What is a Swarm?
The Rise of Swarms: When Collaboration Outperforms Competition
Imagine launching a new venture with the agility of a startup and the resources of a Fortune 500 company. In a world where startups struggle and large corporations lag, Swarms offer a radically more collaborative way to succeed.
What is a Swarm?
A Swarm is a network of aligned startups, humans, and agents that share resources, opportunities, and relationships to move faster and improve their chances of success.
Every startup is incentive-aligned with the others, for example by owning a piece of every other startup in the ecosystem. Deep incentive alignment incentivizes direct and indirect collaboration beyond what you typically see in lone startup or even accelerator cohorts.
Startups in a Swarm are independent and composable— each one is free to make their own decisions and while they focus on solving a narrow problem, they can combine their solutions to tackle complex challenges together; like Lego building blocks. This approach allows them to attract bigger and better customers, investors, and talent. In Swarms the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Swarms aren’t new
They’ve emerged in different contexts:
- Grassroots Disaster Response
After Hurricane Maria, local volunteers formed ad-hoc teams to distribute aid. They combined resources far more effectively than traditional relief organizations, demonstrating the power of decentralized cooperation. - Haier’s Small Teams Model
Haier, the #1 IoT company in the world with $36 billion in revenue and 80,000 employees, uses self-directed teams within its larger structure. Each team (around 15 people) runs like a mini-startup. This lets Haier stay nimble, even with its large size. - Valve’s Mobility
Employees at Valve, a gaming company, “vote with their feet” by literally wheeling their desks to projects that need their skills. This freedom encourages organic collaboration and quick pivots, a hallmark of Swarm thinking.
As more and more cases of Swarming have accumulated, our understanding of them is growing.
Why Swarms?
RnDAO operates as a venture builder with a core thesis around CollabTech—technology that enables collaboration i.e. working together. In our specific case, operating as a Swarm provides the following advantages for our ventures:
- Speed to Market
By tapping into the collective experience of the Swarm, new ventures halve their time-to-market-feedback. RnDAO’s collaborative playbooks enable ventures to learn faster and cheaper by over 50%, a critical edge in competitive markets. - Built-in Customer Network
Once one venture breaks into an enterprise account, other ventures can follow. Over 35% of revenue at RnDAO comes from “warm” introductions. Instead of starting from scratch, you get connected to an established customer pipeline. - Funding Advantages
The Swarm collectively pools investor networks, cutting the time required for fundraising. This lets founders focus more on building and less on courting investors. - Autonomy and Guidance
Rather than giving up control of your venture, you gain access to mentors, resources, and other specialized teams. You guide your venture’s direction while still benefiting from the Swarm’s collective power. This ensures each team is driven and entrepreneurial, unlike most corporations. - Founder Wellbeing and Community
Founders in a Swarm aren’t isolated. They have peers, coaches, and cross-venture relationships that lighten the load and reduce the mental health strain so common in traditional startups. You're not alone at the top. - Cross-Ownership and Collaboration
The Swarm owns a piece of every venture within the ecosystem, but in return, unlike traditional incubators and venture studios, each mature venture also owns a piece of the Swarm. This creates a cross-ownership structure, where every startup has a stake in all the other startups. This alignment incentivizes collaboration, ensuring that each venture's success contributes to the growth of the entire network.
How Swarms Work
Swarms are designed around three key principles:
- Zero Distance to Customers: Market feedback drives decisions—no bloated hierarchy blocking quick pivots.
- Autonomy: Each startup functions with independence, enabling rapid execution.
- Shared Rewards: Everyone benefits from the success of individual ventures and the success of the broader Swarm.
RnDAO’s venture builder structure is the formal framework: we incorporate new ventures, provide tools, handle legalities, implement processes, and find talent. The Swarm is the collaborative network tying it all together, ensuring contributors and ventures engage in two-way value exchange—you give and you get. The more contributors and ventures join and the better they do, the stronger the network effects.
Collaboration in Action
- Co-Marketing and Cross-Selling: If one venture has a robust sales channel, another venture can tap into it with their complementary product. Both ventures benefit financially.
- Integration of Solutions: Like Lego blocks, different ventures stack their offerings, creating comprehensive product suites for customers and building up network effects.
- Skilled Talent Sharing: Contributors help across multiple ventures, sharing skills, and in return, they receive ownership, compensation, or reciprocal assistance. The startups benefit from having specialized talent at hand.
The different enterprises in a Swarm engage in co-marketing and cross-selling (particularly useful in B2B setups where sales cycles often take months), integrate each other’s solutions, share research insights, and support each other through talent referrals, partnerships, best practices, and more. This enables resources to compound as more enterprises join and grow in the Swarm, accelerating growth and creating powerful network effects.
The same pattern is now increasingly adopted in AI Swarms, where networks of agents collaborate with one another. And increasingly we'll see Swarms combining both humans and AI agents as contributors, and more and more agents being the product created by the Swarm's ventures.
Swarms rely on launching new enterprises, attracting others to join, and growing together. Some Swarms like Constellation Software focus more on acquisitions while others like Haier and RnDAO focus more on internal R&D and incubation programs. Funding of new enterprises is often done together between contributors, the Swarm, and external investors, which provides incentive alignment through shared upside.
In a Swarm, all contributors are entrepreneurs. Humans (and soon agents) are enabled to start and lead new enterprises, work for one or more of the existing ones, or support at the platform level helping to attract talent and support the multiple enterprises. Each contributor can pick the best path for themselves and also accrue ownership in the different ventures by contributing. This is often done via the use of sweat equity whereby contributors can “invest” in a project by providing work and receiving part of the compensation in ownership (shares or tokens).
What’s your next move?
Ultimately, RnDAO’s Swarm approach shows that combining autonomy with networked collaboration leads to better outcomes. By organizing a set of ventures around shared goals and open contributions, we expand the possibilities for each contributor, each startup, and for the network as a whole.
To fully grasp how a Swarm can supercharge your journey, discover how we do it at RnDAO.
A few ways to get involved:
- Join a Venture
Contribute your skills to an existing project and earn sweat equity. - Pitch Your Idea
Start a new initiative within our CollabTech focus and access RnDAO’s resources. - Become a Swarm Contributor
Share expertise across multiple ventures, broadening your impact and portfolio. - Help Us Grow
Support the overarching Swarm by building community, attracting talent, or improving our shared infrastructure.
Introduce yourself in RnDAO’s Discord and chat with our team! Let's build the future of work together.