Nathan Schneider & Danny Spitzberg, Organizers, Exit to Community Project
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy. Danny Spitzberg is a user researcher for a cooperative economy.
Nathan and Danny join me today to discuss their Exit to Community report that they have been recently working on. They share with us recent examples of other exit to community companies that we would be familiar with. They also talk about another effort, Start Co-op. We also discuss if innovation is tied to risk taking and they share their advice with us.
“The cool thing that this startup culture is good at is, is being nimble and being a pivot and enabling really creative exploration to figure out where the market fit is where the who the true community really is, and sometimes it takes some time to figure that out.” - Nathan Schneider
Today on Startups for Good we cover:
- Policy changes that are needed when to support exit to community
- Thinking about the exit during the start up phase
- Blockchain compared to co-op models
- Sharing equity with users and the SEC take on it
- How tech enabled co-ops can access capital
- If co-ops can scale quickly
Learn more at the exit to community website
Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!
Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.
Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about The Giving Circle. Please share your feedback with us by going to our listener survey here.
Transcript
Miles
Welcome to startups for good. Nathan, Danny, thanks for coming on.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you Miles.
Miles
Yeah, really excited to talk about some topics that I think may be new to a lot of our audience. And you can teach us, but why don't we start with each of you introducing yourselves? Danny wanted to go ahead.
Danny
Yeah, thanks. And Glad to be here. I'm Danny and I do user research, which is probably something that a lot of folks will know as that sort of oddball ball source of direction. And I also have been committed for a long time to shared ownership and worker control in the tech industry at large. And I'm based in California.
Nathan
All right, I am Nathan Schneider. And I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I got a little group called the media enterprise Design Lab. And I have been worked as a journalist in the past and and through that really got interested in how to build more democratic ownership and governance and online economy. And so that's where, where my work has really revolved around for a good number of years is trying to figure out pathways just to make it easier for us to to have more accountable and, and equitable technologies.
Miles
Great. I think the first thing we should start with is a recent project you guys collaborated on? Which was the exit to community report. How did that come about?
Nathan
For me, you know, curious about how Danny would tell the story. But but a big part of it really came out of an earlier collaboration that we did, were starting in 2016, we were we're kind of this effort to, quote unquote, buy Twitter, to encourage a mobilization are among Twitter users to, to ask the company and even to demand of it to explore options for user ownership. This is the time when Twitter was considered an acquisition, a series of acquisition offer. And it you know, it's kind of a stunt in some respects, just to kind of get the idea out that, that, you know, companies don't just have to be owned by investors or by other companies, they can be owned by their participants. And at the time, it was kind of a, you know, crazy thing and treated that way and all media coverage about our campaign, we ended up submitting a shareholder proposal and, you know, getting Danny went to the shareholder meeting and Twitter headquarters and all this and, and, but, but just a couple years later, now we're seeing a lot of projects, including early startup, but also like, large establishment, you know, behemoths like, like Uber and Airbnb trying to find ways to explore user ownership in different in different forms. And to community is an attempt to just build a narrative around that idea around that the idea that maybe in a lot of cases, the real, the best, or who should own a platform or a company is the people who depend on the users rather than a who usually is which investors and shareholders and, and this sort of thing, and that narrative opens up all sorts of possibilities about the kinds of accountability we could build into our platforms, but it also presents a lot of challenges. How do we get there in a policy and, and business environment that's really not well for, for this kind of community ownership. And we drawn to have, you know, emerging models, those historical models that demonstrate that community ownership has been done or has been powerful, and something that we should really expect of our of our online economy.
Miles
Are there recent salient examples of exit community that people wouldn't No?
