[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models ...
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Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models (like a co-op)
for SaaS?
Long story short, I'm building a new product and will likely launch
it as a yearly SaaS with a permissive license. I'm later in my
career and am mostly building it for fun, but I think it has
potential to be a good, small business that I'd have fun fiddling
with for a long time. I went through and set up the usual LLC, but
was curious about how I could set it up to be a member or worker-
owned company. Has anyone done anything like that from the
beginning? Should I just worry about this later? With licensing,
the typical model has been to make your core permissive, and keep
the hosting / billing application private. Has anyone made even
that part of their SaaS open? I know that would make is really easy
to fork the business, but was thinking something like a time-gated
Functional Source License (FSL) might work? I'm open to ideas. I
don't see this discussed commonly on HN, so figured it was a good
topic.
Author : snide
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-01-18 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| I met some guys a decade ago at a tech meetup in silicon valley
| who did this. they all contributed like 5% and got themselves
| healthcare/dental and other benefits.
| fredtalty5 wrote:
| Interesting idea! Co-ops for SaaS are rare but possible. Some
| groups pool resources for benefits like healthcare. For open-
| source, a time-gated license like FSL could work, but it risks
| forking. Maybe focus on the product first, then revisit the
| structure later.
| monodeldiablo wrote:
| Reach out to the NWCDC (https://nwcdc.coop/) or NCBA
| (https://ncbaclusa.coop/) for resources on how to draft bylaws
| and structure a worker-owned business that meets your needs. In
| my experience, they're extremely passionate, knowledgeable and
| helpful.
| snide wrote:
| Thanks. I didn't know about either of these groups.
| johnobrien1010 wrote:
| I haven't done it but it looks like an ESOP something you might
| to look into.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| You can always change it, so I would focus on not letting your
| product idea die until it's on good footing. Then consult with
| some folks who have done this before.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Why can't you just give your employees equity? If you want to
| make sure people have have ownership of their work that's a well
| understood model.
| snide wrote:
| This gets difficult as more employees join. Typically companies
| set aside a portion initially, and then keep splitting that
| portion.
|
| There are consumer-owner / member-owned co-ops where the people
| that purchase the service (say in a yearly subscription) end up
| as owners.
| luckylion wrote:
| The purchase price usually doesn't get you ownership though,
| you buy shares (or whatever their equivalent name is) to
| become a member, which then entitles you to buy the services
| they offer.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| How many people do you expect to join? Are you trying to
| solve a problem you'll never have? Even if you run out of
| shares you can always dilute your existing shares to add more
| people.
| perfmode wrote:
| I established a limited liability company (LLC) for a business
| venture initiated with friends. My objective was to ensure that
| all contributors received a fair share of the equity while
| maintaining a simplified structure for tax purposes.
| Additionally, I wanted to ensure that equity shares did not
| confer voting rights, functioning instead as profit-sharing
| interests. Legal counsel assisted in structuring the entity as a
| single-member LLC, where I am the sole owner, with profit-sharing
| units allocated to other contributors. This arrangement entitles
| contributors to a defined percentage of the company's profits and
| proceeds from events such as a sale of the company.
|
| My only regret is that I spent a lot of money on legal fees and
| the company ended up not being profitable so a lot of the work
| went to waste. But now I can re-use the structure again if I wish
| to create a new venture.
| snide wrote:
| That's interesting, but I was thinking something possibly even
| farther. That the members of the co-op are the people that pay
| for the SaaS itself. Essentially the yearly fee is "dues"
| towards the organization.
| pplante wrote:
| So you mean a customer? Why do you want them to own it? Just
| open source it if you want to share without building a
| business.
| snide wrote:
| Open source just gives away the code, without setting up
| resources for the people who work on it. If I charge for
| the service, which is owned by the members, I could
| presumably pay upkeep (hosting, dedicated workers...etc).
|
| As far as I know this is how places like REI or some
| groceries work. They are essentially customer owned. I'm
| not an expert in this, which is why I was asking for
| advice.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >As far as I know this is how places like REI or some
| groceries work. They are essentially customer owned. I'm
| not an expert in this, which is why I was asking for
| advice.
