Starting Up
Future of Teamwork Series
Starting a company requires assembling scalable back office operations. Today’s web2 companies have no shortage of software options to get started:
- Accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero)
- Cap table management (Carta)
- Accounts Payable (bill.com, Tipalti)
- Invoicing (Freshbooks, Zoho)
- Payroll (Gusto, Deel)
- Document management (Docusign, HelloSign)
- Recruiting (Angelist, Greenhouse)
- Code repo (Github)
- Cloud storage (AWS, Digital Ocean)
- …many more
Web3 companies operate on different rails, but have been left with little choice but to use the same providers. In my past experience running a web3 finance operation, there were hours of manual work, expensive tax and legal consultants, and unending frustration accounting for simple crypto transactions.
The fees associated with the software services above cost startups anywhere between $2,000 — $6,000 per month depending on the size of the company. If the company is a tech startup, these baseline costs can easily triple with cloud storage, and other volume based usage subscriptions. As startups work to achieve rapid scalability, costs can spiral out of control with the growth of staff, users, and maintenance costs. This makes building a profitable, sustainable business all the more challenging.
Today’s SaaS providers thrive because they are highly specialized and only sometimes interoperable, requiring startups to pay for all of them simultaneously to patchwork together a single back office operation. One of the opportunities of web3 is to break down the barriers between these centralized software providers. Rather than spend resources to administer basic functions, companies can have more autonomy over their operational stack at a much more reasonable price point.
As the world has changed around us post-COVID, so too has our vision about what the future of work looks like. The corporate back office needs to catch up, and we at Franklin are accelerating that process. Franklin’s mission is simple: to help enable a future of teamwork that values data sovereignty, peer-to-peer interactions, and an easy, compliant connectivity to the web2 business worlds in which we are grounded.
Franklin’s first product is compliant cash & crypto payroll. To learn more about what we have built at Franklin and how it could help your business, reach out to us, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or keep tabs on our website.
