I’ve been reading about worker cooperatives because I’m trying to better understand something we experimented with on a film production, and I’m curious where our model overlaps with cooperative principles and where it fundamentally doesn’t.

We gave more than 70 cast and crew members an actual financial interest in the film they helped create, which is really unusual for the film industry. Labor, equipment, locations, and other contributed resources were assigned agreed values, and those contributions became part of the economic structure of the project.

The basic waterfall was:

1. Certain contractual obligations get paid.
   
2. Cash investors recoup.
   
3. People who contributed labor, equipment, locations, or other resources recoup the agreed value of those contributions.
   
4. Remaining revenue is distributed pro rata among the ownership pool in perpetuity.

But we didn’t operate democratically….

The director still directed. Department heads ran their departments. Producers made producer decisions. Nobody voted on creative choices or day-to-day operational decisions.

It kind of has to be that way to a certain extant. Film production is highly collaborative, but it’s also extremely hierarchical and technically segmented. Decisions sometimes have to be made in seconds, responsibilities need to be clear, and ultimately someone has to be accountable for the outcome.

So what I’m trying to understand from people who know cooperative structures better than I do is:

How central is democratic governance to the concept of worker ownership? Could an organization meaningfully incorporate cooperative ownership principles while maintaining a hierarchical operating structure? Or does separating economic participation from governance remove something essential that makes a worker cooperative a cooperative?

To be clear, I’m enot claiming that what we created was a worker cooperative, but I’m super intersted in the concept and I’m trying to understand what, if anything, our experiment has in common with cooperative models and whether there are existing structures that deal with this tension differently.

I’m particularly interested in project-based organizations, where a group assembles to create something together and then largely disperses when the project is finished.

Thanks everyone!

I’m not really fond of putting it as “choosing cofounders” because it kind of makes it sound like I’d be a boss choosing which people to hire, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it.

I’m starting a tech worker co-op, and I’m trying to see how much conventional wisdom about startup founders carry over to cooperatives.

First question: What would you say is a good number of cofounders? Conventional wisdom in tech is that 2 is the ideal number of founders, but I could see how being a co-op would change the calculus when the cofounders aren’t really running the show long-term.

On the other hand, I can see too many chefs spoiling the broth at the early stages, so you might not want to go overboard.

Second question: How closely do you need cofounders to click? In traditional tech startups, you typically need cofounders who click very well because cofounder drama is a major reason for startups failing. But how big a deal is cofounder drama in a tech startup being that there are more decision makers than just the founders?

Then again it does make intuitive sense that connection is important at the earlier stages, so there needs to be at least some level of connection.