I worked at a company that started with a passionate founder who respected his users. Then he was ousted by the investors. Then the company was acquired by a giant corporation. It all went downhill from there. At some point I couldn't take it any more and quit. I couldn't bring myself to betray my users, I felt personally responsible for what I put out. Now, it's increasingly a money-making machine. Many sane people left. There are now KPIs tied to metrics. There are now managers and hierarchies. There are managers who have no clue what they're doing. There are now a/b tests, server-side settings, dark patterns, unwanted algorithms, omnipresent analytics, and user manipulation. It's effectively a B2B company now, and your attention is the product.

Even though I quit 5 years ago, it still pains me to see what has become of something I put my soul into, something I lived for, something I enjoyed using myself and recommended to everyone.

This is why I've been looking at how worker-owned cooperatives can be formed and work. The entry moats for tech businesses is low enough, and tech worker wealth is high enough that it really should be possible - or even common. One difficult part is that for the structure not to decay in the same way you're describing, you need truly shared ownership coupled with democratic decision making and that might be slower and less cleanly decisive than a typical hierarchy.

I’ve been thinking about the same. Starting a company with good intentions is all well and good but the founders won’t want to or be able to run it forever, and then it seems like your options are either selling to a big company or going public. I’m interested to know more about experiences and practicalities of handing ownership to the employees in a tech company.

As far as I can tell the most public examples are both larger and smaller than what I feel would end up where a tech coop company would end up. Larger because examples like Mondragon corp is just much larger and much more stable than a starting coop would be. Smaller because much coop organization and literature is oriented to something like a coffee shop or restaurant.

A direction might be putting together financing as a coop to purchase an ongoing company that a single founder is maybe ready to turn over or sell - lifestyle companies ready to turn over are maybe an interesting category for this kind of transition.

I would absolutely be interested in joining a worker cooperative in the tech industry.

There's a lot of those:

https://ioo.coop/directory/clouds/ https://dna.crisp.se/docs/index.html https://autonomic.zone/ https://vebit.xyz/ https://komun.org/?l=en

The deal with a lot of them is that they want to stay small, and others want to be local.

I'm involved in the early stage of a new remote-only co-op. If anyone in this thread is interested, my email is on my profile.

I had a SaaS vendor that followed that trajectory. The technical team was very dedicated but the president didn't even pretend to care about existing customers. The cost of leaving was assumed to be so high that he said out loud that they added features only to attract new business.

"Our department is suffering. Badly. So are others. Complaints to upper management appear to go on deaf ears, or with ridiculous responses (like: well we saw one of you on your cellphone so you're not really busy)."

"And when we've asked for direct support for retaining customers (using their sales language), our team was told "just make less mistakes"."

Wow, that's literally Dilbert-level of bad management. My condolences. Where I work (a large international corp.), the two or three levels of management above me are fairly reasonable and in touch with everyday reality. I guess I'm lucky.