COP28 Crowdsourcing Platform for Climate Innovation – Swae and UICCA launch ClimateCall.com

COP28 Crowdsourcing Platform for Climate Innovation – Swae and UICCA launch ClimateCall.com

COP28 Crowdsourcing Platform for Climate Innovation

Swae and UICCA launch ClimateCall.com

4 min read, 23 Nov 2024

FOFO business leaders not listening

The world today is facing three planetary crises: climate change, biodiversity loss and unmanageable amounts of pollution, stemming from an economic growth model unfit for our planetary boundaries. Each crisis has its own causes, symptoms and solutions, but finding solutions to each that are scalable, globally relevant, and adequately address all three simultaneously with the urgency required, is an overwhelming challenge.  While it may be unrealistic to imagine a single solution or “silver bullet” will solve the climate crisis, we must nevertheless all lean-in to imagine different ways forward and collaborate with one another to find the macro and micro-solutions that fit together to unlock progress for all of our benefits.

To that end, earlier in June 2023, Swae partnered with the UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) to launch ClimateCall.com, an open-to-all interactive platform to empower new and unheard voices – particularly young people and citizens of the Global South – to propose innovative climate action ideas to decision-makers in the lead up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), being held in Dubai later in November 2023. 

Climatecall.com is an open problem-solving platform designed to crowdsource and accelerate innovative climate action ideas from around the world. The platform facilitates everyday citizens, especially young people, and communities who will be the most urgently affected by climate change around the world to propose new solutions in three climate challenge areas: Food Security, Water Scarcity, and Renewable Energy.

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

ClimateCall.com is an open-to-all interactive platform to empower new and unheard voices – particularly young people and citizens of the Global South – to propose innovative climate action ideas to decision-makers in the lead up to the 2023 United Nations COP28 in UAE

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

The UICCA

The UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is a non-partisan, climate action entity that has a mandate to bring together members of the public and private sector, including academic institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to drive the UAE’s commitment towards net zero by 2050. In the lead-up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), the UICCA was mandated with establishing an independent body to advise COP on collaboration, cooperation and innovation. Climatecall.com is one example of direct innovation towards useful solutions and recommendations to decision-makers. Outside of this example, the UICCA operates as a think tank, and advisory resource, providing advice and recommendations to a range of stakeholders on positive climate action that facilitates the transition to a green economy. Included in its mandate, the UICCA facilitates international business, innovation and technology partnerships that work towards the common goal of tackling climate change.

Swae

Swae is a platform for organization-wide ideation, crowdsourcing, and decision-making.  Swae’s AI and bottom-up collaborative features encourage users to contribute ideas to improve any organization or suggest solutions to emerging and topical challenges. The best and most debated ideas bubble up to a review by management automatically. Decisions are made on the platform ensuring a strong feedback loop, reinforcing trust, transparency, and engagement. 

 

With over 50,000 users, Swae creates a secure, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem-solving within organizations, enabling leaders to tap into their workforce’s creativity to address pressing challenges and improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients like the United Nations, Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others.

More to explore…
Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

4 min read, 11 April 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Swae partners with Rutanio to support their process for broader distribution of RUTA tokens towards innovative entrepreneurial grant projects enabling community-based decision-making

The Vision: A Participatory and Knowledge-based Economy 

Medellín, Colombia, is in the process of engineering its reinvention. In less than three decades, it’s attempting to reposition itself from a hotbed for cartel violence and “the most dangerous city on earth” to the “Silicon Valley of South America.”

At the forefront of this transition is the Ruta N center, an innovation hub responsible for spearheading and coordinating the transition to a more prosperous and future-compatible economy. 

Ruta N’s job is to connect people, businesses, and companies to create new economic opportunities while supporting progressive and innovation-friendly public policy development to encourage digital acceleration and entrepreneurial growth. The organization cooperates with different international organizations to bring disruptive solutions to the city. They’ve created a hub, academy, and Distributed Innovation Platform to experiment with technologies and develop capacities to execute projects in a creative learning environment for innovative initiatives that will connect with global innovation and entrepreneurship communities.

Entrepreneurship and innovation have grown to become essential pillars for future growth in the city’s region of Antioquia and nationally in Colombia.

As such, the Ruta N group is trying to shape a model where innovation is the primary driver of the economy and well-being of Medellín, with the mission to transform the city into a “knowledge economy” working closely with the government and other industry-leading stakeholders.

“What makes Ruta N unique is that this is an initiative backed up by public policies, and we are working on innovation and technology for almost 10 years because Medellin thinks that if we have a sustainable economy, this needs to be based on knowledge,” said Sin Kit, CTi solutions developer at Ruta N.

Elkin Echeverri Garcia, the former planning and foresight director at Ruta N, said that “The system we’re searching for isn’t to have more unicorns or to win the Nobel Prize…but to improve the standard of living.”

Rutanio and the RUTA Token: The MVPs of this Future Vision 

The Rutanio Project is an initiative catalyzed by Ruta N, supported by Medellín’s Mayor Federico Gutiérrez and local startup advisors, international Colombian business leaders, and diaspora community members.

The goal of the Rutanio project is to create a “Minimum Viable Economy” through the use and proliferation of an Innovation Token, the RUTA, which will facilitate the exchange of services, force digital adoption and digitization, eliminate high transaction costs, and generate value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio intends to internationalize and accelerate the ecosystem of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity to provide the world with a simple, transparent and reliable way to access resources, capabilities, and talent.

