Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

Explore game theoretically sound ways to start new companies as "worker co-ops" and to reward participants. The idea being to aim toward a future where there is a large gray area between "employee" and "entrepreneur."

The companies formed don't have to be start-ups per se: they could be as simple (and low risk) as a group of people who build web sites and apps for clients, but would like to have a stake in it rather than just "working for the man."

Since it is research, it is ok if things are explored that would require changes in laws.

I can imagine a site (or better yet, a standard protocol) -- sort of Kickstarter-ish, but different -- where people start projects, gather contributors, "pay" those contributors by giving them equity (or actually pay them, if the company is bringing in revenue).

There would be ways of holding votes (presumably voting power is weighted by how much you have contributed), and various checks and balances to prevent participants from gaming it. Everyone would probably be able to weigh in on the contributions of others, in a carefully designed way that encourages everyone to be productive, cooperative, and creative.

The idea is that there are a huge number of people out there with talent, creativity, and a willingness to take some risks, but most of them aren't really entrepreneurial types per se. This would be both a matchmaking site for getting people with complementary talents and personalities together, as well as a service for handling equity calculations as people contribute hours (and various other things that streamline the process so people with talent can spend their efforts using their actual talents).

Obviously there is some overlap with what Y-Combinator does, but this is a way of scaling it out much larger, in ways that could dramatically increase innovation as well as increasing job satisfaction.

I worked this out in great detail, it took about a decade to get the bugs out. The problem is that it works well for founders and other people interested in the mechanics of running a company but it emphatically does not work for people who would rather 'just be paid'. Not everybody wants to be an active participant in the ownership portion of a company, plenty of people simply want a job and a paycheck and that's it. (And to make it explicit: there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, just like not everybody needs to know or wants to know how to fix their car in order to be able to use one.)

I have no doubt there are people who would rather just be paid, probably the majority of people. But that still leaves a lot of people to do this sort of thing.

Also, as the companies grow a bit larger and mature, they should be fine for the "just want to be paid" folk, as that is basically how it would work.

Also, I would hope that most of the mechanics would just be handled by the system. At least the tedious stuff. Stuff like voting on company/product direction, and rating your peers seems like something everyone would like to participate in, especially if it doesn't become political (in a bad way).

There have been some attempts at this - assembly.com and one other company that I don't remember the name of. Has not worked out yet, as the contributors usually lose focus after a while

I was sad to see assembly.com close down. Seemed like a pretty solid structure for this kind of endeavour.

I wasn't familiar with assembly.com. I think that it would be a challenging thing to get right, so that such issues don't tend to occur, but it should be doable. One thing that is probably needed is people who join as project managers, to keep things on track and provide reports on each person's commitments, progress etc to other members (all of whom can rate the contributions of one another). When starting out that may not be necessary, but after it starts to gain momentum you may well need some additional help to keep the momentum going.

That's an interesting idea and angle.

While reading "The Dispossessed"[1] and thinking about the way syndicates work there, I had this (generic, not-worked-out) thought about some form of protocol for creating co-ops of the kind mentioned, and then running and enforcing the rules (including e.g. equal dividend payment / whatnot).

I wonder if someone has considered implementing some kind of a co-op system in Ethereum (where contracts are transparent and enforced and no single node is responsible for running the code). :)

Hmm, taking ideas from anarcho-syndicalism and implementing them in Ethereum....

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed - this is a nice book indeed.

Definitely in the works. Check out http://boardroom.to/

Its allows any arbitrary ownership rules, so it works for co-ops as well as shareholder corporations

Thanks, looks interesting, will check out their whitepaper!

Interesting architecture in regards to their "General Hook Middleware" and other ways of implementing "middleware contracts" (for things such as company payroll). Curious stuff...

edit yeah, this is interesting. Do you know how close this is to a working implementation? I see some "pre-alpha" screenshots etc.

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