We would like to persuade you to support this proposal as a service agreement for software that we have built and will continue to develop, rather than as a grant or RFP. Meaning: we would like to be evaluated on the value we provide.
We firmly believe that in order for DAO’s to succeed we need the economics of building the best tooling to work, and that involves eventually building a business that can at the very least sustain itself. We prefer if the proposal is evaluated on the question of “Is Tally worth this amount? Do they drive this much value?”. If the value we are providing the Uniswap community is not evident, I would encourage delegates to vote “no” on our proposal as clearly we have failed in our attempt to build valuable software.
About us: In general we are about 15 people, mostly engineers. We pay folks health insurance, family leave (5 teammates have started families since joining Tally), state mandated unemployment insurance, legal bills, and taxes. Engineers rotate between building new features, refactoring software, security testing, and doing research and development on new feature ideas. Non-engineers work in customer management, client services, planning and sales. As the UF and other delegates can attest, we sometimes spend many hours working directly with delegates on crafting proposals and reviewing executable code. The fee we’re requesting equates to about $20k per month, which to put into perspective, is far less than the salary of a single senior level software engineer in the United States. (Yes I know some parts of the world are cheaper, but senior engineers are valuable everywhere, and again, the team that builds Tally is based in the USA).
I firmly support an RFP process, but we’re making a separate pitch here: we build many of these features for DAOs because we think they are valuable. We invest our own time and resources to do the research and pay for development. Because we are a platform and serve many orgs, we can be independent and build great software for everyone, and enable many of the delegates here to effectively operate across the ecosystem with the same great tools.
Our focus on building a business we think will also lead to better DAO outcomes (we think it already has!). Despite Uniswap funding numerous DAO interfaces (Including Agora at nearly the same price as we are requesting, and Sybil which is no longer used), Tally remains the most feature rich and popular tool in Uniswap, and the ecosystem at large.
This is all to say, I recognize your concern on ensuring funds are spent well. I would ask you to take a look at Tally, its contributions to the Uniswap ecosystem, and the wider Ethereum ecosystem, and DAOs in general, and support this proposal on the basis that it’s providing the value we think it is.
Exclusivity:
Many of the features we build and distribute to everyone in the ecosystem, we believe strongly that a “rising tide raises all boats”.
The Uniswap DAO has never asked us not to share work we’ve developed with any other DAO, and currently Uniswap benefits from a large number of features originally developed for other teams. I’m not clear why the Uniswap DAO would want to prevent another DAO from using features that they developed. The Uniswap DAO isn’t in competition with any other DAO.
If the DAO wants to prevent another team from using something we custom develop, that can certainly be part of a custom scope agreement, but again, this service agreement would support us continuing to support Uniswap and bring it new features that are on our roadmap. These features on our roadmap are intended to help the entire ecosystem grow and prosper.
@jayyu23 - “multi-dipping”
As we move towards being a business that is self-sustaining, we will eventually offer a paid service tier to all of our communities. To be clear, no one client of Tally actually covers anywhere near the total operational cost of Tally. We’re endeavoring to get there, but we’re not there yet. We already have enterprise agreements with a number of DAOs, and for the teams with whom we don’t, we will be creating proposals directly to their DAOs.