> Fundraising is completely impossible to delegate (if you delegate that to someone else, you'll alienate investors) and even with hiring/org building, you have to at least do the recruiting/candidate selection of top lieutenants yourself as a CEO in order to make sure that you are putting the right team of divisional heads in place to execute.

> ...

> The other challenge with this kind of dealmaking is that the stakes are so high and the counterparties so formidable that if you put anyone except an equally formidable party in place to negotiate with them, you'd end up in a bloodbath that ended up unfavorably for the company and favorably for the counterparty.

I know you didn't connect these two paragraphs explicitly -- perhaps you had something more like {vendor/partner} establishment in mind for the latter -- but in practice I think they connect fairly neatly.

They ring true based on the way that strategic initiatives from large companies and startups alike often either succeed wildly or fail completely; the outcome depends on the ability to identify an opportunity and then have motivated and ambitious people in place to capitalize on it (both in terms of negotiations and implementation).

Personality-wise: an ability to quickly assess a business relationship, summon the relevant statistics and talking points, evaluate potential outcomes (a nod to your mention of BATNA) and then communicate and work towards the preferred ones: all of that is good. Persuasion, influence and manipulation are where things get a bit murkier, I think.

Environment-wise: is your sense that many of these negotiations are zero-sum? That kind of situation would seem to be a natural fit for extremely competitive mindsets, although my sense is that it could be better to wait for positive-sum opportunities, even if that takes longer and requires {business/market} development. Return-on-capital might not always reward that kind of delay, but I think that effective human advancement does (and, ideally, regulation should try to align those two vectors).

(rationale: positive-sum situations feel like they should be easier to agree upon (aided by the presence of honest and verifiable information), should be more sustainable growth-wise for both parties, and should reduce the risk of disputes occurring later -- something that employers might not necessarily have on their mind when allowing competitive negotiators to dealmake)

> PS: I'm also realizing another interesting petri dish where we could see parts of what you're suggesting play out are DAOs in crypto.

I share your skepticism on this - the code in cryptocurrency {contracts/organizations} as they exist today doesn't stop when a problem occurs; instead the stories we hear about are expensive mistakes and losses of funds.

Code as most developers write it also has limited ways to assess the real-world effect that it has on each contracted party (not to mention uninvolved parties, often equally or more important) beyond basic metrics.

To refer back to an earlier thought: perhaps the hosting environment for the code (not the contracts themselves, necessarily, to be clear, but the hosting environment within which they're evaluate) should look for and reward positive-sum results. And (human) governance of that hosting environment should confirm that those rewards are being distributed "correctly" -- in whatever senses that's possible to determine.

(by the way: thanks for the thought-provoking discussion - even if I've gone off on some unusual tangents)