Initial attempt at writing down my ideas for a company based on trust.

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Mar 3, 2013, 4:00 PM

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start 11:54

Start

I want to create something.

I have an idea for a project that I need help with. The project itself
might be interesting, or it might not - I'll get to what I want to
create in a bit - but the more important thing, the reason that I'm
writing this, is that I want to try to create a new way for people to
work together for profit. I'm tired of corporate feudalism. So, I want
to try building something, as a side project, that people will be
willing to pay money for. And I want to try a radical experiment in
cooperative work and distribution of the wealth that we can
collectively create. I apologize in advance if this runs a bit long.

It feels prosaic, even trite to write this, because our language has
been so long corrupted by those who would abuse such words for
personal gain (at others' loss), but I want to know what it is like to
work with a group of people where the fundamental principle of all our
interaction is trust, where I, and the people I work with on it, will
be utterly honest and open with everyone we come into contact with
(including, of course, each other.) I can feel the claws of a million
corporate ethos statements, and our collective cynicism about them,
rending my very will to write this down. But upon my life, if it is
worth anything at all, I assert that this is true. After the love and
well being of my family, to do meaningful, creative work in an
environment of trust, honesty, and respect is all I really want from
life.

The Project

So, back to the project for a moment. This is an almost trivial bit,
but I want to get the high-level "what" out of the way so that I can
focus on the "how" without feeling like I'm dragging you along to get
to the punchline. I want to create an online environment for
collaboration on creative work. Now, I know that that statement is
essentially content-free, so, think Github, for everything that's not
software - instead, for all the other creators, of music, video,
3D-printing and CNC enthusiasts, hardware hackers, whatever - a place
to version, derive, digitize, share, and document the artifacts and
process of their creative work. People have of course been doing this
with the web forever, and the OSS movement has got it down to an art,
but none of the other makers really seem to have available to them a
service that provides the same kind of amazing tooling we have for
doing this sort of thing with software. I think that such a thing
needs to exist. The details, we can talk about later.

So, there's something that I think I would like to build, something
that I think has enough value that people might pay for it, and I'd
eventually like to be able to maybe even support my family as a
consequence of building it. The "natural" thing, according to the
dominant culture, might be to start a company. but, as I said, I'm
sick of corporate feudalism and its confident, smirking assertion that
on person's work is self-evidently worth more than the work of
another. TO HELL WITH THAT. Each of us has just a few hundred thousand
hours of life to live, in the best of circumstances, and to me the
notion that the hours of my life that I might spend working are more,
or less, valuable than someone else's is bloody offensive. I don't
know what kind of vicious, subversive mind control has been worked
upon us to make us accept it, but I think this idea is not merely
wrong, but damned evil. So, I want to propose a gloriously naive other
way.

stop 12:51
start 13:12

The Value of Time

Time is fleeting. In every job I've ever had, even though I love the
work that I do, I feel like every minute that I'm working I'm stealing
time that I could be spending with family, friends, or just alone with
my thoughts. Likewise, when I *am* doing those things, I feel like I'm
giving up precious moments when I could be moving the project I'm
working on forward. I haven't ever been able to strike a balance and
usually end up working too much, then trying frantically to recover
lost time with my children and my wife and parents and friends (even
lost sleep) in compressed, hyperactive, unnatural segments of vacation
or weekends. I guess I've been well-conditioned to believe that this
is inevitable, but logic and history tells me that it's not the only
way. What I want to create is an opportunity to do profitable work, to
create wealth, without compulsion to spend a certain number of hours
in a certain place doing a certain task. The way I see it, such
compulsion is only necessary in the absence of honesty and the absence
of trust.

Here's how I think that a group of people collaborating for profit
should work. I hesitate to call this a "company" because of all of the
implications of that term, but I'm going to use it for now because I
can't be bothered to think of a better one and I don't want to use
"cooperative" or other, loaded alternate. But I'll urge you to, in the
following, think of the term in a more classical fashion; perhaps,
when you see it, think of the term as in "the company you keep."

I believe that, when honestly applied, that the time a person spends
working toward a goal has value - the value is exactly that of the
hours of life that have passed, hastening toward that person's
inevitable end. The question to be answered is, what is the value of
of the work produced during that time? This, of course, can only
really be judged at present by the uncompromising metric of what
someone else is willing to pay for it, over the lifetime of whatever
"it" is. Ultimately this is just a proxy for the number of minutes, or
hours, or days of *their* lives they're willing to devote to having
what it is you've produced. For this moment in history, money is as
good a proxy as any for this. So, basically, I believe that people
should be paid for their work, according to the price that other
people are willing to pay for it. Simple enough. What's a little
different about what I'd like to try is the method for how this
payment is allocated.

Compensation

If we, in company, can produce something that someone pays for, we
should immediately divide up that payment according to the cumulative
amount of time from our lives that we've each devoted to the
production of the thing being paid for, adjusted for the eventual
depreciation of our labor. So, each person working on the project
counts up the hours they've put into it, and that fraction of the
total value accrued by all of the participants is paid out to him or
her, with one adjustment that is a prospective answer to the question
"for how long is a given bit of labor valuable?"