Danny
Well, it depends how recent you want to go back. I think you probably mean in the last, say, five to 20 years. And there are some thought experiments there. I think my favorite one, though, which is still modern history, is one that Nathan dug up from when the Associated Press in around 1945 was by the Supreme Court and the US essentially turned from a small cabal of folks running a news wire to get cables from Europe to the US. The Supreme Court basically said, You're extorting our newsrooms across the country for information on what's happening in Europe and elsewhere. And that's not good. We're trying to win this war. So you will now will be made into a cooperatively owned nonprofit. And that was that. And I wouldn't call that as much as an exit strategy, like you might even for a business, you know, even back in the 40s. But it still was a very wholesale shift for the structure of AP. And I would say also, parts of the strategy thinking of modern times are really the place My mind goes, right now, when you think about an exit, and then to community, there's a lot in both of those words, the word community obviously is used, you know, probably 101 ways. And there's a lot of possible definitions there. But I've seen a lot of groups over the last few years that are building what could be key, I guess you could call them like the building blocks, right, some structural pieces of how they run the organization that would make it very realistic to see themselves as community owned. And a lot of these all sort of give a bit of a push on some folks who assume that cooperatives are excellent. A lot of the examples I've seen are coming from groups that are in no way even familiar with what a cooperative or shared ownership structure looks like. Where they, for example, in my own focus, they are extremely responsive and reciprocal with their users, their users are making proposals for how to drive the roadmap because they are invested in their users, and they care about them. And they have very meaningful dialogues. Okay, so now as for, but like, what are the real examples, the only one that comes to mind is a bit of a sort of a hop in the skip, which is a platform called Stocksy, which is a stock photo platform in Victoria, Canada, but you know, selling digital content, like photo and video. And the founder came out of the industry, right, the digital media industry, and turned a dime turned on a dime to create Stocksy for what it is, as a platform owned by its workers who run the thing, and its contributors who create the video and photo. So it's not like a wholesale exit, but it was someone carrying an idea and a lot of experience from one place to the next. And Stocksy remains one of the only, let's call it like industry competitive examples of a cooperative platform out there that that goes to the industry conferences and shows up and gets that respect. Nathan may have other examples of groups that have pushed through I think there's Hacker News or Hacker Noon, excuse me, I forget which one but I'm more focused, I think on the building blocks because it takes a long time to get there.
Nathan
Yeah, Hacker Noon is an interesting example. It's it was it's a news for a kind of blog for for tech workers and and it started out as many do on Medium and then they ended up feeling like Mediums you know, viable place to build their business, there are too many restrictions, policies kept changing, they were just weren't in control their platform. And so what they, they needed to exit their form. And in order to do that they had this capital and and to build their own and they ended up raising about a million dollars through a an equity crowdfunding campaign. So it didn't become a traditional cooperative. But it did become something where the community of that of that platform became its donors. And, and, you know, I full disclosure and one of them. It's a, you know, family business here in Colorado that used leverage its community to enable it to raise capital and to and to expand. And but but also, it's important to, you know, Danny mentioned policy earlier in the role of Supreme Court. But since 1974, we've had a framework in place to enable companies to come the employee owns through a Structure Aesop. And this has enabled, you know, some really large companies to have significant employee ownership. And if there's a healthy tax structure, there's, there's this whole process kind of codified into law that enables companies to become employee owned. here in Colorado, a famous example is New Belgium Brewing, you know, maker of Fat Tire beer, which until very recently was fully employee owned, there have been, you know, a pretty good number of community transitions and in recent US history through this employee ownership law. But that doesn't help. You know, for instance, Airbnb exit to ownership by its hosts, you know, which they've indicated they would like to do in one way or another. And so I think we need to explore what are the frameworks that we need to enable these companies to do what actually seems like a really good fit for them recognizing that, you know, we've done it for, for certain kinds of businesses and certain kinds of transitions, but we haven't really updated that for the online economy.
Miles
So what are those policy changes that are needed?
Nathan
I think what we really need to look toward is a broad framework for community ownership, financing community ownership. So right now, if you're, you know, a wealthy person who's an investor, and you're you want to, you know, make a big play, and, you know, in some kind of fund, or some kind of company, you know, you can access capital to make that investment, you're not necessarily just putting in your own money, you're, you're, you know, maybe borrowing money to make that investment. And, you know, a group of people with a reasonable idea can't do that right now, you know, so this is why, you know, we have huge parts of, of us countryside that doesn't have broadband, you know, it because investors don't see value in investing in those places. And the people who live there who do see value investing in investing in their communities can't, because they can't access capital. And we have that problem before, like, you know, that the housing market has an insurance structure, you know, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, these sorts of things that, that make it so that. So that so that ordinary people with low incomes can can get mortgages to, to buy a house, we've done it on a large scale with electric cooperatives, we electrified the rural America, starting in the mid 30s. Through enabling, you know, this specific, narrow kind of community finance, I think we need to enable, you know, group of users on the platform who have a common business, you know, people, for instance, the founder of Meetup.com, Scott Heiferman, would love to see, you know, we've tried to work with him on these polls, he'd love to see Meetup turned into a cooperative of its community organizers. But those community organizers can't access capital. So we need a framework for that bare basic, you know, step in that direction is. You know, in 2018, Congress passed the Main Street Employee Ownership Act, which asks, you know, requires the Small Business Administration to allow groups of employees to access small business loans, just like entrepreneurs can, the SBA still hasn't implemented that, that President Trump signed. But it is an example of the kinds of things that that can happen that are relatively small, bipartisan tweaks, you know, that bill passed with straight down line, bipartisan support, that can really supercharge our communities to participate in the economy. And right now, ways that only rich people can.