|
| I wouldn't say they work well, though, given the state of
| REI and grocery customer cooperatives.
| waldothedog wrote:
| I don't believe this is a great representation of REI. My
| understanding of REI, as a member, is that rather than
| holding shares, I receive a dividend relative to what I
| spend in each year, and I have access to certain perks,
| but I cannot elect board members and I cannot earn any
| additional power through working or volunteering labor
| for the organization
| my_username_is_ wrote:
| REI Board elections are open to all members. In the last
| election the REI union recommended not voting for all of
| the incumbent board members due to their hostility
| towards the union.
|
| However I believe the board nomination process used to be
| open, but now only board members can nominate people for
| a board seat
| ericholscher wrote:
| This is a beautiful vision, but I think it would be hard
| implement in practice. I'm trying to imagine how a pitch
| like this might work. Do you offer the customer/members
| some kind of profit sharing? A discount on future
| services?
|
| Given that customers often want to avoid lock-in on any
| purchasing decision, it seems hard to build a service
| that has a larger up front psychological and legal
| commitment. I love the idea of getting bonus points in
| life for building structures with collaborative
| ownership, but realistically most people and businesses
| only want a simple "buy a service that I can cancel"
| relationship.
|
| That said, I'd love to see someone try it! I think it
| could work well in a niche environment, or something like
| a Kickstarter where people feel they helped bring
| something into being.
| jackthetab wrote:
| I think my (and other) Community Supported Agriculture
| (CSA) farms would disagree with you.
|
| I buy shares in the farm per my needs. The CSA takes my
| money and buys seeds, fertilizer, etc. I get discounted
| (100% :-) products from them throughout the growing
| season. They also sell their goods at farmers' markets,
| do deliveries, etc. My CSA has been growing for years.
| They're a part of a larger co-op org that spans the NE
| US, IIUC.
|
| So yes, the "beautiful vision" can be, and is,
| implemented. Even in tech; I'm sure you've heard of
| neighbors getting together and building their own local
| networks because the local ISP won't service them.
| ripitout wrote:
| I love it when tech people are like "this isn't remotely
| possible", and it's like... happening at the farmer's
| market already lol.
| albedoa wrote:
| And credit unions, and mutual insurance companies, and on
| and on. I love this commenter who cannot imagine a
| customer that has an ownership stake in a business or why
| anyone would want that. No time to think, too much
| uninformed posting to be done:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42748956
| ripitout wrote:
| This is exactly how Vanguard works.
| waldothedog wrote:
| The person directing you to the tech coop peer group is a
| spot on. There are many ways of doing this, but IMHO it
| ultimately comes down to writing bylaws for an
| organization that dictate how resources are accumulated
| and distributed, and evaluating the associated incentives
| and dynamics generated by those rules.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Customer owned co-operatives are an established business
| model. First one was founded in Rochdale, England, in 1844,
| and is still operating today as a convenience chain called
| simply "Co-op", across the UK.
|
| The main advantage to this is that it gives customers
| incentive to support the business financially, not just
| take the assets. You can still have cashflows in way that
| don't exist in open source models, and around products that
| can't be open sourced (like loafs of bread, pints of milk,
| as per the Co-op model).
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Technically this is a consumer cooperative rather than a
| worker cooperative model.
|
| But what you described truly is the most direct way to align
| the interests of stakeholders/users with the direction of the
| company/product. A downside I think in this case is that it
| becomes even more imperative to know who your "customers"
| are, as pivoting will be quite difficult.
| ellisv wrote:
| I wish more people know about profit sharing interests.
|
| I was a part of a startup that offered profit sharing
| interests. When I joined the profit was X and left it was Y. I
| received a check for my percentage of the growth in profit. It
| felt pretty fair.
|
| There was a relatively direct incentive to impact the company
| bottom line and I didn't have to wait for the company to exit
| to get compensated.
| stevage wrote:
| Specifically, annual profit not valuation? So if the company
| had not become more profitable, you get nothing?
