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Meet Nathan Schneider (Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder; Board Member, Start.coop). In this episode, we dig into how small business owners can make employee ownership (EO) a realistic exit path—and why Zolidar is designing a Wikipedia-inspired EO community to keep fragmented information fresh, accurate, and community-owned. We talk frankly about the hard parts of building participatory spaces and multi-sided commons: the need for clear early scaffolding (sometimes top-down) so participation matters from day one, and how the right software becomes an “Iron Man suit” for owners, advisors, and employees moving from curiosity to transaction.
Some takeaways:
- Why a Wikipedia-style knowledge layer is key for EO: freshness, accuracy, and shared ownership of information
- Participation is hard: pragmatic scaffolding early on so people actually contribute and benefit
- Tech as a thought partner: a platform layer that speeds trust, widens reach, and supports real transactions
- Day-one value design: seed content and peer owner stories so first visits create momentum
- Right-sized governance for SMBs: don’t rewrite every rule—shift accountability and keep participation lightweight
- Where the numbers work: tools that surface financially sound EO deals and run them on familiar professional rails
MAILBAG | GET IN TOUCH WITH US We'd love to feature your voice in an upcoming mailbag episode! Have a question for us? Leave a voicemail at 650-203-6565, or send an email to social@zolidar.com. Remember, voicemails make for more engaging episodes—we want to hear your actual voice!
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CHAPTERS
- (00:00) - Introduction to Nathan Schneider
- (00:24) - Exploring the Intersection of Technology & Social Change
- (02:07) - The Twitter Campaign and Platform Cooperativism
- (03:34) - Building New Digital Communities: The Case of Social.coop
- (05:02) - Cultivating Community in Online Spaces
- (06:49) - Diversity in Shared Ownership Models
- (08:28) - The Challenge of Stakeholder Ownership
- (09:47) - Shifting Accountability: From Shareholders to Stakeholders
- (10:25) - Aligning Incentives in Cooperative Structures
- (12:36) - High Fidelity Democracy: Liquid Democracy and Citizen Assemblies
- (14:42) - Designing Participatory Spaces for Community Engagement
- (16:22) - Success Metrics in Shared Ownership Models
- (20:01) - The Power of Ownership and Participation
- (23:14) - Navigating Fragmentation in Employee Ownership
- (25:37) - Scaling Employee Ownership Awareness
- (27:29) - Policy and Technology: A Dual Approach
- (30:14) - Building Trust in Online Communities
- (35:10) - The Importance of Governance in Online Spaces
- (37:38) - Podcast Outro
CONNECT WITH NATHAN SCHNEIDER
REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE:
© Copyright 2025 Zolidar, Inc.
Note: This podcast is not investment advice and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this episode are solely those of the guest(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or Zolidar.
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Creators and Guests
What is Bicycle For The EO Mind?
Most small and medium businesses (SMB) struggle to sell — employee ownership is a proven exit path. Hear real stories from business owners who transitioned through employee ownership. Whether you're an owner, advisor, or investor, we dive into expert insights, practical strategies, and how technology is reshaping exit planning.
Matthew (00:00)
All right. So hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Bicycle for the EO Mind podcast. Today, I have the great honor of speaking with Nathan Schneider, who is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab. His most recent book is Governable Spaces, Democratic Design for Online Life. How are you today, Nathan?
Nathan (00:17)
Good, it's good to be with you.
Matthew (00:24)
So just as sort of a way of kind of introducing maybe yourself and this conversation, could you speak to us about your journey in exploring the intersection of technology and advocating for change in the economy and society, and particularly from involvement direct or indirect involvement in online communities?
Nathan (00:39)
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know where to begin, but one version of it is, about a little over a decade ago, I was working as a social movement reporter, and I was just seeing the importance of digital networks in movements for social change, and also saw the ways in which those networks were really not serving.
