When I needed help last year taking my scrappy site design for the publics [[v2]] to an Actually Good Website, I asked Framer’s community if I could pay anyone for a tutorial. Within 5 minutes, I had just as many responses in my inbox—one of whom was Visar. We got on a Whatsapp call later that day; 10 minutes into it he offered to redesign the entire site, free of charge. Why? What would take me weeks to complete would be at most a two hour gig for him, and he was happy to offer me that time.
I first got close to Maz and Eiman because it was my job to—they were community members of Backdrop, of which I was the community manager. We stayed close because we’ve been looking for every opportunity since to take our friendship to the next level; to turn companionship into collaboration. Elliot was my pipeline into web3 consumer social—inviting me along every project until I was just as well networked within his network. We used to joke that he has 2% equity across my entire net worth (currently non-existent) (social tokens were, like, super in at the time).
Robin Kimmerer’s Serviceberry speaks to the indigenous culture of the gifting economy: in hive-oriented social networks, people don’t give to get—they give because the gift itself is the transaction. Maybe you gain in future reciprocity, or you catalyse a pay-it-forward flywheel—but that gift becomes a public good—a commons built around freeloading.
Open source economies aren’t just gifting economies—human capital is also the first truly regenerative factor of production we’ve learned to mine. IP is a social good…and the knowledge economy demands freeloading as an act of consumption.
We are in the service of gifting social infrastructures to products that serve freeloaders.
Why? Because it’s what we think about, and we care about investing those thoughts in you.