Open Collective Plans ‘Exit to Community’ | Hacker News Reader

Open Collective Plans ‘Exit to Community’

blog.opencollective.com

I read this, and I still don’t know what this means.

> Rather than exiting to an acquisition or IPO, we want to transfer ownership to our community. We will be working to make that a reality.

So… the shareholders make a private sale?

There’s a lot of fancy talk, but it sounds like they can’t find a buyer, and are trying a Hail Mary whiles giving some “we deeply care about the mission and the people” clap trap.

That was my initial reaction as well.

Sounds like websites like Open Collective shouldn’t raise VC money in the first place. Now the community needs to make philanthropic donations to bail out the equity holders.

They don't need to. They may, if they value whatever they would get in the transaction more than the costs.

The irony is that they went to VCs probably because they couldn’t harness the necessary public investment. If they manage to do that now, they would basically have gone through a circuitous route — with anything greater than a 1x return for the VC as a tax on the community investment, compared to direct community fundraising.

A question I've had about OpenCollective:

Do they have any relation to the commons project? Their logos are virtually identical, and the OpenCollective logo has a similar colorway to that of their CommonPass project (https://thecommonsproject.org)

Open Collective is venture funded? That's kind of grim; I thought it would be a clear case for a non-profit.

Okay, so the investors want to sell. Understandable, it doesn’t look like there is any (direct) profit to be extracted (which makes me wonder what was initially promised to them ...).

An „exit to community“ is an interesting concept, but I have to wonder whether the numbers will ever work out. Are there really 30.000 people willing to pay 100$ each to own a part of OpenCollective? 3.000 at 1.000 each? Maybe. And are 3M$ (barely any return) even what the investors want back?

Maybe another/a supplemental way would be commercial sponsorship.

In general spreading out ownership seems like a great idea to me and I definitely hope OC survives. It’s absolutely an enrichment for sustainable software funding.

Really interested to see how this comes together. I wonder if it'll be something like an ESOP or worker collective.

Worker cooperative would be nice; it'd be good to see more democratic org structures on the radar for the tech industry.

Now maybe I'll get some backlash for this, but I can't square this attitude I hear again and again:

> Hyper-growth at any cost was out of the question, because it incentivizes profit over purpose and extractive practices toward users.

If you believe, in your heart of hearts, that growth and profitability come _only at the expense of your customers_, then the chance of creating a successful enterprise is zero percent. Maybe it's a lie we tell ourselves, maybe it's the core foundation of capitalism, who knows: but you _have_ to believe customers are giving you their money because they want what you're selling - not because you're tricking them. You can believe SUCCESSFUL_COMPANY practices "extractive practices toward users", but clearly SUCCESSFUL_COMPANY doesn't believe that, and most likely their paying customers don't either.

I really love so much about the entrepreneurial world, and I'm glad we've all walked back on the "hyper growth at all costs" mentality, but in both my generation and the newer one, this vein of "making money means doing bad things" runs deep. It genuinely depresses me. If there are only two worlds, the wolf-of-wallstreet world and and the "hey man, money is evil, okay?" world, I hate to say it, but I'll be putting on my blazer.

> Now maybe I'll get some backlash for this, but I can't square this attitude I hear again and again:

> > Hyper-growth at any cost was out of the question, because it incentivizes profit over purpose and extractive practices toward users.

> If you believe, in your heart of hearts, that growth and profitability come _only at the expense of your customers_, then the chance of creating a successful enterprise is zero percent.

No backlash, but you're conflating users and customers.

Consider the entire adtech industry. It definitely treats data about users as a resource to extract refine and sell, and their (paying) customers are the advertisers.

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