Co-ops, Cabals, Departments, & Valve
I have made it known that I intend to turn Subsoap into a co-operative in the future. This to me means that the employees will one day fully own the company, and they will fully profit from the work which goes into the company. I won’t live forever and I want to build something which will last.
Getting to the co-operative stage is a major challenge. The right people need to be in the company, the right culture needs to exist. Without the right people with the right culture it will be impossible to work out. Until then it will remain more like Valve with private ownership, but still some of the benefits of a co-op.
The path to getting there I will be modeling after Valve how they run their company. With some differences. We will have some kind of syndicalistic economy within our organization.
We will have department imprints. These are like themed categories which contain different types of products and try to stick to the general theme of product. Within each department imprint there is a single cabal. Each cabal will have one active project at a time. The goal being for everyone within a themed cabal to all be working on the same thing at the same time. People should work on what inspires them, what they are excited about, what they want to do.
Employees will have complete freedom to move to any cabal at any time, work on the active project, and recruit members from other cabals. There cannot be a single person in a cabal - if there is that person is moved to the default cabal - people are not allowed to work alone. These are my general thoughts and they are not in stone.
What are your thoughts related to these subjects?
You may one day be working with us.
August 07, 2012
