Reimagining Organizations With Reuben Bramanathan Of IDEO CoLab

Jess sits down with Reuben Bramanathan of IDEO CoLab for the latest episode of Building At The Edges.

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Reimagining Organizations

On the latest episode of Building At The Edges, Jess chats with Seed Club OG Reuben Bramanathan. As a genesis member of Seed Club’s origin group chat and current General Partner at IDEO CoLab, Reuben shares his perspective on the dual challenges and opportunities of community tokens. Tokens enable the creation of more equitable, fair, and open organizations, effectively disrupting our understanding of existing organizational possibilities. How we best utilize community tokens to build internet native organizations remains an open question. 

Many DAOs identify governance as a leading community token value proposition, but we’re seeing the limitations of this idea emerge in real time. Governance is, frankly, a strange word that we’ve collectively carried over from pre-web3 corporate org architecture. While governance remains a critical DeFi value proposition, it might not functionally make sense for DAO token holders to vote on every possible DAO action. The evolution of consumers into participatory member-owners is where the true opportunity of community tokens comes alive. 

Token technology creates the conditions for people to interact and collaborate in ways outside the bounds of what was historically possible. The realization of these opportunities will take much longer than we think. Improved UX is often cited as a necessary unlock for onboarding the next wave of web3 participants, but UX is an incomplete mechanism for thinking about the design challenge in front of us. Reuben argues that innovations within the broader experience layer will enable meaningful adoption in future cycles. Innovation on the experience layer not only includes improved UX, but also encompasses every aspect of how users interact with a protocol or a community. 

Many DAOs are still shedding stale ideas from the previous ICO mania of 2017. Reuben’s hottake: There doesn’t need to be a token for everything. Arguably, corporations and centralized structures are better at coordinating early stage teams. This assertion is particularly salient at the intersection of building products. Reuben believes that if people want to build web3 software then people should go build it. They should then question whether it actually needs to be decentralized.

What many DAOs miss is the idea that the DAO is the product. These new type of internet native organizations are a perpetually emerging spectrum of decentralization. This begs the question: What is the right amount of decentralization in DAOs? We’re looking forward to collectively finding out.