Explorer Grants

TL;DR Explorer Grants is coming off a successful pilot, finding and funding five great people. We learned a lot of what worked, and what didn’t. We are asking to be trusted with more capital to bring more talented builders into the Nouns ecosystem.

We would like to run two more rounds of grants, as well as invest further in the project to attract more talented builders to the Nouns ecosystem through Explorer Grants.

Pilot Round Recap

What our Explorers have done:

• Greg - built Prop 249 (Solo Staking), built the Nouns API, and NounsList
• Drew - created valuable content about Nouns, crafted a thoughtful video and TikToks, gained Nouns delegation from Wilson and has been voting with reason consistently.
• Jackson - created cookbook.dev/nouns, running a workshop on how to build on Nouns
• Tigris - built many, many, prototypes, wrapping up a proposal for Nouns hardware going on-chain after this!
• Our fifth explorer had to put the grant on pause due to unforeseen work coming up. We are hopeful we can restart their grant or use it for someone else in the second pilot round.

What we learned:

• Grants are an excellent marketing tool for the DAO; by leaning into the funds that we were given, we were able to beat the record of applicants to a Nouns Prop House Round (90) and build a sizable following outside of Nouns, despite no previous traction. Therefore, every $ of the grants was used for two purposes: marketing the grant and the actual grant. If the grants were smaller, we would have gotten less applicants.
• There are amazing people waiting to be Nouns-pilled who just need a bit of help. Just in our first round, we had to reject amazing applicants who could have contributed great things to Nouns and just needed a bit of help.
• We probably won’t get people to leave their jobs with large Explorer Grants (some of you can say “I told you so!” here). We got few applicants with full-time jobs, and participants who were not tied down to other responsibilities were often able to go deeper on Nouns. We want to give alternative, smaller Explorer Grants to talented builders who have other commitments, paired with hands-on support.
• Bringing people into Nouns takes time and effort - a lot of the people we talked to weren’t available at the moment, and building connections with prospective explorers takes time. This is similar to executive headhunting - not as straightforward as finding someone and giving them money.
• Hack Week was a lot of fun and a great success with 90 ETH deployed, hundreds of participants, and dozens of new contributors to our community!

Goals for this round

Our #1 priority is to continue bringing top talent into Nouns. We want to fund 5x as many builders while maintaining the quality of the Pilot Round - we have an ongoing list of people who were highly interested but unavailable during our original application period. We’ll continue our main grants by doing two cycles of 6 grants of 6 ETH each. We may also use Prop House’s infinite rounds to run part of our smaller Explorer Grants, which Nouners will be voting on.

Other objectives:

• Re-invest into the EG talent pipeline: build out a community, build out a strong decentralized brand for Explorer Grants, and create content that brings in more talent from outside of Nouns. This will require paying people outside of the main team.
• Contribute to the Nouns dev ecosystem: we ran Nouns Hack Week and would like to continue efforts like it, build out content for Nouns builders as a whole, and be stewards of Nouns contributors.
• Participate in governance: we’d like 1 Noun to support Explorers and Builders (we are currently paying for delegation). This also doubles as an equity-like payment to the Explorer Grants team so that we can share in the upside of Nouns. None of us own Nouns.

Ask

• Grants: 100 ETH
  • Regular (via application cycles): 12 x 6 = 72 ETH
  • Small (via Infinite Rounds + by team): 14 x 2 ETH = 28 ETH
• Growth / Reinvesting - Community, Content, Brand, Operational: 10 ETH
• Team Compensation: 15 ETH / month for six months
• 1 Noun Total: 200 ETH + 1 Noun