Miles
So you're talking about not just the way the business gets sold to the community after being funded some other way, you're now transitioning to talk about how the business gets started in the first place?
Nathan
Well, the acquisition, you know, the sale is often leveraged to you know, so finance just runs throughout the whole, the whole, the whole story, and, you know, so much of what we can and can't do is, you know, inscribed into little obscure rules somewhere. And, you know, what those rules amount to in our world today is, is a, you know, is a total ecosystem in which, you know, a very small number of people can play and in groups of people, you know, should they should be protected. Often these rules are designed to protect, you know, retail investors, but, you know, when groups of people come together to do very reasonable things, you know, we we need a framework that enables them to access capital, just like, you know, laws were changed to enable venture capital to happen. But yeah, I think that, you know, the, you know, the finance landscape is crucial to because in the case, like, like, Meetup is so critical, you know, you have a founder who wants this to happen. You have a clear business model for how the community owned, you know, it just makes so much sense. The stopping the, you know, the bottleneck was the investors just, there wasn't a framework for how to, for how to facilitate that transaction. And that's what, that's a big part of what we need to change. It's very chicken and egg, you know, you know, we have a lot of people who want this system, this process to be possible. You know, but, but in order to get the the policy change, and, and, and the ecosystems, the infrastructure, you know, we need some good examples. And we've got partial examples out there. But we're, you know, this is really where Danny's been then leading in trying to help some of these startups that are real would really love this option to help help them become pioneer and create pathways that others can folow in.
Miles
Can you be more specific about this Meetup example? I'm really curious. Was it hung up? Because of accredited investor roles? Or what particular hang up was there? There wasn't financing to borrow before you could raise the money from users or exactly what were the mechanics? I'd love you to peel back the onion, if you don't mind.
Nathan
Yeah, sure. It's really the latter I mean, investors, you know, in the current market, know how to buy things that they can then treat as a speculative asset. Or, you know, they know how to buy companies and then turn them around and then sell them to more investors, what they don't necessarily know how to do just because they, they just gotten the practice is selling them, you know, to buy to, to leverage a deal that ended up turning the thing over to, you know, its close participants in that employee ownership world that I was talking about the Aesop. You know, that happens all the time, where where, you know, large commercial banks will, will lend through this kind of tax advantage process to enable work, they become workers without putting in a dime of their own money, which is really important for people who don't have wealth and savings, they earn it back through the future success of the company. So it's a, you know, it's something is doable, it's something with employee ownership, where you leverage that transition, but there just aren't enough models to, you know, to or examples to point to, there isn't a, you know, a product and right now that you could turn to to say, Okay, here's the financial product, we want you to, you know, to to understand, here's how it works, that that's the kind of thing we need to develop and that some of the people are, are working to do, recognizing that this is a real missed opportunity.
Miles
Is some of this happening in the blockchain?
Nathan
Definitely. And, you know, in some ways, actually the, some of the earliest uptake from on the exit to community idea came from the blockchain community, for instance. Like booter, and the founder of Ethereum has been using this language to talk about you know, his desire to kind of see the community take fuller ownership over the over the protocol he's developed, and also being tools coming out, like fairman and another called role, they're using kind of blockchain technology in finance to enable these kinds of things to happen both of those companies rolling fairman have explicitly identified with exit to community yet. And and they use kind of different strategies to make it easier for people to become kind of CO owners in a company or a brand that they that they identify with. You know, there are some issues there around regulatory stuff around, you know, usability that always comes up with blockchain. But I think one of the exciting opportunities is to kind of meld together the new technologies with like the old legal structures of cooperatives and trusts to bring those those new technologies of ground and to make it work to make them less like it transactional and more about about, you know, building a responsible democratic committee. So there's, you know, there's something really to be learned between these old traditions and and these new technologies.
