In January 2022, crypto was near its peak DAO moment. Those were halcyon days, when decentralized autonomous organizations like Friends with Benefits (FWB) were flush with cash – buoyed by valuable tokens – and imagining a future with a different kind of Internet. I’d just moved to London, and on a wintry night I joined FWB’s London chapter at Roast, a chic restaurant overlooking the millennium-old Borough Market. 

Unlike the merchants of yesteryear, FWB is a community that took root with very little in-person interaction. Discord-based connection – complemented by Roast-like evenings – propelled the DAO from a social experiment to the web3 commonwealth for cultural membership.

Over the past two and a half years, FWB has continued to unfurl across a bevy of digital products and physical gatherings. There’s a micro social networking app, an online bazaar and FWB FEST, the “Crypto Woodstock” that will host its third edition this August in Idyllwild, California.

Greg Bresnitz helped orchestrate the festival, and in December, he became the new Mayor of FWB. A democratically elected council appointed him the DAO’s third leader, following the initial stewardship of co-founder Trevor McFedries and inaugural Mayor, Alex Zhang.

I recently sat down with Bresnitz, who called in from a cafe in New Orleans, where he lives. We chatted about the state of FWB, of course, and how his tech-as-culture perspective and balanced affinities for music and cuisine led him to its helm.

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Growing up, Bresnitz was surrounded by good music and good food. His father was a music head, and his mother and grandmother were both excellent cooks. Naturally, alongside his identical twin brother Darin, Bresnitz plumbed the intersection of those worlds. 

Read more: Nodes from Underground on the FWB Roast event

The brothers’ musician-meets-epicurean podcast Snacky Tunes has over 600 episodes and was adapted into an award-winning cookbook. "Dinner with the Band,” another Bresnitz brothers joint, is a cooking and music show that brings musicians – like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Rufus Wainwright and Andrew W.K – into the kitchen.

After selling the show to the Independent Film Channel (IFC) in 2009, Bresnitz forged ahead as cultural curator. He led Events Marketing at Vice before beginning a decade-long stint at Ace Hotel, where he started the decentralized events program.

For Fashion Week in 2013, Ace commissioned a fibonacci-inspired, 3-D printed gown for Dita Von Teese. Bresnitz spearheaded the project.

“It fucking broke the Internet – I mean billions of impressions,” he told me. “And I was like ‘oh my god, tech is culture.’”

Bresnitz turned his cultural gaze toward tech. He produced “healthy hackathons” with the Clinton Foundation, and then a blockchain symposium on “digital de suite,” an adaptation of “droit de suite,” or “right to follow” – the idea that artists should receive a resale royalty any time one of their works is resold. 

Bresnitz was first drawn to the concept via The Blockchain Revolution, which frames the idea against the backdrop of largely unsuccessful legislative implementations. The European Union has a harmonized droit de suite system, but despite various proposals in Congress, the US – mostly due to administrative complexity and potential conflicts with existing copyright – has no federal framework. (California does have a droit de suite law, but its future is uncertain due to a legal challenge in an ongoing 2018 case.)

“This is droit de suite without government intervention,” he realized. “And then web3 just stuck with me.”

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During the pandemic, Bresnitz dove in head first. “I did anything I could in the space.” He wrote marketing briefs, redesigned websites and joined The New Computer Corporation as their Chief Growth Officer. The company debuted their first project at FWB.

Bresnitz and FWB Founder McFedries had known each other for years. Bresnitz booked DJ Skeet Skeet – McFedries’ DJ moniker – for the first Vice party he ever organized in LA. 

“He's still on my phone as Skeet,” Bresnitz said. “So I've known him and we’ve [continued to] cross paths.”

Before starting FWB, McFedries was collaborating with Chris Brown and sharing stages with Katy Perry. He also spent a stint at Spotify as an early Artist Advocate, and captained the AI startup Brud – known for creating the CGI influencer, Lil Miquela – and then Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot. He launched FWB in 2020.

