<story><title>Ask HN: How can we improve the world via creative, compassionate new ventures?</title><text>How can we...&lt;p&gt;• improve Fair Trade on the consumer or producer side?&lt;p&gt;• strengthen and expand non-profits or charities?&lt;p&gt;• educate or help the working conditions of labor (people who work for wages)?&lt;p&gt;• improve the ecological sustainability and environmental impact of supply chains?&lt;p&gt;• Expand access and convenience of healthy foods and diets?&lt;p&gt;• Improve democracy at the organization or government level?&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re already part of an organization focusing on these things, tell us about it!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SethRich</author><text>There is never a situation in which it&amp;#x27;s a good idea to give every employee an equal vote. Employees of various seniority and talent provide varying levels of value to the enterprise.&lt;p&gt;1. Why should the newly hired janitor have equal voting rights to the CTO that envisioned and built the product or the Machine Learning PHD whose education cost him 10 years and half a million dollars?&lt;p&gt;2. Personnel counts grow at an exponential rate. If you double your personnel count over a year as plenty of startups do, what&amp;#x27;s stopping all the new employees from mutinying and kicking out the early employees that have been been working on the business for 5 years?&lt;p&gt;3. Where&amp;#x27;s the incentive for founders who face disproportionate risk in the startup stage to build an enterprise that they may eventually own 0.1% of?&lt;p&gt;If you have ever even thought of starting a business on your own, you would not think this is a good idea.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>Start a cooperative enterprise, owned by the workers at all levels, not just the techno-elite founders. With all given an equal vote. Establish small limits on pay disparities (say, never more than 2:1 to compensate for different schooling&amp;#x2F;certification requirements for doctors or the like).&lt;p&gt;I second the open source suggestion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kiliantics</author><text>1. No co-op works this way. New hires almost never have the same privileges and voting rights as original members. There is usually a kind of &amp;quot;vesting&amp;quot; period for voting rights since members need to be sure everyone is committed to the mission of the co-op.&lt;p&gt;2. See my point on 1. In the long term however, the kind of mutiny you suggest could be a good and necessary thing. In a co-op, you are not starting &amp;quot;your&amp;quot; company, but a cooperative. The whole point is that it is owned and run by everyone, it&amp;#x27;s not the founder&amp;#x27;s special baby. If the founder can&amp;#x27;t see what&amp;#x27;s best for the company and its workers while everyone else can, then they should definitely be overruled.&lt;p&gt;3. The incentive is to be founding something that can change the exploitative nature of the economy we live in. You&amp;#x27;re not starting a co-op to get rich off the work of others in implementing your amazing idea for an ice-cream delivery app. You&amp;#x27;re making a product that a community is invested in, both in the production and consumption, where everyone truly benefits because they all have a share of power over the project. A co-op couldn&amp;#x27;t buy up entire city blocks because one small board decided on it, or pollute a water supply because one small group of investors didn&amp;#x27;t give a fuck. That is why we need co-ops.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been involved with starting businesses and I think co-ops are great.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How can we improve the world via creative, compassionate new ventures?</title><text>How can we...&lt;p&gt;• improve Fair Trade on the consumer or producer side?&lt;p&gt;• strengthen and expand non-profits or charities?&lt;p&gt;• educate or help the working conditions of labor (people who work for wages)?&lt;p&gt;• improve the ecological sustainability and environmental impact of supply chains?&lt;p&gt;• Expand access and convenience of healthy foods and diets?&lt;p&gt;• Improve democracy at the organization or government level?&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re already part of an organization focusing on these things, tell us about it!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SethRich</author><text>There is never a situation in which it&amp;#x27;s a good idea to give every employee an equal vote. Employees of various seniority and talent provide varying levels of value to the enterprise.&lt;p&gt;1. Why should the newly hired janitor have equal voting rights to the CTO that envisioned and built the product or the Machine Learning PHD whose education cost him 10 years and half a million dollars?&lt;p&gt;2. Personnel counts grow at an exponential rate. If you double your personnel count over a year as plenty of startups do, what&amp;#x27;s stopping all the new employees from mutinying and kicking out the early employees that have been been working on the business for 5 years?&lt;p&gt;3. Where&amp;#x27;s the incentive for founders who face disproportionate risk in the startup stage to build an enterprise that they may eventually own 0.1% of?&lt;p&gt;If you have ever even thought of starting a business on your own, you would not think this is a good idea.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>Start a cooperative enterprise, owned by the workers at all levels, not just the techno-elite founders. With all given an equal vote. Establish small limits on pay disparities (say, never more than 2:1 to compensate for different schooling&amp;#x2F;certification requirements for doctors or the like).&lt;p&gt;I second the open source suggestion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Robotbeat</author><text>&amp;gt; There is never a situation in which it&amp;#x27;s a good idea to give every employee an equal vote. Employees of various seniority and talent provide varying levels of value to the enterprise.
&amp;gt;1. Why should the newly hired janitor have equal voting rights to the CTO...?&lt;p&gt;The reason why a single vote per person is fine is that more senior employees also have more influence in the organization just naturally. They can and will be able to persuade people, as long as they&amp;#x27;re doing their job effectively. Also, there can be a fairly long (months or years) on-boarding process where employees learn the culture and values of the organization.&lt;p&gt;If you are doing such a crappy job that you can&amp;#x27;t even convince the janitor that you know what you&amp;#x27;re doing, then I fail to see why you deserve a bunch of extra votes.&lt;p&gt;...and if your machine learning PhD cost you half a million dollars, I suggest you should get a refund. That&amp;#x27;s ridiculous.</text></comment>