In our previous blog about mission protection for traditional companies, we discussed how golden shares, a type of share with special voting- or other rights, could be used as a tool to preserve an entity’s social mission. In this blog, we discuss voting trusts and voting agreements as another mission-anchoring mechanism for a tradition entity …
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Mission Protection for Traditional Companies – Blog 1, Golden Shares
Mission-driven for-profit entrepreneurs often face the tough task of deciding how to balance mission protection with growth. In this blog series, we will explore how traditional corporate entities can anchor their mission in the corporate DNA. In the initial three posts, we will discuss mission-anchoring strategies including: golden or veto share; voting trusts or voting …
Mission Protection Mechanisms for For-Profit Entities
Mission protection for socially driven businesses can be structured in numerous ways and formats: by tweaking the existing framework of a traditional for-profit corporate form; by combining two corporate structures and form a hybrid entity; and lastly, by choosing a new or alternative entity type, such as a public benefit corporation or public benefit cooperative, …
Patagonia “Exits to Climate”: A Win for Capitalism, But a Mixed Bag for Stakeholder Governance
I, like most, was delighted to read the news that Patagonia’s shareholders decided to give away ownership of the company to benefit the climate and not private equity, a strategic buyer, or public capital markets. We’ve written extensively on mechanisms for mission protection in corporate entities. It appears that the Chouinard family, which owned …
What is the legal treatment of payments to DAO contributors?
If you have been active on Twitter this past year, you probably came across a reference to DAOs and maybe you saw statistics about developers and other folks quitting their jobs to become full-time web3 and DAO contributors. In my work, I have received many questions about DAOs’ legal status and distributions of tokens, and …
Voting Structures for Businesses
All corporations and cooperatives have some sort of democratic model for decision making. There are two major voting structures for all businesses. The first: “one share, one vote;” means that an investor gets one vote for each share of a company they own. The second: “one member, one vote;” means that each cooperative member or …
New Models for #platformcoop Design, Part 5: Reciprocal Ownership
In this series so far, we have analyzed the potential for a sistered for-profit entity and cooperative entity to separately optimize for financing and member-orientation. Since publishing this series, I’ve received some good feedback from readers. Some have asked about additional terms and benefits that could be designed into the TechCo – Cooperative “pre-nuptial” agreement. …
