DAOs vs Startups

Are they conflitants or complements?

There is an Efficiency x Resilience spectrum on organization structure strategy.

If you want more efficiency, growth, and velocity, you need a more centralized structure, hence a traditional startup.

If you want a more resilient, democratic, and anti-fragile system, you need decentralization, therefore probably a DAO structure.

However, as the startup grows and becomes a large corporation, it would be healthy for it to go towards decentralization over a DAO structure.

For example, Twitter has grown fast as a startup but now has reached such a large scale and power that without a doubt it would be better to run on a DAO structure, with decentralized governance, open source code, and economic alignment through tokens.

So, DAOs can't create startup-like products?

I really think they do. But the playbook is quite different than MVP -> Seed Capital -> VC Growth Capital and Exit.

In Web3 actually, there is no playbook yet, but there are already some signs.

First, create a high-aligned community, then set up a governance DAO, and only then enable the rise of subDAOs to create startup-like products.

It's important to understand the independence between these two structures, as well as their interdependence.

Iterative decisions should be made by the core team of subDAO. But also should harness the power of community.

A startup that is part and/or has been born as a spin-off of a DAO can leverage the community as the first: clients, marketing evangelists, beta-testers, customer educators, talent recruiters, and so on because they own the underlying token and are economically aligned to the project.

DAOs are not even 5 years old yet, but we are already can see the power of decentralized projects as a result of intelligence collective.

In the Digital Era, we need digital-native structures.

And DAOs have the best fit for now.