Identity and validating qualifications with Evin McMullen of Disco.xyz

Maren Kate
Hello. Hello. Today my guest is Evin McMullen. I'm super excited to have Evin on the podcast. She's currently the CEO and co-founder of Disco, your digital identity for the metaverse. Evin is also a core community member of Boys Club, which is a global community of women and nonbinary people in Web3. Evin, we are super excited to have you. Welcome.

Evin McMullen
Thank you so much for having me today. Let's get this party started.

Maren Kate
Awesome. And you guys can't see right now but Evin has amazing disco ball earrings so really has set a great mood. So my first question is just around, kind of, career-wise how did you get here? What was your very first job and then what was the trajectory to do what you're doing now?

Evin McMullen
So I think the short answer for how we got to now is that I had the absolute best professor of all time when I was an undergrad who opened my mind and set forth my career on this path. I was studying computer science and anthropology and ended up in a seminar led by an incredible woman who introduced me not only to the universe of free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, and the intersection of law, technology and culture but that also led me to learn about Bitcoin and decentralized technologies. So the same professor, Elizabeth Stark, who now leads Lightning Labs over in the Bitcoin ecosystem but she actually also helped introduce me to my very first job. So I worked for Jesse Dylan, who's an incredible creative and producer in West Hollywood and we were producing all kinds of content. The firm Wondros produced commercials, music, videos, and pro-social and nonprofit content and we supported the work of everybody from bands like One Republic to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider helping them lobby for basic science research funding from the US government. So it was an incredible opportunity. I ran the story department which meant helping to translate the many diverse narratives that we wanted to share in a variety of different forms in a way that would meet people where they are using language that was accessible but not dumbing DAOn or simplifying the robust ideas that we were able to communicate. Some of my favorite projects included working on things like the launch of IBM Watson so introducing these technologies that we have really grown to become used to in our society but really being part of that first entry was really cool.

Maren Kate
And then what was your, I guess, early introduction to Web3, to DAOs, especially, what led you to what you're doing now at Disco? What was the first, you know, starting to dig in and really getting involved in that space?

Evin McMullen
So Web3 for me started off as a hobby. I was curious about Bitcoin. It was a sort of fun, almost like a toy to play with, and when smart people who I respected, folks like Alexis Ohanian, started talking about digital wallets I began paying attention in a much more serious way. So I would hang out at hackathons, go to hackathons with my friends, spend a lot of time kind of lurking around the edges of Reddit and Twitter, and reading a lot of white papers but it wasn't until 2017 that I started working full-time in Web3. At the time, I thought of it more just as crypto as opposed to the extended definition of the metaverse that I contemplate today.

Maren Kate
Very cool and I like the way you define that too.

Evin McMullen
We're a much broader set of capabilities and ideas, I think than the financial use cases where we've started but those very use cases were what led me into Etherium and to learn first about the capabilities of human coordination using public ledgers but then, to your point, got me really interested in DAOs and how we can coordinate groups of individuals to solve problems together, to pool resources and capital, and to embody collective decision making and collective ownership in a very real way. So, in my own practice, I am, as you noted earlier, an active member of the Boys Club community, which is an ecosystem of Web3 learners and experienced veterans of the space who like to come together both in-person and online to explore the bounds of what's possible in Web3, building projects together, discovering new opportunities and new applications, and maneuvering this space as a unit. I also have helped to start DAO Jones, an investment DAO.

Maren Kate
I love that name. I saw that I was like, I love it.

Evin McMullen
We're a bunch of degens and DJs. So folks that come from the crypto and Web3 space, folks that come from the music space, and together we invest in early-stage sort of pre-seed and seed organizations in the Web3 community. So it's really wonderful to have the opportunity to help support early-stage teams in the exploration of moonshot ideas that otherwise might seem crazy. But we are the team that backs crazy because we know that's exactly what we need to bring more fun to this Metaverse, to make it a more delightful and fulfilling place for us to spend our time in the future. I also casually am involved in a few other DAOs where I've participated in governance, where I've participated in vibes and community and discord and actual parties, and what I've learned is that DAOs are really awesome at pooling capital and spending money together. But anything beyond being a group chat with a bank account requires an extraordinary amount of effort and an extraordinary amount of centralized tools with their own challenges and biases and lack of continuity. So we have a long way to go in terms of building the capabilities we need for DAOs to realize the true potential future of work.

Maren Kate
Okay and so in terms of that where do you see...because I agree with you on that and I…what are the building blocks that will have to be laid and what do you see already being done to get to a point where this could maybe expand to compensation or things like this. You think about when someone does work right now they do it for a salary, hourly salary or an hourly wage, there's equity, there's different things, occasionally, anything from stocks to RSUs. What do you think we will need to have in place for DAOs to be more robust and really impact the way people are hiring and the way people are working?

