Steward Ownership - An investor model that protects your data and attention
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Güte der AnpassungDomain <Netzwerk>BenutzerbeteiligungRechter WinkelVerschiebungsoperatorDesign by ContractProjektive EbeneSchlussregelTermBildverstehenSelbst organisierendes SystemSpieltheorieFacebookZweiGebäude <Mathematik>Gemeinsamer SpeicherTouchscreenDatenmodellInterrupt <Informatik>SoftwareentwicklerWort <Informatik>Spiegelung <Mathematik>DatenstrukturMAPCASE <Informatik>UmwandlungsenthalpieEinsNormalvektorBesprechung/Interview
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Finite-Elemente-MethodeComputeranimation
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
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So our next talk is Oliver Souda, also a very good friend, and Oliver is the person that
00:23
years ago started to talk to me about a new way to incorporate a project, whether it's a startup, an organization, in a way that is not, let's say, so heavily prescribing and constricting and predefined, like, let's say, a cooperative, which a lot of people,
00:45
especially in our culture, tend to orientate themselves to. But something that is still conserving actually allows you much more creativity in terms of what kind of rules
01:02
you want to embed in this organization, while having something that is also more, where basically where the people that are actually producing value inside this organization, they are the ones that also are owning the, let's say, the financial destiny of this
01:26
organization. And we've been talking lately, especially in the last year, how this is something that is not only relevant for just any project, because it allows you to make something that is ethical, but also lean and easy as opening a normal Gambia in Germany,
01:45
that would be, or a Juge, that would be in Germany, the kind of a limited company. But also how it's particularly relevant for collaborative ecosystems, like the one we are seeing emerging in the WebTree domain, so where actually your organization needs
02:05
to collaborate if they want to develop interoperable infrastructure. But the advantages are so much more, and I let Oliver to share his talk with us, and we can come back when it's done
02:23
to have a little reflection together. So Oliver, the stage is all yours. Thank you very much, Juge. Let me share my screen. You can see the screen now in full, right?
02:41
We can see the screen in full, and we can also, yes. Yeah, I'm Oliver, and I incorporated a company called Worldbrain with the Stuart ownership model, and maybe saying incorporation is maybe not the right term. The Stuart ownership in itself is a
03:03
social contract that is made between investors and team members, and primarily in how to reward people participating in the company or taking the risk, and if you like to, also adding some governance structures. So a cooperative is, in a way, a Stuart-owned company with very specific
03:22
rules, but I'll come to why this is the case in a second. So if we're thinking about the problem of depth of attention and data, we all know these examples of Facebook, like building this entire machinery to optimize targeting of ads to you and selling it off to third parties. Or you
03:44
may, some of you have seen the social dilemma, which points out how these algorithms are optimized for sucking in your attention. And the root cause, I don't see necessarily in like, capitalistic profits or the necessity to make profit. The root cause, I see that
04:06
the current investor reward models, investors essentially get more profits if the company makes more profits or grows in value, and there is really no cap on how much that can be.
04:21
And in the end, what that means is that there's always a competition and a need, a competition for social responsibility and a need for a company to build more exploitative algorithms, to build or incorporate business models that can neglect the externalities, the costs that are created in
04:46
society, in the environment for example too. So except here, there are other unaccounted externalities if there's a constant competitive dynamic between the profits that a company gets
05:02
and the costs that it would occur in order to pay your workers better, to improve your supply chain sustainability or to adopt a business model that does not require to sell off data or build the most attention-grabbing algorithms that are out there.
05:23
So there's, what we want to figure out is a way of where can we give a company more social, the more economic freedom for social responsibility. And it's actually, oh yeah,
05:40
one other issue is if you have kind of an optimization towards profit maximization over time, you will always end up with an immense amount of wealth inequality and you cannot stop it because the rich have more means and less risk to invest more money and then essentially
06:00
over time it will just create this kind of wealth inequality. And interestingly, this is an interesting factoid I found out where I'm still not sure where I see cryptocurrencies really
06:22
making those economies more decentralized because if we're looking for example on Bitcoin and the wealth distribution in Bitcoin, which is by the way according to these lists and this data, one of the more decentralized, economically decentralized communities, we have the top
06:41
0.01% of the US owning 12% of the wealth. In Bitcoin it's 42%. Of course there's also some whales or bigger exchanges that hold some of those wallets, but still there is, even if it's half, the amount of centralization of economic power has been at a really breakneck speed in this
07:08
case. And what we hope for is that we figure out a way of, for example, the talks that Eugene Mie had in the past year about how can we tokenize student ownership and use the advantage
07:25
of cryptocurrencies becoming, having a force, being a force of decentralization by enabling more access to people that usually are locked out of financial markets and that can't go to buy stocks
07:40
in the stock market. But still we need to figure out how we not repeat the same uncapped investor returns that lead to the kind of maximization incentives in those communities. Weirdly it's also quite an antithetical economic approach when you think about that
08:07
the decentralization community wants to build more decentralization into an economy but deploy economic reward mechanisms, speculation mainly in this case, that hyper-centralize.
