Free ftopia — A new beginning.

French version

TL;DR: We’re starting the adventure of turning a 7 years old SaaS project into a fully decentralized way of doing business. And we need you to join us.

I’m an entrepreneur. 7 years ago, I started a business called ftopia.

Our purpose then was to help organizations share documents with their customers and partners. Box was still very much focused on consumers, and so was the nascent star, Dropbox.

There were several players in this space, and many others have joined since. After all, sharing information is what the internet is all about. Business organizations need better ways to do it, and there are still some significant market opportunities for solutions that are simpler, or more secure, or more elegant, or tailored to fulfill specific requirements.

So, even though I was contemplating an ocean that was quickly turning red, I wasn’t worried. When addressing widespread needs, a startup can always find ways to differentiate itself and to find its audience, through product innovation, customer service, or go-to-market strategy.

Besides, I didn’t want to rule the world. :)

The destructive growth path

After co-founding and running a VC-backed company for 5 years, I had my share of roller coaster rides. Among wannabe entrepreneurs, raising funds is generally seen as an achievement, a mark of success. When you bootstrap for months or years, closing a couple of multi-million rounds can be exhilarating indeed. It’s tempting to enjoy the social status attached to it. With the money comes a form of hubris, the impression that one should aim higher, think bigger, expand faster. Again and again.

This hubris often leads to the endeavour’s crashing to the ground. And it can make you oblivious of the values that made the path of entrepreneurship desirable in the first place.

I learnt that the hard way, after building my previous company for several years and watching its value destroyed in a few weeks, in an explosion of greed, fear and anger.

So when I started ftopia in 2009, I was willing to do things differently. Very much inspired by David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 2008, I chose to build a product that customers would be happy to pay for, and to generate revenue from paying subscribers rather than chasing venture funding.

I also wanted to work with and for people from different countries, different backgrounds, different cultures. Ftopia was global from day one. Now it is being used everyday by thousands of business users in 60 countries.

The team is global as well. I’ve been lucky to work with talented designers and developers that have contributed to ftopia for a few weeks, a few months, or several years. At one point, fifteen people were working on the product from six different countries.

Early on we’ve been using agile methods and online collaboration tools, in order to solve the challenge of working remotely. It worked well for us. Co-creating and delivering a SaaS product as a member of a distributed team has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my professional life. Together, we have been able to develop and deliver a service praised by our customers for its usability, its security and its design.

But ftopia has now reached some barriers. It’s “ramen profitable”, but in its current form and in the current highly competitive landscape, its growth is hardly sustainable. Our attempt to partner with a larger organization, Cloudwatt, didn’t bear the expected fruits. We’ve also tried to find an industrial partner that would help funding our growth, to no avail.

We could keep the service running as it is, with no further investment, so that it pays for itself (infrastructure, operations, financial debt). That’d be a frustrating endgame. As a team, we have started to explore new ways of working together. Building an organization is about sharing experiences, effort, knowledge. Why let a sub-optimal financial return decide of the fate of a collective journey that is still very much alive?

Actually, why not reinvent ourselves as an organization, and change the terms of the return on investment in such a way that humanistic values — fostered through social innovation — define the success of the project?

Reinventing a startup. From closed intellectual property to open source software. From a corporate, centralized model to an open governance where both users and contributors have a say. From a for-profit business to a new form of commons, owned by its stakeholders.

If we succeed, ftopia will be a totally different animal. Different from what it is today, and probably different from any other sort of organization.

Rewarding the creators of a commons

The path to get there is unknown. Today there are many attempts to decentralize organizations. Zappos is a famous example of a bold attempt to use holacracy as a replacement for traditional hierarchies at work. But most organizations that have gotten rid of hierarchies are closed ones. Being part of them requires to be hired. This is an essential difference between a company and a community.

In the world of platforms such as Uber, Facebook, Youtube or Ebay, everyone is encouraged to engage in an open network, as a contributor, as a consumer, as a producer. The bigger the network, the more valuable it is for its members. Since the actions of millions of agents can be automatically coordinated by algorithms, the cost of scaling globally is insignificant. Hence the stunning pace of growth of the Web giants, which came to dominate new and existing industries on a worldwide scale in just a few years.

While platforms rely on open networks to thrive, the companies that operate them are relatively small, compared to the leading firms of the pre-digital era. Amazon’s valuation tops Walmart’s one, with a headcount that is 10 times less — 155,000 employees vs. 2.2 million. Airbnb, with 1,400 employees, offers over 1 million rooms today, more than world-leading hotel chains such as the Hilton group, whose headcount is… 110 times bigger!

Even if productivity gains result in lower prices for consumers, there is a growing concern about the widening inequality gap between a small number of investors, founders and managers on the one hand, and the rest of the society on the other hand. Proponents of the peer-based economy, such as the P2P Foundation, claim that the economic value produced within a network should be distributed among its members, or managed by them, rather than being extracted by a third-party.

Join our quest for an open governance

But how could such a change occur, when the rules of the network are written by the company that owns it, in order to scale massively, achieve global domination and maximize profit? The concentration of the economic value goes together with the concentration of power, through new forms of surveillance and control.

Of course different approaches are possible. Kickstarter, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, decided that having a positive impact on society was more important than maximizing shareholders’ value, and as a result re-incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation a few months ago. Medium’s founders made the choice to get rid of managers and to distribute the power of decision making early on.

Still, in every platform there is a divide that remains between the firm and the community. The code of the platform is the law that governs how people interact with each other. No matter to which extent the value is produced by the community, it has no say in the way it is operated.

Things are quickly evolving though. There is a lot to get inspired by: open source projects that have paved the ways of peer-based production driven by intrinsic motivations ; new movements, such as platform cooperativism, that gather researchers, entrepreneurs and activists who have seeded for years the field of decentralization, a field that is now about to blossom; blockchain-based decentralization protocols, such as Backfeed’s, that enable the distribution of value and influence without relying on central authority.

We can now create new forms of organizations that are:

• open: welcoming to everyone — equipotentiality is adopted as an organizing principle,
• fair: distributing revenues according to the actual involvement and contribution of each participant,
• meritocratic: ensuring that people have influence on decisions that affect them, in proportion of their peer-assessed, demonstrated expertise,
• transparent: leveraging the blockchain to provide unfalsifiable and verifiable traces of distributed decisions and transfers of value.

Even though the path is unmarked, we are ready to take a leap of faith, and to join the forefront of the movement!

One of our mottos at ftopia is “sharing more than files”. We are starting this Medium magazine today in order to share our journey through decentralization. We will report on the transformation of a business into a commons, on why it may be done, and on how it can be done — if we succeed.

And… we welcome your help! Every component of our structure, every step of our processes will be reengineered. We need finance people, coders, lawyers, designers, communicators. We want to connect with other organizations that aim at the same goals, with thinkers that can shed some light on our path.

Interested? Please email us at free@ftopia.com. Or just help us by spreading the word and sharing this post. Let’s work towards a world of peers, fairer and freer.

Thank you to Jaime Arredondo, Ralph Boeije, Antoine Brachet, Jean-Baptiste Dezard, Matan Field, Primavera de Filippi, Duc Ha Duong, Jocelyn Ibarra, Neeraj Jain, Antonin Léonard, Vincent Lorphelin, Basile Michardière, Felippe Nardi, Etienne Segonzac, Tal Serphos, Patrick Stachtchenko, Martin Sterlicchi, Will Schiller, Emmanuelle Tran Ngoc Jardat and Saverio Trioni for their encouragements and edits.