Team Work Makes The Dream Work And Andros Wong's Wonder Is The Tool For The Job

Written by: James Carnell

Western culture tends to operate from an individualistic mindset. The needs of the individual are often prioritized over the needs of the collective and people are considered most successful when independent and autonomous. While this is not necessarily problematic in itself, it does foster the perspective that being dependent on others or asking for support is embarrassing, weak and even a sign of failure. In contrast, collectivist cultures foster an environment where being dependable or self-sacrificing are highly-valued traits. Working together and supporting one another is of the utmost value to the security and evolution of the whole.

Thankfully, many are now taking this collectivist lens to the world of business in order to work together. With Wonder, Andros Wong and his team have developed an intuitive task management system that allows DAOs and teams to organize projects, pay contributors, and collaborate in their unique project metaverse.

Collaboration not competition

Collaboration is all about progressing as a whole. Overall, it is more profitable, productive, and efficient to work together. This is the intention behind Andros Wong’s community-led platform, Wonder, which fosters collaboration and goal completion, while letting users own equity in the world that they are helping to construct. His platform rewards users for building, creating and learning. Andros is a young and talented entrepreneur who believes that the internet came with the promise of connecting the world – and it has – but it has fundamentally come at a cost. That is why his personal mission is to create value rather than monetizing people’s attention and making people even more addicted to consumption.

How it all started

The development of Wonder was actually quite organic. It all began with six friends working together on a variety of projects. First, they created an Excel spreadsheet to gather all of their goals into one location, which also acted as a tool to keep each other accountable on action steps. Then as they started to add comments to each other’s work, helping to develop and expand the projects, they knew that they were onto a brilliant idea. Andros Wong, an expert in crypto/web3, and his co-founders created a social app that allows people to collaborate on projects through their project management framework and post tasks and milestones onto their feed. They then introduced a private beta and users began to launch albums, start-ups and podcasts on the platform. However, it was only when Andros learned about DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) that the light bulb came on in regards to Wonder’s true special use case.

“DAOs are all about transparency, liquid work and building in public. We knew Wonder could help them succeed, so we made the move into web3,” Andros explained.

Why do DAOs love it?

This young entrepreneur addressed the unique needs of DAOs with Wonder’s brand new project management software. Previously existing software systems would assume that everyone was an employee, which simply doesn’t fit with the requirements of a DAO structure. Wonder provides nuanced permissions, allowing DAOs to token gate roles which have specific permissions - like creating tasks and milestones, assigning them, and paying people. Wonder also makes the payment process easier when a task is completed.

Andros says that he is on a mission to empower people to create and collaborate for a better world. That’s why he recently added the option to create social profiles for DAOs to post announcements, polls and give kudos for great work their contributors have done. His project collaboration infrastructure facilitates powerful networking opportunities for DAOs and provides these benefits to both start-ups and builders.

It is not a surprise that Wonder has become a leader in the infrastructure for DAOs and is a leading example of how a DAO should be run. In addition, Wonder has over 12K people in their discord, over 45K on their waitlist, and have received almost 3M in funding. The company’s future clients include Rabbithole, Forefront, dYdX foundation, Ready Player DAO, MetricsDAO, and Kernel. Of course, a bright co-founder does not want to rest on his laurels – Andros plans to add premium subscriptions for contributors so that they can publish tasks on-chain and get better analytics on their productivity in the future.

Never give up and always try hard

Interestingly, Wonder is not the only company that Andros co-founded. While completing his Masters in Engineering, Economics and Management at one of the top ranked schools – the University of Oxford – he started an ed-tech company. The business not only helped students to find funding through a search engine for scholarships but also provided a crowdfunding platform. It was a huge success and, after just a short time, a quarter of his university was using it. It received angel funding but then, sadly, they had to abandon the business due to irreconcilable differences between the co-founders.

In 2017 Andros Wong moved to San Francisco, in hopes of finding a job in the tech industry and connecting to the power players in Silicon Valley, which is when he first caught wind of crypto and web3. He heard a lot about Bitcoin and Ethereum. His roommate, at the time, worked for Stellar and got Andros hooked on the space. Eventually, he started working for the research team at Ripple. Shortly after that, the CTO of Ripple spun his team out to form a new company – Coil – which worked on streaming micropayments for Twitch streams, Youtube videos, and more. Andros learned a lot and found great success working with Coil. He built decentralized games and blogging platforms that monetized based on users’ attention.

In 2018, as crypto winter hit, Andros grew disillusioned with the space and pivoted to work for Instagram with their payment system, focusing on their in-app payments product. However, as crypto quickly took off again, he jumped back into the space and started building Wonder with a target of solving the DAO operations software’s inefficiencies.

In a time when we all want to find meaning in our work, we must be grateful for people like Andros Wong – leaders of today with a mindful eye to the future. It seems that working together is now a realistic goal and Wonder is helping us to get there.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes