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Building an organisation is complex and time consuming. Culture, community, comms channels, systems and processes all take time to design. Corporations on the other hand, have streamlined processes but with scale, traditional organisations become bureaucratic. Early stage startups copy these large corps as they continue to scale. Copying “best practices” means copying web2 dysfunctions, while designing more progressive practices can offer benefits but also require significant time investment and risk.
As a consequence, most product teams end up building mediocre organisations which limits their potential.
Web3 was supposed to be the answer, building in the infrastructure, attitudes & mentality that could revitalize the future of coordination & collaboration. However the irony is that web3 is heavily fragmented, with many small teams wanting to be the hero of their own story & in effect repeating the very same issues that lead to the stagnation in web2.
If we could lay egos aside and overcome our mutual distrust, can we move past holding on to the shares of our little pie and instead dream a shared but massive dream?
What if the next mega successful ecosystem of products (think Apple, Unilever, etc.) was built by a network built from a bottom up approach instead of a corporation?
What if we could have autonomy to quickly iterate and explore venture ideas, while collaborating on organisational best practices and jointly leveraging the benefits of collaborative scale. And what if it could embed a new set of principles and through both direct impact and memetic unleash a new era for human collaboration?
A new model for organisation design is emerging, where small, nimble teams form part of a larger organisation, collaborate, and coordinate through (internal) market dynamics and service level agreements, and contributors are incentivised as intrapreneurs. This new organisational technology is already proving that it can provide the benefits of scale while enabling innovation.
Haier, despite being a consumer appliances company, was able to build ThunderRobot (one of the leading gaming laptop brands) and generate hundreds of millions in revenue, in the space of only a handful of years. How? by creating a shared infrastructure that reduces coordination costs beyond the wildest dreams of 20th century corporations, and by having then micro-enterprises with deep capabilities for R&D, manufacturing, distribution, etc. Each micro-enterprise specialised in a certain area, and together coordinated to assemble the operational capabilities of a corporation while having innovation capabilities that surpass most independent startups.
We're taking this approach and applying it to build a collaboration network: RnDAO - an innovation DAO with a mission to empower humane collaboration.
Imagine an ecosystem of projects, built bottom up by bringing new contributors and new projects into the community, one by one.
Imagine having as an entrepreneur the same benefits of portfolio diversification that a VC enjoys, while still having autonomy and focusing your time and energy on building what you believe in.
Imagine a goldilocks balance between the safety of an established job in a large enterprise and the potential upside of a startup, as determined by you, for your needs.
Imagine that you have a larger community, a shared brand you can leverage to give weight to new ideas, and shared assets you can leverage to move faster with more care and precision.
Imagine the learnings from cumulative experiments and compounding user insights, where every hard earned discovery is used not once but multiple times.
Imagine proving that DAOs are more effective and offer more wellbeing and satisfaction than a web2 startup path or corporate job ever could.