Origin Story

Ryan and I (Diego) met some time during COVID. I remember it was so, because I was in Texas when we got on the phone for a conversation, and I proceeded to spend hours talking to another young person who I felt was brilliant. Ryan was at Solana Labs at the time, and I was at COLLINS.

We had both reached out to Brian Collins in order to work for the New York-based design agency, COLLINS, but I had gotten the job (because of some salesmanship and writing, not because I was some incredible graphic designer. Brian tells me not to say diminishing things like that, but so be it.) Ryan ended up working more in technology, but we connected over our love for this intersection between design and pure technology.

NATION began as a side project to help Aid for Ukraine create a nicer landing page to collect donations in early 2022. With some time, we figured there was more to learn about DAOs, online communities, and governance, so we brought together some collaborators to help us explore. Among these key early collaborators were Keegan McNamara, who lead the beginnings of our engineering, Glauber Sampaio, who was an absolute design badass for us on early versions of the product, and Abhinav Godavarthi, who pushed engineering on our first fully functioning versions of the DAO tooling product.

We are still very early in our lifespan as a company, actively forming our origin story, but the above rundown is useful in understanding the very seed of why NATION exists as a collaboration between me, Ryan, and our small team as of this writing (October 2022).