What is our goal? Why is this 10x better than existing alternatives? What exciting future might we be building? Why not just modify existing solutions?
What is our dream for the future?
- Jobs are permissionless.
- EngineerDAO contracts are 10x or more effective at completing tasks than traditional employment.
- Workers can fluidly determine their work/life balance. Want more money? Work more. Want more time? Don’t work today!
- Workers decide what is interesting and valuable. Gone are the days of slogging through legacy codebases. Work on what excites you.
- Founders and suppliers abandon the recruiting industry.
- Software projects become simpler and less expensive. Huge teams are no longer required for small projects. The free market is optimizing towards goal completion, not butts-in-seats.
- Alignment of values. Legacy working relationships lacked real alignment of values. When we share risk and align around contract completion, everyone gets what they want.
- Workers become uncancellable. Opinions (political, cultural, etc.) aren’t relevant in the workplace and compliance with “company culture” cannot be used as a weapon against workers.
- We build the tools that allow software agencies to operate at massive scale, without a massive core team. A small team of planners, organizers, and integrators can effectively produce outsized results, as the talent pipeline is self-organizing and unlimited.
Builders
The present day system for monetizing engineering skills is fraught with exploitation, gatekeeping, inefficiency, and other relics from the Industrial Age.
Our world was built in an era of in-person collaboration. Networking and navigating your company’s “game” (whatever that might entail) for promotion and recognition is the path to success. Often times, those who provide the least value are the most highly rewarded. As Peter Thiel notes in “Zero to One”, jobs in large organization tend to become more about signaling that work was done - not necessarily doing the work (much less the correct, valuable work.)
More in Philosophy.
Our dream is a future where work is more like interacting with an API. We discover work that seems interesting and evaluate our ability to complete it quickly and correctly. If it’s a match - we invest in the project.
Permission
We imagine a system where contracts are truly permissionless. To illustrate this, lets take a look at existing permissioned systems:
- Traditional jobs: employees need the company’s permission to work, as gated through interviewing and other screening.
- Web2 Freelance: Market participants must work to profess their skill, experience and reputation. These systems (like Upwork) tend towards rewarding a select few who have gained reputation on the platform, as suppliers don’t want to waste their time with poor performers or lose money in a bad deal.