I'm very excited to announce our inaugural operating committee candidates! I will also be reapplying as well to be a part of the operating committee. To ensure that the committee is servicing the needs of the Japanese Farcaster community to the best of its ability, the one request that I make is that we try to have at least 2 native Japanese candidates as part of the operating committee. Also as the DAO's legal signer, Edward On will automatically be one of the operating committee members.
※If you have any questions about the candidates, feel free to reply to this article @ the candidate in the feed.
Japanese Candidates
Yudai Suzuki
Farcaster Account Name: @reblock
Timezone: Japan
Languages: Japanese (Fluent), English (Basic/Conversational)
Background/Experience: I'm co-founder of Fracton Ventures. Fracton Ventures is Japanese crypto incubator and accelerator. And Fracton Ventures is the operation team of DAO TOKYO which is leading DAO gathering event.
How Can I Contribute to Tokyo DAO: Legal formation support with MIDAO, Fracton Ventures is a partner of MIDAO. Treasury management.
wakkin
Farcaster Account Name: @wakkin
Timezone: JST
Languages: Japanese (Fluent), English (Basic/Conversational)
Background/Experience: I have been a magazine editor and comics editor for 20 years. I have experience using Adobe illustrator, Adobe photoshop and Adobe premiere pro.
Why Wakkin: I have no experience making anything with crypto, but I love using it. I would be happy to do anything I can do based on my experience with many Japanese manga artists and making stories. Maybe they should join Tokyo Dao as soon as possible! they feel that if there is a membership number or an NFT associated with it, we can promote it more to Japanese users so that they will think "I should join Tokyo Dao as soon as possible!
Ren Stern
Farcaster Account Name: @renstern.eth
Timezone: Tokyo
Languages: Japanese (Fluent), English (Fluent), French (Basic/Conversational)
Background/Experience: Half-Japanese, born and raised in New York. Have lived in Tokyo for 8 years. I love culture and crypto. Currently run a web3 startup called Senspace (part of Seed Club's SC06 Cohort). Starting this year we've focused 100% of our efforts on building communities and experience on Farcaster including /ball and /card. Prior to Senspace, I was a principal at a VC firm called SIP Global Partners and ran my own indie hip-hop label called Frank Renaissance. I first got into crypto through my VC work and released my first NFT in 2021 as part of a collaboration with Japanese-Jamaican hip-hop artist Daichi Yamamoto and Chicago rapper, Mick Jenkins. While at the VC firm, as part of our CSR activity, I also produced kids music education and donor events for Carnegie Hall in Tokyo: https://www.carnegiehall.org/Support/Membership/Notables-Japan-en
Why Ren: I'm the type of person who likes to do things vs. just imagining them. Especially when there is very little precedent for something like Tokyo DAO on Farcaster or in Japan, it takes a pioneer mentality to build the DAO into something great. From a sheer desire to make Tokyo DAO into a reality, I have spearheaded the launch of Tokyo DAO, Tokyo DAO's participation in Farcon, the campaign for a Farcon Tokyo and more without any compensation. As someone who has a strong nexus to global crypto communities and local creative/crypto scenes, as well as being fully bilingual/bicultural and having experience leading teams, I believe that I am uniquely capable of helping navigate the early stages of making Tokyo DAO into a bridge between Japanese and global crypto communities. As someone who also spends time within real world creative communities, I feel confident that I can support Tokyo DAO in have a strong nexus to culture and creativity.
Global Candidates
Piyush Deshpande
Farcaster Account Name: @314yush
Timezone: GMT +5:30
Languages: Japanese (Basic/Conversational), English (Fluent)
Background/Experience: Love solving problems and building products. web3 journey started 3 years ago at Polygon as the youngest marketing manager - led growth and community for incubated startups. Moved over to Bungee Exchange by Socket, looking after product, marketing, community. I currently at clique.tech leading community, growth operations.
Why Piyush: I've been an early member of multiple communities and movements across niches in web3, I've found the most amount of joy servicing and helping users and community members grow. I act as a glue between teams in a company - because I understand tech, marketing, sales and can build understanding from scratch quickly.
Alix Zerd
Farcaster Account Name: @alixkun
Timezone: PST
Languages: Japanese (Fluent), English (Fluent), French (native), Chinese (intermediate)
Background/Experience: I've worked in gaming for 10 years in Japan as a game producer/BD manager between 2008 and 2017. I also happen to have been into crypto for the past 10 years: I bought my first Bitcoins back in 2013, and then in 2017, I co-founded a cross-border payment company called Telcoin and running on Ethereum. I raised $25m for this project and acted as VP of business development and COO. In 2020, as covid hit, I decided to leave the company to do a deep dive into emerging verticals like DeFi, DAOs & NFTs. I experimented with different DeFi protocols, joined a few DAOs (Friends With Benefits, Chainforest) and minted NFTs. In 2021, after being VP of Business Development for a decentralized stable coin project called Mimo, I decided to start another company, this time in the creator space: I launched Everwave, a collaborative music production app organized as a DAO on Solana, with its own NFT marketplace & own governance tokens. I wrote the platform tokenomics & I've been developing it until now.