The people that were relying on them and the movements that were relying on them. And it seemed to me critical and many others ⁓ to rethink how our digital networks are owned and governed. This pulled me deeper into a much wider tradition and legacy of the cooperative movement of shared ownership in other kinds of forms.
And so over the years since, I've been deeply involved in cooperatives on and offline, employee ownership on and offline, and efforts to build democratic practices also into online communities of many sorts, even if they don't involve shared ownership in the familiar sense. So to me, the challenge has really become, how can we insert opportunities for democracy and power sharing into our lives wherever we can.
Matthew (01:51)
So the Buy Twitter campaign is just so much for me, it's at least personally sort of a zeitgeist moment of like, for my thinking about like, what is this intersection of the technologies that we use relying upon them, as you say, and like, do they serve us? What is the governance aspects of that?
Nathan (02:07)
Yeah, in 2016, a group of us who were involved in what became known as the movement around platform cooperativism. So we've been organizing conferences and we've been supporting startups, trying to build tech companies with cooperative ownership, owned and governed by the workers or the users. A group of us saw a danger with Twitter, a company that has always kind of been uncomfortable in its identity as a company.
So we started with a petition campaign, ended up actually doing a shareholder proposal at Twitter that would ask the company to explore options for democratizing the ownership of the company.
But in the meantime, the campaign did get some attention and introduced the possibility, that horizon of shared ownership to a bunch of people who might not otherwise have encountered it. And so in that respect, was successful, though, unfortunately, we weren't able to preempt what happened later on.
Matthew (03:05)
Yeah. And so thank you so much for walking us through that story.
Nathan (03:08)
It was a pretty small group of us organizing who had developed a lot of trust in the cooperative movement already and knew each other and then drew in some other participants and organizers as well. So we were really kind of drawing on networks that we had been forming already. And one outgrowth of it that emerged in terms of new digital communities that really came after the shareholder meeting was there was always this conversation about whether we should really be trying to fix Twitter or actually just build something new. And so there was always that kind of dual strategy at work. And we ended up taking on the, you know, the latter approach. And we, a group who had been involved in organizing broke off and formed a new cooperative called Social.coop, which is a server that runs Mastodon, which is an open source decentralized social network. And at the time it was very small. So we set up this community and we're using it and we're running it. And it's still like not something you could really use every day, but we kept it going.
That, you know, now it's really become my primary social media home. And it's really wonderful to be able to experience those to have a feed and to be part of a community that we really own and govern and have built up over years. And it's just, at least in my life, shown the benefits that can come from building social media, building our online experiences through shared ownership and governance.
Matthew (04:43)
Yeah, I think, super interesting. I appreciate you mentioning that sort of like dual strategy and this sort of like a tension between the fix what's there, make something new to prefigure some alternative. I'm curious on that second point about, you know, folks migrating more toward the Mastodon approach. What have you learned in the process of trying to cultivate that community?
Nathan (05:02)
A bunch of things, but one is the ways in which there is not one model for shared ownership and governance, right? A lot of times as we've been developing this community, one, we've had to change the structure of the co-op when it moved from being a few dozen to a few hundred people. We've had to centralize a little more so that we know what one another is doing, so that the different working groups actually can talk to each other, not just among each other. And it's also, at times, some of the problems that have inevitably emerged have made me wonder, OK, how could we do this differently, designing for a different kind of user or a different scale? Our approach is very much a hands-on, very participatory, very volunteer-led cooperative model. I think you could also do a social media cooperative that's much less hands-on, you know, and it's gotten me thinking a lot about, for instance, you my credit union that is, you know, the largest mortgage lender in my region. It's where I have my mortgage. You know, I'm glad it's a cooperative. I think that's a good thing. I do want to participate in the social.coop community.
it's been a reminder that we need a kind of diverse mix of structures and styles in a healthy world of shared ownership. And there isn't just one. So in some respects, the kind of challenges we've faced have reminded me that we need to get out of kind of one size fits all thinking and recognize that as with any other kind of organizations, shared ownership organizations need to be able to look and feel really different.
