In this session, you will learn about new concepts, trends, and techniques to marry a platform business model with a cooperative.
Platform cooperatives leverage network effects, platform technology and member engagement to break the mold of "rent seeking" and extraction, made infamous by Silicon Valley-backed start-ups. Platform cooperatives put value-creators at the center and align incentives by allocating surplus back to members in proportion to their platform contributions or consumption. Many of these platform cooperatives opt for multi-stakeholder design. Emerging trends enable platform cooperatives to optimize for financeability as well as community ownership.
Panelists:
Lauren Ruffin
Lauren Ruffin is co-founder of CRUX Cooperative, an Albuquerque-based immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Mx. Ruffin is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. Mx. Ruffin has nearly 20 years experience in policy, marketing, business development, and strategic planning in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. It’s their mission to take the skills and lessons they’ve learned and share them with Black and Indigenous led organizations for radical social change.
Dr. Astrid J. Scholz is a co-founder of Zebras Unite, a growing global cooperative of founders, investors, and allies who are creating a more ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable approach to building businesses. She leads Zebras Unite’s capital team. Astrid is also Managing Partner of Armillaria, a system design and technology collective dedicated to co-creating global, distributed, democratic infrastructure for mobilizing data, innovations, and capital to solve today’s wicked problems (see https://trillions.global). Astrid was previously President of Ecotrust, a conservation-based development organization with $150M in assets under management. She holds degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews, Bristol, and California at Berkeley.
Jason Weiner
Jason Weiner is the Principal of the boutique law and business consulting practice Jason Wiener|p.c., and co-founder of “Colorado Cooperative Developers.” He specializes in cooperative law, shared ownership models, cooperative finance, regenerative capital and financing strategies, sustainable economies law, teal lawyering, virtual outside general counsel, and worker-ownership. Mr. Weiner has significant experience structuring platform cooperatives.