08:23
So it's something that I'm very wary about and I hope we can have more of those conversations into crypto communities that effectively try to decentralize power. So what we want from an alternative model of rewarding investors is that extractive actors can turn into regenerative
08:43
actors. And this means we also need to reduce the ability for executing on greed as much as possible. And what we also need here is that this alternative economic model has an economic
09:04
freedom built in for social responsibility. So lower costs and higher costs and lower profit for the company does not necessarily mean lower return for investors. Then secondly we also need a fair reward of effort and this is what I believe is the great
09:23
part about capitalism as we know it is that it incentivizes people to actually do more and take risks and this is what we need. We need to have a certain level of growth in order to progress forward and actually solve most of the challenges that we have right now. But the
09:40
question that we never ask ourselves or that is not explicitly asked in the current capitalistic reward mechanisms is how much is actually enough. So how much is enough for the individual as to make profit for the company to make profit and this is what we never ask.
10:01
And the third requirement that we need for an alternative economic reward model is that it doesn't need any or very little regulation. And the reason for that is simple that as soon as you have regulation people try to cheat it. So the more you can create incentive structures
10:22
that intrinsically modulate the person to not to do well the better you are in the end off because you don't need to regulate you don't need to persecute the people who exploit the system. So yeah how do we solve this? Essentially what we definitely need to figure out is a way of
10:47
breaking this binary thinking where we're right now in the world where we think about oh capitalism is the only way or socialism is the only way to make like very extreme comparison right now and to get more into something like what is what is the best part
11:02
from capitalism that we can use and what is the best part from socialism that we can use. So how do we take the incentives to grow to a certain level and combine it with the social responsibility that is at least baked into the values of socialistic structures? And we end up with a model called steward ownership what I dub as an investor reward
11:25
model that protects your data and attention or an investor reward model for a regenerative economy. And essentially the two principles that this model has is the first one the company cannot be sold so there's no exit there's no market that can optimize for growth there's no market that can
11:45
rip out the purpose of the people running the company out of their hands like for example if you are doing an IPO with with your company then essentially the market dictates from then a point on what you as a leadership level will do like in the US it's even so extreme that you
12:04
can be held like financially liable as a CEO if you actively take actions if knowingly take actions that lower the profits of investors which is fucking crazy like if we think about that this is even baked into the legal structures then it's a profit maximization is
12:23
the only way forward for those companies so essentially this mode of corrupting the purpose of the company and corrupting the ability of the company to be socially responsible needs to be removed and that's what this first principle does. And the second principle is that
12:41
the reward for investors and team members happens through a capped profit share. And this is really important here like we need again we need a way of rewarding people who take a risk and who spend an extraordinary amount of time into hopefully building something that
13:03
makes a positive difference in hundreds of thousands to millions of people on this planet and they should be rewarded in a in a in a fair way but again through introducing a cap on that on that reward you essentially ask this question how much is actually enough
13:23
and how much is fair and on the example of our company we raised so far about 400 000 euros and we still have 100 percent of our shares which is amazing and what we basically say to the 130 000 euros we got through investors is that their seed and pre-seed investments
13:45
are coming at the higher risk so they will get a six to eight x return out of these 130k make it easier for the calculation 100k so we have effectively debt to those investors of about 650 700 000 euros and what we do is we take 25 percent of our profits to pay back
14:06
those investors and what that means essentially is that after we deduct all of the expenses that we want to put into the growth of the company deduct the expenses that go to investors and team members we end up with free capital that suddenly can be reinvested without lowering the total
14:26
returns of people and this is really a game changer in the end because it it is exactly the kind of social responsibility that is enabled by not having a competitive relationship anymore between what the investor profits are and what the let's say society profits are by
14:44
having a better supply chain or by the workers getting paid sick leave better or parental vacations etc and this is also not something new like spirit ownership has been
15:00
around for over 100 years and in in its natural form it's very related to the german mittelstand which is the middle class economy in germany where the which is the bedrock of why germany right now is such a solid and socially stable country and if you think about companies that are
15:23
like stewart ownership has been more like prevalent until now in in hardware domains like e-commerce or industry but it's now slowly and steadily going into also online areas so for example mozilla is a stewart ownership company
15:42
buffers so stewart ownership company ecosia and the older shards like john john lewis the supermarket and bosh and size and size actually invented it those are the guys who make the camera lenses on your phone and bosh a lot of people probably know so in the end what i feel
16:04
what happens through stewart ownership is actually we're ending up in a win-win-win or how the game be people call it an omni-win scenario because in this case everyone will the company for example is you get people with more skin in the game because they know they will not work
16:23