Danny
I think what what blockchain also does for provoke provoking us for better and for worse is it has a very developed imagination that a lot of folks, even in tech, find a bit illegible And that's, you know, not a judgment, it's just to say that there's a lot of deep work and a lot of thought and vision there, specifically around governance. And the irony is that we've been talking a lot about ownership, which is important and often is a sort of higher order function, you know, who owns the thing can do a lot. And what is so I suppose, a bit of a, there's a bit of a, some some work to make up on, I suppose, in the, in the blockchain world, there's a lot of the governing structures are pretty primitive from what I've seen, like voting, you know, up and down voting, or, you know, small ways to comment on proposals and tweak parameters, for example, with different protocols. But in cooperatives in real life, and you know, for many years before the internet, even, there's so many very nuanced and sophisticated, but elegant ways of governing that include people's voice. So what Nathan's mentioning about the, beyond the transactional piece, I think what you see with Airbnb, for example, offering a little equity is a small way of taking their extreme brand value, people love, or did really identify with Airbnb as the best thing that they could have, as part of their, you know, income subsidy, if you will, depending, and now offering a bit of a transactional or MIPS, some sort of token way of solidifying that. And I would, I would caution us to go the other way, and say, Well, if we can just offer lots of users a little bit of equity, then we'll just be able to say the same will make the same claims rather, as all these other excellent examples from history. And I would say that's missing the the other piece, right ownership and governance is a sort of, I don't like to say one two punch, but you know, it's a it's a dynamic duo, right. And there are so many ways that have I've seen, again, groups that don't even know what a cooperative is, or have no concept of shared ownership or shared power, or doing really excellent work to reciprocate and do more than build, you know, transactional ways of interacting with their users, but build relationships with them. And then develop proposals and then shift the balance of power have working groups, having committees, having all sorts of special funds, or, you know, allocating money for groups to actually go and do stuff themselves, which is what we're talking about at the end of the day here is that the community gets to do what it wants to do for itself after it's had a little bit of self awareness, some introspection and maybe some encouragement. So blockchain, like I said, can kind of provoke us to balance our view here with some of the governing mechanisms that are really critical requests, but maybe don't have the vocabulary or the legibility that we would need for. For for really utilizing them.
Miles
Can you share a little bit more about Airbnbs desire to share equity with hosts? I know, the one of the ride sharing companies also was interested in sharing equity with their drivers. Wherever those proposals gone, where do they get hung up? And has SEC encouraged this recently?
Nathan
Yes, or no? So. So, you know, 2017, we did our Twitter, shareholder meeting in 2018. You know, just a year later, you, Airbnb and Uber, both write letters to the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission said we want to share equity with our users, can you help us do that currently, you know, you can do equity compensation with employees, you can do some sharing with with contractors and and advisors, but it's really not meant for, you know, like a the scale of millions of users, which is what these folks are dealing with, and wanted to have a framework and especially the Airbnb is pretty, pretty darn eloquent, you know, and I find the both social and, and business value of aligning these incentives and bringing the user base in as you know, as the as core stakeholders, and the SEC ultimately kind of didn't act at that stage. They've expanded some some worker compensation opportunities. So you know, we'll see where that goes. But But it seems like there's some possibility of movement there, you know, I should put my cards on the table. I don't really trust these companies. To provide utopian template here. I point to them to demonstrate that there is a desire and that there is is an opportunity for a kind of ace to the top where we really incentivize companies to do more of this kind of this kind of community owner, what Uber ended up having to do kind of work around before their IPO where they basically like, gave (unintelligible) money and invited them to buy shares at Airbnb did something sort of similar, they've now set up a, an interesting structure within the company, that allows proceeds from equity to go to, to certain hosts, as well as a kind of host elected governance system ultimately, are not grunts, just like oversight advisory system, they're ended up kind of building a kind of intimacy within the company itself, but it's just a demonstration of how what they actually want to do in terms of real equity had to be back and how the companies really see value and in, in trying to, in trying to integrate this. So you know, looking at the Airbnb proposal, which includes, again, both governance oversight, you know, around policies and, and possibilities for distributions of equity, is, you know, it's just a sign that, you know, this could be something that we expect of our platforms that, you know, we should expect that if somebody is going to be using our personal data, we have some voice oversight, if somebody is going to be making money, you know, off of value, we're creating that, you know, we should share in that in that benefit.