Rutanio has developed the RUTA, a Complementary Digital Token and network that uses cryptographic techniques and provides top security to prevent counterfeit or duplication of token transactions. The purpose is to allow and facilitate, both in public and private sectors, the exchange of services, support of profit systems, elimination of friction in transactions, and generation of value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio has also developed a blockchain ​​platform for the RUTA social token and an exchange market that desires to foster connections and support progressive entrepreneurial development. You can learn more about Rutanio and its mission by watching this video here.

Swae’s Role in Supporting a New Economic System Built on Collective Decision-Making

The Rutanio team initially approached Swae to request access to the platform to begin decentralizing decision-making and helping them include their community in important strategic decisions. Originally, they planned to invite their community members into a grant funding program to request RUTA tokens to build projects and initiatives that improve the value of the entire Rutanio ecosystem, and the usability of the RUTA token, for every member. 

Since Swae was built to provide everyone inside an organization an equal voice to raise solutions and shape decisions to create an inclusive decision-making environment, we chose to sponsor an annual license for Rutanio to help them realize their mission. 

Rutanio will utilize the Swae platform to help them: 

    1. Collect feedback from community members.
    2. Increase knowledge and adoption of blockchain technology in the city.
    3. Generate business opportunities.
    4. Accelerate the development of the technological capabilities of ecosystem members.
    5. Advance regulatory issues for distributed ledger technologies.
    6. Democratize and internationalize the Ecosystem of Innovation Articulated by Ruta N.

Swae’s collective intelligence, collaboration, and crowdsourcing features will allow members of the Rutanio community to create proposals anonymously with the support of AI that will improve the quality of those proposals and then open them up for the input of the larger community. The crowdsourcing feature will enable the proposals to be debated on their merits, edited with others’ perspectives, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision by the Rutanio Community Council to fund the projects with RUTA tokens.

Using Swae, community members can apply for 3 streams of funding:

  • Less than 250,000 RUTAs
  • Between 250,000 – 750,000 RUTAs
  • More than 750,000 RUTAs

The process set up by Swae helps Rutanio’s Community Council gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve proposals to drive distribution and usability of Rutanio without creating a tremendous burden of added work for the members.

This new space facilitates community-driven decision-making, giving their community an intelligent decision-making platform combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence to help the organizations unleash the creativity of their members and make better quality decisions.

How Swae’s Technology Supports Tokenized Communities and Facilitates Bottom-Up Decision-Making

As more and more tokenized communities/Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) seek to build genuinely community-driven programs, Swae is poised to become the platform to support these efforts. The uniqueness that Swae brings is that it’s much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform; it’s a robust, community-driven, and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making driven by collective intelligence. 

The world of Web3 and the explosive growth of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) will be a hotspot for experimentation around community governance. 

The features and functions that Swae offers that benefit tokenized communities includes, but are not limited to, the following: 

  • Rich formatting options when creating proposals
  • The affinity with AI-supported tooling, such as the NLP writing tools built-in
  • The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments, and Suggestions anonymously, allowing the difficult things to be said openly and discussed 
  • Interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked to allow for open community-based interactions
  • The team at Swae can collaborate for customized developments within the platform that can enhance roadmaps and allow for the co-creation of more elaborate new features as desired.

Today provides a unique opportunity for Swae to become the grant management and governance platform of choice that can support progressive DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) across the globe. 

The blockchain business models of DAOs are forging a promising new ecosystem for the exchange of services (internationally), entrepreneurial projects, and other digital startups. Swae strengthens a DAOs community by allowing more people to have a say in the decisions being made, providing an open and safe space where there’s accountability for the decisions and processes implemented, and a place to document outcomes creating an ongoing learning-based system of what works and what doesn’t. 

Swae sees the city of Medellín and Rutanio’s innovation and development center as progressive concepts. Many regional and local systems can mirror this approach to help solve real problems that provide a benefit to society and generate value through an open, collaborative and multidisciplinary approach. 

Swae is a powerful tool for bottom-up and community-led governance to structurally and culturally prepare governments and organizations for a management philosophy that is less hierarchical and where everyone can be included. 

At its fundamental essence, Swae provides organizations, government agencies, and DAOs an end-to-end proposal development and collective decision-making system, helping the collective users make sense of their members’ desired wants and needs, revealing hidden opportunities for consideration, and turning these into positive implementations.

As more and more tokenized communities & DAOs seek to build genuinely community-driven programs they need more sophisticated and transparent systems to help build trust and progression. 

Swae is much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform; it’s a robust, community-driven, and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making driven by collective intelligence.


Soushiant Zanganehpour Swae Founder and CEO

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Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

More to explore…
Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accelerates into web3 with CDL One of the most respected accelerator programs in the world of technology entrepreneurship29 Nov 2022 1 min ReadWe are excited to announce that earlier this month, Swae was accepted into the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in its...

Entrepreneur Mag: A deep dive into the ups and downs of building a tech startup in uncertain times

Entrepreneur Mag: A deep dive into the ups and downs of building a tech startup in uncertain times

Swae: A roller coaster ride

A deep dive into the ups and downs of building a tech start-up in uncertain times.

10 min read, 7 April 2022

Entrepreneur Middle East April 2022 issue is here featuring Swae CEO & Founder @soushiant‘s story of building Swae duding uncertain times [read ‘global pandemic] as well as enforced work, from home, team building and a host of other issues. Nobody ever said it would be easy, but every cloud has a silver lining and the Swae team is more dedicated than ever to help make the workplace more inclusive and help decisions beceom more democratic. 