| mcbishop wrote:
| I recommend the book: Reinventing the Organization. It has case
| studies of alternative models around the world.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I am co-founder of a residential trash collection cooperative:
| seegull.org I started in 2022. Bought a trash truck last year and
| we start picking up earnestly in May. We're both part time cause
| we don't have enough business yet to be full time.
|
| No two cooperatives operate exactly the same and you should think
| about it more like a family than a business. It's not a purely
| transactional thing I'm not keeping track of inflows and outflows
| because I don't have anybody else to report to other than my
| cofounder and we treat it like a family business.
|
| Really the only thing you have to keep in mind is that the single
| thing that makes you cooperative is that there is no distinction
| between worker and owner.
|
| Depending on your state there are some obscure tax codes that
| make your org legally a "cooperative" but that doesn't really
| mean anything because you'll be taxed on revenue like everyone
| else
|
| So you could set it up as an LLC and then within that LLC you run
| it as equal distribution based on whatever the cooperative
| agreement is between all the parties.
|
| In our case there is no equity, there's no assignment of shares,
| there's nothing to cash out. Revenue comes in and is used for
| operations and then distributed to whomever did the work.
|
| For a SaaS because capex is low you have a ton of options, but
| again if people join your org who want to make money or get rich,
| then the cooperative will eventually just turn into another
| company.
|
| One of our new marketing efforts is: we have a brief weekly ops
| call that we're just sharing only two so far:
| https://open.spotify.com/show/4jekdwCcjWKYJd7NSh6KlA?si=eFEI...
|
| At the end of the day a cooperative is about creating an
| alternative and equitable social group of mutually supportive
| people, and the way you sustain it is secondary but important
|
| If you start it as a money making enterprise then you will
| eventually turn into fully into a money making enterprise
|
| However if you start as a social group that has a reason for
| existence more deeply rooted than financial gain, then you might
| actually have something that survives.
| myheartisinohio wrote:
| Man, I love HN so much. This is really freaking cool. I have an
| app idea related to cleaning up litter. This makes me want to
| build it even more. Thanks for posting.
| tnjm wrote:
| I developed a SaaS business to fund a nonprofit foundation, which
| is a little different from your situation.
|
| The key thing was to keep the SaaS-y bit as boring as possible,
| which meant a corporation. This is in Europe but the equivalent
| would be Delaware C corp.
|
| Shares in the corporation were then given to the wrapping
| organization (in my case the foundation, but this could be more-
| or-less any legal structure that can have assets). Downside is
| two sets of accounts, upsides are that M&A gets a ton easier
| later on, and taking on employees is simple and not colored by
| the legal quirks of the parent organization. The potential
| complexity of SaaS accounting (revenue recognition, R&D credits,
| etc) is also kept inside a simple, normal corporation which every
| CPA is super-familiar with, so you're not consulting niche
| experts every time something new comes up.
|
| I advise a quick consult with a tax lawyer before doing anything,
| because it's easy to say you'll deal with this later but some
| changes have unforeseen implications if not done at the outset.
| (I punted on some of the setup for a year while I focused on
| finding product/market fit, and that turned out to be a mistake
| that the lawyers had to fix at some cost. A year more and it
| might have become unfixable.)
| pavlov wrote:
| I think the co-op structure makes more sense if your business is
| local.
|
| For example, I'd love to have a local alternative to
| Uber/Doordash that was a co-op owned by the drivers and the
| customers together. 95% of my taxi trips and food delivery are
| within my home town. I'd love to support a company owned by the
| drivers who live here, instead of a massive multinational.
|
| Co-ops are pretty successful in many European countries. In
| Finland, both the largest bank and largest grocery store chain
| are national co-ops owned by customers. It's a model that can
| scale far, even though the big co-ops do develop internal
| politics very similar to any traditional corporation.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I've heard of such models, but the problem is apparently
| maintaining quality (from the people I know who have tried
| this).
|
| Drivers often need firing. How would a co-op approach that?
| herrherrmann wrote:
| "Drivers often need firing." - is that a given fact or would
| a small coop perhaps do better selection and/or training of
| drivers to create a high retention? This is a recurring
| scheme of cooperatives as well: longevity and people-centric
| thinking. While the standard business might toss out people
| without thinking twice, coops might approach these kinds of
| issues with more creativity and resourcefulness.