Matthew (06:34)
Yeah, interesting. I appreciate that note toward the diversity of practices, not one size fits all. I'm curious, is there maybe an example that comes to mind for you would you say there are like effective online communities that are greater scale that maybe like fit the credit union community you're kind of talking about?
Nathan (06:49)
⁓ Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at something like Wikipedia or even Mozilla, which is in a way a cooperative, but is kind of a public benefit oriented tech organization, or some large cooperatives like say OCLC which is ⁓ a big cooperative among university libraries for managing data, large digital cooperative, or you can think of REI as a platform co-op, and a lot of its sales happen online. These are all very low touch organizations in the sense that their users are not participating in them every day, but they still have a sense of being perhaps represented in the organization. And it's that kind of thing that I think in many respects we might aspire toward.
But we need to build an ecosystem where the things that really affect our lives day to day and that are important to us in kind of high touch ways enable us to have high touch participation. And the things that where we just simply need to know that our trust is not being misplaced, that the accountability is appropriate there. I mean, with my credit union, I have met with members of the board. You I have once gone to an annual meeting, you know, it's not like I'm totally checked out. But but I don't feel the need to do that much because you know, like my meeting with the board member was really good. And I felt like, okay, you're doing a great job, you know, and you're doing work that I don't want to do. And thank you. And you know, you know, you know, that you're ultimately accountable to your members, not to outside shareholders.
And I think, you know, there's sometimes a kind of magical thinking around shared ownership that it's like a transcendentally different thing from say investor ownership. And so people wonder, how could you possibly share ownership among thousands of people, right? Or even more? Well, we do that with stock ownership every day with every public company. They are owned by countless people who have a stake in them and who they have to be accountable to. And there is a structure of proxy voting and alignment of incentives and things like that to make those companies accountable to those people. And so the problem of widespread shared ownership is actually not a problem. Like it's something we know how to do.
The problem, in my view, is that too often we do that with a purely shareholder mindset and structure where companies are purely accountable to financially interested shareholders rather than stakeholders who have an interest in things beyond just the profitability of the company and a narrow sort of profitability as well. So in some respects, I think this challenge of stakeholder ownership is easier than many people make it out to be.
Yeah, and maybe it's not every stakeholder, right? There's a lot of interest right now in multi-stakeholder structures where you've got some percentage of shares for your employees, some with users. I'm pretty skeptical of those, although I'm happy to support them when people want to do them.
In a sense, a difference in kind of the decision being made. It's just a difference in who is being prioritized.
Matthew (10:12)
Yeah, yeah, I totally absolutely see what you mean. Sort of the clarity of like, OK, if we just shift, OK, it's not the shareholder, but it's the employee. Now we've also got a very clear directive. It's just a different kind of, it's just a different direction for that clarity. I'm curious. So you mentioned sort of using this example of interviewing someone from your credit union, which I'm hearing is sort of like your personal process of how you feel comfortable with delegation. Because you know that you're delegating to them, sort of showing up as you would hope Nathan would.
Nathan (10:24)
That's right.
Matthew (10:39)
if Nathan were directly engaged in the credit union on a day-to-day kind of basis. Are there other ways you think about like representative and direct democracy, how people feel comfortable with being in these spaces where like so many users and it's so hard to be directly engaged. So we know we're delegating so much. How to feel comfortable with that.
Nathan (10:59)
I think there are a few approaches. A lot of people who are into governance like to focus on decisions and votes and things like that. Those are important, but I think they're actually much less important than people sometimes seem to think. Culture is deeply important in organizations. That is a way of shaping them. And employees have a lot of say in shaping culture.
