That’s a Liquid Super Team in action: a team of people with different strengths, most of whom wouldn’t quit their job to work for Maple full-time, committing to work on it a few hours a week. Everyone retains optionality, and everyone has upside.

DAOs make it easier to form, organize, and compensate Liquid Super Teams.

The Cooperation Economy is about what’s possible when many of those individual atomic units recombine in new ways, of their own volition. The Cooperation Economy is emergent; if companies are planned top-down, collaborations form and dissipate as needed. Individuals will come together -- formally or informally -- to create Liquid Super Teams, forme... See more

Cooperation is the winning strategy in the Great Online Game.

In this case, traditional employment is becoming unbundled and people are choosing to bundle back up with each other. We’re doing it from a place of increased individual empowerment, with more flexibility and optionality baked in.

As my friend Dror Poleg wrote in NFTs and the Future of Work, “Technology will make it possible to compensate each person according to their economic value. That’s pretty bad news for most people, and very good news for some.”

Similarly, if people follow people, not companies, then bringing together a group of people, all with their own audiences and toolkits, should create more reach and ability, more cheaply, than a company that employs all those people, if they could even hire them in the first place.

That writer or publication has one unique superpower: they are the only one of their kind. To use the strategic term, they are differentiated, and differentiated people – or products – can charge far more than their marginal cost. -Ben Thompson

The takeaway is this: individuals have more power than ever before, and they depend on companies for their survival less than ever before. But I don’t think the real freedom here is working alone; it’s the freedom to choose how, and with whom, to work.