Encouraging On-Chain Entrepreneurship
Let's bring the next generation of companies on-chain from inception
We’re holding back an entire army of talented entrepreneurs who should be building On-Chain Organizations (OCOs) because they’re terrified of the seemingly impossible task of building a “Decentralized Autonomous” organization. They don’t even know what that means. It’s daunting. It’s unnecessary. And frankly, it’s a toxic mentality. We’re growing the web3 community at a rapid pace and new members are highly impressionable. When they join a “DAO” for the first time, they’re expecting some type of democratic utopia, then disheartened when they face the hard reality that OCOs streamline decision-making. There are still hierarchies (although they tend to be much more flexible and fluid).
Some will argue that DAO “is just a name”. Having launched one of the most famous “DAOs,” I can tell you that the title caused more conflicts than anything else. To this day, we still get nasty tweets from former contributors who were upset that we executed swiftly and centrally out of necessity. Some of the less hostile media outlets “revealed” that we were fairly centralized and that there were community members who were not able to participate in our workstreams. We accepted everyone into our server who followed basic ground rules, but that wasn’t enough. People expected our operations to be decentralized too. How many of those conflicts could have been completely ignored if we just called ourselves an On-Chain Organization? Instead of splitting hairs discussing “decentralized” and “autonomous” we would have talked about what it means to be on-chain. We would have talked about the permissionless nature of the blockchain. We would have
We’re re-setting expectations: It’s time to embrace On-Chain Organizations (OCOs). They don’t need to be decentralized. They don’t need to be autonomous.