TLDR

We believe that collaboration tech (i.e. organisational and community tooling) venture-building is broken because:

1. people take a consumer app approach (jump straight to prototyping) instead of deep tech (research-informed) so they solve symptoms instead of root causes and repeat mistakes from history
2. collaboration tech is largely a B2B market (selling to groups, communities, organisations), as such entrepreneurs struggle with long, complex sales cycles (specially the time it takes to build relationships) and can’t have limitation to dogfood basic usability tests (they’re not groups)
3. independent startups get stuck trying to do organisational innovation and product innovation at the same time so spread too thin
4. despite being largely a B2B market, there're no economies of scope (startups face high customer acquisition costs but can't expand the scope of the relationship as they don't have a portfolio of products to offer after the initial one).

We believe the solution is:

• Cross-disciplinary research and building expert networks to deeply understand problems and solve for root causes instead of symptoms.
• Autonomous Units specialising in specific areas of human collaboration but coming together as a swarm to address larger challenges (proactive modularity and composability).
• Cross-Unit collaboration to compound efforts in business development, talent attraction, fundraising, and R&D.

Too big a Vision for only one of us

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?