Miles
So you're making the case there, why it's positive for the community to share in governance and ownership, can you make the case for the founder, or the existing owners to want to exit to community?
Nathan
Yeah, so we hear this from, you know, from founders who are attracted to this idea, I also hear it from founders who, you know, who've sold who've had traditional exit, and feel really frustrated by what happened, you know, I want to example that I've published about is the founder of Ancestry.com, you know, which is, is such an important resource that many families, including mine use to figure out their, you know, where they came from, and, and the, you know, the founder, built it as a company went to make money on but also something he really believed and felt like the biggest, you know, private equity funds that have passed it around, I've really done some injustice to the people who really rely on the platform. And, and so, you know, founders like that, you know, they want to create awesome in the world, and they feel like the existing exit options really restrict their ability to, to their platform, to the fullest possibilities. And, and force them to prioritize things like, you know, extracting value from their users that they think are either they're uncomfortable with, personally, but also that just don't make good business sense in the long term. And then finally, we're seeing, you know, a few things that come up, Airbnb, Uber cases, which one is loyalty, you know, these are platforms that people can drop and move to another platform, you know, whenever a better option becomes available, and, and so, so, so retaining these users, you know, equity could go a long way and help people want to stick around with a particular platform, even if a shiny or option shows up. And then second, is kind of outsourcing the site a little bit you see this with Facebook, where, you know, everything that happens on Facebook is suddenly Mark Zuckerberg responsibility. And his answer to that was to create this oversight board that now is like, exploring the question of whether they should have kicked off Donald Trump. And it's, you know, it's a it's a signal of how these founders have kind of taken on more than they they feel like they should be responsible for and they want to, you know, pass back some of that responsibility to their communities, which I think you know, is good in the long run for the communities too. So it you know, it helps them kind of distribute the responsibility and the accountability in a way that can help them focus on what they do best and and you know, and you know, get get out of some of the questions that are in some sense kind of unintuitive to anybody and that no one person should have you know, ultimate authority on you know, anyway so it's I think that Facebook sideboard is a yet another signal that that is large, super powerful companies see see value in some targeted opportunities for for distributing power. I think we need to push them to really expand that become less cautious about what that what that accountability can look like.
Miles
Now we've been talking mainly about exit to community, I'd like to hear some about your other projects Start.Coop,
Danny
You know, I was going to bring up the Start.coop program, which is a an accelerator for scalable shared on enterprise shared ownership enterprises. When we were talking a little bit earlier about some of the ways to think about whether or not ownership and some of this skepticism because I think that skepticism is the sort of next reaction or impulse some folks have after they get turned on to an idea is Okay, wait, this is exciting. But you know, I, I'm a risk minded person, whether I'm risk averse, or risk tolerant, and I just want to make sure I'm not missing some things. And so, as you know, I've been I've been an advisor with start.coop for a couple of years, and Nathan, as well. And there's a lovely group of folks constantly trying to get on with this group to help it become more accountable to the groups that need it most. And so what that has included, along the way is a way it let's call it some simplifying the language, or maybe making it more universal and less eclectic or esoteric. So when you hear the word cooperative, that does a thing to you, you say, Oh, that's exciting. But can cooperatives scale, or I but that sounds good for a small number of workers or in a certain sector where there's no market, but we're talking about come on here, we're talking about ride hail, or we're talking about whatever other massively, you know, accessible market there is. And I think what's important to highlight is for the promise in the vision of Start.coop, which is just to give a little bit of detail. First, it's been a couple of years with two cohorts of a half dozen or so teams that have graduated. And these teams are starting up some tech enabled, shared and shared ownership enterprise that has a potential to scale and can be transformative in its industry. So staffing or healthcare, or in actually, if you can believe it, even like accessory dwelling units for using an assess part of your property for another unit. And to the skepticism that comes up often just to kind of hit this head on, I think I reasoned this out the other day with with Greg, who's the founder of this this program, that the question of scalable is so important to tie back to the financing that we talked about earlier. Because it's not as though a cooperative can or cannot scale or something was shared ownership. And with distributed leadership and accountability structures that may be even tied to the