| askafriend wrote:
| If you don't have a large pool, you can't provide
| convenience.
|
| When I order an Uber, I want it now. I won't be waiting 1hr
| for it.
| yencabulator wrote:
| As a counterpoint, living in a remote area, scheduling a
| ride 1h in advance is a lot better than not having a ride
| at all; that would be plenty to e.g. drop my car off at a
| mechanic / pick it up, without begging for rides.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > would a small coop perhaps do better selection and/or
| training of drivers to create a high retention?
|
| This is wishful thinking. They might _reduce_ the amount of
| firings needed, but you can 't spot in advance _all_ the
| people who will slack off or cause problems given the
| chance. Not unless you 're a literal god.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| It's not just about hiring people who care to begin with,
| but caring for the business is much more natural if
| you're a co-owner and can directly benefit from the
| organization's success. Compare that to the gig economy
| where workers are worn down, paid as little as possible,
| and thrown out at a whim. In worker-owned businesses,
| workers are more motivated and more retained (there are
| also studies around this, afaik).
| yencabulator wrote:
| That "caring" a coop member has gets prioritized after
| addiction, health issues, family obligations, and so on.
|
| You _still_ need a mechanism for dealing with workers
| that e.g. just don 't show up. You also need that
| mechanism for co-owners of an LLC, and so on.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That literally does not address my point at all. By
| including words like "more" rather than "always" you're
| basically admitting that there are non-zero circumstances
| where workers don't care or don't stay, which is all the
| point I made. You could justifiably quibble with "often",
| but you absolutely will not get away without a firing
| process.
| codingdave wrote:
| > Drivers often need firing.
|
| Do they? The taxi companies in my small tourist town don't
| seem to have problems with reliable drivers. Makes me think
| that there is a retention problem with Uber-style work
| environments more than an inherent problem with people who
| drive for a living.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Let me speak as someone who was a delivery driver for over
| 10 years for an array of different restaurants.
|
| With advent of ubiquitous GPS navigation came a wave of
| some the dumbest most functionally inept people I have ever
| encountered. There was a time when you had to be able to
| read a map and plan routes. But as soon as GPS showed up,
| anyone who could drive and enter and address in their phone
| was good to go making way more than other high school
| dropout work.
|
| The biggest issue though is drug addicts. Lots and lots of
| drug addicts. It's an easy money job that you can smoke
| up/snort up/shoot up while doing. These guys are shameless
| and will be high off their ass driving around.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| I agree with the idea of supporting local non-huge businesses
| that still (need to) for their customers. But I think the coop
| concept works for more spread-out organizations as well,
| especially when it comes to digital services. As you mentioned,
| some big organizations like banks and grocery stores (that
| operate country-wide or even internationally) exist in Europe.
| There are also remote-first design/tech cooperatives around.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Co-ops, employee owned businesses, and credit unions are
| antithetical to American ruthless capitalist exploitation. They
| are economically "inefficient" since they don't maximize the
| exploitation of their customers.
|
| Also, what good products do any of these groups make (besides
| credit unions which are superior to traditional banks)? Sure I
| can go to winco for cheap groceries, but REI isn't exactly the
| bastion of quality that its buyers pretend it is (their stuff
| is cheap crap).
|
| The sad reality is that if you, the customer, want a good
| product, you want the company who makes it to exploit its
| workers. This is also the real reason why unions died in
| America. All the US car companies are unionized and that
| famously caused US company workers circa the late 70s and 80s
| to be literally drunk/high on the job all the time (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Assembly) Meanwhile most
| Japanese car factories aren't unionized, and you get literally
| the most reliable and best fit/finish in the industry from
| doing it.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Fwiw- REI is not a workers coop, it is owned by its customers
| who have a say in the operation in proportion to how much
| they spent. So in theory at least your interests are aligned.
|
| I'll also add that if the excess profits are going to
| shareholders than I do not care about the labor savings a
| company gets by exploiting their workers.
| myheartisinohio wrote:
| You could give equity to those who contribute.
| fisf wrote:
| Equity is one thing. What really matters is voting rights.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| > You could give equity to those who contribute.