Evin McMullen
So if we think about the tools that DAOs are based upon today, generally, a trait that we can assume about many DAOs is that those members that make up these organizations have wallets, they have public addresses that allow them to own and control tokens. So, generally, what this means is that within a DAO if the only thing I know about you is your public address, let's say your Etherium address, the only thing that I know is how much money you have, how many tokens you have, what NFT's you've purchased, but just public financial data, which means that we can only coordinate amongst ourselves trustlessly using this network with our public financial data, which means we can only pool capital, share a treasury, allocate that treasury, but we can't solve more interesting coordination games because we don't know much more about one another. So if we're only going off of our Etherium addresses, let's say, we can't plan a party or write a song very effectively. We need the ability to determine which of us is more qualified or more capable or better suited to success in a given task. But, of course, we want to make sure that this data, this information about ourselves, is shared with our consent in a manner befitting our objectives. So we are not over-sharing this data. We are not handing it over in a manner that might be used out of context without our permission. So not only do we need to maintain our integrity in this interaction but we need to do so in a manner that's going to signal usefully to the friends that we're trying to coordinate with so that we can do more than just spend money together. So what does this mean? Generally, I think in DAOs we want to be able to, as you noted, capture proofs of our nonfinancial work. If I write the newsletter for the DAO, I would like to have proof that I have indeed contributed that value so that I can bring that proof to my other professional experiences in DAOs and elsewhere and I can show that I have indeed made a valuable contribution to this community. If I'm able to capture those proofs over time in a way that is legible to other DAOs I can lower the switching costs that I might experience when I joined a new organization because today I can't really bring a resume that’s verifiable with me. That individual who is assessing my aptitude is probably going to contact the people I used to work with to make sure that what I'm saying is valid and that's going to cost time for everybody. So in order to be more efficient, to more swiftly allow us to enter new environments and begin contributing value, we can make it easier on ourselves by adding more trust cues so the known universe of information that you can have about me, under my consent, can be greater without putting some weird party in the middle of the two of us.

Maren Kate
Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, I feel like, in an ideal world, this is what finally kind of disrupts different not only social networks but even professional social networks like LinkedIn. Or you think about job hunting and you think about, you know, there's just proof of being able to do something or that you have done something in the past. I feel like, your background was storytelling, I've noticed, so being in the recruiting and talent space for years, is some of the most amazing professionals that I've interacted with they're just not great at telling their story but once you get talking to them, you're like, oh, my gosh, there's so much they have, so many interesting things they've done, there's so many cool tie ins, there's so many applicable skills and qualities and traits but it does seem like, usually, we're not great at telling our own stories and selling ourselves in that professional way. But I like the idea of having a way to track that and actually verify it so there's a more continuous story and you're also giving consent with that.

Evin McMullen
That is the key here. Active, informed, enthusiastic consent. So if we want to build a new way into the future that forestalls the surveillance capitalism we are subjected to today, we need to create some healthy boundaries around the value and the data that we produce. At Disco we think of your identity for the metaverse as your need for a private data backpack so that when you create valuable data you're able to bring it with you when you leave and carry it from one application to the next so that you have to fill out fewer forms and fewer captas so that you have to spend less time onboarding and you have the opportunity to spend more time enjoying the activities you were trying to do anyway.

Maren Kate
Will Disco’s success really require kind of a critical mass? How are you thinking about and approaching that issue?

Evin McMullen
I think of success as the net of how much agony and frustration we remove from a user's day and how much delight and value we introduce into their day. Disco is about fun which means that our success rides on how much more fun you're able to have as a result of this new construct where inviting. We see an opportunity to help users get more efficiency out of the places they already spend time and to derive more value out of the communities they already contribute to which means we have an opportunity to enhance value flows that exist today and to remove friction and add delight to the experiences that people are already seeking that we know that they already want. So we're not inviting a totally new set of patterns and, quite frankly, we don't assume that we know the kinds of activities people should be doing but we want to help them do what they already do better, faster, more cheaply, more efficiently in a more globally accessible way.

Maren Kate
So tell me, how did you get to the point of founding this, like, what was that journey? What was the moment you decided to pull the ripcord?

Evin McMullen
So I've had the amazing opportunity to work in a variety of sort of b2b enterprise contexts within the Web3 ecosystem but after spending a few years thinking about how large businesses can communicate with one another I kind of took a step back earlier this year and thought, “that is not what I came here to do”. We have the opportunity to build a future where everyone is included. That means building tools for everyone to enjoy. That does not mean Evin’s spending her day thinking about the marginal utility to a large corporation of some new idea that we might invent. And so I decided to take a step back from that particular work that I had been engaged in for so long focused on enterprises and how they interact and contemplated, reflected on, the time that I was spending with my friends building DAOs which felt so inspiring and so exciting. To be able to come together with people all over the world around a shared idea and collectively produce and create. I was also inspired by friends like Mark Beylin who's the CEO of a team called Myco that offers streaming ownership based on your contributions to a collective shared goal. So there are all of these new models of ownership and participation and, right now, I think the conversation is stifled because that ownership and participation is largely financial but we are more than the contents of our wallets. We are full whole people with experiences and ideas, preferences, friends, senses of humor, and we don't have the data primitives that we need to capture all that makes us us. So in Web3, at present, we are simply communicating our public financial information and so in order to make a Web3 that is available to everyone, welcoming and accessible to all, not just wealthy enterprises already in a position to interact, we need to be able to express the value sets and the traits and capabilities that are important to the rest of the world beyond these ivory towers, beyond where wealth exists already, beyond where power exists already. So it's in pursuit of that more accessible goal and in pursuit of nonfinancial activities in the metaverse that we decided to build Disco.

Maren Kate
And at this stage where you're at right now…So first of all, how long has this DAO been in existence for?

Evin McMullen
So properly, formally, and perhaps in a grown-up form, you might say, we just began early this year in the winter and about February. We have recently begun testing in our private beta. We've had folks set up their data backpack so they can take ownership and control of data written about them. In a handful of tests, we've had the opportunity to test it in person. So folks doing activities at home online-enabled with their Ethereum compatible wallets and then bringing their credentials, their data backpack, with them to a party to be able to redeem their experience at home for a physical disco ball in person and even crash the party, which is pretty fun.

Maren Kate
Oh, that's awesome. I do think there's something really important about the fact that you've used the term fun multiple times. It does seem, in the world of the internet or business or even Web3, there's so much focus on money and acquisition and all these things that you just sometimes lose that basic idea of just joy and fun and not taking yourself seriously. So I think that it's really refreshing to hear that that sounds like a core part of your ethos.

Evin McMullen
It definitely is. The opportunity we have working in Web3 is to solve human coordination problems and build human coordination tools. The operative word there is human, human coordination tools. That means we need to prioritize frameworks that protect humans and that optimize value for humans. So if we are building coordination tools that add friction and do not add meaningful delight, what are we even doing?

Maren Kate
Yeah, I agree and I think that you just hit a point too of exhaustion or burnout or you hear the news it's all this stuff about the economy and sometimes I just get to a point where I'm like, you know what? I just need to stop. I just need to take a deep breath and go do something that's joy-creating versus stress-creating. So I think it's an amazing part of your culture and I love that there’s that physical disco ball too. That's really great. I have a question. With the data backpack idea, I love that term, visually I immediately get what you're talking about when you say that, is that a term that already exists, or is that something that you guys coined?

Evin McMullen
So I've tried to meme it into being in its current form but the inspiration for the data backpack actually came from a tweet from this investor, Fred Ehrsam, I think I’m pronouncing his last name correctly, and this was years ago he tweeted like “Web3 wallets are like bottomless backpacks of your data” or something to that effect and I kind of take issue with that, Fred. I disagree. Maybe for you, that's the case sir but for me, I need more when I walk out of my door in the morning than my wallet. Maybe for you, all you need is a wallet and that's all you need to maneuver through the metaverse successfully but for those of us who need more than a wallet to prove ourselves in this world based on who we are, the resources we have, where we come from, what we're trying to accomplish, we need more than public financial information about ourselves to achieve those goals. So in real life, what do I bring with me when I leave the house in addition to my wallet? I bring my backpack and that backpack includes all the other stuff that I need throughout the day. It allows me to stash the stuff I've brought with me and carry it from one context to another. And similarly, when we think about self-sovereignty, self-custody, and decentralized identity, we need the ability to bring information about ourselves from one context to another. Whether it's proof that we're not a bot, our educational credentials, our residency, our coffee order, and preferences, music preferences even but, similarly, we are more than our financial data. So we need a way to carry more than financial data.

Maren Kate
How do you see this impacting how people hire and how they get hired specifically around, I know we touched on it a little bit earlier, but around the different pieces of identity? I see both pros and cons. What are your thoughts on that?

Evin McMullen
I think there's an exciting and unique opportunity here to capture traditionally overlooked forms of qualification and achievement. For example, many students who do not complete a full degree program from a university will not receive meaningful proof of their achievement in academia even if they had completed a significant amount of coursework.

Maren Kate
Yeah, that’s me.

