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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> It's been an amazing journey.

So you sold it, eh?

Heh, you can't sell a worker coop. One of the key defining features is a "de-mutualization" provision in the founding documents. You can only sell your own share, which has, in our coop, a fixed value of $1,000. And you can only sell that share back to the coop.

interesting, does the value ever change? did you pay that $1.000 at any moment or was discounted from work at any moment? what about new members?

No, it deliberately stays fixed to reduce barriers to entry for new member-owners.

Can I apply to be a member from abroad?

As of now we're only U.S. based, unfortunately. Adding international members adds a lot of complications that we don't have the scale to deal with.

This used to confuse me: don't co-op rules like this distort the value of the firm? But then I realized that I was missing the big picture: the ownership of the firm isn't valued! Worker-owners own a portion of the revenue during their time as worker-owners, and there is no need to put a price on the expected future revenue or profit of the company.

It's not co-ops that distort the value of the firm, it's that permanent ownership necessitates complicated and opinionated financial/statistical reasoning to put a number on what is fundamentally a weird social relation.

So any part of a journey can't be deemed amazing until the entire journey is over?

;-)

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