Bridges to Digital Organizations – Panel Discussion

hello everyone welcome today we're going to talk about we've got a great panel here that we're gonna talk about distributed organizations and what that actually looks like within our ecosystems so I wanted to start out by actually getting a little bit of an audience participation before we get into introductions that who are you in the audience actually organizations that are distributed and are there any certain the audience that's actually trying to get more of an idea of concepts I would say there's probably no really stream like this so what I wanted to start out be doing is having everyone here trying to go through into these yourself companies you work for and then how distributed or not are the teams that you work with I'm John pehle I'm the founder of E Denver and also the co-founder of Ovilus which is a Employment Commons framework our team is pretty distributed I would say we have people all over the US as well as international so it's pretty complex for sure my name is Jake Brookman of coin fund we're a blockchain focused investment fund based in New York our team is very not distributed we're all in the same office but we obviously invest in a large number of companies that take a distributed model or are even doing things like dowse hey everyone my name is Aaron Wright I'm the co-founder of open law our team is distributed by design right we think that that's the right way to build a team the right way to find the best talent and the folks that are really interested in various different projects so hi everyone I'm Megan Nev I run a company called berry ledger we built cryptocurrency accounting software for businesses and our team is fully distributed kind of by happenstance I am Mariano Conte I work at the maker foundation and maker furnish is pretty much very distributed even though there are hub offices in three or four different cities almost everybody else I mean we have a hundred people from the 20 different countries [Music] so yeah so I think part of it is you know we are software company we don't meet with clients in person normally so it gives us flexibility to be able to hire whoever we think is the best fit for our organization I mean for for me like it was mostly about yeah hiring like where can I find the best people to do what I need them to do and it so happened that they ended up being in different cities around the world Aaron I actually you know the way that your team is my design what is that what was that aha moment for you to go that in that direction so before I found it open la I've had the pleasure working for the for-profit sister project to Wikipedia called makea and we were actually distributed by design off the bat to Wikipedia not surprisingly had folks that were contributing from around the globe I think that worked out spectacularly well and I think we learned from that that there's talented folks that are really passionate about what you're trying to do that don't necessarily just reside in the same city or location where you are so I just think that's always inherently made sense I also think just probably if you're developing blockchain technology it probably should mirror at some level the underlying tech stack to really understand the challenges and opportunities so that just seemed like a natural fit there - so your team is all over the place it's actually a little easier this time last year we had two people from Europe and people in Argentina and then in the u.s. in both east and west coast that did become complicated because when people in Seattle were waking up people in Europe were leaving work right so that can create some issues we got really good at a synchronous communication now we're just in the America so it's just east and west coast and when Osiris so you know we make do it's even some form of self-organization where people from similar time zones start working on similar things it is not always the case but I've seen it happen and it just like organically becomes so like tiny subgroups between the team how the recipe found that it looks to actually kind of lead your team to make sure that you're keeping them on certain systems that you use tools anything about nature to make sure that really go towards whatever I think first Offit starts with just good project management I mean if you whatever tool you're gonna use if you don't like the sort of centralization of slack there's other ways that you can talk I mean there's no shortage of like new tech that you can actually use like set the right appropriate expectations I guess you could say if you don't have that distributed work is terrible I mean asynchronous communication is impossible if you don't actually have good documentation and good expectations management it's just it's literally impossible if you don't do that just based on like feedback we've gotten from teams it's like running a distributed organization versus an organization where everyone is in the same place is a kind of trade off and maybe like one of the one of the trade-offs is well you can cover sort of more space more time on the other hand you tend to lose people who you know are bad at like written communication right so that's kind of a weird dimension and one which to lose a set of prospective employees and also isolation could be a problem like one of our portfolio companies did an interesting thing which is they said we're going to be distributed but where we're gonna have hubs we're gonna have a New York hub we're gonna have a Berlin hub and that way members of our organization can still show up to work with coworkers in the same room the communication question I think is one of the biggest things because even for companies that are living employer for employees every day that's don't be problematic so with that in mind John as a talent acquisition expert do you feel like that there are certain traits that employees that might need exhibit at this given time where we are being able to create really how these distribution systems can work that lends itself well to having employees that do really well and thriving environment versus maybe other aspects 100% you mentioned Jake that you lose people that are maybe not as good at like that linear sort of like almost called hierarchical sort of reporting structure sort of management oversight sort of typical in my opinion fifteen years from now that's dead it's dead why autonomy