S04 Ep. 16. Spela Prijon and Sascha Kellert - 4 dimensions of Ownership Economy: Ownco

Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert join us to share the latest news from Ownco - a platform that combines the best aspects of cooperatives, DAOs, and traditional startups to make shared ownership and the ownership economy more fluid and accessible.

Ownco’s approach to distributing ownership moves along four key dimensions - Upsides, Status, Influence, Redemption - and is an approach born through testing hypotheses and assessing the actual results produced by early adopters. For example, through Ownco’s credit system, companies can issue ownership credits that can be backed—through a legal bridge—with exit proceeds, providing ownership-backed incentives for contributors.

Ownco believes that achieving ownership sharing can be done with existing legal contracts, while at the same time, the potential impacts of Web 3 may be important for the long term.

Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert are the co-founders, along with Harry Wilson (not on this podcast), of Ownco. Špela Prijon has been active with startups for a long time, as a founder and team member. Most recently, Špela was Head of CX at Ledgy, leading the implementation of various equity plans for hundreds of startups from seed to IPO stage, in jurisdictions all over the world, with an intimate knowledge of the processes of sharing ownership. Sascha Kellert is a serial entrepreneur who studied Systems Theory at Bayes Business School in London with a thesis exploring how to design viable businesses using patterns and blueprints from nature. Over the last decade, he has been developing practices and tools for the alternative ownership economy while building his last two VC-funded SaaS/platform startups.

In this episode, we delve into several practical use cases, talk through regulatory and governance issues, and explore Ownco’s vision of boundaryless, networked organizations, with micro-teams connected through smart contracts and programmable ownership sharing.

Enjoy this both practical and inspiring conversation with two of the passionate founders of Ownco.

Key Highlights
👉 There are more ways to promote co-ownership than developing full-fledged DAOs.
👉 The future is in networks of micro-companies.
👉 Ownco’s four dimensions of co-ownership: Upsides, Status, Influence, Redemption.
👉 How trust is essential in the time between issuing and fulfilling a contract.
👉 Web3 as enabling inter-company collaboration.
👉 The future of Ownco as an embedded capability rather than a single product.
👉 Ownco’s customer journey starts by asking, “What is the progressive decentralization path that they can embark on?”

Topics / Chapters
(00:00) Building Loyalty in Business Communities
(01:00) Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert introduction
(02:35) Ownco: Making Equity More Powerful and Leveling the Playing Field
(05:31) The Ownership Economy and the “credits” model
(15:55) Legal Bridges: Sharing Ownership Without Complexities
(21:31) The Growing Demand for Shared Ownership: Ownco's Unique Approach
(25:55) Building Boundaryless Organizations
(34:58) Distributing power and ownership within an organization
(39:18) Špela Prijon and Sascha Kellert breadcrumbs

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/ownco

Recorded on April 28, 2023.

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Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: blss.io/Podcast-Music