Autonomous Organizations
I’ve thought about autonomous organizations ever since I learned about crypto. Of course people can come together to hedge against the risk of starting a company while maintaining ownership. Of course it’s easier to market a project when 50 people worked on it!
What is an autonomous organization? What might they look like?
Autonomous Band
An autonomous band would have fluid membership. Artists could come together to work on a song, an album or even something as small as a sample. Attribution would be automatic based on what that individual contributed to the end product. That end product could be recycled, remixed, re-used, re-combined in an infinite amount of ways while retaining that attribution. If a hit song was ever made that included that sample, profit would not only automatically flow to the song’s creator(s) but also to the people or teams that made the individual samples.
This one isn’t that autonomous, it’s more of a collective, but it’s still cool and feels fresh.
The next level would be if the band was a series of algorithms taking feedback from Instagram likes, Soundcloud plays, Spotify streaming data, etc and adjust its output (music in this case) to try and maximize some fitness function (for example, the number of followers on Instagram). It could create its own content to promote itself, looking at what others are doing and factoring that into its own decisions.
Fashion
Users / designers / mothers / brothers can upload fashion designs. Let’s say each week there is a winner via voting and that piece of clothing gets manufactured in short runs. It’s then sold for a limited time on the site and the process starts over the next week.
The system would send the designs off to another system that knows how to take those designs, create or order the fabric necessary and make them. The system could then take the short run of clothing, package it, and ship it to the people who purchased it online. Prices would be adjusted based on cost and a maximum market-bearing margin.
Tech Co
Most tech companies don’t have insane tech. They have pretty good tech, and the rest is why starting a business is hard; marketing, sales, managing people, and building products that people want. There is a line somewhere here. The boon of tech is that margins can be 90%+ if you’re doing it right. Hence the explosion of SAAS. So already there is a higher level of autonomy than the fashion example above. I think the first embodiments of tech companies with 0 employees would be some single-purpose app that does one thing. There are several examples of this in crypto land, which brings us to…
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
The autonomous organizations above look quite similar to a regular tech company. There is a core dev team that builds and launches a product with the idea they will automate themselves away. This efficiency is a goal of most companies whether explicit or implicit. The ownership is likely to flow from the end customers to the core team, or to the company that can then be sold or opened up to public markets.
The difference here is in the decentralized part of the Org. Nobody owns it. The value accrues at the network level and yes participants and co-creators benefit financially but so do the customers. If for example, the org has a token that has value, everyone can participate in the growth of the network. Early users of a product are often the most important to the company, and yet those early users get none of the value of the company itself. Perhaps that's an idea, a company that helps other companies use part of their option pool to incentivize new users by giving them ownership. In crypto, this is native, but as it stands today in the traditional startup world, this is unheard of.
I hope blockchain or some other new piece of tech or legal vehicle enables these kinds of opportunities. I think companies may not always be the most efficient way to organize a diverse group of people towards a common goal, and I think aligning incentives is powerful if not the single most important factor in getting this to work.
What I’m working on
As a stepping stone towards autonomous organizations, I’m looking for several developers who would like to sell code on our container marketplace.
