Continuous Organizations Don't Make Sense for High Growth Startups

Continous organizations are touted as a way to run a company in a radically transparent way on a blockchain. It aims to balance the incentives of the company owners, investors, and employees. However, this is probably impossible to do for a high growth startup.

In order to set up the smart contract that establishes the continuous organization, one needs to set the parameters of the bonding curve up front. This is not possible to do accurately and valuations will be out of whack with the business unless the curve is based on an easily measurable and irrefutable metric (a metric that becomes a goal ceases to be a good goal, and so on). It also leaves a lot of money on the table—set the curve too low and the total value of the company suffers.

Perhaps if there was a way restating the bonding curve parameters without issuing a new token (the equivalent of say a 409a) would let the continuous organization update the curve fairly based on new information. That would provide some correction mechanism, but I haven’t seen this in any of the literature.

See also:

  • Distributed Autonomous Organizations Are More Like an LLC

    Distributed autonomous organzations (DAOs) have more in common with limited liability corporations (LLCs) than C Corporations. There is near infinite variability possible in an LLC’s operating agreement similar to how DAOs can be grant DAOs, investment DAOs, protocol DAOs, and many more. C Corps on the other hand have converged on, more or less, a standard—Delaware C Corp and a well-known governance structure based on ownership of stock.