is the new thing right a stick on this work like different time zones different you know different work approaches it's gonna be task based or more you know project based completion so instead of micromanagement and and reporting structures it's it's work completed right and in the path to get there is really what's up for debate autonomy is the number one thing that the younger worker generations want so they want freedom and flexibility they actually don't work well in micromanagement situations so if you see what HR groups are have done over the past ten years they're like well how do we engage the Millennials they're lazy and they're not they're entitled and they're this and they're that and it's like well the reality is they're actually pretty productive but you're managing them in a way that they just don't work well because they don't like to be managed that way so giving them the freedom to own so the ownership mentality is really the correlative to the autonomy and that's the new way of work so if we don't do that or if you don't do that as an organization and empower people to make good decisions and to do their jobs it it's trouble maybe if I could comment on that like on your sort of thoughts on the innovation of corporate structures like if you do a thought experiment I don't actually know the answer this but like let's say it's 1950 and we want to do maker across continents like the only tool we have to coordinate our team is the phone I'm not it's not impossible to do that but I'm not sure that like that's a good way of doing it and so when you start to think about distributed teams this is really a phenomenon that happened once you had like very cheap global telecommunication tools and if you think about that that's only like 20 years old maybe maybe maybe like 10 years old so what we're sort of in the middle of is this innovation of corporate structures on just on the basis of technology innovating and it's a very very new phenomenon and no one really like planned for it about and that you know John I wanted to actually touch on something else that you just brought it because I think one of the things is so we were talking about earlier early this is early days of all of this - and I think that how we've as as humans have understood how our workplace environments look this is starting to evolve I think that the blockchain tech industry has most definitely lent itself very well to this because especially the earlier days and arguably still today your talent pool as far as maybe development talent other talent is going to be few and far between so you really do want to pull people from wherever they exist you brought up that you know this is gonna start to be more task based and people will be able to know I need to do this this and this where I want to counter that is do you feel like there might be some problems - with younger workers that also are very mission driven they need to know these tasks I'm doing what are they what is the outcome what am i contributing to how do we keep that communication open so that there is alignment and there's a consistent basis for you're doing tasks a B C and D and at the end of the day this is what it's going to contribute to you towards this larger mission so this is working it works I would say that it's a little bit more complicated than this that this is sort of framing it in the traditional sort of relationship of employment so our entire project is about the self sovereignty of employment and the new way of even relationships of employment so the legal contract between worker and corporation today is very paternalistic tasks tasks tasks you got to do these things and it's sort of I refer to it might be not the right word but it's sort of a mercenary mindset right like it's a means to an end it's my paycheck I've got to do these things to get paid there's no purpose behind it there's no and behind it one of the other things that exists in the youngest population one of the major drivers behind why they don't want to tether themselves to a full-time job 53% of them being full-time freelancers already is they don't believe in what the companies believe in so they look at their parents and they go they're not happy I don't want to do that that's not the life that I want being up to my eyeballs in debt and you know having a lifestyle that's sort of cookie cutter like they're just not interested in that so I think tasks based work is a thing I don't think I think it's you know high frequency of work too so I can do a bunch of different things but I think you are absolutely right that with transparency comes choice and now especially with opportunities being more fluid people are absolutely going to align themselves with work that aligns with themselves so corporations or service consumers if you will we're gonna they're gonna have to up their game and providing something more than just a paycheck they're gonna have to provide something more aligned with the purpose and values of the individual or else they're just going to bounce under the next thing so the competitive landscape for talent is moving from the ability to get a check sustainably in the in the context of safety and security and it's moving to freedom flexibility and values I will say on the flip side of it like lust from the talent management perspective and more from like who are we serving you know we work with some Wall Street companies we are a distributed team but we still have to like sort of like conform to the industry and the people that were trying to service so you know every day 9:15 we're checking trades coming through you know so there's like you want to provide flexibility for sure but you also have to like you know still respect the structures like if we're really into you know penetrating more traditional industries we still have to figure out how to conform while providing flexibility so I think sometimes remote work actually makes it easier because if you have people in Europe taking early morning New York orders well you know what with that being said with depending on your clients do we feel do you all feel that having these distributed teams is this gonna be something that is just gonna be common for everyone or is that there going to be some industries in which maybe this doesn't make as much sense yeah I mean I think Jake made a great point before but many ways organization just reflect the underlying technology so in the 