3 Things: The Org for DAOs, Security Questionnaires-aaS, Chain Letters for Good News
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
The Org for DAOs
Security Questionnaire-as-a-Service
Chain Letters for Good News
1. The Org for DAOs
Org charts might not seem like a big business opportunity but when you can map out who’s who within a company or group, it presents a lot of potential both internally for teams to find the right resources when they need them and visualize/plan company growth, as well as externally for those looking to sell products and services. LinkedIn has dominated the space for over a decade and was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for a whopping $26.2B. In 2021, LinkedIn surpassed $10B in annual revenue and the company has had a target on it’s back for years as people continue to discuss the “unbundling of LinkedIn”. The other major incumbent in the space is ZoomInfo which is a B2B database of buyer profiles that went public in 2020 and currently trades at a ~$22B market cap. The shift to remote work during the pandemic forced the first in a series of major workplace changes in moving away from valuing employees for their title or what you can see them accomplish at an office from 9-5, to what they objectively and measurably do whenever, wherever. Even before this shift, The Org launched in 2017 to take on LinkedIn and achieve their mission of making organizations more transparent. They provide a public network of crowdsourced, interactive org charts where you can browse teams, see new hires, and employees can post accomplishments and get recognized for their work. The company has already raised ~$40M from top VCs like Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Tiger Global.
Aside from remote work, the next major workplace shift that we are seeing is the rise of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). In a DAO, you throw out the traditional corporate hierarchy and instead create a meritocracy and community-led structure where members vote on decisions, governance is done via smart contracts, and people are compensated based off of contributions. One challenge with DAOs is that most of the coordination today is done via Discord. It is incredibly difficult to know who is in a DAO, who is an active participant, and in what capacity. Given the focus on transparency and decentralization, a company could create something similar to The Org focused on DAOs where members would fill out and update profiles to visualize the community and find the right people when you need a specific skillset, want to organize a new initiative, or need people to vote or act as a signer. When I was at ConsenSys we were operating as a holacracy and had visualized what we called “The Mesh” in a series of concentric circles where individuals could sit in one or more circles and some circles had many baby circles inside while some were more autonomous but still contained within the master Mesh Circle. You could click into each and get more information on the team, project, person and could also show empty circles as open roles. Something like this could take aspects of The Org’s playbook and become the go-to way to document and visualize the people and structure of DAOs.
2. Security Questionnaires-as-a-Service
If you have every been involved in an enterprise SaaS sales cycle, you’ll know the pain of filling out the security questionnaires, also known as “Vendor Risk Assessments”. When you are later in a sales process with a company, each enterprise will require you to fill out a (usually extremely lengthy) security questionnaire before you can move forward that covers things like information security and privacy, physical and data center security, web application security, and infrastructure security. For startups with limited resources, these surveys suck up a ton of bandwidth from the team and require not only answering a lot of questions, but also tracking down a bunch of information that lives in various places and systems, and preparing the appropriate documentation.
While there is usually a good amount of overlap in the questionnaires from each company, they all have their own format, order, and way of asking specific questions which requires the team to manually deal with each individually during every sales cycle. Just as we have seen a handful of companies crop up (and scale rapidly) in the last few years to help companies streamline and automate their SOC2 (and other security) compliance like Drata, Vanta, and Secureframe, a tech-enabled services company could focus on automating vendor risk assessment completion. They could first work with customers to aggregate any and all data and documentation that may be required and then using NLP, software could ingest a questionnaire and understand what information is required to answer each question and pull from the repository that has been created. The SOC2 compliance companies could make great partners as the two go hand-in-hand and they will be producing and maintaining a lot of the information that is needed to fill out the assessments.
3. Chain Letters for Good News
The world could use some good vibes right now. Between the extreme increases in depression and anxiety that we’ve seen during the pandemic (especially among women aged 20-50), the loneliness epidemic, the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, and much more, the world is teetering on the edge of a mental health crisis. In March 2020, actor John Krasinski started a YouTube channel called “Some Good News” which focused on sharing positive things amidst the initial lockdown. After only 8 episodes, the show had garnered 72 million views and was acquired by ViacomCBS showing just how much Americans (and the world) wanted an escape and to feel warm and fuzzy. Over the last 2 years, the world has both become more isolated and way more connected as our digital communities have become our core circles and most people have spent less time with their family, close friends, colleagues, and neighbors. As we look to the internet for information, entertainment, and companionship, it is all too easy to get sucked down the rabbit holes of the messy, scary, upsetting, and anxiety-provoking.
When you think about chain letters, you might also not have the most happy and positive feelings. Starting back in the late 1800s, chain letters became a way for groups to fundraise. One of the earliest examples was an indebted Methodist academy for women missionaries who created the concept of a “peripatetic contribution box“ where each person receiving a letter would send them a dime and make three copies of the letter asking three friends to do the same thing. Chain letters gained popularity and have mostly been associated with hoaxes, phishing attacks, requests for money, and urban legends; but the concept doesn’t need to be used for bad intentions. I think someone should start a chain letter around sharing good news. You send a message containing some positive things from your life to 3 people and request that they in turn share some good news with 3 additional people in their network. This is less of a true business concept and more an idea that I think could get some immediate virality and major press which can either be used to increase your personal brand or funnel traffic to another product/service. Additionally, it could potentially be a springboard for a chain letter as-a-service business. You could allow people to write the letters online and then use one of the handwriting robots to pen the notes and manage the sending. Each note could contain a QR code that opens the URL where receivers could write their letters and the next recipients’ addresses. In addition to a “good news” chain letter, you could continually pick various trends and kick off new chains.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine