Why “Exit to Community”?

In conversation with Nathan Schneider about new and better options for startups and the communities they serve

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab, a think tank for community ownership and governance in media organizations. We spoke to him about his hopes for “exit to community” and a future of greater corporate accountability.

How would you explain “exit to community” to someone not well versed in startup-speak or how VCs work?

Great question. For most people, “exit” means leaving a room when there’s a fire or something. But for people with any familiarity with startups, exit is a really, really big deal. It’s what startups are for. They are temporary organizations that exist in order to figure out how they will exit, which typically means either getting absorbed by a bigger, more boring company or, more occasionally, becoming a publicly traded company on the stock market. In both cases, that means selling the thing off to the highest bidder. That also means selling any community the startup has built off with it.

“Exit to Community” is the idea that we need a better option — one in which communities become the eventual owners of the startups that serve them. It’s a reversal of the status quo, but it’s a very reasonable one, really. And it would have the nice benefit of inserting a big serving of accountability in a tech industry where accountability is sorely missing.

How does “exit to community” relate to your previous work on platform cooperativism?

They’re very connected! If anything, E2C is an attempt to reframe platform cooperativism for a different audience — the existing startup world, the folks who know what we mean by “exit.” And while platform cooperativism has tended to emphasize creating new co-ops from scratch, E2C emphasizes shared ownership as a destination, recognizing that it might not always make sense for shared ownership to be the starting point.

Also, as you might notice when I say “shared ownership,” this might mean not relying on cooperative structures per se. Those of us working on E2C are looking for any model that can allow us to graft more democratic ownership and governance, including ones that haven’t been tried very much yet.

As you elaborate in your essay, there are institutional barriers to making such exits more likely, class barriers, and also failures of imagination: How do we get to “some mythology that we can tell and retell”? Beyond creating new examples, or hauling out historians to speak to examples like the [Associated Press](http://Associated Press), what else is there to be done?

Right now, historical examples and pioneering new ones are really important — they show this stuff is real, which it is. Historically, also, we see a pattern: New models, whether they’re cooperatives or venture capital, happen in a certain way. A few powerful examples show that something is feasible, and then policy often needs to change in order to remove barriers and further enable it. The dominant venture capital model in tech was unleashed, after experimentation and pressure, by Congress in 1979, when it allowed pension funds to invest. The law is not a flat playing field. It is a cluster of possibilities for some things and not others.

For E2C to become a fully available option, I think we will need policies that better support financing business ownership by communities, not just wealthy investors.

“Exit to Community“ explained in zine form is available, for free, here.

Let’s say you could wave a magic wand and change, overnight, the governance structures of 3–5 companies, U.S.-based or otherwise. Which organizations would you target, and why?

There are so many, and tech isn’t always as important as it likes to think, but I’ve been guilty of attempting to perpetrate exits to community for Twitter, Facebook, and Meetup.

What transformational points in your career have influenced your thinking the most ?

I’ve had lots of inflection points. My academic background was in religion, and now somehow I deal with business and tech. It’s weird. But most recently, it was incredibly important for me to discover that my conservative grandfather, who died when I was young, worked for a large cooperative at the end of his career — that in many ways, actually, my family’s history was shaped and enabled by this model that some people think is marginal or “alternative.” No: This is real, and I hope more people can feel that reality.

What can businesses learn from academia, and vice versa?

Universities carry some pretty shocking features of medieval guilds, which I think business could learn a lot from. Even with the growing power of administrative staff, universities typically still reserve significant governance authority for the faculty. In how many other institutions do top-level executives have to bow to the decisions made in small meetings of mid-level employees? Those seeking to create mission-led businesses today have a lot to learn from the power of trusting in those who do day-to-day work.

What can academia learn from business? There are plenty of others who have ideas about that. All I can say that I’m extremely grateful to have stumbled my way into an institution that respects (however imperfectly) self-directed work, self-governance, and activity that lacks short-term market value.

What cause are you willing to suffer for, if needed?

That is hard to answer in an abstract sense. If my time studying and reporting on social movements taught me anything, it’s that relationships shape decisions like that more than abstractions.

If you were to give advice to yourself 10–15 years ago, what would you say?

Write less, listen more, be patient.

What does the world need the most, right now?

A more widespread experience of democracy as a thrilling and creative art. Too often we confuse democracy with centuries old institutions that have been failing us, and we’re told that our only hope is to merely protect those institutions. Yes, let’s not lose those legacies, but the only way to do that is to keep reinventing them as our needs evolve.

Have you changed your personal habits re. the “extractive” platforms (not sure if you care for the term), and if so, would you recommend others follow suit? I ask this as someone mystified why anyone would spend much time on Facebook, but I felt that way even before they were exposed as being who they are, so I’m always curious how others who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about such things approach their own media diets, and the undeniable need in the content economy to make one’s self public, findable, and known to a certain extent.

For me it’s the other way around. For years I’ve made a point of doing things like using Linux operating systems exclusively and other free, open-source tools. Sure, I use commercial social media, but I also love being a member of Social.coop, a cooperative instance of Mastodon, an open and federated network. At my lab, my students and I collaborate with open-source cloud software that we run ourselves. I really enjoy community-created, community-governed technology, and that enjoyment continually motivates me to work toward making such experiences available to more people. It takes a lot of time and effort to go against the grain, but community-based technology should really be the default option.

Nathan Schneider is also the author of *Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books,[ God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet](http://nathanschneider.info/books/god-in-proof/) and[ Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse](http://nathanschneider.info/books/thank-you-anarchy/), both published by University of California Press. He is also the co-editor of[ Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet](http://nathanschneider.info/books/ours-to-hack/)*.

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