The Smartphone Startup That Accidentally Rediscovered What Every Non-Western Business Tradition Already Knew

In 2015, a man named Dan Novaes sat down with his co-founder Kiran Panesar and asked a question that was, depending on your perspective, either the most obvious question in consumer technology or the most subversive one: if smartphone manufacturers earn billions of dollars from your screen time, your attention, your data, and the four trillion hours humanity collectively stares at glass rectangles every year, why does not a single dollar of that flow back to the person doing the staring?

The answer they built is called Mode Mobile. It pays users for listening to music, scrolling through content, charging the phone, reading the news. Brands pay for the attention. The user gets a cut. By 2026, Mode Mobile has 45 million users across 170 countries, has paid out over $325 million to those users, and achieved revenue growth so absurd that Deloitte ranked it second on their Technology Fast 500 with a 32,481 percent expansion rate. It has since acquired NGL, the anonymous messaging app, stitching EarnOS into another cohort of Gen Z users who had not previously considered that their compulsive scrolling might be a financial asset rather than a personality flaw.

The more interesting thing Mode Mobile did was open its cap table to the same people it was paying. Instead of chasing another venture capital round, it ran a Reg CF and then a Reg A+ crowdfunding campaign, raising over $45 million from more than 40,000 retail investors, many of whom were already users of the product. Earners became owners. The community that generated the value got a formal stake in the machine that generated it.

Silicon Valley called this innovative. Financial journalists called it a new model. A few MBA programmes will probably name it something with the word ‘alignment’ in the title and add it to the curriculum.

The zaibatsu of Meiji-era Japan would have recognised the architecture immediately. So would the chaebol founders of postwar Korea, the Basque workers who built Mondragon in the 1950s, the Grameen borrowers in Bangladesh who owned stakes in the bank lending them money, and every arisan circle, gye, tontine, and rotating credit association that has operated on the foundational principle that the entity and its community are not adversaries negotiating over a finite pie but partners in the expanding of the pie itself. The idea that when you genuinely look after the community, the community looks after you back is not a disruptive startup thesis. It is the oldest business model on earth. It keeps getting rediscovered because each generation of extractive capitalism creates the conditions that make rediscovering it feel urgent.

The idea that when you look after the community, the community looks after you back is not a disruptive startup thesis. It is the oldest business model on earth. It keeps getting rediscovered because each generation of extractive capitalism creates the conditions that make rediscovering it feel urgent.

The East Asian Playbook. Which Was Not, Originally, a Playbook.

The zaibatsu were not designed in a boardroom as a community capitalism experiment. They emerged from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as Japan’s answer to a specific problem: how does a pre-industrial feudal society industrialise fast enough to avoid being colonised by the Western powers that had already colonised most of the world? The answer turned out to be concentrated capital, family-controlled holding companies, and a relationship between industry and the state so intimate that it is difficult, in retrospect, to tell where one ended and the other began.

The four great zaibatsu, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, each owned banks that financed their own industrial subsidiaries, which in turn supplied each other through vertically integrated supply chains, which in turn employed hundreds of thousands of people in conditions of relative security by the standards of the era. The security was paternalistic. The paternalism was not purely cynical. The zaibatsu built housing for workers, ran welfare programmes, and created institutional loyalty that bound employees to the firm across generations in a manner that was simultaneously exploitative, by the standards of later labour theory, and significantly more humane than the alternative, which was unorganised labour in unprotected markets.

The Americans dissolved the zaibatsu after World War II because concentrated capital in the hands of families who had supported Japanese imperial expansion was incompatible with the democratic free-market Japan that the occupation was trying to build. The dissolution produced, with a certain historical irony, the keiretsu: networks of cross-shareholding companies, tied to main banks, engaging in the same vertical integration and mutual support that the zaibatsu had practiced, but distributed across corporate rather than family ownership.

Toyota, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Sony are all keiretsu members in ways that shape who they buy from, who they lend to, and how they behave toward their employees, their suppliers, and the communities in which they operate. The family structure was dissolved. The community structure was not.

