Why should we Cooperate? Rebirth of the Cooperatives

For the past few months I had this post-it on my wall

For those who can’t read my handwriting (almost everyone) here is the text: “Every work compensates with Equity %”

When I wrote this — I meant every work, no matter where you live, what kind of work you do, you should have at least an option of being compensated with equity complementing your salary. That is the logic of this post-it. But it’s just a surface.

Let’s dig deeper…

Today I started wondering, why did I ever post it? I did it long time ago, so I don’t remember anymore. Yet if I tried — could I come up with the same logic that made me write it? I decided to try and ask myself few questions:

Is it important to compensate work with Equity? And if so - Why?

I stumbled for a while, but then it finally struck me.

Inside every corporation — many things are happening. Most of them being beneficial to the society, while some totally disgusting. I guess I am mostly talking about externalities like sweatshops, pollution of rivers on the other side of the world, etc..

Why is this happening?

There’s a myriad of reasons, yet one that really bothers me: public still remains largely unaware of these externalities and for those who are aware — there is so much misinformation, leading us to believe that “it’s beyond my influence to change any of it”.

Quite a depressing situation you might say. Yet I am an optimist, seeing that we have solved many ills of our society — I believe we will solve this one too. So is there a silver bullet? That’s a question for you rather than me..

Yet I am proposing a partial solution. Let’s get back to “Equity for work”. Let’s say Jane is working for a company/organisation… and she would get equity for that work, then I presume following things would happen:

• She would care about the vision of that organisation more than she would if she didn’t have the equity (we are people after-all)
• she would gain an ability to see “what’s happening inside — behind the closed doors”
• With regained sight — she would start to feel empowered to influence some of it
• finally — collective effort of caring individuals would naturally surface, they would start tweaking the direction and practices of their organisation. That’s how eventually she would change it. And this change would fit her value system.

Without equity we don’t have neither the eyesight of what’s happening inside nor the tools to change any of it. With it — we have both.

Studies have show that worker owned cooperatives are more resilient and socially responsible than corporations.

You might ask: why then corporations are so ubiquitous? Probably there is more than one answer to that, it’s a deep topic on it’s own, probably fit for the next post. Just to name some ideas:

• Today’s cooperatives lack flexibility on legal & technical sides
• Investors have less control over it than over corporation

Creating/funding one — means you will have less control over it than you would have if you chose to build a corporation. Yes in cooperatives — there is no master, even as investor you have to share control with others. I bet just reading that sounds dreadful.

It’s far from the best setup for a traditional investor.

Yet there is a bright side. Yes coop’s direction depends on the people who end up working there and on a culture that forms. Yet if you are attentive from the start while choosing your initial team, while forming a culture — these things will eventually outgrow you and will bring fruits you never imagined. In cooperative you have to let creative people do what they do best and allow yourself to be surprised.

It seems it takes a leap of faith to start one, more so — to invest into one and finally to trust people working there. It’s tough, I know. Yet still — studies show they are more effective…

So why not build on top of that?

The birth of “Cooperative on steroids”

Steroids made out of blockchain.

Since recent birth of blockchain technology, with Ethereum as an example, achieving this goal (giving equity to workers) becomes a fairly easy to solve technical problem. A tool designed for this — would do it. Bottleneck one — down.

Legal bottleneck— doesn’t even exist in blockchain. Two down.

Final step — getting coop friendly investors and entrepreneurs on board. Well first let’s find them, hear their stories, find their pains and see how together we can solve them. We will find solutions. Bottleneck three — will eventually come down.

Imagine a world run by transparent and open companies/organisations, with no bosses, only equal partners. Everyone working there — is an owner. You know that everyone cares about their company/organisation and their vision, their products, their quality, their social impact.. These people don’t need bosses, these people need partners. It’s a blessing to be among these people.

I want to live in that world. And I am willing to start building it. It will not be built overnight, I understand that much.

Solving this issue will take some faith, lots of effort, willingness to listen and probably quite some time. But why not? When — if not now? I know I am heading there…

After extensive discussions — our team decided to start building an open source tool. Our goal is to remove all friction of giving equity for work in a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

Here you can find our proposal.

If this problem intrigues you as well — reach out, let’s build it together.

So what do you think — are we, as society, ready to take this step?

P.S. As one guy said: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I am not the only one..”

— —

This was my first post. Yet I am planning to start writing about Cooperation, it’s impact, ways to cooperate, roadblocks, etc.. My goal is to find ways to improve it, help evolve it, nurture it. As I believe Cooperation might just be the answer we have been searching for.