|
| Once challenge with equity is that equity is the thing that is
| left over after you've distributed income and benefits. I've
| seen so many startups (some up-close) where those in charge are
| not working for equity, they are extracting all the value in
| the form of benefits and salary/bonus. The equity then ends up
| just a carrot for those at the bottom being leveraged to keep
| the cycle going.
|
| Other misaligned incentives I've seen is company management
| paying low salaries but having a host of family/friends placed
| into figurehead wishy-washy roles in the company (again,
| extracting value misaligned with employees.)
|
| I've also seen doctors practices where the doctor owns the
| facility and extracts above-market rents from the practice,
| leaving less for workers.
|
| Once a company is in hyper-growth it is easier to find well-
| aligned incentives. However, before that, you really dont know
| unless you can see the salary/benefits of everyone (which
| obviously doesnt typically happen.)
| yochaigal wrote:
| I work at a worker-owned IT company that has offices in three
| states and has been in existence for 20 years. We do not provide
| any kind of SaaS service but I can assure you it is possible! My
| suggestion is to reach out to the Tech Worker Coop Peer Network
| for the USFWC:
|
| https://www.usworker.coop/programs/peer-networks/
|
| They will probably have ideas. Good luck!
|
| PS an LLC is definitely a good way to go, but some states (e.g.
| NY, MA, CA, MN, etc) have dedicated worker coop company types you
| can create.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Hey Dave,
|
| Glad you're still doing cool things :)
|
| Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the
| billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob
| /main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with
| some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership
| changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a
| competing instance or anything, but that might also be because
| the product is kind of niche.
|
| I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use
| the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It
| would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which
| would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the
| enshittification cycle.
|
| We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on
| documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a
| win/win way of sharing in the upside of success.
|
| Anyway, I don't have a great answer here, but wanted to say hi,
| and give a bit of context from our place in the world.
|
| PS: You might also talk with the folks here:
| https://zebrasunite.coop/ -- they are structured like a co-op and
| mostly come from the tech/design community.
| snide wrote:
| Hey Eric! I think of you whenever I open Python documentation
| and see some of my old work!
|
| That's good to know that at least I'm not crazy for also open
| sourcing the billing code. I feel less worried.
| hkt wrote:
| I've looked at this for years, and have my (basically defunct)
| attempt at it over at mutual.email - the idea was customer owned
| email (+etc) service.
|
| The main idea was to make a service covering people's "workspace"
| needs (comms, documents, collaboration etc) which would place
| things like data governance under end user control, mostly on the
| assumption that given the choice, people would never agree to
| having their data mined by eg, Google.
|
| In practice I wasn't really ready for it, but doing this kind of
| thing as a co-operative society with worker or member ownership
| is a fabulous idea and one I'd love to see come to fruition.
|
| A lot of the pitfalls I've seen from surveying not just my own
| attempt but other people's is that getting your initial
| collaborators on board is hard, and keeping a culture that
| promotes change rather than stagnation is even harder. Lots of
| coops in the email and hosting space show this: they'll sweat
| hardware way past when it is economical or sensible to do so, and
| are generally averse to raising cash to invest in the business.
| Customers go to them and pay a premium because they want
| something "ethical", which lets them off the hook for being
| uncompetitive. The spiral continues, tightening until the service
| is so poor and prices so high that literally nobody wants it
| anymore. My suggestion is whatever you do, avoid that situation:
| investment starvation kills coops.
| ada1981 wrote:
| I predict this will be the future for many industries.
|
| Shifting to worker cooperatives and innovation on the business
| ownership side.
|
| Imagine Amazon as a coop?
| prisenco wrote:
| There's a lot of potential and precedence even if there isn't
| much discussion. It's clear that while people may not always
| like the market for needs like housing and healthcare, they
| strongly prefer it for consumer goods and services. A
| cooperative is a way to engage with the market without running
| into the problems of large for-profit enterprises.