And also just structures of alignment. think a lot of how corporations are set up today is less about like who's voting day to day, but actually like how are incentives aligned. The use of, for instance, stock grants to CEOs is a very powerful tool for aligning CEO interests to shareholders without shareholders having to make a decision to say, do this or do that. It just means like the shareholders can trust that the CEO has their best interests at heart because the interests are the same. So that question of how you organize a company or an organization to be aligned can do in some respects a lot more than any one decision. And so for instance, when we look at employee ownership, you know, one design that we've seen recently is using preferred stock for investment. So you are aligning the investors' interests with the workers' interests. If the workers want to see dividends, want to see profits, they have to make sure the investors are also seeing returns. That alignment is built in. And it's a way of avoiding necessarily having to give those investors direct say in the company, say through voting shares or seats on the board or things like that, the alignment can do that. At the same time, I think there are opportunities to have more high fidelity democracy in our organizations, such as for instance, using kind of ongoing feedback processes. We see a lot of experimentation with governance mechanisms and, you know, in these digital organizations built on blockchains, using cryptocurrency. I think a lot of the dust has not settled there, but I think there are lot of really cool opportunities to explore how can some of the experiments that have been developed there, ideas like liquid democracy, where you're able to withdraw the delegation of your vote at any time, you're able to delegate on just certain issues you know, where you're able to get higher fidelity information about participant preferences, that sort of stuff can be useful. I think also the use of, for instance, citizen assemblies, which are being adopted by governments around the world in many places, including here in my town in Boulder.
We're just in the process of starting our first one. These are opportunities where you build essentially a random jury of people in a community that's representative demographically in some way and have them come together and make recommendations or make decisions. That can be a really powerful tool for getting out of the polarization that sometimes informs voting processes. And there's actually an experiment now going on at Mondragon, the largest network of worker co-ops in the world, applying citizen assemblies within the context of a co-op. I think that sort of thing is really exciting.
I do think there's a lot of space for experimentation around decision making.
You don't have to rewrite every rule in the book. It's actually just the key thing is to shift who you're accountable to.
Matthew (14:22)
We're thinking about aligning incentives and creating structures where we're still a bit removed, but we understand that through the aligning of incentives, we can feel comfortable with deferring, not being so directly engaged. But then also having these more high touch, high fidelity instances like liquid democracy or citizen assemblies as these chances to jump in. I'm curious.
When we because we mentioned, you you cited Wikipedia as one example, and that's actually something that we're thinking a lot about at Zolidar in the way that we're kind of thinking about the design of our employee ownership online community for variety of reasons, you know, so some of which is that we know that information itself can be so fragmented. So just to have a place to bring employee ownership information together to keep it fresh. So hopefully it's, you know, this is a sense of ownership in the community of like, we want this information to be up to date and accurate and that we take a shared accountability to like, let's keep it fresh which can otherwise be so difficult if it's a more traditional relationship to knowledge more top-down, Yeah, would you suggest, like as we're thinking about the design of Zolidar's online community, things like assemblies of users coming together as a way to talk about the state of is this information fresh and useful and applying that kind of practice.
Nathan (15:31)
Yeah, building participatory spaces is really hard. building any multi-sided market or kind of commons is not easy. And I don't think there's an easy answer to this. And in some respects, I think it's important to recognize that, in some respects, they were drawing on the legacy of very top-down models in order to seed the possibility of a more participatory one, because nobody would participate in it unless it mattered.
