Over the past twenty years in tech, founders have fallen into one of two categories: the sales founder and the engineer founder.

The sales founder is a master storyteller and hype man. Charismatic and media-savvy, they get people talking. Steve Jobs is their poster boy.

The engineer founder may lack some of the salesman’s charm, but they have technical genius and ingenuity. Think Mark Zuckerberg.

Both these founder archetypes have their strengths and weaknesses, and as we’ve seen, both can become incredible successes.

But we believe the next decade will see the rise of a new kind of founder: the Community Founder. We are building Freehold for them.

Here’s what makes the community founder such a powerful new force for creating companies and championing new ideas.

Where capital meets collaboration

Where the two traditional founder types leverage capital and code to build their projects, the Community Founder also leverages community. They win groups of people to their cause and manifest their ideas through collective action.

In fact, there have already been some notable community founders. Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin, and Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, both qualify.

It’s no surprise that both those Community Founders came from crypto. Crypto is built on community.

Crypto breeds community

One of blockchain’s greatest impacts is that it equalizes and scales cap tables––traditionally, the spread of equity among everyone who owns shares of a company. In this case, the spread of equity is between everyone who owns a certain token.

Historically, getting ownership of a company––claiming a piece of the cap table––is slow and exclusive. But cap tables as scaled by blockchain are global, instantaneous, liquid, tradeable digital assets that are much easier to get ahold of. Because of this, Community Founders can onboard anyone on the planet to become a stakeholder in their idea.

Harnessing mass collaboration

Community Founders bring a specific skill set. They must work well with large groups, create a lot of content, and get those who work with them to do the same and more. They need clarity of vision, and the ability to help others see that vision as clearly as they do. So, they should be media-savvy and persuasive to inspire people around the world to become a stakeholder in their idea. We built Freehold to give Community Founders the tools they need to win over and empower their stakeholders.

Once they get rolling, a community like this can be very powerful. Look at Dogecoin.

What began as an internet joke has become something else entirely. How? Dogecoin is innately memetic––you have the constant image of the Doge, a reference to the internet joke that started it all. It leverages community by making everyone feel like they’re in on the joke. The higher the price rises, the funnier it becomes for those with a sense of humour. Turns out, a huge decentralized workforce of unpaid memers love Doge, and they’ll spread the message with passion.

Community can be more powerful than code or capital. By leveraging the power of mass collaboration, even the wildest ideas can become reality. Proof in point: at one point Dogecoin was trading at ten times the value of the New York Times.

Don’t believe it? Let us tell you about CityCoins, a new way for communities to support the cities they love.