South Korea watched what Japan built and, with the particular intensity of a country that had been colonised by Japan, both resented and copied the model at speed. The chaebol, which is simply the Korean pronunciation of the same Chinese characters that form zaibatsu, meaning literally ‘wealth clan’, emerged in the 1960s as the instruments of Park Chung-hee’s export-led industrialisation strategy. Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Lotte were not built by markets finding their natural equilibrium. They were built by government credit directed at family conglomerates, tasked with achieving specific industrial targets, operating in a system where the boundary between state interest and corporate interest was deliberately blurred because the urgency of economic development made blurring it seem reasonable.

The chaebol are more centralised than the keiretsu and more nepotistic than almost any Western equivalent could get away with in public. The founding family of Samsung controls the company through a web of cross-shareholdings that translates a relatively modest economic stake into near-total operational control, a structure that Korean governance reformers have been complaining about for decades and that the Lee family has shown no particular urgency to change. The governance problems are real. The economic performance is also real. South Korea went from a per capita income roughly equivalent to Ghana’s in 1960 to a high-income OECD economy in roughly thirty years, and it did so largely through the productive capacity of institutions that Western corporate theory would describe as too concentrated, too family-controlled, and too entangled with government to be efficient.

The lesson that the zaibatsu and chaebol teach, stripped of the messy specifics, is that the relationship between a large enterprise and its surrounding community is not a cost centre or a stakeholder management exercise. It is the basis of the enterprise’s legitimacy. The paternalistic employment practices of the prewar zaibatsu, the housing and welfare programmes, the multi-generational loyalty expectations, were not philanthropy. They were the operational infrastructure of a system in which workers, suppliers, banks, and the state were all bound into a mutually sustaining web. The enterprise looked after the community because the community was, in the most literal sense, the enterprise. Employees, suppliers, and local governments were not separate entities to be managed. They were constituent parts of the same organism.

Western corporate theory eventually named this ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and made it a conference theme. The East Asian economies had been practicing it for a century before the conference was scheduled. The difference is that in the East Asian versions, the community relationship was structural, embedded in cross-shareholding, employment practice, and supplier loyalty, rather than rhetorical, expressed in annual reports and sustainability commitments that tend to evaporate when the next quarterly earnings pressure arrives.

The Basque Country. Which Nobody Puts on a Slide Deck, and Should.

In 1956, a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarta built a small training school in Mondragón, a provincial Basque town still recovering from the Spanish Civil War. He had a straightforward theological position on economics: that work should produce dignity, that workers should control their own enterprises, and that profit should serve the community rather than extract from it. From this training school emerged the Mondragón Corporation, which is now the world’s largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives, employing over 80,000 people, operating in finance, retail, industry, and education, generating revenues exceeding twelve billion euros annually, and maintaining one of the lowest income inequality ratios of any large corporation on earth.

Mondragón’s model inverts the standard corporate logic at almost every level. Workers are not employees in the conventional sense but worker-members who buy into the cooperative with a capital contribution, receive wages plus a share of annual profits, vote at general assemblies on company strategy, and elect their supervisors and managers. The highest-paid person in any cooperative cannot earn more than six times the lowest-paid, a ratio that makes the average FTSE 100 CEO compensation package look like a philosophical statement about the irrelevance of the people building the product. Mondragón’s cooperatives commit ten percent of annual profits to community development, and the network maintains its own bank, university, research institutes, and social welfare system.

The cynical reading of Mondragón is available and has been made. As the cooperatives have grown and globalised, they have hired wage workers in non-cooperative subsidiaries in other countries, which creates a two-tier system that some critics argue reproduces the very labour relations the model was designed to replace. The cooperative identity is maintained in the Basque core while the international subsidiaries operate more conventionally. This is a real tension and the people at Mondragón are aware of it and argue about it with the specificity of people who have a genuine stake in the argument.

