Building Tech Communities in London
The Story of the Day DAOs and other London Techy Communities (2017-2023) - as I remember it.
by Timothy Coleman - 01/Sep/2023
Coming out of Covid
August 2021 Shoreditch London. Can’t quite remember if it was a sunny afternoon, but let’s be optimistic and say that it was. I’m sitting in a bar called Rotate with Jamie Anson near what is becoming a landmark new build near Old Street roundabout.
“The Art’otel”, Jamie Anson tells me, “Bought the space there so that they could get the Banksy piece on Rivington Street, it’s going to be their main selling point!” I smile and think about how much Banksy would probably hate that.
Jamie and I had started again running small meet-ups (as EthLdn) of up to 6 people, as this was the maximum group size we were allowed as the world tried to get itself out of the Covid lockdown. Today we were allowed to go bigger.
Today, and for the next month, we were going to be running the first NFT gallery in the UK (possibly the world?) as the fledgling seed of Non Fungibility Token mania began its growth spurt towards worldwide recognition.
(Edit: actually Sascha did the first before lockdown, and Miki from ArtSect did have a section for NFTs in his gallery over in Hackney Wick, but we argue ours was the first NFT only gallery - after lockdown!)
Key Players
James Stell - who runs the fantastic London Bridge Rooftop Bar down at.. London Bridge - had very kindly allowed us to try this crazy gallery experiment using his space in Shoreditch; which is sadly no longer there so don’t go looking.
Jamie had put down a huge chunk of his own money and hired around 40 LG television screens which a team had come and screwed into the walls, and I had been trying to figure out how to display the images effectively.
(If you are interested, we hacked this together: https://rotate.unegma.net as a way of trying to display the art on screens with no internal storage, and which would not loop well from USBs. Samsung would become the better future option.)
The gallery opens. A woman comes into the gallery and starts asking loads of questions about NFTs. Her name is Julie. I’m not sure if she is a billionaire or if she is homeless. I also meet a guy called G Clay via Lavinia from Women in Blockchain Talks.
I didn’t quite realise the significance of some of the meetings I had at the time, but G Clay, Lavinia and I would soon go on to create ThursDAO which I will write about later. It was also at an event that evening that I met Tim Copeland.
MonDAO - Weekly Web3 Socials
I had heard about Tim before, he worked as a journalist in the Crypto space, and had an enormous following on Twitter (before it was X). He said to me that night that he wanted to start a weekly meet-up and asked if I would help as I’d been doing them already.
I was sceptical at first.. a Tim Copeland and Tim Coleman running something together would get very confusing for people (it did), but I said sure lets give it a go, I’d do what I usually do and chat, make intros and buy drinks for people.
I also wasn’t sure at the time if there would be a conflict of interest with what we were doing at EthLdn, but Jamie seemed to want to focus more on the regular monthly events and NFT galleries so.. Tim Copeland made that tweet.
After lockdown, the appetite for meeting again in person was like a dam that had been building pressure, and the first MonDAO (though it wasn’t called that at the start) was a Shoreditch bar crammed full of people from the London Crypto/Web3 scene.
This carried on week after week for that whole year, conversations being everything from, “What is the next big coin”, to “How does MEV really work?” and although most was tech talk, I think people just wanted a consistent place to hang out.
TuesDAO - Weekly Web3 Socials
Elle and Alice were two regulars to what was now officially called MonDAO (because it happened every Monday, and was ironically not actually a DAO, at least not in the tech sense). They, like lots of people, found it hard to travel so far east.
Alice had found a bar in central London and along with Elle asked myself and Tim Copeland whether they would have the blessing to call a similar weekly event on Tuesday, “TuesDAO” as this would be on Tuesday and also ironically not a DAO.
I went with Alice and Elle (and Penny and PA who also had gotten involved) to the first event to help make sure everyone had someone to talk to and a drink in hand, and after several weeks left them to it, alternating weekly between MonDAO and TuesDAO.
By this point, MonDAO and TuesDAO began to become a bit of an A/B test, as TuesDAO had opted for a ‘gated community’ style, with admittance only allowed if you were in their Telegram group. MonDAO was free for all. I wondered which would work best.
MonDAO and TuesDAO had become a sort of filter into the Crypto/Web3 tech scene, MonDAO was like a big net, and if people proved serious about building decent tech, then they would be allowed into TuesDAO (which wanted to attract talent not ‘traders’).
A bit of History
So let’s go back a bit in time and back to Shoreditch where I said I met G Clay through Lavinia. I had met Lavinia many years previously at Barclays Rise where she was running one of the first Women in Blockchain events.
Back in 2018 before I started helping out with EthLdn, I was going to every Blockchain event there was, trying to find some sort of community. I went to ZKP meet-ups, Bitcoin meet-ups, Hyperledger meet-ups, but the Ethereum community had something.
