Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:54
Can we build businesses that are better for the world? Enter: entrepreneurship and venture capital with a conscience. Your thoughts? #AskSwell
It gets back down to that boardroom table where there's a bunch of investors looking at a lot of ideas and why do they fund some and not others? And in order to lead us in this conversation, we're going to talk to somebody who is one of the co founders of Zebras Co op, which is basically Zebras Unite is a member owned co op that looks at sort of this tripod of capital, culture and community. And those things create a more just and inclusive economy
Kate Sassoon
@KateSassoon · 4:59
In the article Zebra Sexual, Unicorns Break and Sex and Startups et cetera, all of the wonderful articles that kind of really coined the idea of what is a zebra and directly in opposition to the unicorns that the venture capital world is hunting. And that has kind of set the tone for entrepreneurialism. In this current moment, entrepreneurialism is as old as humanity. But currently we have it in a very strange to me way
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:11
Kate, thank you so much for this extraordinary reply and for clarifying things for me and for everyone. I want to take a little bit of a jump back. You talked about one in six people are part of some kind of cooperative, and can you help us understand and thank you for really chunking this back. What a cooperative is defined as? Is it about the democratization of decision making throughout the entire organization? Is it about the sharing of profits?
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Kate Sassoon
@KateSassoon · 5:00
There's a huge variety of ways from a very flat, very horizontal kind of collective identity where governance and operations are shared in a very horizontal fashion that usually doesn't scale very well, unless you're talking about a federation of cooperatives, in which case it can scale pretty well