Ownco is co-launching its ownership sharing platform, together with 10 pioneering client orgnanizations. This is the first time that so many real world platforms have launched ownership tokens, bringing a combined 200,000 community members into shared ownership programmes in January 2023.
This combined launch is the result of a growing movement towards ‘the ownership economy’, whereby platforms and marketplaces become owned by their communities. The ideas behind this movement have been fueled in communities such as Zebras Unite, Platform Coops, and web3.
Ownco is the first platform to emerge as a practical all-in-one solution for any platform to share ownership, with its leading legally compliant token set up serving the first organizations across the United States, Canada, Europe and Singapore.
“This is a co-launch because it has been a joint effort”, says Sascha Kellert, Ownco CEO. “We’re delighted to launch publicly after the last months of co-designing the Ownco platform together with these incredible first 10 organizations. Together we’re a group of pragmatic idealists - we found a way to turn visions into action”.
Changing the world’s building block: the company
A common driver amongst the 10 shared ownership cohort is increasing equity and asset ownership to their communities. “$100bn in assets were paid out to founders and investors worldwide in 2022. Now that it is increasingly communities that create value on platforms and marketplaces, it’s right that assets get into their hands too, and that’s a huge lever for change” said Spela Prijon, co-founder / head of CX and equity design at Ownco.
Kit Li-Perry and Kirsten Chapman are approaching this with AG_Trois, an gender-free fashion marketplace for the community that supports all gender spectrum expression - a segment that has been disenfranchised and underserved. “If our marketplace is successful, it will be thanks to the community - we want to build it for them, with them and co-owned by them” says Li-Perry, co-founder.
For Maverick, a fitness platform, it is both a question of ethics and business together. “Fitness trainers traditionally earn month to month, and are self-employed - we want to give a nest egg for the future to the most loyal trainers at our gyms” adds Michael, co-founder of Maverick. “We want to be the best fitness platform for trainers in the US, and sharing ownership is central to that”.
Ownership as an engine for growth
While traditional companies have shared ownership with employees based on time spent, these platforms and marketplaces are sharing with their communities based on impactful contributions.
In the first cohort, ownership will be earned by communities being regular users, referring new members, signing up to new products, curating or delivering the best rated content. Ownco automatically distributes tokens to community members every time they complete the actions that help their organization.
"OwnCo gives us a route to grow the platform in a way that rewards the language teachers that make it happen!" says Khawar Malik, somos founder & CEO. “They'll earn a fraction of ownership every time students complete their courses”.
Christoph Fahle, founder of OneCoworking, is using shared ownership to align a network of independent coworking spaces towards a common goal - becoming the highest coverage coworking space in the world. “We’ve set the goal that if the community can add 1,000 more coworking spaces to the network in the next 3 months, we will share the next batch of ownership. Shared ownership is the major unlock - 300 spaces have signed up on day 1!”.
Practical steps towards the ownership economy
The first 10 cohort companies are the first set of “real world” (or non-crypto) companies sharing ownership digitally and programatically with tokens. The major enablers cited by the first cohort is that Owco is legally compliant with their existing legal structures, that Ownco is suitable for non-crypto users, and that a fraction of ownership can be shared to start with.
“I spent the last 18 months reading every forum, every discord, about DAOs. With Ownco, I can’t believe how easy it is” said Dan Wood, CEO of the World Freestyle Football Association (WFFA). “We needed an easy way to onboard our community into web3, and step towards becoming the first community-owned sport, on the blockchain” explained Aisha, head of web3 strategy at WFFA.
“This is an amazing tool for community growth” said Rizala Carrington, founder of LesbianPride.org, preparing to launch a new network with Ownco. “As community leaders we need to be able to start small, see what works, see how the community reacts, and be able to turn off what isn’t working and turn up what is working”.
Each of the founding cohort have designed a first phase to share typically 0.5%-10% of their companies - a method which has become formalized in the Ownco progressive decentralization onboarding.
“We’re proud to be enabling this founding cohort that have huge visions. In the next phase, we can expect to see founders sharing increasing portions of their companies based on results. Further ahead, we see emerging needs to facilitate asset exchanges between the communities themselves, enable founders to ‘exit to community’, and bring governance based on community contributions” added Sascha Kellert. “We’ve built progressive decentralization into the product experience, so you start simple, and move as far as you want into community ownership over time and with guardrails”.
Join the movement towards shared ownership
Ownco is now live and there is a free version available, so you can try it for yourself.
Help is available to any organization wanting to share ownership, using the Ownco progressive decentralization method. You can arrange a guided meeting here.
If you like the sound of this, you can join the movement - and own a share of it too. Ownco is also a shared ownership platform, and you can contribute and own here.
