Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
blog.ecosia.org
blog.ecosia.org
I love working with people who aren't afraid to solve problems, but are also firmly in the camp of recognizing how clueless we usually are. We shouldn't be terrified of failure, anxious about what we don't know, etc. But man, some humility goes a long way.
The alternative leads to terrible software, team dynamics, work-life balance, etc.
https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/the-two-stages-...
[1] Otherwise I have a serious impostor syndrome.
To be fair to the other ones trying, we’ve set a fairly high bar recently, with "Let me show you how to run the world’s first superpower".
Not sure about attorneys, but there are certainly legislators / regulators who think that, or who at least think that every problem they throw at engineers, like implementing end-to-end encryption that their government can backdoor but foreign governments can't, is instantly and easily solvable.
The phenomenon discussed here has engineers believe they can practice law and medicine themselves. So they're not asking lawyers to get them out of a murder caught on national television, or doctors to cure their cancer in three days. They think they can do these themselves.
This is, of course, one of the most important skills anybody can have, but most people are terrible at it (whether by lack of talent or lack of practice) so our society pays lawyers to do it for them.
So much so that this is a running joke among nearly every lawyer I know in private practice.
People as a whole are not incompetent, every individual (and every grouping of individuals) have goals and will take appropriate actions to achieve them with intent, but somehow a neologism has tricked people into believing this is the exception and not the norm.
It's the same principle as another comment I made a few days ago ([1]). It's not hard to identify problems that really are problems, but finding effective and feasible solutions to those problems is often far more difficult, especially if you're an outsider. The mistake isn't in identifying the problems, it's in thinking that you can come in totally blind and know how to solve them. (Or, put another way, in thinking that you as an outsider can tell the "dumb and easily fixed" problems from the "horrifying systemic nightmare" problems.)
Then what happens is I realize I can go answer that question myself by doing some research, and either I discover my original concern is unwarranted OR I can now state "well they said this but if you look here it's actually XYZ in fact!", which is much more interesting.
In fact it’s better to be arrogant than to be “neutral” (agnostic) towards a press release.
The figurative "you", in this case
Everyone starts off with a great intention, but money corrupts and humans are generally highly unreliable long term.
https://steemit.com/history/@taznuranam/let-want-to-know-his...
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bbtvDJtb6YwwWtJm7/...
You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be taken away from you.
There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.
So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)
Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
Some trick this with “consulting fees” to companies controlled by the top dogs, but it sat least something.
German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.
As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.
Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%
Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%
Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.
In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.
The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
- If you are in a lower tax bracket, the taxes are almost the same for everyone, so talking "net" is okay. If you have a more substantial income though, there starts to be more difference in net amongst people, as it depends on how your compensation is technically paid, and how much it is. So for the same gross, people can end up with different net.
- People tend to think in terms of what is wired to their bank account. For a long time, most (western) European countries did not have "source tax", meaning you would get your gross every month, and are supposed to save up for the income tax coming end of the year. That changed a lot in recent years, and more often now the income tax is directly subtracted from your monthly wages, which may direct people to talk in net.
> The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
I get you, and that's not just because of gros/net, but also just the general cost of living that changes. I lived in a baltic country for a number of years with half the gross I had in western Europe, and felt substantially wealthier.
Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.
Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.
I was there in their earlier years. Ecosia set the standard for me what an ethical company should be like.
And hey odiroot ;)
The company is doing the work to earn that money.
Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.
The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.
Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.
They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.
I said the product will be better for me. I generally believe that things are better for me when they're trying to entice me versus when they're trying to entice someone who isn't me, but we can debate that, if you want.
In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.
They were very aware they were herding people like cattle into digital conclaves where they could be milked.
Strangers with candy are great for everyone, until...
At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.
A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.
Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.
"Oh no the entire company has wages - let's assume it's exploitation"
Is basic divisive language that just perpetuates the "world is bad and there is no lesser evil" bs that drives current news fatigue imo.
People are sure that 1 < 100000 but Google Vs ecosia is somehow more muddy.
It does get fatiguing.
If you want to compare the merits of two systems, you have to do it on legal grounds. If you allow cheating, then nothing is comparable, everything is possible, no system is better.
Or the Irish shenanigans of US tech companies.
or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers.
there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.
If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.
If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.
If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.
You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.
