Goodbye bosses, hello voting and crypto-payment: a new type of business is taking hold

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Last December was a stressful time for 42-year-old Nicole d’Avis. She had been working remotely for months because of the pandemic. Then she was fired from the Music Entrepreneurship Program she ran at Berklee College of Music.

“It was definitely an eventful and moving time,” said d’Avis.

With her background in management, event planning and communication, she hoped to find work in the music industry, but landing the right job proved difficult.

“My resume certainly didn’t reach any of the algorithms of the big music product companies that I was interested in,” she said.

D’Avis has accepted consulting and freelance assignments. She also became more active in online communities that shared her passion for music and technology. When some of the people she met online decided to host a virtual conference in March, she stepped in to help organize it.

“I was like ‘yeah! I can do that,’” Avis said. “I need something to, like, take up my brain space other than trying to keep my kids on their own. [school] zoom and argue and print a million spreadsheets. “

The conference went well and she decided to continue working with the group, called Seed Club. She became a full time employee in July.

But Seed Club is not a traditional employer. It is a DAO, which stands for decentralized autonomous organization. Decentralized means that the structure of the organization is flat, so that it has no head office and generally no corporate hierarchy or bureaucracy. The employees decide as a group how to proceed.

Since decentralized also means it’s not a government-recognized entity, Avis doesn’t get a W-2, so she’s still trying to figure out how to do her taxes.

“DAOs are often or can be thought of as Reddit or Discord or group text with a bank account,” Avis explained.

“When you work to create value, do the people who do the hard work in an organization benefit from that work and do they have a long-term interest in the thing they are building? ”

Nicole d’Avis

People who invest work or financial support in a DAO become members. These members can then vote on all of the organization’s decisions, which can range from who to hire and what projects to undertake, to how to resolve conflicts between members.

“At the heart of it, it’s just a bunch of people who really care about something, and they want to work on it together,” said Anne Connelly, who teaches blockchain and social impact at the University. from Boston.

The first DAO started in 2016, and they’re increasingly popular in tech-savvy circles. Deep-DAO, a company that analyzes the growth of these decentralized organizations, estimates that there are currently 1.3 million DAO members – a number that Connelly says will continue to grow.

“DAOs are truly the future of work,” Connelly said. “I think our world is becoming more and more global, and we’ve seen it with COVID, this notion that you’re going to show up to a geographic location every day to work for a company in a regulatory jurisdiction (…) is already an outdated notion, even just in the digital world. “

Currently, many of the larger DAOs work in finance and cryptocurrency. Some, like the popular Friends with Benefits, or FwB, are digital spaces for people to connect.

The Avis DAO that Avis works in is trying to build something new. She helps creators, such as musicians, filmmakers, and media personalities, promote their work using blockchain technology. The goal is to make them less dependent on big platforms like Spotify or Facebook.

“DAOs are really the future of work. I think our world is becoming more and more global, and we’ve seen it with COVID, this notion that you’re going to show up to a geographic location every day to work for a company. in a regulatory jurisdiction (…) is already an outdated notion.

Anne Connelly, professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University

D’Avis’ monthly salary comes in two types of cryptocurrency. One that she’s able to convert into dollars – that’s what she uses to pay off her mortgage and her bills. The other comes in the form of tokens specific to its DAO, which are similar to a company’s stock.

The more Avis works, the more tokens she gets and the more stake she has in the DAO. This arrangement ties in with Avis’ core belief about work – and a question it keeps coming back to: “When you work to create value, do the people who do the hard work in an organization benefit from that work and do they have a long term stake in the thing they are building? “

So far, Wyoming is the only state to officially recognize DAOs. And because DAOs are so new, they’re still looking to reinvent elements of “traditional” jobs, such as benefits and human resources. Most of the time, they are finding out how to run a workplace when everyone has the right to vote.

This governance model can add transparency to businesses, but the majority decision is not always the right one, warns New York-based IT specialist Emin Gün Sirer.

“We know, thanks to many failing democracies around the world, that just because you’ve opened something up to potential votes from people doesn’t mean you’ll get good results,” said Gün Sirer, who helps write computer programs for entities such as DAOs. “So we have to be a little careful what we want.”

Gün Sirer says it’s important for DAOs to create checks and balances – and to think about how they design their voting systems.

For D’Avis, the transition to an unfamiliar type of business made her nervous. She was excited, but worried about financial stability, especially as a mother of two young children. In the end, she decided it was worth it.

“I’m happy with the risk I took,” Avis said. “It was also really hard to think of going back to something where you’re part of that institution, like a bigger institution, and you’re executing someone else’s vision and you’re just kind of a cog in that. machine.”

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