The issue is headlined by @Mhdgroupoman‘s @mohsinhani and also features @Amazon‘s Paul Misener, @FarEye‘s @kushalnahata, and the winners of@MastercardMEA‘s #WomenSMELeaders Awards 2022. 

You can read the magazine here, read the virtual magazine below or keep scolling for the full text:

Back in 2019, I shared with Entrepreneur Middle East my company Swae’s founding story, and our big vision of the need to upgrade the decision-making process for organizations and government  institutions, so that they become more compatible to the needs of the future, as well as the direction the world was headed in. 

In it we shared a common trend we saw across many types of organizations – that most people feel they lack voice and cant influence the major decisions made inside the organizations they belong to. This is often the consequence of closed cultures, outdated structures, or an over reliance on a top-down decision-making process. As a consequence, many are disengaged and the impact on the organizations is very visible – 3x higher disengagement rates, 3x higher absenteeism rates, and 34% lower productivity rates per employee on average.  Thankfully, though slowly, this trend is leading many decision makers to come to terms with their structural or cultural shortcomings and begin reconsidering how they include others in decision-making processes or shift culture to be more inclusive.

“Today’s most consequential institutions (governments, corporations, city councils) make their most important decisions through hierarchical processes. They interpret stakeholders’ preferences through periodic surveys or consultations, and leverage representatives to filter information up and down the hierarchy, precluding regular, meaningful, and unfiltered participation of most stakeholders into the process. But, our ever-advancing communication technologies are challenging this outdated proces, enabling direct and instantaneous communication, allowing for efficient access to distributed intelligence, and even helping create the first ever distributed organizations.” 

Over this period, Swae began carving out its niche and penetrating the market. The platform amassed close to 40,000 users from clients all over the globe, including some of the world’s top organizations such as the United Nations, the governments of Mexico and Chile, blue chip corporations such as Bosch, Etihad Airways, LifeLabs, and EMC Insurance. After winning the New Shape Prize, and securing a $750K CAD non-dilutive grant, 20 months later we were able to successfully fundraise an additional $750K CAD seed round – a 50% increase from the initial $500K offer – led by the former head of Engineering at Netflix and other notable investors, and, we even had time to produce a swanky new explainer video showing how Swae works to condense the technological concept and narrative down into something digestible and fun for all audiences.

But since publishing the article in 2019, no one really could predict there would be a global pandemic that would turn every assumption all of us had on its head. From the unique lens of Swae, the pandemic was a positive forcing function – the challenges that organizations face only accelerated and came to the forefront. There was no more hiding them between the natural cracks an organization faces during growth. They became prominent issues to solve for today. 

THANKFULLY (THOUGH SLOWLY), THIS TREND IS CAUSING MANY LEADERS TO COME TO TERMS WITH THEIR STRUCTURAL OR CULTURAL SHORTCOMINGS, AND BEGIN RECONSIDERING HOW THEY INCLUDE OTHERS IN DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES, SHIFTING COMPANY CULTURES TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE.

 

Thanks to Covid 19 and the ensuing the market volatilities and revamped nature of work, the need for such a wake up, to create an environment of psychological safety and inclusion, to create a system that helps organizations listen at scale, to hear as many voices as possible (instead of the loudest or most powerful few at the top), to source creative solutions to new problems and enable good ideas with meaningful action, is more important today than ever before.

“In today’s era, there really is no excuse for organizations and leaders not to leverage the available but untapped collective intelligence that resides within them. We have the technology to do this efficiently, research shows that crowdsourcing reveals high enough quality of solutions to problems to be worthwhile, and modern culture has progressed enough so people expect this level of transparency and inclusion in the decision making process, especially decisions that have a big impact on their lives. Leaders and organizations that fail to listen and update their processes to meet the world where it is and where it’s headed will be left behind. No one wants a part of the outdated reality they have to offer.” says Soushiant Zanganehpour, founder and CEO of Swae

 But the Covid-19 pandemic did not discriminate between organizational types. Swae nearly went under. 

Covid-19 & its Impact on all Organizations 

As it generally goes, building a tech startup or any startup for that matter is indeed a roller coaster ride. Building a tech startup during a global pandemic brought a level of challenge I had never faced in my life before.  At the outset of Covid-19, Swae was thrown into a number of crises, and had to overcome many headwinds to adapt itself to the new reality.  We’ve had a lot of learnings since our 2019 launch. The challenges that hit when 2020 came all centered around planning and maneuvering through massive uncertainty – uncertainty about what our clients were going through and if they had the available budgets to invest in our solution; uncertainty about where funding would come from and how to fundraise without in-person roadshow and meetings; uncertainty about the impact of the pandemic on recruiting global talent and team formation; and uncertainty about how to grow a team and instill the right culture while being entirely remote! 

“Since 2019, the landscape and market we’ve entered has changed in ways that I couldn’t have predicted. Covid-19 came and hit everyone like a wrecking ball; the workplace instantly became remote, and decision-making, team collaboration, and innovation (the things that Swae does) are now far more complex and fragmented than we ever imagined before. The toll the pandemic has had on people on all levels means what we do for employees (and leaders) is so much more profound.  This shift certainly forced us to re-evaluate and reinvent how we support organizations, and we’re far stronger for it.

Initially we resisted the changes thrown unto us but learned quickly not to fight them. We reminded ourselves that we aren’t the only company that was massively affected during these highly unstable times, and it ended up being an opportunity for us to get really clear on what we’re doing and how to overcome big hurdles as a team. Embracing the uncertainty helped us find solutions and come a long way. 

