Cohere Network: Property Portfolio or Social Network?

Are Network States focused on acquiring sovereign land to generate wealth or building highly aligned communities that create new realities together? Hint: Its both!

Introduction

The real question of this post is why do people join Cohere Network? Is it to get access to properties around the world, a community they can't find at home, or services like health & wellness our members provide that they can't access in their country? Perhaps it's all of these things and more. While not every CoordiNation and Network State will have the same mutual cooperative model as Cohere, the questions and answers that this community is asking are relevant to others. Akiya DAO and Cabin DAO in particular have similar dichotomies and I will do similar posts about them in the future.

As a quick reminder, Network States are a subset of CoordiNations so we will use the broader term CoordiNations for the remainder of the article. I focus on Cohere Network as a tangible case study since it’s the project I know the best and am most involved in currently. It’s also the CoordiNation that is the most focused on conscious colivingl so the topic at hand is most directly applicable to them.

Not everyone in the Cohere community is in agreement about whether it should be a social network or property portfolio.I see arguments for both and they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, Cohere is out to illustrate and innovate the impact of the two integrated.

“The reality of the building is not the roof and the walls but the space within to be lived” - Lao Tze.

What is the value of our real estate without the community and vice versa. My personal motivation for writing this post is to air out both sides that i’ve heard over the past months and suggest that Cohere could be a social network first and foremost that also owns/manages a property portfolio. Its a lot harder to gather hundreds or millions of amazing people with similar values and lifestyles as you into a neighbourhood or city sized container to create a shared identity and vision than it is to coinvest in a property together. The difference is between “owning real estate” and “having a home”. If the goal of Cohere, or any CoordiNation, is to give people a new way of living outside of existing government systems then we must provide them a home, governments already do a great job of creating real estate markets.

What is Cohere Network?

Cohere is a curated community working towards a shared vision of creating a global network of conscious communities. We share a sense of empowerment that by coming together we will build viable and pragmatic alternatives of how we live in order to thrive together. Rather than ignoring the political and environmental planetary implosion, we can actually regenerate global bioregions, local community, and personal vitality through our network of high trust. 

Trust between our members is the most valuable resource. Trust that is born out of curating a container for organic connection and activation to occur–also known as friendships. From this we ferment community, scaling into culture which enables the possibility of coordination for co-ownership and co-living creating virtuous feedback looping. Our member owned platform that streamlines the curation process for people, properties, and capital. 

Community & Capital - Symbiotic Network Effects

TL;DR; Does your land provide community and psychological safety or profitability and financial security? How can we provide both faster for lower costs?

It is easy to confuse the two because they both have network effects. The more properties you have, the more people will use your service and the more people in your network the more you can crowdfund and sustain properties. This means there are obvious synergies around doing both at the same time…if you plan carefully. As the community grows, you bring more capabilities inhouse reducing costs, offering more diverse products and services to monetize properties, and create more connections between members that can return value back to the network e.g. tools that further optimize operations or startups that give equity back for their incubation.

People that want to live, work, play, love, etc. together have an inherently different philosophy than those that are seeking financial returns from a property. Financial interactions necessarily change social dynamics. Money is the most quantitative and tangible value system in the world which is why it works everywhere and holds more cognitive weight in how we think. The goal of CoordiNations is to show people there are other ways to scale security and success through values/incentive alignment, coordination mechanisms, reputation systems, and microsolidarity. The key to combining community and capital for CoordiNations to develop is to separate their concerns from each other.

Curating Capital with Community

TL;DR; Cohere's essence lies in orchestrating a balance between human needs, financial returns, and environmental values. A unique blend of aesthetics, culture, and capital driving value to members and investors. 

Curation is the future. Curation is the foundation of art and culture. And curating your tribe is one of the important things people can do. What creates most value for social media networks is the ability to curate info and insights for others to keep people engaged on the platform. That's why I think focusing on curation and not investing is the best way to create value for/within Cohere. Part of the reason I joined Cohere is because I know they are doing the job of curating both people and properties for me. As a nomad for +6 years that constantly has to do both myself, that's a massive value add.

Currently the Cohere Network does 3 activities:

1. curating community members

2. curating properties

3. coordinating community <> capital <> CoLabs

Currently Cohere - the company nor members - aren’t investing in property. Technically Network States and CoordiNations never have to do the actual financial investing in their land themselves. I’ll explain that later.

Curation requires alignment. This is why curating culture and members is the most important thing for CoordiNations because all decisions are downstream from there. Same as the classic “VCs invest in founders' except with all the complexities of social dynamics and living together. It's not just about culture and leadership but purpose and vision. Do we want luxurious resorts on beaches or low maintenance bungalows in the forest? This is not simply a stylistic choice, the type of people that want to stay at each are very different. 

