Mobilising Community, Capital and Culture

The situation

In 2017 four founders — Astrid Scholz, Aniyia Williams, Mara Zepeda and Jennifer Brandel — wrote Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break, out of their own experience trying to finance tech companies. They had each hit the same two walls: impact investors did not understand technology, technology investors did not understand impact, and underneath both sat a startup finance system that routes an indefensibly small share of venture and bank capital to women and founders of colour.

Over ten thousand founders, investors, lawyers, accountants and philanthropists answered the article, most of them saying a version of the same thing: you have described what I am, or want to be, or want to invest in.

A movement is not an institution. Zebras Unite was growing at roughly ten per cent month on month with none of the structure that rate of growth requires.

What ran

Armillaria became a founding member of the cooperative and brought our systems design process to the first roadmap. Two questions had to be answered in order.

The first was legal and financial. Zebras Unite needed a non-profit arm to hold the system-changing programme work and a for-profit arm that could scale — and the members needed to own the mechanism that created value for them, not merely benefit from it. The for-profit arm was incorporated as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, with the non-profit holding a golden share to anchor the mission. Member-owners are rewarded through a patronage system for the value they create.

The second was technical. Matching entrepreneurs seeking capital to aligned investors, connecting people across geographies, letting members exchange solutions they are working on, and tying all of it back to patronage — none of which the available tools did, and all of which had to be interoperable rather than another silo.

What it produced

What we produced was the structure: a multi-stakeholder cooperative with the non-profit holding a golden share, patronage as the mechanism that returns value to the people who create it, and a technical roadmap built to serve that structure rather than sit beside it.

What Zebras Unite has built on top of it, by their own reporting at the time this was written, is a chapter-led global cooperative of over ten thousand people across more than forty countries and six continents, with a small team of worker-owners, more than three hundred individual and organisational members, and an investor cohort holding over $3 billion in assets under management. Those figures are theirs, not ours.

The ownership structure works today. The infrastructure is still being built.

What it shows

Most coordination problems are treated as software problems. This one was a governance problem first: no platform would have helped until it was settled who owns the thing that creates the value. Getting that order right is most of the work.

One disclosure, because you would find it anyway: Armillaria is a founding member of the Zebras Unite cooperative and continues to provide patronage through this work. We are participating in the legal, financial and digital infrastructure we are co-creating. That is exactly where we want to be, and you should read this page knowing it.