreat to build out our 2024 strategy, alignment and conviction on our goals, and in-person collaboration. Many thanks to @deltajuliet , Jess, @CoachJonathan and others for their roles planning this event!
I’m including a recap of the event below. Stay tuned for more takeaways and follow ups, including a S21 wrapup/Q2 lookahead from Grants Lab and our $50M GMV strategy.
Day 1:
We kicked off with a joint session across Passport, Grants Lab, and Ecosystem Collective. @kyle led a welcome session and a preview of the days ahead. We played a fun game of Human Bingo as an icebreaker – kudos @CoachJonathan for organizing. I’d be remiss not to note that the Grants Lab product team ( @melissa @michelle_ma and yours truly) brought home the proverbial bingo trophies.
We also held a Q&A where the team was invited to send anonymous questions answered by leaders across the DAO. We received over 20 questions that led to a great discussion. We should do this format more often – I will plan to roll it out for GL Monthly Meetings. @deltajuliet is leading a summary of the Q&A that will be posted to the governance forum, and raw questions can be found here: Lisbon Q&A.
Finally, we held a presentation by @owocki and myself on the Gitcoin 2.0 Whitepaper. This was a great review and deep engagement and discussion from the team.
Many of the Q&A questions centered around Gitcoin’s financial strategy, which myself, @deltajuliet , and @owocki spent time at the offsite talking about. You’re already seeing posts from @deltajuliet roll out (link and link) in executing our 18-month financial strategy. We’re focused on using our existing treasury and current bull market conditions to buy ourselves time and stability. This may include diversification of GTC into stablecoins, investigating yield generation efforts, and more.
Concurrently, the Grants Lab team is focused on building network effects for eventual financial sustainability. The most important thing is to build Allo GMV growth and widespread Allo adoption (including, but not limited to Grants Stack adoption.) While we are focused on adoption, we will trial value capture mechanisms to validate that value capture can work at scale. After network effects are achieved, we will focus on scaling value capture mechanisms with the goal of financial upside and eventual financial sustainability.
We will provide regular updates and revisit these goals in 12-18 months!
Day 2 & 3 (Grants Lab)
The Grants Lab + RPP teams spent the bulk of the retreat talking about how to increase Allo GMV. We have a “business” goal of $15M in 2024. This is based on our $5M GMV achieved in 2023 and feels like an achievable, business-as-usual goal for this year and we’re tracking this publicly. We also have a stretch goal of $50M in 2024. This is our BHAG – we think it is totally achievable if we get creative and push ourselves to think outside the box.
We spent a lot of time building context on the market, our pipeline, and our competitors. This info can be found here: Day 2 - Allo GMV 2024. We identified a number of areas that we need to focus on or improve in order to hit our goals. These include optimizing our sales cycle & time to close, expanding our partnerships with current clients, and opening up more opportunities with organizations that are primed for growth this cycle.
We explored and brainstormed different ways to hit $50M GMV this year and took bets on where they might come from: $50gmv betting exercise. We have a clear focus on selling into large treasuries as well as a number of bets we can place in innovative product and GTM strategies.
With that innovation in mind, we also talked about where opportunities lie across different mechanisms. QF is our bread and butter, and we will continue to invest in making this an excellent product. Easy RPGF could be big – or not! We’ll be able to tell after the pilot program, which is currently running. We also believe that there is still lots of potential for Direct Grants, but we need to improve the product & marketing for this to be successful.
We were lucky to welcome the Rapid Prototyping Pod into Grants Lab meetings during the offsite and really enjoyed this collaboration. There’s been discussions about the future home of RPP now that @owocki is taking on the CTO role in Grants Lab. We will evaluate this quarter on where this should live in the future.
Day 2 & 3 (Ecosystem Collective)
Thanks @CoachJonathan for these notes!
- Day 1 - Personal Development
- Improvisation workshop
- The team took an hour out of their afternoon to do a series of activities meant to spur creativity and encourage being OK with making mistakes & the discomfort that comes with that
- Design Thinking Test
- Design Thinking is an incredibly powerful methodology that forces implementers to tap into their emotional intelligence to design better for their users
- This assessment provided the team a look at what skills and behaviors that have & are lacking in order to bolster their design thinking chops
- Results were discussed, recorded and input into a personal development implementation plan that will be reviewed every 4-6 weeks to ensure that is gradual progress and mastery in this domain
- Peer Review Disucssion
- Ahead of the retreat, each team member provided & received feedback from fellow team members to give them a sense of where their strengths & areas of improvement are
- An open discussion provided an opportunity for team members to provide more context and for individuals to come up with plans/strategies to capitalize on areas of improvement
- Everything was recorded and input into a personal development implementation plan that will be reviewed every 4-6 weeks to ensure that is gradual progress toward identified areas of improvement
- Improvisation workshop
- Day 2 & 3 - Coworkiung
- Community-facing OKRs
- Reviewing the OKRs set in our budget renewed our focus on aligning our work to accomplish what we set out to do at the beginning of the season
- We looked not just at “where are we now and where are we going” but also from the perspective of “how do we bring the community along with us?”
- What opened up was a broader conversation about our “Innovation” focus area and new ideas on how to loop in Citizens
- More will be shared on this initiative at the start of S22 at our mid-term budget review
- Brand Narrative Building
- Gitcoin has long struggled to land firmly between its Regen narrative & credibly neutral protocols - credibly neutral & Regens (who are not credibly neutral) are naturally misaligned
- Discussion about how to bridge this gap was the main focus of several conversations
- Another challenge was trying to weave in all the other narratives that we’ve once taken up around Quadratic Lands, Green Pill, Public Goods, etc. all while staying 100% committed to seeing Gitcoin find financial long-term sustainability
- We landed in a really great spot and the community can expect to see posts about this in our governance forum and later manifested in the form of events and inspiring & exciting online community activaitons
- Coworking
- The team took the opportunity to move forward on a number of projects including:
- EthCC planning
- Future collaborations with CrowdMuse
- Roadmapping and project management
- The team took the opportunity to move forward on a number of projects including:
- Community-facing OKRs
Conclusion
I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend time with the full team – this only happens once a year and I truly appreciate the time people take away from their busy schedules. This offsite was an incredibly valuable experience and use of resources. Stay tuned for more follow ups.
