A Proposal for Partnership Profit

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

There is a subtle difference between profit and value, and by extension profit extraction and value creation. While it is entirely possible to extract profits in the short term, this is likely in direct conflict with long term success and value creation. I would even go as far as to say that being "for-profit" is a skeuomorphic mode of operation, a... See more

Better economic alignment between platforms and participants is coming, and will enable the advent of true stakeholder capitalism to give billions of people the opportunity to build wealth alongside the products and services they love and use.

When a Collective joins a Fiscal Host, they get a clear service: we'll hold your money, you don't have to go get a bank account and form your own legal entity, we're going to take care of some really annoying paperwork stuff for you, and we'll give you this nice online tool that lets you share your budget transparently and pay your expenses. On the... See more

own a piece of the business and share in the value capture as wel

"Hi, would you rather work with a company that's owned by some private equity schmuck, or a company where some of the prosperity you helped me generate gets reinvested in you and your community?" It's a competitive advantage to do the right thing. So I feel like that we're going to have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are going ... See more

profits derived by extracting value from common resources and communities, including

One unresolved tension here is how to mix individual backers with institutional backers. Andy covered his first year’s expenses via a grant from Emergent Ventures for example. This might be a strong argument for a more sophisticated platform than Substack to run the subscriptions through - ideally you’d like some nice way to combine individual back... See more