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> How would a business like this get started?

The one I know, it just started out with some people who were all equal co-owners. When a new employee joins, they get the same share as everyone else. When someone leaves, they lose their share. Shares can't be sold, everyone has the same amount. It's a cooperative.



This seems extremely good for late employees and extremely bad for early employees / founders? Late employees have no risk and the same reward.


Seems also like a perverse incentive to delay or avoid hiring as well. Every new employee makes everyone else poorer. Unless that one employee is so productive they single handedly make up for lost ownership with increased profit.


Well, is that a perverse incentive? Maybe it just means the company is better off without another employee right now.

But the employees also have other things in mind besides profit, like their work load.


It's originally a software agency that later decided to also develop some of their own products, so there's not that much risk. The primary reward for everyone is just their wages.

They're organized at team level, teams have to write business plans that must be approved by people from other teams, teams decide whether to recruit an extra person, and so on.

Large investments (they built a new hq) are voted on by the whole company.




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