The profit is not the problem. It wouldn't be any better if the company made no profit.
But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.
Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.
Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.
So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).
I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.
In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.
Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.
Nah, the guys working to give people options and save trees. THEY must be up to something
But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?
I honestly have no idea
You can see US non profit compensation online - https://datarepublican.com/nonprofit/assets/
Many of the presidents/vps make in that exact range (~$200 - $300k), although there are other like:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...
Feeding America, which pays their CEO a tad under $1m.
I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well.
(That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any potential future stewards of Ecosia, but I'll prefer a hard legal guarantee over a promise any time, especially when charitable donations are involved.)
Lawyer here - it is basically impossible to do what they (and others) want.
There are few (if any?) countries, where either provision would survive bankruptcy, for example.
They could always choose to dissolve rather than restructure, but if they did choose to restructure, i'm not aware of a country where the restrictions here would be enforced on the successor.
On top of this, in most (all?) countries, agreements not to file for bankruptcy are not enforceable ;)
So that's one mechanism.
In most countries, however, these provisions would be "easily" removable through shareholder + officer vote.
Some companies go pretty far down the path of trying to use trusts as shareholders and requirements on trustees and such to try to ensure such a thing never occurs.
You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.
I also had a friend who explored whether you could legally require the place of voting to be like "the surface of the sun" or something that ensures voting can't occur, but unfortunately, you usually can't.
Companies really aren't meant for this kind of thing - not that there is something better, but what tehy are trying to do is pretty fundamentally opposed to how countries want companies to operate.
If it's really a big enough deal, the "correct" answer is to create a new corporate form, much like we created LLC's, etc (LLC's are less than 100 years old, so it's not impossible)
That said, creditors could still force the sub into bankruptcy in most countries; even then I think the trustee could be instructed to always choose a restructuring rather than a windup if possible. You'd probably put that trust somewhere with UK Trust law.
One major problem with trusts is in lots of places you usually can't undo the action of a rogue trustee, only seek damages/etc against them.
It gets complicated there too - whether you can order the return of property, etc, often depends on the status of who it was sold to and whether they knew or should have known, or ...
This usually means you have to enjoin them ahead of time if you can.
In the end, the law generally assumes money damages are a sufficient remedy. Not always true, but mostly true.
Again, even this varies by country/state.
Honestly, given some of these are talking about many billions of dollars in companies, i'm sort of surprised at the lack of legislative assistance. Creating a corporate form that supports this much more effectively is not hard (states/countries definitely have the power to do it), and despite the common view of legislators/etc, this sort of non-controversial thing is not that hard to get passed, though it takes time.
I suspect it's mostly related to "nobody starts trying to get this done 10 years before they want it done" :P
Obviously, IANAL.
Doesn't this mean it's quite possible to achieve what they want? Is there a limit on how absurd the statutes can get (at least in your jurisdiction)? Votes have to be held at 3:00AM on Mondays, in person, at the company voting office, which happens to be on top of Mt. Everest?
This is doubly true for public companies, as we saw with Twitter.
According to Wikipedia: "The benefit corporation legislation ensures that a director is required to consider other public benefits in addition to profit, preventing shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation." ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Anyone have experience with Benefit corporations and more specifically what legal remedies are available if a corporation once setup as a benefit corporation fails to adhere to it's enhanced responsibilities. Or its directors for that matter.
I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.
If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated as its goal when it's incorporated.)
[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
They are very transparent about it. They list the amounts paid, the partners, the tree species, etc.
They are also fairly efficient from what you can tell by their reports.
As somewhat of a sympathizer of effective altruism (the idea of efficiency being an important factor in charities, not necessarily the implementation and even less the community), this isn't super appealing to me.
Who doesn't? Why else would one make money other than to do something with it?
If they didn't make money, how would they support the tree-planting?
This just seems like a donation with complicated extra steps, in the same way that e.g. "rounding up to charity" or even "round up savings" do not appeal to me at all.
That might well be an idiosyncratic preference, and to some the idea of "planting trees via running web searches" might appeal much more than a nonprofit search engine that donates to a basket of charities, or one that directly pays the user for showing them ads and lets them decide what to do with the money and then the user donating the proceeds themselves.
