 Our next talk is Oliver Sauder, also a very good friend, and Oliver is the person that years ago started to talk to me about a new way to incorporate a project, whether it's a startup or an organization, in a way that is not, let's say, so heavily prescribing and constricting and predefined, let's say, a comparative, which a lot of people, especially in our culture, tend to orientate themselves to. But something that it's still conserving actually allow you much more creativity in terms of what kind of rules you want to embed in this organization, while having something that is also more, we're basically where the people that are actually producing value inside this organization, they are the one that also are owning the, let's say, the financial destiny of this organization. And we've been talking lately, especially in the last year, how this is something that is not only relevant for just any project, because it allow you to make something that is ethical, but also lean and easy as opening a normal game bay in Germany, that would be or a UGAY that would be in Germany, the kind of a limited company. But also how it's particularly relevant for collaborative ecosystems, like the one we are seeing emerging in the web tree domain. So we're actually organization needs to collaborate if they want to develop interoperable infrastructure. But the advantages are so much more. And I let Oliver to share his talk with us. And we can come back when it's done to have a little reflection together. So Oliver, the stage is all yours. Thank you very much. You can share your You can see the screen on full, right? We can see the screen in full and we can also Yes. Yeah, I'm Oliver. And I incorporated a company called World Brain with the Stuart ownership model. And maybe saying incorporation isn't maybe not the right term. The Stuart ownership in itself is a social contract that is like made between investors and team members, and primarily in how to reward people participating in the company or taking the risk. And if you like to also adding some governance structures, so a cooperative is in a way a Stuart owned company with very specific rules. But I'll come to why this is the case in a second. So if we're thinking about the problem of step of attention and data, we all know these examples of Facebook, like building this entire machinery to optimize targeting of ads to you and selling it off to third parties. So or you may some of you have seen the social dilemma, which like points out how these algorithms are optimized for sucking in your attention. And the root cause I don't see necessarily in like, not ballistic workers or the necessity to make profit. The root cause I see that the current investor reward models investors essentially have get more profits if the company makes more profits or grows in value. And there is really no cap on how much that can be. And in the end, what that means is that there's always a competition and a need a competition for social responsibility and a need for a company to build more exploitative algorithms, to build or incorporate business models that can neglect the externalities, the costs that are created in society in the environment, for example, too. So, except here, there are other unaccounted externalities. If there's constant competitive dynamic between the profits that the company gets, and the costs that it would occur in order to pay your workers better to improve your supply chain sustainability, or to adopt the business model that does not require to sell off data or build the most tension grabbing algorithms, they're out there. So there's what we want to figure out is a way of where can we give a company more social, more economic freedom for social responsibility. And it's actually, oh yeah, so one other issue is if you have kind of an optimization towards profit maximization over time, you will always end up with an immense amount of wealth and equality. And you cannot stop it because the rich have more means and less risk to invest more money. And then essentially over time it will just create this kind of wealth and equality. And interestingly, this is an interesting fact, factoid I found out, and where I'm still not sure where I see like cryptocurrencies really making those economies more decentralized because if we're looking, for example, on Bitcoin and the wealth distribution in Bitcoin, which is by the way, according to these lists and this data, one of the more decentralized, economically decentralized communities, we have the top 0.01% of the US owning 12% of the wealth in Bitcoin is 42%. Of course, there's also some whales or bigger exchanges that hold some of those wallets. But still, even if it's half, the amount of centralization of economic power has been at a really breakneck speed in this case. And what we hope for is that we figure out a way of, for example, the talks that Eugenie had in the past year about how can we tokenize student ownership and use the advantage of like the currencies becoming, having a force, being a force of decentralization by enabling more access to people that usually are locked out of financial markets and that can't go to buy stocks in the stock market. But still, we need to figure out how we not repeat the same uncapped investor returns that lead to the kind of maximization incentives in those communities. And weirdly, it's also quite an antithetical economic approach when you think about that the decentralization community wants to build more decentralization into an economy, but deploy economic reward mechanisms, speculation, mainly in this case, to hyper-centralize. It's something that I'm very wary about. And I hope we can have more of those conversations into crypto communities that effectively try to decentralize power. So what we want from an alternative model of rewarding investors is that extractive actors can turn into regenerative actors. And this means we also need to reduce the ability for executing on greed as much as possible. And what we also need here is that this alternative economic model has an economic freedom built in for social responsibility. So lower costs