“I'd heard about Trevor working on this, but I didn't think about it until I became a member,” Bresnitz said. “And then literally it was like, what can I do here?”

Most things, it turned out. Bresnitz started on the membership committee, built the events program and led partnerships before becoming the community’s second “Mayor” – FWB speak for chief executive officer (CEO).

As CEO, his purview is broad. Alongside the social app and bazaar, there’s a robust editorial program and a number of adjacent projects that have spun out of FWB – like List3n, a project focused on supporting emerging web3 artists through unconditional grant funds. 

There's FEST, too, whose 2024 roster features Perfume Genius alongside experimental artists like Nala Sinephro and web3 favorites like Iman Europe and Vérité (past years have featured cultural topliners like Pussy Riot, Oneohtrix Point Never, JPEGMAFIA and James Blake).

FWB is also in the process of migrating their token (the Discord is token-gated to members who hold at least 75 $FWB) and continuing to develop their organizational structure. Earlier this year, FWB's product team was spun out as a more traditional software C Corp (the same entity type as organizations like Google and Amazon). In January, that C Corp, Scene Infrastructure Company (SIC) closed a $3 million seed round, led by prolific crypto VC firm a16z, which also led the DAO’s contentious $10 million fundraise in 2021 (some people felt the return on investment (ROI)-driven nature of venture capital is antithetical to core DAO principles). The DAO itself holds a 30 percent share in the new entity, which will focus on expanding the utility of the $FWB token.

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For most small companies, FWB’s breadth would be anathema to the bottom line. But FWB is not a typical company. "If we can't identify an expert, we don't do the project – but people come to us,” Bresnitz told me. “Someone just approached me about running an incubator program, and I knew a member who's passionate about that. So I said, 'Actually, we can do that.’”

In your standard startup, founders raise money based on reputation and a focused product idea, then test and iterate in hopes of finding product market fit. FWB flipped the script, building community around ideals – united by the liquid $FWB token – until they found products to build for their own needs. The product market fit – and a diverse constituency of experts – were baked in.

"What sets FWB and some of the few of our colleagues apart is that we were cultural people in search of a technological solution," Bresnitz said. "And there are a lot of companies in the space that are very good technologists that are now desperately seeking a culture.

"A number of years ago I hosted a panel called 'Homes Not Hammers,’” he added. “And it was the idea that web3 was so focused on hammers and wiring and concrete, because we were still building it. 

“But no one has ever looked at a hammer and said, 'oh my God, the beauty of that hammer.' It's all the things that the hammers have built. And now I think we're getting into an era where we don't have to talk about hammers much,” he continued. “We can talk about companies."

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Back in January 2022, FWB was two months removed from the fundraise that gave it a $100 million valuation. The $FWB token was hovering near $60, and around our table at Roast, we imagined futures through rose-colored lenses. Today, $FWB is worth about $4. 

As the pandemic receded from view and culture makers spent less time on Discord, FWB had to toe the line between tradition and experiment, digital and physical, company and home – carving out an identity as culture-maker.

And broadly speaking, web3 has always been “desperately seeking a culture,” but nobody noticed until the hype died and the money went with it. Until then, culture was largely hammered into existence by technologists seeking a problem for their solution.

But if web3 is to mature beyond its initial hype, and to become applicable in cultural realms outside of technology, we have to consider living in it – to give it flesh and feeling. What does web3 feel like when it’s suffused in the bouquet of roasting pork belly and beef wellington, onion compote, and fennel, saffron and rosemary? Or when it’s streamed from hi-fidelity speakers in the woods?

"Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes,” Beethoven once said. “And I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken."

Today, in a world that generates too much, we need less Bacchus and more sommeliers – people who can, indeed, inebriate the spirit and not just inundate the mind. We need folks as comfortable deploying smart contracts as they are curating music festivals, until engaging with web3 feels as natural as sharing a good meal at home.