Evin McMullen
So that the ability to break down educational experiences and prove achievements over time, even ones that may not match up to a very traditional structured form, those achievements are still valid and worthy and relevant in many contexts. So for students who are transferring schools perhaps, for students who switch programs, who begin programs, who don't finish programs, those pieces of information, qualifications, may still be relevant in a verifiable manner. Additionally, as we see folks working in DAOs and contributing to new constructs of human coordination, they may not have a formal diploma but they may experience quite a lot of education, whether that's onboarding curriculum, participating in hackathons, creating tutorials and documentation. So these non-traditional non-standard but rigorous forms of education might still be worthy for people to be able to document and prove especially in spaces like Web3 where traditional academia has not yet caught up to our subject matter and so we need to look for non-traditional views of aptitude.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I mean, I think the aptitude angle is so interesting because, just the current model, where you worked, where you went to school, that is a very broken model. You could go to a fancy school and you probably would have an easier job getting into fancy workplaces or whatever, say, Goldman Sachs if you went to Harvard, but you could also just be phoning it in. It doesn't mean you're good at XYZ. It doesn't mean that you have the qualities or the skill sets. And then there's people that didn't have those opportunities, and they, probably with a little bit of training, a little bit of coaching, they could be excellent. We miss a lot. That data is not really quantified yet. Obviously, there's a lot of positives and, obviously, you're very bullish on the metaverse and on the way things are continuing to evolve across various functions of Web3 but I would say with every innovation there are both, call it relatively binary, but call it good or evil use cases and, usually, there's a combination of both. What would you say worries you about the technology that we're seeing built? Thinking through the metaverse, what worries you if you think about the next decade or two and why?

Evin McMullen
The public permanence of blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin are incredibly powerful but, at the same time, they offer a great surface of risk because if we publish data that can be used to cause harm to people there is no way to undo that potential cause of harm. If we publish data that marginalizes communities in a public and globally accessible way, that data can be used to harm those communities in perpetuity and there is no way to go back. So I am inspired by the opportunity to experiment in Web3 but I am cautious about the resounding consequences of experimenting on the most public most permanent platform of communication that humankind has ever known.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I agree. That's the things that I think about too. You think of everything, either misunderstandings or…there's just a lot of different angles there. All right, so quickly just some final questions I have. First of all, in terms of if people are interested in learning more, you guys are in beta now or will be soon?

Evin McMullen
So we are currently in private beta, we are testing out our very first user flows, identifying all of our bugs, getting our initial disco data backpacks ready for everyone to enjoy. So if folks are interested in getting their very own data backpacks and helping us test out what these experiences can feel like, giving us feedback, we would invite you to share your email address and your Metaverse dreams with us at disco dot xyz.

Maren Kate
Awesome. I love that too. I just put my information on. I love the metaverse dreams. And in terms of a product or tool that you rely on day to day to do your best work, what is that? Besides email, phone, the basics.

Evin McMullen
From a product perspective, I absolutely love Ceramic. For Disco, Ceramic is a decentralized data storage solution built by some of our favorite brilliant minds in the Web3 identity and technology space. Their infrastructure is extremely thoughtful. It is very app-centric in its designed which makes it very easy to interact with and it's offered us a really wonderful place for users' data backpacks to store the credentials that make users’ personalities pop in Web3. So it's an absolute joy to be able to work with their team and really exciting to have that solution up and running already and something for us to experiment with and we're very excited about seeing all of the other kinds of data storage that will become available in the monsoon and we certainly hope that all of those experiences of integration and partnership are as awesome as working with Ceramic.

Maren Kate
I love that. I just checked out their site. They also have a beautiful design. What's your favorite podcast or book from the last six months? And it doesn't have to be…it can be anything related.

Evin McMullen
So my absolute favorite podcast from the last six months is an episode of Layer Zero from Bankless hosted by David Hoffman featuring Simona Pop, who is a community leader in the largely Etherium ecosystem involved in things like Status and Gitcoin. She was the co-founder of the Bounties Network, which is an early public goods initiative in the Etherium space. And specifically, what spoke to me about this conversation is Simona’s discussion of the Romanian revolution in her early childhood and how she contemplates revolution today. So Simona describes revolution as cutting off the head but replacing the head and maintaining the body. Whereas she describes evolution as a complete transformation of the entire system head to toe. So Simona’s call to arms in this Layer Zero Bankwest podcast is that we in Web3 need an evolution, not a revolution, and I think about that daily.

Maren Kate
I think that is the best description for revolution that I have ever heard. Wow, that actually explains a lot of things just thinking back historically. Awesome. Well, we'll link to all of this in the show notes. Evin, it was awesome having you on the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to get my own data backpack.

Evin McMullen
Welcome to the disco-verse. We're so glad that you're here and it's been an absolute pleasure being able to join you today. Thank you so much.