RnDAO x SAFE: growing the SAFE ecosystem and returnign value

[daniel-ospina]

Hey all

We’re planning to get more involved in SAFE, as we’re seeing many interesting synergies. We hope to bring a few years of practising organisation design and governance for DAOs, strategising ecosystem development, planning fund deployment and more, and together grow this ecosystem.

A quick introduction and then sharing some ideas to hopefully spark a conversation

About me:
I’m an organisation designer and governance nerd. Instigator at RnDAO (more on this below), colead at TogetherCrew (a project to empower communities with their data). Ex head of governance at Aragon, Supervisory Council SingularityNET, used to train BCG consultants and run workshops for executive education in Oxford U. Started two companies and began my career as a Michelin chef, so expect a few cooking metaphors and feel free to ask me for recipe recommendations.

About RnDAO:
We’re an R&D DAO focused on empowering humane collaboration through research, advisory, and venture building. We’re creating an ecosystem of modular and composable CollaborationTech tools (aka B2B software, organisations on chain, future of work). We’ve for the past two years gathered a community passionate about decision-making, ecosystem development, organisation design, DAO legals, and more. We now have 8 projects building CollabTech tools (scheduling, sense-making, robotic process automation, rewards and compensation, etc.). We hope working with SAFE can help us advance towards our vision for a modular and composable supper app for human collaboration and, in so doing, serve this ecosystem with all the learnings we have gathered in the last decade of obsessing about this topic.

About our potential collaboration:
I believe RnDAO can support SAFE in growing its ecosystem (Ecosystem Development) and generating value for the token by seeding an ecosystem of ventures that return value to SAFE (somewhat akin to an Open-Core strategy with the use of development venture capital).

We’ll try to unpack these ideas and gather feedback from the community over the next few weeks

[daniel-ospina]

Food for thought 1:

Something that particularly resonated with us about SAFE’s philosophy is the idea of open innovation. We see this as an absolute critical aspect for the success of an ecosystem and had written this piece about it:

Organisaiton Design for Ecosystems - Principle #1: Openness matters even more than decentralisation.

As ecosystems compete for relevance, a key factor in their organisation design can make all the difference. Even more important than decentralisation is openness - the degree to which an ecosystem allows for outside-in innovation.

Decentralisation prevents capture by a small group of participants, generating trust. However, a capture-resistant ecosystem can still die through disruption and being outcompeted by others. So how do we prevent that?

Generally speaking, the survival of any project is directly dependent on its ability to adapt and improve, to understand the needs of users, talent, investors, etc. and to provide outstanding solutions. Said otherwise, the key for survival is being able to innovate in how we solve people’s problems.

Being at the forefront of innovation is a tricky thing. By definition, innovative solutions are not commonly known and understood. Innovation can not be fully planned, it can only be supported and encouraged.

Critically, because innovative ideas can come from all kinds of places, as an ecosystem, it’s key to be welcoming to innovations that originated somewhere else. Corporations have learnt this lesson the hard way and now commonly fund accelerators, VC funds, and M&A to facilitate outside-in innovation. However, despite these strategies providing some defences to disruption, the lifespan of corporations keeps decreasing. More needs to be done!

For an organisation designer like myself, DAOs are exciting because they promise both capture resistance AND a radical upgrade in our ability to incorporate outside-in innovation. Instead of problems being discussed behind closed doors, DAOs can employ open communication platforms. Instead of rejecting anything ‘not invented here’, DAOs could celebrate experimentation. Instead of falling for the shortermist allure of cost-cutting and reducing redundancy, DAOs could decentralise operations and experiment with a variety of methods. In sum, DAOs could transform organisations from closed to open, leading to better outcomes for users, contributors, and investors.

DAOs could do that but right now that’s far from certain. The allure of centralisation is strong. Innovation compounds over time but it’s hard to measure in the early stages. When appropriate methodologies and assessment frameworks are not in place, cost-cutting (disguised as efficiency) quickly kills anything hard to quantify or explain.

This is not a new problem, a range of methodologies and tools for what’s called open innovation has been slowly maturing. Our research shows that sense-making (being able to identify and prioritise challenges and root causes) is the critical first step. We now understand that access to information and being able to search through weak signals is key for outsiders to be able to propose innovations. And we know that offering quick access to funding for small experiments is critical for anything innovative to ever be tested.

The lack of tools and methodologies for open innovation (or lack of awareness that they even exist), leads many to conclude that the only way to operate is closed (centralised teams, private meetings, etc.). As Disruption Joe eloquently said , DAOs suffer through a common pattern of decentralising (poorly), then worrying about execution, centralising, and finally stagnating. Let’s avoid this faith; let’s avoid the false dichotomy of centralisation and decentralisation; let’s welcome outside-in innovation. Let’s build open organisations!

Note for dummy-proofing: we’re big believers in decentralisation, we’re in no way suggesting that decentralisation is not important. We’re suggesting decentralisation IS very important, and openness even more.