[p2p-research] Fwd: [Metacurrency_Project] Some thoughts... (on professionalism)

Sun Dec 26 22:47:40 CET 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 11:40 PM
Subject: Fwd: [Metacurrency_Project] Some thoughts...
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: creatinguriah <uriahz at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 9:57 AM
Subject: [Metacurrency_Project] Some thoughts...
To: Metacurrency_Project at yahoogroups.com

I like non-profits and all, and clearly the idea is to make operating
non-hierarchical coops easy and effective, but there is a reason why
corporations run everything-- access to capital. In order to borrow money or
take investors, you have to fit into certain business structures, and have
certain positions. You can't publicly offer shares unless you file with the
SEC and meet their requirements, which is a massive pain in the ass. This
radically limits what you can do and how fast you can grow, unless you've
figured out a way around this.

Also, while in theory having people do work for a chunk of the profits is
good, there is a lot to be said for real positions filled by people who have
been thoroughly vetted, who are managed, even if it's by their peers. A
'real job' goes a long way in terms of the quality of work you're able to
get. GroupOn isn't successful because their idea was so new and special
(though it was)-- they're successful because they implemented it well, and
built a large and powerful professional sales team. As someone who's been
director of business development for an internet marketing company, I can
tell you that even if it is all commission, you won't get good sales
performance if you're not closely working with your sales reps, as well as
only hiring the best you can find. You can in theory make up for it with
lots of commission-only reps calling like crazy, but in my experience
working for less reputable companies, that does real damage to both your
company's reputation and the receptiveness of your potential customers to
your entire industry, not to mention your customer turnover. And I'm not
sure you can count on business owners responding to your open source nature
so much better than the rest of the huge rush of groupon clones out there.
It is at least SOME sort of differentiation, but making sales happen is
gonna take real skill. And I don't see how this necessarily leads to less
overhead. If you're paying some sort of percentage of profits or sales or
whatever, you're still paying. Those are still expenses. A properly lean
startup attempts to minimize overhead-- if all you have is the promise of
future money, you might be able to get some people, but will you get the
experienced startup people with the skills you need? I'd have to get some
sort of modest salary and a title that improves my resume if I was gonna
jump on board something like this, as nice as it is to talk about. And that
means investment capital, which the structure you've laid out isn't capable
of getting.

The point of building an open source venture, aside from sheer
egalitarianism (which I support, though capitalism seems to frown on it), is
to build a company that is more flexible and responsive to market trends, so
that you can outcompete the big evil companies siphoning all the profits.
Doing business BETTER. So here's the thing: if you want to build an
experimental OSV to test these concepts, you need a business that's
intrinsically interesting enough to get people to put in their efforts for
the promise of a piece of the pie, that serves not just a business need, but
a social need. A crowdsourced seed company is way better a project than a
GroupOn clone. It's useful for building resilient communities, which means
it's something that you can continue to use. GroupOn isn't. Christ, GroupOn
isn't even good marketing unless your product is good enough that people
will come back and buy again at full price several times, or your margins
are so ridiculously high that you can make money selling your stuff for half
of your sale price. Sure, I'd feel better as a business owner patronizing an
OSV marketing company than Joe Sleaze marketer from GroupOn clone #23, and
an OSV would have an edge in customer acquisition, but if you can't put
together a badass sales team to put together deals, you just won't have the
deals you need. John's got a bit of a following and with the right social
networking might be able to get enough eyeballs to make a few deals happen
by simple virtue of its OSV status, but is that gonna be enough to let you
compete against well-funded competitors, especially when the only people who
care about your being an OSV are internet addict socialists (mind you, I
include myself in that)? I'm just saying, do something else. It's fine as a
mental exercise, but it's not a business you want to be in. Trust me.

Okay, I don't just have criticisms, I'll also bother to contribute something
to the discussion to push things forward-- consider shares of a company as a
sort of metacurrency. Normally, a share has two aspects: there is the
percentage of the profits you're due, and there is the voting rights. Here's
the thing-- you can divorce the two. It's called a proxy. These proxies
could be a sort of metacurrency all their own. If you have a means of
electronically and instantly assigning and calculating your votes to other
people, suddenly a whole range of variables become possible to add, allowing
you to use shareholder voting for all company decisions. For instance, you
can assign your votes temporarily or permanently. You can assign them to
particular categories of decision, so that the CFO gets a vast number of
votes when talking about the budget, but just a fraction of those votes when
it comes to making marketing decisions. You can attach voting rights to
positions in the company. You can use them to reward excellence. You can use
them in place of a board of directors-- your board might be just the six
non-employees with the most votes. You can give your customers votes. You
get a lot of the flexibility and inherent transparency you're looking for
from an OSV, but it's not so scary to investors-- you're actually radically
empowering them to take a hands-on role in the management of the company,
even while you create the conditions that force you to do better business.
You can even have weighting, so subject-relevant experience and education
gives your opinions more weight in the decision-making process. Tied to a
project management suite akin to BetterMeans, this could be a powerful
business management system that significantly reduces hierarchical
bureaucracy while retaining the absolutely necessary meritocratic aspects of
the current system. And it does it in a way that can be explained to
investors without their eyes glazing over.

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