A treasury with a lock only governance can open
Strip away the branding and a DAO is a specific piece of engineering: one or more smart contracts hold assets (a treasury of tokens, sometimes NFTs, sometimes control over other contracts), and those assets can only move through calls that a governance module has approved. There is no founder wallet with override access sitting behind it, or if there is, the project isn't actually decentralized yet, it's a company wearing DAO branding. The treasury contract literally checks, at the moment funds try to move, whether a valid governance approval exists for that exact action. No approval, no transfer, regardless of who is asking.
This is a meaningfully different claim than 'a community with a token.' A community with a token can vote on a forum poll all day and it means nothing on its own, someone still has to manually execute what the poll decided, and that someone is a trust bottleneck. A DAO in the mechanical sense removes that bottleneck: the vote's outcome is either directly binding on-chain, or it feeds into a contract that will execute automatically once conditions are met. The governance process isn't a suggestion layer bolted onto a treasury multisig, it's the access control layer for the treasury itself.