We started Poko - DAOism with the goal of replacing companies in cross-border collaborations with DAOs. Having run global teams, spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars setting up companies around the world to do the work of pooling capital, allocating capital and managing organizations, we asked ourselves why in this age of digital and global collaborations there is no digitally native and global entity to organize work?
What is a DAO? DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organizations. It is code that enables groups of people to raise funds, allocate capital and implement rules for how the organization operates. Similar to how a new project or company has a constitution or articles of association that governs how it operates and has to raise funds for its work. Whether it is a project, a small investment fund or teams building software together.
We want people starting their next project or business to do so as a DAO instead of a company. Why? Because it saves you time, money and administrative burden that you can spend on building your project or business. When we were building a US$2 billion dollar blockchain protocol, we had engineers in multiple countries working on an app (or DApp) on our protocol. They live in Romania, Ukraine, Vietnam and Germany. There was no country which made sense to incorporate an entity to organize this team. They needed funds and needed to be organized as their own organization.
DAOs mean economic opportunities for people. We worked with small investment funds, investors clubbing to buy land, creators making a movie series or engineers building web3 apps to set up their projects as DAOs. The investment fund would take a year to get its license if it even could get one. The creator would never have been able to raise funds so quickly. The developers could now present themselves professionally as an organization, make decisions collectively, and tap into financing opportunities in the DeFi world.
We believe DAOs are the future. But the philosophy that guides what we build is very different from existing DAO creation and management tools. We believe in the following:
**
Build to reflect current company governance, not just the future**
Companies have well understood mechanisms for decision making and governance. Our DAOs give the flexibility for users to build a decentralized organization if they want to, but also allows them to replicate how companies make decisions today.
** 2. Legal interaction with the off-chain “real world” is a must**
DAOs will need a legal infrastructure layer that enables them to contract with entities that can only deal with incorporated entities. They will need access to arbitration to give confidence in a dispute. We build legal on and off ramps that enable DAOs to do so.
** 3. Build for compliance of the future**
We authored crypto regulations at the World Economic Forum Digital Currency Governance Consortium. Our team built digital identity and eKYC products at startups that reached 20M users. We recognize that compliance and regulation will eventually reach this space, even though it might be 10 or 20 years in the future. We build compliance tools to enable users to be responsible and safe in how they use DAOs.
We believe in DAOism. We want you to build your next project or company as a digitally native and globally oriented DAO.
To find out more, visit www.poko.fund