Unless there was a clear foundation that this is a commons that we care about and that is already useful and where the contribution I make is going to be read by people and it's going to be ⁓ informing what other people are doing. In the context of employee ownership, one case that I've had the opportunity to study closely is that of a network here in Colorado that started with an employee-owned solar installer called Namaste Solar. They ended up, they tried to scale nationally. They didn't end up finding that that worked. They wanted to keep the company pretty regional so that they would retain their culture. But they did build out a large purchasing co-op called Amicus Solar that's national. And that's a co-op of, whose members are small businesses that are solar installers that are need are buying solar panels together and getting huge discounts in the process. And they built a really successful, you know, one of the core offerings of that co-op is the online community among the companies that participate in it. And one of the things that I think makes it valuable is that they don't just let anybody in. They have
They're pretty unapologetic about a culture of ethical business, of companies that are really committed to treating their employees well and to being part of the a just solar transition. And so they do a lot of vetting. They do a lot of relationship building on the front end. And so when people get into that space, it's a very high quality space. So that's one way of doing it, you know, but just as valid as the strategy of Wikipedia, anyone shows up, but then we're gonna like really be attentive to who ends up having power. You know, there are all kinds of ways of building these kinds of commons There's again, it's not a one size fits all, but it is about knowing your community and knowing how to align the incentives, right? So that, so that people have a reason to participate. You know, one thing that I see a lot and that,
Would you do more? What would you have to do? In order to do what would you have to get or experience or or be part of in order to do more? if we want people to participate a lot, you know, they're really being, they're really getting something out of it. And if we don't actually need them to participate a lot, how do we make sure to design it so that they can still, the accountability is still to them, but they don't have to be there every day.
Matthew (18:24)
I'm hearing you say like, let's be really conscious about the design. And yeah, one part of that is like sort of the empathy gap that can exist if we thought we designed it for everyday engagement, but we're not getting that.
And so that also kind of comes back to how we think about success in these communities and, of course, metrics to that. But there's also more of a maybe an ineffability also, too, about how exactly do we say a community is successful. I don't know you wanted to share anything about that.
Nathan (18:49)
Well, I think it's really about what is your mission and what do you need from those participants and what are you offering back? And that success is something that, know, the nice thing about a shared ownership model, the challenge and the nice thing is those stakeholders get to decide what success is. In an investor-owned company, success is very clear. It's exceeding market expectations. That's the definition of success. And that's a very powerful definition of success. don't wanna, you know, I think that's important to recognize like that requirement to exceed market expectations can produce a lot of creativity. It can produce a lot of risk taking and in some respects, long-term thinking. And, you know, I respect that algorithm, you know, as a formidable tool.
Yet in the context of say an employee owned business, you have the opportunity for employees to help shape a very different set of rules, a set of goals. And that goal setting is the most important thing stakeholders can possibly do is step in and be able to say, what is it that we really want this organization to have as its as its core purpose. One thing too, though, that I think is important to recognize is that the data around employee ownership specifically makes pretty clear that the real gains from employee ownership aren't going to come from just the ownership. They really need to include both ownership and participation. When you get those two things together, you start to see real significant productivity gains in an organization.
So don't take what I'm saying as a kind of license to ignore the cultivation of a community of participation. In some respects, employees, community members of all sorts, they're gonna do more and they're gonna be better contributors. They're gonna feel more connected to the community if they are participating. But the question is, what does that look like in any given organization?
Matthew (20:51)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for underlining that point. And it's certainly something we've been thinking a lot and from our own review of the literature ourselves, seeing just exactly as you say, employee ownership as a employee benefit is truly optimized with participation, not mere I say mere ownership. It is important even if it is sort of like the sole access point. But yeah, participation is what really unlocks that benefit for employees.
So as we're thinking about, again, building this Wikipedia is one kind of, it's a proxy, of course, for not building Wikipedia, but sort of an employee ownership knowledge base. We're also thinking about identity in the sort of almost like a social sense, like what you're saying about social.coop, where folks can meet organically, have conversations. So I think an interpretation of what you're saying is that we should also center participation as kind of the way we talk about employee ownership and in the way that we like seed our knowledge base about like the kind of articles you'll find there. Like it should be very intuitive and quick to maybe like see the fact that participation linked with ownership is the true benefit. And that's kind of the way that we can help seed that community effectively, but then also knowing that it kind of takes on a life of its own at that point as well.
Nathan (21:57)
Yeah, and it has to also be something that people perceive as trustworthy, and that is trustworthy because there's a recognition that that sense of ownership is so powerful in creating healthier and more dynamic and creative workplaces. And just imagine how much more we can do with real ownership.
There's no one template for what that looks like, as at the same time there's a lot to learn.
