Centralized Governance For Decentralized Organizations?

Link: https://twitter.com/KyleSamani/status/968308830408007680

This thread is about one of the most interesting questions that is coming up as top quality entrepreneurs flood into the crypto space: can “decentralized” organizations have “centralized” leadership.

A few thoughts:

• • At the moment, “decentralization” is a holy word, in the sense that it is a foundational pillar and intellectual underpinning of the blockchain movement, and yet, at the same time, means totally different things to different people.
  • Where I believe this lands is a spectrum of decentralization where we can understand that there is a difference between decentralized control and leadership and decentralized approaches to solving problems, and that different projects are going to evolve with different degrees of decentralization in each of these areas of leadership and execution approach.
  • Even within a single project, different parts of the lifecycle may need different degrees of centralization or decentralization in order to execute against the needs of that phase.
  • In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if that it becomes increasingly normal to see the default model be an expanding model of decentralized governance, in which:
    1. Early going relies on centralized structures to aggregate the necessary financial and technical resources, rally the community of contributors, and set the initial frameworks for contribution…
    2. …but designs from day 1 for the obsolescence of that central structure and replacement with an at least semi-decentralized leadership
  • This trajectory for company leadership will get even more pronounced as we start to recognize the differences inherent in building for-profit companies that seek to maximize revenue versus shared economies that seek to maximize the number of people contributing and interacting and the value of those exchanges.

For those interested, check out the discussion on Token Daily: https://www.tokendaily.co/p/great-twitter-discussion-of-whether-decentralized-cos-should-have-centralized-governance