Exit to Your Community - Nathan Schneider

we're going to introduce the next um speaker now this is going to be nathan schneider with the talk exit to your community nathan hello hello you hear me all right yeah i can hear you great thanks so much for joining us and looking forward to seeing your talk go right ahead okay sounds great all right well welcome uh from wherever you are welcome to colorado i'm actually physically in colorado not in denver but uh but but close enough and boulder and it's great to have you i want to step back a little bit from the kind of bleeding edge crypto stuff that we've been talking about uh and and talk about how this is part of a longer tradition we've been talking about the ownership economy this morning uh in this session and the idea of an ownership economy it sounds kind of it's kind of new and fancy it's like a new brand on the block here but it's actually nothing new particularly here in this state but probably also where you are the idea of co-owning things is very old what you're looking at is a picture of the colorado cooperative company according to a recent newspaper article reporting on it back in the 1890s it was a socialist based ditch company that's water ditches organized in denver with the intent of establishing a colony for its members cooperative businesses other kinds of shared ownership are a long tradition here you know my grandfather grew up as a farmer in colorado didn't get electricity on the farm that he grew up in until the rural electric cooperatives started emerging in the 1930s he later ended up becoming part of working for a national hardware cooperative co-owned by hardware stores um i've a kind of second cousin in the area who for better or worse was part of the effort to make united airlines employee owned he was a pilot and ended up really suffering in that deal because it wasn't structured right and and he ended up losing a big chunk of his retirement the process so so i've known in my family how how shared ownership can have real uh real strengths and real benefits as well as real downsides but this is a long tradition and it's a tradition that um that colorado's really been leading on right now colorado has really the best laws for cooperatives in the country in addition to its powerful support for for blockchain businesses it's become a place where uh actually co-ops from all over the country are now incorporating kind of like delaware is for c corps so colorado is is really leading the way so it's really fitting that we're having this discussion at least virtually here but there's a whole range of ways in which before blockchain people were structuring shared owner's ownership through co-ops as i've mentioned through esops which are employees stock ownership plans that enable 14 million americans to be co-owners of the businesses where they work uh and trusts which are also part of esops and and are increasingly being used more and more to enable some shared ownership and i've been exploring uh ways in which we can bridge these two um traditions fusing um the kind of new bleeding edge startup culture and particularly crypto startup cultures uh with this longer legacy of shared ownership to see if they can help each other um both have problems you know the legacy is getting kind of stale um the bleeding edge stuff is you know is always in a regulatory gray area is having trouble getting off the ground can they can they help each other and that's why a year ago um at the east denver uh related event uh sustained web 3 i i first presented this idea of of exit to community this is an idea of trying to put together you know the early phase startup culture uh that that we know and love with the goal of of being able to exit not just to an ipo or a corporate acquisition but to community ownership uh to ownership by the people of the project by the people who know and love it who use it who rely on it as well as providing benefits in that exit to the people who created it and put their their risk and investment into the effort and so this conversation has grown a lot in the last year even though we've all been stuck at home i was planning to be traveling the world uh connecting communities around this idea uh over the last year but that didn't happen instead of just been running a bunch of webinars and and things like that this is uh me talking about this idea a year ago um i remember those days when we could actually see each other in person that was that was cool i spoke at sustain 3 just before uh vitalik buterin who then you know since then has been talking about this exit to community idea um thinking about his own role within the broader ethereum community that's helped to socialize uh this exit to community frame and and help help some projects in this space think about what they're doing in these terms so i'm going to share a few of those projects a little bit of that shilling john was talking about earlier like role for instance which is creating infrastructure to allow um influencers and community leaders to build their own co-owned communities of their their fans and and supporters um ferement which is creating a kind of which is a you know defy solution that's creating a new way to create like continuous exits so exit isn't something that you happen you have just once but rather you have ongoing liquidity events uh using a bonding curve and these are projects that have have uh you know intentionally and explicitly kind of align themselves with this uh exit to community idea and then variant fund a new fund that is uh working in this space really very much with the idea of enabling community ownership as a means of growing startups and it's really exciting to see um to see to see that come online and then opolis our our co-hosts here uh are are already really on the cutting edge in blending these traditions in that they're actually forming a cooper a colorado cooperative they have formed um and they are using that cooperative method uh that cooperative legal mechanism to bring their you know their their utopian crypto universe online and uh and above ground in the regulatory universe so it's really exciting to see that merger happening uh in the context of opolis also in the last year in around september late august my lab at the university of colorado boulder put out the an exit to community primer co-authored by founders and entrepreneurs and an investor and a lawyer about the kinds of options out there for exit to community it's about 70 to 74 page booklet that you can get online for free i'll share a link a bit later but uh please check it out it's it's kind of a list of uh you know collection of of writing about you know why this idea is important and and what people can do to make it work and out of that we uh held a a cohort a kind of peer leading peer learning cohort uh of different startup founders who are interested in this exit to community idea um people mainly early stage who are trying to figure out how to uh sell this narrative to their investors and to their uh to their other stakeholders to help them see what it could mean and why it could be powerful to uh eventually work their way toward uh toward community ownership and at the same