The 3-minute Tour
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A quixotic company is a group of independent actors who distribute revenue
among themselves according to the amount of time they've each spent
contributing to a project. As soon as any revenue is received, it is
immediately paid out to the contributors in proportion to their contributions.
In a sense, the hours contributed to the project form the "shares" of the
company, with a caveat as will be described below.
Any hour logged is equivalent to any other hour logged that ends at the same
moment; this produces a situation where the value of each individual's life is
considered to be equal, at the outset. However, it is acceptable for one
contributor to explicitly "work for" another, by either donating some of their
share of revenue to their collaborators, or by allocating time that they have
worked to another's account. In this way, a market for talent can evolve within
a company; however, all such actions are public, and at the sole discretion of
the individuals making them.
The caveat: for numerous philosophical and practical reasons, the value of an
hour contributed is not constant. Instead, the value of an hour decays
according to a tunable function of time elapsed since the hour was logged. For
example, after 6 months from the time of the original contribution, an hour
contributed begins to decay at a rate of 2 minutes per month, such that after 5
years, the value of the hour has been completely exhausted, and when revenue is
distributed, that hour will no longer be compensated. Of course, hour-shares of
the company are also subject to constant inflation as more contributions are
continuously being made.
If the company needs to rent a shared resource, the money needed to pay for
that resource may be raised from the contributors, or from others, by
auctioning hours of time that are then logged to the accounts of the
purchasers. It is not recommended that the company, as an entity, own anything;
ownership is a privilege reserved individuals.
There is, of course, nothing preventing a subset of collaborators from making
an external agreement for shared ownership of a resource that is then rented to
the company; however, the particulars of such agreements are outside the scope
of the quixotic company structure.
What Is a Quixotic Company?
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The idea of the quixotic company arose out of my experience in the open-source
community. Something we have learned from the past couple of decades of
experimentation with open-source projects is that a group of motivated
individuals, working in their own individual interest in a framework of
collaboration and trust, can achieve amazing things.
The modern corporation is essentially feudal in structure; a hierarchy of lords
to whom the greatest benefits accrue, lieutenants who provide command and
control, and serfs, whose labor fuels the enterprise but who may never achieve
the level of financial independence of the upper classes. The lore of modern
business is that those at the top of these hierarchies are justly compensated
for providing the greatest contribution or taking the most significant risks
but I believe this justification is contrived to mitigate the natural
dissatisfaction that people feel when confronted with inequality; the simple
fact is that hierarchical structures are relatively stable. However, as the
open-source software development world has shown us, this sort of hierarchy
is not the only kind of organization that can create great things.
Open-source development, however, has a couple of problems. While it's true
that a great deal of open-source work is paid for by conventional corporations,
it is actually remarkably difficult to make a living as an independent
contributor to an open-source project. The quixotic company is intended to
provide the minimal structure that is needed for a group of individuals to
collaborate on a project for which they hope to be paid.
The Value of Time
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What is the value of an hour of your life? This is a question that I've spent
years wrestling with while trying to balance time spent with my family and
friends, time spent working, and time alone with my thoughts. In my consulting
life I've assigned monetary value to my hours somewhat arbitrarily; I determine
an hour to be worth enough to maintain a certain lifestyle and yet not be so much
that nobody will be willing to pay it. Yet, the question has always remained with
me: what is the actual value, in terms of revenue, of the effort of the hours that
I've put in?
A related question is, how does the value of my time genuinely compare to the
value of the time of others? The premise that an hour of my life is somehow more
or less valuable than an hour of someone else's seems a little problematic;
we don't know how long we'll live. What is your last hour worth, or your first?
The only answer that I can come up with is this. We should begin with an idea of equality.
Resources
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Tithes
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Investment
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