The Full Circle
On the topic we have been avoiding this whole time: the rise and fall of our co-owned company.
In the last episode of this season, we took the dogs to the Buda Hills to have a surprisingly chill conversation about the emotionally loaded subject of our experience with co-ownership, distributed decision-making, and trust.
The path we took:
A journey back in time to 2015: the pitch to join a co-owned company, and what made us say yes.
The era of building end-to-end product agency / venture builder hybrids.
The beanbags and foosball tables of every 2010s office, aka hiring developers before the bootcamp boom.
The motivational powers, technicalities, and challenges of co-ownership.
Experiments with flat organizations and distributed decision-making, and the ups and downs of our implementation of holacracy.
And the downfall: why we left, and what we are taking with us - about PLCs, amazingly productive meetings, and contract-backed trust.
Further reading:
https://www.lab.coop/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NVNYM4C
https://www.holacracy.org/
https://blog.crisp.se/2015/06/....07/henrikkniberg/no-
https://blog.lab.coop/holacrac....y-from-scratch-40e1f
https://blog.lab.coop/share-mo....re-to-have-more-why-
Ps. We are going on a little summer break now and will be back with our next season in September. We're experimenting with some shorter outtakes and thought-nuggets on Instagram until then. Also, we are all ears - if you want to chime in, have some feedback, or have a topic in mind that you would love to hear about next, hit us up at @paths.puddles.products!