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8note 6 hours ago

I'd go for a co-operative ownership model rather than capitalist?

and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy

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jacquesm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Mondragon for IT... it's been my dream for decades.

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komali2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.

I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.

I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.

The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.

This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.

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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.

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komali2 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.

Yes, agreed for the USA/Taiwan/Japan where we mostly operate. For us it's been understanding and leveraging the alternative resources we have. Like, we have a lot of members, but really only a couple are bringing in customers, despite plenty of members having very good networks.

Is your current a co-op? 200+ sales at 30k a pop seems to be pretty well off the ground!

	▲	jacquesm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Effectively, yes, but it is tiny. There is a corporate entity but it just serves to divide the loot between the collaborators.

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YetAnotherNick 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.

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jacquesm 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.

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YetAnotherNick 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee

Exactly what I said. We need lower shareholder interference not more, and in co-operative it's the opposite.

> with immediate liability for their person.

What do you mean?

	▲	jacquesm 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A cooperative does not have shareholders in your sense of the word.
	▲	komali2 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The only shareholders in a co-op are the owners/operators ("employees"), or the owners/operators + customers (for example REI I believe). There's nobody seeking to extract value at the expense of the employees or the customers. If, as a shareholder operator, a co-op member pressured themselves to exploit user data to turn a quick buck, I guess that's possible, but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm. In my experience, co-op members and customers are more value-oriented than profit-motivated, within reason.