1950s it wasn't possible to have really remote work you know with the internet and also I would say increases in bandwidth so we could get video conferencing I think that's the trend I think broadly what the blockchain industry is gonna bring is not just efficiencies when it comes to communication but also some of the less exciting but important operational aspects of it right so when it's easy to hire somebody when it's easy to pay somebody the costs of creating that organization go down that means you're gonna see a future where you can pull capital pull people together make sure that they're paid make sure that the back end is kind of all handled whether that takes 10 years or 50 years I think is a big open question but I think that's the vision of where things are going which is pretty exciting I'm Aaron actually I have a question for you kind of going into some of the interests of where are we so I think that you know we've got different regulatory things to keep in mind like if we're talking about HR compliancy security how do we how do you handle maybe the benefits that you might have for an employee that's in one state to the next one country to the next how do you see that from the legal perspective how is that evolving where are we right now with those types of you know systems and and where do you see that moving I mean on the tech side I think we're doing some pretty amazing stuff we've demonstrated and other folks have done this too you can pay people in real time if they're all in crypto you can we've actually done a proof-of-concept where you can pull taxes automatically so the government could collect taxes in real time as people are getting paid you know part of this broader concept that value can kind of flow like water the laws catch up right so if folks want to do things at least in the US and it's reasonable and sensible and usually the laws will figure meander their way to that end point so I think there are some challenges though but that also those regulatory challenges also create software opportunities and ways to kind of build additional tooling that may manage some of that complexity and Meghan talked a little bit about that side for you like yeah I know that you've seen that with some of your clients some some of the issues there but let me hear more I think just one of the things you know we have seen like you know progressive regulatory you know steps forward in the United States sometimes I would say we run into tension between like state level sort of like you're a Vermont BB LLC or something else and you know the Federals sort of compliance that you have to do doesn't really you know drive with that so I think one of the you know specialties that at least I have and I think I presume to say aaron has with open lies figuring out how to translate what's going on in the entrepreneurial environment and how you guys want to build businesses to sort of you know like what exists to be compliant now and we're getting closer every day but they're still like a little disconnect there in my opinion Mariano I'm hearing a lot about the good thing about being down in Argentina is that I can still tell people to just use die and say [ __ ] you to the government and because and I'm gonna keep doing it as long as I can which might not be long I know that like you say regulation catches up to everybody I I know that that stuff used to be possible here it might not be that way anymore but there's still lots of places where people can feel a sense of empowerment but just saying we've been screwed over for so long and you know this technology is did they give us a chance to screw them back or or maybe just like take ownership of our you know our own life around financial destiny so I don't know it's interesting that that we're already discussing I try not to think about regulation and even though there's probably 20 people at the foundation that that's their job right i I want to not think about that for as long as I can actually it's understandable Aaron how do you feel I think I mean I think I mean I think you're you're that's admirable I would say particularly the u.s. we're very pragmatic so the pragmatism just tends to win right so people want to move in a certain direction it's kind of deep-rooted that we'll figure out the path there and people will argue about it and it could be ugly and gruesome and confusing but ultimately we have paths forward I mean just look at the token economy we're pushing you know slowly towards what that looks like I imagine we'll get to the same point for stable coins I think we'll get to the same point for Dow's and if there's other issues and that pop up just sensible heads tend to prevail here despite what you may read in the headline most folks are pretty pretty reasonable people so getting it back into kind of a bit more of like what is the the day-to-day look like I know you know we're creating things and systems and a new very new technology and when you're in more nascent industries there is the need to be creative and to be collaborative and to have moments where you need to problem-solve as a unit so how do you go about doing that without being able to put people in a room hackathons you know I was just going to say aren't we doing that right now I think there's for every successful distributed organization that I've seen there's probably a half a dozen yearly convergences the people element has to stay in place I don't I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that that's gonna change either like it's sort of a human component right like we thrived in community I mean if you're gonna do it collaboratively if you're going to really focus on collaboration and expression of creativity it's not going to be about just zero-sum competition and having your freedom and flexibility is great but it also gets lonely and you sort of need that human connection and if you're not doing that eventually people get disconnected from back to the purpose right so I think it's really important that people are intentional about you know getting physically together intent on a regular basis yeah I think I think you covered it quite well and just sort of like thinking about distributive organizations we've seen is there's always yearly on sites that reinforce the mission maybe the thing to add is like you know how expensive is that like how much of a clause is that for an organization versus the benefit that they