Digital fabrication pioneer Smári McCarthy has some ideas to create a ‘radically distributed start-up’.

Give him feedback here.

Smári McCarthy:

* Everybody at the company works on a contractor basis, including executive staff. Executives put up bounties and assign them to “fixed contractors” (what would be employees normally) or to less regular contractors who may have specific skills.

* Have at least one “fixed contractor” who does accounting for the company and for any contractors who need help – this simplifies things by giving people the perks of being not-a-contractor and the perks of being a contractor. This is an investment in luxury, but it’s not that much and it’ll make people happy (specially if they also have access to the accountant for their non-company related work, for free). This may be complicated if you’re paying taxes to a bunch of different national entities though…

* No headquarters. If you need temporary bases of operation, rent them. Offer to install infrastructure in the rented buildings in exchange for lowering the rent (it’s synergetic). Keep all rental terms small, renew often – life doesn’t happen on neat single year boundaries. Don’t waste a lot of funds on furniture, gimmicks or creature comforts, you shouldn’t be hiring people who want cable TV and disco balls anyway.

* Free everything – as in freedom. Use free software, free hardware, etc, to avoid superfluous payments, royalties, etc. There’s no reason to pay for things you can get for free, specially when you can get more freedom as a bonus.

* Make your own products free as in freedom; remember, the purpose of a company is to provide a service, not to squander the planet’s resources on benefiting relatively few people.

* Use e-mail and VoIP for all communications. Pay somebody to run a server sitting on a fat pipe in an undisputed territory to host an mail server with IMAP for directories and an SMTP that requires logins, an Asterisk PBX piped through TLS, a GIT archive, etc. Also host your website there. Be smart and pick something like Linode where you have root access and virtually unlimited everything.

* Only hire contractors who are proficient with e-mail. People who don’t do e-mail are going to be a burden. Likewise, avoid people who aren’t familiar with the technology they’re going to be using, even if they’re otherwise useful.

* Avoid anybody who might be a liability. This means people who are likely to get shot, lynched, and so on for whatever reason or might damage your company’s reputation. When you’re going to be working on dangerous turf, bigots and jokers aren’t going to get you very far.

* No sales people. If your hackers can’t get the point across thoroughly enough, you’re losing and seriously need to rethink your pitch.

* Elevator pitches are good – catchphrases that can capture people’s attention long enough for them to listen to the next twenty words. 80% of people have 20% of the total pooled attention span, so make everything documented function well in bursts and make for scanability.