If it's just a token amount, then I'd rather not support a marketing gimmick and would prefer to just donate directly to an organization focused on trees. If it's a significant amount, then it seems unlikely that they'll be able to compete with for-profit alternatives that can focus on developing the best product.
Ecosia is profitable, they take some percentage of that profit and use to plant trees. In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners. Profit is measured after investments into R&D, salary, marketing everything that come with running a business.
Sure they could "just" spend more on developing their product, but from what I can see they don't really need to, it's already a good product. So rather than stuffing the pockets of an owner or shareholders, they donate that profit, or parts of it, to organisations that plants trees. Most people wouldn't donate to a tree planting organisation, but they will switch their search engine, if it's good enough and even if that plant only 100 trees, that's better than no trees.
I worked for a company that spends it's profit on helping sick children. The owners make enough money. They donate over €1.000.000 per year to a foundation, rather than putting that money into the pocket of the owners. The customers might not even know that they support that foundation, but that also doesn't matter as long as they get the products they want and the price they want. Your suggestion is that the owners should pocket that cash, and I should go donate to that foundation directly?
Only if the company returns money to its shareholders (ex: pays a dividend or does a stock buyback). Many growth-focused companies don't do this -- Amazon didn't do it for its first 22y, Google for its first 17, Netflix for 24, etc.
What has the lower barrier of entry: making a point to donate your money, or switching your default search engine?
https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
So where is your fault?
They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!
[1] https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmai...
[2] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
The only inconvenient thing is people know how to spell gmail.com and have to be told how to spell my personal domain, but my preference is to use my personal domain anyway, I've been using my personal domain for email since before gmail launched; if I used gmail, I'd be forwarding my mail to it, rather than using my gmail address. Fastmail for mail just works, and I don't remember if I had to turn conversations off, but I only had to turn it off once (I detest the conversations feature, but if you like it, I can't tell you if Fastmail has a good one or not :P). Actually, the second inconvenient thing is the Android app doesn't really do offline content; I think gmail is better at that; I griped about this for a long time, but now I just accept it --- offline content is a good match for email, but it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it.
I do use my gmail address for something things where I feel it's a good thing to "present as a normal person", or where my email domain might be embarrassing (I have some other email domains, but one of them is a .is, which is even worse for getting people to spell). I used to use my yahoo address for that, but I got tired of logging into yahoo just for that, and google has successfully tied me into their account system.
I do not use the Fastmail calendar. Android calendar is convenient, and tied to google calendaring.
On top of that I moved services to their own custom email like <service-name>@<my-domain>.com. That way it's all neatly sorted inside Fastmail in different folders (and I know who is selling my data)
The only paid search engine I know is Kagi (kagi.com)
I don't yet pay for search (mostly using duckduckgo), though I am considering it.
I pay for Kagi because it is a genuinely good search engine. I pay for both because I de-googled my life and I understand that one needs to pay for a service one way or another.
The price is negligible in the grand scheme of things. I've had nights out that cost more but gave me less.
But I've still got my @outlook.com email address.
Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines.
Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.
Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.
Ad revenue is then used to plant trees
you cant complain about that
Stiftung (Foundation) generally work well if you have a bunch of money and you basically have a fixed "algorithm" that you want to execute around the money like: "Invest it all into an index fund, and in any year in which the fund returns a profit, pay out the profits to the family members of person X in the same ratios that would apply if those people came into X's inheritance". You then appoint a bunch of lawyers to serve as the board of the foundation. Because the "algorithm" is so precisely defined, the set of circumstances where the lawyers do their job wrong will be well-defined, and will constitute a breach in their fiduciary duty. There's basically no room for making entrepreneurial decisions along the way. It's a bit like taking a pile of money, putting it on a ship, putting the ship on autopilot, and giving up any and all direct control of the ship. Depending on what precisely that "algorithm" actually is, this might get you tax advantages. Or it might create non-financial positive outcomes you might be trying to achieve like making sure that your progeny will continue to enjoy the wealth you created for many generations to come while limiting the probability that any one generation can screw it all up for the later generations.
Social entrepreneurship is different from that: A social entrepreneur wants the goodwill and favourable tax treatment that comes from giving up their claim to ownership of the money generated by the business (this is what the gGmbH status does; it's a bit like 501(c)3 in the U.S.) -- But they want to retain control over the business. They want to make entrepreneurial decisions as they go, changing strategies along the way in whatever way they please, without restricting themselves too much to the execution of any predefined programme.