I don't know exactly, but a scheme I'd like to try is something like,
after 3 months, the value of an hour of labor in the pool begins to
depreciate by something like two minutes per month. This means that
the value of that labor goes to zero after two years and nine months;
if we tried 6 months and one minute per month, it'd be five and a half
years. It's probably an imperfect scheme, and it very deliberately
ignores the question of good work versus bad, because to be honest I
don't want to collaborate with someone who produces bad work; I'd much
prefer to simply, sadly let them know that they're no longer welcome
on the project (but that they will continue to be paid, as everyone
else, for the value that they contributed while I/we trusted them.)
The advantages, though, are prodigious. Each participant can expect to
be fairly and impartially compensated for the time they've spent on
the project, insofar as there's any compensation to be had. There is
no lower bound, and a very natural upper bound, on the amount that
anyone can work. If someone ceases contributing or becomes unwelcome,
their share of the overall total will fall off at first slowly, then
with increasing rapidity as the total amount of effort invested by
others grows. And, if the project is to be successful, then the
benefits will accrue to everyone who has participated in making it a
success.

stop 14:07
start 14:22

Bootstrapping

There are some things that this company, if I am to be a part of it,
must never do, though hopefully the design of the system I'm proposing
for the distribution of income would make them practically impossible
anyway. First, we will never take outside investment or borrow money,
except as individuals. No one will ever be compelled to take on risk
for the benefit of another. In past eras, this would have been a major
impediment to getting started, but of course with the kind of project
I'm talking about here there's no such problem. The need for up-front
investment is low enough that the participants can simply pay for it
out of our own pockets. The problem with investment in particular is
that it structurally promises potentially indefinite future benefit
for a one-time infusion of value, and this is antithetical to the
underlying principles of the compensation scheme. There is, of course,
nothing that should prevent a person from selling his or her accrued
hours to a third party, if they wanted to bet against the success of
the company in that way.

So, it seems to me that the only viable way to proceed is in the way
that every open-source project (and a great number of successful private
enterprises) does; to bootstrap ourselves. It seems to me to be the
most honest and way to proceed; in bootstrapping, unlike in
investment-funded startups, it is impossible to hide from the truth
about whether what you're doing is actually valuable or not.

Costs

This brings up another issue, that of how to handle ongoing costs, and
here again, the answer is startlingly simple in an environment based
on trust. If we genuinely trust one another, there is no inhibition to
regularly pooling our resources to pay for the services we consume. I
trust that if I spend some money to benefit everyone, that repayment of that will
be treated as a moral (and no other) sort of obligation by those in
company with me. I want for nothing stronger than the word of a good
person as a guarantee. Likewise, if, at some point down the road we
wished to invite a new member to our company and that person could not
financially manage to survive on the value produced by their initial
contributions of time (due to it being a small fraction of the amassed
total value) I would have no compunction about issuing that person a
series of loans, to be repaid as they are able (providing that doing
so would not jeopardize my own well-being.) For, of course, inviting a
new member requires that he or she be entrusted with far more than
just a bit of money.

stop 15:05
start 15:46

Decision Making

I'm going to hedge a little bit here, because I don't actually have
any great answers as to what the best mechanism is, but I think that
the open-source community's model of consensus and forking is probably
the best guide available. A creative works license can be devised that
incorporates the compensation scheme described above, and all of the
creative work that is produced by the company licensed under it. If
someone or some group wishes to fork the project, it does little
harm. A harder question is how to collectively come to the conclusion
that someone is untrustworthy or unwelcome and thus remove them from
the company; here I suspect that some democratic process requiring a
supermajority in favor of condemnation is the best we can do. It's an
imperfect world. I can only hope that the foundation of only expanding the
membership of the company to individuals worthy of profound trust will
obviate the need for much of a formal process.

Customers

Perhaps at this point the following should go without saying, but if
we do not extend the environment of honesty and trust to the people
who might buy our services as well as the people around us, then this
experiment will have failed utterly. No admission of fault will ever
be withheld from our customers, if we are so lucky as to have
them. The truth will always be known anyway; it's best if we're the
ones telling it.

Finish

Being at the end of these few hours of writing, I can see that there's
a lot left unspecified by this proposal, and ultimately I can only
trust that what remains can be argued over, refined, adopted or
rejected by a group of people whom I respect for their honesty. The
best that I can hope for is that this experiment is interesting, and
perhaps makes a little way exploring the space of ways that people can
work together. If it fails, or is laughed away, or explodes in a
flaming ball of shrapnel I can only try to go do some other, good,
uncompromised work inside of the current system. But if you're
receiving this, and have read so far, I can only humbly hope that
you'll do me the honor of giving it some thought. I invite you to
experiment with me.

This is me, this is what I believe, this is what I want to create.

finish 16:37

I have willfully chosen to spend 3 hours and 26 minutes of my lifetime writing this document.