Internet Of Ownership

How can startups create truly empowered communities? A growing network of entrepreneurs, organizers, and investors is exploring the idea of “Exit to Community”—enabling startups to transition toward ownership by their core stakeholders. There are many possible pathways towards this goal, as well as many challenges along the way. But one...

January 24, 2020 10-11:00 a.m. Mountain Time Webinar A growing network of entrepreneurs, activists, and investors are exploring the possibility of “exit to community”—enabling startups to transition toward ownership by their core stakeholders. There are a variety of possible pathways toward this goal, as well as a variety of challenges...

December 11, 2019 10-11:30 a.m. Mountain Time Webinar What if startups could transition to ownership by the people who rely on them most? When a startup company takes early investment, typically the expectation is that everyone is working toward one of two “exit” events: selling the company to the investor-owners...

November 18, 2019 3-4:30 p.m. Mountain Time CASE E422 Activist Stacco Troncoso introduces the Decentralized Cooperative Organization Listen to the conversation here. Too often, the necessary care work that generates and sustains our lives occurs at the margins of the economy, unaccounted for and under-recognized. Spain-based activist Stacco Troncoso is...

October 4, 2019 3 - 4:30 p.m. CASE building, rm. E422 A conversation with Mara Zepeda of Zebras Unite See photos from the event here by Kimberly Coffin Startups are increasingly looked to as the future of the economy, but their founders, their investors, and the people they chiefly serve...

Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want...

I’m the founder and CEO of Curafied. Curafied is a platform that helps digital content creators earn monthly income by charging a low monthly subscription to fans for their content creation and curation directly—not from “patron” donations or advertising sponsorships. We’re exploring a new direction for our startup, and I...

June 6, 2019 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. webinar A webinar on emerging explorations on trust structures—their promise and their problems Watch the webinar recording here. The employee stock-ownership plan, or ESOP, is one of the most powerful legal innovations in recent US history. Since its introduction in the mid-1970s,...

The following is a lightly edited email exchange I had with Bimo Ario Suryandaru, CEO of KOSAKTI, a cooperative in Indonesia. He and his team are developing an interesting approach that I was grateful to learn about, and I thought others might be, too. See their slide deck here ...

I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded. How does this work out for them? Not well. Usually one of two entirely predictable things happens as a result—and...