just for investors interests they also work for their own interests and for the for their own ability to be profitable the company actually also has through that a more long-term sustainability because everyone knows if we're not building a profitable company that actually makes sustainable revenue and is not just optimizing for the next quarterly results uh our likelihood
16:46
that we're getting our money back at all and faster like more speedy is higher the company has also more freedom because it doesn't need to obey to stock market's interest as soon as it
17:01
goes on that level of like scale in the end and also because it has less pressure to grow at all costs which a lot of companies and a lot of startups actually suffer with after they raise their first money and then they become these kind of walking dead companies which are kind of working and profit potentially profitable but are not interesting anymore for additional investors
17:26
when they want to for example extend certain product lines etc and then they just become these walking dead which is kind of sad like these are the companies that work and they support a lot of people and those companies have to make really difficult decisions that often
17:42
kill those companies in in the end it's also a benefit for the people people are happier because they feel supported they feel valued and value is a like the value of your contribution
18:03
is a very active and conscious conversation that happens inside um a uh a steward-owned company because uh you cannot just go and say like oh yeah because you're a founder or like you're you usually get like three percent of the of the company you actually have to have a conversation
18:22
about hey what are your skills what is your risk that you right now take where do you can where do you contribute where did you contribute um and how much time of your free time did you take how much maybe less salary did you take in order to have a higher return based on the like actually putting in money into the company etc and so you have a multitude of aspects that
18:46
you can take into account making the people at the end feeling much more valued to work at a steward-owned company um and working for a company that just optimizes for like company profits and also the company takes care of them more because suddenly you have more um
19:04
like profits or like expenditures that can be take it can be taken to improve workers lives and in the end everyone can still get very wealthy and should like if you build a company that actually helps millions of people you should be rich i don't i don't care but i don't i don't
19:22
see a point where you might be a billionaire like which is which is um i feel not in relation in most cases to how much uh value someone generated in society somehow if i if i click uh
19:44
doesn't sometimes doesn't switch the okay um yeah there's also benefits for investors um the steward ownership model historically has shown that those companies have a six times higher survival rate um than we see funded companies um and this is partly due to the fact that people actually
20:04
with skin in the game with the interest to make it profitable um much more likely like create a business that is profitable and that when it's profitable it's much harder to kill or yeah as opposed to a company that um gets to a billion dollar value valuation without making
20:24
any profits and then falters because some competitor comes up and also a benefit for the investor is in the end um that through the six times higher survival rate you uh create on an entire portfolio an almost equally competitive return rate um than than a regular vc uh
20:47
vc classic vc portfolio where you have only one out of ten companies actually surviving and also the the profits that are made because they are returned gradually like i said before
21:01
where the company pays back um from its own profits pays back the debt that it has towards investor um the investor also has the ability to reinvest that money straight away and not only when the company has an exit or is again sold to another investor where they can sell their
21:22
shares the only loser here is greed i feel because you essentially remove through the cap you remove the ability for people being greedy um they might be able to optimize that they can get their profits back faster but they cannot optimize for getting as much out of the company
21:41
as possible if you're generally interested how to implement steward ownership there's a couple of ways um so again the principles are you cannot be sold and you cap the investor returns and so you have a lot of opportunities to do that differently the simplest one is a classic loan
22:03
it requires high trust and works with angels that have like that want to invest and you really know them because there's less legal ability for the investor to force you to pay a share of your profits for example but for the beginning you can open a classic limited liability company
22:26
or ug or gmbh whatever and then just use alone no problem the second one is a silent partnership which is a way of uh against the german construct so i don't know if how um like how you can do that in other jurisdictions but a silent
22:45
partnership is essentially giving the investor the rights to claim some of the profits the company makes on a legal on a legal basis and has also more transparency rights in terms of what the
23:02
company does then the full model is the purpose model which is a advocated by the purpose economy folks they're also in berlin which essentially is you give a veto share to foundation
23:20
and the foundation has the only purpose to veto any sale of shares of the company or veto a strong deviation on the of the purpose that the company has right now as opposed to where it was founded however again whatever kind of governance structure you
23:41
implement is is another thing like important is that you can use you can really make it and at least your company cannot be sold because of the the this foundation backing or blocking this ability and a bit more experimental this is something that you and
24:00
me have been talking about a lot how do you use for example a crypto token with a fixed rebuy rate that essentially allows for a secondary market to occur but the secondary market would kind of um like create a tunnel of where profit can occur so someone that for example
24:22