The less cynical but still accurate reading is that Mondragón has maintained its cooperative structure through multiple economic crises, including Spain’s devastating 2008 to 2013 recession, during which Spanish unemployment reached 27 percent and Mondragón’s unemployment rate stayed near zero through a policy of redeploying workers across cooperatives rather than laying them off. When Fagor, one of Mondragón’s largest cooperatives, became insolvent in 2013, its workers were absorbed into other cooperatives within the network rather than made redundant. The community looked after the community.

The interesting question about Mondragón is not whether it is perfect. Nothing with 80,000 employees is perfect. The interesting question is why, despite seventy years of demonstrated financial viability and social outcome data that should make every MBA student and every development economist put it at the top of their reading list, the Mondragón model has not been replicated at scale anywhere outside the Basque Country. The answer is the same answer that explains why the arisan has not spread widely into native-born Western communities. The model requires a specific quality of community trust, shared identity, and long-term commitment that is easier to build from a provincial Basque town with a specific history and a specific priest than to manufacture from scratch in a venture-backed Chicago startup or a government-funded economic development programme.

The architecture of community capitalism, whether it is Mondragón’s cooperative structure or the zaibatsu’s vertical community or Mode Mobile’s user-shareholder model, is not transferable as a policy instrument. It is growable as a genuine relationship. The difference is important and is the thing that every replication attempt gets wrong.

The Grameen Model. Or, How a Bangladeshi Economist Embarrassed Every Development Bank on Earth.

In 1976, Muhammad Yunus was a professor of economics at Chittagong University watching people in the village of Jobra, next to the university campus, fall into debt cycles with moneylenders charging interest rates that were not interest rates in any meaningful sense but rather mechanisms for transferring everything a poor person owned to someone who already had considerably more. He lent $27 of his own money to 42 women who made bamboo furniture, to free them from the moneylenders for one cycle, and discovered that they paid him back.

What grew from this experiment was the Grameen Bank , which operates on the principle that the poor are creditworthy in the presence of peer accountability and that the community group is the collateral that no formal banking system had thought to accept. Grameen’s lending groups of five women hold each other mutually accountable for repayment. Not legally liable but socially accountable. The mechanism is the arisan mechanism applied to credit rather than savings. Defection from the group is socially costly in a community where group members live near each other, know each other’s families, and will continue to interact regardless of the outcome of the loan. The repayment rates on Grameen loans have historically exceeded 97 percent.

Yunus added a structural element that put Grameen in a different category from merely clever community banking. He made Grameen’s borrowers its owners. The bank is majority-owned by its borrowers, who hold shares that represent genuine equity in the institution that serves them. The people who need the bank most own the most of it. This is not a philanthropic gesture. It is an alignment mechanism. An owner who is also a borrower has interests that a purely profit-maximising bank and a purely welfare-maximising borrower do not share. The borrower-owner wants the bank to be sustainable because its sustainability protects their access to credit. They also want the credit to be affordable because they are paying it. The interests converge in a way that the adversarial client-institution relationship of conventional banking does not produce.

Development economists initially dismissed Grameen as a charming local experiment that would not scale and that was probably underreporting defaults. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Microfinance as a sector now reaches over 140 million borrowers globally. The critics who said it would not scale had a point about the limits of the pure Grameen model in very different social contexts, and some microfinance institutions that adopted the lending mechanism without the ownership structure produced outcomes ranging from mediocre to actively exploitative. The mechanism without the community alignment is just another lending product. The mechanism with the community alignment is a different kind of institution.

Mode Mobile. Or, The San Francisco Version of What Osaka, Seoul, and Mondragón Already Knew.

Dan Novaes did not grow up reading about zaibatsu or Grameen Bank. He grew up flipping PlayStation consoles on eBay between the United States and Brazil, which is its own kind of economic education: a practical course in arbitrage, logistics, cross-border market inefficiencies, and the discovery that attention and effort, applied intelligently to the spaces between markets, generate returns that employment does not. By high school he was already an eBay titanium power seller turning over more than a million dollars. By the time he and Kiran Panesar sat down in 2015 to think about the smartphone economy, he had built and exited several consumer electronics ventures and had developed a specific allergy to the version of capitalism that extracts maximum value from a community while routing none of it back.

