Decentralized Startups

Coming full circle.

“Folks, the current way that startups are being created is starting to break. Under the current way of building startups, you have to figure out what potential users want and will pay for by doing customer development, pitch investors who are not your customers / don’t get it / are traditionally slow, fight in this war for talent against Google, and lastly, as a founder, get burnt out and combat personal mental health issues in the process. Does that sound like the best way to deploy resources for our society?”  -“The Rise of the Decentralized Startup” @elizabethyin.com

It may seem like a jungle out in the fringes of web3, with bored apes, cryptopunks, loot and bounties. But in this digital jungle is disorder trying to order itself. The best thing to do in this case is go back to the basics. Without the basics, one can easily get lost amongst all the new terminology, leaving many floating, lost and not so progressive

In this essay, I will focus on startups or rather why people come together to work together. Let’s say, that someone has an idea that solves a physical or mental problem and people came together to make it a reality, sometimes in a hierarchical manner as in the pharaohs and the building of pyramids and sometimes in a community-like manner as in the building of the homes of Native American tribes. 

The decentralized startup digitizes the community-like manner of building something. Rather than asking someone to devote their life to a single job or focus, decentralized startups offer bounties to get work done, so members can choose work based on their interest and time. Decentralized startups also rely on the community to do word-of-mouth marketing versus in traditional VC funded e-commerce startups, where 40% of their funding is spent on Google and Facebook ads that most people just ignore. So rather than all these dollars fleeing to global entities that are increasingly out-of-touch and not serving their user’s best interests and in fact at times manipulating their users for profit, perhaps decentralized startups are the wave of the future to put the building back into the community’s hands empowering them to resolve the issues that touch them. In other words, it’s a new structure in which to organize people with a common goal and fairly distributed equity (their common survival), without the red tape of bureaucracy, but potentially the red tape of cold code (001010111).

DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations is one such vehicle to host these decentralized communities including startups. I will explore this further in tomorrow’s essay.

This essay is one of 7 essays for The Tech Progressive Writing Challenge. Join the build_ Discord to join the conversation.