Top 5 Challenges Faced and Lessons Learned

 From all the ups and downs we went through resulting from Covid-19, to some early learning moments predating Covid, here are the top 5 challenges we endured since launching Swae, how we overcame them, and what we learned about about hiring, team formation, strategy, as well as ways to enhance the technology.

Losing Anchor client at the outset of the Pandemic

At the outset of Covid 19, we lost our first and largest paying customer, Etihad Airlines. When the wrecking ball of Covid came crashing in, the impact on global airlines was swift, immediate, and painful. Etihad saw an 80% reduction in sales and canceled all major enterprise contracts to reduce their bleed, including ours. 

Our entire pipeline of enterprise deals also went up into thin air as well. Covid-19 indefinitely delayed the start of many projected client projects and or made the business case challenging to argue for. 

Mitigation & Lessons Learned

To respond, we quickly turned on a dime to minimize our burn rate and preserve cash flow. To replenish our lost projected cash flows, we began applying for grants and thinking of new markets for our product. We eventually leveraged government support and grants to help us recover 40% of the lost revenue to manage through this period of uncertainty.  

Knowing we weren’t the only ones facing difficult times, we understood that many organizations and local governments were struggling to adapt to virtual, all-digital, decision-making during this prolonged period of uncertainty. We came together and began brainstorming more immediate and shorter use cases of Swae. From listening to clients, we learned that people could use Swae to manage remote annual general meetings and even use it to crowdsource content and agendas for virtual meetings and events. We felt there was a way to adapt our core product to be more nimble to launch and easier to configure, to help others while allowing us to earn short term revenue.  Two months after losing Etihad, in May 2020, we launched three complementary products to enable teams to make collective decisions over the internet quickly, conveniently, and safely. These include: 1) Swae for digital annual general meetings, 2) Swae for digital policy making and governance 3) Swae for remote team decision-making.

Losing Anchor funders at the beginning of the pandemic 

In January 2020, we launched a $500K seed round and quickly closed the first $150K. As shared above, in February 2020, we also closed our first 6-figure annual commercial contract with Etihad Airways, after a year long pilot of our platform inside their organization. The year was off to a great start, so we thought. With enough investment closed and expected revenues from our first $ARR contract (as well as a pipeline of $500K-$1M worth of enterprise deals), we decided to pause our fundraise and instead focus on going to market with our product. Anyone who has built an early stage startup knows that fundraising is a very intense and distracting process, and we thought the time would be better spent closing new deals. Hindsight is 2020 (no pun intended)… When you have momentum, never stop! That was our biggest mistake. After we paused our round, in March, everything changed. Etihad canceled the contract and our entire pipeline of enterprise deals also disappeared, thanks to Covid. Now, with no anchor deal, and no pipeline of deals, how easy do you think it was to raise funds?  When we tried to revive the fundraise two committed anchor investors immediately retracted their commitments to invest due to the impact of Covid on their portfolios, general cash availability, and the grim future that presented itself. 

Their cancelled commitments combined with the comical series of other debacles SIGNIFICANTLY changed our cash flow projections and reality.  One day, we were projecting more money than we needed, the other day we could barely fund ourselves.  It was a vicious circle that would not cease. Without any new confirmed investment or revenues, we were projecting an end date of Swae for December 31, 2020. 

Mitigations

With a clear end date in site, we knew we had to prolong our burn rate as long as possible. So we came together as a team and decided to restructure and opt to reduce our salaries as a last ditch attempt to save the company. Each of us came to the table with an open mind and depending on our individual situations, each offered to give up some portion of their salary they derived from Swae.  The minimum amount reduced was 30% and most offered to give up 100% of their salaries.  Instead of salary, the team would earn what they had sacrificed in equity with a sizeable risk premium and bonus. That seemed fair. 

 I took the first heavy paycut, then all other part-time contractors voluntarily contributed their entire salaries to Swae in exchange for equity. Finally, the leadership at our outsourced tech team bravely offered to contribute some engineers to our cause without pay for a long enough period to help us with ongoing client implementations and progress against our roadmap. This experience was a transformational and cathartic moment for us as a team. During a global pandemic, amidst all the uncertainties surrounding our individual lives, the team came together and collectively decided to do whatever we all could to keep the mission and dream of Swae alive. That experience brought everyone together in ways that superficial team building exercises simply don’t. When faced with crisis, the team stepped up. Until this day that moment acts as an an enormous source of mutual trust and kinship – like a binding agent between all of us. It’s cemented part of our culture that we simply don’t give up when we face adversity, and instead we come together to look for solutions. That crisis gave us a resounding amount of  confidence to face the future, whatever it presents. 

The internal restructuring allowed us to extend our runway by an additional 9 months, allowing us to get to the other end of 2020 and successfully enter 2021. During these turbulent months, a silver lining emerged. Investors stopped seeing Covid-19 as a massive interruption and began seeing the long term implications of it on the future of work and society. Instantly, many began to see Swae as a potential source of solutions for the new complexities of working remotely during a pandemic. The explosion and irreversible long term impacts of Remote Working, the accelerated adoption of digital tools, and new challenges associated with collaboration, maintaining engagement, and decision-making increased the projected market size and opportunity for remote collaboration tools from $18b to $60b (almost a 4x increase) from 2021-2024. This new framing of the needs of the future workplace began changing Swae’s market perception and only increased interest in Swae. 

After a few short months, we were able to land our lead investor, Mr. William Eisenman, the former CTO and Head of Engineering of Netflix, and were able to finish raising our seed round and it was oversubscribed. 

