
The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock, the Radical Who Organized Visa (2012) - JoachimS
http://m.fastcompany.com/27333/trillion-dollar-vision-dee-hock
======
Animats
It's a fascinating story, told better in Hock's book, "Birth of the Chaordic
Age". Visa is unusual in that it is a organization of _competitors_ who need
to cooperate on some standards for the system to work. The Visa model would be
a useful model for Internet governance. Visa is a network operator of a big
network which predates the Internet. They run data centers and switches all
over the world.

There are other organizations with similar organizational problems. Most are
financial clearing houses, such as Depository Trust Company. In the past, the
Association of American Railroads acted as a clearing house for railroad cars.
(When a railroad car is not on its "home road", the borrowing railroad pays a
daily rental to the owning railroad. One of the AAR's functions was being the
clearinghouse for that and other inter-line billing issues.) The AAR is still
the standards organization for railroad equipment. It's owned by the big
railroads. That's typical of industry organizations; they're dominated by the
big companies.

Visa was a chaord because the US used to have a lot of small banks, and the
small banks wanted a system that wasn't controlled by the big banks. As the
financial industry consolidated, this became less of an issue. Visa
International is no longer a chaord; it went public a few years ago.

~~~
mseebach
> The Visa model would be a useful model for Internet governance

I disagree on that. The Visa model works because at every single turn there is
a clear, shared understanding of what the single purpose of the whole thing
is: Process payments.

The same is emphatically not true for the internet, just look at net
neutrality. That's a pretty simple but very fundamental concept, and there's
nowhere near consensus on the matter. Or even without considering NN, the fact
that Netflix and Skype are eating the lunches of the very companies that own
and operate most of the consumer internet (telcos and cable cos). It's hard to
imagine a similar conflict at Visa, yet the internet's history is riddled with
them, and the fallout from their incomplete resolutions.

Incidentally, this clarity is also why Visa would probably be fundamentally
ill-suited to deal with an existential threat, e.g. of the sort some people
imagine bitcoin to be.

~~~
empath75
Yeah it seems like it would mostly be effective for cartels, rather than
corporations. It would probably be useful for something like W3C, perhaps.

------
Adlai
Today, Hock is on the advisory board of Xapo, claiming that _" Bitcoin is one
of the best examples of how a decentralized, peer-to-peer organization can
solve problems that these dated organizations cannot."_ How about that pivot!

[https://blog.xapo.com/announcing-xapos-advisory-
board/](https://blog.xapo.com/announcing-xapos-advisory-board/)

------
ZenoArrow
Interesting article, Dee Hock could be onto something very useful for society
at large.

On initial reading, I wondered if an analogy could be made with the organic
growth of computer technology through developing protocols and standards,
looking at the growth in USB devices as an example.

There are probably finer details that I'm missing out on, would be interested
to learn more about the chaordic approach to building social structures.

------
deathtrader666
Hock's book "Birth of the Chaordic Age" is one deep read!

Modelling organic growth of a company according to biological growth, is quite
mind-bending.

------
MaysonL
1996, not 2012!

~~~
esw
Yeah, I was really confused as to how a 67 year old could be the founder of
Visa.