at higher costs and lower profits for the company does not necessarily mean lower return for investors. Then secondly, we also need a fair reward of effort. And this is what I believe is the great part about capitalism as we know it, is that it incentivizes people to actually do more and take risks. And this is what we need. We need to have a certain level of growth in order to progress forward and actually solve most of the challenges that we have right now. But the question that we never asked ourselves or that is not explicitly asked in the current capitalistic reward mechanisms is how much is actually enough? So how much is enough for the individual as to make profit, for the company to make profit? And this is what we never ask. And the third requirement that we need for an alternative economic reward model is that it doesn't need any or very little regulation. And the reason for that is simple, that as soon as you have regulation, people try to cheat it. So the more you can create incentive structures that intrinsically modulate the person to not to do well, the better you are in the end off because you don't need to regulate, you don't need to persecute the people who exploit the system. So yeah, how do we solve this? Essentially what we definitely need to figure out is a way of breaking this binary thinking where we're right now in the world where we think about capitalism is the only way or socialism is the only way to make very extreme comparison right now. And to get more into something like what is the best part from capitalism that we can use and what is the best part from socialism that we can use? So how do we take the incentives to grow to a certain level and combine it with the social responsibility that is at least baked into the values of socialist structures? And we end up with a model called steward ownership, what I thought was an investor reward model that protects your data and attention, or an investor reward model for a regenerative economy. And essentially the two principles that this model has is the first one, the company cannot be sold. There's no exit, there's no market that can optimize for growth, there's no market that can rip out the purpose of people running the company out of their hands. Like for example, if you are doing an IPO with your company, then essentially the market dictates from that point on what you as a leadership level will do. Like in the US it's even so extreme that you can be held like financially liable as a CEO if you actively take actions, if knowingly take actions that lower the profits of investors, which is fucking crazy. Like if we think about that this is even baked into the legal structures, then profit maximization is the only way forward for those companies. So essentially this mode of corrupting the purpose of the company and corrupting the ability of the company to be socially responsible needs to be removed and that's what the first principle does. And the second principle is that the reward for investors and team members happens through a capped profit share. This is really important here. Like we need, again, we need a way of rewarding people who take risk and who spend an extraordinary amount of time into hopefully building something that makes a positive difference in hundreds of thousands to millions of people on this planet and they should be rewarded in a fair way. But again, through introducing a cap on that on that reward, you essentially ask this question, how much is actually enough? And how much is there? And on the example of our company, we raised so far about 400,000 euros and we still have 100% of our shares, which is amazing. And what we basically say to the 130,000 euros we got through investors is that their seed and pre-seed investments are coming at the higher risk. So they will get a six to eight X return out of these 130K, make it easier for the calculation 100K. So we have effectively debt to those investors of about 650,000, 700,000 euros. And what we do is we take 25% of our profits to pay back those investors. And what that means essentially is that after we deduct all of the expenses that we want to put into the growth of the company, deduct the expenses that go to investors and team members, we end up with three capital that suddenly can be reinvested without lowering the total returns of people. And this is really a game changer in the end, because it is exactly the kind of social responsibility that is enabled by not having a competitive relationship anymore between what the investor profits are and what the, let's say, society profits are by having a better supply chain or by the workers getting paid sick leave better or parental locations, et cetera. And this is also not something new. Like Stuart ownership has been around for over 100 years. And in its natural form, it's very related to the German Mittelstand, which is the middle class economy in Germany, where the, which is the bedrock of why Germany right now is such a solid and socially stable country. And if you think about companies that are like Stuart ownership has been more like prevalent until now in hardware domains like e-commerce or industry, but it's now slowly and steadily going into also online area. So for example, Mozilla as a Stuart ownership company, buffers, so Stuart ownership company, Ecosia and the older charge like John, John Lewis, the supermarket and Bosch and size and size actually invented it. So the guys who make the camera lenses on your phone and Bosch, a lot of people probably know. So in the end, what I feel what happens through Stuart ownership is actually, we're ending up in a win, win, win, or how the game be people call it an omnivin scenario, because in this case, everyone will. The company, for example, is you get people with more skin in the game because they know they will not work just for investors' interests. They also work for their own interests and for the, for their own ability to be profit profitable. The company actually also has, through that, a more long-term sustainability because everyone knows if we're not building a profitable company that actually makes