But that's not what I'm asking about. Unlike in the US, Stiftungs in Germany (both family and public-purpose) can own an unrestricted percentage of shares -- including all of them -- in normal companies (Kapitalgesellschaften). And I'm specifically interested *not* in restructuring a GmbH as a Stiftung, which is what Ecosia decided against, but rather, I'm wondering if there are any resources available discussing pros and cons of forming a Stiftung as a holding entity, fully owning a GmbH subsidiary (such a construct is not legally possible in the US).
From my perspective, this holding structure would provide much better legal insulation (in both directions) from the founders, preserve the operational flexibility of the (operational) GmbH, while allowing distributions from the GmbH (which would, by definition of being a 100% stakeholder, flow exclusively into the Stiftung) to be distributed by the (purely administrative) Stiftung, according to the founding documents. But I've never seen such an arrangement discussed in depth, which is why I'm asking about it.
Regarding your last paragraph, where you say that a foundation provides better insulation from founder control, it sounds to me like you answered your own question: Retention of control vs. insulation from control is precisely the distinction here.
Foundations are typically for people who don't have the option of retaining control, even if they wanted to, because they are typically close to death and in the process of structuring an inheritance. Handing over control to person X is something they see as a threat, because they assume that X will screw it up, so they'd rather make it so that no one can have control.
With social entrepreneurship like Ecosia, founders are typically still young and somewhat idealistic. They want to retain the control, because them being in control is not something they see as a threat. Rather that's what they see as the best possible mechanism for their company/cause retaining its idealistic values. (Also, they are looking for something meaningful to do with their lives).
A cynic might notice that you're kind of looking at regular narcissism vs. communal narcissism here.
If you wanted to structure your social entrepreneurship type business as a foundation which owns 100% of the shares in "your" for-profit corporation, that doesn't work as a "have your cake and eat it too" solution, because either that means that the trustees of the foundation are actually your boss and you're just a replaceable employee with replaceable employee wages or, if you try to pull any shenanigans to make it so that this is not the case, the trust loses its tax-free / "community interest" status. Trying to game this system is something that rich people are routinely trying to do. I'm not saying that some don't get away with it, but the authorities generally have a lot of tools at their disposal to fight this sort of thing.
What I mean by legal insulation is more that, in this holding construct, the GmbH ceases to have any financial relationship to the founders. Stiftungs are sort of... headless financial pools governed strictly by their founding documents, completely divorced from the people that created them, and the GmbH would simply be an asset in that financial pool. That means that, for example, were someone to sue the founders, even for something completely unrelated, there is no possible way that shares in the GmbH could possibly end up someone else's hands. Typically when we talk about the liability limitations in corporations, we're talking about them in terms of shielding the founders from the actions of the company, but the inverse is in my opinion just as important (if you're truly interested in forming a self-governing social organization pursuing a social good). I'm not sure if there's any examples of shares in a gGmbH being assessed as assets in a civil case; that would be another interesting question to inform the decision.
That being said, one of the reasons that I'm so interested in the idea of a Stiftung holding, is that I think it also opens up options for actual democracy within the leadership of a company, which is a fascinating idea. That isn't a requirement in a Stiftung holding relationship, but I do think it's an interesting possibility.
At any rate, I think probably the primary downside of this idea is that, like I said, I've not seen any examples of it discussed publicly. Which means you'd need to be doing a lot of the legal legwork on your own -- which means lots of time spent talking to lawyers, which would be really expensive. But I think there's some really interesting possibility for innovation in terms of corporate governance here, in a way that, like I said, wouldn't be legally possible in the US, and it definitely seems like the structure that gives the social purpose the maximum possible protection.
This stuff actually gets a lot of attention from lawmakers: For example, in the U.K. you have the “CIC” (community interest company). Some 13 years ago, David Cameron tried pretty hard to motivate enthusiasm for the idea of a “third sector”, something that's not government and not for-profit. In the U.S. you also have the “L3C” (low-profit limited liability company). In Germany, you have the idea of “Verantwortungseigentum” which was on the agenda for the previous government, though they then didn't get around to it, and you had Sahra Wagenknecht making it into a big talking point for her campaign.
