> If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works

I run a co-op, and the most surprising thing I've learned is that it seems the only reason other people don't set up their businesses as co-ops is, frankly, greed.

In this startup ecosystem, why would you do a co-op when you could instead chase that multi million dollar exit that profits you? If we have any kind of event like that the earnings would be distributed basically equally among around 30 people. 20 mill payout suddenly becomes... Less...

Anyway though apparently statistics are on my side. Apparently co-ops are more sustainable and live for longer than traditional corporations. It seems to me that people are much happier here than at traditional corporations.

Clients are happy, engineers are happy and productive, I'm happy because I don't have the entire responsibility of the business on my shoulders - engineers are constantly contributing to the improvement of internal systems for example, because why wouldn't they? That saves them money too!

Downsides are increased ownership come with increased responsibility. Can't just clock in here, people need to manage the client relationship, issue invoices, participate in the accounting, and if they want more work when their gig is closing out, either try to sell the client on more work or help us find another one. Until we can find an alternative revenue stream to selling our labor to clients, we're all beholden to keeping the BD wheel turning in order to get paid. Upside is that we're keeping 85% of the margin for ourselves rather than at toptal where you keep, idk, 30%? And that 15% is still our money anyway it just gets used for overall co-op stuff, which members get to decide on.

Also I don't know if this kind of business lends itself to the silicon valley mythos of the huge work week for a few years followed by functional retirement. Instead it seems we'll all need to keep working for the foreseeable future, but at our own reasonable pace, fully remote, our own hours, at very high compensation but not "fuck you money" compensation. Well except for our people in Ethiopia and Taiwan, for the local market rates, their compensation is getting way up into that territory.

That said, I don't know about our ability to survive a full on capitalist attack in the form of lawfare or getting priced out or closed out of deals. Priced out in a labor market would be difficult since the only way to beat our labor margins is to hire directly, but we could be lawfared to death pretty easily considering our ARR might be 1 mil this year if we're lucky.