Parting ways with two different CTOs and still building a great product

We went through two (yes, two!) CTOs but still built the platform without that leadership position filled. Here’s the backstory: when Swae initially launched, I bootstrapped the company from my savings and we didn’t have a CTO. We used the limited resources we had and our intimate knowledge of the problem to outsource the build out of a prototype (the team that did it is the team we still work with to this day). At that time, our needs were basic. 

After winning the New Shape Prize, getting a $750K non-dilutive injection of cash and some validation, we were ready to expand the team.  We began recruiting for a CTO, searching for a strong technical lead, full stack developer, and AI programmer with expertise in Natural Language Processing to assume the responsibility of shaping our product, prototyping new features, building beautiful, consistent, scalable and intuitive software, and leading our AI development. 

We received over 400+ applicants, and successfully hired a former Amazon Alexa Natural Language Generation Team Member, a Full Stack Developer + Architect (Natural Language Processing and Generation specialist), as our new CTO. 

Unfortunately, after working with this individual for a short 7 week period, things did not work out as we had imagined.  He was brilliant but the interpersonal fit was quite off.  Our working styles and expectations about how to manage Swae became more incompatible over his short tenure. 

Fast forward 6 months after his departure, we were able to find a more suitable CTO with the right balance of interpersonal, leadership and technical skills to be a better fit for what we needed. She helped improve the product and launched the newest version of Swae. Though she was with Swae for nearly 2 years, in May 2021, she also parted ways due largely to strong differences in opinion about the responsibilities and trade-offs of being a co-founder, the overall product experience, and the company’s direction. 

Mitigations: 

When we were recruiting for either CTO, we identified some red flags and the potential for some of the behaviors we saw later in the working relationship to arise, but we decided as a team to be practical – that we would try to manage these concerns as they came up. Truth was that we thought we really needed a CTO with the skill set they had to accomplish the technological goals we had in mind with the product, and we thought there skill set was a priority than fit. This was a costly mistake – something we will not repeat when our gut is telling us not to go ahead. 

Though exhausting and expensive, we learned very valuable lessons in both cases about how to pick the people we want to work with. Moving forward, we only make hiring decisions if the gut feels right, and won’t compromise that intuitive feeling on being “sensible”. We will never make the same compromises we did previously because they are unsustainable.

Initially we panicked about the fact that we couldn’t build a tech platform without a strong technical lead. The experience of going through two CTOs and having to launch a product without them proved we were wrong. We realized instead that we could distribute the tasks of the CTO into the existing roles we had amongst our team. Distribution of responsibility, combined with strong spring defining, demo, and quality assurance processes meant we were able to develop new features and iterate the product consistently and affordably without needing to rely on a figure head. 

With hindsight we also realized we were too early to need the skill set and seniority of a CTO, and instead could make similar progress with a strong senior developer instead. Adding the layer of CTO would only be relevant after a few more years of traction and progress of the product. 

Without a CTO, the engineering process and team did not fall by the way side. The team stepped up on both ends (in Vancouver, and India), to ensure things remain on track, features are released under the expected conditions, and the platform relaunch timelines are met. To make up for the gap, we have instituted new processes and meetings that include more critical roles (like weekly demos by the engineering team, priority setting meetings that include design, product and engineering together, etc.)

Not having a CTO also allowed us to save a significant amount in monthly recurring salaries and expenses, to help prolong our burn rate. 

At the moment, we don’t have a CTO. We decided that our ‘departments’ would be headless as we realized that we didn’t need a multi-layered C-level or VP-level role in every department of our startup. When everybody has a voice and everyone is equally accountable, this becomes the bottom-up way (or “Swae way”)  to drive all the important aspects from marketing, sales, product development, and customer success and improvement. We’re doing some radical things and practicing what we preach. 

“Ultimately, what we decided is that everyone has autonomy but everyone owns unique directives. Often things come back to me because the ultimate vision of any organization has to be driven by the core person(s) and I’ve been thinking about Swae and what it can be in this world for a much longer time than anyone else on the team. This has worked really well thus far and makes us much more responsive so we truly are practicing what we preach,” says Zanganehpour. 

Lacking Essentials for Strategy and Go-to-Market: 

As is typical in a startup’s initial launch phase, often there’s a lack of clarity in some key areas around marketing and sales. We had a bit of a rough start when we realized that we didn’t have some key strategic details fully fleshed out. Since Swae had so many use cases and was an organization and use case agnostic tool, we didn’t have a rigid and well defined understanding of who our ideal customer and archetype was. This lead us down the path of being everything to everyone initially, which is a perfect recipe for failure. 

Mitigations:

Realizing this was a flawed approach, we invested time in gathering information and conducting research to create archetypes (or personas) of who we serve – this was critical to success. Once the archetypes were in place we began learning what objections people had to saying yes or no, and redesigned our pitch to address those upfront before we face long sales cycles that go nowhere real fast. Not having that sound structure led us to realize it was necessary to deeply understand the people that we need to connect with, and understand how to work through the objections. We’re making these powerful changes for our sales and marketing output to help us make a larger impact overall. 

  1. Fundraising and Hiring Remotely: Fundraising without face to face meetings was much more challenging than anticipated, as was building a team totally remotely. When face to face interactions became undoable, we had to get to the core of creating important systems and building structures to support this effort. As most know, video conferencing is laborious and taxing as well.  Anything else here?

