Xavier Damman

Xavier Damman's throughline is that the internet solved the problem of creating commons but never solved the problem of funding them, and everything he talks about traces back to that gap. He is explicit about it: the internet made it "trivially easy to create digital commons (open source projects, communities), but there is still no internet-native way for a community to receive money" ². Open Collective exists to close that gap, and he frames it in almost civic terms rather than startup terms — "complete, don't compete. That's really what I want to do with Open Collective" ². He wants people to see this as a legitimate successor to prior eras of cultural energy: garage bands in the MTV era, startups in the TechCrunch era, and now communities and cooperatives as "the new startup for the 21st century" ². His advice to would-be founders is not to wait for a better plan — "definitely start today, don't wait" ² — because the form itself, not just the idea, is what needs adopting.

A second consistent theme is distrust of top-down control and a preference for permissionless action. "You don't need to have anyone's permission to do what's the right thing to do" ² is stated flatly, and it maps onto his critique of how funding and accountability currently work: "Today we are in this crazy situation where the people who are paid with our money are asking us to do work for them. That's upside down" ². This is not abstract populism for him — it's a specific argument about fiscal hosting and reporting overhead, where Open Collective is meant to work "like WordPress for organizations," letting fiscal hosts share one legal entity, accounting and reporting so communities can focus on their actual mission instead of bureaucratic overhead ². He extends the same logic to government: rather than subsidies, he wants states to create "islands of sanity" where organizations operating fully in open source and open data are simply exempt from filing reports, since the data is already public ². He goes further and argues every government subsidy should default to being on the blockchain, on the reasoning that it's public money and that transparent recipients will naturally out-compete opaque ones for future project calls ² — transparency as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance burden.

He's also candid about the technical maturity of his own vision. He calls the current Open Collective a "Toyota Prius" — a hybrid piggybacking on existing bureaucratic infrastructure — and describes the endpoint as a fully "electric" web3-native version where blockchain lets a community get a bank account in a few clicks without users ever needing to know blockchain is involved ². This is a rare moment of a founder being explicit that the shipped product is a compromise version of the idea, not the idea itself. He backs this up with an evidentiary instinct rather than ideology: he points to the fact that over 5,000 local currencies run in Europe even though "the technology barely works," treating that persistence as a signal of latent demand and "a great place to start a technology project" ² — in other words, look for where people are already forcing a broken tool to work, because that tells you where the real need is.

On the craft of building things, his stories are personal and specific rather than generic startup wisdom. He says things only started working for him in Silicon Valley once he stopped pitching and started listening, and that a weekend hack built around what people actually needed got picked up by TechCrunch overnight and opened his network and eventual co-founder ². He pairs this with an explicit willingness to discard sunk work: don't be afraid to throw away months of work and start over "like an artist crumpling a sketch," since the learnings are never lost — Storify's product, he says, only took off after he scrapped the first version and started a new repo ². This connects to his broader claim that "it takes time to become an overnight success" ² and that hitting a nerve isn't about grinding harder but about tapping into what the world actually needs: "once you really tap into what the world really needs, it doesn't take long to hit a nerve" ².

He's also unusually direct about the structural misalignments built into startup financing. He argues that cap table composition matters because of asymmetry of interests: a billionaire investor treats a few-million-dollar exit like casino chips worth re-rolling, while for a young founder the same outcome is life-changing, meaning the two parties are structurally not on the same side even when they appear to be partners ². This is consistent with his instinct to build Open Collective around fiscal hosting and shared community infrastructure rather than around the venture-backed equity model — he's not just critiquing VC incentives abstractly, he's proposing an alternative organizational form as the fix.

Underlying all of this is a stated theory of personal change: "humans are great at adapting to an environment but bad at changing within one" ², and since you become "the average of the five people you spend the most time with," the way to change yourself is to change your environment rather than trying to will yourself into a different behavior ². He applies this same logic when he doesn't know what to work on next — instead of trying to force an answer, he designs the environment (places, people, ingredients) so the solution can emerge on its own ², which is also why he says he trusts "the ecosystem, the environment, the community, that the answer will come," adding that once you've experienced that, "you are unstoppable" ². It's a philosophy that treats naivety and fearlessness as necessary founder traits — "you need to be naive to be an entrepreneur, and to be fearless, to believe so much into something" ² — while also being pragmatic about jurisdiction and friction: comparing life back in Belgium to a decade in the US, he notes plainly that "the amount of time I need to spend on bureaucracy compared to the US, it's night and day" ². Even a small, practical gesture like offering free coworking space during a heatwave gets framed in the same vocabulary of shared resources — "that's what the commons are all about. Sharing resources" — showing that for Damman the commons isn't just an organizational theory but a daily practice.