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A few articles I wrote on working at Igalia last year:
http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master
http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/13/but-that-would-be-an...
I don't want to draw out a tenuous claim: but in some ways most tech companies (and particularly early-stage startups) are more like cooperatives than has historically been the case in corporations. As Sam Altman's recent article on employee equity points to, being liberal with ownership is considered a virtue in technology companies. Long-gone are the days where you can build a technology company and keep all the ow…
90% for us 2, 10% for the rest of you!
Not at all what a co-op is about.
Igalia, http://www.igalia.com/ -- 40+ people, 11 or 12 years old (I forget!). A few articles I wrote on working at Igalia last year: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/13/but-that-would-be-an... http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money
Igalia is a great company, really wonderful people and they do fantastic work. I really love the model they've created for the company.
I'm Max and I'm new to HN. My contact info is in the team section of our website if you want to chat further or get a copy of our fleshed-out business plan. I also need to hire a developer soon so... :-)
> At the end of 2012, it employed 80,321 people in 289 companies and organizations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.
When the new equity crowdfunding rules go into effect, I was thinking a more interesting model could involve equity. Every person in a "startup cooperative" could own a piece of everyone else's startup. It might help minimize the risk with doing a startup if you own a small piece of a number of other companies.
A cooperative is type of a business entity that does not have outside shareholders. Rather, its members are its owners.
So, in the case of a worker cooperative, the people who work for the business are its member-owners. (In the case of a consumer cooperative, its patrons are its member-owners.)
What are some benefits of cooperative businesses?
For one thing, because the business is not beholden to outside shareholders, who typically only have an interest in the financial health of the company, it can make decisions that a for-profit company might not be at liberty to make.
For instance, a for-profit bank, under shareholder pressure, might introduce sneaky hidden fees to increase its bottom line -- but at the expense of irritating its patrons. That just wouldn't happen with a credit union (a form of cooperative), because the investors and patrons are one in the same, and their interests are aligned.
Another big benefit, and this is especially true with tech companies, is that the member-owners are invested in the company's success in a way that mere employees are not -- and they have the decision-making power to actually influence how the company operates, because coops are democratically controlled. A lot of tech companies grant stock options and offer profit-sharing programs, but stock options can be a crap shoot (there are a lot of ways for them to end up being worthless, even when the company is profiting handsomely), and profit-sharing doesn't necessarily mean power-sharing.
There are two major downsides to operating a business as a coop, though. One is that you have to raise all of your capital from your members, rather than relying on outside investment. That can be really tough, especially when you're just starting out.
The other downside is regulatory. I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in the U.S., there are a lot of restrictions and hoops you have to jump through. For instance, consumer cooperatives must restrict membership based on some type of common bond -- a geographic area or an alumni association, for instance. But some types of businesses just don't flourish unless you open them up to everyone. This is less of a problem, though, for worker cooperatives.
I'm a big fan of the cooperative movement, and the broader distributist movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism), and I wish more people knew about the benefits coops offer.