But I don't think a lack of legal infrastructure is really the limiting factor here: As you noticed, we do have foundations (Stiftung) of various types, as well as coops (Genossenschaft). In addition, regular partnerships (like KG, OG) have recently been opened up so that their bylaws can now prescribe a purpose that isn't for-profit. A club (Verein) which in and of itself isn't for-profit, can have a sort of dual identity because it can become the proprietor of a sole proprietorship with a for-profit purpose (at least I seem to recall reading that such a thing is possible). Oh, and, of course, a corporation can, in theory, own 100% of its own shares. I recall reading about that, just please don't ask me where. You can basically wipe out ownership that way, without being subject to the stringent rules around foundations.
So, legal structures are as powerful and flexible as they are underutilised: I think it's the psychological side that explains why.
Usually, even if you have very good intentions, your best bet initially is to start your entity as a for-profit. Being able to operate cheaply and without cumbersome decision-making structures beats lofty aspirations for any business that just gets started. Not turning a profit in a given year (and not paying taxes because you don't turn a profit), is an option you always have. (There's no special paperwork needed for that). In fact: Not having any profit to worry about when it comes to your structure is the likely outcome. Having a profit and trying to decide how to make it so that your profits won't corrupt you in your idealism is a problem you would quite like to have! (Again: From the perspective of a founder who is just getting started).
Then, the day comes where you turn a profit quite regularly. And, at that point, once the flywheel has got going, truly giving up control will be psychologically difficult.
It is indeed possible to have a so-called "kein-Mann GmbH" where the company has bought back all of its shares, though my understanding is that it's a bit of a legal grey area, and certainly not settled law.
I agree that the legal infrastructure is almost certainly there, at least in the sense that there are absolutely plenty of lawyers and lawmakers that specialize in this area. My point is simply that, because it's so much less common, basically every situation ends up being unique, which means that the work that the lawyers are doing is almost always a one-off, which makes it really expensive. And so it's just not worth the effort.
Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.
It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.
Trees need a safe place to grow without saplings getting destroyed.
But trees absolutely don't need planting. Besides, a healthy forest has to go through pioneering stages first.
It's true that if your goal is to regenerate native forest, which it generally[+] should be where that's an option, then it's indeed true that you want to allow existing forest to regenerate as naturally as possible. The problem in these cases is either land use (land is used for forestry / agriculture / etc. so there's nowhere for new trees to grow) or over-grazing (either by livestock such as sheep or by high populations of wild herbivores such as deer). In those cases you need to solve the underlying problems rather than just counting the number of saplings in the ground (in a heavily browsed area planting may have the advantage that you tend to put in tree guards. Ideally one could instead install appropriate fencing around the entire area to reduce herbivore numbers below the problematic levels).
However you aren't always in that scenario. For example if you're in a landscape with few seed sources then natural regeneration might take an implausibly long time. An extreme example of that would be "regreen the desert" type projects where you need to bootstrap the conditions for tree growth by putting in a lot of trees in a short space of time, although those have a high failure rate. You might also be worried that natural regeneration is too slow in the face of changing climatic conditions, and want to plant trees right for the anticipated climate 100 years hence (although that itself is likely to be controversial).
And of course frequently in the real world tree-planting projects have goals totally unrelated to climate change e.g. just forestry, and as such one shouldn't expect those things to be especially good for the climate, or at all good for biodiversity.
Anyway, I like the idea of companies dedicating part of their revenue to tackling severe global problems like climate change. But I tend to agree that Ecosia's continued focus on tree planting as their headline activity makes them look a bit naive to the audience that is likely to be most receptive to changing products specifically for environmental reasons. Hopefully some of the other project types they're moving into look better in the details than just tree planting.
[+] But not always of course. Converting peat bog to woodland, for example, is going to reduce its effectiveness as a carbon store, and likely reduce biodiversity as well.
Many trees fail to grow. Most people would be astounded at how many trees don't make it.
Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.
You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.
Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.
And you're taking them anyway in the form of planting trees. You could have just had a normal company and taken all the profit you wanted and used it to plant trees and done the same thing. I guess this is somehow more tax-efficient, but it’s not really any different in principle.
It's a very interesting problem. When starting a company the biggest problem is often getting the first few users. One option is to build something people want - another is to build something your friends want - but another option is to build something the media wants to talk about.