    “Even with these challenges, we were able to fundraise $750K CAD seed funding round – a 50% increase from the initial $500K offer from some notable investors and we’ve got the financial runway to build a MVP of our platform and really move forward in a more progressive manner. And we’ve been able to grow a solid team that is now in place as of 2022, even though we had retracted twice since 2019 given market challenges and global uncertainties due to the pandemic,” says Zanganehpour. 

The Future of Swae and the Creation of More Inclusive Bottom-Up Organizational Models

2022 Milestones for Swae 

With these great lessons behind us and more important insights to face head on, over the next year we expect: 

  • To grow revenues to $1M+ ARR
  • To double our team from 8 to 16 people 
  • To grow the platform user base from 40K to 100K+ users 
  • To add significant features to the core platform including Chats, Polls, and Brainstorms
  • To add to proprietary features to our existing AI algorithms, including bias detection and evidence suggestion features 
  • To add important integrations such as MS teams, Slack, and other collaboration platforms.
  • To launch a second product based on the core feature set tailored more to use cases in Web3, DAOs and participatory governance in Crypto projects
  • To partner with some smart cities to launch citizen engagement, bottom-up and participatory policy making initiatives 
  • And many more…

At the core, Swae’s mission stayed the same; to give everyone an equal voice in raising solutions and shaping decisions, allowing organizations (even government systems) to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within, through a robust and innovative idea management and bottom-up decision-making platform. 

The sheer pace of adaptation to change that’s required of organizations today thanks to Covid-19 has set the scene for Swae. Our three biggest use cases include collaboration during remote work, increasing collaboration without unwanted noise, and building more inclusive cultures supporting growth and DEI initiatives. All of these points are extremely important in today’s organizational realities, no matter the company size.

The ROI of Swae so far 

Over the past 12 months, the results from implementing Swae for various clients speak for themselves and this has made us more proud than anything else during such harsh times. Some of our clients include the United Nations, LifeLabs, Etihad Airways, and more.

Having compiled results from over 40,000 unique users and several large organizational pilots from around the world that demonstrates we’re delivering on our promises – even though we’re just getting started. Some of the great things that have come back to us: 

  • $5M+ USD – the value of innovation ideas that have been sourced through Swae (so far).
  • $1M USD – average value of innovation pipeline developed over 12 months
  • 200K+unique collaboration exchanges have happened between Swae’s users.
  • 94% of users polled say Swae increased their engagement, motivation and happiness by helping them have a meaningful voice in decisions.
  • 90% of users polled claim Swae surfaced ideas that would not have otherwise surfaced using other available collaboration tools. 
  • 84% of users polled say Swae made idea sharing and collaboration easier & more accessible to their whole community
  • 3-months is the payback period – either resulting from cost savings ideas generated from the platform, revenue generating ideas sourced from the platform for investment and development, or efficiencies resulting from replacing more manual idea management and decision-making tools.
  • 70% increase in engagement (compared to other experiments and efforts to date)

While Swae is all about helping organizations shed more light on their challenges and providing a reliable platform where they can source ideas from the people within to create more inclusive cultures and a more equal playing ground, we do have a more grandiose vision that is the next evolution of our technology.

“Swae is ultimately designed to inspire ideas and stimulate debate around new, more effective forms of global cooperation at the highest levels in the biggest governments whether it be in cities, states or countries. We must realize that our system is no longer fit for our new age and we need new actors, new operating assumptions, and new norms to help reframe our priorities and uphold humanity-first, and nations second.

We need new processes and improved participation methods in order to create new solutions that prioritize and give political weight to ideas that advance humanity, preserve and benefit all in our species, above a narrow set of national self-interests. This can happen using the foundation we’ve built for Swae and will be our next big evolution of the technology we’ve built,” says Zanganehpour.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

More to explore…

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Swae Chosen as SingularityNET’s DAO Grant Funding Platform –Helping Distribute $1M in Grants for Newly-Launched Deep Funding Program

Swae’s platform will also support SingularityNET’s plans for progressive decentralization and community-driven governance for their DAO

7 min read, 29 March 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup operating a bottom-up idea management and decision-making platform, has been chosen by SingularityNET’s executive team to support their Deep Funding grant allocation program, which offers their token holders from around the globe a chance to apply for up to $1M in grant funding for winning AI projects.

The Deep Funding program intends to distribute up to $1M USD equivalent value in AGIX tokens (valued at 0.11 USD per token) in the first funding round between March and May 2022. These rounds are expected to grow in size and scale after this initial implementation.

A budding partnership to power next generation DAO governance and their plans for progressive decentralization and community-driven decision-making

About SingularityNET’s DeepFunding.AI Grant Program

The Deep Funding program is an initiative from SingularityNET to seed the decentralized AI platform. In this program, they will offer a total of $1 Million in grants in round one. The project is searching for AI and app developers working on innovative AI products that will help grow the AI platform, to send in their proposal. The chosen project winners that will receive funding will keep ownership of their AI model, and be able to monetize their intellectual property and contribute to building a global ecosystem of decentralized AI (see DeepFunding.ai).

Hear about the Deep Funding Program directly from SNet’s Founder, Dr. Ben Goertzel

The Community’s Role in the Deep Funding Program

Deep Funding is intended to be a genuinely bottom-up and community-driven program where community involvement is essential for reviewing proposed grants and projects to ensure the best make it to the top.

Community members are invited to submit new grant proposals, read and review other proposals that come in, and help improve them through collaborative edits to help make the proposals cleaner and without errors. Collaboration will include the ability to point out strengths, risks, ask questions, as well as rate them against other idea proposals.

