I have no idea if a startup working within these constraints could possibly work. I’m even not sure what the benefit, if any, of doing anything like this would be. But it’s got a kind of crazy logic to it and I have decided that it will be fun, or else, so here goes: On day one, the open startup has no secrets…
The open startup:
(1) is committed to preserving the privacy and confidentiality of others without introducing any of its own
(2) respects the intellectual property of others, but considers anything it creates to be public property
(3) recognises that it must strive to provide a valuable service to humanity and must pursue and strive to deserve the engagement and trust of the public in order to justify its consumption of the world’s resources
(4) commits to actively sharing all its ideas and innovations
(5) will only seek payment when it is offering to create genuine value for others
(6) will publish all its costs, margins, metrics and board meeting minutes
(7) cannot indefinitely retain the status of being a startup and so it must strive to determine a set of conditions under which it would cease operations and set a date for meeting those conditions
I get the feeling that this could be the basis of either a competition or an event, or maybe both. I also had the temptation to put in something about the open startup ‘pivoting until it finds something humanity would value’, but then I thought this particular founding mother should leave the job of suggesting the first amendment of the open startup constitution to the iij readers.