communities, like the literal neighborhoods, for example that a company serves, it's can they compete? Can these enterprises compete enough in the markets that they choose to try and enter fast enough to get to where they would like to be to have a competitive advantage, you know, that they can protect? Or they can defend? And that changes the conversation quite a lot? Because Can you compete? Well, it's Can you hire enough folks fast enough? Can you hire good enough folks? Can you hire and get partnerships with some key folks who would enable you to enter into markets? Or can you get a lobbying arm like we've seen a lot of these companies, I did an interview last week with one of the earliest cooperative platform examples that everyone was super excited about, which was for freelancers. And for seven years, the person trying to get this thing started, did incredible acrobatics, to try and find partnerships with a community college system throughout the state of California, all the way back to earlier days, trying to find specific small niche markets, like dog walkers or whatever other you know, let's call them in perpetuity freelancers, and it was actually constantly a struggle to find the money to compete. It wasn't whether or not he could scale wasn't even if he could find a niche, who's that you really are looking to get and you're up against folks who have their their logos on bus stops all over a city within a week right after they launch. So I know it may sound simplistic to just put it back on the money. But I think that is a way of reasoning out how this program start.coop can help think through how we might scale up some of these shared ownership projects that are both Well, you know, shared, owned and governed. And so that's a long way of introducing the program. But I think it's it's important to introduce it as Nathan said, there's a whole ecosystem and a whole cultural sea we swim in that we don't acknowledge or we haven't really, you know, picked apart to make sense of critically and to think about these alternatives. This person There's a bit of a wedge that we can drive through to expose some of that and make progress.
Miles
Can you explain your vision for how these kinds of tech enabled co ops can or should raise capital?
Danny
Raising capital is not my forte, but I will say that in part of the value proposition for a company to go up and try to engage with investors, wherever they may be, whether they're small, medium, or large, no individual unaccredited accredited or institutional? or, or, you know, very well endowed angel or what have you. I think that my favorite building block that I'll add in is my own work. Right now I'm I'm leading research with a group called Turning Basin Labs. And we've found ways to basically train up the users to conduct their own user research. So in a way that's jumping, or leaping ahead to figuring out what would this company what would this enterprise do for the people that is serving and have the efficiency gain, if you will, of those folks saying it, implementing it, you know, working on production line, as part of a pitch, that's one of 101 components or building blocks and not to use that word too much, that I think helps maybe, on the one hand, seem interesting and novel, and on the other hand, show a repeatable, reliable mechanism for generating value. So again, on the other side of the table, that's not where I've been really spending much of my time. But I think maybe perhaps there's a way of codifying, and making a simple topology of what it looks like to make a reasonable pitch and to have the terms for a deal secured. One example that I do want to highlight here that was I think it's a rare one, and it deserves some some quick attention is Savvy, which is a similar to what I just mentioned, in a way it's, it's a cooperative of patients, or folks who have certain health and medical conditions that they're very familiar with, contributing that wisdom as part of studies. And I'm not exactly sure where the where the Savvy is at in terms of its offering, but they basically partner with research groups of different kinds, to run these studies with these folks who know their stuff well, and can speak on it and can also add a whole nother layer of input to how the study should be run and so on. They did a deal with Indie.VC, or IndieVC. About a year ago, now, maybe eight months, I don't know time is, time is hard right now. And the short version or the sort of highlight of that deal, to my understanding, and there was a webinar that Nathan and I and Astrid Schultz from Zebras United hosted with, with Jen and Jason Weiner. The highlight was this. Bryce from Indie VC, who's the sort of, you know, person out in front, trusted Jen Hornjeff, from Savvy from a number of years of conversations from seeing the operations of savvy come up, such that he did not require a board seat, because again, he trusted the operations, he knew that it was consistent. And it was going to be what he expected, over the long term or the medium term, such that again, that was for the cooperative on Jen side of the table tenable. Right, that they could have outside investors without threatening the internal democracy of the coop. And like Nathan said, with all the little minutiae of all the rules, they were all taken care of, and they were all respected. So it's a rare example, and a really important highlight that you can trust someone. And it can be also, you know, to a degree contractually structured to make that kind of investment deal. And I think Savvy is doing quite well in the in the pack of other folks who have graduated upstart.
