Traditional startup roadmap Investor ownership is the default for technology companies and startups. Typically, founders go from owning 100% of a company, to gradually selling more and more in sequential fundraising rounds. Often, investors will purchase 20-30% of a company in each round of funding. After several rounds of funding, investors are likely to own […]
Many gig economy startups have created commanded high valuations built on the collective labor of their contract workforce. These platforms have promised that, if we choose, we can improve our lives by becoming a side hustling solopreneur. In our spare time, we can drive people with our cars, walk other people’s dogs, or assemble a […]
Background At Ampled, I’ve led the process of researching the necessary steps and considerations for becoming a cooperative. Starting the process was intimidating. While there are endless blog posts and videos explaining how to start startups, almost none of the material is applicable to starting a co-op. We don’t have a team like a traditional […]
Find it here: Marisol Sandoval, “Entrepreneurial Activism? Platform Cooperativism Between Subversion and Co-optation,” Critical Sociology (November 13, 2019)
This year, Ampled worked with the CUNY Community & Economic Development Clinic to develop simple revenue share investment term sheets, which allow organizations to receive funding while retaining ownership and control. We are openly sharing them here for anyone to adapt, use, and improve. Our goal with Ampled is to create a platform that is […]
Last year, our team formed to build Ampled, an ethical web platform that allows music artists to be supported by their community with direct, recurring payments. The goal with Ampled is to help artists gain sustainable and predictable income in today’s streaming economy and give them ownership and control over a platform they rely on. […]
Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want to get rid of. But […]
by Arielle Jordan I’m the founder and CEO of Curafied. Curafied is a platform that helps digital content creators earn monthly income by charging a low monthly subscription to fans for their content creation and curation directly—not from “patron” donations or advertising sponsorships. We’re exploring a new direction for our startup, and I would like […]
I work in a startup town, the rare kind of place where you can trip over veteran founders, with multiple exits behind then, on the sidewalk. By “exits,” I mean the end-goal of most tech-oriented startups—the moment when the startup is sold, either to a bigger company or, more rarely, to the investing public on […]
The winners of the Propaganda Challenge—which distributes proceeds from our book Ours to Hack and to Own—have been chosen. Above all, we were blown away by the entries, all of which were thrilling to see. We had to make a choice, however, and we decided on the basis of promise and variety: Mai Ishikawa Sutton […]