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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Ok, show me a single example of this model working for a software business that makes a profit. Just one.

I honestly can't find any.

I'm one of the managing directors for a 3-person software development co-operative. We each made around double the market rate for developers in our country last year, with a small amount left over in the company at the end of the year to invest in new staff and a small side-business the company owns.

Loomio[1] is a successful product-based co-operative, and was spun out of another successful co-operative called Enspiral[2]. Enspiral got up to over 200 co-owners before they started splitting off to other companies.

This is just looking at New Zealand, which is small and doesn't have a big co-operative sector. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples around the world.

1. https://www.loomio.com/about/ 2. https://www.enspiral.com/

Not parent and not arguing that this model is common by any means. But a noteable example is Motion Twin [0]: a game company that had a couple of mainstream hits (most recently Dead Cells).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Twin

My point is that pretty much every business is an example of what a co-op could do, because the differences are small on an operational level. It's an ownership structure, not a management structure.

Companies in new areas of technology generally started with a concentration of power and after a while that concentration of power goes away. Every new tech has effectively had this.

Anyway our economic model is toxic to cooperative businesses. So yeah it’s gonna be hard to find examples of successful coops.

> Anyway our economic model is toxic to cooperative businesses.

I don't really buy that.

Our economic model rewards businesses that make money. In tech, you don't even need to make a profit, just having a lot of revenue is enough to get a ton of investment (although that might be changing, and that change is probably good).

If a software co-op could succeed as a business, why hasn't that happened?

One of the tricky things about worker coops is that it’s more difficult to grow fast. You can’t just have outside investors and shareholders pump money into it. Ownership and employment are directly tied together.

There are successful software worker coops out there. Usually small and medium.

And there are examples of firms that follow the spirit but not the legal structure. Effectively worker owned, but regular corporations on paper.

Generally worker coops have been shown to provide more stability/sustainability, worker engagement in many cases.

My intuition is that these virtues are less in demand than rapid growth and big exits when it comes to software ventures. Also a big issue might be that this business form is simply less on the radar for people, which can be perceived as risky or off base.

But there might be domains and types of projects that would fit very nicely.

Models of company ownership don't really extend properly into cooperative companies. Raising funds is neigh impossible.

B2B relationships are extremely difficult with cooperative business models due to a lack of understanding (both on law side and just "personal feels" side of things).

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