Vision: Too big a vision for only one of us
TLDR
We believe that collaboration tech (i.e. organisational and community tooling) venture-building is broken because:
- people take a consumer app approach (jump straight to prototyping) instead of deep tech (research-informed) so they solve symptoms instead of root causes and repeat mistakes from history
- collaboration tech is largely a B2B market (selling to groups, communities, organisations), as such entrepreneurs struggle with long, complex sales cycles (specially the time it takes to build relationships) and can’t have limitation to dogfood basic usability tests (they’re not groups)
- independent startups get stuck trying to do organisational innovation and product innovation at the same time so spread too thin
- despite being largely a B2B market, there're no economies of scope (startups face high customer acquisition costs but can't expand the scope of the relationship as they don't have a portfolio of products to offer after the initial one).
We believe the solution is:
- Cross-disciplinary research and building expert networks to deeply understand problems and solve for root causes instead of symptoms.
- Autonomous Units specialising in specific areas of human collaboration but coming together as a swarm to address larger challenges (proactive modularity and composability).
- Cross-Unit collaboration to compound efforts in business development, talent attraction, fundraising, and R&D.
Too big a Vision for only one of us
Building an organisation is complex and time consuming. Culture, community, comms channels, systems and processes all take time to design. Corporations on the other hand, have streamlined processes but with scale, traditional organisations become bureaucratic. Early stage startups copy these large corps as they continue to scale. Copying “best practices” means copying web2 dysfunctions, while designing more progressive practices can offer benefits but also require significant time investment and risk.
As a consequence, most product teams end up building mediocre organisations which limits their potential.
Web3 was supposed to be the answer, building in the infrastructure, attitudes & mentality that could revitalize the future of coordination & collaboration. However the irony is that web3 is heavily fragmented, with many small teams wanting to be the hero of their own story & in effect repeating the very same issues that lead to the stagnation in web2.
If we could lay egos aside and overcome our mutual distrust, can we move past holding on to the shares of our little pie and instead dream a shared but massive dream?
What if the next mega successful ecosystem of products (think Apple, Unilever, etc.) was built by a network built from a bottom up approach instead of a corporation?
What if we could have the flexibility to quickly explore and develop ideas, while also leveraging the benefits of collaboration? What if we didn't need to choose between autonomy and scale?
A new model for organisation design is emerging, where small, nimble teams can come together to form larger organisations. Swarms of teams that can collaborate and coordinate through (internal) market dynamics and service level agreements. This new organisational technology is already proving that it can provide the benefits of scale while enabling innovation.
Haier, despite being a consumer appliances company, was able to build ThunderRobot (one of the leading gaming laptop brands) and generate hundreds of millions in revenue, in the space of only a handful of years. How? by creating a shared infrastructure that reduces coordination costs beyond the wildest dreams of 20th century corporations, and by having micro-enterprises with deep capabilities for R&D, manufacturing, distribution, etc. Each micro-enterprise specialised in a certain area, and together coordinated to assemble the operational capabilities of a corporation while having innovation capabilities that surpass most independent startups. Every team becomes autonomous and every worker an entrepreneur.
We're taking this approach and applying it to build a collaboration network called RnDAO - a venture builder DAO with a mission to empower humane collaboration.
Imagine an ecosystem of projects, built bottom up by bringing new contributors and new projects into the community, one by one.
Imagine having as an entrepreneur the same benefits of portfolio diversification that a VC enjoys, while still having autonomy and focusing your time and energy on building what you believe in.
Imagine a goldilocks balance between the safety of an established job in a large enterprise and the potential upside of a startup, as determined by you, for your needs. And based on close knit collaboration in small team.
Imagine that you have a larger community, a shared brand you can leverage to give weight to new ideas, and shared assets you can leverage to move faster with more care and precision.
Imagine the learnings from cumulative experiments and compounding user insights, where every hard earned discovery is used not once but multiple times.
Imagine proving that we can be more effective and offer more wellbeing and satisfaction than a Web2 startup path or corporate job ever could.
This is what we have been building for a year. We've built research expertise and learnt a lot about collaborating as swarms, we've generated revenue and built multiple ventures ( ), we've proved that we can create composable and modular practices for Units to accelerate each other's development, and built a brand associated with quality.
Overview of RnDAO ventures
Now, we want to double down on this vision. And what we're missing is… you. We need you to take our platform and make it your own, to leverage it to make your own dreams and thus expand it beyond what we ever imagined.
Join us in building, shaping, and creating. Join us dreaming a bigger dream, and together, we'll make it reality.
Next steps we're working on:
- We have 5 ventures already (), looking to advance these, and start more, and onboard others into the alliance.Overview of RnDAO ventures
- Develop the community by bringing in more projects and contributors, and building it into a movement (see: )Strategy for RnDAO - Q2 2023
How to get involved:
As a wanderer (just curious for now): join the platform and see where we’re at, how we work and what we care about.
As a motivated individual (excited to explore this): become a co-shaper and co-owner of this vision and project, and work with us to build it by contributing and co-leading (full or part-time) one of the Project Units and/or RnDAO itself through DAO Work Units (those directly servicing the network).
As a project for humane collaboration: a part of you becomes a part of RnDAO, and vice versa.
As an investor: join our waitlist and we'll reach out when the time is ripe.
As an unrelated project or otherwise different path: let’s explore!