The collection of constructive and collaborative changes will signal to the wider community which proposals are gaining the most traction and are best positioned to be considered for an official vote and potential grant win.

Through the process of collective intelligence and constructive criticism from the community, the best proposals and projects will be prioritized and supported to implementation, and SingularityNET will begin practicing how best to implement community-driven governance for its DAO.

 

How Swae Powers the Deep Funding Program

Using Swae, Singularity NET will invite proposing teams and community members the following top goals: 

  • The program will gather a constant supply of high quality AI project proposals that are a good fit for the Deep Funding Program
  • Create continuous and constructive community involvement
  • Prepare for scalability to support a longer term program potential

AI project teams from around the world will use Swae to introduce themselves and promote their project proposals into the greater community and receive valuable feedback.

The projects that are chosen as grant winners will receive funding through grants to develop their AI project using AGIX tokens from SingularityNET’s DAO platform called SingularityDAO.

Once the winning projects have been funded, the winning teams will launch their AI service on the decentralized AI-platform to start monetizing their service. There are two levels of grants that will be offered in round one:

1) $500.000 USD of AGIX will be distributed for smaller proposals with a maximum of 40.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal

2) $500.000 USD In AGIX distributed to larger proposals with a maximum of 150.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal.

See https://deepfunding.ai for more details. 

 

Why Swae was Chosen to Support the Deep Funding Program

Swae was chosen by the SingularityNET team as they found Swae to have all their desired features and function sets. They’re seeking to build a genuinely community-driven program, and Swae is much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform, it’s a robust community-driven and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making that’s driven by collective intelligence. Swae was chosen for many reasons, including:

 

  • Rich formatting options when creating proposals
  • The affinity with AI-supported tooling such as the NLP writing tools they already have built-in
  • The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments or Suggestions anonymously- allowing the difficult things to be said.
  • The way that interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked is a solid starting point for community-based interaction.
  • The willingness of Swae’s team to collaborate in developing the platform gives the SingularityNET foundation and community an opportunity to enhance their roadmap, or even co-create with them, on the development of elaborate new features.

Pictured above shows Swae’s AI capabilities and reviewing process, whereby users benefit from various NLP AI algorithms to improve the quality of their initial proposal or idea. Some of Swae’s algorithms improve basic grammar, tone, sentiment and emotion, and more advanced algorithms under production will help detect bias in language and suggest evidence to further strengthen their ideas.

“Swae’s bottom-up, self-organizing-creativity based philosophy has proved a great match for our decentralized cross-disciplinary organization. Their active embrace of web3 technologies promises to position them excellently as leaders in idea management for the emerging decentralized tech ecosystem.

We’ve started out at SingularityNET with Swae as a framework for a community-driven grants program, DEEP Funding, but are now exploring further potential uses of the platform within our ecosystem. The miracle of Swae is the judicious product design that provides enough structure to guide the creative collaboration and decision process, but not so much structure as to become constraining and bureaucratic.

My colleagues and I are excited to continue exploring what Swae can enable as the platform grows and adds new features.

Swae_Dr_Ben_Goertzel
Dr Ben Goertzel CEO of SingularityNET

“Deep Funding is a very important initiative for SingularityNET and the growth of our AI platform. But it is more than that. I see Deep funding as a catalyst and experimentation ground for community governance.

We want Deep funding to become a true community driven initiative eventually evolving into a full DAO. Therefore I am extremely happy with the feature set and capabilities of Swae. We count ourselves lucky to have found such a great partner that feels like an extension of our own team.

With our joint collaborative and innovative approach and the constructive feedback of our community, I am confident we will be able to develop Swae even further into the best tool for governance processes of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.


Jan Horlings, VP of Products at SingularityNET

Swae was founded to give everyone inside an organization an equal voice in raising solutions and shaping decisions – something that is currently foreign and missing from most experiences inside small and large hierarchical organizations.

We want to prove that a bottom-up system of decision sourcing can be as equally good or more effective than the top-down processes we have in place today in most organizations.

Nowhere do we see a greater opportunity for our ambitions and vision to be realized than within the world of Web3 with the explosive growth and mainstreaming of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

Soushiant Zanganehpour Swae Founder and CEO Swae_io_Logo

Deepfunding program is designed to support new ideas in decentralized AI. We are happy to be able to contribute to the benefit of the next generation of projects across the globe. Our NLP work at Swae is truly making the future possible as we observe current AI solutions helping to create new ones.


Vlad Sokol Head of AI & Engineering 

About SingularityNET

SingularityNET is one of the most ambitious web3, blockchain, and AI projects ever conceived in the world. 

Lead by Dr. Ben Goertzel, former Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, former scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; chairman of the OpenCog Foundation; and former Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created Sophia the Robot, SingularityNET intends to combine artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence.

SingularityNET features a decentralized AI platform that enables developers to monetize their AI services on a global market without sacrificing ownership.

The next cornerstone of the AI platform is ‘AI-DSL’, a protocol that allows individual AI services to dynamically find and communicate with each other, forming ad-hoc collaborations that are capable of much more complex tasks than any individual service would be.

This way, the project aims to remove one of the major limiting factors to AI growth today — the lack of interoperability — which severely restricts the ability to leverage the strengths and capabilities of individual AIs. The Sophia robot, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of our first use cases of this vision.