Matthew (22:29)
And thank you for that. And another thing I wanted to underscore too about sort of like our hypothesis at Zolidar about the relationship about employee ownership and the online community of employee ownership is that we find that part of our hypothesis is that there's a fair amount of fragmentation in terms of the employee ownership space. Like it can be really challenging to feel like you.
Maybe if I were a small business owner who's going to be using the Zolidar app to help me go through an employee ownership transition to even get a sense of the landscape of people who maybe are the professionals that could help them. Beside even having a knowledge base where can go look at articles and I can interact with a chat bot that has been trained for employee ownership to ask lots of questions as a thought partner. That fragmentation effect of like, how do I know who's even out there, who to reach out to? And furthermore, how do I compare them is another kind of key question that we're asking, as all of our online EO community could help address. So I curious if that resonates from your experience.
Nathan (23:21)
Well, there are directories out there, know, like NCEO the National Center on Employee Ownership has directories of professionals.
But there are like more directories out there than we know what to do with. But actually, in some respects, think that the business and reality kind of happens more organically. And it's in some respects more important to embed knowledge in communities, not simply have lists of them. And it's why I think the genius of the ESOP structure, which is the most widespread tool for employee ownership in the United States. The genius of that is it was designed by a lawyer, Louis Kelso, who designed it in a way that lawyers could make money on, to put it crudely. And when lawyers can make money on stuff, they suggest it to their clients.
And same with Bank of America opened an ESOP office, not because Bank of America is a devoted stakeholder in the employee ownership communities because they can make money off of it. And I think that's not something to shy away from. think ultimately these kinds of things are going to work because the people who are the trusted professionals and trusted guides to any kind of business decision, have a stake and have an opportunity to benefit from these kinds of transitions and from these kinds of models.
When you have a movement where people are really able to build a life livelihood on enabling good things to happen, you know, I think, you know, the support structure forms organically. So that's something I think we really need to make sure we're prioritizing rather than simply like, finding each other out there. You of course we don't get to that destination. We don't get to that healthy ecosystem without people who are deeply committed, who are going to be there no matter what, whether they get paid for it or not. You know, and, you know, I'm, I'm, see myself as part of that community. I think you are, think, you know, a lot of, a lot of us building now are in that, in that, you know, in that category. But I think we're not going to get very far unless we build for people who aren't like us.
Matthew (25:37)
I mean, certainly, yeah, we just look right at the raw numbers of, you know, we got what, 6,500 ESOPS, maybe somewhere between 700 to 1,000 worker co-ops. So yeah, scale is certainly something we think a lot about, you know, at least in terms of, you know, the deliberate sense of that, right? Not just scale for scale's sake, but, know, like, so I think to your point is like, there is so much of the American population who have never heard about employee ownership, who have thus never participated in employee ownership in any way. And...you know, it's up to us as those who are like, maybe call me some say early adopters or evangelists, as you say, like kind of you and I might fall in that place to design like for us an online community that is, you know, a technology layer that makes participation fun, makes it easy, attractive, brings, lets people organize organically to embed their own knowledge, to co-create and take it in the direction that they truly need it to go for us to actually tap into that sort of bigger, like the middle of America in the sense of like a bell curve, right? For like how much adoption do we have of employee ownership? We just have to do our best to make a container where that's possible, it sounds like.
Nathan (26:41)
Yeah, and I think there's also some structural challenges that we need for expanding this model. mean, the tools that we have are still quite limited. And I think we are struggling to compete not just on awareness, but on the kind of benefit. And a lot of the early work in employee ownership conversions, you know, happened in the goes back to, the early years after the ESOP was created in 1974. You know, the numbers of ESOPs of employee ownership of employee owners has been relatively stable over the years. And I don't think that's simply an awareness problem. I think it's it's that there are too many businesses that where the calculation just doesn't work out.
