1/ Crypto seems to me to have tipped the scales for tech org design from a firm model with some tweaks to a true layered network model featuring a core team, circled by a network of specialist service providers, and enabled by a wider community of user-contributors. Thread 👇
2/ Distributed teams have been a conversation for a while, but the impulse to keep things geo organized around the hubs was strong. Whether it's the global nature of the blockchain space or simply the no-time-to-wait push for talent, that geographic constraint feels broken.
3/ There is plenty of conversation around the shift away from traditional hubs. As I was writing this, for example, @mdudas commented on @andrewchen's recent thread about the impossible costs of building in SF.
4/ Importantly though, the break in hegemony of tech hubs coincides with a larger shift in talent specialization. If you’re a top tier content producer, for example, you want to be able to produce content over and over, not also have to be amazing at performance marketing.
5/ The marketing generalists that *do* exist tend to be strategists and operators, whose specialty is, in fact, organizing networks of contribution. These are the people I think most likely to be at the internal core of marketing orgs.
6/ My bet is we’re headed towards small core teams serving as stewards of the brand and organizers of large distributed networks of specialist contributors. This will also be the case for other parts of the org, although where the boundaries of inside and outside lay may vary.
7/ The org model then will be a set of nestled, layered networks: 1) core team of organizers; 2) a distributed network of specialists who provide discreet world-class skills; 3) the larger community of user-contributors that breath life into the project as a whole.
8/ Of course, in reality, there will be multiple models. @ricburton has written eloquently on why @Balance_io now has a more complex relationship with remote
9/ The point is that while we recognize that a key aspect of crypto projects is figuring out how to organize a community of open source contributors, it is also ground zero for figuring out new working relationships between core teams and specialist contributors.
10/ @_jillruth's ‘Free Company’ is effectively a proposal for one version of how those relationships might work and specifically how networks of talent might organize themselves to better contribute to protocols. Check it out for more on this.
