Your self as a future adversary

Today I participated as a speaker in the Company Models for Impact session at Oslo Innovation Week. My time was limited to ~3 minutes, which turned into a fun (and slightly grueling) exercise in brevity. My speech was based on an earlier draft of this text, which I’ve sinced revised after today’s live performance.

I hate to admit it, but Elon Musk was a pretty cool guy 10 years ago. He was making cool things anyway. Maybe he was never a particularly swell guy to begin with, but I genuinely don't think his personal 10-year plan included becoming a Nazi sympathizer; I don't think that was on his vision board, you know?

Similarly, in the early 2010s two founders had gotten together to make WhatsApp. They took some venture capital to scale up quickly and a few years later they posed a legitimate threat to Facebook's messaging monopoly.

Facebook did what Facebook does and offered the WhatsApp founders 20 billion dollars to make the problem go away. Of course, they sold, in spite of WhatsApp being founded on a core principle that it would never become an ad-supported business. Why? Because 20% of their company was owned by a VC that no doubt told them “hey, it'll take you at best another 10 years to make this kind of money and we want our return on investment now, sooo..”

To their credit one of the founders went on to found Signal, the non-profit open alternative to WhatsApp. Signal is excellent, but it hasn’t had nearly the same reach and impact as WhatsApp because its founders sold their early-mover advantage to the monopolist, which is now critical messaging infrastructure for billions of people.

There would be no need for Signal if WhatsApp had stayed true to its original mission.

What happened here is they essentially carried the ring from the Shire all the way over to Mordor where Sauron was waiting for them by the volcano, and he said:

“wow, guys, what you've done here is really impressive, quite intimidating even; how about I pay you an ungodly amount of money and you just give up on this grand quest of yours now?”

AND THEY DID. What a profoundly sad and uninspiringly boring story that is, nothing like the heroic tales we grew up with and aspired to live out ourselves one day.

I want a better story for Roomy. Like the WhatsApp founders we're also making an ambitious communications platform, in our case to challenge public-space platforms like Discord and Facebook Groups (and Notion/WordPress).

As a founder I am naturally terrified of failure, but I'm even more terrified of realizing in 10 years from now that I've let my past self down. The thing is, none of us know who we're gonna be 10 years down the road; in that time, I might've gotten myself Musked. Who knows what kind of novel brainworms or VR mind-viruses the future has in store for me.

The greatest favor present-me can do for future-me is to preemptively take the unforgivable options off the table. That's what steward-ownership does.

For a startup, that kind of structure begins with the investment deal. It means slow capital over fast capital. It means capped returns for both investors as well as founders. So as the company is ever more successful, its debt to investors and founders decreases over time rather than increasing, setting it on a clear path towards complete self-ownership, free to pursue purpose over maximized and extractive profits.

A comms platform with planet-scale ambitions can only have a credibly net-positive impact if it is legally bound to democratic rule by its employees and users alike, and that is what steward-ownership enables.

Thanks to Emily Liu & Bluesky team for the “company as a future adversary” motto I’ve remixed herein.