Ask HN: How would you fund a tech cooperative owned by workers and users?

From a funding perspective I suppose it's pretty simple - like with all businesses the owners pony up the cash.

The regular model is that you need cash, so you go looking for it, selling (part) ownership.

In this case you have pre-determined the owners, and presumably their share %, so presumably they're putting up the cash.

Alternatively you can go with a non-ownership approach. Ie a loan. That'll vote either an interest rate, and usually dome collateral (which I guess also comes from the owners.) If you go this route I recommend you get a lawyer to clearly explain the implications of liability - one participant can easily be on the hook for the whole loan, not just their share of it. They'd be much better off taking small individual loans to "buy their share " than participating in a group loan.

Future admin work may also be affected by your governance model. There will be times when all owners need to sign, and you need to thus have mechanisms to strip ownership if the person leaves, or dies. Shareholdings which become part of their estate, and are inherited are a concern.

In short, you need a lawyer well versed in these structures. Not just internet advice.

I applaud your vision, but you need to think very carefully through all aspects of this.

You’d bootstrap, and then have future employees buy into a restricted share class (you could also take on debt to fund and personally guarantee until you can pay it back with future revenue, or find someone wealthy to write an investment check [1]). You're aligning incentives and sharing in the economic success, but using share restrictions to prevent, broadly speaking, shenanigans that are not aligned with your desired outcome. You wouldn't want shares transferred without board approval, for example. Craigslist was a cautionary tale about this [2], make sure your agreements are drafted to withstand potential adversaries. The culture should be clearly communicated about this when hiring and onboarding.

Check out Certified EO [3] [4], they can help you. Maybe reach out to DHH or Jason Fried on this too, 37signals is a similar model of staying small and and profitable [5] [6].

[1] https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on...

[2] https://www.delawarelitigation.com/2010/09/articles/chancery...

[3] https://www.certifiedeo.com/

[4] https://www.certifiedeo.com/why-employee-ownership

[5] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1887964677344489574 | https://archive.today/dZwKz

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171325

Lot of work happened in the last 5-10 years in the web3 space around tech-enabled participatory governance, with some funding backdrop because it's on top of a crypto platform. ENS is kind of the poster child

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

In terms of participation incentive models I like pointing people to slicing pie. The concept is simple enough and can learned from their free materials. Helpful mental model quantifying sweat "equity" where equity can be voting shares, or actual financial shares:

https://slicingpie.com/

In terms of governance policy that is specific to your domain- what are the incentives and measures and countermeasures to ensure good behavior from the different roles of participants particular to therapy- there are certainly codes of conduct in the therapy space but probably this is going to be new work for you.

I have read quite a bit in the anarchy space, including Graeber, and Chomsky's references and pull-outs from the moments during the Spanish Civil War when there was real movement here- regret to say that the prior thinking does not strike me as anywhere near sufficient to serve as models for the current shape of the world. A lot of new work has to get laid down for these to be real things.

Democracy is a fragile mechanism that as we see can collapse quickly under lots of limited resource regimes and when community trust is fractured. High trust does not scale. Low trust is needed to scale and professionalize.

But +1, think now is a good time for worker-controlled services to serve as a growing alternative to platform controlled services (just saw first Amazon therapy ad today, like, are you effing kidding me?)

Good luck.