Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There’s a need for more risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can already access traditional funding.
Welp, there goes another SaaS platform in our corporate ops toolchain. Anyone have a recommendation for a tool to handle the cap table for an early-stage cooperative with several hundred members that won’t cost us an arm and a leg? Excel?
This was a fundamental question for me before taking the plunge into starting a coop. Long story short, I did a lot of research and there wasn’t anything that really compensated risk in early stage startups hence the dearth of platform coops.
We ended up structuring our coop to have equity split from voting rights to allow employees to have ESOPs and investors to invest as they do in traditional corporation minus their control of the board. In theory we would be able to IPO down the line, and perhaps become the first coop to do so without demutualizing or a separate investment vehicle on the side.
This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.
Managing the dispatch of our delivery drivers and monitoring our infra over the holidays.
Wish there was some way to bond with others that are on-call while being on-call. It’s lonely with the rest of the company being away. I guess this thread is a close as we get.
Best of luck to you and anyone else with generator fires and Happy Holidays to all!
Our venture-backed cooperative startup board has 1/3rd of its seats reserved for its employees, which incorporates both corporate staff (devs, marketing, etc) and operational staff (drivers, support).
The other 2/3rds are divided equally between our restaurant and consumer members. Each member class votes exclusively for their portion of the board seats.
We’re nearing year three,
and this arrangement has been working well for us. We’ll see if it can continue to scale as we expand geographically.
IMHO as someone who participated in a lot of these non-equity corporate accelerators, both as a startup and as part of the technical teams supporting the initiatives (at two different companies), it’s primarily cheap PR for both the parent company and the startups. There are some perks like the product and service credits as well as the opportunity to network with relevant teams at ParentCo, but I find the experience hardly comparable to a more traditional accelerator like YC. It’s a question of incentives.
If your partner has the bandwidth, I would consider applying for the perks, but I would be mindful of getting distracted by things that don’t entail building product/solving the core problem and selling to clients.
Re solo founders. Would you consider a team with one founder and 1-2 "employees"?
The reason I ask this is because my partners and I have more of a mentor-tutee relationship and although we all share perks and they get equity (considerably less than my share, but still sizeable), they see themselves more as learning than being at the same level as myself in terms of responsibility.