After writing my previous article I ended up talking a lot with giga-brained friend 0xcarnation. Carn asked, as always, an incredibly prescient question that cut to the heart of my thought process: “So what do you want to do?” Meaning, ok you’re thinking about DAOs and governance, you’ve created a model that is too centralized for many use-cases, and each concept we threw around didn’t fit your desires. So what did I want?

What I want, personally, is to be able to leverage my own abilities to serve an organization. I’m good at structure, planning, administration -- I can make budgets and flow charts until the cows come home. Like so many non-technical people, that has made it genuinely difficult to find meaningful ways to contribute. However, it also showed me a weakness in existing structures and made me consider actually useful applications of this system.

This, not that

Let me outline a few use-cases:

1. An organization that is building a product.

Our limitations here are numerous:

• Competition in the space
• Being beaten to the punch on release
• Attracting and holding talent in a market that is begging for more shadowy super coders
• Income flow and operating capital
• Rapid technological development rendering our product unnecessary or unsupported

2. A trading organization

• Possibility of a division between active traders and non-active earners
• What is the incentivization for very good traders to collectivize?
• How are salaries paid out? Commission for those who make the trades? For those who find the leads?
• What place is there for people like me? You basically just have a trading pit with a shared wallet and a distribution system -- do we need operators and administrators?
• Eventually we'll either not be able to outperform the market, or experience burn out, or get regulated, or gobbled up by as bigger player.

3. An investment/VC group

• Sustaining and building capital
• Delayed income streams
• Competition from big dogs

I’m sure there are more examples, but these immediately come to mind. And not that they are bad systems -- I simply question their longevity and productivity.

When having this discussion with Carnation, I thought about the term “zaibatsu” -- Japanese conglomerates that leveraged vertical integration to dominate massive sectors of industry. We can continue this concept in the modern age as mega-corporations that, in addition to owning their supply chains and implementing economies of scale, work across industries and markets (even creating narratives of false choice between their own products).

Obviously, I’m not directly talking about starting one massive organization to control every facet of industry -- that is coming already. What I did take away was the idea of a company operating across many verticals and fields, with many services and diversified streams. Not only would this allow for an organization to maximize active and delayed income, it wouldn’t be solely reliant on internal or external revenue sources. It would allow for the recruitment of a broad range of talent across the spectrum, enable modularity of compensation, and larger collaboration. Discoveries or insights from one division can be used for the betterment of the others.

Yes, of course, it is big and sprawling, grand and confusing. But the reason monopolies are so powerful, why owning the supply chain is so valuable, is because it works. Why pay others for research when we can conduct our own? And then, even better, why not sell that research to others? If we can invest in a project, why can’t we also offer our services as marketers, designers, coders to them for additional gains? If you’re building a lot of houses, why go to the lumber yard when you can just buy the lumber yard? Or better, when you can build the lumber yard.

Of course, this requires a large organizational component, administration that other DAOs and DAO-like entities have lacked. Each of these divisions will require a budget, a team, communication, documentations -- in some cases legal and licensing considerations.

Each of these divisions can be spun up or activated in their own time according to a roadmap -- though obviously complimentary ones should be actualized in tandem (Research and Trading, for example). The obvious first hurdle is securing enough funding to start -- either by outside investment or personal funding by founding members -- each with their own drawbacks and advantages. I am confident on a macro level that given a relatively short amount of time, the structure can become self-sufficient and begin to scale.

A substantial reason why I want something like this is one of the overall (idealistic) goals of decentralized finance and organization: inclusion. A space where all manner of people of diverse talents and skill sets can work together to contribute to a larger whole, with advancement adjudicated by merit. Coders and traders, yes -- but also biz-dev, HR, marketing, people who are good at spreadsheets and documentation. If you have a skill, we will find a use for it. We will compensate you, support you, give you a sense of purpose.

In this way, the Zaibatsu-DAO grows more akin to a nation-state -- with many things contributing to the GDP, in service not of arbitrary profits and traditional corporate overlords, but its citizens and workers whose labor deserves a fair share of reward. From an external standpoint, this Z-D would be an all-in-one entity (similar in some ways to Paradigm or Delphi) that can assist and grow the ecosystem around it, while also serving its own interests.

The conventional state exists for its own self-preservation and the enforcement of territory. The traditional corporation exists for shareholder profit maximization. The Zaibatsu-DAO would exist to enrich the people who work inside of it and fill the addressable markets and niches it identifies. On the one hand, this exists in a hyper-on-chain capitalist way -- almost virally adapting and expanding to fill more need and create more revenue -- on the other it can also exist as a benevolent co-op providing for and maximizing good in a utilitarian fashion for as many people as possible.

I will close with this, which came to mind when discussing this with Indy:

“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Part of maturing, of becoming grounded in reality, is to realize that we are not the main character of this story. That each of us is a composite, roughly hewn and formed, of myriad strengths, weaknesses, ideals, fears. It is best for us to abandon this stand alone complex and to instead join hands -- an interlocking series of arches supporting one another.

Then, perhaps, I will feel genuinely useful and can have no qualms about retiring early to tend to my garden and write poems.