The Challenges of ESOPs

In this episode of the Ownership Economy podcast, Martin and Jahed speak with Zoe Schlag, a co-founder and Managing Partner at Common Trust. Zoe has spent her career as an entrepreneur and investor. Prior to Common Trust, Zoe served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s family office, where she designed and led their Shared Ownership investing. Before that, she was a Managing Director at Techstars, a global venture capital firm, where she led Techstars’ first impact fund and accelerator program. In the conversation, Zoe Schlag walks us through her learnings as an entrepreneur and investor and the evolution of her thinking on shared ownership. The conversation discusses in detail the concept of Employee Ownership Trust and Purpose Trusts, an entity type recently used by the founder of Patagonia to transition his company to steward ownership. As always, if you like the episode, please subscribe and rate us.