I guess I joined a Co-Op?
First of all, thank you for joining!!!
But you’re probably wondering, ok now I’m a member, but what does that mean?
Ok so first, being a member does not (yet) mean you have equity in the cooperative as is the vision. Right now, the lawyers tell me we have lower legal liability if you’re a lower m member, but the plan is to do the legal work (probably $5k-$7k worth) to enable us to sell equity to capital M Members once we get a bit of critical mass. Anyone who joins now will receive that Membership for free once we as a group vote to do legal work to make it happen, so we’ll need to have some level of that this is going to go somewhere. Once that happens, as a Member, you’ll receive Membership payouts proportional to the surplus (profit) generated by the group, after we’ve paid back any Preferred Units that want out (which anyone can earn by investing cash or through sweat equity helping out with tasks). If you’d like, collecting your Membership payout (i.e. profit share) can be the entire extent of your relationship with the co-op for the rest of your life. But Members also get access to certain perks and opportunities, so if you’re stoked on the big vision there are a few other ways to participate/interact with the co-op. We made this little flow chart to hopefully help summarize the ways to interact with the co-op.
There will be opportunities to take advantage of things like company tools and expertise, or product discounts. Guess who is in the fast track for getting a luxury 3D printed house collaboratively designed by you alongside a trained architect (in VR??) that only costs $50/sq ft to build (so 1,200 sf would be $60k)?! Or an advanced water production/cleaning system that combines fish, plants, atmospheric collection, a babbling brook, membrane filtration, and mineralization to produce drinking water based on your personal body chemistry? Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the co-op’s purchasing power and collective bargaining to get better access to office/work space, insurance, administrative support, overcome supply chain hurdles (like minimum unit manufacturing runs), accounting/legal help etc to develop their own mission-aligned ideas under the Corona umbrella. I would propose that they pay Corona (at cost) for those services and then any money they generate through their idea would go 100% to the entrepreneur.
The Memberships in the company would basically be the Preferred Shares, except no one can have more than one so we’re all on equal footing for votes, and they can’t be sold later on for more money. Members will be able to vote on all sorts of things that will influence the future of the cooperative (and presumably there would be a mechanism to vote on literally all aspects of the co-op with enough support, except I would say the foundational mission), like organizational branding (such as the name we’re going to choose, logo, promo materials etc.), company policies, who to hire etc. You’ll also be able to vote on what tasks should be done and their relative priority, how quickly they need to be done, and how much doing that task should be worth in compensation for whoever does it. All of this influence on task creation gets fed into the 2nd way to participate in the co-op: The Bounty Board.
There are always a wide variety of tasks to be done to move a big idea like this forward, and for day to day management of the company. One idea we’re playing around with (let us know what you think) for getting this work done via co-op members, and the community at large, is to flip things around a bit by posting tasks on a “Bounty Board” in a way that will hopefully promote fairness, give everyone in the co-op a shot at getting paid work, and also promote collaboration. If you see anything on the bounty board that your skillset could provide value in completing (and the price is high enough for you to be willing to do it), you can choose to claim it. If you can’t complete the task by yourself because other skills are necessary, team up with a fellow co-op member (or recruit a friend), and negotiate a split of the Bounty. Set a deadline for when you plan to complete it. If the deadline passes you can still submit it, but the task re-opens up for others to claim and submit too. Tasks that aren’t getting any takers will slowly move up in value as they become more urgent/important (and again, the urgency/importance of various tasks is partially set by votes from Members). *Should we offer a specific bonus/incentive to team up or just let it happen naturally if it fits?*
And remember, you can also work your way to a Membership by completing Bounties as opposed to paying cash, or some combination of the two. If you want to earn sweat equity toward the Membership fee and then toward Preferred Units (hyperlink needed), message Cody on Slack and he’ll create a Loomio poll so the group can set an hourly rate for you to accrue sweat equity at for a given role/task/skillset etc.
In the early stages there may be things we think should be done, and people with the right skills and generally willing to do them, but their importance isn’t such that the group thinks cash should be put toward it. In these cases the hope is to give sweat equity in the form of non-voting Preferred Units.