Bad Governance Can Break Even the Best Tech, Says GoodDollar's Sam McCarthy

TL;DR: Sam McCarthy, Governance Lead at GoodDollar and Ecosystem Lead at DAOstar, just wrapped a nine-week community redesign of GoodDollar's governance system. His core argument: the hardest problems in DAOs are social ones, and most governance primitives have already been built—what's missing is the people work. He breaks down how to diagnose broken governance (plutocracy, back channels, fake inclusivity), why crypto projects should start lean and centralized before decentralizing, and how GoodDollar's new two-house system—the House of Alignment for aligned projects, the House of Citizenship for the wider community—is designed to push back against the failure modes he sees everywhere else. The throughline: governance is a muscle, and people only flex it when they believe their participation matters.