Miles
I think the question for me, would be whether coops are compatible with scaling quickly. So fast growth, that is indicative of the tech enabled, tech startup that you're used to. And Can that be changed? Or is that a benefit? In other words, are you proposing people consider coops so that they grow in a slower what you might argue more healthy manner and take less risk? Or are you saying they can grow quickly as a coop? And there's a way to do it?
Nathan
Yeah, they absolutely can and it but it does require a different approach. You know, your capital model, which doesn't really work for coops, because coops retain value in their communities. You know, involves throwing a huge amounts of money at a bunch of bets and seeing what works and basically reaping all the rewards from the from the few that succeed in cooperatives, you know, just doesn't it doesn't work this kind of model and that's okay. There are other ways to scale and and innovation. For instance, you know, a case here in in Colorado, and we're gonna study on right now actually uses a worker CoOp called Namaste solar that tried to grow nationally, but then decided this was not really didn't make sense, they have stuck being a reason regional business. But what they did to grow to scale was they built a cooperative called Emeka solar, that is joint purchasing among small businesses across the country, this kind of model that leverages existing photos in (unitelligible) is one that cooperatives have been able to scale very, very quickly. And so we see purchasing cooperatives that, you know, in businesses like Best Western hotels, the purchasing cooperative, Ace Hardware, you know, my grandfather ran for a little while, a multi billion dollar hardware purchasing Coop, these kinds of things that, that leverage and redirect existing flows have grown very, very quickly and in in the past, and I think we can, you know, modernize that model, adapt it and be directed, I mean, Visa credit card network was really building that model, it was agglomeration of banks. And, and so it just requires thinking differently, you know, the different like Apple differently, just it's grammatically correct. And you you instead, rather than trying to disrupt industries, you attempt to leverage existing flows with them and transform industries by by through co ownership, redirecting those stoat so rather than thinking about replacing all of the small newspapers in the country, instead try to hurdle small newspapers, you know, it's even a way of kind of what we see with Shopify as opposed to Amazon, you know, creating a model that is about empowering small businesses, smaller exists entities out there, rather than wiping them off the off the map, and so requires us to think about what could technology enable us to do that's different from what the venture capital financing model has, has compelled and encouraged technologists to do, it's not the technology that that forces the destruction of whole sector, the economy, it the it's the business model, and, and that cooperatives prevent, present an alternative way for us to think about how, how we grow our technology, and requires some, you know, appropriate finance, but this can be an at scale, you know, down the road. For me, there's $130 million Cooperative Bank called Cobank, you know, really powerful financial institution that's is itself a co op is designed to finance cooperatives, it operates in agriculture, which is a strongly cooperative sector. But you know, we should have a Cobank for tech. We don't have that right now. But that's, that's what a bunch of us are, you know, are trying to build the build the support structure to create to make it so that this stuff is not, you know, it's not crazy. It's just, you know, it's just, it's just a normal option out there to become community owned.
Miles
One of the things I'm wondering is the extent to which innovation is necessarily tied with taking risk, and are co ops positioned to take risk, the examples you use of purchasing CoOp, even a Visa, which was innovative, are about sort of taking less risk, and as you said, going with existing flows in the economy. So I don't know if you have an answer, but it's something I certainly ponder and will continue to ponder.
Nathan
Yeah, it's one of the reasons why this exit to community idea is really important is is that you know, co ops do have risk problems times if you if you're starting a business at the very beginning, that is operative, you know, you've got a bunch of people who are members who, you know, might, you know, might be anxious at taking risks. And I think we want to hit you know, the best of both worlds. The cool thing that this this startup culture is good at is, is you know, being nimble and being a pivot and enabling really creative exploration to figure out what the, you know, where the market fit is where the who the true community really is, and sometimes it takes some time to figure that out. But then that's a company does, you know what, you know, Facebook can't move to break things anymore. It's gotta, it's got to move slowly, reliable infrastructure or whatever. And and I think we need the ability to to pivot from one to the other to pivot from startup mode to when something becomes a community asset that communities are relying on enable us to transition it over to community ownership.
