“There are always more smart people outside of one company than inside of it.” 

Our Co-Founder Kai drops this quote in nearly every interview. It’s a fundamental rethink of how we build, grow, and scale networks in today’s world. Ultimately it’s one of the foundational ideas behind Impossible Cloud Network and nearly every web3 - at least every DePIN - project.

In this ICN Insight special, we’re tearing apart this quote to tackle the following question: How do you create something—an entity, a network—bigger than anything we’ve ever seen? 

As you can imagine, the answer doesn’t lie within the concrete walls of a centralized HQ. It’s out there, in the brilliant chaos of open source and decentralization. 

The Centralized Ceiling: How Big Can a Company Get?

Let’s begin with the classic playbook for building a company. A team identifies a customer's problem and architects a product that solves this. Of course sometimes there’s a problem the customer didn’t know he had, so the product is something entirely new. But generally the team aims to solve an existing problem, raises capital, buys machines, and hires a team of sharp professionals to help them make it all happen. It all comes down to the decisions of this team, one entity, thoughtfully allocating resources towards the most effective solution of the problem. 

And it works—with a big portion of luck, the result is a big company, worth a lot of money. Just take a look at CompaniesMarketCap.com: Apple, NVIDIA, Tesla all are built by (initially) small teams and now have market caps in the trillions. Accenture, Volkswagen and DHL Group employ over 1,5m people - but how big can a company, operated by a single entity, really get? 

Open Source and Decentralization: Unleashing Exponential Scale

Let’s imagine a different playbook. What if the small team didn’t hire every contributor and didn’t have to make all the decisions on how to allocate resources? What if, in the map of ideas, there's a more intelligent approach to decision-making that lies somewhere between the free market economy and swarm intelligence.

Let’s take a look at the open source revolution. 60,000 brilliant minds—coders, tinkerers, visionaries—actively contribute to the three well-known projects Linux, Wikipedia and Microsoft VS Code alone. It's challenging to provide an exact number of people contributing to open source globally. However, these are some significant figures: In 2024, developers worldwide made nearly 1 billion contributions to open source and public repositories across GitHub and about 1.4 million new developers globally joined open source in 2024.

Millions of brilliant minds are already building tools that power the world, all hired without a single recruiter. And not a single company in the world recruits talent at that scale.

Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen: Building decentralized networks with web3

Open source projects currently rely on voluntary participation, which is great and at the core of its idea. But what if you could enable ownership and economic incentives inside of projects that mobilize that many people and attract that many resources. 

Decentralized, (web3) networks don’t just attract contributors—they turn them into stakeholders. 

While the platform economies of today aren't in many ways decentralized, they already provide strong evidence that this approach works. Let’s look at the hospitality industry for example. The Hilton Group and Marriott International have just under 2 million rooms and around 500,000 employees. Airbnb operates with about 5,500 employees, yet more than 5 million hosts manage 8 million listings across 220+ countries. This shows the power of economic incentives and the decentralization of resource allocation. 

Also compare how long it took the Hotel industry to build out their capacity with the exponential growth Airbnb was able to achieve. Hint: Airbnb needed a few years, centralized hotel companies needed decades. Why? Because:

“There are always more smart people (and resources!!!) outside of one company than inside of it.” 

Airbnb’s success is undeniable, with a valuation nearing $90 billion. But who benefited the most from this achievement? Mostly institutional investors, who own about 60% of the company. If you were to build a similar network today, though, it doesn’t have to follow the same pattern. Thanks to a new technology called Web3, there’s a different way.

Web3 allows networks to be scaled rapidly due to the decentralized participation, while being built on shared ownership, rather than being owned and controlled by a handful of players. To see how this works, let’s look at one of the biggest network success stories in recent times: Bitcoin.

Instead of a few companies or investors owning the network, many people participate and benefit. This shared ownership model has fueled Bitcoin’s incredible growth. Bitcoin's computing power grew from approximately 8 MH/s in March 2010 to 773 EH/s in March 2025, a growth factor of about 96.6 trillion. Today the network is much more powerful than the biggest supercomputer in the world and its computing power (not its price!) has been growing by 153% CAGR during the last 15 years. 

Comparing to Big Cloud Companies

Let’s compare Bitcoin’s growth to the CAPEX growth of cloud giants like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Bitcoin’s computational power—assuming the amount of money and resources invested into the network grows proportionally—has increased by 153% annually for 15 years. Meanwhile:

• AWS spent $2.7 billion in 2010 and $43.6 billion in 2023 on data centers, CAPEX growing 41% yearly.
• Google Cloud spent $5 billion in 2010 and $31.4 billion in 2023, growing 15% yearly.
• Microsoft Azure spent $7 billion in 2010 and $26.9 billion in 2023, growing 10.9% yearly.

These companies spend big to meet AI and storage needs, but Bitcoin keeps growing faster. The hyperscalers have to admit that they can’t build data centers quick enough. Therefore - to meet AI and storage needs - we need a new way: an open cloud where many people share ownership of the network and the allocation of resources is decentralized. Why? Because:

“There are always more smart people (and resources!!!) outside of one company than inside of it.”