Downfall Of The Firm

The theory of the firm seeks to explain why companies and organizations arose, when individuals could, in theory, engage in pairwise transactions. The explanation is that firms exist to reduce coordination and transaction costs: all the things that make it hard for people to work together, solve problems, and deliver value effectively and efficiently. But what happens when tools for coordination are more widespread, and a whole range of innovations -- from Zoom to Discord to DAOs -- makes it easier to work together outside of formalized organizations?

It’s increasingly difficult to draw hard boundaries between the inside and the outside of an organization. And, for businesses that need to adapt, the biggest opportunities may come not from locking things down, but by opening them up. In a networked world, information, data and people flow through open channels between organizations. We are entering the post-social media era, where people are moving off centralized platforms and into a curated mosaic of niche, private, and cooperative spaces: Koops.

Built To Progress

While communities are built to connect, Koops are built to progress.

The old model of monolithic jobs with defined roles and responsibilities has been replaced with modular jobs that are constantly evolving and changing. In other words, work is being unbundled from employment. Finding communities of other independents is becoming a replacement for the company or team.

Culture Meets Squads At Work

For both full-timers and independents, career growth in a permissionless world is an increasingly modular and evolving process, vs. the hierarchal scales enabled by an industry of gatekeepers. As we become more specialized, we “move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.” Innovation has allowed us to merge our economic selves - professional, skilled, competitive - with our public selves - civic, social, and personal. There is no longer a separation between professional development and personal development. All skills, experiences, and practices can be brought to bear on our professional and private lives. Who we are in work is who we are more generally.

Ideas jammed on in the Discord or Twitch stream are turned into cultural movements. What follows next is not simply execution, but something even more powerful — memetic virality. Brands will be created by squads, and they will not be tied to workplaces or organizations. A place where you never have to sell yourself because your contributions speak for you. You work is not assigned, it is guided by your inner voice. Koop is for collaborators, builders, and self-starters.

Self-Funded

Koops are funded by direct member investment. Crypto offers limitless options for bootstrapping. A group could use profits from selling NFTs, staking, completing bounties, and more to externalize their social products.

We plan on natively supporting all of these use cases, starting with NFTs. Early Koop members can use the surplus of NFT profits to fund launching their own product. Profits from the product are then used to build out a storefront, for example. This framework enables sustainable growth of both the businesses and communities they serve. Every social Koop will start investing to bootstrap funding events and projects.

Where We Are Today

NFTs are an asset in a shared treasury. Fluid user-owned networks, will collect NFTs as an accurate measure of not only their social capital, but also their cultural positioning. NFTs as a treasury asset allow for audiences to be built around the Koop, expanding its product base and external community. Token holders have an upside in the NFTs and the creators of the content NFTs. Each Koop is its own micro-economy, legitimized through contributions and credit.

Koops are owned and operated by their members. Members can be creators, or consumers, of the Koop’s products and services. Pooling resources for an evolving mission, determined by its members, allows Koops to remain flexible and scalable within their niche.

What We Believe

Everything we do starts with these questions: Why should Koops exist? Why should anyone care to use it? Why is collective ownership so important to us? Eventually, the “why” led us to three truths.

Community around cultural pieces.

1. Shared ownership is about community, not fractionalization. A shared treasury enables lower barriers to entry for highly-valuable assets. Owning an NFT means you have subscribed to the notion that ownership is intrinsically relational – value that is determined in the context of other relationships, associations, and connections.
2. We are building the blueprint for mutual organization, giving groups leverage to collect, invest, and catalyze cultural movements together. The squad is the user class for tooling we need today, yet few products enable groups to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together.

Collectivism > Individualism

1. To go further, go together. In collectivist cultures, groups are of primary importance—individuals are secondary. In these cultures, individuals acknowledge the contributions of others to their existence. They may sacrifice self-interest to promote the interest of the collective.
2. A bridge has yet to be built between collectivism and individualism, where the autonomy and sufficiency of the individual is enabled, while also promoting aligned values and in-groups. Interestingly enough, the pseudonymous nature of Web3 enables us to hold multiple identifies — to be a core contributor in multiple collectives.
3. Your friends become your coworkers. Your shared purpose and mission is backed by assets and projects that you hold total ownership of. Your ability to move across opportunities and interests is not bound by contractual or societal obligations.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how we remain an artist once we've grown up”

1. A new generation of entrepreneurs want to build transformative and scalable businesses that align with their values and combat - rather than perpetuate - economic and race-based inequality.
2. Independents are people who work for themselves. Instead of a full time job, individuals will lean on a fluid portfolio of revenue streams. Individuals will work on projects that align with their beliefs and interests, enabled to spend energy on missions they stand by.
3. In traditional freelance, individuals support each other by sharing their networks, rates, leads, etc. There are many lessons to be learned from a collaborative ecosystem in which creatives are able to share resources and learnings. A collaborative economy will have an outsized opportunity to elevate underserved communities and provides avenues for wealth creation and distribution.

Our Promise

Koop is for doers and makers. Recent events have required all of us to reevaluate our relationship with time, work, and identity. Our hope is to inspire and enable you to be more autonomous, more fluid, and more collaborative in the way you spend, earn, and collect.

Our mission is to build a true extension for your craft. A curated home for your digital contributions, far away from social networks, bank statements or bounty boards. A place of utility as much as a place of energy. Because that’s all Koop is: A tool meant to help you generate abundance and achieve as collectives.

We expect our vision to evolve as our community grows, so we make these promises to you now:

We will uphold our responsibility

We aspire to offer conditions for connection, learning, and action to arise in a fluid and simple manner. Managing payments and being rewarded for your contributions should be an after thought. This will be accomplished by offering new modes of sharing resources — open, trustless, and transparent. We promise to have NO vanity metrics and NO social pressure.

We will work together

The current web is made to withhold information and influence you. The only way this changes is by working together. We are focused on building on top of existing infrastructure and collaborating through our own open-sourced technology. We aim to contribute an environment of co-creation.

We're in it for the long haul

We're an independent company who's built many other independent products. We only answer to you, our members and supporters. This allows us to grow slowly and carefully while ensuring our values are reflected in everything we do.