Positive Sum +Σ is a collective of startup community builders and Web3 futurists building a better startup community, powered by Web3, where all types of capital, not just financial, are recognised and rewarded in a more positive-sum way, allowing us to build more open, equitable, and inclusive entrepreneurship infrastructure in future.

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As we come back from the highs of the southern hemisphere’s summer and into a new year, it’s a good time to reorient ourselves, and buckle-up for our new season 2!

Previous seasons have generated some huge learnings for us, having been spent mostly sensing and designing how we could build a better startup support ecosystem for growing game-changing new companies.

To date, this work has mostly been at a systems level, looking at how value flows in startup ecosystems currently, and how value could be exchanged in more open and equitable ways in a future decentralised startup economy.

Whilst this helped us understand the real change thesis and impact opportunity behind our work, for many startups and supporters drawn to this purpose, it had ended up being relatively abstract and thus hard to engage with.

For startup supporters (i.e. those who use their skills, or capital, to support startups), the pitch/proposition for what we’re doing isn’t concrete enough to help them understand how they engage, especially the non-Web3-savvy amongst them.

Whilst for the startups, we have not been able to support them effectively enough, since we do not yet have the right programmes in place.

This new season solidifies those learnings and focusses on going right to the top of the stack to develop and deliver a clear and compelling, end-to-end, decentralised proposition that helps support startups in this new way and demonstrate our model.

This proposition will likely be a slice across all of our thinking to date, demonstrating how we can use emerging digital models, technology platforms, and crypto-economics to build a better, more open, and equitable system than what currently exists.

Done right, this work should provide both startups and supporters a meaningful engagement model and call-to-action to get involved with our work and purpose.

Season 2 Strategy - Proposition Design & Execution

The updated season 2 strategy, therefore, is summarised in the diagram below, which also neatly rolls up our thinking to date about how everything fits together.

This new three layer decentralised model (left hand side of diagram) is a great summary of our vision of the future and combines our previous seasons’ thinking so far.

Our updated vision in season 2, is to build a Positive Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem which builds Positive Sum Startups.

• A Positive-Sum Startup is one who cares about recognising and rewarding the contributions of everyone who helped them along the way, and gives back to support the community throughout their journey.

• A Positive-Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem is a community strongly aligned around creating open, equitable and inclusive growth opportunities for each other.  People within this ecosystem can not only consume value but crucially are rewarded for the value they create for the community.

This model is enabled by three key operating layers: a protocol layer, a platform layer, and a product ecosystem layer.

Layer 1 - The Protocol

Like many Web3 platforms with embedded crypto-economics, we envisage an open Positive-Sum Value Exchange Protocol at the heart of our new world and in startup communities of the future.

This protocol, operating as smart contracts on the blockchain, would use our native token to represent a number of things: value flow; your reputation in the community (in terms of your expertise and value created for others); and as income to power the underlying network through micro-transactions.

This last piece is critical, as it’s this micro-taxation, whenever value is exchanged, that will be used to sustain the community as a whole over the long-term. Imagine it like paying-forward a small portion of each piece of value exchanged, back to the community as a gratuity for the support the community provides as a whole. It’s not enough to break the bank, but an acknowledgement that supporting the community is critical to help others on the journey.

At a small scale, this contribution is probably negligible (e.g. a few cents on each value exchange), but at scale, and as more value is exchanged in the network, this really has the potential to create a meaningful sustainable revenue stream for all active members of the community, possibly generating long-term wealth and a universal income for those who continually add value over time.

This taxation revenue would flow into the DAO and be distributed to fund protocol development, platform development, and product ecosystem programmes, grants, and investment funds.

Because the taxation revenue will be controlled by the DAO, it will be managed by all members of the DAO who have governance rights, creating a decentralised model of governance and funds management.

Layer 2 - The Platform

Sitting on top of these smart contracts is the Positive-Sum Online Platform, which will allow people a slightly friendlier way to engage with the protocol rather than calling the underlying smart contracts directly (which, whilst possible, is not for the faint of heart!)

This platform, already in it’s infancy, would allow startups looking for support to find Positive-Sum Programmes in our ecosystem to help them grow. For startup supporters it will let them contribute their networks, knowledge, and know-how to help startups be successful, engage in programmes, and get rewarded with community reputation and tokens for adding value to those startups in a decentralised way.