Danny
One of the most amazing and, again, very provocative things I've seen in the last about 10 years is I've noticed a lot of tech companies of all kinds, but especially the larger ones include a (unintelligible) a few, let's say, even 10, or fewer employees are hiring community and labor organizers are folks who have that background. Partly, and this is something I'm looking at, you know, like, these are people I talked to directly. This isn't like reading in the news. It's like, I've seen some of these folks say, you know what, I just need to make some more money, I want to get a home for my family. But I think the trend there within the talent acquisition will, that's really to be taken seriously is these are folks who have training as community and labor organizers in acknowledging big threats and serious risks, thinking about how folks will get comfortable with their risk tolerance, and get articulate about it, be able to speak on it openly with each other vulnerably with some courage, and then take that risk collectively. Which is interesting to see that tech companies are hiring for these folks, because most of it is you know, having someone on staff who can organize, you know, literally I'm not kidding, like pizza parties with neighbors to help them get comfortable with the idea of scooters. Right that maybe now flooding their sidewalks. So that's smart on a tactical level. But I think to your question miles about where risk factors into this, this calculus, collective risk and who or whom, I never know which one is taking that risk together is the important way I would suggest to frame the question, which is, again, why exit community and community ownership is, at least on first blush, a really obvious solution to the problem of getting folks involved and to have some skin in the game. Now, you know, it gets much more complicated. As soon as you start asking, Well, how do you pay back some of the folks who've earned or who ought to earn a lot of sweat equity from groups that from starting something that was not venture backed, so it was all just there, you know, social capital and their blood, sweat, and tears? And conversely, how do you pay off or buy out investors who are expecting just, you know, just like any other deal, a substantial or a reasonable amount of return for their investment? And so how can you organize folks, collectively, you see a lot of activity, like I said, in groups, hiring community labor organizers, I think that is a huge shortcoming amongst these shared ownership enterprises where there's not enough of an organizing component. You know, there's not enough of a earnest humble approach saying, who are all the folks here who have a stake at this? Can we, you know, sure, like you were saying, Can we speed it up a bit to engage with them fast enough? And then to have the conversation be about not just are they going to use our tool or app or service or what have you, but are they also willing to follow through on that and do more with it, and then share some of the risk, whether it's, you know, the benefits or the, you know, the losses, which I think is an important thing, too, a lot of cooperatives in the financial crash of 08 actually made it through pretty well. There's a robotics cooperative, where I was at grad school in Wisconsin, that did even better than all of its peers there, sort of a manufacturing engineering group, making robots that make robots and they came out pretty well, because they all took the risks together, and they all took a pay cut together, that resilience is, is nothing to, you know, just mentioned lightly or go and not something to romanticize either. But risk, has a sort of shape and has some contours that really helps grapple with it a lot easier when you lay it out like that.
Miles
Thank you for that. Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Nathan
I think it's so important to find each other. Right now this stuff we are we're figuring it out as we go along. And we've been working particularly through the Bridge Unite network, which is an awesome women led network founders are, you know, interested in different ways of challenging some existing norm startup ecosystem, that's a great way to start. Getting involved we on the Zebras Unite online network, we have a, you know, a special kind of exit to community space. But when we're not other you know, you can also reach us and can help you connect with some relevant other founders who are exploring these ideas and we just be learning from each other and, and helping helping to create pathways that others can follow in the future.
Miles
And where can people follow up online?
Danny
Well, one good place to see a lot of this small but I hope representative community effort is E2C, Exittocommunity.how, where that's the program, Nathan and myself, Melissa Pettah. And some other folks from (unintellibible) my group ran this program last fall was, you know, group of participants, group of mentors and facilitators. And hopefully enough folks around the wings who can bring some more resources. So that's a good place to go and visit and to check some BIOS out. Get some inspiration there.
Miles
Wonderful. Thank you both for being on.
Nathan
Thanks so much for for us for having us and for being interested in these these questions.
Danny
Thanks a lot miles. Glad to be here with you.