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[Nathan]

Hey team, love what ya'll are doing! 

Here is the deal, I run a small boutique consultancy in NYC. Natureof.work 

We are looking to growth by way of a distributed/dynamic equity swap with our current and future employees as well as customers. 

By allowing customers to take an equity position as members in our business we believe we can encourage them to make introductions to future clients on our behalf. Further more, we consult as organization designers and sometimes our clients aren't ready to take the leap into the self-management and distributed decision making we encourage, so the theory is --create a practice ground e.g. Nature of Work LLC, so they can dog food these approaches in a lower risk container than on their core business while having an upside in terms of equity and dividends if they make intros to their friends.

I image this to allow us to reduce our operating expense, freeing up cash to distribute in the form of dividends, and grow the value of share through equipping customer with decision making rights for their direct participation. 

I need help to build; 

- a set of bylaws that ground the decision making mechanisms based upon tiers of accountability and authority. 

- a dynamic equity solution e.g. labor for equity, and the necessary contractural feedback loops inherent therein

- a protocol standard to update the bylaws rapidly 

- employee contracts 

- customer contracts 

- investor contracts

- and everything else my feeble, non-legal brain cannot conjure. 

 Thoughts/feedback/help? 

Nathan

 

[Wong Meng Weng]

Hey, cool, this sounds like a cross between a few things:

the traditional co-op model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Organizational_and_ideological_roots

holacratic and teal organizations

https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Organizations-Creating-Inspired-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00ICS9VI4

slicing pie

http://slicingpie.com/

transparency a la buffer, stripe, etc

https://open.buffer.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/

coase's penguin

http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

going beyond even these ideas, i mused the other day that maybe one day everyone will have their own currency, just as nations (outside Europe) and publicly-traded companies do; and currency exchange could serve as a proxy for Doctorow's Whuffie. (Which, he mentioned the other day, he thought was a bad idea.) But that's probably still far away for now.

Back to the problem at hand – one of our initiatives at Legalese is to codify the Slicing Pie model in software. That shouldn't be too hard, because many many startups already codify their vesting and ESOP structures using spreadsheets and written contracts. It shouldn't be hard to formalize such a model in a language like Javascript or L4 – they are Turing equivalent, after all.

The effort should start with use cases, story cards, elicited requirements, an architecture of moving parts, and a semantic model describing primitives from which we can build object models and contracts.

Have you got any stimulus material available written down somewhere that we can build on?

Do you know of any organizations that are already doing something like what you want, and which have "source code" available?

[Nathan Snyder]

Thanks for the links! These are at the top of our influences regarding the idea. I really got the itch for this after Undercurrent, the firm we grew out of, went down last year because of Quirky's lame failure. Undercurrent ran as an abbreviated Holacracy but the bylaws were never put in place to ground our decision making authority thus we were still under the normal labor contracts just with more responsibility over the divisions of labor.  We are looking to contract some lawyers to help us build this, let's see how that goes and if it makes sense to share.  For starters ---  F18 is doing some interesting calculations for GSA contractors. Here is their github.  I think we'll branch from Holacracy's bylaws for decision making authority. Colony is building a Whuffie.  Our friends at Parabol are making a go at an equity for contribution effort. Here is their contract.  Assembly failed.  Have you read Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus?

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[Meng Wong]

That's a lot of really good prior art! I had not come across some of those links before.

It feels like the effort is in the stage of product design and definition, and at this stage it would be really valuable to have worked through the user experience, onboarding process, and problem/solution story cards for staff/participants/members, so you have a really strong sense of what the UX will be.

If you bring in the lawyers before you do that, you might run the risk of adding a new box to

http://www.tamingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tree-swing-project-management-large.png

where basically a fence goes up around the tree, with a sign pointing to the courthouse.

Figuring out the business logic and user experience is primarily the job of the product manager, which is you … and only secondarily the job of the software engineer or the lawyer!

Once the design is done you can explore some of the code paths in the form of a FAQ – keeping in mind Bertrand Russel's “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

Legalese itself is going to take a stab at building a startup compensation calculator, along very similar lines, which we will encode in L4, and opensource so that other people can avoid reinventing the wheel for their own startup. This is Balaji's business-in-a-box concept: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/750164832855351296

We will take inspiration from the same well and report on our progress as it occurs.

[Meng Wong]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Meng Wong <meng...@legalese.com> wrote:

Legalese itself is going to take a stab at building a startup compensation calculator, along very similar lines, which we will encode in L4, and opensource so that other people can avoid reinventing the wheel for their own startup. This is Balaji's business-in-a-box concept: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/750164832855351296

We will take inspiration from the same well and report on our progress as it occurs.

I looked at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/contracts/ hoping to see something innovative but I think their compensation structure is pretty standard.