|
| The hard parts are:
|
| 1. capitalization - once you have investors who have more say
| than employees, it's no longer very cooperative
|
| 2. legal - the structures for for-profit or hierarchical non-
| profits are well defined and there are any number of
| experienced law firms that can help structure a business, while
| for a cooperative not so much
|
| 3. structural - there are a thousand books published every year
| about for-profit businesses. There are comparatively few about
| starting and running a cooperative. Although the latter have
| more signal than the noise of the former.
|
| These aren't insurmountable problems, though. They've been
| solved before.
|
| | _Amazon as a coop_
|
| A cooperative Amazon would probably work best as a federation
| of cooperatives.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| You might be interested in Subvert, a group of people (formerly?)
| from Bandcamp that are now founding a worker-/artist-owned
| version of Bandcamp and launching the platform soon. They
| basically want to avoid running into the same issues that came
| with Bandcamp's recent ownership changes and the instability and
| worker-facing hostilities around it.
|
| They also published a magazine explaining their thinking behind
| the setup, etc. - you can find out more on their website:
| https://subvert.fm/
|
| Could be interesting to check out, even if just for inspiration
| or fun.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i'm trying to do this with https://bookhead.net and
| https://sweetclay.net. i'm prototyping the coop with sweet clay
| bc the business is a side hustle and good for experimenting. and
| then i'll apply it to bookhead since that business has more
| earning potential and i wanna get the membership stuff right
| before risking that. setting up the legal stuff takes money that
| i could use for other stuff that could maybe bring revenue, so
| it's tricky situation, especially if you need labor asap. and it
| takes time to research/design governance and equity etc.
|
| i wish there was stripe atlas for coops if anybody would like to
| start a new cooperative. i emailed the stripe PM asking for this
| and they said it's not on their roadmap. businesses in america
| are designed to be organized as capitalist enterprises so there
| are some extra things a coop needs to do which takes time and
| money.
|
| would be cool to make an open source "stripe atlas for coops"
| project and help other coops start up. i'm too busy right now but
| could do the project if i had some collaborators. email me
| sam@bookhead.net if you're interested in a project like this.
| snide wrote:
| Yes. That's essentially what I was looking for. A generic
| playbook for something like this.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| see https://.start.coop and
| https://www.democracyatwork.info/co_op_resources
|
| and the work of nathan schneider:
| https://nathanschneider.info/
|
| and anybody talking about "platform socialism"
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, I've made LLCs with friends primarily in a profit sharing
| capacity according to work done as contractors, ie if the company
| got a client, the ones who worked on that particular project get
| a split of the profits after company expenses were taken into
| account.
|
| I've also made and worked on some fully open source projects
| where the entire stack was open. I don't believe in those source
| avaliable licenses because you either believe in your abilities
| on the business side or you don't; if someone can take the exact
| same product and market it way better, then you honestly deserve
| to go out of business.
| connectsnk wrote:
| Can you elaborate more on how the expense split maths worked?
| Also why would the contractor wish to keep getting the business
| through the coop. Once they have the business, isnt it in their
| interest to make a direct deal for the next instalment of work?
| moralestapia wrote:
| A lot of people on both sides are scared of the "direct deal"
| situation whereas in practice it is extremely uncommon.
|
| When was the last time you asked a Uber employee for their
| phone number?
| connectsnk wrote:
| uber is not repeat business. Some platforms with repeat
| business like upwork see this a lot
| moralestapia wrote:
| I don't think that applies.
|
| A lot of people user Uber everyday. Not everyone uses
| Upwork more than once.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Because we're all friends and we only split the money for the
| projects that we all worked on, projects that need, say, #X
| engineers, #Y designers etc, and so we split the funds. If
| anyone gets their own contract, by all means, they can get
| paid directly, but usually companies might hire us as a team.
| gessha wrote:
| The folks at Muse discussed different ownership structures. I
| didn't retain much from the podcast episode but I remember it was
| fun and informative:
|
| https://museapp.com/podcast/4-partnership-freedom-responsibi...
