A conversation with the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization — or DAO — that focuses on enabling and funding longevity research.

The sketch of how a DAO works is that people buy voting tokens that live on top of the Etherium blockchain and then use those tokens to vote on various action proposals for VitaDAO to take. This voting-based system contrasts with the more traditional model of a company that is a creation of law or contact, raises capital by selling equity or acquiring debt, and is run by an executive team who are responsible to a board of directors.

Since technically nobody runs VitaDAO the way a CEO runs a company, I wanted to try to embrace the distributed nature and talk to many of the core team at once. This was definitely an experiment!

The members of the core team in the conversation in no particular order:

• Tyler Golato
• Paul Kohlhaas
• Vincent Weisser
• Tim Peterson
• Niklas Rindtorff
• Laurence Ion

Links

• VitaDAO Home Page
• An explanation of what a DAO is
• Molecule

Automated Transcript

VitaDAO

[00:00:35 ] 

In This conversation. I talked to a big chunk of the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization or Dao that focuses on enabling and funding. Longevity research. We get into the details in the podcast, but a sketch of how a DAO works is that people buy voting tokens that live on top of the Ethereum blockchain. 

And then they use those tokens to vote on [00:01:35 ] various action proposals for me to doubt to take. This voting based system contrasts with more traditional models of the company. That is a creation of law or contract raises capital by selling equity or acquiring debt, and is run by an executive team who are responsible to a board of directors. 

Since technically, nobody runs for you to doubt the way it CEO runs the company. I wanted to try to embrace the distributed nature and talk to many of the core team at once. This was definitely experiment. Uh, I think it's your day. Well, Oh, well, but I realize it can be hard to tell voices apart on a podcast. 

So I'll put a link to a video version. In the show notes. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Vita Dao. 

What I want to do so that listeners can put a voice to a name is I want to go around everybody say your name and then you say how you would pronounce the word VI T a D a O. Tim, would you say your name and then, and then pronounce the word that [00:02:35 ] that's kind of how I've done it.

Yeah. And so I'm the longevity steward we can help kind of figure out deal flow on, edited out, so. Awesome. All right, Tyler, you're next on. It is definitively Vieta Dell. Yeah. And I also help out with the longevity steward group. I started starting longevity group and I'm the chief scientific officer and co-founder at molecule as well.

And then Nicholas you're next on my screen. It's definitely beats it out. And I'm also a member of the longevity working group in this science communication group and also currently initiating and laptop. Great. And then Vinson. Yeah. So it's the same pronunciation weeded out, but I'm helping on the side and also on kind of like special projects, like this incline where that I took around, we had recently and yeah, in Lawrence.

Lauren Sajjan Vieta thou. And I [00:03:35 ] also steward the deal flow group within the longevity working group. And I think we should all now say as a hive mind, Paul Paul has said at the same time, oh, sorry. I'm going to say bye to dad.

Mess with her in yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Paul cohost. I would say, be to down. I actually wonder what demographics says, Vida, like RESA. We should actually look into that. It's interest, interesting community metric. I'm the CEO and co-founder of molecule and one of the co-authors of the VW.

I also work very deeply on the economic side and then essentially help finalize deal structures. So essentially the funding deals that we've been carry through into molecule and yeah, very excited to be here today. And maybe we can jump back into Lawrence adjusted

 we

well, [00:04:35 ] also, so the thing that's confusing to me is that I always assumed that the Vith came from the word vitality. Right. And so that's, that's where the idea of calling it a fight Vita doubt, right? Because like, I don't say vitality, I say fighting. In German, it's actually retaliatory. Yeah. So it's just like the stupid Anglo centrism that is from the Latin, I would say from the word life.

Yeah. Cool. So to really sort of jump right in, I think there's the, to like, be very direct, like, can we like walk through the mechanics of how the, how, how everything actually works? Right. So I think listeners are probably familiar with sort of like the high level abstract concept of there's a bunch of people.

They have tokens, they vote on deals you give researchers money to, to do work, but like, sort of [00:05:35 ] like very, very mechanical. How does the dowel work? Could you like walk us through maybe like, sort of a a core loop of, of like what, what you do

Yeah. So I mean, the core goal of the DAO is really to try and democratize access to decision-making funding and governance of longevity therapeutics. And so mechanically, there's a few different things going on and anyone feel free to interrupt me or jump in as well. But, so I would start from the base layer is really having this broad community of decentralized token holders, which are ultimately providing governance functions to this community.

And the community's goal is to deploy funding that it's raised into early stage. Clinical proof of concept stage longevity therapeutics projects. And these basically fall between these two, let's say points where some tension exists in when it comes to translating academic science. So you have this robust early stage, let's say basic research funding mechanism through things like the NIH [00:06:35 ] grant funding, essentially.

And that gets really to the point of being able to do, let's say very early stage drug discovery. And there's also some sort of downstream ecosystem consisting of venture capital company builders, political companies that does let's say late stage funding and incubation of ideas. They're more well-vetted, but between there's this sort of problem where a lot of innovation gets lost, it's known as the translational valley of death.

Yeah. What did we try to do is we try to identify as a community academics that are working and let's say, have stumbled onto a potentially promising drug, but aren't really at the point yet where they can create a startup company. And what we want to do is basically by working together as a community, provide them the funding, the resources, in some cases, even the incubation functions to be able to do a series of killer experiments, really deep risk of project, and then file intellectual property, which in exchange for the funding, the dowel actually, and this is, this is sort of mechanically enabled by a legal primitive that we've been developing a molecule called an IP [00:07:35 ] NFP framework, which basically consists on one side of a legal contract, typically in the form of a sponsored research search agreement between a funder and a party that would be receiving the funding, the laboratory, and on the other side of federated data storage layer.

And so the way this works is basically beat a doubt would receive applications. Some of these projects could, for example, be listed on molecules marketplace have an IPN T created meta dealt with would send funds via the system to the university and in exchange, they would hold this license and essence for the IP, that results from that project.

And then within the community, we have domain experts. For example, we have a longevity working group which consists of MDs. Post-docs PhD is basically anyone that has deep domain experience in the longevity space. They work to evaluate projects due diligence and ultimately serve as sort of a quality control filter for the community, which consists of non-experts as well.

Maybe just people who are enthusiastic about what. And beyond that, there's also additional domain expertise in the [00:08:35 ] form of some people who have worked at biotech VCs, for example, people with entrepreneurial experience and through this community, you basically try to form, let's say a broad range of expertise that can then coach the research or work with them and really help the academic move the IP and the resea