Jamie and Andy eventually asked if I would help out with EthLdn as I’d been a consistent attendee, and had helped them solve a very serious warm beer issue at one of their events near Kings Cross (connections are important in London).
I had just finished working on an almost 4 year long contract with a company that had been bought out by a Blockchain company in the US called Sweetbridge which was growing like crazy and hired around 60 of the best people in Crypto.
It was 2018 and Sweetbridge had raised a LOT of money from the 2017 bull market, and everyone was expecting Crypto to just keep going up from there. That didn’t happen and we were all let go. I was desperate for something new and so got involved in EthLdn.
ThursDAO - Weekly Web3 Coworking - Part 1
So anyway, I was in a bar in Shoreditch with Jamie, running arguably the first NFT Gallery in the UK, maybe the world, and Lavinia (who I love dearly), had introduced me to this very handsome and charming floppy haired American guy called G.
G had just moved to the UK, and around the same time MonDAO started, had asked a group of us whether we wanted to do some weekly co-working around Shoreditch where he was living with his long term partner at the time.
Co-working was my style; when I was with Sweetbridge (and the company they bought out), I had been travelling and working remotely for 2 years, so I had been to a lot of co-work spaces across the world, so had a good idea of what worked.
We started out in a Cafe in Shoreditch (pic above), but later that afternoon moved over to WeWork near St Pauls Square, courtesy of George Benton and the Footium team. This co-work space was also next to Barclays Rise.
Barclays Rise, thanks to Lavinia’s connections, would be where we spent the next 6ish months running a weekly co-work event from their Cafe. As this event happened every Thursday, and as we had Mon/TuesDAO, I suggested: “Let’s call it ThursDAO?”
ThursDAO - Weekly Web3 Coworking - Part 2
Later that same year, by some strange coincidence, G Clay and myself both met Tom Salmon separately within the same week. Tom was the owner of a space in Dalston called The Bakery, and was a speaker at an event at my current co-work space Soho Works.
G told me that Tom had offered to let us use his space on a weekly basis to run our ThursDAO event, and as Barclays Rise preferred to use their incubator space for other purposes, we decided to move (grateful for the time there though).
ThursDAO continued to operate weekly at the Bakery after that, and eventually we were able to open the space up for co-working on a Wednesday as well, although we then started to wonder whether a name tied to a day was actually a good idea.
Over time, we began to discover that creating a good business model for the space was challenging, as we started entering another bear market, we found that people were only coming on days that we offered the space for free.
People also found it difficult to travel so far east, and other groups such as Frontdoor opened up in central London. We hoped to form some form of joint membership model with Frontdoor and other spaces however, this unfortunately never came to pass.
FriDAO WednesDAO SaturDAO and SunDAO?
One of these other spaces which was offering co-working was FriDAO/DLT Hub/Lounge over in Canary Wharf. Independent co-working spaces providing a space for builders of Web3 across all of London: a ClassPass-like model would have been great.
We were initially surprised when we discovered there was a FriDAO as it formed somewhat independently of our MonDAO TuesDAO ThursDAO community, but this is decentralisation, and we met with the founders and were excited by what they were doing.
WednesDAO was a similar story, forming an online community, and I gave over the WednesDAO.xyz domain name which I owned to Dylan to help with what they were doing. I also started to build something for Ozgur, Mehmet and Matt at fridao.xyz.
SaturDAO was a Telegram group chat from Presence to G Clay as part of his leaving gift, as he unfortunately had to move back to the US. We had hoped to start a ThursDAO in NYC, but the future of ThursDAO in its current state is uncertain.
There was never really a SunDAO as far as I know, although occasionally some people would do things together on a Sunday, and so, if we’d wanted to brand this, that could have been an option.
Conclusion
And that is the story of the WeekDAOs. A story of people just wanting to hang out and meet regularly, held together by a common interest. Someone once said to me: “If Crypto disappears, we probably won’t keep doing this”. Reader to be the judge.
The week DAOs continue to tick on by, but as we always find at EthLdn, interest waxes and wanes in accordance with the markets. We are however doing a big hackathon in October, so please sign up if you are actually mostly in it for the tech.
One thing I’ve learnt from building Web3 tech communities in London, is that, just as in Keynesian economic theory, economies grow when people are spending. The more you give, the more you seem to get back in return. Invest in people.
So if you have ever benefited from attending Web3 events in London, maybe you have got a new client or some good advice, if you can, maybe now is the time to give something back, as we mostly do these events voluntarily.
And if you are interested in partnerships or collaborations with Unegma, please do get in touch, we are always looking for new things to build; and we will continue to build and support the tech communities in London as we have done all these years.
