Forget Pump and Dump, Pimp and Hodl

Why should only Sales, Marketing, and PR/Communications departments shamelessly promote the place that indirectly pays your rent, your retirement, and for the food to feed your kids? Why should marketing need to hire spokesmodels, spokesmen, and influencers to pump the product? Wouldn’t the success of “your company” directly reflect in your success?

Public Pumping

But what happens when the business you’re in—as an employee, stakeholder, investor, or owner—goes public? What happens when your penchant for promotion and viral marketing and your prowess in sales and communications starts inflating the value and the valuation of the company itself? This sort of market manipulation has been frowned upon for eons when it comes to public companies on the Stock Market and it’s also is being frowned upon in the crypto world of the Initial Coin Offering (ICOs), but what about other assets and investments? What about hybrids? What about companies that are investments that are coins that are tokens that are not public, per-se, but can be bought and sold and traded as though they were? And what if all the so-called market manipulation and pumping didn’t result in dumping but resulted in just a larger, healthier, more profitable entity? Wouldn’t that be cool?

The future of business might be in the form of a blockchain-backed form of incorporation that is software based and programmed to pursue growth, success, and revenue while jettisoning waste. The entire company lives distributed across blockchain nodes around the world, never actually being born or beholden to a State, City, Region, Country, or Politics. Everyone who interacts with this organization becomes a de-facto investor: investors, owners, and workers, all.

Pimp & Hodl, Inc.

Why pump and dump when you can pimp and hodl? A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a self-running and self-regulating entity that can do just about anything an organization can do, and this will be even truer as the state of the art in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) approaches autonomic sentience. Then, DAOs will be able to bleed from the digital into the actual.

However, until robots can get loans or rob banks, the DAO will need to raise funds from humans, will need humans to do the work and even a lot of the marketing (though I am sure at least one AI has sorted out advertising on Google, Facebook, and Twitter, with just a little help, going so far as to have mastered algorithmic trading, with a little help of a copywriter, a designer, a graphic artist, and maybe an adman—at least for now. DAOs are cool.  Whenever I think of them, I think of corporate personhood:

“The legal notion that a corporation, separately from its associated human beings (like owners, managers, or employees), has at least some of the legal rights and responsibilities enjoyed by natural persons (physical humans).” —Wikipedia

Fire the Boss

It’s not that they fire the CEO and all the other members of the C-Suite and the entire Board, all the Middle Management, the HR and Law department, Accounting, and all the other cost centers—they never hire them in the first place.  The only humans that are retained of service are those solidly in the profit center side of the debits and credits. Theoretically, even, one could hail a job at a DAO by just benefitting it as a whole.

I assume that DAOs would really glom onto affiliate marketing and marketers. Humans who do a lot of work on spec with the hope, down the road, that they will benefit partially from all the fish they’ve landed on behalf of the company and for the company—all without being on the payroll, all without ever being a cost center.

Supranationalism

So, if DAOs could be pinned down to a nation-state, most tax forms would be for independent contractors in lieu of employees; which, in the US, means W9s and 1099s. Like Uber drivers to Uber or Lyft driver to Lyft (they would both be exceptional DAOs).

But DAOs are above the law, supranational, transcendent, and as independent of national and international laws as are Ethereum and Bitcoin. Which, realistically-saying, is as compliant as they want to be. And that country of compliance might be Malta. It’s up to you and your DAO (technically speaking, once the DAO is born, you’re no longer the boss if it, per-se—so only if incorporating in Malta is in the DAO’s best interest).

Is It a Store?

DAO PlayMarket 2.0 is an early interpretation of this vision. On the surface, it’s an e-commerce store that hosts Android apps. One might even say YAAAS (Yet Another Android App Store). But no! It’s a little bit GoFundMe, it’s a little Vanguard, it’s a little bit Google Play, and it’s a little bit Open Ledger—all about cause the DAO in DAO PlayMarket 2.0 stands for decentralized autonomous organization and so it’s much more than an e-Store.

The PlayMarket platform can run a Token Sale to raise funds to develop Android apps; it’s an e-commerce site where people can upload apps to sell and visitors can download to use; it’s an Index Fund because all apps, at some point, convert from being products that make the developer and investors rich into becoming assets that are owned and that benefit anyone who owns investment Tokens; and it’s a decentralized exchange (DEX) where investors can buy, sell, and trade their ownership in PlayMarket and the apps through their buying, selling, and trading their Tokens.

Go Team!

In many ways, the DAO only works if everyone financially involved works as hard as possible to make the corporate entity as successful as possible, from promoting not just your own apps in the PlayMarket store but all the apps in the store, to the exclusion of all other store and all apps that haven’t joined up. It would behoove all members of the PlayMarket family to tread their DAO more like their favorite sports team or their alma mater than just the convenience store where they just mindlessly clock in and out of. It’s more like a family-owned ethnic restaurant where the grandparents, the parents, the kids and grandkids all work there. All for one and one for all. To me, it’s a compelling business model—even more than just because of the autonomous and decentralized nature of the business model and how there are virtually—ideally—no cost centers and only profit centers. I like it most of all because everyone who works is also become part owner—or could if they wished, instead of cashing out—and because success is more emergent than designed. All things come from the bottom up. In an environment where each member is so tied to the success of the larger corpus, pimp and hodle—not pump and dump—would be de rigueur.

Originally published on Newconomy