The smartphone economy is perhaps the most remarkable value extraction machine ever built. Seven billion people carry devices that deliver their attention, their data, their time, and their social behaviour to a small number of companies whose market capitalisations suggest that this is among the most valuable economic activity on earth. The people providing the attention, data, time, and social behaviour receive, in exchange, the service they are using. The terms of this exchange are set entirely by the service provider. The user is not a partner in the value creation. The user is the raw material from which the value is extracted, packaged, and sold.

Mode Mobile’s question was whether a different arrangement was possible. Not charity, not regulation, but a genuinely different commercial structure in which the attention economy’s raw material, meaning the user and their time, participates in the economics of its own processing. The EarnPhone and EarnOS pay users for the attention that brands are already paying for. The payment is not a gift. It is the user’s share of a transaction that was already happening, from which they had previously been excluded by the structural assumption that the user’s role was to generate value for others rather than to capture any for themselves.

The community equity piece, the decision to run Reg CF and Reg A+ crowdfunding rounds that allowed over 40,000 retail investors to buy shares, many of them existing users of the product, is the element that places Mode Mobile in the same conceptual territory as Grameen Bank, Mondragón, and the user-shareholder dynamics of the best East Asian corporate models.

Raising $45 million from your own community is not just a capital structure choice. It is an alignment decision. When your users own equity in the machine that pays them, the relationship between user engagement and shareholder return is not incidental. It is designed.

The user who earns from using the phone, and who also owns a stake in the company that runs the phone, has interests that are aligned with the company’s in a way that a user who merely uses and a shareholder who merely invests do not share.

The flywheel that Mode Mobile identified, that users who earn money become more engaged, and users who own equity become advocates, and advocates bring more users, and more users increase the earnings pool and the equity value, is not a clever growth hack. It is community economics expressed in the language of a Chicago consumer tech company. The arisan circle in Jakarta is running the same basic model at a different scale. The Grameen borrower-owner in Dhaka is operating the same alignment principle in a different sector. The Mondragón worker-member in the Basque Country has been demonstrating for seventy years that the people who create value and the people who own the value-creating entity can be the same people, and that when they are, the entity tends to behave differently than when they are not.

The flywheel Mode Mobile identified is not a clever growth hack. It is community economics expressed in the language of a Chicago consumer tech company. The arisan circle in Jakarta is running the same basic model. The Grameen borrower-owner in Dhaka is operating the same alignment principle. Mondragón has been demonstrating it for seventy years.

The East and West Comparison. Which Is Not About Who Is Right.

The conventional framing of the East versus West business comparison tends to produce one of two narratives. The first says that Eastern business models, with their community orientation, state entanglement, and long-term thinking, produce more equitable and more sustainable outcomes but less dynamic innovation. The second says that Western models, with their individualism, shareholder primacy, and market discipline, produce more innovation and more efficient capital allocation but grotesque inequality and a tendency to internalise profits while externalising costs onto communities, workers, and the environment.

Both narratives are roughly accurate and both miss the point. The useful comparison is not between East and West as fixed categories but between the specific mechanisms that different business traditions have developed for answering the same underlying question: who gets to participate in the value that an enterprise creates, and under what conditions?

The Japanese keiretsu answer involves cross-shareholding among member companies, main bank relationships that provide patient capital and crisis support, and employment practices built on mutual obligation rather than transactional exchange. It produces companies that are difficult to acquire and difficult to fire from and that have long time horizons even at the cost of quarterly efficiency. The Samsung answer, in a different mode, involves a controlling family that has used its position to pursue the kind of long-range industrial strategy that Western public companies whose quarterly earnings are under permanent scrutiny find nearly impossible to execute. The chaebol governance problems are real. So is the industrial policy that produced Samsung’s chip manufacturing capacity, which turned out to be the most strategically important capability in the global economy when supply chains broke in 2021.