SingularityNET’s vision is to combine AI and blockchain to create a decentralized marketplace for different types of AI. This ecosystem is powered by the AGIX token that enables companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI, but will also facilitate large numbers of autonomous transactions between all individual ai services. This capability will be further enhanced by HyperCycle, a novel Cardano Sidechain protocol, specialized in decentralized AI and capable of supporting the massive number of transactions needed for the future AI economy. SingularityNET’s “AI-as-a-service” aims to become the key open-source protocol for networking AI on the internet. A long term goal is to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence within the market network. It is an ambitious mission but the whole AI field is in its infancy (see SingularityNET.io).

In December 2017, @SingularityNET carried out an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds for its ambitious vision and project. It is reported that their ICO was fully subscribed and raised $36 million USD in just 60 seconds! The Singularity team reported that the crowdfunding was capped after receiving $361 million in investor interest on its white list from more than 20,000 erstwhile investors.

For more info about SingularityNET, watch Dr. Ben Goertzel presenting SU Net at the World BlockChain Forum

About Swae

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to bring all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

More to explore…
Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

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Rutanio deploys Swae for as a Space for Innovation and Community Decision Making

Rutanio deploys Swae for as a Space for Innovation and Community Decision Making

PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

Rutanio adds Swae to facilitate Collaboration and Creation of great Community driven “Use Cases” for the Ruta token.

9 March 2022 | For Immediate Release

With Rutanio new Space for Decision Making now the Community has an intelligent decision-making platform that combines anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to help the organizations unleash the creativity of their members and make better quality decisions.

“We’re in the middle of an irreversible social and cultural transformation, accelerated by new technologies and unreasonable entrepreneurs. We are transitioning from one strong set of operating assumptions about how to manage society, to a new, upgraded set”, said Soushiant Zanganehpour, Founder and CEO at Swae.

Swae Platform enables decision-making for future organizations. Their team started as a company to re-image organizational decision-making and build the operating system for future organizations. Rutanio’s partnership with Swae strengthened international cooperation between their communities and it offers members of the Rutanio community the opportunity to receive RUTA tokens for the execution of their projects.

With this new collaboration tool, members of the Rutanio community can now create great proposals anonymously with support of AI, and then improve the quality of those proposals with crowd input. Proposals are debated on their merits, collectively evolved, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision by the Rutanio Community Council to fund the projects with RUTA tokens.

RUTA is a Complementary Digital Token for innovation, which allows and facilitates, both in public and private sectors, the exchange of services, support profit systems, eliminate friction in transactions and generate value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

The new Rutanio Space for Innovation helps our Community Council gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve proposals to drive distribution and usability of Rutanio, without creating a tremendous burden of added work for the members”, added Felipe Cano, Rutanio Co-founder and Community Outreach Lead

About Swae

Swae is a collective decision-making software combining AI, anonymized identity and crowd-intelligence to help anyone, in any organization, have a constructive voice in decisions.

About Rutanio

Rutanio accelerates and connects communities and people around innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity.

More to explore...
Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accelerates into web3 with CDL One of the most respected accelerator programs in the world of technology entrepreneurship29 Nov 2022 1 min ReadWe are excited to announce that earlier this month, Swae was accepted into the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in its...

The Results Are In [Why Investing in Swae Pays Off]

The Results Are In [Why Investing in Swae Pays Off]

The Results Are In [Here’s Why Investing in Swae Pays Off]

Swae Boosts Inclusivity, Idea Meritocracy, Enhances Decision-Making Processes, and Supports Collaboration Without Boundaries

FOFO business leaders not listening

Results from over 30,000 unique users and several large organizational pilots from around the world demonstrate clearly that Swae delivers on its promises – even though we’re just getting started.

These before and after results come from case study after case study that confirms Swae consistently helps organizations uncover hidden innovation, boost engagement, improve inclusivity and collaboration despite physical borders, and enhance decision-making options.

Swae boosts inclusivity, idea meritocracy, enhances idecision making processes and supports collaboration without boundaries.

“I created Swae out of lived experience. As a former director in charge of strategy and investment decisions, I saw missed opportunities resulting from closed, top-down decision-making processes first hand.

When I included employees from all ranks into the idea development, refinement and prioritization process – creating a safe yet competitive environment for the best ideas to shine through – the results spoke for themselves.

Swae was born just a few years ago, to help others experience those same benefits that I did.”


Soushiant Zanganehpour Founder & CEO

The stats below have been gathered directly from the mouths of our clients:

Digital Disruption

COVID & Remote Working

Need for Inclusivity

Idea Meritocracy

Swae

$5M

the value of innovation ideas that have been sourced through Swae (so far)

$1M

the value of cost-savings ideas that have been generated.

200,000+

unique collaboration exchanges have happened between Swae’s users.

1000+

number of organizational challenges and solutions that have been created and solved by Swae’s users.

90%

of users polled claim Swae surfaced ideas that would not have otherwise surfaced using other available collaboration tools.

84%

of users polled claim Swae made collaboration easier, and sharing ideas more accessible to their whole community.

92%

of users polled claim Swae helped increase voice and convey ideas better than other collaboration platforms available to them.

94%

of users polled claim that having a voice in decisions through Swae helped directly increase engagement, motivation and/or happiness.

3 Months

the payback period saved from other manual idea management and decision-making tools

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems and generate tomorrow’s strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We’d love the chance to show you how Swae can ‘pay off’ for you…

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

More to explore...
Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accellerates Web3 & DAO push with CDL

Swae accelerates into web3 with CDL One of the most respected accelerator programs in the world of technology entrepreneurship29 Nov 2022 1 min ReadWe are excited to announce that earlier this month, Swae was accepted into the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in its...

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