Why Alix: I'm interested in either a pure operational type of position, or a BD/Partnership type of position. I've lived in Japan for 12 years, working in the gaming industry and blockchain industry there. I've also run an independent music label based in Tokyo for 10 years as well, working on music licensing and deals with HMV records shop. The skills I used most where BD/Partnerships related, and also operational skills as I had entrepreneur experience and had to handle that part. For these reasons, I think I could bring my experience and skillset to help Tokyo DAO achieve its goals! While being based outside of Japan (currently in San Francisco/Bay Area), I travel to Tokyo at least once a year.
Edward On
Farcaster Account Name: @Jackalpha
Timezone: Tokyo and Toronto
Languages: Japanese (Basic/Conversational), English (Fluent)
Background/Experience:
Deloitte - Strategy Consultant
Samsung - Head of Health and IoT partnerships for Canada
Wonderverse (DAO tooling) - Partnerships
BeyondClub/Checkin Caster - Partnerships Bankless Japan - Core Team
I really enjoy working in Web3 and especially in the Asian web3 ecosystem. Although I don't live full time in Japan, I am a frequent traveller as I work with Yuki on a few projects. I also have 3 Japanese godkids who I'd like to help build a thriving ecosystem for with strong female role models so they can explore more career paths as they grow up.
Why Ed: General Committee member as the signer. I have general experience in a variety of fields and can be hands on or strategic as needed!
Guilhem
Farcaster Account Name: @alreadythere
Timezone: +1 UTC
Languages: English (Fluent), English (Basic/Conversational), French
Background/Experience: Arts and Cinematographic studies MD, I've been teaching arts and philosophy for 5 years. I'm a photographer, designer, film maker and musician (mostly guitar and techno). Also, I like to build communities and create side blogs, just for fun. See in my linktree. On the other hand, I'm a project manager invested in technology. I'm into crypto since circa 2012/13, exposed to market since 2018. I'm feeling like I've always been shilling crypto to everyone around me. I live in Montpellier, France. I'm connected to the local Japanese community.
Why Guilhem: I am interested in being artistic consultant, provide experienced feedback on creations and share my point of view if necessary. Also, I really like the DAO philosophy and I would be happy to contribute to something big.
Ina Lulaj
Farcaster Account Name: @beecurious
Timezone: JST
Languages: Japanese (Basic/Conversational), English (Fluent), Albanian, Italian and a bit of Spanish
Background/Experience: My name is Ina, and I've been living in Japan for six years. I have a rich and diverse background, with roots in Albania, the UK, and the USA. My career has been shaped by cross-functional leadership roles and a blend of cultures, with notable experiences in the cryptocurrency and food industries. Currently, I am leading an innovative NFT-tea project and have successfully launched the inaugural tea for the Farcaster community, showcased at Farcastea.xyz. Previously, I worked at Kraken Japan and Kraken Global in client support and compliance roles. I have been involved in the cryptocurrency space for approximately five years.
Why Ina:
Operations: I have experience as a Community Moderator at Warpcast, where I grew channels and fostered community interaction, starting from zero and now having an account with 2.1k followers. At Kraken, I streamlined and improved the onboarding processes for Japanese clients, enhanced customer retention, and provided specialized guidance on trading-related queries. Additionally, while working at Janice Wong Japan(Client of Jalux), I gained expertise in project/event coordination, market research, content creation, and community management. I organized a chocolate fair in February and set up pop-up shops across Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Lastly, I hold an MSc in International Trading and Logistics.
Pichi
Farcaster Account Name: @pichi
Timezone: EST
Languages: English (Fluent)
Background/Experience: Pichi is an artist on Farcaster, but IRL she is a former event planner, community builder, and ex management consultant that’s worked in over 50 countries including Japan. She spends her springs and autumns in Japan.
Why Pichi: Treasury/Ops or At Large I believe I can help bridge the gap between Japan and the west by bringing more attention and U.S. Partnerships to the DAO. I’d like to focus on raising awareness and visibility of Japanese builders and creatives to Western Audiences. I’ve spent the past 15 years bouncing between the U.S. and Japan for work and fun and have a good handle on the issues the DAO may face as it grows and needs to reach an international audience.
Lia
Farcaster Account Name: @wasavi.eth
Timezone: GMT+8
Languages: English (Fluent), Filipino
Background/Experience: I lead marketing at Aragon, previous to that I was working as a content strategist at VICE
Why Lia: I would love to push Tokyo DAO marketing further
Andrew
Farcaster Account Name: @0xbdandrew
Timezone: Japan
Languages: Japanese (Basic/Conversational), English (Fluent), French
Background/Experience: Started in crypto in 2017 - did a little bit of investing but wasn’t to knowledgeable. Just decided to buy Eth and BTC. Fast forward to DEFI summer of 2020, I learn about Uniswap and get absolutely obsessed with crypto. Spending most waking hours trying to learn about it and understand the concepts. I eventually decide that I would like to be more than just an investor and so I ended up landing myself a freelance spot as a community/content manager for one of the biggest BSC memecoins back in 2021 called Pinksale. Running a telegram of over 30k members. Also during that time, I started my own NFT collection and DAO that I lead and generated over 200k USD. I eventually pushed forward a proposal to sunset the nft project but not without first airdropping our holders our treasury. After this I was recruited by crypto.com to work on their brand marketing team, where I wrote articles and quizzes for their app. Now I’m at cointelegraph, helping projects come to Japan.
Why Andrew: Would love to get into some position on the operations side. I think I could be a good fit as I have experience participating in DAOs in the past but also because I am interested in helping to organize events and gather people together. I’m really interested in learning more about how DAOs run and how I can help be a part of that.
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