sustainable revenue and it's not just optimizing for the next quarterly results, our likelihood that we're getting our money back at all and faster, like more speedy, is higher. The company has also more freedom because it doesn't need to obey to stock market's interests as soon as it goes on that level of like scale in the end. And also because it has less pressure to grow at all costs, which a lot of companies and a lot of startups actually suffer with after they raise their first money and then they become these kind of walking dead companies, which are kind of working and potentially profitable but are not interesting anymore for additional investors when they want to, for example, extend certain product lines, etc. And then they just become these walking dead, which is kind of sad. Like these are the companies that work and they support a lot of people and those companies have to make really difficult decisions that often kill those companies in the end. It also benefits a lot of people. People are happier because they feel supported, they feel valued and value is like the value of your contribution is a very active and conscious conversation that happens inside a student-owned company because you cannot just go and say like, oh yeah, because you're a founder or like you're the second employee, you usually get like 3% of the company. You actually have to have a conversation about, hey, what are your skills? What is your risk that you right now take? Where do you contribute? Where did you contribute? And how much time of your free time did you take? How much maybe less salary did you take in order to have a higher return based on the like actually putting in money into the company, etc. And so you have a multitude of aspects that you can take into account making the people at the end feeling much more valued to work at a student-owned company and working for a company that just optimizes for like company profits. And also the company takes care of them more because suddenly you have more like profits or like expenditures that can be taken to improve workers' lives. And in the end, everyone can still get very wealthy and should like if you build a company that actually helps millions of people, you should be rich. I don't care, but I don't see a point where you might be a billionaire like which is I feel not in relation in most cases to how much value someone generated in society. Somehow if I click, it doesn't sometimes doesn't switch. Okay, yeah, there's also benefits for investors. The student ownership model historically has shown that those companies have a six times higher survival rate than VC funded companies. And this is partly due to the fact that people actually with skin in the game with the interest to make it profitable much more likely like create a business that is profitable and that when it's profitable, it's much harder to kill or yeah, as opposed to a company that gets to a billion dollar valuation without making any profits and then falters because some competitor comes up. And also a benefit for the investor is in the end that through the six times higher survival rate, you create on an entire portfolio and almost equally competitive return rate than a regular VC or classic VC portfolio where you have only one out of 10 companies actually surviving. And also the profits that are made because they are returned gradually like I said before where the company pays back from its own profits pays back the depth that it has towards the investor. The investor also have has the ability to reinvest that money straight away and not only when the company has an exit or is again sold to another investor where they can sell their shares. The only reason here is brief I feel because you essentially remove through the cap you remove the ability for people being greedy. They might be able to optimize that they can get their profits back faster, but they cannot optimize for getting as much out of the company as possible. If you're generally interested how to implement steward ownership, there is a couple of ways. So again the principles are you cannot be sold and you cap the investor returns and so you have a lot of opportunities to do that differently. The simplest one is a plastic loan. It requires high trust and works with angels that have like that want to invest and you really know them because there's less legal ability for the investor to force you to pay a share of your profits for example. But for the beginning you can open a classic limited liability company or UG or GMBH whatever and then just use a loan no problem. The second one is a style of partnership which is a way of against the German construct so I don't know if how like how you can do that in other jurisdictions but a silent partnership is essentially giving the investor the rights to claim some of the profits the company makes on a legal on a legal basis and has also more transparency rights in terms of what the company does. Then the full model is the purpose model which is advocated by the purpose economy folks they're also in Berlin which essentially is you give a veto share to a foundation and the foundation has the only purpose to veto any sale of shares of the company or veto a strong deviation on the of the purpose that the company has right now as opposed to where it was founded. However again whatever kind of governance structure you implement is another thing like important is that you can use you can really make it solid to at least your company cannot be sold because of the this foundation backing or blocking this ability. And a bit more experimental this is something that Eugene and me have been talking about a lot how do you use for example a crypto token with a fixed re-buy rate that essentially allows for secondary market to occur but the secondary market would kind of create a tunnel of where profit can occur so someone that for example invested in the company 100k and should get back 500,000 when he sells it on a secondary market he's not able to sell it for 500,000 he's maybe able to sell it for 200,000 so that the person who invests has the ability to get the rest