The Mondragón answer involves worker ownership and democratic governance and mandatory profit sharing and a pay ratio that makes inequality structurally difficult. It produces companies that are slower to restructure and that cannot offer the equity upside that a standard tech startup offers its early employees, but that also do not lay off 30 percent of their workforce when a quarterly miss triggers a board conversation about ‘right-sizing the cost structure’. The stability is not a feature for everyone. It is the feature for the community in which Mondragón operates, which has built its economy around the assumption that the companies at its centre will still be there in fifty years.

The Western answer, in its dominant form, involves shareholder primacy, quarterly earnings as the primary accountability mechanism, and a theory of the firm in which workers, communities, and suppliers are inputs to be optimised rather than constituents to be sustained. This produces spectacular efficiency in good conditions, creative destruction that generates enormous aggregate wealth, and a specific tendency to socialise costs while privatising returns: to extract value from communities while declining to reinvest in them, to pay workers the minimum the market will bear rather than the amount required for the community’s long-term health, and to route the surplus to shareholders who may have no connection whatsoever to the community that generated it.

The comparison is not that the East has solved this and the West has not. Samsung’s governance scandals, the opacity of chaebol succession planning, and the human cost of the South Korean work culture that produced the economic miracle are all real. The keiretsu’s cross-shareholding structures create protected incumbents and make it genuinely difficult for better-run companies to displace poorly-run ones. Mondragón’s global subsidiaries hire conventional wage workers in a structure that does not extend the cooperative identity to the people building its products in Malaysia. None of these models is a clean answer.

The comparison is that the Eastern models, in their various forms, built the community relationship into the structure of the enterprise rather than into the public relations department. The community was not a stakeholder to be managed but a constituent to be sustained. And the enterprises that maintained this structural relationship consistently demonstrated a quality of resilience, employee loyalty, and long-term orientation that the quarterly-earnings-focused Western equivalent found genuinely difficult to replicate when it tried to import the culture without the structure.

The important word in that sentence is structure. Culture without structure is aspiration. ESG commitments without governance mechanisms are annual reports. DEI statements without equity economics are branding exercises. The zaibatsu did not build community loyalty through statements about values. It built community loyalty through employment security, supplier relationships, and housing provision. Mondragón does not maintain its cooperative identity through a mission statement. It maintains it through ownership law, profit-sharing bylaws, and a pay ratio that is enforced rather than aspirational. Mode Mobile does not create user alignment through a loyalty programme. It creates it through paying users money and offering them equity.

The mechanism is the thing. The values are what you say. The mechanism is what you do. Every business tradition that has successfully maintained a community relationship over decades has done so through structural mechanisms that made the community relationship costly to abandon. Every business tradition that has articulated community values without structural mechanisms has eventually abandoned them when the next earnings pressure arrived.

On ESG, DEI, and the Specific Difference Between a Framework and a Flywheel.

There is a reason this essay does not use the words Environmental, Social, and Governance as a framework for the argument it is making. ESG is the language of compliance, of reporting requirements, of frameworks designed to make institutional investors feel better about where their capital is allocated without requiring the recipients of that capital to actually change how they allocate value internally. It is, in its current form, the financial sector’s way of discussing the community relationship in terms that do not threaten the primacy of shareholder returns.

The ESG report tells you how many tonnes of carbon the company emitted, how diverse its board is, and whether it has a supplier code of conduct. It does not tell you what share of the value created by the company’s workers went to those workers versus its shareholders. It does not tell you whether the communities in which the company operates are better or worse off for its presence. It does not tell you whether the alignment between the company’s interests and its community’s interests is structural or rhetorical. These are the questions that the zaibatsu tradition, the Grameen model, the Mondragón cooperative, and Mode Mobile’s user-shareholder structure are actually answering. ESG is a reporting framework. Community capitalism is a governance structure. The difference between a report and a structure is the difference between describing the fire and putting it out.

