<story><title>Build Unix, Not Uber</title><url>https://thesephist.com/posts/legacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that&amp;#x27;s needed by competing entities. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It&amp;#x27;s an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn&amp;#x27;t issue cards. It doesn&amp;#x27;t handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant&amp;#x27;s bank, and card issuer&amp;#x27;s bank. It&amp;#x27;s in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that&amp;#x27;s a natural monopoly, but the customers don&amp;#x27;t want it charging monopoly rents. It&amp;#x27;s not idealistic. It&amp;#x27;s a practical solution to that class of problems.&lt;p&gt;Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.)
His optimistic book, &amp;quot;Birth of the Chaordic Age&amp;quot;, is still available.&lt;p&gt;There used to be a &amp;quot;chaord&amp;quot; article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock&amp;#x27;s article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m_mueller</author><text>There’s also the cooperative. Here in Switzerland they are rather popular - some of the biggest banks, insurances and property owners, and more notably, the two largest supermarket chains (making up &amp;gt;80% of food &amp;#x2F; non food market) are organised this way. Your customers could be part of the ownership structure of your company, which creates a strong loyalty effect and a focus on organic &amp;amp; vertical growth rather than growth just for the sake of beating quarterly numbers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Build Unix, Not Uber</title><url>https://thesephist.com/posts/legacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that&amp;#x27;s needed by competing entities. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It&amp;#x27;s an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn&amp;#x27;t issue cards. It doesn&amp;#x27;t handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant&amp;#x27;s bank, and card issuer&amp;#x27;s bank. It&amp;#x27;s in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that&amp;#x27;s a natural monopoly, but the customers don&amp;#x27;t want it charging monopoly rents. It&amp;#x27;s not idealistic. It&amp;#x27;s a practical solution to that class of problems.&lt;p&gt;Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.)
His optimistic book, &amp;quot;Birth of the Chaordic Age&amp;quot;, is still available.&lt;p&gt;There used to be a &amp;quot;chaord&amp;quot; article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock&amp;#x27;s article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spideymans</author><text>There might be potential for this chaord idea in telecommunications and utilities.</text></comment>