Explored the idea of starting a tech coop myself. Haven't really went into too much theory because it felt off. Already established tech coops are closed, have a steady income, started as a group of close friends and they most probably just profit from calling themselves a coop. In reality, you will fail hard and fast trying to find the right people who will accept working on their time to share income with some hippy dude sketching out some figma designs when he happens to be awake. I'd better start a company and learn how to add a profit margin to other people's work

The biggest issue is attribution.

How many shares should I get versus you?

Next you have the problem with all your early employees leaving if you give them too much equity.

Also at some point new products would cannibalize old products.

Next is the issue with attracting startup and growth capital.

Pay everyone the same base salary.

RSUs would be vested.

RSUs would be determined by an intensive yearly calibration process where every manager has to agree on the nature of their employees' revenue and internal efficiency impact.

> Also at some point new products would cannibalize old products.

This happens everywhere and doesn't have anything to do with a different structure.

> Next is the issue with attracting startup and growth capital.

This is also a generic problem faced by all.

I like the idea of co-op’s for things like insurance, mutual aid, buying clubs, etc. But for a tech business, it could be difficult. I’m sure there are legal resources available to figure out how to do it, but I would guess the biggest obstacles are:

1. Equity liquidity—-workers coming and going won’t be able to sell their equity without a large discount;

2. But if equity liquidity is mandated in the bylaws, then there is the issue of having cash available to grow the business; and

3. With a lot of owners, you have a cap table that is always in flux, difficult and expensive to manage and/or discouraging to any future acquirer.

Megatechcorps pay much more than most employees are "worth" because nearly all employees in a large org are completely replaceable and for any given job holder there are 100 or more people who would do a fine job and would take less money for it.

The main reason companies get large is not the work, but the financials. To be able to deploy capital on the scale that any large tech corp deploys it- billions for data centers, manufacturing, compute, etc- requires unified capital management. Single balance sheet, etc.

Disagree somewhat.

A small % of employees in megacorps contribute disproportionate impact, and their income (and bonuses) don't directly reflect this. It's all but assured that underpaid temporary workers contribute massive shareholder value while seeing little-or-no sharing of the spoils.

Groups that need to deduplicate costly Cap/OpEx could embark joint ventures. Buy in bulk, standardize, and share resources as much as possible rather than DIY.

This is the area of economics that deals with this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Among other things, while the workers might like the upside of ownership, do they also want the downsides? If so, why don't they just buy the megacorp stock?

Megacorp has a constant stream of candidates wanting to work for them and pushing salaries down, would a worker owned co-op have that?

How do you distribute equity?

My idea: Map shares to dollars. So if you get a paycheck for $100, you get newly created 100 shares.

So the people who get paid more get more equity, equity accrues according to how long someone is with the company, and everyone who contributed to the company in any way owns equity.

Main problem is inflation. Later employees will get more shares for what is effectively the same pay priced in older dollars.