uh invested in the company company 100k and should get out should get back 500 000 um when he sells it on the secondary market he's not able to sell it for 500 000 he's maybe able to sell it for 200 000 so that the person who invests has the ability to get the rest of the 300 000 euros um as um as their profit out of the investment they make um
24:49
yeah but that's uh if you're interested in in continuing this conversation um you can write me at ollie at worldbrain.io but that's really early stages um to think about this um
25:01
and to really marry those two worlds of again the advantages that crypto offers but also removing the what i believe are more toxic dynamics that we copied from the existing system that actually in my view is probably one of the reasons why bitcoin was created in the
25:21
first place as one of the results of the exploitation of the current uncapped reward models if you're generally interested in more resources to read about this you can go to worldbrain.io stewartownership to purposeeconomy.org zebra unite zebrasunite.com or read a book the value
25:42
of everything by mariana masukato which is amazing book to understand um or to dive into how do we have a future economy where we have the ability to put a value on on contribution and where where value is created in our society um last thing if you
26:08
want to change as a investor or a funder in any form consider investing in stewart-owned organizations and because the early stages of those companies is extremely difficult to raise
26:21
money it was a pain for us to do so it was a lot of work that could be easier by more capital being available to companies that want to be more socially oriented but still be a for-profit company which we need we cannot just go with just non-profit or just for profit
26:40
and if you're a team do everything to keep your equity and control if you can't keep your equity try to keep control and control in such a way that you have the ability to change the reward mechanisms later don't get into the situation that you have that you either way
27:01
veto rights to certain investors which happens a lot actually that actually would enable investors even in a minority stake to get you out of your founder or ceo or cfo or whatever position that you hold as a as a person running that company um yeah um i think there's one last
27:23
slide let me check not very responsive sometimes yeah that's it um if you guys have any questions we can start with that now and i'll check in um into the q a section
27:46
yeah thank you oliver i was checking um let's see if somebody you still have some time um i was checking for some reason the text on the slido and the overlay to join the conversation didn't work but i'm also making something more long-term let me see so let me also
28:13
add something more long-term because i see it on slido um people are also like
28:20
asking if there is some more long-term conversation to have so i created this telegram group that you can uh just join uh i just created it so there's just me and jacob but um yeah we could just overlay and then people can we can repost the talks when when
28:45
when they get released by the voc the the technical infrastructure of the ccc that will basically cut and put an intro and outro into into the
29:02
into the into our around our videos um but yeah it's always exciting i really hope that this new way is also bringing more people that are actually struggling with like finding ways
29:20
that are um not as prescriptive and and sort of uh and i mean i don't have anything against cooperative per se but for instance in italy which is the country where i come from that legal design is also used to do bad things you know to kind of exploit
29:44
funding and in like um margin like fragilizing the way some some of the the way you treat the your workforce um so it's not all the good actually and in germany i'm hearing a lot of planes about certain kind of uh
30:09
how do you say uh yeah kind of constraints that the regulator puts on you oh yeah yeah like especially if you're a young organization of being a cooperative is not
30:25
good thing because you um you immediately give out the governance control and i mean the legal governance control to a much bigger pool of people that have to be put in alignment before they can be um effective and especially in the early stages you need to be very like fast moving
30:45
as a company and be able to make decisions fast and um especially if you've found an organization with usually years of prior thinking and experience as a founder you have some level of kind of thoroughness of thought tendentiously that that you need to be able to execute
31:07
and um that is difficult if you uh run um you run a cooperative and actually a friend of mine this happened to is that his cooperative got overtaken by a board that has been elected
31:21
by the overarching community and that was completely incompetent in in um in running this cooperative and in the end it faltered and went from a promising actually a promising role model of being a cooperative in first place and for a business model that worked uh to an
31:40
organization that essentially is bankrupt right now and so um yeah it's kind of tricky so it's super exciting what we are seeing oh i'm muted yeah if you ask something yeah i was muted on on zoom um but yeah um i think um yeah it's super exciting what i'm also seeing
32:01
in the webtree space where there are um few players that are trying to basically reduce the complexity of interfacing with the legal requirements that you have in each geography and in each sort of um regulation framework depending it's
32:21
if it's a different industry different geography and and sort of providing interfaces for just normal entrepreneurs to allow a much variety of stakeholders to to uh to join the the shareholdership and uh and the ownership in general um one example is
32:42
is fair mint uh which they're doing great job in us canada i think now they're doing something um but yeah it's like on one side is like how you make it um let's say a legal or paralegal so something that is like not necessarily
33:02
uh proactively regulated by by the regulator but something that can work around what is the current situation and rapidly evolve um in response to that um cool so we will bring the the channel in in pause uh oliver uh will also join us in the next days uh from for other
33:25
events uh as a commentator and uh he will cheat with his brother timmy which is also gonna bring some fun to the channel i hope and um we go a little bit in pause for uh five minutes and uh we join with the next talk um so stay with us