time like the big bad evil companies that i sometimes think of myself as as fighting against are are doing the same thing in 2018 uber and airbnb both asked the securities and exchange commission uh to allow them to share more equity with their with their users um and they didn't really get what they wanted at the time the sec has been moving a little bit in this direction but not quite enough but airbnb has gone ahead right ahead of its ipo and and set up the structure for an endowment uh and an advisory board eventually that would be elected by by hosts um and so they're kind of creating a virtual structure within the company uh in lieu of being able to really share ownership um but it's just a signal that the these you know startup founders that are early stage and and and radical and trying to do something really different um are are actually seeing some of the same possibility for um incentive alignment uh that uh that some of these largest companies in the online economy uh are seeing as well so where does all this um where does all this lead um i i've been uh thinking about this uh this connection a lot um you know i think there's a lot to be gained from a kind of marriage of co-op values uh and crypto uh creativity you know the cooperative movement that has existed since the mid 19th century is um all about uh democracy about mutual education about community uh service and and and um concern for community cooperation among cooperatives and um and these sorts of values uh also you know in some ways have had a tension with the kinds of values that have arisen in you know in crypto communities for instance one thing that cooperatives really aim for in some respects is to kind of decommodify um some of our business relationships to make it less about about um about transactions and about passing around tokens um and and make it more about innate creating spaces where we can bring our values into the business and we're not just kind of operating on these robotic markets at the same time a lot of these a lot of this cooperative legacy is in need of a reboot it's uh you know a lot of these big cooperatives out there the rural electric cooperatives like the one that brought electricity to my grandfather's uh farm uh you know is is pretty much just kind of keeping things going they're not pushing boundaries the way they could and i just can't even imagine what could be possible if we brought some of the creativity uh from this space uh into into those kinds of spaces the kind of creativity around governance uh around around new kinds of financial structures like the the bonding curve that that fairment is using uh just opens tremendous possibilities uh for that older tradition of cooperative business so i'm i'm really hopeful about what this uh can make possible and finally the regulatory possibility you know a lot of people in crypto have been trying to figure out how can we make it legal for people to invest in you know ordinary people to invest in our projects at the outset and then be co-owners owners and stakeholders of the thing they've just invested in and the cooperative tradition has been doing that legally for over a century um so precisely the things that are so hard uh in the um in the crypto world are the things that this tradition has to offer um and and they have some really important lessons about how to do that right how to protect uh the people who participate in appropriate ways um so that there's you know lower likelihood of exploitation um but it there are so many ways in which these two um uh teams the team cooperative and team crypto can uh can come together and one thing i'm really excited about is that actually if denver itself is in the process of adopting this cooperative tradition and and converting into a um into a co-owned uh uh uh event and and platform uh so east denver which you're participating in today is undertaking its own exit to community and if you're interested in an exit to community of your own i'd love to hear from you we've got a bunch of resources at the the website of the media enterprise design lab at cu boulder where i work and you can find more at this link here this this short link we've got our zine we've got information about our cohort got a whole bunch of webinars archived there and we've got another one coming up on the 26th on friday at 2pm you can sign up there at that website as well where we'll be going deep on some of the intersections between exit to community and and emerging crypto technologies featuring co-founders of roll and fairment so really really looking forward to uh to to deepening this conversation and again i'd love to hear from uh from any of you all if you're if you're interested in getting more involved thank you so much uh for hearing me out and uh i'm looking forward to uh uh to the the east denver exit to community uh that is now underway and and and deepening our our community together thanks thank you so much nathan um actually if you can take a question i think uh do we have a minute for questions um backstage absolutely we've got three minutes left so love to hear some questions see what the chat saying and i can read them off to you yeah i've not seen the chat so it would be great sure i'd love to um let me just check it out loving all these post internet platformist examples uh love the coke ko ko kop i think they meant co-op spirit thanks nathan uh not co-cop um so what what i guess i can ask a question for this kind of um this cooperative spirit you're talking about and stuff wait let me see if there's a question oh no they just corrected their name um how how do you see like ethereum community specifically fitting into this as far as what like what's the next thing we can do what's the next step to like accomplishing this yeah that's a great question i mean the a real critical step is is things like what opolis is doing right now which is working with for instance legal experts here in colorado who are who know the cooperative model really well and finding ways to fuse those two um in a you know in a business structure and and again opolis and um you know and a few others are starting to um are starting uh to to do that there's there's one called dorg that's a kind of um dow based uh a tech consultancy uh that's done the same but those kinds of experiments are really important because we can all learn from our pioneers um and so if you see an opportunity in what you're doing um to to bring you know the crypto above ground with the cooperative legal structure um you know talking to someone like john uh paula who you just heard from who's doing it with opolis um you know is is a wonderful way to start um and you know just recogni and learning about this tradition as well learning about the kind of variety of cooperative models that have been around the past you know visa was formed as a cooperative initially you know the idea that you could transform financial markets through these kinds of models swift is a cooperative is not is not new um and and you know this tradition can provide lots of inspiration that's a great answer thank you so much uh very interesting talk and thank you so much for attending uh have a great day youtube thank you