Intro.(2:22) - Start of interview.(3:04) - Aaron's "origin story". He grew up in New Jersey. After law school he founded a tech company focused on user generated content that got bought by Wikia (the for-profit sister company of Wikipedia). He later practiced law at a few law firms before joining the faculty at Cardozo Law School in 2014. He got interested in Bitcoin early on, and collaborated on the launch of Ethereum. He co-authored a book called The Rule of Code, Blockchain and the Law (2018). He's been constantly playing around with the technology itself and he co-founded OpenLaw, which makes it easy to create legal agreements that work with Ethereum. Most recently he's been spending a lot of time pulling together a bunch of DAOs.(5:13) - How blockchain can disrupt corporate governance. The history of DAOs (6:35). Dan Larimer's Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) article (2013). The concept of DAOs picked up with the Ethereum blockchain. Beyond just corporations, to organizations generally. A lot of people think about blockchain as a system to transfer value in a fast way (~12 mins for Bitcoin and ~12 secs for Ethereum). But beyond this transfer of value, blockchain can also be understood as a system to coordinate disparate people with a set of smart contracts. This allows a new way to structure organizations.(12:13) - The story of The DAO (2016). "It was pretty revolutionary in terms of its objective." After the project got hacked, it led to "quite a dramatic (governance-related) decision to fork the Ethereum network." For a number of years, people had "PTSDAO", they were afraid of other hacks. "But about 2-2.5 years ago that started to change, PTSDAO began to wear off and developers began to look at this problem again." New DAO platforms and tooling emerged, the most notable example of them was Moloch DAO (it provided grants to Ethereum projects). More innovation followed, and DAOs were capable of not only giving grants but also making investments. "There has been a sort of explosion of DAOs." To put some numbers to it, "In Feb 2019 there was ~$10m in these DAO like structures with ~2,000 users, today depending on the numbers you look at, it's north of $10bn with several hundreds of thousands of users."(20:30) - His article "The Rise of DAOs: Opportunities and Challenges" (Stanford Journal of Blockchain, Law & Policy, 2021). Questions on legal frameworks for DAOs: partnerships, LLCs, new state DAO LLC laws: Vermont and Wyoming. Unincorporated Non-Profit Associations (UNAs). Wrapped and unwrapped DAOs. How to think about interests in DAOs (securities or something different like member-managed partnerships). Separating economic and governance rights. Are tradable governance rights securities? Grey zone.(29:58) - His take on The LAO (the DAO that he co-founded focused on venture investments). "This was an effort to reboot the original The DAO concept but in a compliant US law format." It's structured as a Delaware LLC, with changes in its operating agreement that waived fiduciary duties and conflicts of interests. Core decision-making was delegated to a smart contract (code). They pooled capital (in Ether), members were only permitted to purchase up to 9% of the LAO (most purchased between 1-2%). There are about 75 members, scattered around the world, chatting via discord, all decisions are made via blockchain-based voting. "It's created a hive-mind." "Instead of having a few people in charge like in a VC fund, you have a collective group." "The decision-making has been pretty great." "The members of the DAO have been able to move faster than traditional VC funds, generating a higher rate of return (still early so TBD) and better at predicting the future of the market, such as with NFTs." "A network of capital deployers"(37:21) - On DAOs' decision making (7 day voting period), rough consensus (no quorum requirement) and internal mechanisms. Faster and better decision-making (time will tell if the latter is true). Each