The Product that Crypto could be.

A speculative company culture manifesto offered for a crypto currency startup that would yet end usury, intrisically incentivise adoption, reward loyalty and provide liquidity to the disadvantaged.

This was a love letter to a crypto startup. Written on my own terms in my own time, it in no way presumes to speak for the actual vision and current values of Sweetbridge.

In the future of money, everything is at stake. After eighteen months of immersion in blockchain culture, I have not found a more compelling use case than the tokenised rights, synchronised accounting and the loyalty reward system which Sweetbridge have under development. It is vital that the good guys win the race to be the supply chain rails for global commerce, and I wish them every success.

I owe a significant debt to Rhys Lindmark and his Grey Mirror Podcast for richly informing my understanding of crypto’s potential with a systems approach to our social and economic reality — and for so much more, I’m grateful.

Sweetbridge are a better way to build a better way.

You, me and the team. We.

We are cathedral builders, a guild crafting civic splendour to endure for generations. Together, we design and implement artistic, prophetic, public, infrastructure: conspicuous monuments to the performance of human flourishing. We are daily, humbly, contributing to something massive, that others after us will complete.

This is the cause we are recruiting for, this is the why for every sacrifice we’re making. We are a tight team, a swelling chorus, a kettle of productive generosity.

Sweetbridge are cathedral builders.

Sweetbridge are better bridges in everything we do.

We bridge. We bridge better. We bridge geographies. We bridge generations. We bridge differences. We bridge digital and analogue, we bridge corporate and grass-roots. We reach out across the void, at great cost, we connect. There is a better way to span the gap, and we are doing it, daily.

Like a bridge, we signpost the direction of travel, we spring from a place, to a place, we provide safe carriage across a chasm, we are built to carry weight and weather storms, by such burden bearing, we create a lasting bond between two parties.

Just so, our communications are robust from end to end. If your desk is a bridge, the on ramp for tasks, projects and fruitful collaboration is clearly signed. If our office is a bridge, we have open-source APIs for vehicles to run on our rails, share our space and access our processes.

We are not a causeway, synthesising land and sea. We are not a catapult launching people across troubled waters to lands unknown, we carry them through a transition, we meet them halfway, at their own pace, in their own language, miles above the ravine below.

Sweetbridge lead by dying, self-starving for a better perpetuity, with better urgency.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Sweetbridge is decentralising by dying, in six years time.

In the meantime, a being towards death is a source of freedom: disabling hoarding, disincentivising selfishness, defusing tribalism. Our terminal condition purges the egocentrism of centralised power.

In all of our projects, ownership is time-limited, the goal of our leadership in everything is always the enrichment of others. The race is on. Time is short. We are a better way to number your days.

Sweetbridge are better marketing, we are better bait to way better fish.

We are a better way to market. We are a better way to sell. We are selling ourselves. We are fishers of men, and we are fish, and we are the bait. We are an holistic attractional way to find, acquire and retain customers. We are sellers and buyers, sold and bought, all at the same time.

Taste and see. See, we eat our own dog food. We are emphatically inviting all other dogs to do the same. We are not selling a bank or payment system, we are inviting people to a wedding feast: to participate and collaborate.

Our office uses the Sweetbridge platform, is powered by Sweetbridge, is Sweetbridge. Yours can be too.

Sweetbridge are a better way to hard fork.

The code of the organisation does not always have to be as it has always been. If the protocols of our office were a code, they can be pulled, they can be locally edited, and you can make a merge request. Or, you can fork.

The inner workings of our company, our values, our processes, our policies, our OKRs, our KPIs.. they are open source. And you can edit them.

Sweetbridge are a better way to share, reward and incentivise.

We are a better way to share. We operates on the basis of abundance. We are presuppositionally a better way. It would be truer to say that we have found a better way, quite apart from ourselves, preexistent in the providence of a just and abundant universe. We are conduits for that way. We are distributors of superabundance. We share because we overflow what we have received. We are generous as a foreshadowing or what we will yet receive. We pay it forward in all things.

As such, we are a better way to reward. Because sharing is its own reward, we are a rewarding company to work for, we are a rewarding community to be a part of, we have a rewarding platform that helps you reward others.