Layer 3 - The Product Ecosystem

Finally, sitting atop this stack, which has been probably our most elusive element up to this point, is a Positive-Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, which consists of decentralised startup support programmes (e.g. mastermind groups, pitch coaching, feedback clinics, accelerator-type offerings, investment readiness programmes, etc), decentralised investment funds, and programme grants that are all owned and operated by the community, and ideally funded by the Protocol revenue given enough scale and throughput over time.

A key design goal of these Positive-Sum Programmes isn’t really to recreate existing or even deliver our own programmes, it’s primarily to enable other ecosystem programme providers to deliver their existing products and services in #TheNewWay, i.e. in a Positive-Sum Way, which ultimately will deliver more Positive-Sum Startups.

This layer is perhaps the more traditional interface to startup support services that non-Web3 folk would be more familiar with; our main point of difference is that they will be delivered in ways which pay-it-forward to the community as a whole using Web3 crypto-economics via the Positive-Sum Value Exchange Protocol.

We believe this three layer model allows us to deliver upon our purpose by helping more ‘Positive-Sum Startups’ thrive within a ‘Positive-Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem’, and thus creating a more ‘Positive-Sum Economy’.

This, in turn, drives our core-thesis, which is that if we can capture and reward more of the early unpaid value which flows in many startup communities, we can create a ‘flywheel’ to create more value for each other and all win together in a positive-sum game.

Season 2 Strategic Goals

Because we’ve mostly had our head down in layers 1 (protocol) and 2 (platform) so far, we’ve never really landed on any meaningful propositions that make it super easy to get your head around what we’re about, especially for non-Web3-savvy folk!

Thus, season 2 is all about doing exactly that, using our combined knowledge of entrepreneurship support to build our first decentralised proposition that allows startups to find support, engage through our platform, and use the protocol to both generate some revenue for the community, and show the contribution-reputation-reward loop in action.

This translates into 5 key strategic goals this season, summarised below:

1. Proposition Design & Interface with Startup Community

We don’t yet know what the first cab-off-the-rank is for our initial startup support offering, which is still to be ideated and developed during the season.

But our goal here is to ultimately build a model that allows anyone to create a programme, and use the community to help deliver it (if required); running it through our platform and protocol tools in a positive-sum way.

Part of this work will, therefore, require prototyping a programme ownership and collaboration model that respects and rewards those people who create programmes, and those who provide their effort to deliver them (I can already see Programme Creator NFTs and distributions like shared bounties both for programme creator royalties, and programme ‘deliverers’ in our near-term future!)

This also means that longer term, given these ecosystem programme builders would be a key audience for us, developing fellowships, grants, and training programmes to help them onboard into our ethos and interface into our ecosystem would be required too.

So, whilst this is by no means agreed, here’s what a Positive-Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem might look like over the longer-term. Certainly feels good to have this missing product/ecosystem vision to build towards!

2. Platform Activation & Development

Whilst we’ve developed a skeleton MVP of our platform, without the right propositions which utilise that platform, it’s missing a little context!

Developing our first proposition running on top of that platform will focus it’s use-case, and activate usage as value is recorded and exchanged to deliver that first programme.

We’d imagine that the platform would be modified to help support programmes and allow people to register for them and reflect that on their individual profiles, as well as acting as a single point of reference for all value exchanged during the programme as a sort of public record of what value you got from the programme, and from whom.

Some of these tools already exist, but some still need to be built over time. We envisage the following set of tools to complete the minimum critical feature set for the full Positive-Sum Online Platform.

3. Protocol Design and Implementation

We’ve done a lot of thinking and design on the right tokenomics model to represent our model of value exchange within the Positive-Sum Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, but have yet to realise those as actual smart contracts that can be used.

With our first proposition, which would utilise the protocol, it gives us a good rationale and push to complete this work and enshrine our values in code.

Our current protocol design has two parts:

• A reputation model for value creators, so people looking for help know where to find it, and also to recognise those who provide value in a fine grained way (e.g. I offer business model mentorship versus product strategy mentorship, and I have AgriTech investor networks versus FinTech investor networks, etc.); and secondly

• A token-based reward model that uses both a token to represent value exchange and an NFT membership card that unlocks greater community and token rewards the more value you create for others (just like an airline reward card!).

This season may allow us at least to develop a basic form of both models to prove out the value-exchange and capture model, allowing us to create a permanent record or proof-of- value delivered by both by an entrepreneurship programme, and the individual contributors, something that’s been hard to measure up to this point.

Of all the things slated for season 2, seeing this part come to life gets me super-excited as it really is the realisation of the vision stripped to it’s most basic core!

