Why Cobuild

The Firm

Companies were built for the 20th century, when the cost of coordinating individuals through markets was high. Every project meant finding counterparties, discovering prices, and negotiating contracts.

The company was the workaround. Instead of haggling over every task in the open market, people signed long-term employment contracts, got a manager, and were told what to do. Inside the firm, the “price mechanism” was largely superseded by hierarchy: if a worker moved from project A to project B, it wasn’t because the wage for B ticked up, it was because their boss said so.

Coase’s insight was simple: firms exist to save on transaction costs. As long as it’s cheaper to organize work inside a company than through the market, firms grow; once internal bureaucracy becomes as costly as external contracting, they stop. That incentive shaped the corporate structures we inherited.

The Internet

For most of the 20th century, your labor market was your city. You hired from the people who lived nearby, or you moved if you wanted a different job. Coordination was local by necessity.

Then the internet arrived and shattered that constraint. You could email, chat, and ship files across the world in seconds. But inside most companies, very little changed: people still commuted to the same buildings, sat in the same meetings, and reported to the same managers. The network was treated as a communication tool, not a new substrate for how work itself might be organized.

More importantly, the internet rewired how we find one another. It made it normal to have a closest collaborator you’ve never met in person, a group chat that matters more than your office, a feed full of people who share your exact obsessions. It turned the world into a search engine for affinity: you can find a thousand people who care about the same thing you do, anywhere on the planet.

But these networks of affinity are still weightless. Compared to corporations, they are hamstrung. We can trade ideas and motivation, but not hold assets, contracts, or shared upside. Our real communities live online, but our money and authority live inside legacy firms and legal paperwork. We can gather online as global tribes, but lack the technology to reach our full potential in the real world. Spiritual networks trapped by old world coordination.

Ethereum

On the web, data could be copied freely, but ownership and incentives lived in legacy systems built for simple agreements. If you wanted rules (“if X happens, pay Y”), you needed lawyers, contracts, and courts.

Most agreements assumed a small, fixed set of parties: a customer and a company, a worker and a firm, anchored in the legacy legal and banking system. Many-to-many agreements across borders meant stitching together a patchwork of accounts, entities, and contracts, and in practice almost never happened. Those rules were written for a handful of counterparties at a time, not for networks of millions.

In 2009, Bitcoin introduced a different primitive: a shared ledger that anyone could verify, but no single actor controlled. For the first time, you could have native digital assets. Scarce, transferable units of value, without a central issuer.

Ethereum generalized that idea. Instead of just tracking balances, you can put code on the ledger: smart contracts that hold assets and execute rules automatically. “If a vote passes, release the budget”; “If these conditions are met, mint new shares.” No middle managers, no opaque legal plumbing, just shared logic everyone can inspect and no one can unilaterally override.

Blockchains turned the internet from a network where we could only read and write information into a network where we can also own things together and coordinate how they move. A new substrate for building organizations that are natively global, programmable, and owned by the people who contribute to them.

Abundant Intelligence

Even with the internet and blockchains, coordination still hit a hard bottleneck: human judgment. Connecting the right people, evaluating work, and deciding where money should go all required scarce attention from managers, reviewers, and committees. If you wanted high-signal allocation, you had to spend a lot of time reading, interviewing, and debating. Most of the world’s capital and opportunity was steered by a specialized few.

For the first time in history, intelligence itself is becoming a commodity. That means the cognitive labor of coordination can be automated:

• Matching contributors to the right projects across the whole internet
• Scoring proposals against a community’s values and past outcomes
• Auditing reputation and proof of work effortlessly
• Simulating different funding rules before putting money at stake

What used to require a foundation, an investment committee, or a full-time ops team can now be done by a few people with cheap, abundant intelligence.

Combine this with programmable money and shared incentives and you get something new: organizations that can fundraise, align, and allocate at global scale without growing a giant management bureaucracy. The constraint is no longer “how many smart people can we put in one building?” but “what values beyond profit do we want to optimize for?”

Meaning in the 21st Century

Industrial society asked people to find meaning outside their work through church, family, hobbies, while their days were spent in what Alan Watts called the commute-necktie-strangle scene, doing tasks disconnected from food, shelter, beauty, or community.

The Industrial revolution gave us material abundance, but it turned most people’s working hours into lifeless routines that neither express their full gifts nor root them in the world.

People still want to give their best effort to something that matters and be known for more than their résumé or shopping cart. Our incentive systems don’t know how to offer that for most people.

The question for the 21st century is whether we can build forms of coordination where earning a living and living your values stop being two separate tracks of life. The next generation of great organizations won't look like companies selling products; they will look like communities co-creating culture. Cobuild exists to give these communities the economic rails they need to sustain themselves.

Our Opportunity

There's one economically dominant, albeit meaningless, global belief system today: consumerism. Nothing else really has the legs. Our idea is simple: build the economic engine for the next million belief systems. Turn today's online networks of believers into organizations owned by their contributors, with real capacity for collective action in the world.

Put another way: a coordination engine to build meaningful meritocracies at scale.

A new type of organization is necessary for the intelligence age. One that operates without borders, traditional hierarchies, and is uniquely internet native, onchain, and AI coordinated.

Cobuild is our attempt to build the coordination layer for these organizations. Communities define their values: what they care about and what “good work” looks like. Cobuild turns values into transparent rules, matching the right people and projects, and moving capital intelligently. Resource allocation shifts from committee decisions to the real‑time expression of millions of people’s values and intentions, encoded in logic that is shared, inspectable, and forkable.

If we succeed, more and more people will be able to earn and own by contributing to the cultures they actually believe in. They’ll do it using upgraded primitives that once only served corporations, but now empower million-person networks with meaningful goals beyond profit.