The Drivers Cooperative

Coops generally have to get money by borrowing rather than equity investment.

I'm for increasing federal programs for offering and subsidiziing loans to worker-owned coops -- like we do student loans -- not that that's a model, I realize, student loans don't work well, but just a demonstration that the federal government can subsidize loans in the public interest if it chooses to.

There are also hybrid models possible where workers own some % of the company -- over 50% if you want to consider it worker-controlled -- but investors also own a portion. Investors invest in companies where the founders have a controlling stake, it's not unheard of. there could be federal tax or other subsidy incentives too.

I think cooperatives would struggle to gain a monopoly holding because they're not as ruthless as investor-driven companies. They tend to treat their workers fairly and focus on quality of life, over relentlessly pursuing high quarterly growth targets. That's a very good thing for the employees and probably the customers too, but makes the company less competitive.

> The reason developers in the US make so much is because they live in a large wealthy country that’s the launching point for most ventures before global expansion.

If that were the case then developers all over the US would make bank. They don't; only in startup-focused areas like the Bay Area and NYC. It's the same here in the UK, you can make a ton of money if you work in London for hyper-capitalist companies, but outside of London most developers are making 40-60k max. Which is still good for the UK, but not the 6 figure incomes that even shit-tier developers can make in California.

Farming cooperatives can be very capital intensive.

In contrast, technology platforms are relatively inexpensive to build these days. The value of a platform is proportional to the number of users (drivers) it has: hence, this is a particularly good application of a cooperative structure.

> It takes a lot of capital to pay programmer salaries for desirable features that customers want and since co-ops are capital-constrained (by definition because they can't take millions in investors money), the app will always have less features compared to Uber/Lyft.

There's nothing saying the cooperative cannot have revenue bonds, notes payable as a percentage of revenue. Savvy.coop received funds from https://indie.vc under these terms. Moreover, technologists could contribute well below their market rates in exchange for revenue bonds. https://start.coop is working on these sorts of legal details.

Cheap is not an absolute term. I agree with another comment here, it's absurdly cheap compared to almost anything else.

One is advertising: for many people Uber is either the only app they know or the one they see as the "standard". " To uber" has even become a verb in many languages. Uber can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ads.

The other thing is operating at a loss. A co-operative, almost by definition, will produce a service at fair prices for both customers and employees (market forces dictate the price to customers as with any company, and the co-operative structure means that profits go to labour -- you know, the people actually doing stuff and creating value). A private company with never-ending billions of cash can simply operate at a loss to out-price their competitors until they close and they have achieved an even more hegemonic monopoly in their space. At some point Uber was burning 300,000,000$ per month to subsidise artificially low prices. Of course, as non-profit seeking enterprises, co-ops are plenty restricted from accessing capital in the current economic system.

Now the really interesting thing to me is how neither of these factors of advantage for private capitalistic enterprises is actually anything useful. Spending billions to drill your brand names into the brains of people is a net loss for society, distorting the market is favour of those with the biggest advertising budget, not those with the best product. In fact nearly all advertising is universally imoral in my opinion, but that's a different story. And burning venture money to artificially lower prices and further skew things is also obviously a negative.