While Cohere is still formalizing their property evaluation framework through their team-led, community-operated Review Council, the community is already aligning on properties that they want to evaluate or purchase already via their online hub. (private link for members only) Cohere has done a good job at building an effective membrane, keeping bad things out and letting good things in, but doesn’t have any immune system for kicking out bad things that get through the membrane. How do we evaluate if investing in a property was a mistake? When do we decide to kick a member out? What situation would cause us to delist a property that we don't own if we think it's not a fit for our community? This is an important part of the curation process. Clearly communicated direction, values, and constraints are key. We need these to assess who is aligned or not and what is important for our attention, time and resources

As our system gets better our community trusts itself more, improves (curates) its processes, earns a track record to get capital faster/easier, and can take on visionary projects to create spaces that could only have been imagined before. Cohere is cultivating a sense of aesthetics instead of defaulting to a generic helvetica neue branding.  All of this creates cultural, ecological, and financial capital as our CoordiNation defines its identity through physical spaces, coordinated practices, and shared accomplishments more than a bunch of friends living together.

However there will still always be cliques like in any large group. This schism will primarily be between the members living on land getting their hands dirty and the ones off land that are part time or primarily interface with the outside world instead of the community itself (e.g. investors). Even if there are members of the network that are good at investing and playing capitalism (like me) there's no reason everyone should be forced to be capitalists unless that's the explicit goal of the group. We should isolate capital acquisition/formation to the members that excel at this to fund the properties and community. The other members do what they do best - creating spaces, providing wellness services, etc. Non-financial members then earn equity in Cohere Co. for upside and alignment by providing other forms of capital to the network and members (thereby the network too).

As someone that is great at investing and “earning returns” I believe this is the best way forward because i often choose between making money vs supporting people and visions that I want to see in the world. Not that these are mutually exclusive actions/outcomes but one will always be prioritized and affect the other. And despite my best efforts, investing in “good people” (not necessarily good founders) is often a terrible idea for both sides because once you put obligations on them  it stops being fun and natural. Their performance actually tanks while you are trying to make it go higher or they are naive/sheepish and generally don’t have what it takes to make big moves in the world. By separating concerns between community and capital, Cohere doesn’t feel like investors are making that compromise. The members that are good at playing capital games are focusing on their thing while others have the responsibility of creating transcendent, soul-stirring spaces for us to coexist in.This is how Cohere’s strategy of  shared vision -> shared tooling -> shared living -> shared thriving is coordinating this communion of community and capital to jumpstart our CoordiNation for a global conscious coliving network.

How To Glob Your Networks Together

TL;DR; Not just community. Not just capital. But a third more powerful thing incentivizing and coordinating both Cohere Co. by creating positive sum games with equity rewards

We need glue to hold our community and investors together, yet separate them, while providing value for both without alienating them from each other. Cohere is aligning incentives to break down boundaries. If Cohere, or any CoordiNation, wants to let in investors then the community must co-opt the very definition of investors and redefine the incentives of crony late stage capitalism. We must repurpose the coordination mechanism of The Market and reorient it to win-win realities. If we all co-own the commons, we all benefit from protecting and growing the commons. The Cohere rizz is co-opting and re-aligning capitalism. 

The magic of community is in spontaneity and chaos while investors want predictability and stability. Money cannot buy you happiness and at times it can’t even buy you food because of inflation or empty stores. Cohere Co. is the alignment and incentive mechanism between human, capital, and environmental needs. Cohere mediates relations, reduces investor control via management, has multiple revenue streams from members for services beyond just property value so has communities interest at heart, and provides formal governance frameworks for everyone to co-manage properties. Most importantly they provide the medium for investors to exit to community by issuing equity for members’ work at the property and network level. Investors will always have equity and equity always gets more valuable because of labor from the community, they just eventually own a smaller piece of the pie so they don't control the community. The community gains sovereignty over land all over the world in parallel but it vests over time instead of going from one place to one place sequentially. 

There are multiple options to get our land with no upfront capital or risk to the community. Government land grants, rent-to-own, or trade land directly for equity are a couple straight forward options. I think the ideal combines all three in some way. Initial land/capital is seeded by investors or government, fundraise for development costs from banks or family offices (not VCs that expect 100x returns), and then slowly dilute shareholders by issuing equity to community members as they pay rent or increase property/network value. With this model the community gets to live for free on land that someone else bought for them and eventually own a majority or all of the land outright with the work they put in. Of course the equity distribution algorithm has to be designed properly so that members can reasonably earn majority share with a reasonable amount of work while investors make sufficient money in the long term as the property value increases from community members. It's a positive sum game that aligns everyone over the long term to continually contribute to our network, regenerate our land, and coexist happily. 

Conclusion

As a member of Cohere Network I’m excited to be part of this exciting expedition that transcends the boundaries of traditional coliving and investing. We are nurturing a sense of aesthetics, culture, and financial savvy by innovating practices for land acquisition, development, and governance that symbiotically empower our members and investors. Cohere is more than just a network. It's a living, breathing testament to the power of collaboration and cooperation. Welcome to the future of conscious coliving.