The evidence is in - scaling as an approach to growing an organization doesn't work. Anyone in a tradorg that has grown knows that an 8 person organization can't function the same way an 800 person organization does. An insect scaled up to human size would collapse under its exoskeleton. The 50 foot woman literally couldn't be human at that size - her bone density would not support her body. Geoffrey West's book Scale includes many great examples of these challenges.

We often use the word "scale" for "growth", but they aren't the same. Nature doesn't grow by scaling, it grows by reproduction. The oldest humans barely make it to 120 years, but the species has been around for 250x longer. Tradorgs lionize exponential growth and barely tolerate reproduction, because the former is much easier for it to manage than the latter. The promise of DAOs is that startup and shutdown can be much easier, so they can harness the principles of reproduction far more effectively than tradorgs, and by doing so outcompete them.

This is the main reason that I was attracted to Orca Protocol (now Metropolis). Pod structures can enable DAOs to effectively coordinate while minimizing the costs of doing so. This requires an approach to governing DAOs that can take advantage of pod mechanics. This can’t be a retrofit. We have to design support for growth into DAOs and make it part of how they work from day 0.