We are the anticipation of the Kingdom of God. We are tokenised heaven. As such, we are sweet to the taste. We are never squabbling over scarcity. We hear each other generously, we love patiently, and we give ourselves away.

We have a ten-percent principle as an absolute minimum. We are already giving it away. And as we do, our right hand doesn’t let the left hand know what it’s giving.

Sweetbridge are the tip of an iceberg of better ways.

We are the tip of the iceberg.

We are not the first, we are not the only. We are but a part of a ground swell. We are not the only non-crypto-bros in the space, there are many people of peace. We are not a quaking last Elijah. We are swept up in a murmuration of starlings.

At any scale that we are encountered, we are humbly and honestly a part of something bigger. We seek the good of our competitors. Our office is a venue for the common good common cause, a magnetic watering hole for all the many others pursuing a better way.

Sweetbridge are a better company structure, servant-led, bottom-up.

We are not a flat organisation, we are not a holocracy. We are a hierarchy. We are led, from the bottom. It is clear how weight is passed through a bridge’s structure to the piers.

The clarity of our structure makes us nimble and scalable. Our decision making is centralised enough to be risk-taking, our decision makers are welded to the whole sufficiently to enfranchise all, and to empower subsidiary initiatives by all.

The global bridge we are undertaking to build is predicated on nodes constructed by an imitation of a style of leadership that races to be servant of all.

Sweetbridge are constantly testing hypotheses about a better way. We are in labs, always.

Sweetbridge is Sweetbridge Labs. Humble hypotheses publicly and perpetually peer-reviewed. We fail fast, we fail often and we document it. We are iterating asymptotically towards a better way.

We are beta-testing the whole idea of being a company. We offer a bug bounty on our internal processes. The constitution of the company is a work in progress, testing a hypothesis, trialing a methodology, and so bolding going to work, counting the cost.

The way we work? There’s still a better way. We don’t presume to have arrived. We don’t rest on our laurels. We take this seriously. We do this humbly.

Sweetbridge are a better way for London.

We are a better way for London. We are for a way better London. We seek the good of the city. We are London’s Local Operating Unit, licensed to serve the city in intimately and precisely local, nuanced, tailored, bespoke ways.

If our platform is a better way, it is a better way for Exmouth House, because we, in all we do are demonstrably a better way for Exmouth House. We are a better Clerkenwell. We love our neighbours specifically, proactively, relentlessly. We are an available public good.

We start in Jerusalem, only then Judea and only then the ends of the earth. We ripple, to the Jews first and then the Gentiles. We consider what is in our hand. We work with what is ready to hand.

London is our test case to prove, our sandbox to experiment, our own house to get in order.

Sweetbridge play for a better way.

We play for a better way. Every day the work we pursue in the office is a better way to play, to gamify, and so to incentivise.

Our office is a blockchain in simulation, a supply chain in miniature. We collaborate on projects across an immutable public ledger, we negotiate priorities within a frictionless and transparent exchange of value. We have our own miners who contribute to the network via both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. It is rewarding, and it is fun. We are adventure, we are peril, and it is for pleasure that we pursue this together.

Sweetbridge are transparently a better way.

We are a better transparency. We speak with radical candour, directly and fearlessly, we put ourselves out there vulnerably frank about our failings, because we know ourselves securely attached.

Individually, we say what we mean, we keep our promises and don’t overpromise. Our confrontations are face-to-face, our slack channels are never private, our wisdom is never siloed, no venture or cooperation is stifled by protectionism.

As a company, we say what we mean, we keep our promises and don’t overpromise. Our accounts are transparent, our salaries are public domain, our company handbook is open-source, our public roadmap is properly precise. We are distinguished primarily by a willingness to be honest about what is under-developed in our product suite. People sign up to a warts-and-all version of a product in-process, precisely because they want to collaborate and because such transparency is the defining characteristic of a mature and secure startup in the crypto space.

See Buffer Gitlab and Stripe on simple exemplary transparency

Sweetbridge grow better.

We are a better way to grow. We grow you.

Grow your company on our platform.

Grow your career in our office.

We grow you because it’s a win-win. We grow you because the network effect multiplies everyone’s abundance. We are a Trellis. We grow by teaching. We grow by resourcing, and providing a stepladder towards flourishing.