It may be that your tools can show us, actually, there's a whole set of businesses out there where this makes a lot of financial sense and they really just don't know about it. That may be the case. My suspicion is that if employee ownership were a superior option for a lot more companies right now, for a lot more sellers right now, we would be seeing more of them. would see the market pick that up. And I'm not a market absolutist, but I tend to think that my riding assumption right now is that we are in a position where the incentives are not strong enough, where the incentives currently are too strong for selling to private equity, for selling to investor ownership and exploitation, and they're not strong enough for for employee ownership. a lot of my focus right now is on changing, identifying the strategies we need at a policy level to make a difference.
Just recognizing small opportunities that could make a big difference to ensure that employee ownership is a more attractive option.
Matthew (28:36)
Yeah, and yeah, thanks for talking about kind of how you're thinking about strategy here. I mean, certainly we've seen, you know, employee ownership favoring legislation. I can only imagine you were probably pretty involved with how progressive Colorado is in this regard. Colorado is certainly a leader. And, you know, we're seeing, of course, the EEIA, which is the Employee Equity Investment Act, I believe was that what that stands for. So we're seeing various initiatives, other states, too, you know, California fairly recently ⁓ passing employee ownership favoring policy changes. I'm curious about, how do you see maybe the intersection between the technology and like a Zolidar and changes in policy? Like we have our own sort of hypothesis about how we can tap into that, but yeah, maybe you have thoughts around that.
Nathan (29:18)
Yeah, technology has a really interesting relationship with with policy, something I've been thinking about a lot. I've been developing this concept of innovation amnesia, which is a process where we actually often seem to forget policy structures in the face of new technologies.
Are there ways in which a new technology could actually change the ground for employee ownership? Could we use technologically mediated tools to enable more shared ownership? One place that I've been working on this is the kind of much maligned blockchain universe, which I've been really interested in because it's a technology of ownership. And it creates the opportunity to really redesign how we structure ownership by using digital contracts that are self-enforcing But one thing that we've seen happen for a few years in the kind of late 2010s, there was that sense of possibility that, we can really reinvent organizations using this technology.
Matthew (30:15)
Yeah, thank you for those reflections. you know, certainly one of the things where even, you know, even goes back to the, naming of this podcast, you know, that we chose bicycle for the EO mind because we have this view that like, you know, yeah, so I'm going to get this right. So, I mean, it's the human being, of course, is so central to that. And, you know, for us that we're the way that we're thinking about employee ownership and the way that, you know, ⁓ the advisors and the small business owners and the technology hopefully come together and it's incredibly mutually reinforcing, ecosystem, but also a technology layer that supports the ability for transactions to be successful. by virtue of being a software application, also hope has much further reach than a lot of, say, maybe our existing nonprofit infrastructure has been able to reach maybe more. We can hopefully reach more businesses than have been reached previously to get the informational out. But then, of course, we exist in this investor-owned
Nathan (30:48)
reach.
Matthew (31:03)
preferential ecosystem that is the sort of superstructure of all these things happening. So that's always kind of, you in our minds as well. So, yeah, I guess what I'm getting at here is, you know, that we want the technology to be ultimately super, like supercharging. You we've used this like analogy of Iron Man, like the Iron Man suit is the way to like supercharge the humans who are involved and to make it to where like the technology feels truly like thought partnership as small business owners go through this type of transition. Yeah, I'm just curious, how do you see that potentially evolving that way? And is that maybe part of a key to there being this idea of tech for good? That we situate the human, that we center the human, but sort of supercharge them in some way.
Nathan (31:45)
Well, I think of the case I mentioned before, the community around Amicus Solar, which again is a purchasing cooperative whose members are small solar companies around the US and into Mexico and elsewhere. And one thing that I think is very powerful about that network is it's actually enabled several member companies to become employee owned because it built a community of trust and of knowledge and elevated and gave people an experience of a cooperative model that they came to trust and benefit from. so they took a step and embraced this approach ⁓ in ways that they probably wouldn't have otherwise.