DEI is a cousin of the same problem. The diversity, equity, and inclusion framework is concerned with representation, which is a real and important issue, and with cultural inclusion, which is also real and important, and is almost entirely silent on economic inclusion, which is the variable that has the most material effect on whether a community is actually better off for an enterprise’s existence. A company can achieve excellent DEI scores while paying its predominantly diverse entry-level workforce wages that require a second job to survive, routing its profits to a shareholder base that is overwhelmingly concentrated in the top wealth percentile, and locating its headquarters in a city where the workers who generate its value cannot afford to live. The framework does not capture this because the framework was not designed to be uncomfortable about economic structure. It was designed to be uncomfortable about cultural representation, which is a politically safer conversation.

The models this essay is discussing were not built by people who were trying to solve the DEI problem or the ESG problem. They were built by people who were trying to answer a much simpler and much more demanding question: does the enterprise make the community genuinely better off, in ways that the community can measure in its own living standards and long-term security? The zaibatsu founder answering yes by building worker housing. The Mondragón priest answering yes by making workers the owners. Muhammad Yunus answering yes by making borrowers the shareholders. Dan and Kiran answering yes by paying users for attention that was already being monetised without them.

None of these people were running a framework. They were redesigning the mechanism.

What the Flywheel Looks Like When It Works. And the Conditions Under Which It Stops.

The communal capitalism flywheel, in any of its forms, has the same basic structure. The enterprise creates value for its community, in the form of employment, earnings, ownership stakes, or some combination of all three. The community responds by providing the enterprise with loyalty, advocacy, stability, and continued participation that a purely transactional relationship does not generate. The loyalty and advocacy reduce the enterprise’s customer acquisition and employee recruitment costs. The stability provides the long-term orientation that enables investment decisions that quarterly-earnings-focused companies cannot make. The continued participation deepens the enterprise’s understanding of the community it serves, which improves the product, which creates more value for the community, which deepens the loyalty.

Mode Mobile’s version of this flywheel: users earn money from the phone, earning creates engagement, engagement creates advertising revenue, advertising revenue funds further user payments, engaged users who also own equity become advocates, advocates bring users who earn money from the phone. The circular structure is why the company describes it as a flywheel rather than a funnel. Funnels are extractive. Flywheels accumulate momentum.

The Mondragón version: workers own the cooperative, ownership creates genuine stake in the cooperative’s success, genuine stake creates effort and innovation that produces competitive performance, competitive performance creates profits, profits are shared with worker-owners, shared profits deepen ownership commitment, ownership commitment produces the stability that allows long-term investment, long-term investment produces the product quality and cost efficiency that creates competitive performance.

The keiretsu version: cross-shareholding creates mutual obligation among member companies, mutual obligation creates stable supplier relationships, stable supplier relationships reduce transaction costs and enable quality improvement investment, quality improvement creates competitive products, competitive products generate revenue, revenue supports the employment security that creates worker loyalty, worker loyalty reduces turnover costs and enables tacit knowledge accumulation, tacit knowledge improves product quality.

The conditions under which these flywheels stop are, in each case, the same. They stop when the alignment between the enterprise and its community is compromised by a more immediately compelling incentive. The chaebol wheel slows when the controlling family uses its structural dominance to extract personal value in ways that damage the collective enterprise, which is what the Samsung corruption scandals were about. The Mondragón wheel wobbles when the global expansion logic requires hiring wage workers in countries where the cooperative membership model is not legally or practically available. The keiretsu wheel grinds when the cross-shareholding relationships protect incumbents that should be replaced and prevent the capital allocation efficiency that market competition is supposed to produce.