4. DAO As An Impact Organisation

One thing I’m realising is that what we’re actually building is a model of sharing public goods to help people build companies, and providing access to it in a open, distributed, and fair way using blockchains.

According to Gitcoin founder, Kevin Owocki, this is a “regenerative economic’ model which uses money to incentivise communities to solve a systemic issue of equitable value exchange, and it strikes me that the model we’re building is more Impact DAO than just DAO.

In my season 1 reflections I touched on reframing the concept of DAO less as a Web3 ‘thing’ that sounds new and technologically scary, but more akin to any other traditional organisation with a mission, employees (contributors), and leadership (albeit decentralised).

This shifts the current paradigm of DAO more as a community, to DAO as an impact organisation that you’re intentionally joining to “work for” to further it’s mission (whilst also having a community as a side effect).

You come to the DAO to work, to further the purpose of the DAO (and get paid in reputation and tokens), but you stay for the people, the community, and shared values.

This season then, we want to take more of a formal step to reframe the DAO so it is seen more as an impact organisation rather than just a community. This means thinking about onboarding members as employees; detailing work to be done as bounties that anyone can claim; and matching incoming member skills to that work that needs to get done to help create capacity.

Whilst we’re progressively decentralising and designing many of these operating systems, we’re not truly a DAO yet, so this move locks-in that operating model more formally, and is a great use-case as we can use this ownership/governance model more explicitly when we create our programme/ecosystem propositions.

5. Funding

Finally, perhaps the biggest elephant in the room, is to address funding a little more head-on as a strategic goal this season.

It’s been great to see the current team and supporters flock to the vision so far, but turning them into meaningful contributors requires solving some money worries for them, and ensuring we’re not permanently operating on goodwill. Without it, we will continue to be capacity constrained and struggle to move forward.

There are multiple potential pathways for funding to explore this season, each with pros and cons:

• Funding the product proposition through sponsorship or grants;

• Raising general funding for the DAO through NFT sales to known parties (i.e. a small-scale local sale rather than a full token offering);

• Web3 venture-capital investment;

• Funding proposals to develop the platform and decentralised tooling further.

Whilst each layer in our model (propositions, platform, and protocol) might have their own funding requirements, we wanted to make funding a top-level strategic priority to call out its importance in maintaining momentum and motivation for team members.

This likely also means we need to solve the looming question of how to legally structure ourselves… I guess like many DAOs, we have to tackle this at some point, so no time like the present!

Season 2 Outcomes

The above season 2 strategic goals should allow us to build targeted startup support propositions with the startup community, activate our impact, and share the rewards using our protocol (as both tokens and reputation).

Thus by the end of Season 2 we hope to have realised the following:

• We will have a clear and compelling hook/message, and value proposition that resonates in the market

• We will have a decentralised programme that creates direct value for startups and engages the startup support community in its delivery

• We will have a real DAO operating model and platform

• We will have clear mechanism for people to onboard and become activated into delivering value for the DAO

• We will reward contributors to the DAO with tokens

• We will have a platform which can support our developed proposition and onboard users into it

• We will have a roadmap for funding and some funding already closed to support some of our initiatives

The Future

So that’s season 2 in a nutshell, including some better packaging up on our thinking to date.

If we manage to successfully deliver on our first proposition during the season, in future, I believe it will allow us to:

• Build upon this season’s pilot of developing a product proposition and delivering it using the Positive Sum Online Platform;

• See some community growth and activation from both Startups and Supporters from that usage;

• Continue to create new product propositions in future, and;

• Facilitate other startup programmes already in the market to move their operations to be powered by our protocol and platforms (i.e. become Positive-Sum Programmes)

The more we can generate usage of the underlying Positive-Sum Value Exchange Protocol, the more community funds will be generated in the treasury.  This will allow us to scale our operations and deliver more value in the future.

This all sounds great on paper, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get us there, and we’d love your help. Do reach out to me directly, or jump into our Discord server and say hi if you want to help us build towards this vision of a more open and equitable entrepreneurship infrastructure.

Thanks as always for reading and following our journey.

-Dan (@LeanCTO)

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Thanks as always to our core contributors who helped formulate our season 2 strategy – hat-tip to long-time co-founder @simianaudio; season 1 diehards @nikkim, @sallyh, and our resident Gigabrain, @diligentdeer!

If you want to find out how to get involved with our work at Positive Sum, you can look around our DAO docs (which need updating to reflect season 2, hang tight!), jump into our Discord (and help us with better onboarding and community management!), or just stay connected through our monthly email update - subscribe below to stay updated!