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| I've been curious to try starting an Aftok: https://aftok.com/
| erikerikson wrote:
| A coop is a degenerate form of what has been called a Fair Shares
| Commons[0] company structure.
|
| https://graham-boyd.biz/fairshare-commons/
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Why a "degenerate form"? This just looks like a co-op that
| isn't locked to a single set of stakeholders (worker,
| customer), as the owner group.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Exactly (mostly).
|
| Coop is historically a two interest cooperative structure
| (business+customer/employee/producer)
|
| This model generalizes two to N and formalizes it.
| 20after4 wrote:
| https://sourcehut.org/ is a sort of coop open source project and
| a SaaS with an interesting model.
|
| There is also https://opencollective.com/ which provides a
| platform for collective ownership of an online business.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _There is alsohttps://opencollective.com/ which provides a
| platform for collective ownership of an online business._
|
| I don't think Open Collective "provides a platform for
| collective ownership", unless I missed something on their
| website and they've recently introduced some new offering.
|
| As I understand it, they sidestep much of the legal process
| through the use of fiscal hosts to collect and disburse money.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| A 49% employee, 49% customer (b2b or subscription), and 2%
| CEO/CFO model seems better for a long-term sustainable company,
| especially for companies providing critical services like
| Mozilla, Proton, Chrome (if it were divested),etc..
|
| That aside, I think it's important to codify into the
| incorporation charter or a company as well as share holder
| agreements that the company will never go public. Or perhaps have
| a clause that forces dissolution of the company and sell of
| assets if an IPO ever went through. It makes sense for some
| companies to be publicly traded but if your intent with a company
| is to do the public, your employees or customers good, instead of
| a pure profit play, then even the possibility of an IPO is
| cancerous.
| eclark wrote:
| I work on a startup where the entire self-hosted SaaS is
| permissively licensed.
|
| https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included
| https://www.batteriesincl.com/
| https://www.batteriesincl.com/LICENSE-1.0
|
| I started the company because I wanted to give the infrastructure
| team that FAANG companies have to smaller enterprises. Most of
| the best infrastructure is open source but too complicated to use
| or maintain. So we've built a full platform that will run on any
| Kubernetes cluster, giving a company a push-button infrastructure
| with everything built on open source. So you get Heroku with
| single sign-on and no CLI needed. Or you get a full RAG stack
| with model hosting on your EKS cluster.
|
| Since most of the services and projects we're building on top of
| are open source, we wanted to give the code to the world while
| being sustainable in the long term as a team. I had also been a
| part of Cloudera, and I had seen the havoc that open core had on
| the long-term success of Hadoop. So, I wanted something different
| for licensing. We ended up with a license that somewhat resembles
| the FSL but fixes its major (in my opinion) problem. We don't use
| the competing use clause instead opting for a total install size
| requirement.
|
| I'm happy to chat with anyone about this, my email is in my
| profile. Good Luck nd I hope it works for you.
| anovikov wrote:
| How does a co-op exit?
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Hot take, but anything is likely to work, as long as there is
| demand for your product. Some might make less or more money than
| the conventional approach, but if people really need your
| product, they will do anything needed. So just focus on demand,
| imo.
| oulipo wrote:
| I think there's this one in France https://coopcycle.org/
| ravetcofx wrote:
| There's a lovely managed web and Nextcloud host here in Vancouver
| Canada that's a co-op. Had a really nice chat with their
| leadership. https://cantrusthosting.coop/
| rgbrgb wrote:
| I'm also very interested in alternative company/governance
| models. To me, the traditional company structure seems fairly
| effective but I don't like the feeling of being an employee.
| There's an ownership/power dynamic that feels inhumane but
| fixable.
|
| Before suggesting anything, it would be useful to understand your
| goals with a co-op structure. What are you trying to improve over
| the status quo delaware c corp that stripe atlas will setup? Are
| you planning to take investment?
|
| In terms of solutions, Flexile is an implementation I don't see
| mentioned yet: https://flexile.com
|
| It seems to be geared towards software companies that might not
| need everyone as a full-time worker. Not sure how many of these
| there are. It's by the Gumroad founder.
| rsingel wrote:
| I founded and run a SaaS technology company for publishers. I
| think there's a rich vein here that hasn't really been explored.
|
| [Outpost](https://outpost.pub)
|
| We work with pubs like 404Media and Platformer
|
| Incorporated in California.
|
| Happy to answer questions
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