Before entering into the Web 3.0 realm, I’ve always been really interested how to better structure a team or organization to work towards a common goal.
If you are interested in talking please message me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/EllsonChen1
2020 was an interesting year. It was an end to a previous journey and a start of a new one. Towards the end of the year, I began dipping my head into the Web 3.0 space (Props to my co-founder, Jay) and was fascinated by its features. I was particularly drawn to its ability to incentivize a large decentralized community towards a common goal and naturally produce a network effect. This got me thinking if I could design an operating system with the natural traits blockchain had to offer and build companies upon it.
Being a YC alumni, we’ve been through the process of incentivizing early team members through equity options and a shared dream. However, long term rewards like this doesn’t seem to provide enough long lasting motivation and decays quickly over time. Especially when the company is tackling hard problems or facing detrimental challenges. When targeting efficiency, some solutions may include implementing an OKR system to allow team members visualize their contribution in the big picture while focusing on what tasks they need to finish. When it comes to decision making, in a rather flat company structure, I’m sure fellow founders have all been through too many long meetings with heated discussions where you simply couldn’t reach common grounds. This often resulted in someone who’s more of an articulate speaker to sway the discussion. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the best decision was made by the most experienced people based on sufficient logic. When the future of Web 3.0 seems to incorporate global talent and people who you probably never met, the original organizational structure seemed like it needed an upgrade.
With past experience in mind, my co-founder and I wrote a few variations of designs that included a social resume structure, reputation systems, some type of delegate voting mechanism and other wild ideas to piece into an operating system. In the process, we came across the Colony white-paper and was amazed by their work.
In this post, I’ll give a summarized overview of Colony’s system of their 56 page white-paper and share some of my thoughts on a few future use cases.
Colony.io (link to their website)