get by being by being distributed would be one issue I'd want to think through is like an investor in such a company for all of you what has been the biggest challenge with kind of curating the environment for your your your companies I was just gonna say the biggest challenge for me is like I'm always awake you know because I wake up early to like talk to people in the West Coast and that late at night you know so it's just like you know I think you know it's mentioned before like the more you plan ahead to be able to like have a 24/7 operation is great but I'm just awake all the time so that's the only time zones right we went through something similar to maker where we we extended pretty far out in the time zones and that was challenging just to get they sync communication to work pretty well so we kind of tightened the bands of where we're gonna look for folks for remote and then also I think that you do have to do a lot of writing I don't mind that being natively a lawyer but I think that that's critically important just documentation and being able to express yourself and written form it is really important for remote first teams I think I will also say personally that when you have so many people around the world and doing something like die which we want it to be a global decentralized stable coin you sometimes feel that you can attack all those countries all at once just because you have one person there and it's like okay I already got the in and they're gonna know everything about their country even though it's like you cannot peg one person you know for representing a whole country that I mean not even a CD not even maybe a city block you know so that divide is interesting and and it's like yeah we have people four people in one Osiris right but maybe that's not even enough to say okay we know enough about the city or the country to try to like take on this place next so yeah I don't know that's that's something that I always felt interesting and I don't know if that's me or if it's like a common concern have you found so your your team in Argentina do you guys regularly get together are you regularly so two developers a community they have an abyss dev so I mostly only get together well with the other dev so we can code together but then we do monthly meetups with the whole etherium community there so that's when yeah we see each other but I think I see some of the team more you know the international team just coming to hackathons that sometimes some people from that work maybe 20 blocks for me I I want to kind of start to wrap this up a little bit and really dive into the how do you guys feel where do you think we are right now with creating these kind of distributed structures and our what are the biggest things that we're really going to have to solve to make this more of a mainstream use case I have an answer that I think that we have to think about the two sides of the thing that we're trying to build the technology that we're building this decentralized but the legal frameworks that we build are highly centralized so like we've got this sort of tension happening between the two and I think that we're gonna see a huge boom in cooperatives huge boom in cooperatives and they're not gonna be your you know old-school 1960s cooperatives for AG sort of supply chain stuff we're gonna see high-frequency digital cooperatives that have governance layers legal contracts all sorts of different components that are baked into a single UX and you're gonna have a whole different legal relationship that emerges out of this that allows for a much more flexible sort of employment dynamic so I think I think you know we talk a lot about tech in the blockchain space but a lot of the problems that we're solving actually aren't tech problems they're coordination problems that are solved by tech or they're human problems we're trying to solve by attack but then there's this really really really really unfun like thing called legal and errand deals with this all the time guys are you guys picking on lawyers no that's fine we can I'm very happy I'm fun for me I'll just speak for myself there's too many lawyers we all know that right particularly what you do yeah well that's the lawyers and everything would be better for me I'm saying this more as like quite frankly the work that you're doing like praise be dude because like seriously I don't have the I probably don't even have the intelligence for it because it's that complicated but the net end of this is the convergence of the digital and the legal create a new call an employment contract construct that allows for this high fluidity of work this new worker dynamic that supports freedom flexibility of purpose and actually then supports this tech that we're trying to build that's I think the hardest work that we have to do so call it the legal protocol is needs a little bit of work I mean you're doing a bunch of work on loud out and we're doing a bunch of work in coops and there's a bunch of other things happening that are like the I call it the ugly underbelly of the things that we just have to do it's not sexy work but it's like the things that are gonna make it go so like yeah I mean I work in accounting and people think it's not sexy and or it's boring or whatever and it's totally not true back office processes are like so important and in business school they just like they teach you like you know how do you make employees engage like what are different strategies how do you get businesses to work together like literally the technology that you guys are building is the solution to that problem so I feel like that's the precipice but also like you know I tell the story I told the story to Aaron once like I used to work at a Wall Street firm I was a budget analyst and I uncovered this like multi-million dollar fraud and that's like why started at Bayer ledger because I was like you can automate all this stuff and then you don't have these problems so it's really like you know sometimes the most boring things that like maybe you don't have subject-matter expertise in like they have like the biggest impact and if you can start like figuring out how to like change some of those fundamental structures for how you run businesses it can have a huge impact so that's what I'm passionate about thank you I think we're out of time guys but thank you all so much and I hope everyone has a rest a good rest of eats Denver [Music] you