of the 300,000 euros as their profit out of the investment they make. Yeah but that's if you're interested in continuing this conversation you can write me at ollie at worldbrain.io but that's really early stages to think about this and to really marry those two worlds of again the advantages that crypto offers but also removing the what I believe are more toxic dynamics that we copied from the existing system that actually in my view is probably one of the reasons why bitcoin was created in the first place as one of the results of the exploitation of the current uncapped reward models. If you're generally interested in more resources to read about this you can go to worldbrain.io slash steward ownership to purposeeconomy.org zebraunite.com or read a book The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato which is amazing book to understand or to dive into how do we have a future economy where we have the ability to put a value on contribution and where value is created in our society. Last thing if you want to change as an investor or a funder in any form consider investing in steward owned organizations and because the early stages of those companies is extremely difficult to raise money it was a pain for us to do so it was a lot of work that could be easier by more capital being available to companies that want to be more socially oriented but still be a for-profit company which we need we cannot just go with just non-profit or just for profit and if your team do everything to keep your equity and control if you can keep your equity try to keep control and control in such a way that you have the ability to change the reward mechanisms later don't get into the situation that you have that you either way veto rights to certain investors which happens a lot actually that actually would enable investors even in a minority stake to get you out of your founder or CEO or CFO or whatever position that you hold as a person running that company. Yeah I think there's one last slide let me check not very responsive sometimes. Yeah that's it. If you guys have any questions we can start with that now and I check in into the Q&A section. Yeah thank you Oliver I was checking let's see if somebody you still have some time I was checking for some reason the text on the Slido and the overlay to join the conversation didn't work but I'm also making something more long-term let me see so let me also add something more long-term because I see it on Slido people are also like asking if there is some more long-term conversation to have so I created this telegram group that you can just join I just created it so there's just me and Jacob but yeah we can just overlay and then people can we can repulse the talks when when when they get released by the VOC the the the technical infrastructure of the CCC that will physically cut and put an intro and outro into into the into our around our videos but yeah it's always exciting I really hope that this new way is also bringing more people that are actually struggling with like finding ways that are not as prescriptive and and sort of I mean I don't have anything against comparative per se but for instance in Italy which is the country where I come from that legal design is also used to do bad things you know to kind of exploit bluefall in funding and in like marginalizing the way some of the the way you treat your workforce so it's not all the good actually and in Germany I'm hearing a lot of complaints about certain kind of I would say yeah kind of constraints that the regulator puts on you oh yeah yeah like especially if you're a young organization a being a cooperative is not necessarily a good thing because you you immediately give out the governance control and I mean the legal governance control to a much bigger pool of people that have to be put in alignment before they can be effective and especially in the early stages you need to be very like fast moving as a company and be able to make decisions fast and especially if you've found an organization with usually years of prior thinking and experience as a founder you have some level of kind of thoroughness of thought tendentiously that that you need to be able to execute and that it's difficult if you run you run a cooperative and actually a friend of mine this happened to is that his cooperative got overtaken by a board that has been elected by the overarching community and that was completely incompetent in in in running this cooperative and in the end it faltered and went from a promising actually a promising role model of being a cooperative in first place and for a business model that worked to an organization that essentially is bankrupt right now and so yeah it's kind of tricky so yeah it's super exciting what we are seeing oh i'm muted yeah is your ask conference yeah i was muted on on zoom um but yeah um i think yeah it's super exciting what i'm also seeing um in the web tree space where there are um few players that are trying to basically reduce the complexity of interfacing with the legal requirements that you have in each geography and in each sort of um regulation framework depending it's if it's a different industry different geography and and sort of providing interfaces for just normal entrepreneurs to allow a much variety of stakeholders to uh to join the the share ownership and uh and the ownership in general um one example is is fair mint uh which they're doing great job in us canada i think now they're doing something um but yeah it's like on one side is like how you make it um let's say a legal or paralegal so something that is like not necessarily uh proactively regulated by by the regulator but something that can work around what is the current situation and rapidly evolve um in response to that um cool so we will bring the the channel in in pause uh oliver will also join us in the next days uh from for other events uh as a commentator and uh you'll treat with this brother timmy which is also gonna bring some fun to the channel i hope and um we go a little bit in pause for uh five minutes and uh we join with the next talk um so say with us bye folks