Mode Mobile’s flywheel will face its own version of this tension at the point where the incentives of its institutional investors, its founding team, and its retail investor and user community diverge. The Reg A+ investors who paid $750 per share in a 2023 crowdfund have a different time horizon, risk profile, and information set than the M25 and Merrick Ventures institutional backers who came in earlier at presumably better terms. When the IPO arrives, and Mode Mobile has already reserved its Nasdaq ticker symbol, the community of earner-owners will discover whether the communal capitalism promise survives the specific test that every consumer tech company with community equity rhetoric has historically found most challenging: the transition from private community ownership to public market discipline.

The flywheel survives this transition if the structural mechanisms survive it. Grameen Bank’s borrower-ownership survived decades of growth because it was built into the governance structure rather than expressed as a cultural aspiration. Mondragón’s worker-ownership has survived seventy years because it is codified in bylaws that require a legal process to change. Mode Mobile’s version of community alignment will survive in proportion to how much of it is structural, in equity ownership, in payment mechanisms, in governance rights, and how much of it is rhetorical, in mission statements and press releases about democratising the attention economy.

The bet on Mode Mobile is not really a bet on the EarnPhone hardware or the EarnOS software. It is a bet on whether the structural alignment between 45 million users and 40,000 retail investors and the founding team is durable enough to maintain the flywheel through the inevitable moment when a purely extractive model would produce better short-term returns for the institutional investors. The zaibatsu, the chaebol, Mondragón, and Grameen all demonstrate that the durable answer is yes, but only if the structure is the answer, not the aspiration.

The Indigenous Models the Business Schools Forgot to Study.

The communal capitalism story is incomplete without the oldest versions of it, which predate every corporate form discussed so far and which have been systematically undervalued in the economic literature because they developed outside the European tradition from which most economic theory descends.

The ujamaa philosophy in Tanzania, which Julius Nyerere attempted and partially failed to translate into national economic policy in the 1960s and 70s, held that African socialism was not an import from Marx but a recovery from African communal tradition: that the village was the original cooperative, that land and resources were collectively managed, and that individual accumulation at community expense was not ambition but theft. The policy implementation was often coercive and economically destructive. The underlying principle, that the community’s collective management of shared resources produces better long-term outcomes than individual appropriation, is not wrong. It is the same principle that the arisan, the Mondragón cooperative, and the keiretsu express through different structural mechanisms.

The Indigenous communal land management systems of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia operated on similar principles for millennia, allocating use rights within community governance structures that maintained ecological sustainability across generations in ways that the private property model that replaced them has not replicated. The specific mechanism by which these systems failed is instructive: they were legally dissolved by colonial powers that could not recognise community ownership as legitimate property, because the legal tradition they operated from required individual title. The destruction of the community ownership structure was not incidental to colonisation. It was its primary economic mechanism.

The waqf system in Islamic jurisprudence created endowments of productive assets, land, commercial property, water sources, whose returns were dedicated in perpetuity to community welfare: schools, hospitals, water distribution, religious institutions. At its peak in the Ottoman Empire, waqf assets represented approximately a third of all productive land in Anatolia. The system was gradually dissolved or nationalised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by modernising states that needed the assets for national development programmes and that regarded the community governance of waqf endowments as an obstacle to central planning. What was lost in the dissolution was not merely the assets but the institutional architecture of community ownership: the legal mechanisms, the governance traditions, and the accumulated social knowledge of how to manage productive assets for community benefit across generations.

The reason to mention these models is not nostalgia or the romanticisation of pre-modern economies. It is to point out that the problem Mode Mobile is trying to solve, the problem Mondragón solved in 1956, the problem Grameen solved in 1976, and the problem the zaibatsu solved in 1868, is not a new problem produced by digital capitalism. It is the oldest problem in political economy: how does a community ensure that the enterprises operating within it distribute enough of the value they create to maintain the community’s health, rather than extracting that value and relocating it to wherever capital currently finds its best return?

Every human society has developed mechanisms for this. The mechanisms have different names and different structures. They have in common the insight that the enterprise and its community are not separate interests to be balanced but a single system whose sustainability depends on the health of both.

The Cynical Observation. Which Is Also the Hopeful One.

