Xavier Damman

The through-line

Xavier Damman's consistent argument is that the internet made it trivially easy to create digital commons, open source projects and communities of every kind, and yet there is still no internet-native way for a community to receive money [2]. That gap is the founding problem behind Open Collective, and it is also the seed of a much larger political claim: "We need system change, not climate change" [2]. Everything else follows from it. If communities can hold resources, then the community itself becomes the organisational form of the era, and the startup loses its monopoly on ambition.

The position has widened over time rather than moved. It begins as a product observation from Silicon Valley and grows into a programme covering fiscal hosting, local currencies, open data, government subsidy design and how a person should choose what to work on next. The practice stays small and concrete alongside the theory: a coworking space in the centre of Brussels with air conditioning and spare desks, offered openly because "We love sharing. That's what the commons are all about. Sharing resources" [1].

On the community as the new startup

The successor to the garage band of the MTV era and the startup of the TechCrunch era is starting a community or a cooperative [2]. "The new startup for the 21st century is a community, is a cooperative or digital cooperative. That's the new startup. So definitely start today, don't wait" [2]. This is a different animal from a startup and demands two kinds of energy at once: yang, the outward push to attract resources, and yin, the care and attention that keeps a community alive [2]. The competitive posture drops away with the form: "Complete, don't compete. That's really what I want to do with Open Collective" [2].

Two attitudes make it possible. The first is permission: "You don't need to have anyone's permission to do what's the right thing to do" [2]. The second is a kind of useful delusion, since "You need to be naive to be an entrepreneur, and to be fearless, to believe so much into something" [2].

On the missing plumbing for money in the commons

Open Collective is described as WordPress for organizations: fiscal hosts share a single legal entity, accounting and reporting, so that communities can spend their attention on their actual mission instead of overhead [2]. The current version is a Toyota Prius, a hybrid that piggybacks on the bureaucracies that already exist [2]. The fully electric version is web3-native, using the blockchain so that a community gets a bank account in a few clicks, and critically without the users needing to know that a blockchain is involved at all [2].

On open source as the invisible foundation

"There's not a single startup today that could exist without open source" [2]. The claim underwrites the rest of the argument: the commons is not a fringe alternative to the commercial economy, it is the substrate the commercial economy already runs on, which is why the absence of a payment channel into it is such a structural defect [2].

On bureaucracy and what governments should actually do

The comparison is blunt: after ten years in the US and six back in Belgium, "The amount of time I need to spend on bureaucracy compared to the US, it's night and day" [2]. The deeper complaint is about the direction of the relationship. "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].

The remedy is not more money. The best way governments can support citizen initiatives is to get out of the way, creating islands of sanity where organisations operating fully in open source and open data are exempt from filing reports, on the grounds that all the data is already public [2]. The complement is transparency on the other side of the transaction: every government subsidy should be on the blockchain by default, because it is public money, and recipients who build a track record of financial transparency will naturally win more project calls since they represent lower risk [2].

On reading demand before building

The Silicon Valley lesson was that things only started working when he stopped pitching and started listening; a weekend hack, Listimonkey, built around what people actually needed, got featured on TechCrunch overnight and unlocked both his network and his co-founder [2]. The general form of the rule is that "Once you really tap into what the world really needs, it doesn't take long to hit a nerve" [2]. The same eye is what makes local currencies interesting: when more than 5,000 of them run at scale across Europe even though the technology barely works, that is a strong signal of latent demand and a great place to start a technology project [2].

On throwing work away

Do not be afraid to discard months of work and restart from scratch, the way an artist crumples a sketch, because the learnings are never lost [2]. Storify is the evidence, since the product only took off after he scrapped the initial version and started a new repo [2]. The patience that goes with this is stated plainly: "It takes time to become an overnight success" [2].

On cap tables and asymmetry of interests

Who sits on the cap table matters because interests are structurally misaligned. 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 [2]. The asymmetry is not a matter of good or bad actors, it is built into the positions each party occupies [2].

On changing your environment rather than yourself

Humans are excellent at adapting to an environment and poor at changing within one, and you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so the way to change yourself is to change your environment [2]. This is also the method for deciding what to do next: rather than trying to jump straight to the answer, design the environment, the places, the people, the ingredients, so the solution can emerge [2]. The confidence that comes with that practice is the payoff. "I'm doing something, I don't have all the answers, but I trust the ecosystem, the environment, the community, that the answer will come. And once you experience that, then you are unstoppable" [2].

Takeaways

• Build the thing people actually need rather than the thing you can pitch; the weekend hack Listimonkey, built from listening, was what got the TechCrunch feature and unlocked the network and co-founder [2].
• Treat scrapped work as sunk code, not sunk learning; Storify only worked after the initial product was abandoned and a new repo started [2].
• Check the cap table for asymmetry of interests before taking money: an exit that changes a founder's life is a chip worth re-rolling to a billionaire [2].
• Judge Open Collective by the gap it fills, that communities can form freely online but still have no internet-native way to receive money, with fiscal hosting sharing one legal entity, accounting and reporting across many communities [2].
• Ask governments for exemption rather than subsidy: organisations working fully in open source and open data should not have to file reports on data that is already public [2].
• Put public subsidies on the blockchain by default, since transparency creates a track record that lowers perceived risk and wins future project calls [2].
• Look for domains where people persist despite broken technology, as with the 5,000-plus local currencies running in Europe, and treat that persistence as proof of demand [2].
• If you do not know what to work on, change the room rather than interrogating yourself, because "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with" [2].