And if you could, as I mentioned, that's a very slow and high trust network. If technology can enable that kind of trust to move faster and to reach more people and more industries, I think it can make a difference. And I think the question is, two, how do you make sure that people are getting value from the project on day one?
You want to join this one because it's going to save you money. And then five years down the line, you'll have developed trust with all these people that you're saving money with and realize, you know what, actually this employee ownership thing is for real where they are actually seeing the benefits start to happen in their lives.
Again, it begins with putting yourself in the shoes of the users and recognizing what is it that would make me actually be willing to take the risk and walk in this door.
Matthew (33:18)
Yeah, so that dropped in my mind, Nathan, this idea of like thinking about a small business owner joining the Zolidar online community. then, you know, maybe by virtue of the fact that like we've already learned like what industry they're in, they receive like, as part of their launch page, a video of like, here's an owner like them that's gone through a transition, and then they're talking about their experience of it, right? like, they're describing these things that say like, this is why it worked from a, you know, human emotional perspective, like it felt really good to preserve my legacy.
Like I knew I was doing well by my people, it preserved my mission, and also did well by me financially. I got a fair market liquidity event out of it. And they could hear those things simultaneously and in this relevant, easily trustable probably sense of like, that's an owner like me. It seems like that could be a way that technology could help. Still moving at the speed of trust, but a slightly faster speed of trust.
Nathan (34:04)
Yeah, no, and I think also just having, knowing that there's a community of people who can help carry them. I mean, I have a lot of interactions with people exploring transitions for their companies. mean, I'm chatting with people almost every day who are working through this and just like, you know, answering questions and pointing them to others and that sort of thing. And I think a really important challenge is just knowing that, okay, if I do this, like I'm not, don't want to be alone and I need to have the trust that there's going to be someone to help answer my question and maybe someone who I don't have to pay $600 an hour for. And, and, and so I think, I think there's a, sense of even the promise that if you do this, a community is going to help carry you. A community is going to, you know, you're going to be able to, you know, post your questions and, ⁓ and get good answers and be able to develop relationships with others, learn best practices. A lot of people come in with a lot of fear about like, am I gonna have to like totally reinvent everything that I've built because I'm adopting a new model? And just knowing that there are lots of other people who they can access who've done this is important.
So yeah, my most recent book is ⁓ called Governable Spaces and it's about governance in online life. a big part of the story of it is actually just recognizing that in online spaces, we've kind of departed from a lot of things that we have done offline in a lot of different kinds of contexts. When we come together, set a few ground rules for how we're going to do it.
When we're forming a new kind of a new community, be explicit about how power flows, make it clear, don't be afraid of it, don't hide behind it. And another piece of this that I think is that really came to the fore for me is I set out to do a book this time not about shared ownership, but just about democratic governance. I really tried to avoid the question of ownership, but it came back. in the historical story I learned through my research was that really the lack of shared ownership of things like servers of tech companies is a profound driver for why we don't experience a lot of democratic life in those contexts.
And that extends down to like just a small community of people coming together around a shared interest, not just like the big companies and how they're structured. So it really persuaded me once again that ownership matters and that we can't really get around that. And that if we want to build more democratic societies and projects that are really able to be accountable to the people they serve and to harness the creativity of the people they serve, we do really have to bring ownership into the mix and employee ownership is one of the really powerful tools for doing that.
Well, I think one question to raise with you all is just what your own trajectory is. What kind of trust people can have in the platform itself? Is there a way that people can, when they come into it to talk about shared ownership,
And it would be really powerful to see a project like Zolidar that is building around shared ownership
Matthew (37:14)
Just to lay it out for our timeline, mean, yeah, we've just launched as of last month. So if future listeners are listening to this, September 2024 was our launch. So we're quite early in the journey. But we have defined five different milestones in our blog. We are absolutely co-designing the future as we build. And yeah, thank you so much, Nathan, for your time today.
Nathan (37:32)
Thank you, Matthew. It's always good to be with you. Thanks for the work you're doing.
Matthew (37:36)
Take care.