The business world in 2026 is full of companies that have discovered, with the specific excitement of someone who has not been to the library recently, that treating your community well is good for business. The B Corporation certification movement, the benefit corporation legal structure, the stakeholder capitalism declaration that 181 American CEOs signed in 2019 and most of them spent the subsequent five years quietly ignoring, the ESG reporting frameworks that grew from a niche concern to a trillion-dollar compliance industry, and the employee experience consultancies that charge serious money to tell companies that paying people fairly and involving them in decisions increases their engagement: all of these are symptoms of the same recognition.

The recognition is that the model of pure shareholder primacy, which was articulated as a theory by Milton Friedman in 1970 and operationalised by the leveraged buyout industry through the 1980s and 90s, has produced distributional outcomes severe enough that the people who operate within the system feel compelled to say something about it, even if what they say rarely requires them to change the mechanism. The $350 entrance fee for the conference about stakeholder capitalism is still paid by the shareholder’s capital. The panel about equitable value distribution still does not include anyone from the supply chain.

What makes Mode Mobile, Mondragón, Grameen Bank, the keiretsu, and the arisan interesting is not that they have beautiful values. Most companies articulate beautiful values. What makes them interesting is that their beautiful values are expressed through structural mechanisms that make the alternative behaviour costly. The Mondragón cooperative cannot decide to extract value from its workers because the workers own the cooperative. The Grameen Bank cannot decide to prioritise shareholder returns over borrower welfare because the borrowers are the shareholders. The Mode Mobile user who owns equity cannot be dismissed as merely a customer to be monetised because they are also part-owner of the monetisation machine.

The structure is the ethics. The mechanism is the morality. And the history of every model that has succeeded in maintaining genuine community alignment over decades suggests that this is not a coincidence. It is the only way it actually works.

The zaibatsu families did not build housing for their workers because they were kind. They built housing because they needed a stable, loyal workforce and the community relationship was the mechanism through which stability and loyalty were produced. Muhammad Yunus did not make borrowers shareholders because it was the generous thing to do. He made them shareholders because the ownership stake was the mechanism that aligned the borrowers’ interests with the bank’s survival. Dan Novaes and Kiran Panesar did not open their cap table to 40,000 retail investors because they love retail investors. They did it because turning earners into owners is the mechanism that converts a user relationship into something stickier, more resilient, and more defensible than any ad budget can buy.

None of this is romantic. All of it is extremely practical. The most radical thing about genuine community capitalism is not its values but its arithmetic. An enterprise whose community genuinely benefits from its success has a constituency that Apple, Samsung, and Meta, for all their market capitalisation, have never managed to cultivate. Apple’s users admire the product. Mode Mobile’s users own the company. The difference between admiration and ownership is the difference between a customer and a constituent, and it is the specific difference that the zaibatsu, the chaebol, Mondragón, and Grameen Bank have all exploited to survive and grow through conditions that extracted comparable enterprises did not.

The most radical thing about genuine community capitalism is not its values but its arithmetic. An enterprise whose community genuinely benefits from its success has a constituency that no ad budget can buy.

The committee will not replicate this. The conference will not produce it. The ESG report will not measure it and the DEI framework will not capture it. It grows from the specific structural decision to design the enterprise so that the community’s financial interests and the enterprise’s financial interests are the same interests. Not complementary interests. Not interests that can be balanced in a boardroom. The same interests, by design, because the community is the owner and the owner is the community.

A teenager figured this out flipping PlayStation consoles between Chicago and São Paulo. A priest figured it out building a training school in the Basque mountains. A professor figured it out lending $27 to bamboo furniture makers in Bangladesh. The same idea, in different bodies, in different centuries, in different industries, producing different implementations of the same foundational insight: the enterprise that genuinely makes its community better off is the enterprise that survives.

The rest, as they say, is the committee meeting.

Finance #FinancialLiteracy #Savings #Community #SystemsThinking #LongFormThinking #BehaviouralFinance #NoBS