One of the things that strikes me is a quiet revolution in how companies operate.
The winners of tomorrow aren’t just open-source — they are open employee. It is about to cause the next tidal wave of unicorns.
The company of tomorrow has a full time core team that frames the problem so that anyone can drop in and contribute. In this way you indirectly have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of opt-in employees. Let’s call them soft employees.
This already drives the open-source world and open-source companies. Contributors get paid in nothing but goodwill and prestige — maybe coffee money. What will happen, I wonder, if these fractional contributors had something more substantial in it for them? That expert ML engineer could hold down a full time job at OpenAI but provide outsized contributions that otherwise would not have happened, at other projects. Would expecting any reward kill their drive and motivation? Or would the goodwill be even greater?
What happens when you combine this with the natural scarcity of a reward system that operates on a curve like Crypto? That was the key insight of crypto, not the block chain but the economics of Nakamoto Consensus. Early adopters get value and being a good actor pays better than being a bad actor.
I expect this type of thinking to be the exponential template behind my future companies. How can I include the network? How can I incentivize soft employees? How can I frame problems to be modular for drop in contribution? How can I do this in a way that’s healthy for all stakeholders?
This is the thinking that sits behind Droid Credit. DroidX will be a micro company made exponential by the (eventually) millions of opt-in, on demand, soft employees from around the world.